"Hey, kid, hurry up, we haven't got all day 'ere."

"Hurrying, hurrying. You know what, I've got an idea." Danny turned around from where he had been hunched over a set of blueprints. "Why don't you shut the hell up and let me focus?"

One of Danny's irritable partners, a burly mutant with a thick New York accent, muttered, "Yeah, yeah."

Danny had made the idiot move of pissing off a crime kingpin a while ago with a hasty intercept of a minor drug shipment. It would'nt've pissed the guy off so much had Danny not swapped out the drugs with candy and sold that. The actual drugs turned up neatly in a police evidence locker the next day, with enough evidence for the police to locate and arrest a good portion of one the kingpin's empire's smaller subdivisions. Danny had thought he had been quite clever for thinking that up - making money and pissing off a gang lord for the fun of it - until he found himself surrounded by far too many burly thugs, all armed to the teeth, for him to take. He ended up having to broker an apology deal, which left him here - in a truck in the middle of the night, about to bust into some bank with this mutant and a team of people to steal a crap-ton of money. At least he'd get at least two thousand of the profit. That was the highest he could negotiate to.

The blueprints had been provided by his employer. The mutant apparently had super-strength, which probably meant a wake of destruction - not that Danny minded. He also had a group of seven humans who were apparently very skilled at this sort of thing. Which, considering that he wasn't, left him at a bit of a loss. Finally, he managed to formulate the basis of a plan.

"Okay, let's see. You two, head with Tyrone." Three of the masked men at his command and the mutant nodded. "Uh, start smashing up the other end of the bank, I guess. Set off the alarms. Make some noise. Pretend you're all drunk or something, so you guys, masks off." They nodded and complied, and Danny racked his mind for a next step. "You three, pave the way for the last two." He stabbed a point on the blueprints with a finger - a loading bay entrance. "Start from here, it's the closest entrance to the vault. Clear the area, make sure there's a clean path. Finally, you guys, go in with the bags. It's gonna be messy, but we want to be in and out in under seven minutes. Got that?" Everybody nodded - except for Tyrone, who was looking out the window worriedly.

"Kid, we got a problem." Danny joined Tyrone and winced.

A police truck sat at the corner of the curb.

"Somebody must've tipped them off," Danny muttered, and for a moment there was a heavy and rather awkward silence. He glanced around. "No, I know it's not one of you, I've been monitoring all your calls since I met you. I don't care if I invaded your privacy, I wanted to make sure something like this didn't happen. Oh well, nothing else to do now." He headed towards the back of the truck and opened the doors.

"Kid, where you going?" Tyrone asked.

"Stop calling me kid. I'm probably over five times your age and intelligence, you dimwit. Wait for the signal, and then go in."

"What's the signal?" one of the goons asked.

"You'll know it when you see it. Get ready." And he shut the doors, and started to creep towards the police truck.

He knew it was a police truck because really, what other trucks attempting to be inconspicuous sat outside banks at midnight? So he crept towards the side of the car before rolling beneath it and pulling out his knife, slashing the fuel tank as he went. As the contents spilled across the road, Danny rolled out from the other side and flipped open the cap on the suicide button. And then, praying that the team he'd been given wasn't full of complete idiots, he pushed it.

The car blew up.

In a city with as large a mutant population as New York had it wasn't all that rare to run across unusual things happening in every day life. One could be walking down the street one day and pass a kid with a couple of extra arms and a weird yellow tinge to his skin or accidentally slip in a trail of slime some woman was leaving behind her as she slid across the sidewalk. Hell, one might even see some stuck up dragon with a seriously over-inflated ego crashing down the street and looking to pick a fight at the same time he was insisting to anyone within earshot that he was some kind of divine creature among mortals.

Explosions, however, were slightly more unusual. Even mass murders were more common than explosives, which Isabel had personally had a hand in. And since it was so unusual the sound of the explosion caught her attention quickly enough. She'd simply been out wandering for the sake of wandering anyhow, so a little chaos was a welcome distraction. Besides, the commotion would most likely draw a crowd and that meant she could cause a little trouble without necessarily being the center of attention and therefore wouldn't technically be breaking any promises if she was careful enough.

It wasn't too hard to find the source of the noise since all she really had to do was follow the smoke and the flames. Finding that it was all happening outside of the bank made things even more interesting. There was very obviously something happening and it was most likely only just getting started. She didn't need to get herself involved just yet, though. No doubt the cops and the fire department would be showing up soon enough and she wanted to hang back for a few minutes to see if it would be worth it to join in on the fun or not.

He woke up perfectly unscathed in the wreckage of what had once been a police car.

The leaky fuel had done its work, and the entire vehicle had been incinerated, with pieces flung as far as fifteen feet away from him with the force of the blast. He leapt up easily, brushing some of the dirt from his clothes, and quickly surveyed the scene. Something was moving a little off to his right, so he headed towards that.

He had been right about it being a police vehicle - the heavily burnt man had a gun in a holster and a charred badge clipped to his belt. Without an ounce of remorse, as the man started to shakily lift his gun at Danny, he flipped out his knife and slid it in between the man's ribs. This officer had been right above the fuel tank and virtually in the epicenter of the explosion, and would have died a rather long and painful death otherwise, which wasn't something that Danny condoned.

But the other officer wasn't as badly hurt. This one had only minor burns and a large cut on the side of his head. He was unconscious, and Danny took full advantage of that, dragging him a safe distance from the wreckage. The fire department would be here soon, and they could handle calling the paramedics on their own.

