Time is a Thief 8 - #425 - Hecatomb
Title: Time is a Thief (Formerly EX) 8
Fandom: BtVS/Teen Titans
Prompt: 425 - Hecatomb
Words: 3513
Warnings: Unbeta'd
Having his 'relationship' with Jinx outer gave Xander a surprising boost in popularity. Even in a high school of backstabbing villains it was an ingrained social rule that if you hung out with the cool kids you were considered a cool kid yourself. Jinx's public show of approval, deliberate or not, cemented X's position at the top of the food chain. For now.
Unpleasant side effects of her endorsement included being on the hitlist of a 6'5", 300 pound human wrecking ball and a 4'2" technological gremlin, who was so young that he still hadn't grown out of calling people such charming things as douchewaffle and pit sniffer. Mammoth and Gizmo were gunning for him. He wasn't even sure they knew he was 'Anonymous' and had been the one to break them out of the JCPD. He wasn't sure if knowing would deter them or spur them on. They hadn't been overly pleased to need rescuing.
He wasn't that worried about Mammoth. He may be slightly more mature than Gizmo, but he wasn't half as intelligent and his revenge was uncreative and on par with typical high school bullying. Xander was constantly evading his rib breaking shoves in the hallway and he grew very adept at dodging spitballs and balloons filled with various disgusting fluids. Mammoth was an amateur as far as prank wars and bullying were concerned. He'd pummel Xander if he could, but he had to get his hands on the slippery thief first, which wasn't going to happen. Xander would need to be tied up, drugged and concussed before he slowed down enough for Mammoth to catch him.
Gizmo on the other hand was more skilled, more creative, statistically more intelligent than Xander and thus a much more legitimate threat. He started small by attacking Xander's public HIVE accounts. He switched passwords, deleted assignments and loaded a fake blue screen of death that popped up every time Xander signed in. It was all small time stuff, clearly Gizmo's superiority complex blinded him to the fact that Xander was in no way technologically illiterate. He corrected all the small hacks and straightened out his accounts with ease, passing in his backup copies of assignments that had gone missing.
One day at lunch the soda dispenser went nuts and doused Xander with pure, unmixed cola syrup until the sugary sweet goop positively dripped from him. Everyone started laughing and clapping, there were even some catcalls. Gizmo smirked at him in triumph but Xander had come a long way from being the insecure class clown he used to be. He kept eye contact with Gizmo, visibly unnerving the irritating imp as he reached out and pressed the water dispenser, secretly pleased when it too had been redesigned to spray him. He casually hosed himself down, right there in the cafeteria under the disbelieving eyes of the student body.
Several people made the connection between the prank and his unwavering eye contact with Gizmo and whispering started up immediately. The technological prankster squirmed uncomfortably as people loudly speculated what Xander would do to him as punishment. Xander smirked coldly at the pint-sized terror as it became clear that his cool under fire had turned the prank around to his benefit. Xander's reputation as a dangerous villain was still going strong and there was a flurry of gossip about whether Gizmo would go missing or turn up dead.
It was quiet for a few days before Gizmo realized that retaliation wouldn't be coming and regained his self-righteous anger. The tiny twerp's next move was to take control of the school building itself and turn it against Xander. The pneumatic doors would slam in his face and lock him into and out of classrooms and he had to avoid the elevators completely. A few times the doors even went into lockdown mode, an extra set of blast panels with yellow and black reflective taping slamming in his face as bright flashing alarm lights blinded him. All of his personal codes were rejected. Luckily his reflexes were trained to the point that no matter how quickly the automatic doors slammed he was never physically injured. Still, he made sure to never enter a room that didn't have an alternative exit. His focus had always been on getting in and out of facilities without being detected, but this was good practice for evading security in a worst case scenario.
Then came the climate control. Gizmo started altering the A/C and heating in Xander's classrooms making him sweat through his clothes and then chilling him to the bone over and over again. He tried to stick to common areas, because the hacker wouldn't dare cook other students. He would keep to unpleasant but non-lethal temperatures. The dehydration and stress on his body gave Xander a headache, but he persevered, pretending he was learning to endure torture techniques and extreme conditions. One never knew when they'd need to steal from a greenhouse in the middle of winter or break into a refrigerated facility in the height of summer.
