Good-Bye Psyc
I can't believe I'm doing this, Psyc thought, not only did I just go on an insane rescue mission without telling anyone, but I also took Logan's bike! He's going to kill me.
She wasn't worried about what would happen because she left. She really didn't care. Sherry came first, but Logan was gonna be pissed she had taken his bike.
Well, if I live through this I'll be the luckiest person in the world and I'll just have to hope it doesn't run out.
She had been gone for over a week and was extremely grateful she had gone through all that training with her dad and the people on his squad. She smiled at the memory, her dad laughing as she ran the course, nick telling him he was insane to let his only child do it at not even two years old and then telling him she would make a fine soldier when she was older. But the grin passed quickly as she remembered why she was now silently thanking tem for all their training in tracking. When they where in the countryside it was fairly simple to track them, but when they went through the cities it was more difficult. She had nearly lost the trail in the last one but had finally managed to pick it up again, she had lost time, but decided to make up for it by pushing the bike to it's limits during the stretched where there was no there to go. It was obvious that whoever had her wanted to keep her. They had changed vehicles everyday and sometimes more then once in one day. It made it difficult because they always did it at fork in the read and would also continue with the old truck past a few more forks then abandon it, so she had to backtrack to find where they had switched. She didn't seem to be gaining any ground, so needless to ay she was more then a little pissed off. For the first time in over seven years she was considering calling for help, but if she did that then she wouldn't be free to do what she wanted when she found the fuckers that had taken Sherry.
I can' b'lieve she lef' li'e tha', Remy thought. I n'erstan' she wa' worry 'bout Sherry bu' she knew Remy wa' commin' back. She shudda waited.
He found his thoughts drifting back to when he and Jazz got back to the mansion….
"Whe'e is she!" Remy had demanded.
"What do you mean, Remy?" Xavier had truly been puzzled.
"Lar'a! When di' she leave!"
"She and Sherry were gone when I got back from my meeting three days ago, it's nothing to be concerned about. Psyc often takes the girl away for a week to get out of the house."
Remy had been able to do nothing but simply stare, unable to believe Xavier hadn't realized something was wrong. The air around him turned into a nimbus, glowing with the power he was having problems controlling as angry as he was. At that point, Jazz stepped in and explained what had happened. Now they were on the road, just the two of them because Logan was too high up in the group they had infiltrated to suddenly pull out and the other team was busy getting rouge mutants out of trouble when they got in over their heads.
Fig'res, he thought bitterly, One o' our team go miss'n' an' 's up to de newbies to fin' 'er. An' we learnin' real quick 's damn near 'possibal to fin' 'er if she don' wan' to be foun'. The bes' we c'n do is try to follo' de ki'napper trail an' bein' t'ree day behin' dere no' much lef'.
"And I've decided to dye my hair candy apple green and join a punk-rock band," Jazz said just as he was returning to reality.
"Remy don' t'ink yo' bro wou' like dat," Remy told her absently.
"You are out of it. Dude chill out. It' not like she can't take care of herself," Jazz said more then a little annoyed. "You act like she's gonna die if we don't find her in the next ten minutes. Let me assure you, if anyone can tail these people and not get caught it's her."
Shit. It was all she could think. After another week and a half Psyc had finally caught up with the kidnappers. She had to trail them all the way to the outskirts of L/A. but she had caught them, and it was obvious they planned on keeping Sherry. Not only was the place guarded better then Fort Knox, they apparently had Sherry in a room with "Psyc" blocks.
So I stake out the place, find the weakness and take advantage of it. Time to put all that training to the ultimate test.
"Yes, Prof…. We will…No I don't think we're any closer… Yes her trainin' does make it hard to follow her…I understand you can't track her…Right I'll call with an update tomorrow," Jazz said as she hung up the phone. "Asshole," she muttered as she stepped out of the phone booth into the rain.
"Well, he's not gonna send us any help," she told Remy when she got back to the hotel room they had gotten for the night.
"Remy di'n't 'spect 'im to," he told her staring fixedly out the window.
Here we go again, Jazz thought right before he turned to face her.
"Wi we gotta stop? Yo' t'ink Lar'a stops at a nice comfy 'otel ev'y nigh'? While we stopped 'ere she pullin' further an' further 'head!"
"I've told you before," Jazz sighed. "If anyone is watching us it has to look like we're just on a cross country trip. I don't like stopping every night any more than you do, but we have to if we don't want anyone knowin' what we're really doin'. I know just as well, if not better then you that she won't stop. She'll just drive until she can't see straight, and is at risk of falling off the bike, then she'll just pull of to the side of the road and sleep right there and she probably won't let herself sleep for more than three, four hours at most, before she makes herself get up and go on. And it will stay that way until she finds Sherry and brings her home safe or dies tryin'!"
By now, it was all Jazz could do to keep from screaming, "Just remember, it's my best friend out there and I hate the fact that there is nothing I can do for her."
Then she grabbed her coat and stormed back out the door into the growing storm.
