"Here we are! Home sweet home," the brunet beside him, Toad(?) apparently (weird, but fitting, he thought; he figured it was either a strange nickname or some sort of codename), announced as the car pulled into a dirt driveway.
'The Brotherhood of Bayville Boarding House,' the sign read.
"This is where you live?" Mokuba asked. The others seemed to take offense to that, thinking he was looking down on them, but Lance didn't miss the note of sadness in his voice.
'What is up with this kid?' Lance was already beginning to regret letting them—mainly Pietro—talk him into this.
They all got out of the car and walked to the house. Mokuba was watched the whole short trip, but other than that, no further move was made to restrain him. Not that it mattered since he wasn't planning on going anywhere soon, anyway, but he added that fact to his growing mental list of strikes against them as kidnappers.
The interior of the house was a mess. There was no other way to describe it. It was unkempt and honestly looked like it would fall apart at any given moment.
His kidnappers stood around awkwardly, exchanging glances amongst one another.
"Sooo," Toad began, "What now?"
None of them really had an answer for that, so they just continued to stand there.
Mokuba sighed and rolled his eyes. "Well, where are you going to keep me?" he prompted in an attempt to, as strange as it sounded, help his kidnappers hold him captive.
They all gave him confused looks.
"Um, right here?" Fred answered, though it sounded like he was asking Mokuba for confirmation.
"This spot exactly?" Mokuba clarified, one eyebrow raised.
"Of course not, idiot," Pietro broke in. "He means we're keeping you in this house."
"In the entire house?"
"Yes! Why is this so difficult to understand?!"
"So you're not going to keep me locked in any room or anything like that. You're just going to let me wander around the entire house."
"We don't really have a room we can give entirely to you," Toad explained.
"There's Mystique's old room," Fred volunteered.
"Okay, it's settled. You can have Mystique's old room," Pietro announced proudly as if he was the one who had come up with the idea.
"Who's Mystique?" Mokuba whispered to Lance. Even though he figured Lance was the most dangerous, he also felt that he was the most likely to give him an actual answer.
"The lady who's supposed to be paying the bills, but she ditched us, so now we gotta find the money ourselves." The answer was angry and given in a much louder volume than the one Mokuba had used to pose the question.
The others, hearing the obvious anger in his voice, backed away slightly and seemed to almost brace themselves. For what, Mokuba wasn't sure, but their reactions made him nervous.
Nothing really happened, as far as Mokuba could tell, though he almost thought for a minute there that the ground was trembling.
He was pretty sure he had found their motivation, though.
"Have you guys ever considered, I don't know, getting a job?"
His kidnappers collectively turned towards him. "What."
He shrugged. "Well, I just thought that instead of trying to kidnap some kid and using the ransom to pay your bills maybe you should actually try to get a job."
His kidnappers looked at each other, seemingly having a silent conversation amongst themselves via glances, shrugs, and other vague gestures, before turning back to him and saying, "Nah."
"Besides, who'd hire us?" Todd said, and, yeah, okay, he kinda had a point cuz Mokuba sure wouldn't.
"Okay, fair point," he conceded, "but you thought kidnapping me was a good idea because…?"
"We watched a movie about it," Fred volunteered.
So they kidnapped him because they had seen a movie about kidnapping someone and holding them for ransom. Oh, this just kept getting better and better. He really was dealing with a bunch of clueless amateurs, wasn't he?
"Yeah, and how'd that work out for the kidnappers in the movie, huh?"
"Not great," Pietro admitted. "But we're going to do it better."
"Well, you're certainly off to a great start, then."