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He'd caught her just as she was going to break into a grocery store. He'd got her handcuffed, after Gary had managed
to hit her with a lucky shot from his tazer, as the ground beneath their feet rumbled.
Now, he didn't have anything
against mutants personally, but he couldn't wait till they brought in that Mutant Registration Act. It might help them out
in the field, because it was getting dangerous out there; you never knew who, or better yet, what you were going to come up
against.
Take this girl for instance: looking at her, she was blatently a street kid, probably breaking into the store
to get money for her next hit. Only then they try and arrest her and she's got this power to shake the ground and they can't
get to her. How the hell are they supposed to combat that? Because really, the shot that got her was very lucky. At least
once they were all registered and tagged they'd know to have their tazers ready or whatever else might be needed.
The
girl was out cold, so they were taking her back to the police station as quickly as they could, so that she would be safely
behind bars before she came back round and could attack them again.
Bob was helping Gary lift her to her feet to get
her into the police cruiser when he thought he saw half a shadow's movement, something like a cat, right in the corner of
his eye. Next thing he knew he had a bloody nose, probably broken, and Gary was on the floor, not moving much. Then one of
his knees was taken out and a blow to his head made the world fade to black.
Callisto lifted the girl out of the police
cruiser, picked her up in a fireman's lift and carried her away. She hadn't meant to get involved in anything tonight, because
her last couple of run-ins with the police had come very close to going wrong, but she couldn't let a sister get arrested
for stealing food just to try and survive. And yeah, she might have been assuming a lot about the girl, but what was the worst
that could happen to her? It wasn't like either of the policemen would have seen what she looked like, she was a ghost in
this neighbourhood, no one would have noticed that she had been around.
The girl came to quickly enough, and looked
around worriedly.
"Don't worry, the police are long gone." That didn't seem to settle her. "Name's Callisto. Fellow
mutant." That was the first time Arclight had heard it called that. Back home it was just that thing, the thing that made
her a freak. Her dad said it probably had something to do with the God knows what he dropped on Vietnam when he was over there;
her mother just cried. But that was nothing new.
"Arclight." That's what her dad said she sounded like - Arclight bombs
landing on some poor bastard's house.
"Food's over there. We've got water to drink. Anything else, you've got to find
for yourself."
Arclight helped herself to some food. If she hadn't have been starving, she wouldn't have been stupid
enough to try and break into a shop at the front of a parade of shops. "So how do I make money around here?"
Callisto
smiled. She liked this girl, she liked this girl a lot.
~~~~
He'd been told that this was the place to go for
an electronica night. The guys who'd told him seemed to be right, just judging from the line of people waiting to go in. Even
the doormen were decked out like electrogoths.
So he was dancing away, and maybe, maybe clicking with this hot chick
in a tight red PVC skirt, when the DJ announces that there's going to be a battle and he just can't resist, because that's
what he came for, to dance, so he joins in.
He trounces this other guy, who's half a foot taller than him and must
work out at a gym. The guy doesn't take it too well and starts hitting him. Every single instinct is telling him to run 'cause
no good is going to come of it if he fights back, but he won that dance fair and square, so he's not going to back down. Plus
he's pretty certain he's tough enough to take this guy, given he's got certain advantages.
Unfortunately, the moment
those come out to play, the entire club seems to take offence, and the odds are seriously not in his favour anymore.
There's
a point, when there's twenty guys about to hit him and the ground seems to shake with their anger, that he thinks he's done
for. That this is going to be it, he's going to be nothing more than a statistic on a page, another mutie victim of hate crime.
But the ground keeps shaking and it's then that he's dragged away.
That's when he really thinks he's going to die,
it's the doormen from before, only they're girls and that doesn't reassure him any because how tough does a chick have to
be to work as a doorman. They drag him to an alleyway at the back, the door closes and he's pretty sure he's doomed.
The
taller one tries to quieten him down which just makes him want to shout louder, but then the shorter one, who's girlier-looking
but scarier for it, turns round to him and says, "Listen, kid, shut up. We are trying to save your ass here."
The two
of them start this mad duet of dustbins smashing against the wall, the tall one causing the ground to shake again, and that
was when he got it. They were mutants too.
"Listen, while we're doing this, run back home. And stay away."
"But,
I owe you."
"You owe us nothing except staying alive." Except he did. They'd saved his ass. But that meant that he'd
do as they asked.
So he stayed away. It shouldn't have been too hard; yeah, that *had* been the best club he'd been
to, up until the fighting, but even the clubs that weren't as good had decent music for part of the night and, while he liked
to battle, he knew that was how he got into a quarter of the trouble he did, and so he stayed away, for eighteen days. But
he couldn't get those girls out of his mind. He knew it was because they were mutants and didn't seem to be hiding it.
He'd
only found out that he was a mutant the year before. He'd been a reasonably good student at school, worked hard, didn't get
into fights, and then one day some jerk from the year above decided it would be fun to try and pummel him into submission.
Only it wasn't fun for either of them, because the jerk ended up with three spikes through his neck and nearly died. He'd
had to run away, freaking out because there'd been spikes coming out him and how was that possible and oh fuck, he was a mutant
and how was he ever going to tell his parents.
The answer was that he didn't. Thankfully, no one believed the jerk
when he said what had happened so he'd got away with it. That was just about the only thing that went right though. He was
freaked out and pissed off: pissed off at that jerk, at himself, at his family, because if he did tell them they'd throw him
out because being a mutant was 'unnatural' or something.