I hate this! Jazz thought viciously at herself. She's out there pullin' who knows what crazy stunt, probably getting' herself killed and we keep fallin' further behind 'cause the prof. keeps remindin' me that we have to keep up pretenses.
"God damn it!" she yelled swinging her fist and putting a decent sized dent in the U.S. mailbox.
"Yo' know yo' pro'ly broke it," a voice said form behind her.
She swung without thinking and just managed to stop her fist mere millimeters away from connecting with Remy's nose. He took her hand and started checking the bones.
"Remy's no 'spert, but he'd say yo' leas' fractured t'ree bones. Now le's ge' yo' to de hospitol."
"No. Let's get the truck. I'm sick of playin' perfect soldier for wheels," Jazz said, purposely using her disrespectful name for him, "we're going after Psyc, and we're not gonna loose anymore time.
Now that she knew where Sherry was, and the after work routines of some of the workers, Psyc decided to get information the best way she knew how: flirting. As she walked in the doors of the nightclub she remembered the party she had gone to at the mansion, and felt a slight twang of guilt for lying to Remy and telling him she couldn't dance, but she had hopped it would get him to forget about dancing with her. The truth was she could dance, quite well in fact and she planned on using some of her more provocative ones to get some information about the place they were keeping Sherry.
Well, she thought, at least I can try and have some fun while doing this, not that it's likely, she added when she saw what kind of guys she would be tempting, but hey, at least the music is good.
With that last thought she let herself find the rhythm and started moving to the music.
It had been three weeks since Jazz and Remy had started tracking Psyc and they were still no where near close.
"Damn it!" Jazz swore. "Does she have to make it so difficult? She has to know we're followin' her even if she is days ahead of us so why can't she make it a little easier?"
Her temper was fueled by the fact that trying to track Psyc had made it where it had taken them weeks to cover the amount of ground it would normally have taken mere days. They had to stop at every fork in the road and figure out wick one she had taken, and after all this time it was no easy task to find hints that she had been ther, the easiest clue to find was when they found skid marks and close be an area by the side of the road where you could tell a fire had been started.
"Look at it dis way, cherie, at leas' she ain't tryin' to hide where she been stoppin' almost' looks like she wan'ed us to find this one," Remy said when they stopped to examine a site that turned out to be one of her camp sites.
"Yeah, thank what ever higher power you believe in for that," as she turned to go back to the truck she saw it, a piece of weather worn paper stuck under a rock that had been used a part of the bounderie for the fire pit. She picked it up and read it aloud.
Dear Remy and Jazz,
I know that you're tailing me, and thanks for being concerned but I don't need your help. Go back to the mansion with Logan, I'll get Sherry out of this. It's my fault she's in this mess and I'm going to made sure she gets out. I don't expect to come back so be ready for her call.
Thanks for being my friends,
Larla-Rose Datarazanoff
"Thas' it?" Remy asked. "She 'spects us to jus' turn round an' let 'er do it on 'er own? Non! Don' care wha' she wan' us to do, we gonna keep followin' 'er till we find 'er den we gonna bring them both back!"
"My thoughts exactly," Jazz said.
They climbed in the truck and took off down the road.
When the hit farm country, Jazz said, "Screw this stop and go shit. Now we can do this the easy way."
Jazz stopped the truck and told Remy to take the wheel. Once they were on the move again she sent her mind searching.
Cows, she thought privately. I hate talking to cows, but it's better then searching blind. Then she opened her mind up to the herd, she sent them a picture of a girl on a bike, her helmet off because they had found it at one of the places where she had stopped for the night, black hair with red streaks blowing out behind her, a determined look on her face as she put n a burst of speed for the stretch of road ahead, she pictured Psyc as vividly as she could and planted it in the mind of every animal in the heard along with the question, "Have you seen her?"
The answer was back almost immediately, "Yes, she was here. She scared the calves with that loud noise maker."
Jazz sighed with relief, then asked, "Which way?"
"She turned in the next black path, toward the sun as it painted the sky," they told her then went back to grazing.
Jazz opened her eyes and smiled, "Turn west on the next road," she told Remy. "It's time we put a little less distance between us and Psyc."
Two days later they crossed the L.A. city limits.
"Why would someone bring a kid here?" Jazz asked.
"Don' know, and Remy really don' care," Remy told her as they pulled into a motel parking lot. "Le's get some sleep. T'marrow we star' lookin' for Lar'a."
"Wi we here?" Remy asked Jazz as they entered a nightclub the next night. "I don' tink we gonna find 'er here. I mean, she can' even dance." He was surprised to hear her laugh.
"She can dance, I assure you," Jazz said. "The girl dances so well she can get almost anything she wants simply because of the promises her movement implies, which is why she would have hit places like this first, and if she was here then I assure you someone will remember."
"Where are they!" the man was the same one who had been trying to get Psyc to talk for the last week, ever since he had found out she was asking questions up at the club. "I want answers! Our telepaths may not be able to get in you head, but we have ways of getting information out of people."
Psyc slowly raised her head. "Well, obviously what you been tryin' ain't workin'," she said with a smirk, then promptly spit on the mans suede shoe. The man wasn't surprised to see that there was more blood then saliva.
