Hey, nerds. What's up.
Grahh! I hate this story :( I am so ready for it to be done…unfortunately, I'm not even 2/3 done yet. –wails- This is dragging me down majorly. All my other stories are within 5 chapters of being finished, and this is still…bleh. Whatever. Let's get on with it.
Ulquiorra: This story is trash. It is not original content, in fact it is plagiarism. I do not know why you are writing it. The motives behind the things that you do are far beyond me.
Me: Shut up! You're not welcome in this fandom!
Ulquiorra: Well, it's not like he didn't come to my fandom. –points at Fang-
Fang: Huh? Oh, yeah, I did go to your fandom for a moment. It confused me.
Me: Okay, who wants to do the disclaimer? –sneakily changing subject like a bau5-
Nifty: MEE~ !Disclaimer: ACTIVATE!
Me: Nifty, what are you—
I'm just about to wake up Iggy for second watch when it happens again.
Max sits up fast, like a broken umbrella collapsing in on itself. Her eyes are wide, and her fingers are clutched to her skull like if she lets go her head will crack open and her brains will splatter everywhere.
Déjà vu, much? Ahh.
"Max?" I try to make my voice as gentle as possible, remembering the feeling of that pain, slicing through my skull. Any small noise is like a rusty chainsaw inside your head, drilling into your brain, splitting your skull into neat chunks like Pangaea into the seven continents.
She moans, and then her mouth opens, random noises coming out. If I hadn't known better I would say she was speaking different languages – Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Greek – God knows what else, all one after the other, like she was saying a sentence in each language very quickly.
"Fang." It's Iggy. His voice is low, worried. "Is it happening again?"
"Sh." I shush the blind boy behind me. "Are the others asleep?"
"Like rocks." Iggy makes his way over to Max. "What's going on? Is she speaking Dutch?"
"Among other things." I put my hand on Max's shoulder, squeezing gently to let her know I'm still here. "I don't know what to do," I confessed.
"You're not the only one, bro." Iggy sits back helplessly. "If there was a surface wound, then maybe. I just don't…Ugh, I hate Bosnian. It sounds like someone just sat there and spewed out random words and matched them with random meanings. When d'you think she learned that?"
"I don't know," I say, not really thinking about it too hard, seeing as Max's sudden multilingual skills are the last of my worries right now. Okay, maybe not the last. But it isn't as high on the list as how the heck I'm going to stop her pain.
"Who's screwing with my Mac?"
Me and Iggy both look up, tense on high alert. Max is still muttering to herself. Now I think it's Italian. "Who's there?" Iggy calls, his head turned to see if he can hear anything else.
"Who are you?" the voice comes again. It sounds male and superbly pissed. "What are you doing? You've crashed my whole system, you worthless dipstick!"
Max is finally silent, and her firm grip on her skull is beginning to loosen a little bit. I breathe a sigh of relief. She's going to be okay.
"What are you talking about?" I say dangerously, hiding my relief.
"My system crashed. I've tracked the interference, and it's comin' from you. So I'm tellin' you to knock it off – or else!"
The owner of the voice finally gets close enough for me to see. He's short, but his proportions suggest that he is about our age. He has on a beanie pulled down around his ears, dirty and ragged army fatigues, and he has his PowerBook attached to his shoulders like an accordion or something. Despite his filthy and ragged appearance, his computer is shiny and spotless, like he spends a great deal of time keeping it meticulous.
And yeah, even Angel could easily take him. I hold in a snort.
"And what's wrong with her? She trippin'?"
"She's fine," I say coldly, even though she's anything but. "We don't know anything about your computer. If you're not brain-dead, you'll get out of here." I need him to leave so that we can deal with Max.
"I'm not going nowhere till you quit messing with my Mac," the guy says flatly. "Why don't you get your girlfriend to a hospital?"
Iggy snorts quietly behind me, and I resist the urge to reach around and backhand him across his white face.
Max attempts to sit up, making me automatically start freaking out. "Who the hell are you?" she whimpers, sounding so pathetic that I gently push her back down. She sits back up right away.
"None of your beeswax!" he yells, making Max wince. "Just quit screwing up my motherboard."
Max takes a deep breath. "What are you talking about?" she croaks. I feel a wave of annoyance. Does she not trust me to handle this kid? She needs to lie down and rest.
"This!" the kid yells. He turns his Mac toward us, and Max gasps, her eyes squinting against the glare of the screen - but she doesn't look away. I look at it as well.
It's the same stuff that Angel had showed me from her mind during the attack.
Max looks shakily at the kid. "Who are you?" she whispers.
"I'm the guy who's gonna kick your butt if you don't quit messing with my system," he says angrily. Tough, but unrealistic. Talk about an empty threat.
The screen changes to green. Red words scrolled down.
Hello, Max.
mind=blown
I look around and stare at Max. She gazes back at me helplessly. Then like we're attached to levers, we both look back at the screen, which now reads Welcome to New York.
Max jumps. "Can you hear that?" she says shakily. "Did you hear it?"
"Hear what?" I look over at Iggy, who shakes his head.
"That voice?" She rubs her head while me and Iggy share a confused glance. A voice? No…
"What's the deal?" asks the kid. He sounds kind of weirded out. "Who's Max? How are you doing this?"
