A/N Hello, all. This one took a little longer than usual because it's really one of the main chapters that goes right back to the start of the series and explains a lot of the stuff that's happened throughout, so I had to make sure that everything was correct and plausible and that I did the explanation justice. Enjoy!

There she stood.

Just…

There she stood.

Slowly, I picked myself up from my place on the floor, trying to make sense of the image of my mother standing in the doorway. For a moment I felt the overwhelming urge to run to her, to let her look after me and make things right the way she had before.

'Mom?' I said, and my voice came out sounding young and uncertain. 'Wha-… What are you doing here? Did they capture you too?' Please, a voice inside me begged. Please let her have been captured too. But I knew I was just being desperate, grasping at straws; as I took in her dark suit, her straight back, the calmness in her eyes, I knew that this wasn't the look of someone who was trapped and afraid. It wasn't the look of someone who'd just laid eyes on people whose safety she'd been worrying about. It wasn't the look of my mom.

Does not compute.

She smiled at me, tilting her head as little as if to say 'aw, silly child, is this a bit hard for you to get?'

Error, error, does not compute.

'No, Maximum,' she said, and her voice was missing all the warmth it had held every time she'd spoken to me in the past. 'No. I haven't been captured.' And then she stopped talking, just carried on standing there, regarding us.

'You-' I struggled to talk, but the words were getting stuck in my throat, feeling like they were about to choke me. 'You're-'

'You're the General,' Dylan finished for me.

'I am,' she, my mom, confirmed, and I felt all the breath get knocked out of me by those two words. Even though I'd known it, I'd known it as soon as the door opened and I saw her standing there, it was still like a painful electric shock to hear it being said.

'But-' My brain felt like it had just stopped functioning, unable to make sense of what was going on. 'No. No, you helped us!'

She sighed and closed her eyes briefly, looking fed up.

'Please, Maximum, let's not play games. You know things are never that simple.' Her gaze skimmed coolly across the room, then she let out an airy laugh when she saw Ratchet curled up on the floor, his arms wrapped around his head. 'Oh, how rude of me! Your friend's been completely unable to hear anything we've been saying.'

Stepping further into the room, she allowed the door to shut behind her, and Ratchet relaxed as the noise was cut off.

'You'd lock yourself in here with us?' Star asked, her voice cold and even, and The General's – I couldn't call her 'Mom' anymore – eyes fell on her.

'You think I worry that you're going to harm me in some way? Oh, no, that's not a concern of mine at all.'

'And why's that?' Star shot back, the expression on her face saying that she'd have no problem with things getting violent.

'I am the only person able to give the order for your release,' The General explained, placing her hands behind her back. 'If you kill me then you're never getting out of this place.'

'Because you're planning on letting us go as it is?' Iggy spat.

'Perhaps, perhaps not. But with me dead you'd have no chance whatsoever. Besides, I didn't come here today to hurt you. I just wanted to talk.'

I clenched my fists, forcing myself to look her in the face, forcing myself to act as though I wasn't about to throw up with the grief of it all. If this is who she really is, then you shouldn't feel upset about losing her. She's just another psycho you need to beat, I told myself.

'Talk about what, exactly?'

She started to stroll across the room, her hands still behind her back, looking for all the world as if she were taking a walk in a park during summer as opposed to being shut in a white box with a group of shell-shocked genetic experiments.

'Quite a lot, really.' Her voice had taken on a conversational tone. 'I'm sure that you've been through a few things that don't quite make sense to you.'

I lifted my chin.

'Such as?'

'You never wondered how it was so easy for us to find you, no matter where you were? Why you started taking on seemingly random mutations? Where that voice in your head came from?' At that she turned to face me, a self-assured, pitiless smile on her lips.

'I-' Thrown, I strained to find a reply. Because I had wondered about all those things. There had been parts of our lives that just didn't add up, never seemed to come to anything, never seemed to quite make sense.

