I didn't get a whole lot of feedback from the first chapter, probably cos its moving along a little slow. Sorry about that but I have to introduce all the characters first. Plus I'm trying to fill in Mac's back-story. I promise eventually it will gain something vaguely resembling momentum.
Have a nice day.
Shalimar dumped her black leather biker jacket on the steps leading up to the dojo. She had just been to enter two new mutants into the underground, one elemental, one psionic. It had been a complete waste of time.
It wasn't that they hadn't showed. They most certainly had Shal thought as a frustrated sigh escaped from her lips. They had turned up bringing along ten Strand members.
It had been a long, hard fight. Shalimar had managed to take out six of them including the psionic, a woman named Connie before being overpowered by the rest. They had gotten her onto the floor but she had swept their legs from beneath them all in one last effort. She had jumped over their heads and ran for her motorbike sparing a punch for Russell, the elemental on the way.
She wasn't sorry for the workout. She hadn't had a really good one in quite a while but she was sorry and she knew Adam would be to that they had lost two more seemingly nice new mutants to Gabriel. Two more new mutants for them to fight. If Gabriel kept on getting to new mutants like he had been over the past couple of months soon there wouldn't be any to put into the underground.
Shalimar walked to the lab. Adam was giving Brennan his regular checkup, Jesse was playing around on the computers, Emma was nowhere to be seen. Shal walked through the doors, ready to tell Adam that she had just gotten screwed over by Gabriel…again.
Mac raced along the balcony that went around two walls of the main hall. There were four classrooms leading off from it and she raced past three of them. She skidded to a halt outside the fourth. She had spent so long playing around in the snow, that not only was she completely drenched from head to foot, she was also very late for her next lesson.
She considered ditching it so she could have enough time to come up with some kind of excuse but she then noticed two girls, both of which were in her politics class come running down the hall towards her. If three of them went in together it surely wouldn't be that bad.
Mac pushed open the door to the classroom and trying not to attract too much attention to herself walked to her desk and slid into her seat. The teacher didn't seem to care too much. He was looking forward to getting the rest of the day off. The snow had been falling since first thing that morning and the principle had decided to let everybody go home at lunchtime. He smiled at Mac as she raised her eyes to look at him.
Mac was one of his best students, an intelligent girl who seemed to catch onto everything he taught so quickly that it was sometimes hard to keep up. She didn't talk much in class, didn't offer answers but she worked steadily and got good grades. He had no reason to complain about her.
It was weird though. She had had a tough upbringing and her education had been interrupted due to her movement from foster home to foster home. She wasn't really settled anywhere, she had no permanent address and yet she did fantastically well at all her classes. Mac was a mystery. But he loved teaching her. He loved teaching people who didn't boast about their intelligence but used it to best affect.
Mac pulled her books out of her bag. Luckily they weren't too wet from all the snow but the pages were bent and crumpled. She didn't have much of a desk to put them in at home. In fact she didn't have much of a bed to sleep in, it wasn't like you could even call what she lived in a home. She had run away from her last foster home. They were nice and all but she had felt trapped. And they hadn't really had any clue as to how to deal with a new mutant, especially one like Mac. She had found an old, disused apartment and had started living there. It was away from the rest of the world, just the way she liked it. Since she had moved in she had tidied it up, made it look and feel more like a place she could settle in. She had to work in a bar to get food in her fridge. The people there didn't pay well but the tips were good money. She didn't mind having guys stare at her ass before they went home to their wives provided they paid her well for the privilege. The bar wasn't seedy and they let her wear pretty much what she wanted so if she felt like covering up she could have. But covering up lessened the amount of cash she got at the end of the night. It wasn't worth it.