So his grades went down. He couldn't be bothered anymore.
What did it matter anyway? Someone would find out he was a mutant and who'd hire him then? It wasn't like he'd wanted to go
into something where they needed more people - he wanted to be an accountant, he wanted to work for Goldman Sachs, he wanted
... things he was never going to have. He'd have to do something else. Something like those girls were doing.
That
was why he went back. He had to know that being a mutant wasn't quite the end of the world that he was starting to feel it
was.
Just in time, too, 'cause sure, those two could take people on, but when he arrived they were in a fight with
what looked like the entirety of the club. He took out a couple of guys on one of side of them to clear a path. The shorter
one noticed and tapped the other one on the shoulder to attract her attention. The other one then made the ground shake so
hard that everyone else, who wasn't expecting it, fell over as they made their way over to where he was.
They ran,
the two girls knowing where they were going and him tagging along because he barely knew this area and he wasn't going to
be left to deal with the crowd that was probably howling for their blood behind them.
He turned a corner, expecting
to see them a few metres ahead of him but there was nothing except a dead end alley. Then he heard a whistle. When he looked
up the smaller girl was a few rungs up a fire escape.
"Up here, quick."
He followed them up into a small flat,
it wasn't much, but it was kind of homely. Not only was it clean, but someone had taken the time to get some cushions and
a throw for the sofa. There were two full bookshelves, and he noticed there were a lot of books on the Black Panthers.
The
taller one gave the shorter one a can of Coke. He really had to find out their names soon because this was just getting silly.
Having taken a long drink, the shorter one turned to him and started to speak.
"Thanks. No, I mean it. I think we owe
you one now." He shrugged his shoulders to say 'no worries'. "Name's Callisto. That's Arclight." Arclight just nodded.
"I'm
Quills." It was as good a name as any. He never used his old one again, save on official documents.
"Anything we can
do to help you?"
It turned out that they could. They gave him a purpose, a mission. He'd get a job, better paying than
door-work, and then they'd use the money to help other mutants. Some of those details were still hazy but Callisto had plans.
She and Arclight had been doing what they could, he'd not been the first kid they'd bailed out of a fight, and from what Arclight
said, Callisto had rescued her too. Not that Callisto ever said anything about it - she was always reserved, never unfriendly
but not open about herself like Arclight was.
So they did what they could, giving the occasional kid a floor for the
night, beating people up where necessary, knowing which doctors you could go to and so on. It wasn't much, but it was something.
The
disheartening thing was that things, even three and four years later, didn't get any better. If anything, they got worse.
Mutants had gone from being freaks to being a menace. It wasn't like anyone asked to be a mutant, and it wasn't their fault
that mutants were just better.
Callisto got edgier. They were being worn down, working every hour that they could;
he worked an admin job from eight till six, and then DJed at some of the clubs that they worked at from ten till two. That
was where Kid Omega came from - the DJ that used to run the electronica night had upped sticks to New York, got himself a
residency somewhere better, and the night would have folded only Callisto suggested Quills as a replacement.
But it
still wasn't enough for Callisto. She wanted more. She wanted to draw a line in the sand and say this was them. She wanted
for them to have their own symbol. Her plan was for tattoos. She'd heard of other groups of mutants doing something like that,
or having some other distinctive gear that they always wore. It bound them together, and if they were together they could
defeat anything.
"It makes us visible. And if we're visible, we can be a rallying point. You said yourself that it
made life easier knowing there were other mutants out there."
"Makes us targets too." That was Arclight.
"That's
the point. Think about it. You're one of us, and you see someone with a tattoo saying they're a mutant getting beaten and
you know to rescue them. I'm not always there and there has to be a way of telling us from them so we know who is on our side.
If we smack enough idiots around, people are going to stop picking on mutant kids for fear of getting beaten up themselves.
It's self-protection, if you will."
Her mind was made up. And nothing ever changed Callisto's mind once it was. Even
the number of tattoo parlours that said they wouldn't do it, not over her eye, not on her face at her age. They all said the
same thing about skin changing with time, and having to be very certain about all tattoos and triply so about facial ones.
Eventually, one of the first ones they'd asked, after they'd asked him the fourth time, agreed to do it, because it was obvious
that she would be getting it done and he would rather do it and do it right rather than have some other jerk with half the
skills do it and get it wrong.
Then Arclight had her's done. It wasn't quite as obvious, but then again, it didn't
need to be, where one was the other one was too. Quills's wasn't visible when he wore his work-shirt; yes, he was probably
letting the side down, but he was the one working in retail. Plus, the minute he was out of work, he was into his basketball
tops and everyone could see it. People stopped making anything out of it after the first guy got pulverised.
Callisto's
idea worked, their little area became a semi-safe haven, semi-safe because idiot skinheads would come round for a fight and
then there would be one, because the skinheads didn't realise that really they were woefully underarmed if they came to this
part of town with anything less than an army. But they never learnt and still came back about once a month, and shamed though
Quills would be to admit it, he did look forward to those fights.
But it was all going well. Better than that really,
and then came the cure. There was going to be a meeting in the old disused Methodist chapel four streets away from the club.
He'd been worried even before Callisto's senses started tingling that someone powerful was coming. They'd have to go, though,
no matter what. This was going to be important.
~~~~
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