Finally, Gizmo went too far. Xander was slowly shuffling his way back to his rooms after being locked into an airtight classroom with an over active fire control system. He had escaped before the chemical foam could reach more than waist height but he was dizzy on fumes. His chest burned for air and his sinuses and throat were scorched from inhaling the fire suppressing foam and fumes. It wasn't people safe stuff, the sprinkler systems were supposed to go off in rooms with occupants, the flame suppressing foam was only for empty rooms. If there wasn't an air vent large enough to crawl through in the classroom he would have drowned when the room filled or suffocated on the chemicals. As it was he would have to carefully monitor his breathing and worry about chemical burns in his lungs.
Xander leaned carefully against the wall as he struggled for breath. He was no longer amused by the escalating pranks. He could have died tonight. He couldn't pretend that this was just an out of hand bullying situation. Gizmo was a legitimate psychopath, and Xander had let himself forget that he was in a school that deliberately bred monsters. He had been humoring their hurt macho pride and territorial posturing. He had even kept Jinx from knowing how bad it had gotten because he could fight his own battles and didn't want to make his only friend choose between him and her team. A small, hurt part of him believed that she would choose them and he would be alone again. He desperately didn't want to be alone again, all he had was Jinx and Buzz, and the robotic bug didn't even have a personality.
No more. He was done. Mammoth had grown bored, but obviously Gizmo wasn't going to stop until someone stopped him.
Xander sighed in relief, coughing harshly as his door swooshed open without fighting him for the first time in the last week. His relief was short lived as he took in the mess that was his living space, his private space that no one was allowed to enter. It was a disaster area. Everything was trashed. The mattress had been torn in half and the bed frame twisted beyond recognition. All of his clothes had been thrown on the floor and by the smell Mammoth had even pissed on them. He really was a backwards neanderthal, literally marking his handiwork. Xander's computers and equipment were fried, the casings melted and still smoking lightly.
What really made him see red and decide it was high time to strike back hard was the sight of Buzz, splayed out and sparking from where he had been pinned to the screen wall with twisted pieces of Xander's broken office chair. His robo-bug had been brutalized and his wings had been ripped off and crushed into a mess of twisted parts. Tears that had nothing to do with his irritated eyes trickled down his face.
A giant cartoon representation of Gizmo's face grinned out at him from the screen wall as an obnoxious laugh track played over and over, taunting him. Xander shattered the screen with a punch, breathing raggedly as he tried to contain his rage. Mammoth and Gizmo had better pray to whatever Gods they held dear because they had invoked the wrath of someone born and raised on the Hellmouth. They had no idea what was coming for them.
He spent hours cleaning up the mess, and it was enough time to take the sharp edge off of his anger. He no longer felt like he was going to kill them, it wasn't his style. He wanted to scare the monsters and teach them a lesson, not become one himself. He would hit them where it hurt. They were arrogant supes with a superiority complex a mile wide. He was going to hit them right in the pride, because that would cause the most humiliation and they'd never forget. Never fuck with someone from Sunnydale. He had lived through things that would shatter their minds.
He was going to show them what it felt like to lose what you value most.
-----------------
Jinx turned off her alarm and flopped over in bed, her pink hair strewn everywhere across her pillow. She was always one of the first students up because it took so long to get her hair just right. She loved the quiet of the early morning, it was her time to think without anyone interrupting. Villains were typically night-owls, staying up late and sleeping late. Jinx was a bit of an oddity like that. Even when she was exhausted after a long night, she could never sleep past dawn.
She sighed and stared up at her ceiling, wondering if X was going to show up today. She was starting to get worried about him. He hadn't been to classes or their private training sessions in three days and even before that he had been acting strangely jumpy. He'd never missed so much as a single session since they'd started and now he had missed three in a row and seemed to have completely disappeared from the school. She'd gotten so used to spending time with X that having her afternoons suddenly free was throwing her off. She had heard something about him getting sprayed with soda in the cafeteria, but didn't think he was the kind of person to hide from such a minor embarrassment.