'Let me explain, starting right at the beginning,' The General said genially. 'It's customary for a microchip to be inserted into every subject upon their entry to the School. These chips monitor things such as heart rate, the concentrations of various chemicals and substances in the system – for example blood glucose – and multiple other important occurrences within the body. They also act as a tracking device, meaning that a subject can be pinpointed within seconds anywhere on Earth. We've been monitoring you every moment of your life since you first arrived into our care.' She paused for a moment and let the silence hang in the air, then continued, sounding as if she was savouring everything she said. 'Which is why I was, ah… let's say surprised to find it so easy to, in colloquial terms, get in with you. To get you to trust me. Given your history and your tendency to lean towards wariness, I expected that building up a relationship with you would take months of high-intensity encounters.' She smiled kindly at me, her gaze searching my face. I felt my jaw tighten. 'But it wasn't like that, was it Maximum? You trusted me almost instantly. It didn't take much; I patched up a gunshot wound, and not even a fatal one at that, I took the reveal of your wings in my stride as an understanding stranger, and I gave you a roof over your head for one night.

'I'll admit that when you left that first time I was doubtful that I had made enough of an impression. After not too long I started to plan out a second meeting for us, but before it could be put into action you came to me completely of your own accord, didn't you? And this time you brought company.' Her eyes shifted to Fang, who was leaning against the wall, arms crossed and face blank.

'But I came to you for help,' I burst out. 'And you gave it to me. That was the chip, wasn't it? The one you spoke about. That was the chip that I wanted out, and you did it!'

She considered me for a moment, her head tilted back.

'Did I?' she asked eventually, her voice light. 'Did I really? Are you sure it's not still in there? That I didn't just fake it?'

'I watched the surgery,' Fang cut in coolly, training his unblinking gaze on The General. 'I saw you take the chip out.'

She gave a slight tut.

'No, Fang, I'm afraid you didn't. What you saw was me cutting Maximum's arm open, pretending to search around for a while, and then showing you a decoy chip. You were too distracted by her Valium-induced ramblings that you didn't notice the switch being made.'

Despite the horrible situation we were in, I still felt a flush spread across my face at that memory, and Fang's poker face faltered briefly, his eyes flickering to me for a moment before zipping back to The General. She didn't miss the movement.

'Yes, your maudlin adolescent confusion was an ideal cover. The highly-charged emotions of teens are so easy to exploit.'

'So what about my arm, then?' I ground out, wanting to get away from any talk of that kind of thing. 'If it wasn't paralysed because of the chip being removed, what happened? Did you just cut a few nerves whilst you were in there to try and put me out of action?'

'Bear in mind that both Jeb Batchelder and Anne Walker, the people who supposedly repaired your arm, were both under my direction at all times,' The General stated calmly. 'If I'd wanted you to be permanently debilitated by your arm then it would have remained unusable. But I had to make it look realistic. Having warned you so strongly about the dangers of the surgery, to have you emerge from it with no consequences would have seemed suspicious. So when I administered your anaesthetic, I used one exclusive to the School, created in the laboratories just a few corridors from here. A simple nerve block as it appears on the outside, but this one was extraordinary in its endurance; it would not break down until it came into contact with another substance which acted as a counter to its effects. A substance with which you were injected when you arrived back in the School with Drs Batchelder and Walker, giving you full use of your arm once more. An instant reversal of your "paralysis".' She said the last sentence with laughter in her voice, as if the absurdity of the thought amused her.

I felt sick as her words hit home.

'The chip was never removed,' I said weakly. 'It's been giving away our location the whole time.'

'Oh now, Maximum, don't feel too bad – every one of your little flock members had an identical device somewhere in them.'

'You faked the X-rays.' It wasn't a question. Not long after the rest of the flock had met the person who had been my mom, she'd X-rayed all of them to check for chips like mine. It was obvious now that the 'clean' images hadn't been real.

'Why didn't you do that with Max's X-ray, then?' piped up Nudge. 'Why did you show her the chip?'

'I think I've mentioned already that this was all about building up trust.' The General pierced me with her stare and smiled cruelly. 'What better way to prove that I was trustworthy than to have you lying there, vulnerable in front of me, and choose to help you rather than hurt you?'

'You're sick,' I growled, still completely horrified by what was happening. The General really did laugh at that, the sound bouncing off the walls of the room.

'Perhaps,' she conceded. 'But it worked. The next thing I knew, you had brought your flock, the people you cared about most in the world and would protect above anything else, to my door. You let me take you all in, feed you, and after just a while longer you let me take part in your decisions, even make some for you. Trust is control, Maximum. And I had it.'

