Here ya go: Chapter 3. It's a little shorter than the other two (by, like, 2,000 odd words . . . ), simply because I didn't want to add more crap to the end scene. Chapter 4 will be longer, though, I promise! I've got a few fun tricks up my sleeve.

Thanks again to Hack.Drawer and ElFangor87 for the awesome and consistant reviews; because of you two, I'm kept on my toes as a writer. Hugs Much love.
Hm . . . not really much more to say, except that I'm in LOVE with the greatest guy on the freaking PLANET. Gah! He's so fabulous! He opens doors for women, he's courteous and gentlemanly, he's got the right amount of personality with the right amount of respect and is ADORABLE to boot. Mahaha. I must be the luckiest girl in the world. (End sickening rant)

On with the chapter!

"Follow the screams, hm?" Veronique mused. "'s morbid enough."

Fin tensed and relaxed his muscles, as if contemplating their capacity. He smirked coyly at Veronique. "Catch me if you can."
Just as Francis had for the first time fifty-two years before, Fin flared up and kicked off the ground, jetting away to the part of the city somewhat masked by purple haze.

Veronique groaned; he was challenging her, and she should have been smart enough to be able to ignore it, but she refused to give Fin the satisfaction of beating her to the scene. She glanced around quickly for anything metal that could support her weight without collapsing and last long enough to get her there.
"Aha!" she cried upon sighting the pole to a street sign hovering above the durable, glass like road (the likes of which had become the norm to be more compatible to the invented hovercrafts). She reached a hand toward the pole, and it wobbled for a moment before levitating to her with alacrity. She grasped it firmly in both hands, held it above her head and sent a burst of power into the metal. It responded promptly by lifting her into the air and shuttling her off in the same direction Fin had gone.
In a short matter of minutes she had nearly caught up to him and was quickly closing the space between them.
"Hey Slowpoke, what's the matter? You had the head start!" she crowed, accelerating ahead.
"At least I've still got both hands free," he retaliated, adding onto the power he was channeling into his flight to catch up to her.

The two landed a short distance away from the bulk of the chaos, Fin diminishing the flames which had made him into an airborne inferno, and Veronique de-magnetizing the pole, though still holding it loosely at her side as a potential weapon (she doubted she'd need it, and even then she'd be hesitant to use it, but she figured it was better to be safe than sorry).

"Wow," she breathed, then looked to Fin. "We've got a lot of work to do."
"We?" He sounded amused. "Sparkles, you're on your own. I don't need some cunt drooling at my heel to slow me down."

Veronique tensed; did he have to express everything so poorly? "All right, then. Let me know your plan so I can be sure to stay out of your way."
Of all the things Fin had been expecting, compliance wasn't one of them. He swallowed his unnerved astonishment and hooked his thumbs in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels to stall for time. "Just that: to stay out of my way. And don't get killed, 'cause I'll be blamed for your dead ass."
"Let's go."
He ignored the second attempted gesture of teamwork and dived off the roof they were perched onto the chaos below. She observed for a moment longer, analyzed the scene:

The purple fog cast a nebulous veil over the city sect, hiding distant rooftops and trouble occurring anywhere beyond a few buildings away. Fin was blazing already, shooting streams of flame at anything that came near. She snorted and shook her head.
That idiot. Even if he stopped any of the metahuman activity raging in the area, he'd more than likely end up killing one or more innocent mutants, and that would only worsen his condition (she doubted murder would serve as a gold star on his record).

Boom. Someone's solid quartz fist came into contact with Fin's solar plexus and sent him flying back into the side of the building, which trembled on its foundations from the impact.
"He couldn't even last five minutes out there without my help? I thought he was so proud of being independent," she grumbled, creating an electromagnetic web around Fin to shield him from further damage. "Don't move," she instructed the male as she jumped from the roof and landed smoothly on the ground in front of him. "I might accidentally electrocute you."
As Rock-fist took an unorthodox, thundering step toward her, she cocked an eyebrow. "You've got to be kidding me, Hothead. You couldn't even take care of Rocky Balboa here?"
An electromagnetic net surrounded the stone metahuman and closed around him as Veronique clenched her fists, enjoying the telekinesis-like control she had over her powers. A few unidentifiable mutants swaggered (limped?) toward them, and in response she swung around, the trapped metahuman swinging about with her and proceeding to knock them over, out of their paths, most likely unconscious or rendered incapable of moving when the electricity paralyzed them.