Jinx rolled out of bed and dragged her uniform on mechanically, not really paying attention as she pondered her unusual friend. The last few days had been odd. X was missing and Gizmo and Mammoth had been in disturbingly high spirits, they only had to make eye contact for both of them to burst out in vicious laughter. They had obviously done something terrible to some poor soul. Jinx didn't want to know. As much as they were her teammates, she had never been as delighted to hurt people as they were. Cops, security guards and heroes were free game, but Jinx couldn't bring herself to delight in the pain of bystanders and civilians. Just another way she didn't fit in. She never seemed to fit in anywhere.
She carefully brushed and shaped her hair, studying at herself in the mirror. Maybe that's why she had latched onto X so quickly. He didn't fit in either, but for him it was deliberate and he reveled in it. He seemed to love being a loner. So much so that she was surprised by his lack of fight as she blackmailed her way into his life. He had eventually warmed up to her and was surprisingly social once she got to know him. Maybe the loner thing was a punishment he enforced on himself rather than a natural state of being. After all, what kind of a past caused someone to completely erase themselves?
She shivered. She didn't know what he had gone through but there were dark shadows in his eyes sometimes that made her heart ache for him. Whatever it was, it had been the worst kind of bad.
A horrifying shrieking cut through her thoughts. It was coming through the wall she shared with Gizmo's room and it sounded like he was being brutally tortured. Jinx quickly dropped her brush, ignoring the fact that she only had one of her hair horns up and the other side of her hair flowed free. Her teammate was in trouble. She thanked Tyche that Headmistress Kane had put all of their rooms in the same hall as she ran next door.
She stopped short at what she saw. Gizmo was bawling his eyes out as he clutched at his tech-pak, snot streaming down his face as he sniffled and sobbed. He wasn't hurt, nothing was attacking, nothing even looked damaged. "What the HELL, Gizmo? I thought you were dying in here."
"I'd rather be dead!" Gizmo wailed despondently.
Jinx had no idea what to do, so she awkwardly patted her underage teammate on the back. "Uh… There, there. I'm sure it's not that bad."
"IT'S ALL GONE!"
"What's gone?"
"EVERYTHING!" Gizmo dissolved into a new crying jag and his tantrum reddened face made him look just like other brats his age, for once.
Obviously Gizmo wasn't going to be any help. Jinx poked around his room quickly, looking for something that could have set him off. She didn't probe too deeply into his junk, he was a 10-year old boy after all with all the disgusting habits that implied. She found her answer when she looked over his elaborate computer station. She had initially thought the monitors were off, which was strange enough because Gizmo never turned them off, but when she looked closer she realized that every single one was displaying a black screen with one single line of white text.
-Press any key to boot from CD-
Jinx cringed in sympathy, she didn't know much about computers, but she knew that systems should boot from the hard drive not a CD… unless someone had wiped the hard drive. Suddenly Gizmo's breakdown about losing 'everything' was clear. The kid lived a 90% digital life, he thought digitally, designed and planned digitally and saved anything he coded or hacked to his home built system. Now it was all gone.
"Don't you have any backups?"
Gizmo gestured despondently at a large cabinet set to the side the bank of monitors. Swinging the door open she saw shelf after shelf crammed with slim CD jewel cases. "Then what's the problem?" She snagged one of the plastic cases at random and pulled it out. "You can just…"
She flipped open the case to find it empty. Quickly, she grabbed another case from a different shelf. Empty. She pried one from the back of the shelf. Empty. The magnitude of what had happened finally struck her. She glanced over the shelves quickly calculating. 5 shelves high, each stacked with 3 rows of discs, 4 cases deep and 4 feet across with roughly 1/4 inch cases. Someone had gone through Every Single One, removed the disk and put the case back just to taunt Gizmo with false hope for recovery of his data. She was impressed with the amount of work and size of the personal vendetta that must have gone into this.
"How much data was in here?" She asked in morbid curiosity.
"Eleven and a half-point-two thousand disks, each a double-sided, duel-layer DVD-9."Gizmo muttered, hugging his tech-pak for comfort as he rocked back and forth and stared into nothingness. "Seventeen gigs a disk, thirty-nine point one-sixty-eight gigs a shelf, five shelves. One hundred and ninety thousand, eight hundred and forty gigabytes of data. Gone."
