It was cold, she thought as she walked through the streets of Kalamazoo. The wind seemed to knife through her like a dull blade, and her teeth chattered. As she sought to pull her coat closed against the winter weather, she tried to keep her whits about her.
She didn't know why, but ever since she was returned to her parents, she had a hard time handling the things she once loved. Indeed, the snow burned her as much as fire did.
She only thrived in the summer sun.
Xavia found herself pausing at the corner of Park Street, and gazed at the familiar achitecture of the old houses. She was in the old district, where the houses were at least, 100 years old or so. And did I mention that she was cold?
Her lithe form folded over, and she gasped for breath, exhalations coming out in puffs of vapor. Her destination seemed so very far away, yet it was merely around the corner. Pioneer Park, the former cemertery-turned park where people gathered to rally.
As she unfolded her form to stand up straight, she smoothed her fingers over her jeans, which weren't the norm for her, but more condusive to what she was doing at the old cemetery in the middle of a cold November night.
Finaly, after walking two miles from the bus stop, she made it.
A shiver went through her spine. Even though there were no more headstones, the place seemed way too creepy for her tastes. After all, there were over one hundred bodies still buried in the grounds.
Now, Xavia didn't even know why she was there, standing in the middle of a park where only four benches sat, and a bunch of unmarked graves. But, she was there.
She chose the first bench on the right, sitting down with her feet on the concrete path that ran in a diagonal line across the grass. The lamplight shone in it's yellow glare, casting an eerie glow upon her head.
She looked at her watch... Just after midnight... She was late.
The person who she went to that park to meet was late too.
Or perhaps he had shown up and left when she was late.

"Miss Worshahlai, at last." She whipped her head about to see the glowing figure of the private investigator. "I do hope I haven't kept you waiting too long, but I had to make sure my information panned out. Anyway, here I am."

"Gilmore," she growled softly, "Couldn't we meet in a bar or something? It's too f**king cold out here." Her voice, though slightly garbled from her germanic accent, was a myriad of melodic notes that reached out pleasantly to the man's ears.

"Nope, nope... Too crowded. Too many ears."

"Whatever, just get on with it... Tell me what you found out, Gilmore, so I can go home and get into the warmth."

"You're not going to like this, but the man who supposedly kidnapped you, is supposedly dead."

"Supposedly? You waste my time." She snorted and clapped her arms closer about herself. She stared incredulously at the informant. Something seemed.... Off about him tonight.

As she stared at him, the first whispers came to her... Telling her not to trust the man, telling her he was not a good person to be around... She could feel what even the simplist blade of grass felt, and it wasn't good.

As the man lapsed into silence, an odd look crossed his face, and she canted her head. Then, she stood abruptly. "Mr. Gilmore, I have to--"

"Not so fast, Miss Worshahlai." He stood just as quickly, his hand snaking out and grasping her arm.

Tears sprung into her eyes with the pain of his g rasp... His hand... It was... Was so cold! She was starting to feel fuzzy, "Let go of me..."

"You are coming with me..."

She was about to defend herself, when her whole world went black, exploding around her in bright stars.....

When she next awoke, it was at least three days later, tied up in the back of a van. She could hear the familiar voice of the man who was supposedly a private eye, "Yeah, boss, we're just outside of Buffalo, we'll be in NYC in a few hours with the subject. As far as I know, she's still asleep... I thought she would put up more of a fight, but damned if Joe didn't come up behind her and conk her a good one... Stupid woman, never saw it coming."

"Ugh..."

"Sounds like she's awake... Hey Joe, give her another whack."

And the world went black again.

((ooc: Hope this works for you. Tell me if I should Mod anything! )

Buffalo, New York. Home to the Buffalo Zoo. It wasn't the first time that Calley had visited the place, but it was the first time he'd gone there without just looking for the biggest, meanest, poisonest things he could find. Now that his issues with his employer were resolved, he'd felt that a non-war-time visit was in order.

Copying something as cute and useless as a capybara was like pouring cool water over his head. Refreshing. Cleansing. Meerkats, pigmy goats, ocelots, reindeer, servals, rock hyraxes, a six-banded armadillo, giraffes, river otters--he'd even gotten a prehensile-tailed porcupine and a prehensile-tailed tree skink. There was joy in the animal kingdom outside of fighting and sneaking, he had learned. And most of it started with the prefix "prehensile-tailed".