Kate had been frowning throughout the conversation, and chose that moment to get her two cents in:

'So you had control. But why didn't you just capture them straight away? Surely if you wanted to keep them from being a threat then you shouldn't have let them stay free.'

'It was never my intention to restrain them; I had no concern that the flock could pose a threat to the School. My reason for wanting control was to keep them in check, and to explore the ways in which we could use them to our advantage. From very early on it was clear that Maximum and the flock were some of the most successful recombinants we had ever created, and upon that realisation it was decided that, when the time was right, they would be let loose from the School. They would then be used as a measuring device to test any viable subjects that followed them.

'At first the only ones able to survive beyond infancy were the Erasers, and whilst we did manage to create stronger and stronger variations of the original design, it wasn't until a few years after the flock's so-called escape that we moved forwards into a time of massive scientific advancement. This opened many doors for us in terms of what we were able to create, and I'm sure that Maximum and her friends will understand now why they came up against such a wide range of opponents. Within the School, the group is referred to as the Referee.'

And I did understand. Suddenly all of the seemingly random rivals we'd fought over the last year or so made sense; Erasers, Flyboys, clones, Omega, the Uber-Director and his evil henchman Gozen, M-Geeks… So many of them had seemed to come from nowhere, then completely disappear again.

'It's us,' I whispered, trying to take in what The General had called us. 'The Referee. The flock.' I looked up at her. 'So everything – the School, the Institute, Itex – they're all the same thing.'

'Quite right, although the School was really the beginning of it all; everything else is a branch off the original concept, each with a slightly different focus in its work.'

'And the Doomsday Group?' Holden asked.

'Also a part of our organisation. You must understand how serious I am when I say that everything you have faced since leaving the School was at our command. I wonder if it occurred to you that there seemed to be times when a mutation would occur in one of you that just happened to become extremely useful very soon after it appeared? We wanted to test you, yes, but at the same time we needed you to be strong enough to act as a valid indicator as to the abilities of our other experiments. Each of you possesses a series of dormant capabilities which can be activated at our will from this location via the mainframe computer, so when a situation called for a new power, we were able to ensure that you had the tools to put up enough of a fight to truly test our latest subjects.

'Of course, the hardest part of our plan was that we had to give you the means to grow strong, but at the same time we couldn't allow you to become a danger to us. So we offset your physical strengths with emotional weaknesses; I'm sure those headaches you had were extremely distressing for both you and your flock, Maximum? And that Eraser you saw when you looked in the mirror? The stress of going to school and having to deal with ordinary life, the different leads on your flock's parents that came to nothing, your own mother-' She chuckled a little. '-being kidnapped by an evil megalomaniac or trapped in a falling plane? Everything was designed to make sure you couldn't achieve any more than we wanted you to. Any triumph you experienced was carefully planned out. On the whole, we managed to keep you under our thumb quite nicely.'

The room was deadly silent for a moment as everyone took in what she'd said. The awful thing was that it made sense; I could see all of the different pieces, all of the things that had confused me and seemed to have no real reason behind them, suddenly falling into place. I cleared my throat, trying to get rid of the football-sized cotton ball that seemed to be stuck in there.

'And the Voice? You mentioned the Voice before,' I said, my words clipped. The General waved a hand as though it wasn't important.

'A second device implanted in your brain from an early age. A fantastic piece of technology, but hardly worth mentioning. Words were transmitted into your auditory cortex from our base here, with a few select people holding the partnering device that allowed them access, myself and Dr Batchelder included.'

Another silence fell, which was quickly shattered by a loud crack as The General clapped her hands together and looked around at us with a smile.

'Well, this has been nice. I think we've covered everything, don't you? Yes, I believe we've discussed everything that needs discussing, so if you'll all excuse me…'

She turned to leave, her hand coming up to press against the wall so that the door would open for her. Dylan's voice called her back:

'Why did you tell us all this? What was the point?'

'Because she's a psycho who likes to play with her food before she eats it?' suggested Iggy.

The General faced him, a dark relish in her eyes.

'Understand that scientists as people have a massive tendency towards pride when it comes to their work. Where would the fun be if we'd had you jumping through our hoops from day one and never taken the chance to tell you about it?'

And then, with a chilling laugh that I felt like one final, physical strike to my chest, she opened the door, and was gone.

A/N Hope you liked it and that it raised a few ideas about everything that's happened to the group. Review!