"Move!" Finny shouted suddenly, but instead of heeding his command Veronique turned to look at him over her shoulder, both eyebrows raised in question. Milliseconds later, she was struck in the side by a piece of razor-sharp metal that had been sent flying by a telekinetic prompt from an unseen attacker.
The electric field surrounding Fin weakened and vanished, and he immediately struck out into action.
"Couldn't even last two minutes without my help?" he shot to Veronique, delivering a hard punch to someone's collarbone and blasting flames to fend off another onslaught. Handfuls of fire whooshed past Veronique as she staggered backward and fell, her vision blurring. The 'battle,' as it were, was over in a matter of minutes, the metahumans retreating into some hidden place where they could seethe undisturbed by any of the powers that be of the city.

His fists still smoking, Fin turned to Veronique and lifted an eyebrow. "Stupid. Can't you take care of yourself?"
She groaned in response, reaching over to her side and yanking out the metal with a cry of pain. Her slick hands shook as she tossed the metal aside, her eyes fixed on the wound oozing blood. Fin knelt beside her and gave no warning before plunging two searing fingers into the wound. A scream ripped from Veronique's throat and she struggled to get away, but he held her in place with his other hand for a few moments, then finally stood and stepped away from her.

Tears spilled from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks from the pain, but a glance at the burned, raw flesh told her it wasn't bleeding anymore; she had him to thank for the fact that now she wouldn't die of blood loss. It took her a decent amount of time and several calming gulps of air before she could speak steadily again, but when she did her voice was weak. "Thanks."
"Don't get too full of yourself, Sparkles. I hate you, and that's not gonna change. I just don't want you dead with me to blame."

She swallowed another shuddering breath and used the side of the building for support as she stood as well, her eyes wandering until they landed on Fin's stubbornly set jaw. He glared at her.
"The hell didn't you listen when I told you to fuckin' move?" he grouched in disgust, shaking his head.
She didn't answer, which was just as well. If she had spoken it probably would have only worsened his mood.
Fin closely inspected the area for any activity. Finding none, he returned to Veronique and scowled. "No point in waiting around for somethin' to happen. Nothin's gonna be goin' on for a while."
Veronique glanced up at him from the sleeve she'd torn from her apparel to use as a bandage, which she was tying around her waist.
"How can you be sure?"

He sneered at her, disgusted at the fact that she was still nursing what he would have treated simply as a scratch. "I know how their minds work. They won't show again until they get confident." He said nothing else, just turned on his heel and picked his way skillfully out of the messy area, not seeming to care whether she followed or not.
She tailed him as closely as possible, holding one hand pressed to her side and daintily sidestepping the rubble. She couldn't get used to the idea that it was way too quiet for a place which had just been infected by the dangerous meta-gene concoction. It occurred to her that right now she should be very pissed at Fin; after all, it was his fault: had he not knocked her out so he could escape and do something stupid to grab attention, she wouldn't have gotten hurt.
She jogged a few steps to catch up with Fin, then darted in front of him to stop him in his path. Jabbing a finger at his chest, she glared vehemently. "You are an idiot," she spat with an air of both conductivity and finality. "Everything that's happened today and will most likely happen afterward is your fault."
"Excuse me?" Fin's eyes narrowed. In a scarce matter of seconds, Veronique found her feet being taken off the ground, lifted by a strong fist which had attached itself to her neck. Fin's eyes burned and his hands along with them.
"Don't," he warned, his voice chilled and steely. "Condescend me." He tightened his grip on her throat a few moments more before abruptly dropping her and continuing on.
She landed rather roughly on the ground, choking and gasping for breath. Her hands instinctively went to her burning throat, making her wince as they felt the already forming bruises.

A bolt of electricity slammed into his back, knocking him forward and landing him on his knees. He growled in rage and leaped to his feet, whirling about to glare at Veronique, who was picking herself back up and staring evenly at him with similar hatred.
"Two can play this," he snarled, a stream of fire bolting from his fists and heading straight at her.
A sparking purple orb formed around her, deflecting the flames and diminishing only after Veronique had summoned the pole used earlier back into her hands. She was airborne now, still struggling to breathe properly but too angry to care.
"You're so stupid!" she shrieked, hanging onto the pole with one hand and firing a squadron of bolts of electricity with the other at the pyro, who had ignited by now and was quickly closing the distance between them. As difficult as it was for her to aim, he dodged her attacks with ease.
"I know you are, but what am I?"

She gripped the pole with both hands again, swinging it around to smash it into Fin's side. He gritted his teeth against the pain of ribs cracking. He spun in midair and struck the center of Veronique's chest with the heel of his shoe, sending her flying back a few meters until she regained her composure and darted back, this time aiming to hit his skull with her metallic weapon.
He took this as a chance to take the matter quite literally into his own hands, as he grabbed one end of the pole and held on, channeling heat into it. A surge of electric energy pulsed through his body, forcing him to let go, but he refused to give up just yet. "You fight like a pussy, Sparkles!"