His brain was stuffed to his sinuses with new forms waitin' to be tried on as he turned his 1981 Volvo onto the highway, heading back towards New York City. Maybe he should have invited Kat. She probably would have really liked this. But... maybe next time. This time had been somehow personal, in a way that he wasn't used to putting his finger on. The thirteen-year-old had wisely advised him to start making plans. Plans that didn't include dying. So the somewhat-less-than-wise eighteen-year-old was. His new plan: go back to the Danger Room, and practice his abilities like any normal Mansion resident. It was sort of a baby-step-plan.

The traffic was pretty light. Which was nice on the there-weren't-tons-of-cars-around sense, but bad in the sense that the cars that were around were going really really fast. Calley hit the accelerator and clutched the wheel, trying to keep up with his fellow drivers and not die on any curves. He wasn't a new driver. Oh no, he was better than that: he was an unlicensed driver. So. Speaking of plans: he should ask someone to teach him to drive, for real. And then he should replace his fake driver's license with a--

--there was a cat running across the road. A large gray queen. His mind focused on it, copying it in an instant. Which, when a teen is pushing seventy miles an hour, leaves him very very little time to blink in sudden realization and HIT THE BRAKES. Hitting the brakes was not, working hitting the brakes was not working-- Calley's palms went hand-over-hand, pulling the wheel to the right without consulting his brain. Or checking for cars.

Calley saw the gray queen give a smug half-glance over her shoulder as she disappeared into the underbrush on the other side of the highway. Safe. And then he saw the van he was about to hit. The driver's eyes met his through their panes of glass. No words were necessary: the man and Calley both had the same look on their face. That look that came with knowing what was about to happen, and knowing in the same heartbeat that it was already too late to stop it.

The passenger side of the Volvo slammed into the driver's side of the van, at 47 miles per hour. Calley could heal. He didn't know about that man.

Xavia didn't know what happened. One moment, she was knocked out cold, the next, she was suspended in air, and the van was careening onto its side. Without thinking, without so much as a prompt, a cushion of leaves and vines surrounded her, protecting her from the brunt of impact. Of course, she had no control over this interesting defense mechanism, but there it was.

However, the cushion withered away just before the van went still, and she took some of the impact, gaining a few bruises and lacerations. She was the lucky one.

The driver of the vehicle and the passenger, both seemed to have died upon the impact, horn honking continuously, no break, air bag expelled into the face of the fake PI, the other man staring sightlessly, sprawled on top of her.

For a moment, she was silent, her head hurting like no tomarrow, blood caked on her scalp from the blows to her head. Her vision swam, and she could feel the weight of the corpse on top of her, and he only came into focus in a slow manner... When she was able to steady her gaze, she fouond the sightless eyes oof the dead man staring into hers, and she screamed hysterically.

"AHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" She frantically shoved at the dead weight... "ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRH. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Her screams could be heard clearly through the broken glass of the vans tinted. Oh god, his blood was in her mouth, and she gagged!

Finaly, she was able to scramble from beneath the dead guy, and able to get out of the van. Sobbing, she crawled painfully toward the back door of the vehicle, which, thankfully, was ajar. Out onto the traffic clogged street, she crawled, untill she sprawled in a shaking mass in the center of the chaos.

She heard sirens in the distance, of course, and her vision was swimming, once more. Xavia clapped her hands over her ears, and again, issued the broken sirens of her screams.

(If one looks around the van, one would be able to see fragments of those vines, still withering)

There was a horn blaring. There was a horn blaring, and technically speaking, Calley was dead. The face of his human form was against the steering wheel, where it had first hit: hit, rebounded, and settled. The Italian teenager's baby blue eyes were half-open, but he could not see through them. There was a fracture in his neck, but he could not feel it. Deep in his chest, the heartworm splinters he had taken to habitually having were still moving. They could not hear the horn, or see the woman who stumbled out of the van and into traffic: they could only feel each other's presence, and the gray void of rapidly dimming input from their human form.

Slate. You can heal that. Tell me you can heal that. You healed it with the tiger form, when we fought Hunter--one broken spine is just like another, right?

