Zane

When Zane was back at the giant metal tree, Jay had turned a lovely shade of pink that went rather well with the rather violent shade of fuchsia that he dyed his hair with only a couple of days ago.

Cole was hugging the wall to keep from falling over from the laughter while Kai was having a very serious-looking conversation with Jay.

"… and that's where babies come from," Kai said in a serioustone.

At least his friends were back in the land of the waking again, but Zane wondered what brought on Kai's rather bizarre conversation with Jay.

"Ka(squeak)i! I kn(squeak)ow where ba(squeak)bies come from! A(squeak)nd you go(squeak)t it all wrong!" Jay was turning redder and redder with each squeak. "I d(squeak)idn't even as(squeak)k for you(squeak)r opin(squeak)ion!"

Cole was sliding down the wall, crying from laughter.

"What's going on here?" Zane asked Cole where he was helplessly laughing. "What's wrong with Jay?"

"His freaking voice is breaking!" Cole screeched. "He sounds like a rubber duck trying to speak!"

"May I say something?" Zane asked. "After you're done laughing?"

Cole nodded through the tears.

"I don't kn(squeak)ow why you're la(squeak)ughing! Yo(squeak)ur voice bro(squeak)ke too wh(squeak)en you were my a(squeak)ge!" Jay yelled at Cole.

"Yeah, but not that much!" Cole cried. "I can't breathe!"

"What did you mean when you said I got it all wrong?" Kai asked, clearly offended.

Cole couldn't speak anymore from laughing so hard.

Jay tried to say something, but he got frustrated and sat down, mouth shut and face red.

Cole looked like he wasn't going to stop laughing anytime soon.

Zane wondered when Cole was going to stop laughing so he could tell them what happened.

"May I speak now?" Zane asked.

Cole nodded, turning into Jay as he continued laughing.

An empty bucket flew at Cole and he slowly stopped laughing. "Ow."

Zane carefully explained how he found out that he was an android.

"You're a robot?" Kai asked.

"An android," Zane corrected. He was about to open the panel in his chest, but decided against it. It would be too strange.

"How didn't you kn…" Cole started to ask, but Zane interrupted him.

"I have a memory switch. Someone must have turned it off. There may be a reason for that, so I will respect their wishes." Zane pulled a leaf from his hair. "Oh, and there is another thing. When the treehorn attacked, something very strange happened."

Zane started explaining how he started glowing and floating before he controlled his plants with ease and squeezed the treehorn that attacked them until it exploded into a green goo.

Then Kai turned his attention back to Jay. "What did you mean when you said that I got it all wrong?"

Jay let out a stereotypical teenage groan, which made Cole start laughing again and caused the younger boy to seek solace in one of the bedrooms.

"So nobody is even a little worried?" Zane asked, feeling slightly relieved that nobody was making any action to act any differently to him about the revelation that he was a robot, but also feeling a bit peeved that nobody was even slightly worried about the glowing green floating experience he had.

"Are you going to join the robot uprising?" Kai asked, grabbing some of the spices that were in the cupboard in front of him.

"Um, no." Zane shook his head. "What robot uprising?"

"I'm not going to tell you, you might join them," Kai said as if it was obvious what robot uprising he was talking about.

"Where's Lloyd?" Zane asked, looking around for the group's young charge.

"He's under the table," Cole said, lifting the white tablecloth, revealing the young boy sleeping there. "Poor kid's all tuckered out."

Kai was now very seriously spicing something in front of him.

"I think we should give him to his uncle," Kai said in a very serious tone. "We shouldn't be doing this."

"But he doesn't want to go to his uncle," Cole said, turning his purple eyes to the Master of Amber. "Remember what those ninjas did to him? They abandoned him to get vegetables thrown at him."

"He got hurt," Kai argued. "I'm sure that if we explain everything very politely and hand him over…"

He's pretending to be sleeping, guys.

Kai stopped talking, a clear sign that he heard Jay's voice in his head as well, and both he and Cole looked guilty.

Zane lifted the tablecloth and gently shook Lloyd. He looked like he wanted to cry, poor guy. His eyes were tightly shut and so was his mouth, but he was clearly awake.

Cole and Kai stuck their heads under the table as well.

"Kiddo, we know you're awake," Kai said. "I'm sorry about wanting to send you to stay with your uncle, but I think it would be better if we did. You almost died today."

Lloyd opened his eyes and angrily turned them to Kai. "So did everybody else!"

"How about this?" Kai asked, putting a gloved hand on Lloyd's shoulder, "Just until we can find a more permanent place to stay, you go stay with your uncle. Just one week; If you don't like it, just give us a call and we'll come get you and never make you stay with him again if we can help it."

