With an Open Mind - 5
It did not take long for us to find the source of the noise.
Near the entrance to the district, next to a still pretty pristine looking building, was a group of kids.
Three, to be exact, though a fourth could be seen a bit further away, in front of the gate. Seemed like only one of the four didn't have enough courage to actually get in.
Probably for the better.
The closer we came, the clearer the circumstances of this odd gathering became.
The kids seemed to be either early teens or late pre-teens.
The one outside, a girl, and two boys looked perfectly normal.
The fourth one, though, the one surrounded by the boy duo, was anything but.
It was a crying girl with blonde hair. So far, so ordinary.
But her skin was a deep red. She looked up at her tormentors with yellow slit eyes and a mouth filled with sharp fangs.
Behind her back were a pair of bat-like wings, tied together with a rope or string of some kind.
"Please....I wanna go home...." she cried, but the boys just laughed.
"Hey, Jas, she wants to go home!" one of them yelled to the girl at the gate.
"Why? She fits in so much better here." the girl taunted.
"This is where the Freaks live, so this is where you belong, demon." the other boy spat.
".....not a...not a demon..." the Empowered whimpered, barely audible through the tears.
"Wretched vermin. Let's take care of them." Boneyard whispered, and before I could ask her how she planned to go about it, she stepped through the haze.
I froze for a few seconds.
This wasn't good.
If I did nothing, there would no doubt be dead kids on my hands. Doing nothing to save them would be just as bad as killing them myself. At least with adults or late teens, I could argue that they could've fled earlier, or hid, or not even been in that situation if they were a bit more thoughtful...but kids were stupid. They didn't have the capacity for that kind of stuff. Not yet.
But if I was too defensive of them, too protective, things wouldn't end well for me. I could be seen as a liability. Maybe Zen would see that I was no longer useful and reveal my affiliation with W.R.A.I.T.H., and then my head would be cleanly separated from my body without a second thought.
I had to be smart about this.
"Hey, there's someone there." one of the boys said as Boneyard came into view.
With a mixture of sickening sounds, both wet and cracking, the Villain's body underwent a transformation.
Patches of skin and flesh all over slid off, hanging from her bones as if she had been caught in a knife storm. Her arms and hands, parts of her legs, half her face...and her torso. Her torso had it the worst. Her ribs were on full display, and the organs behind them as well. A fleshy mass of blood and viscera.
Her beating heart pulsed visibly.
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The two boys screamed and tried to run, but they didn't get very far. Boneyard's gangly limbs reached out and caught both within a second. One was pinfully held aloft by his hair, the other dangled from his leg upside down. The bully girl near the entrance was long gone.
I approached slowly, trying not to come off as if I cared too much, but I had to do something.
She held the boys closer together, their heads at a similar height, and leaned in with her half-skeletal face.
"Naughty...........boys.......Trespassing..........and bullying. Didn't........your mommies teach you .........any manners.........at all?......Aunty Boneyard..........has to correct that."
I put a hand on her shoulder, and her head turned backwards to look at me.
"That's right. They need to be taught a lesson. And that means they'll have to stay alive to learn from it, right? They're just brats. Killing them is not worth the scrutiny it'll bring. We also have to hurry. One of the them got away, so it's only a matter of time before Heroes show up."
Boneyard was still for a moment, but then nodded almost imperceptibly. With a loud crack, her head turned back the way it was supposed to be, and she gripped her prey tighter. The boys cried out as her sharpened finger bones pierced the skin and went deeper.
"My friend..........is right, of course............Let this be...........a learning opportunity..............To not tease someone........for their looks.........And never....EVER....come back here.......again.
As soon as her bones made contact with theirs, the boys began to change. Their faces and bodies malformed, their bones shifting beneath their skin. A misaligned jaw, an eye higher than the other, a hunched back, a rotated thumb......and probably much more that wasn't immediately obvious.
After the transformation was over, and Boneyard set the boys down again, the two sobbing bullies ran as fast as they could, which was not as fast as they used to be able to. One of them shouted "I'm sorry!" again and again in a slurred, barely understandable drawl.
My heart was beating a mile a minute.
I was pretty sure I just saved these two boys.