"We're not doing anything," I tell him, and the kid's eyebrows shoot up. Max clutches her head again, and the screen goes funkadelic again. Coincidence? I think no. Four words stand out to me among the chaos: Institute for Higher Living. Max looks at me, and I nod to show that I've seen them before the screen goes blank again.
The kid starts typing furiously. "I'm gonna track this down…"
We watch him drill his keyboard for a few minutes, the frown on his face growing steadily deeper. Finally he sits back. He looks around him for what seems to be the first time, seeing the other kids sleeping, Iggy sitting behind Max, who she doesn't seem to have noticed yet.
"I don't know how you're doing it," he says irately. "Where's your gear?"
"We don't have any gear," I tell him. "Spooky, isn't it?"
"You guys on the run? You in trouble?"
"Why would you think that?" I ask, avoiding his question with Ninja Fang skills.
"Let me see," he says sarcastically, rolling his eyes. "Maybe because you're a bunch of kids sleepin' in a subway tunnel. Kind of clues me in, you know?"
Ninja Fang has been momentarily defeated.
"What about you?" Max asks, turning the question around. "You're a kid sleeping in a subway tunnel. Don't you have school?"
The boy laughs without humor. "MIT kicked me out."
MIT? Oh, so he's a midget, then. One look into Iggy's blind eyes has me reeling at the amount of amusement in them. Right, not a midget. Just an effing genius. Of course.
"Uh huh," Max deadpans.
"No, really," he says sheepishly. "I got early admission. Was gonna major in computer technology. But I spun out, and they told me to take a hike."
"What do you mean, spun out?" If he's a psycho, I don't care how bad Max's head hurts. I don't care how tired Angel is or how lazy Nudge is feeling at that moment. If he's insane I was getting the flock the hell away from him. And so far he seems pretty insane.
He shrugged, though, instead of going on a weed-induced rage like I was half-expecting. "Wouldn't take my Thorazine. They said, no Thorazine, no school."
Oh, so he wasn't insane by druggie standards. He was actually insane. Level schizoid.
"So you didn't like Thorazine." Max sounds like she's struggling to hold in a laugh.
His face hardens. "No. Or Haldol, or Melleril, or Zyprexa. They all suck. People just want me to be quiet, do what I'm told, don't make trouble."
Okay. Things were getting too emotional and deep for Ninja Fang. He can only deal with surface discussions. "So what's up with your computer, man?" I say in an attempt to save my manhood.
He shrugs again. "It's my bread and butter. I can hack into anything. Sometimes people pay me. I do jobs when I need money." Suddenly he tenses and seems to go on alert. "Why? Who wants to know?" he demands.
"Chill out, dude," I say, putting up my hands. "We're just having a chat."
The guy is too far gone. He backs up slowly. "Who sent you?" he shrills. "Who are you? You just leave me alone! You just stay away!"
He turns and runs into the subway tunnel. A few seconds later, we can no longer hear his footsteps.
"It's always so refreshing to meet someone crazier than us," Max says almost dreamily. "We seem so normal afterward."
"We?" I say in a don't-lump-me-together-with-you voice.
"What's up?" Iggy says, wanting to know the visual details. Max sighs and explains it to him. All of it – even the stuff I didn't know, like a voice inside of her head. I frown.
"Maybe I'm going crazy," she says in a tone that suggests she's trying not to think about it. "But it will lead me to greatness. Like Joan of Arc."
"But controlling other people's computers?" Iggy says, a skeptical look on his face.
"I don't see how," Max says. "But since I have no clue about who or what could possibly be causing it, I guess I can't rule anything out."
"Hmm. Do you think it's connected to the School or the Institute?" I muse out loud.
"Well, either that or I was born this way," Max says sarcastically. I try and fail to prevent the song from playing loudly and obnoxiously through my head. "On the off chance that I wasn't, let's really, really try to find the Institute tomorrow. At least now we know what name to look for."
As she lays back down, I grab Iggy's shoulder, stopping him from following suit.
"Hey dude," I whisper. The whites of his eyes gleam in the darkness. "Hey, can you keep this a secret?" I ask him once Max is asleep. "From the little ones? I don't want to scare them."
"Sure thing," says Iggy, starting to lie down again.
"Oh, no, you don't." I grab his shoulder again, and he props himself up on his arm, angry now.
"What now?"
"You're taking watch." I smile at his groan of exasperation and settle down on the concrete, closing my eyes.
"Fang."
"What?" I open my eyes a crack and glare at the blind boy, who I swear is grinning back.
"Goodnight."
I mutter in his general direction and turn onto my side, using my hands as a pillow. I close my eyes again, and suddenly my eyes seem to be cast in bronze.
"Fang?"
"What?"
"Goodnight."
…
…
…
"Fang?"
"Oh, my god! Shut up!"
"No, I'm serious this time," he says quietly. "There's really someone there."
I sit up fast. "Where?" I ask, peering into the blackness, trying to discern a shape. "Where are they?"
"Nowhere." Iggy snickers. "Just fooling ya."
"Oh, my God." I lie back down. He is irritating.
"Fang?"
"GOODNIGHT!"
-here? Oh, crap, the story cut into my author's note in the middle of my senence, ahaha – review?