Lloyd angrily shook his head. "No! You're going to leave me there and never come back for me, just like my mom did!"

Cole turned back into his regular form and sighed. "Look, as much as I hate to admit it, Kai's kind of right. We're just kids ourselves. Kai and I are both sixteen, Jay's only fourteen and for all we know, Zane's six. We like… fifteen bits, and that's when we put all our money together. We don't have jobs anymore and I don't know about you guys, and Jay, that means you too, but I don't think it's a good idea to live in a giant metal tree near a flock… herd… something of treehorns with mutant powers that might attack us at any time we try to leave. We'll come back for you, okay? As soon as we get new jobs and manage to get our hands on a place that allows birds and kids, we're coming back for you."

Lloyd turned around and mumbled something under his breath.

A fourth face appeared right next to Cole, who turned into an unknown older man in a suit with a black moustache and painfully neat black hair in surprise.

When the shapeshifter realised what he'd done, he turned back into himself as angrily as possible.

"I hate it when that happens." Cole got up and dusted his shirt off.

"Maybe I co(squeak)uld tr(squeak)y to f(squeak)ix your falcon," Jay suggested. "It's all busted, but its st(squeak)ill fixable, ri(squeak)ght?"

Zane nodded quietly.

"Maybe we should send you to his uncle too," Kai suggested to Jay. "The old man and his ninjas are very busy and I don't think they can take care of a little kid all the time, and my sister's that samurai thing, so I'm pretty sure that she's busy too."

Jay shrugged. "I gue(squeak)ss I could go wi(squeak)th him. I mean, you're getti(squeak)ng a lot better at control(squeak)ing your powers."

"Just like you and your squeaky voice?" Cole teased.

"No, more like you turning into your dad whenever you freak out," Jay huffily retorted, no longer squeaking. "Hey! It stopped!"

"I think your voice squeaking like that may have come from one of the plants that had attacked you," Zane told Jay. "Some species of plant do that."

"So I didn't need to have "the talk" with him?" Kai asked, sounding slightly annoyed.

"Like I said, Kai, I already know that and you had it extremely wrong." Jay fluffed his hair like some kind of southern lady, which earned him a giggle from Lloyd, and adjusted his collar. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go fix that falcon."

The youngest teenager removed himself from under the table and put himself on top of it, making a lot of noise as he looked for something.

"Um, buddy, what are you doing?" Kai asked, removing himself from under the table as well.

"I'm looking for baking soda," Jay said in a casual tone. "I don't think there is any, though."

Cole removed himself from under the table, and soon, so did Lloyd.

Zane was the last to remove himself.

"So when should we take them to the sensei?" Zane asked as Jay let out a disappointed sigh when he found out that the little box he found wasn't baking soda, but expired candy.

Cole dodged as the box of expired candy was thrown near his head.

Jay jumped off the table and stuck his head under the sink while Kai went back to his cooking.

"I don't know… tomorrow, I guess," Cole said, sticking his hand into the box of candy and trying one. "They're still good, want one?"

A candy in a wrapper flew out of the box and into Jay's hand where he was sitting while Lloyd hesitantly took one too.

Zane didn't feel like candy either and Kai was glaring at Cole for offering candy to everybody while he was busy making dinner, so there was a chance that he didn't want any either.

"Zane, could you grow some of that corn, please?" Kai asked, pointing at a bag of chicken corn that was sitting in the corner, covered in at least fifty years of dust and cobwebs.

Zane took a handful of the corn that was waiting to be planted and stuck them in a pot of dirt before using his powers on the kernels.

The seeds shot up from tiny little leaves to fully mature stalks with ripe ears in seconds and allowed Kai to pick a couple with ease.

"Grow a dinosaur plant!" Jay squealed from under the sink, reminding everybody that he was still the youngest of them, after Lloyd.

"Dinosaurs don't come from plants," Zane explained patiently. "They come from eggs and are extinct."

Jay sighed and removed himself from under the sink and jumped up on the counter to look in the cabinet.

"So, what does baking soda have to do with fixing my falcon?" Zane asked.

"Baking soda's good for getting rid of rust." Jay sighed. "We don't have any."

"Rust or baking soda?" Kai asked.

Jay rolled his eyes and left again.

In the morning, the two youngest of the group and the three elder ones of the group would be separated until a more permanent home could be found, along with a job for each of them.

Hopefully the ninjas would be nice enough to allow them to stay…


Sorry I didn't update this guy for a while, was having a bad case of the writer's block involving this story. Please say in the reviews who you want to see unlocking their True Potential next:

Kai, Skylor, Cole, Karloff, Griffin, Jay or Ash