They spent the rest of the night hopping from club to club, finally they found the one she had gone to. When they overheard someone laughingly say, "Yeah, to bad such a hottie turned out to be a mutie. Well, Randy will give her what she deserves," they knew what had happened. It was all Jazz could do to not send the guys head rolling, and Remy barely managed to get out of there before anyone noticed the air around him was starting to glow.
"Remy, wait!" Jazz called.
"Non, Remy's no' waitin' no more. They've got both of dem. Don' yo' understan'? Both of dem."
"I know," Jazz was fighting not to yell. "I know. I heard it just like you did but it ain't gonna help if we barrel in without thinking. They've had her for a week Remy, we have to think this through for all we know she is so out of it she won't recognize us so let's think for a minute before we get ourselves killed tryin' somethin' stupid!" She did yell the last bit then turned and went back to the truck.
It was raining. Great, Jazz thought. Now we get to worry about catching hypothermia. On the plus side, the thunder and lightening will cover any noise we make.
Jazz and Remy were outside the compound; they had decided to forgo the normal time spent observing the place after what they had found out last night when Jazz had called to give Xavier an update. The news had been stunning; Lagan had called the night before and told Xavier that the group they had been sent to infiltrate, the Friends of Humanity, had for some reason changed track, instead of killing mutants they came across, they had started "acquiring" mutants with useful powers to help find where others were hiding. And the most recent "recruit" was a little girl with the power to become invisible.
Jazz turned to Remy and gave him his walkie-talkie.
"Remember," she told him, "we get in, we split up, we report when we find one of them, and we get them out. Don't stay in there and try to get us all out at once. Our best bet is to leave in groups of twos then if we haven't found them both we get whoever we found back to the hotel and come back for the one left behind, we don't want to fet caught because we didn't want to make a second run, now is not the time to take the sating 'no one gets left behind' to heart."
Remy simply nodded, he hadn't said a thing since they had found out who had Psyc and Sherry, and Jazz could hardly blame him, they had both seen what the F.O.H. tended to do to mutants and it wasn't pretty.
"Alright," Jazz said. "Let's go."
Once they got in the building Remy and Jazz spilt up. Jazz watched as Remy took the west corridor.
Fine by me, Jazz thought and headed east. Jazz made sure to make a mental map of the compound, every time she opened a door she would memorize the number on it, and every time she turned a corner she would note what direction she was now going and how long she had been going that way. After fifteen minuets, Jazz no longer had to worry about avoiding security cameras, the storm took out the power and she and Remy had already dealt with the back-up generator. As Jazz ran past a heavy metal door that she hadn't noticed because it blended into the wall she thought she heard crying, so she went back.
"God damn it!" she swore, when she finally got the door open, in front of her were at least a eighteen kids ranging in age from three to ten.
"God damn it!" someone swore, Sherry spun while sitting on the floor expecting to see one of the workers, mad because they were crying again. At first she couldn't tell who it was, then a flash of lightening lit up the sky scaring the younger kids but Sherry jumped to her feet.
"Jazz!" she yelled and ran and wrapped her hands around the taller girls legs, she tipped her head back to look Jazz in the eyes, "Where's Remy and Psyc?" Sherry asked.
"Remy is looking for Psyc as we speak," Jazz told Sherry then turned to speak into the walkie-talkie.
Remy was working on the first of a set of seven particularly complicated locks when Jazzes voice came over the walkie-talkie, "Hey, Gambit, I found Sherry, along with the rest of the "recruits", so I'm not gonna wait for you. I'm gonna head straight back to the room and get them taken care of."
"Okay," he told her, never stopping his work on the lock. "Jus' be careful. I'll see yo' back at de room, now le' me finish dis."
He set the radio down and went to work on the second lock.
Whatever's in 'ere dey sure wanna keep it, Remy thought, as he worked. I doubt i's Psyc but whate'er it is, 'f I take it, I migh' do some damage ta dem.
It took him another two minutes to get the rest of the locks open, and when he did he wished he hadn't.
Lying in a crumpled heap in the middle of the room was Psyc. She had dried blood on her torn clothes and bare skin, and he could see deep gashes around her wrists as if she had fought against the restraints. Even worse was the fact that she wasn't moving and there was no noticeable rise or fall to her chest to show she was breathing.
"Jazz…" he said over the radio. "We have a problem."
"What?" Jazz asked. "Did you get caught?"
"Non, but I tink we lost Lar'a…as in…for good."
The EndAUTHOR'S NOTE: I realize that those of you that read the story and like it are going to be drawing up plots to murder me after this chapter, but I beg you bear with me. Yes there will be a sequel but I'm not sure when I will get the first chapter posted. Also some of you may start to think I can't even keep my own OC's in character, but I assure you, Jazz still don't like little kids, but anyone walking in on that would have to do something. I would really like feedback on how you think I did with Remy. And as for Psyc? Well…you'll just have to wait and see, now won't you?
Please reveiw. Any comments welcome.