Jinx was in over her head. She had no idea how to handle this. Half the time Gizmo thought she was a gross girl with cooties. He wasn't going to accept comfort over losing his life's work from her. It was time for the big guns.
She knocked on Mammoth's door. There was no answer, but she heard his big elephant feet clumping around behind the door. "Mammoth, get out here! Gizmo's having a mental breakdown and I'm not dealing with it myself."
"No." Came the sullen answer.
Pink hexfire flared up on her hand as irritation flooded her and she knocked again. "Get out here before I kick your ass."
"I'm sick."
"You can't get sick. Now, open the door before I break it down." The lock clicked and slid open. Jinx's reprimand got stuck in her throat. "What the HELL happened to you?"
Mammoth's hair was pink, a pale pastel pink even more feminine than Jinx's and the big metal rivets on his armbands and uniform had been replaced with large pink gems that sparkled merrily every time he moved. Even his goatee had been dyed. She quickly turned her snicker into a cough as he glowered down at her. "Why… uh, why didn't you put on a different uniform?"
"They're all like this," he gestured at himself in disgust. "Some of them have glitter. I'm never leaving my room again."
The school day was a lost cause by the time Jinx managed to calm her traumatized teammates down and intimidate them into revealing who would have had this much of a grudge against them. This was above and beyond the typical attempts at sabotage that came with the position at the top of the school hierarchy. There was legitimate and premeditated vengeance in these actions. Someone had attacked her teammates and destroyed what they cared about most, Gizmo's work and Mammoth's tough guy image. She was shocked to hear both of her teammates' adamant complaints that X was the one who sabotaged them.
A chill ran through her. Had she misjudged the thief? Did he use her to get close to her team? That rat bastard! Had he just pretended to be above the casual cruelty that was common amongst the student body? She had thought she'd finally found a kindred spirit, someone she could trust and he turned around and did THIS? It made a terrible kind of sense, he was the only one with the skills to pull it off without waking either of the boys. Jinx felt sick, she had actually thought she had a real friend for the first time in her life. Turns out he was just like everyone else. Bitter disappointment welled up inside her, spawning a red hot rage.
The boys quickly gave up the location of X's room once she started actually growling and a thrashing aura of demonic pink hexfire enshrouded her entire body. The floor crumbled under her feet and the walls creaked dangerously as she stomped down the hastily evacuated halls towards her unsuspecting target. She restrained her power just enough to not burst X's door like an over ripe melon as she pounded viciously on it.
He looked terrible when he answered her furious knock. His eyes were bloodshot, his nostrils were reddened and running, and his lips were dried and cracked. He was wearing nothing but the shimmering red-black 'Anonymous' body suit he'd worn on the JCPD mission. It was a huge difference from the X she had seen just days earlier. Her rage guttered and died immediately. Any sympathy she had for her teammates evaporated. Without the red haze and self-entitled betrayal clouding her mind, she realized that she really did know X well enough to be sure that he would not have been the one to start things. Not to mention the fact that he was obviously hurting, while he had only retaliated against Gizmo and Mammoth's belongings and pride. She immediately deflated and her vicious aura faded.
"Jinx." He greeted in a hoarse voice, stepping aside so that she could come inside and get out of the corridor where everyone was watching curiously and seemed disappointed that they weren't going to see a full blown bad luck beatdown. Her eyes darted around his room noticing that every bit of his furniture was new, there wasn't a single personal item on display and the air smelled like fresh paint.
"What. Did. They. Do?"
He hesitated, trying to gauge her emotional state, then visibly slumped and carefully wheezed, "Gizmo… set the… automated… fire suppressing… chemical foam… on me."
Her eyes narrowed dangerously and began to glow a solid pink. "And?"
"… and they… destroyed… everything... in my room."
"And?"
"… and… they've been…. attacking me… for a while now." He flinched at his own words and looked away. His shoulders were hunched as if he were awaiting a blow.
"I'm going to kill them." Jinx's blackened heart broke a little for him when he just gaped at her in dumbfounded confusion. She had been completely right when she saw him as a kindred spirit. There was no one who would fight for her either. They were the perfect matched pair, both alone in the crowd. From now on, she promised herself, we can be alone together.