"Break it up!" Two of what looked like metal tennis balls shot out at them, bursting as soon as they came in contact with the quarreling targets, both screaming in protest as tentacle-like arms wrapped around them and sent them both plummeting to the fast-approaching ground.
"Like it? They're called Zap-Traps. My grandfather designed them way back when in his early teenage days, when he was partners with Static. I just improved them to make them resilient to electromagnetic manipulation. Now they only answer to voice recognition prompts."

They were...floating?
Veronique glanced up to see David, decked out in all sorts of knickknack inventions she never pictured anyone being brave enough to wear in public, looking down at the two of them with arms crossed and one eyebrow raised skeptically. The two other teens hadn't hit the ground because mechanical arms had snaked out from an unseen device on his back, gripping them by the collar of Fin's shirt and the intact sleeve of Veronique's outfit, thus resulting in her hanging at a lopsided angle instead of upright, as Fin was.
"David!" she screeched. "Put me down!"
"My sensors instruct otherwise," he informed her. "Besides; if I put you down, there'd be no gravity-defying control preventing you and F-for-Fool from playing rough." Even in mid-monologue, however, David thumbed a command into a panel on his sleeve, instructing the extra arms attached to his back to release them.
Still contained with no option of movement, Fin and Veronique dropped. The former landed awkwardly on his feet, but Veronique hit the ground with painful force on one side, groaning in pain as the breath was knocked out of her. "So help me, David," she spat once she could breathe again. "I am going to kill you if you do that again."
"Sounds like a plan," Fin agreed only half-consciously, having extreme complications in managing not to fall over. He lost his balance entirely when David landed smoothly a few feet nearby and 'accidentally' nudged him.
"Oops," the blond muttered, not sparing any remorse. "How clumsy of me."
"What is with you, David?" Veronique demanded shrilly. "You're like a completely different person!"

He grinned, kneeling beside her and helping her into a sitting position. "I am, V. It's like my mind has exploded with capabilities it never had before, and there's all this knowledge at my fingertips, technology not even the military has access to that I can design!" He gestured to his shoes: thick, padded green boots exchanged for the ones he'd had earlier. "These are hovershoes. With them, I can fly—I haven't tested their full capacity for velocity, but one of them alone could carry the weight of all three of us. I invented them in ten minutes with stuff in a recycle yard. Built them with my own hands." His eyes glittered, and he pointed to them next. "I modified my contacts with a few spare nanites from similar prototypes like that window back at the containment center. Right now, I'm scanning your vitals, and aside from excessive levels of adrenaline and misdirected endorphins, you're just fine." He stood and turned so Veronique could see the device attached to his back. Once he was certain it had had the desired affect upon his audience, he spoke to her over his shoulder. "I scanned in the blueprints for the old 'Backpack' Gear designed, and modified it with a small amount of nanotechnology artificial intelligence. It can do everything the old Backpack could, and more. It's equipped with defense and attack strategies and weapons, and a GPS for each of us or any other metahuman in the world. I don't even have to speak most of the time; I just program it with my mind or with a single touch to the panel here—" he held up his wrist—"More nanotech built into my arm! It can't be removed, and if my arm were to be amputated it would sever the connection to my brain and heart, shutting it down immediately. Same goes for my contacts. In the case that my arm gets dislocated from the rest of my body, Backpack comes to find me, signaling you via miniature ear-insert communicators that I'm inventing right now."

She hadn't realized it before, but now a glance at David's free hand revealed that his fingers were flying over an almost invisible object she couldn't see because the image was blurred; he was moving that fast. Her mind was spinning so violently she thought she might black out.
"David," she moaned insistently. "What are you?"
"Central Processing Unit," he replied with a grin. "CPU. That's what I'm gonna be called from now on."
"Oh my fucking god," Fin muttered impatiently from his forgotten spot a few meters off. "Does Brainiac have an OFF switch?"
David stared calmly at him for a brief moment before tapping one of the many buttons on his wrist. The arm coiled around Fin's neck stretched further up to his mouth, preventing him from speaking any more. "There. I think I quite like you with that new look, Stone."
He tapped another button, and Veronique's binds relaxed, coiling back into the round device, which rolled of its own accord back to David. He gingerly retrieved the object and pocketed it, then helped Veronique to her feet.

