Story 6: The Lost Children
About a month has passed, since Vito's transformation, and by now, the world at large has become aware of the Studio. At first, it was the government protection alone which kept many of the studio members safe. There were a wide array of responses to the fact beings that were supposed to be fictional having appeared there. Some accepted, even welcomed them. Others were indifferent, and tried to remain out of being involved. Still others accused them of various things, like being frauds, monsters, or demons. Some even were prejudice just against them. Time, however, has marched on, and the world for the most part, has learned to accept it. The key, being most...
Those at the studio, however, weren't all remaining behind. In fact, many of those who were brought here sought out to recover some semblance of their old lives in this new world. The Justice League, with clearance from the United Nations, was constructing a new home base to work from. The Fantastic Four had moved on to New York City as well, to remain near a major world port of trade, as Reed wanted to help benefit mankind in this world, when he learned how far behind it's technology was to the Marvel universe. Even other beings, who were not initially brought to the studio, sought this balance. Within two weeks of their arrival in this world, others arose. The most noteworthy being Dr. Doom, of course, recreating his kingdom of Latveria on this Earth. However, despite such strong appearance into the world's stage, most opted to lead their own lives, and avoid imposing on the lives of others. Particularly, those still at the studio, acted as native to the city it was bordering, and participated in the town's activities.
Though our current focus, is on a Harley Davidson building in that city, complete with motorcycle lot, where two different studio members were browsing the selection, while a few out of town people looked on.
"Wonder if they have a garage here for custom work.." A rough looking man muttered to himself.
"I don't knoooooow, but I wonder if they have some things I can put on my Vespa." was the response from the pink haired woman with him.
While they continued looking, one of the men from out of the city was getting agitated.
"What are those freaks doing?" He grumbled.
"Hey, chill out Rick, they're people too."
"Not in MY book..."
Rick, being the drunkard, thuggish type he was, didn't think through his actions before doing them.
"Hey freaks! Get outta here!"
The two looked back, and then ignored him.
"I'm talking to you here! Freeeeaks!"
That got Haruko mad. She took out her guitar, pulled the cord, and lunged at Rick.
"Just shut uuuuup!"
She was, however, stopped by her unlikely shopping pal, none less than Logan, the man known as Wolverine. He had a firm grip on the collar of her jacket to hold her back, and was the only one between Rick, and a body bag.
"Don't bother, darlin', he ain't worth the trouble. Goons like him don't know better." He told Haruko, to calm her down.
"Yeeeeaaaaaaah, I know. I just want to make an example of him."
"We're trying to BECOME part of this world's society, lady, not terrify it."
Rick, being also the thick headed oaf he was, could only recognize this as Logan being a coward.
"You afraid of me? Ha!"
If there's one thing that was suicidal in this situation, it was calling Wolverine a chicken. Rick shortly found himself on the receiving end of getting his legs kicked out from under him, forced on his knees, and with a hand clutching his throat, holding his head in front of three metallic claws from Logan's right hand.
"Listen bub, I'm saying this once, because I'm trying to be nice right now. Shut yer mouth, and get the hell outta here, before you say something I eviscerate you for. I ain't afraid of you, and right now, I don't pity you either. So get outta my sight before I make sure no one recognizes you anymore, you got that punk?"
Rick just whimpered, shivering. Logan sniffed the air, and winced. He scared the guy worse than he thought..
"Go on, get outta here!" Logan yelled at him, tossing him at the ground.
Didn't take long for the jerk to run, despite the soggy and smelly pants. Logan growled in anger, retracting his claws.
"And yet you stopped me from beating some sense into him." Haruko scolded.
"Well, no one's perfect." Logan replied, brushing the sleeves of his jacket off.
"You mean like that kid over there?" Haruko smirked, pointing towards something.
Logan looked to what it was, which was a small girl in tattered clothes and a dirty appearance stealing food from an open air market. Logan berated himself for missing that, even with his senses. He was too busy chewing out the grunt to notice the theft in progress. Too late now, as he ran after her. Haruko looked up, intrigued, and whistled, as her Vespa zoomed to her, and gave her a lift after the chase.
Story Divide
Back at the studio, CD was currently helping Lucca with another invention.
"So when this is working right, it'll alert us to dimensional anomalies we don't already know about."
"It should, CD, but I can't seem to get it to sort out the difference. That's where you come in. I'm more of a hardware type of scientist."
"Right. I know enough software stuff to get it to work."
CD sat down, and typed away at the programming for a large wall mounted scanning device. Lucca watched on, as he wrote numerous lines and scripts of coding for it quickly.
"How do you work so fast?"
"I'm actually giving it about the same coding I put in the dimensional portal I was working on. I'm just tweaking it a bit so it only tracks in this dimension."
"Well, that's still pretty fast."
"I'm just typing in a routine. The actual program's still right here."
CD took out a hard disk from his pocket, which had 'Other Side' written on it.
"That's.."
"All my research on other dimensions is right here." He said, as he loaded it into the machine, and it loaded into the computer..