Fandom: BtVS/Teen Titans
Prompt: 425 - Hecatomb
Words: 3513
Warnings: Unbeta'd
Having his 'relationship' with Jinx outer gave Xander a surprising boost in popularity. Even in a high school of backstabbing villains it was an ingrained social rule that if you hung out with the cool kids you were considered a cool kid yourself. Jinx's public show of approval, deliberate or not, cemented X's position at the top of the food chain. For now.
Unpleasant side effects of her endorsement included being on the hitlist of a 6'5", 300 pound human wrecking ball and a 4'2" technological gremlin, who was so young that he still hadn't grown out of calling people such charming things as douchewaffle and pit sniffer. Mammoth and Gizmo were gunning for him. He wasn't even sure they knew he was 'Anonymous' and had been the one to break them out of the JCPD. He wasn't sure if knowing would deter them or spur them on. They hadn't been overly pleased to need rescuing.
He wasn't that worried about Mammoth. He may be slightly more mature than Gizmo, but he wasn't half as intelligent and his revenge was uncreative and on par with typical high school bullying. Xander was constantly evading his rib breaking shoves in the hallway and he grew very adept at dodging spitballs and balloons filled with various disgusting fluids. Mammoth was an amateur as far as prank wars and bullying were concerned. He'd pummel Xander if he could, but he had to get his hands on the slippery thief first, which wasn't going to happen. Xander would need to be tied up, drugged and concussed before he slowed down enough for Mammoth to catch him.
Gizmo on the other hand was more skilled, more creative, statistically more intelligent than Xander and thus a much more legitimate threat. He started small by attacking Xander's public HIVE accounts. He switched passwords, deleted assignments and loaded a fake blue screen of death that popped up every time Xander signed in. It was all small time stuff, clearly Gizmo's superiority complex blinded him to the fact that Xander was in no way technologically illiterate. He corrected all the small hacks and straightened out his accounts with ease, passing in his backup copies of assignments that had gone missing.
One day at lunch the soda dispenser went nuts and doused Xander with pure, unmixed cola syrup until the sugary sweet goop positively dripped from him. Everyone started laughing and clapping, there were even some catcalls. Gizmo smirked at him in triumph but Xander had come a long way from being the insecure class clown he used to be. He kept eye contact with Gizmo, visibly unnerving the irritating imp as he reached out and pressed the water dispenser, secretly pleased when it too had been redesigned to spray him. He casually hosed himself down, right there in the cafeteria under the disbelieving eyes of the student body.
Several people made the connection between the prank and his unwavering eye contact with Gizmo and whispering started up immediately. The technological prankster squirmed uncomfortably as people loudly speculated what Xander would do to him as punishment. Xander smirked coldly at the pint-sized terror as it became clear that his cool under fire had turned the prank around to his benefit. Xander's reputation as a dangerous villain was still going strong and there was a flurry of gossip about whether Gizmo would go missing or turn up dead.
It was quiet for a few days before Gizmo realized that retaliation wouldn't be coming and regained his self-righteous anger. The tiny twerp's next move was to take control of the school building itself and turn it against Xander. The pneumatic doors would slam in his face and lock him into and out of classrooms and he had to avoid the elevators completely. A few times the doors even went into lockdown mode, an extra set of blast panels with yellow and black reflective taping slamming in his face as bright flashing alarm lights blinded him. All of his personal codes were rejected. Luckily his reflexes were trained to the point that no matter how quickly the automatic doors slammed he was never physically injured. Still, he made sure to never enter a room that didn't have an alternative exit. His focus had always been on getting in and out of facilities without being detected, but this was good practice for evading security in a worst case scenario.
Then came the climate control. Gizmo started altering the A/C and heating in Xander's classrooms making him sweat through his clothes and then chilling him to the bone over and over again. He tried to stick to common areas, because the hacker wouldn't dare cook other students. He would keep to unpleasant but non-lethal temperatures. The dehydration and stress on his body gave Xander a headache, but he persevered, pretending he was learning to endure torture techniques and extreme conditions. One never knew when they'd need to steal from a greenhouse in the middle of winter or break into a refrigerated facility in the height of summer.
