"I Tried"
Furor Paxx 32- In Yo Face
They had been playing for five minutes. Lance moved a rook and took one of Scott's pawns. Scott moved his queen and took the rook. Lance stared Scott in the eye.
"Checkmate."
"What?" Scott asked. "I don't see checkmate."
Lance stood. "Of course you don't. Study it for a while and then count the ways I've got you. Meanwhile, I'll be outside." Lance put all of Scott's captured pieces back into the chest. Scott started to protest, but Lance just walked out of the room.
"What is his problem?" Scott grumbled as he stared at the board, trying to figure if he had really lost.
"Lance is the master of chess. No one's beat him yet." Todd pointed at Lance's queen, which had Scott's king in check. Lance's second rook and one of his knights also had the king in checkmate.
Scott growled. "Now you tell me? Fine. I'll just have to get better at it then." Scott straightened out the board. "Sit down, Todd. You're not leaving til you win."
Outside, Lance was standing, dumbfounded and heartbroken, completely the opposite of what he should have been after beating Summers into the dirt at his favorite game.
The stripper, jigsaw and sander were gone.
In their place was the mutilated pile of wood that had once been Lance's masterpiece.
Lance sat down on the porch and stared at the splinters and broken boards. The shock completely rattled him and he sat unmoving for almost an hour before instinct finally took over. Lance walked, dazed, into the kitchen. Scott was tapping on the table as he waited for Freddy to move one of his pieces.
Scott glanced at Lance as soon as he entered the room. Lance just stood in the doorway, staring at Scott as though the former X-Man had an extra arm growing out of his head. Scott turned back to the board just in time to see Freddy knock half the pieces over.
He turned his attention back to Lance. "What do you want now?"
"Gone... They're gone. Sander, stripper, saw..." Lance sobbed. "gone."
"What?" Scott blinked. "Gone? Where?"
"GONE!" Lance screamed, suddenly the dire truth of the situation hit him. He was a worker without a tool, a father whose children had been torn from him. "THEY'RE GONE!" He threw his arms in the air and howled before collapsing into a sobbing heap on the kitchen floor.
Scott, Freddy, Todd and Jaysin stared at him. "But where did they go?" Scott asked, slightly bewildered. "How did they go? It's not like they have legs or anything." Suddenly he gasped. "Do you mean that someone...stole from us?"
Lance sobbed loudly in response.
"How dare they? We're the Brotherhood of flaming Mutants! We should be doing the stealing!" Scott stood up so fast his chair fell over. Lance paused mourning to look up at Scott and Pietro, Kurt, Wanda and Kaysin all poked their heads down the stairs to see what was going on. "We'll find them dammit, and when we do..." Scott's visor, in a now familiar move, glinted dangerously. "not even the damn X-Men will stop us."
After a moment of dramatic silence, Pietro snorted. "Is that all? I'm booked the rest of this week, and I've got... stuff to do on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so you'll have to tell me about a week in advance when we're doing the revenge thing."
"Ooh." Kaysin raised his hand. "I'm free on Fridays, as long as it's after five. And before midnight. We've got curfew."
Scott's fist twitched for a second. "Alright, then. Friday at six." He acceded, since he had a debate club meeting every Monday and tutoring on Wednesday.
"Well, don't think I can make it then." Lance admitted. He stood up and straightened his clothes. "We've got games on Fridays."
"That's right... Friday's bad." Jaysin had pulled out a cell phone and was checking his calendar. "In fact, I think I'm busy every day but Saturday and Sunday. Oh, man, I forgot about about the SAT on Saturday. I don't think that's a good time to plan anything."
Scott stood there, in the center of the kitchen as the rest of the group pulled out Palm Pilots, day planners and cell phones. He tried to remain calm as they called out possible dates, only to have them shot down by someone who had something planned already. He tried... he really did, but alas, he failed.
"FINE DAMMIT! WE WON'T GET REVENGE!"
The whole house fell silent.
"There's no need to be like that." Pietro pouted. "We're just saying you'll have to catch us sometime around February next year."
A crimson bolt of energy sent Pietro scurrying for safety.
"Forget the two hundred dollar sander, and the one hundred fifty dollar stripper and the two hundred fifty dollar jigsaw. What we need is a calendar."
The Brotherhood of Mutants all looked at each other. "Y'know... that would be a good idea." Lance thought about it. "Time management and all."
"I dunno," Pietro said. "That means you guys would be able to track me down."
"Heaven forbid." Kaysin muttered. Pietro glanced at him and the human smiled innocently.
"Okay, then we could just write down that we're busy doing something for that time period." Scott looked over the Brotherhood. "Alright. Maybe then we'll find time to recover our stolen property. Unless you want to spend another seven hundred dollars on replacements."
The vote to make a calendar suddenly became unanimous.