Story Divide
Logan skidded to a stop at the intersection in the alley, making a hard turn, still in pursuit of the girl. Her scent wasn't hard to keep track of, as she oddly had a strong floral scent on her, but for a young redhead like her, her reflexes were better than his.
"How's the kid doing that?"
Haruko drove up behind him, wearing her goggles now, looking to him.
"Heeeeeey, I can chase her."
Logan quickly got onto the Vespa, reluctantly, as like she did when he accepted the ride to town, she gunned the engine, and shot off at speeds no legal scooter should make, chasing the girl at that speed. As they sped through the winding alleys, Haruko chased the girl down to an abandoned maintenance entrance to a cancelled subway project in the city.
"Kid must've gone underground.." Logan muttered.
"Damn it! This was getting fun!" Haruko whined.
Logan growled, then got off the Vespa, heading to a pay phone just out of this alley. Sooner or later, he'd have to get a cell phone to call CD with or something. He took out change to put into it, and dialed a number...
Story Divide
As Lucca began work on fine-tuning the program for the scanner, CD had gone to answer a call, getting an unexpected caller.
"Hey CD."
"Wha? Logan? Why are YOU calling me?"
"Don't expect me to do it often. Listen, Haruko and I ran down a young thief to an old subway entrance."
"You want me to see where she could get out to?"
"Not quite. Girl smelled like flowers. I think she's getting out near someplace with a bunch of them. Think that fancy computer of yours can find something like that near the tunnels? We'll beat her to it."
"Ah..I see...The scanning computer's not quite perfect right now, but I think it could work for that."
"Right, I'll wait, but hurry up, my quarters are running out..."
CD sweatdropped at that, and looked to Lucca.
"Put the tuning on hold. We need to locate a large mass of flowers near the old subway tunnels, possibly near entrances. We've got a thief to catch."
"All right, let's see..."
Lucca switched gears, and typed search requirements into the keywords for the scanner, starting mainly with flowers, in proximity of the tunnels. Only one real entry came up, and surprisingly...
"Hey CD, there's a large dimensional anomaly there too. And get this, the anomaly...is from THIS dimension."
CD went silent, thinking that through..
"You mean...THIS dimension ITSELF is the source?"
"That's right. This dimension's starting to spring up it's own beings based on our arrival. Our presence has started to shift the dimension to compensate. If this keeps up..."
"...then this world's going to have a horde of it's own super heroes, super villains, and alien races...terrific..." CD muttered, "Not to mention it might attract even more changes from outside it. We might've condemned this universe to become a patchwork of other worlds."
CD then relayed the directions to Logan...
Story Divide
When Haruko and Logan arrived at the address given, they were in for something of a surprise. It was the location of a defunct and abandoned school yard, which was over-grown with plants in it's lawn. Logan could also smell nearly a hundred different people inside, nearly all of them were children or teenagers.
"It's like the kids run the school now.."
Haruko let Logan get off the Vespa, before she drove it around back to take a look there. She was quickly caught in a snare trap, Vespa and all, and yelled in surprise, getting Logan running. At least two dozen youths were looking up at who they caught, all of them in old and torn clothes. One in particular caught Logan's eye, being the eldest of the group, blonde, and wearing leather gloves during spring. This one looked back to Logan, arching an eyebrow behind his sunglasses.
"Well kids, looks like we missed one." He told the others.
"Why are you all hiding here?"
The teenager cracked the knuckles in his left hand, before shrugging.
"We're sort of a branch office for run aways. You could call it this city's group of Lost Children."
"Lost Children eh? Sounds like Peter Pan to me.."
"That's where we got the name, except we changed 'Boys' to 'Children' to respect the girls too." He told Logan, as he knelt down, nearly being an adult, and patted the girl they'd chased on the head.
"You're a bunch of thieves."
"It's how we survive. Adults are a bunch of back-stabbing bastards, to put it bluntly. The only adults we respect, are those who grew to adulthood in our group. Like I said, we're all run-aways. Haste here's mother was murdered by her deadbeat drunk of a father when he abused her, and had his eyes on her next." He told Logan, as he stood back up.
Haruko was quiet, listening to all this. Logan stood where he was. He admitted they had all right to hate adults if all of them had such hard experiences, but he knew there was more to it. His senses and gut instinct knew that.
"You're not telling me the whole story, are you?"
The teen shrugged again, the other kids moving to circle around the two.
"Yeah, you're right. You ever hear of something called Gyqaon? Weird name, but bluntly, the government screwed up protecting some sort of accidentally made mutation gas. Terrorist got it, they dropped the ball, and that stuff spread all over the planet. A lot of the Lost Children's ranks now are different because of it. To put it simply, kids and teens the world over got powers and changes based on their minds. Don't know the details why it works that way, or why some kids' powers change as their minds do, and others remain the same forever. I just know that a lot of the kids here fled from adults in fear they'd be treated as monsters or have their new changes be exploited."
"So some of you are just like me. I'm a mutant too." Logan told him, before bearing his claws.