Finally, Gizmo went too far. Xander was slowly shuffling his way back to his rooms after being locked into an airtight classroom with an over active fire control system. He had escaped before the chemical foam could reach more than waist height but he was dizzy on fumes. His chest burned for air and his sinuses and throat were scorched from inhaling the fire suppressing foam and fumes. It wasn't people safe stuff, the sprinkler systems were supposed to go off in rooms with occupants, the flame suppressing foam was only for empty rooms. If there wasn't an air vent large enough to crawl through in the classroom he would have drowned when the room filled or suffocated on the chemicals. As it was he would have to carefully monitor his breathing and worry about chemical burns in his lungs.
Xander leaned carefully against the wall as he struggled for breath. He was no longer amused by the escalating pranks. He could have died tonight. He couldn't pretend that this was just an out of hand bullying situation. Gizmo was a legitimate psychopath, and Xander had let himself forget that he was in a school that deliberately bred monsters. He had been humoring their hurt macho pride and territorial posturing. He had even kept Jinx from knowing how bad it had gotten because he could fight his own battles and didn't want to make his only friend choose between him and her team. A small, hurt part of him believed that she would choose them and he would be alone again. He desperately didn't want to be alone again, all he had was Jinx and Buzz, and the robotic bug didn't even have a personality.
No more. He was done. Mammoth had grown bored, but obviously Gizmo wasn't going to stop until someone stopped him.
Xander sighed in relief, coughing harshly as his door swooshed open without fighting him for the first time in the last week. His relief was short lived as he took in the mess that was his living space, his private space that no one was allowed to enter. It was a disaster area. Everything was trashed. The mattress had been torn in half and the bed frame twisted beyond recognition. All of his clothes had been thrown on the floor and by the smell Mammoth had even pissed on them. He really was a backwards neanderthal, literally marking his handiwork. Xander's computers and equipment were fried, the casings melted and still smoking lightly.
What really made him see red and decide it was high time to strike back hard was the sight of Buzz, splayed out and sparking from where he had been pinned to the screen wall with twisted pieces of Xander's broken office chair. His robo-bug had been brutalized and his wings had been ripped off and crushed into a mess of twisted parts. Tears that had nothing to do with his irritated eyes trickled down his face.
A giant cartoon representation of Gizmo's face grinned out at him from the screen wall as an obnoxious laugh track played over and over, taunting him. Xander shattered the screen with a punch, breathing raggedly as he tried to contain his rage. Mammoth and Gizmo had better pray to whatever Gods they held dear because they had invoked the wrath of someone born and raised on the Hellmouth. They had no idea what was coming for them.
He spent hours cleaning up the mess, and it was enough time to take the sharp edge off of his anger. He no longer felt like he was going to kill them, it wasn't his style. He wanted to scare the monsters and teach them a lesson, not become one himself. He would hit them where it hurt. They were arrogant supes with a superiority complex a mile wide. He was going to hit them right in the pride, because that would cause the most humiliation and they'd never forget. Never fuck with someone from Sunnydale. He had lived through things that would shatter their minds.
He was going to show them what it felt like to lose what you value most.
-----------------
Jinx turned off her alarm and flopped over in bed, her pink hair strewn everywhere across her pillow. She was always one of the first students up because it took so long to get her hair just right. She loved the quiet of the early morning, it was her time to think without anyone interrupting. Villains were typically night-owls, staying up late and sleeping late. Jinx was a bit of an oddity like that. Even when she was exhausted after a long night, she could never sleep past dawn.
She sighed and stared up at her ceiling, wondering if X was going to show up today. She was starting to get worried about him. He hadn't been to classes or their private training sessions in three days and even before that he had been acting strangely jumpy. He'd never missed so much as a single session since they'd started and now he had missed three in a row and seemed to have completely disappeared from the school. She'd gotten so used to spending time with X that having her afternoons suddenly free was throwing her off. She had heard something about him getting sprayed with soda in the cafeteria, but didn't think he was the kind of person to hide from such a minor embarrassment.
