Prologue - rewritten Gen X fic
*FO,PTB!*
Jan '02
Monday. Bleah.
She never used to abhor that particular day of the week. She never even took much notice of any of them before, just a casual measure of 'today of the day that movies are half-price' or if it was the day to go to church. The only significance Monday used to hold was that is was hated by a pasta-scarfing cat in a comic strip, and - a few years before, even though much was forgotten now - it was the day she would go back to school.
She never used to have school right were she lived, either. She never had to hide behind the walls of an Embassy, afraid of being murdered - or worse - every single moment of the remainder of her existence. That had all started because of THE Monday.
THE Monday was the day her throat closed up all of a sudden and her words stopped and her skin cracked and fell off in dry chunks like crisp onion paper and there was a new skin under it all pale and glittery blue and its iridescence was the last thing she saw as her eyes sealed closed and stayed that way for the months she was changing and the prettiness of it was what she clung to through the pain, hiding hundreds of meters under the ground in a medical facility that had once been part of the Department H headquarters.
It was on a Monday that the fact she now was a 'paranormal' - a mutant, though not a naturally occuring one - suddenly became known to her and to the rest of the world. She was a freak.
She doesn't like Mondays much.
She did not like the ones who had done this to her much, either. They had not intended to harm her, even, but she had the distinct misfortune to have been caught in the middle of a serious fight, and what should have never happened had happened, and by the time the fight was over, the would-be heroes were not able to reverse or even stop the changes. They had apologized, but she could not hear, and they had tried to protect her from further harm, but with the obvious physical manifestations came great powers as well, though it took long months and much confusion to connect the events - both near and hundred of kilometers away - to the crippled, bitterly silent woman who huddled under the depths or rock and steel that had kept her from prying eyes and angry pitchforks.
If it hadn't been for the kids - friends and future warriors - her new allies, and the recent Monday she began a new life with them, she might very well hate Mondays.
No, that's not true at all.
If not for her new friends, she'd be dead. Monday - any day - wouldn't matter anymore.
Sprawled out on a branch 40-odd feet up a tree filled with prickly needles, she shared a stolen basket half-full of pilfered fruit with the favorite of her new friends and contemplated Mondays and changes and the smell of sticky sap.
It was a Monday now, and she was gladly skipping a tutoring session at the new place, where she was not the only one to cower in the shadows of the basements. Embassy or not, the large population of normal humans there meant that she often had to hide her true appearance: specially altered gloves and shoes, long bulky skirts and jackets, a bodybrace that kept her shape painfully constrained into something that passed for human, and an image inducer on her belt to hide what attire could not. All of which she despised.
All of which were currently laying in a dejected heap on the ground far below. Hours ago, she'd stripped down to just her own sturdy hide to explore, the masses of trees and fence and distance to other people acting as sufficient barriers to being seen and therefore disturbed. People who could still talk were more nuisance than not, and she had wanted a quiet day to think, to practice enough to be at least a little confident of what she could or could not do.
She didn't really understand the power aspect of her change, she could barely grasp that the physical body she inhabited was once different than how it was now. Her memories of 'before' were fragmented at best, missing completely at worst, and mostly gone. Her powers had been equally unreliable - sometimes she wanted a thing to happen and it did, though usually in some bizarre and unpredictable way, sometimes it did not, and sometimes things happened that she knew were her fault even though she was just as sure that she had not purposely caused them. Not all of it was bad, however. Like today - she and her favorite friend had sneaked some food from the kitchens very early in the morning, and gone off to be alone.
She had tripped - a common thing - and had fallen onto her friend, but when the purple flash passed over them, and they realised it was not the floor they had hit but a mass of dirt and grass, she knew it was her fault, even if neither of them had any idea how.
They were outside now, with great tall trees around and no people to bother or be hurt by them, and her friend was ecstatic with joy, running off to look at everything and pointing out the empty buildings and paths with sharp fingers and large blue eyes.
The signs, left behind when the people here had moved on, told her what her friend could not put in words. They had landed at the edge of a deep forest, inside the abandoned school grounds where her friend had first come to realise the concept of 'home'. She had been told about it, but had not realised she could travel there. She had no idea how to travel back, but she'd bother with that detail when she needed to. It was empty, familiar, and - best of all - felt safe. After the guided - if silent - tour, she had spent the day practicing her reluctant powers to see what she could and could not do, the marble-colored rifts of light and energy dancing off of her mottled, blue-speckled skin while the black-wrapped, blue-eyed, red skin-shades of her friend alternately watched in interest and wandered off after passing butterflies. She had eventually begun to grasp how it some of it worked, and could even get the wanted response . . . in a few of the attempts.
Then, only minutes ago, she had realised there were people both in the air and on the ground near her, searching. She had run - hobbled - for the cover of the trees, grabbing up the clothing and basket along the way, hiding the offensive garments under some roots and clambering up to the concealing heights of the forest with her companion, eating while waiting to see if the searchers were friend or enemy.
The searchers were not the terrible monster-robots that had come after her a few days before, which was good, but she could sense (though she did not know how) that none of them were normal, hateful humans. But she recognised none of them, so she stayed hidden, and spit seeds at the local squirrels which had soon given up yelling to flee in pain. What she would do - if anything - to the people looking for them, she's decide when and if they were found. Both her friend and herself were quite capable of defending each other, as they had proved to the very dismembered sentinel 3 days previous. The power-things that happened automatically were out of her control, unpredictable, and frightening, but so far had shown to be excellent protection.
So they straddled their branches and waited, and thought about the days events, and she came to the conclusion that Mondays might not be halfway bad.
(end prologue)