Cait Kincaid (miss_mercury) wrote in age_of_miracles, @ 2008-02-27 22:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | mercury |
Narrative: Mercury
Who: Cait Kincaid
When: February 27nd, mid-afternoon
Where: Danbury Fair Mall
What: Cait needs new jeans. Or possibly just fresh air. The mall where the FoH are hanging out? Bad choice of location.
It shouldn't have been complicated. Girl needs jeans. Girl gets jeans. Girl maybe even pays for jeans, if she's feeling nice, and then girl goes home. Certain things in this world, you tended to take for granted, like the basic right to not have holes in your crotch, or the right to spend money and get something and have that be the end of it.
They'd warned her, of course. Not specifically, but among all of the talk of mutant reign there was an undercurrent that Cait herself had felt when she'd been out; mutants were at the top of the ladder now, but not all of the people at the bottom were happy to be there, and some of them were dangerous. It was all fine and good for the kids who looked normal to go running about shouting about how free they were, but it wasn't always that simple.
Still, it was hardly fair to say that Cait had to spend her entire life hiding from a world where mutants were now on top, just because she was - gasp and shock - visibly a mutant. Which was probably why no one had ever suggested it that blatently, because fucked if she'd have listened to them anyway. It had started off well enough, at least. She'd left mid-afternoon for the Danbury, got through the whole parking-lot-and-finding-the-right-store thing with no more than the usual amount of pointing and staring, and actually managed to find three pairs of pants that both fit and looked good, small miracles.
Looking the way Cait did, she'd eventually learned to ignore the majority of people murmuring at her. They weren't usually saying things that she wanted to hear, and if she was paying attention she'd be tempted to answer back, which was never a good idea. So, it took her a while before she realised that the crowd behind her on the way to the parking lot wasn't just doing their usual gape-and-stare deal - and, suspicious Brotherhood Badass or no, it wasn't until she'd left the mall that Cait clued into the fact that it wasn't just your average group of gawkers either - somehow, when she'd been focussed on figuring out how much money she'd actually spent, the general crowd had turned into about eight kids that were looking a fuck of a lot more menacing than freaked out.
When the first one swung a punch at her, Cait reacted automatically, the hand that came up to bloc elongating, turning razor edged. The thug screamed, kicked at her, and Mercury fell back into the easy habit of sparring. A bit harder with more people, sure, but for all of their aggression a few of them still seemed to be creeped the hell out by the fact that the girl they were picking on could stretch and melt in highly unnatural ways.
She'd had it under control, though - or so she thought. Six guys, two girls, one mutant who could turn her limbs into maces. Even enough odds, and they were looking more bruised than she was after the first thirty seconds. At which point they brought out the guns - or, rather, odd assortment of weapons from various places in jackets that made a gang of thugs suddenly seem a lot more frightening. Friends of Humanity, Mercury realised suddenly. Groups of sapiens out to make her life as close to hell as possible - and if they'd managed to get Rogue and John?
She screamed when the tazer hit her, electricity coursing through a metal system to shut down every nerve in her body. The fact that he'd apparently suffered some kind of feedback was a small comfort; paralyzed, Mercury couldn't even melt to avoid it when the remaining Humanity members came at her.
For the first time in a long time, Cait wondered if maybe it was possible for her to die the way the rest of them did.
Note: The story doesn't quite end here - Cait is gallantly rescued by Scorpion, Avalanche, and Remora, which will get put down/(up?) when we can coordinate it!