Jinx rolled out of bed and dragged her uniform on mechanically, not really paying attention as she pondered her unusual friend. The last few days had been odd. X was missing and Gizmo and Mammoth had been in disturbingly high spirits, they only had to make eye contact for both of them to burst out in vicious laughter. They had obviously done something terrible to some poor soul. Jinx didn't want to know. As much as they were her teammates, she had never been as delighted to hurt people as they were. Cops, security guards and heroes were free game, but Jinx couldn't bring herself to delight in the pain of bystanders and civilians. Just another way she didn't fit in. She never seemed to fit in anywhere.
She carefully brushed and shaped her hair, studying at herself in the mirror. Maybe that's why she had latched onto X so quickly. He didn't fit in either, but for him it was deliberate and he reveled in it. He seemed to love being a loner. So much so that she was surprised by his lack of fight as she blackmailed her way into his life. He had eventually warmed up to her and was surprisingly social once she got to know him. Maybe the loner thing was a punishment he enforced on himself rather than a natural state of being. After all, what kind of a past caused someone to completely erase themselves?
She shivered. She didn't know what he had gone through but there were dark shadows in his eyes sometimes that made her heart ache for him. Whatever it was, it had been the worst kind of bad.
A horrifying shrieking cut through her thoughts. It was coming through the wall she shared with Gizmo's room and it sounded like he was being brutally tortured. Jinx quickly dropped her brush, ignoring the fact that she only had one of her hair horns up and the other side of her hair flowed free. Her teammate was in trouble. She thanked Tyche that Headmistress Kane had put all of their rooms in the same hall as she ran next door.
She stopped short at what she saw. Gizmo was bawling his eyes out as he clutched at his tech-pak, snot streaming down his face as he sniffled and sobbed. He wasn't hurt, nothing was attacking, nothing even looked damaged. "What the HELL, Gizmo? I thought you were dying in here."
"I'd rather be dead!" Gizmo wailed despondently.
Jinx had no idea what to do, so she awkwardly patted her underage teammate on the back. "Uh… There, there. I'm sure it's not that bad."
"IT'S ALL GONE!"
"What's gone?"
"EVERYTHING!" Gizmo dissolved into a new crying jag and his tantrum reddened face made him look just like other brats his age, for once.
Obviously Gizmo wasn't going to be any help. Jinx poked around his room quickly, looking for something that could have set him off. She didn't probe too deeply into his junk, he was a 10-year old boy after all with all the disgusting habits that implied. She found her answer when she looked over his elaborate computer station. She had initially thought the monitors were off, which was strange enough because Gizmo never turned them off, but when she looked closer she realized that every single one was displaying a black screen with one single line of white text.
-Press any key to boot from CD-
Jinx cringed in sympathy, she didn't know much about computers, but she knew that systems should boot from the hard drive not a CD… unless someone had wiped the hard drive. Suddenly Gizmo's breakdown about losing 'everything' was clear. The kid lived a 90% digital life, he thought digitally, designed and planned digitally and saved anything he coded or hacked to his home built system. Now it was all gone.
"Don't you have any backups?"
Gizmo gestured despondently at a large cabinet set to the side the bank of monitors. Swinging the door open she saw shelf after shelf crammed with slim CD jewel cases. "Then what's the problem?" She snagged one of the plastic cases at random and pulled it out. "You can just…"
She flipped open the case to find it empty. Quickly, she grabbed another case from a different shelf. Empty. She pried one from the back of the shelf. Empty. The magnitude of what had happened finally struck her. She glanced over the shelves quickly calculating. 5 shelves high, each stacked with 3 rows of discs, 4 cases deep and 4 feet across with roughly 1/4 inch cases. Someone had gone through Every Single One, removed the disk and put the case back just to taunt Gizmo with false hope for recovery of his data. She was impressed with the amount of work and size of the personal vendetta that must have gone into this.
"How much data was in here?" She asked in morbid curiosity.
"Eleven and a half-point-two thousand disks, each a double-sided, duel-layer DVD-9."Gizmo muttered, hugging his tech-pak for comfort as he rocked back and forth and stared into nothingness. "Seventeen gigs a disk, thirty-nine point one-sixty-eight gigs a shelf, five shelves. One hundred and ninety thousand, eight hundred and forty gigabytes of data. Gone."