Well....saved was subjective in this situation. From death, at least.
I knew my "friend" here just told me she felt no remorse even when killing kids, but for some reason, the ease with which she crippled these two was still unsettling to me.
Just another thing I had to push in the very back of my mind later. I had a feeling I would have to do a whole lot of repressing and ignoring things to be able to work with these people.
Boneyard turned toward the crying girl, who crawled backward in a panic until she hit a wall.
To my surprise, the older woman's flesh knit itself back together, the bones vanished, and she even shrank down again. Slowly, she approached the girl and knelt before her.
"Sssssshhhh. It's okay."
"Please....don't hurt me!" the kid blubbered.
Boneyard brushed a strand of moist hair from the girl's face.
"We won't. Don't worry. We're on your side."
She looked up, still crying, but shaking less.
"......You are?"
Boneyard nodded and cut the string tied around the girl's wings.
"Yes. These two vermin are not worth your tears. Don't let anyone make you feel bad for who you are. You are beautiful. Inside and out. And you always will be."
The girl got up and hesitantly stumbled toward the exit, seemingly still unsure if she was going to be let go. But her tears had stopped.
"Th.....Thank you."
"Don't mention it. They had one thing right, though. You are a freak. And that's a good thing. Be proud of it. Embrace it. And when you grow up....come back here. Who knows? Maybe you'll fit right in. Now go."
She didn't need to be told twice. With a running start, she spread her wings, took to the air and sped off.
"Let's return home. Before the White Capes show up." Boneyard said, her gentle tone vanished.
"Yeah. Let's."
Our way back to base was spent in silence.
---------------------------------------
"Come in." Twin said after I made myself known.
She was hovering in front of her mirror, her makeup applying itself.
"Oh, MC.....or should I say RM? To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Her brother sat on her bed, staring in her direction, still as the grave.
"Uhm....MC is fine. I just wanted to ask a question."
She spent a few seconds finishing up and turned toward me.
"Ask away."
It still surprised me how much more personable she was than her brother. I had only known him for a few minutes, but "approachable" may as well have been his antonym.
"Zen. Do you think he could be a mage? I'm a bit curious because his powerset is so...diverse. Never seen that in an Empowered before."
"Unfortunately for you, my mission went well, so I'm still here. I'd bet my dear brother knows a whole lot more about that guy than me. I basically just met him."
As she said that, she gently stroked the zombie's hair. It seemed to lean into her touch.
"But I'll do what I can. I know he floats and can read minds. That can definitely be done by a single type of mage. There are even a few who can pull that off. What else can he do?"
I thought back on what I experienced and what I'd been told.
"Well....he can either teleport both himself and a target to...maybe not anywhere, but certainly very far away places. Or he can create Illusions of these places that also include temperature, wind, and all that kind of stuff. He can bring a mirror image to life for a specific period of time. And he can....remove his head and juggle with it, I think?" I was pretty sure that was most of it.
"Hmmmmm....."
Twin sat in her dead brother's lap.
"That seems like a lot of very disparate powers. There are Mages who can do basically anything, but they usually have a tell. Does he do it on a whim, or is he silent for a bit before he does something? Is he constantly making bets?"
I shook my head.
"Can't really say either is true. He just does his thing whenever he wants."
She leaned back and crossed her arms.
"Then I'm out of Ideas. We have mages that have to....I would say, ask for something to happen. And we have mages that gain Power through games of chance. Risk. But from what you've said, it doesn't sound like he's either. Maybe he wears enchanted nipple rings or something. Or toe rings? Accessories we can't see. But even then, making Power Granting Enchantments is very, very difficult from what I've heard. For active abilities at least, boosters are very simple."
With a flourish of her hand, she made a soda open itself and float over to her.
"In my opinion, he probably isn't one of us. Me and my bro. A Mage, I mean. He's certainly a Freak."
"Yeah.....that he is."
I thanked her for her time and excused myself.
In the end, I learned nothing immediately useful, but....one could never know when a piece of info would turn up surprisingly useful.
Probably not a mage. That was good, at least.
At least I knew more about him than before.
With a sigh, I made my way to his room.
Time for another round of training.