"Shenice was called off to an emergency meeting," he explained before she could ask. "She gave me the card key to her house and said we could all stay there until she returned and explained the situation to us, but now that Hothead has been silenced I'm seriously considering leaving him here."

She jerked her shoulder away from his hand and stomped over to Fin, proceeding to grasp one of the strange limbs encircling him and dragging the bound teen with her back over to David. "No doubt the authorities have been informed of who's responsible for the metahuman breakout. I'd be much happier witnessing whatever they have in mind to do with him, rather than leaving him behind and knowing that sooner or later one of his idiot friends will come and help him out."
Fin heavily grunted something in response, to which Veronique promptly kicked his gut.

"Suit yourself," David shrugged in compliance. "You might not like the outcome later, though."
"Why?" she challenged, a smirk curling her lips.
"Knowing Shenice, she'd rather vouch that Fin stay with us under house arrest or something rather than have him euthanized by the government."
She snorted. "I could honestly care less."
"I know," he countered nonchalantly. "That's why, if that should be the case, I'm going to vouch for you to be his dutiful watcher. After all, you seem to like him so much."
"Wow, David. You're so hilarious, please, by all means, stop."

"Yeah, Bruises. Stop. And next time you use me as a guinea pig for something, make sure it works before you do."
Veronique uttered a small squeak of surprise and dismay, her gaze flitting to the length of Zap-Trap containment in her hand, which had been severed in two places. Each end of the portion she held was steadily melting, shrinking its way to the center. She hastily dropped it and grumbled a stream of curses to herself, crossing her arms. There's no way I'm even going to bother with him now. CPU can take care of it, she thought grimly, watching with a mask of blank nonplus as Fin dove from the air and attacked David. Craftily thrown punches prevented the super-genius from reaching into his pocket for another Zap-Trap, and he made sure that he couldn't reach over and program anything into his wrist-panel to put him at the receiving end of misfortune again.
The battery continued relentlessly until the sickening sound of a limb being ripped from its socket and David's scream signaled its end.

"Quit whinin', Bruises. It'll pop right back in easy enough."
David forced himself to steady his breathing, then smirked up at Fin with a look of utter triumph. "So stupid," he muttered. Fin lifted an eyebrow, clearly unconvinced. The look on his face explained plainly enough that he believed he'd won the fight he called himself; David was down, burned, bleeding, and had a dislocated right arm.
"Think again."
Fin looked at him quizzically, but only for a second before crying out in pain and falling forward, motionless. Behind him was Backpack, a mechanical arm retracting back into the bulk of the device, its end a still sparking high-voltage stun apparatus.

David hissed from the pain of popping the joint back into place. He denigrated the pyro in a series of grumbles directed at Veronique. "Was he even listening when I told him what would happen if that arm ended up dislocated? Is he really that dense and completely void of conscious thought that he didn't realize what he was doing? Ugh. The entire world has gone mad."

"Mm," Veronique murmured, examining her fingernails. "Can we go now?"
"It's 'May we leave now,' and yes, we may—but you're carrying him."
"Why should I have to carry him? You're the one with all the fancy velocity-dexterity-weight-tolerant new gear—you carry him."
David wagged a finger in front of her face. "No, you want him to come along with us instead of leaving him here. He's your problem, so you deal with him. Besides; I'm trying to recover from a traumatic attack."
She scoffed, looking at him with total disgust. "Oh, please. Tell me you're not really that pathetic." Upon further scrutiny to David's condition, she added, "And you looked way worse a second ago...don't tell me you found a self-healing serum, too?"
David looked up from where he was checking Fin's vitals.
"Yes."
"Great. Fork it over, pal. I'm illin' too."
He gave her a doubtful look. "Why should I? Last I checked you didn't seem so thrilled to discover that I could perform miracles with this new and improved intelligence."
"Give me the benefit of the doubt," she begged, pouting a little. "I got roughed up just as much as you did."
"—Which brings me to my next question: why did you just stand there watching when he attacked me?"
She shrugged. "I thought you could handle it. You can't blame me for being wrong." She was treading on dangerous ground and she knew it, but she figured David to be harmless, intellect or no; she'd known him all her life and vice versa, surely they could handle a little teasing on each side.

His dangerous look broke into a wide grin. "I'm just messing with you, V. I just finished with Hothead's ribs; now it's your turn. Open and say 'ah'."
She did as instructed, and he produced a small tube of some odd glowing substance from his pocket, tapping it once to shake some of its powdery contents into Veronique's mouth.
"Swallow. It should start working in a few seconds." He grunted from the effort of lifting Fin onto his shoulder, kicking his boots together and lifting into the air a few feet. "Come on. I don't want Shenice to get there before we do."