Most of the kids were surprised, but the teen didn't budge. Instead, he just shifted his stance, letting his open T-shirt get pushed back a bit, and his broken in jeans have the holes in the knees tear open a bit more.
"Heh, you're like me. You can HIDE it, and it doesn't have a negative impact on you. Haste here's mind's stuck in fast gear. To her, we're taking ages to say stuff. Deafmute's permanently making any sound he makes dead, and Johnny...tch, wait, why am I wasting breath on an adult? It's like I expect you to understand..."
"I do, kid. But you can't just ignore the fact some grown-ups actually care."
"Ha, riiiiight, like they really care... Many of us fled just to survive. We steal and take from adults to survive, we protect each other, and right now..." He spoke, as he was tossed a metal pipe, as long as a combat staff, and grabbed it, taking fighting stance, "I'm protecting these kids from you. I can't risk you just trying to sweet talk your way into getting to us."
Logan growled, since he hated it when people were too stubborn for their own good.
"Suit yourself, bub."
Logan then charged, as his self-appointed foe swung the pipe around, and a blast of electricity discharged into the mutant, throwing him down.
"Good luck, by the way. If you're wondering, I got my powers when I wanted to strike with the speed, force, and fury of lightning, to protect these kids from the likes of adult thugs."
"So you're a living dynamo...doesn't that figure.." Logan grumbled, getting to his feet.
The teen smirked, and had his arms to his sides, hands extended out, similar to his shrugging earlier.
"Dynamo, huh? I like the ring of that. Guess that's my new nickname then. Better than Irvine, and Thunderbird was wearing thin..."
The newly christened Dynamo then swung the pole around at Logan, who jumped over it, coming down at the pipe to rake his claws through it, cutting it dramatically short. Dynamo looked to the cut, muttered an obscenity, and threw it aside, before balling his hands into fists, and swinging a right cross at Logan. He didn't bother to dodge, and was hit in the jaw, as he retracted his claws, and returned a punch to Dynamo's stomach. Dynamo groaned, staggering back, before he reached to his sunglasses, and tossed them aside, then charging his internal power until his eyes sparked.
"Okay, NOW I'm serious..."
"Good, I could use a REAL fight." Logan quipped.
The two charged to clash again. Haruko looked up, and blinked, as a flying figure landed between the two fighters.
"It's him!" Haruko stated, "A fellow alien!"
Dynamo, on the other hand, was less enthusiastic, and more scared...
"Knock it off, both of you. There's no reason for this fighting." The one who interrupted stated.
None less than the Man of Steel stood between them. Several of the kids were in awe, a few heading over to see one of the few adults they respected, due to his world reputation, even though he's fictional, of being a hero. Logan grumbled, standing down.
"What, did CD send you to help? I had it under control.."
"Sure you did. You were this close to crossing the line and going into a berserker rage. I know about your methods Wolverine. I'm not saying you didn't handle it as well as you could, but even if they are thieves, they're just kids. They need care and positive attention, not brutality."
"Heh, the others I heard about you from were right. You're just about as much a boy scout as Cyke..."
Dynamo wasn't nearly as well composed..
"You're...you...ah...I heard stories flying around you were real now, but I thought it was just a bunch of crap...You're Superman?"
Superman looked to Dynamo, then to the kids around him. He knelt down to talk to them. They were praising him, and happy to see him, and he couldn't help but lighten his mood and smile to them. He did see the young girl though, and some old scars on her arms and face.
"What happened to her?"
"It's like I told him." Informed Dynamo, as he pointed to Logan, "Her father was an abusive drunk. She had those when we found her and took her in. Beer bottle scars."
Superman went quiet, and stood up, looking to Dynamo.
"Who's in charge, here?"
"Hey, you're lookin' at him. Except there's a lot of us. So many, we've got groups in different parts of the country. Heck, I think parts of the world, maybe...yeah, sounds pretty out there for a bunch of kids, but we've got a tough leader. Superman or not, I dunno if even YOU can beat him."
Superman smirked a bit, arching an eyebrow, and put his hands to his sides.
"That a fact?" he asked in a friendly manner.
"Yeah. Except...ah, forget it. He'd get mad if I told you. Point is, it's nice knowing that there's at least ONE adult who cares now..."
"That's what I was trying to tell you!" Logan interrupted.
Dynamo sweatdropped, and looked to Logan. He then put his hand on the back of his head, rubbing it, and had a guilty smile, like he realized he goofed up.
"Uh...yeah, you did...you're those guys who became real, right? I guess YOU guys are all right with us. Tell you what, in fact. The guys who lead the different factions are gettin' together in the Big Apple pretty soon, thanks to a teleporter in our group, so maybe you guys can come and we can chat about it there. No hard feelings?"
"If you want to apologize, you should LET ME DOWN FIRST!" Haruko yelled.
We then cut out, with the others looking up at Haruko, and sweatdropping...
Story Divide
My first two-parter for the Studio Stories, and the introduction of my original character faction, the Lost Children.