Finally, he walked over to his team's truck, and found it thankfully empty. They weren't very intelligent, but at least they followed orders. So, good job all around -

And then he saw the bystander.

Knife still drawn, covered in a faint splatter of blood thanks to his mercy killing, he strode over to her. She seemed innocuous enough, but there was some underlying cruelty there that he couldn't put his finger on.

"Excuse me," he said. She was older than him, but most normal civilians would be scared by a teenager walking unscathed from ground zero of an explosion while holding a knife and covered in blood. "Is there something I can help you with?"

Seeing kids popping out of craters without looking any worse for wear certainly wasn't the strangest thing Isabel had ever seen, but it was impressive enough at least. There were few possibilities for what his mutation could be. Being a walking explosive seemed like the most obvious, but it wasn't unthinkable that he could have set of some kind of device instead. So it could also be something like invincibility, fire manipulation, intangibility, or any number of other things. The only thing that was really clear is that the kid wasn't some run of the mill human otherwise he would have been looking like the guy he'd knifed or the one he'd stashed off to the side.

She propped a shoulder against the corner of the building she was lurking by and crossed her arms while she watched the kid briefly inspect a nearby vehicle. She made note of where the car was sitting in relation to herself and the bank in case investigating it herself felt interesting enough before she got bored and went elsewhere. Maybe it was a getaway car or something. If the kid as trying it rob a bank he'd need a method of escape, after all.

Isabel hadn't really gone to any lengths to be subtle about her position as an observer so it didn't particularly surprise her that she was spotted before too long. She lazily watched the kid as he made his way over to her, knife still in hand. She stifled the urge to yawn for effect and instead continued to lean leisurely against the building. She'd been up against much, much worse than some teen with a dinky little knife. It would take a lot more than that to worry her.

"Not particularly," she responded, shrugging with her free shoulder and paying very little attention to the boy in front of her. She was more interested in the bank and the street as well as the looming arrival of the authorities. If the cops showed up and there wasn't enough going on to distract them from her presence she might have to make herself scarce to avoid breaking any promises and dealing with the repercussions that came with it.

"It's not every day that someone blows up cars on the street so I figured I'd take a look and see what was happening," she continued in a bored tone of voice. "Doesn't look like there's a whole hell of a lot more going on though, so maybe it was a waste of time."

"Not particularly. It's not every day that someone blows up cars on the street so I figured I'd take a look and see what was happening. Doesn't look like there's a whole hell of a lot more going on though, so maybe it was a waste of time."

She sounded bored, which partly offended Danny and partly relieved him. Anybody who wasn't intimidated by the fact that he was likely a mutant, and not the nicest one at that, was likely a not-very-nice mutant as well. He could work with that, as long as she didn't interfere with his plans.

Speaking of which, Tyrone and the goons were heading out, with bags of money slung over their shoulders. Danny glanced at them, then back at the woman. "In that case, excuse me," he said politely, and darted off to intercept the group on their way back to the van. After a silent but quick exchange, the thugs along with the other mutant got into the van and drove off, leaving Danny with a bag of bills. He'd counted - exactly two thousand. He glanced back at the woman to check if she had moved, then quickly ducked into an alleyway, handing the bag off to a teenager and pressing a payment of two hundred into the kid's hand. The teenager ran off with excitement, disappearing into the shadows. He was one of Danny's many "friends," homeless children who he fed for no price. This one had been paid to quickly ferry off the money away from the scene of the crime, leaving Danny as a "witness" to incorrectly inform the police of what had just occurred. He strolled back to the woman, business finished. "Sorry about that," he said pleasantly. "What were you saying about a waste of time?"

Isabel let her attention drift lazily to the men exiting the bank with money bags in tow. She let the kid excuse himself and watched quietly as he exchanged words with the men climbing into the van she'd spotted earlier. Her shoulder remained firmly planted against the wall as he ducked out of sight, not particularly caring if he disappeared all together or not. It was easy enough to go back about her own business if the boy was gone. It wasn't exactly like she was missing out on anything exciting.

But apparently he was planning on coming back. Her gaze shifted back to him as he reappeared, though the bag he'd been holding was conspicuously absent. Either he'd stashed it in the alleyway, which would have been one of the dumber things she'd seen, or he had more accomplices than just the ones in the getaway car. That was probably a bit of information she should pass along to her higher-ups eventually. If there was organized activity hovering around Order territory then she figured the Boss Lady would want a heads up.

"Just what I said. Pretty much a waste of time wandering over here," she replied, taking her attention off the boy and instead inspecting her nails. "That had to be the most boring bank robbery I've ever seen. Only one explosion and a pair of charred corpses with a nice quiet getaway. Effective, but completely boring."

"Just what I said. Pretty much a waste of time wandering over here. That had to be the most boring bank robbery I've ever seen. Only one explosion and a pair of charred corpses with a nice quiet getaway. Effective, but completely boring."

Despite the fact that Danny had never meet this woman before, and probably would never run into her by chance ever again, he couldn't help but feel a little bit offended. She had the nerve to criticize his bank robbing skills? It was his first one, for Christ's sake. It wasn't like he had the experience or anything to do something more exciting. He almost opened his mouth to actually defend himself to her, but shut it rapidly before he said something to embarrass himself. Instead, he said (still rather defensively), "What, you can do better? If so, feel free to share. I'm completely open to suggestions."

Okay, maybe he said that a bit sarcastically. And maybe a bit rudely. But he always had been a bit arrogant, and he really didn't like people criticizing him.