Jinx was in over her head. She had no idea how to handle this. Half the time Gizmo thought she was a gross girl with cooties. He wasn't going to accept comfort over losing his life's work from her. It was time for the big guns.
She knocked on Mammoth's door. There was no answer, but she heard his big elephant feet clumping around behind the door. "Mammoth, get out here! Gizmo's having a mental breakdown and I'm not dealing with it myself."
"No." Came the sullen answer.
Pink hexfire flared up on her hand as irritation flooded her and she knocked again. "Get out here before I kick your ass."
"I'm sick."
"You can't get sick. Now, open the door before I break it down." The lock clicked and slid open. Jinx's reprimand got stuck in her throat. "What the HELL happened to you?"
Mammoth's hair was pink, a pale pastel pink even more feminine than Jinx's and the big metal rivets on his armbands and uniform had been replaced with large pink gems that sparkled merrily every time he moved. Even his goatee had been dyed. She quickly turned her snicker into a cough as he glowered down at her. "Why… uh, why didn't you put on a different uniform?"
"They're all like this," he gestured at himself in disgust. "Some of them have glitter. I'm never leaving my room again."
The school day was a lost cause by the time Jinx managed to calm her traumatized teammates down and intimidate them into revealing who would have had this much of a grudge against them. This was above and beyond the typical attempts at sabotage that came with the position at the top of the school hierarchy. There was legitimate and premeditated vengeance in these actions. Someone had attacked her teammates and destroyed what they cared about most, Gizmo's work and Mammoth's tough guy image. She was shocked to hear both of her teammates' adamant complaints that X was the one who sabotaged them.
A chill ran through her. Had she misjudged the thief? Did he use her to get close to her team? That rat bastard! Had he just pretended to be above the casual cruelty that was common amongst the student body? She had thought she'd finally found a kindred spirit, someone she could trust and he turned around and did THIS? It made a terrible kind of sense, he was the only one with the skills to pull it off without waking either of the boys. Jinx felt sick, she had actually thought she had a real friend for the first time in her life. Turns out he was just like everyone else. Bitter disappointment welled up inside her, spawning a red hot rage.
The boys quickly gave up the location of X's room once she started actually growling and a thrashing aura of demonic pink hexfire enshrouded her entire body. The floor crumbled under her feet and the walls creaked dangerously as she stomped down the hastily evacuated halls towards her unsuspecting target. She restrained her power just enough to not burst X's door like an over ripe melon as she pounded viciously on it.
He looked terrible when he answered her furious knock. His eyes were bloodshot, his nostrils were reddened and running, and his lips were dried and cracked. He was wearing nothing but the shimmering red-black 'Anonymous' body suit he'd worn on the JCPD mission. It was a huge difference from the X she had seen just days earlier. Her rage guttered and died immediately. Any sympathy she had for her teammates evaporated. Without the red haze and self-entitled betrayal clouding her mind, she realized that she really did know X well enough to be sure that he would not have been the one to start things. Not to mention the fact that he was obviously hurting, while he had only retaliated against Gizmo and Mammoth's belongings and pride. She immediately deflated and her vicious aura faded.
"Jinx." He greeted in a hoarse voice, stepping aside so that she could come inside and get out of the corridor where everyone was watching curiously and seemed disappointed that they weren't going to see a full blown bad luck beatdown. Her eyes darted around his room noticing that every bit of his furniture was new, there wasn't a single personal item on display and the air smelled like fresh paint.
"What. Did. They. Do?"
He hesitated, trying to gauge her emotional state, then visibly slumped and carefully wheezed, "Gizmo… set the… automated… fire suppressing… chemical foam… on me."
Her eyes narrowed dangerously and began to glow a solid pink. "And?"
"… and they… destroyed… everything... in my room."
"And?"
"… and… they've been…. attacking me… for a while now." He flinched at his own words and looked away. His shoulders were hunched as if he were awaiting a blow.
"I'm going to kill them." Jinx's blackened heart broke a little for him when he just gaped at her in dumbfounded confusion. She had been completely right when she saw him as a kindred spirit. There was no one who would fight for her either. They were the perfect matched pair, both alone in the crowd. From now on, she promised herself, we can be alone together.