The tiger did not have brain damage.

But still, you--

Please allow me to work.

Seconds ticked by, in a healing process that was normally instantaneous. It had always been instantaneous before. A shift, to correct the fractured spine, and gain access to the brain. A shift, to bring the lower functions back to working order: the teenager gasped in a shaky breath, though his head did not stir from the wheel. The frontal lobes were a delicate area, of which Slate had no experience. In theory, they should heal as smoothly as the rest of the body: in practice, they had just hit the front of his skull traveling at 47 miles per hour. Having his skull then hit the steering wheel at a like speed had not assisted matters overly much. Another shift; and a splitting migraine lanced through the teenager's head. He started upright, his eyes fully opening as he gagged on something unseen. One minute and twenty seconds after the accident, Calley's human form was alive again. A thin sheet of blood continued to run down the side of his face, unaware that its source had been sealed off. A horn was blaring. He turned his head.

Behind the driver's seat of the van, the other driver was not moving. Calley struggled with his seat belt, then with his door: finally, he remembered it was locked, and pulled up the tab. He stumbled out onto the black asphalt, palms first. Grit lanced into his hands. It was cold. He would remember that. He would remember that it was a cold Autumn day, because the pebbles that worked their way under his skin were cold. He was running to the van before he was fully upright. The Volvo was totaled. That only mattered because its crumpled front end was lodged into the driver's side of the van. Into. His palms slapped against the front of the van for balance as he dodged around its front, and wrenched open the passenger side. His head hurt. He crawled onto the front seat, his hand reaching across the seat as he sought the other man's pulse. The man's eyes had that same half-lidded look that Calley's had, before Slate had healed them. The man's forehead was resting on the steering wheel, much like Calley's had been. But Calley could heal. No, not Calley: Slate could heal.

Slate. Please. You need to--

I cannot heal death.

Just try, Slate, you--

I have healed another once. Only once, Calley, and it was not while he was dead. I cannot heal death.

You healed me!

You never died.

That doesn't make any sense! You're not even try--

But Slate was gone, with a mental wall slammed between them so hard that Calley's headache spiked to black. When his vision cleared, it was just him, and the dead man. Calley's hand had slipped down from the older man's neck; there was red on his fingers. He did not want to think about what that color was. Couldn't. Not yet. He had to keep moving, or--

--Were there passengers? A wash of gray panic threatened his vision again. Calley looked around, as if seeking the person who was supposed to be sitting in here, in this seat. Okay. Okay, obviously, there were no passengers: this was the passenger side seat, and it was empty. Okay.

What about the back? It was a cargo van; there wouldn't be anyone in the back. There couldn't be anyone in the back. But still, he scrambled backwards out of the passenger side door, and fell into the street. The door to the van's bed was open. But that was okay; that had just happened in the accident. Locks came unlocked. It didn't mean--

Unseeing eyes. These were fully open. They were brown. They looked darker in the van than they would be in the Autumn sunlight. Calley's breath stopped as he vaulted inside of the van's back, scrambling. He knew already. He knew already, but if he hurried, then maybe he would be wrong.

He wasn't.

Calley sat down in the back of the van, his legs crossing unconsciously. His back straightened slowly. His hands came to his knees. He stared down at the man, and the man stared back. When he first saw the movement, he mistook it for the man's, and he let himself start breathing again: a sharp intake of relief. Then his brows came together in confusion. It wasn't the man. It was something on the bed of the van, next to the man. His hand picked it up, without comprehension.

A vine. A withering vine, twisting as it, too, died. He'd... killed a vine? Was this man... had this man been a mutant? But that didn't make sense; he'd clearly been killed on impact; when had he had time to--?

Something clenched in the middle of Calley's heart. It hurt, like white fire. What if the man wasn't the mutant who had made the vines? What if there had been a third person in the van? Hope burned. It was not an expression: it burned, like it might kill him if it were snuffed out. Calley tumbled out the back of the van and, for the first time, saw the woman. She was older than him, but still young. She was shorter than him, but only by a bit. Her hair had a lighter gloss to it and she was screaming, but more important than any of that, she was alive. She was alive, and she was in the middle of traffic.

Calley dodged out after her. If she let him, then he would hook his hands under her arms, and pull her back to the side of the road and to safety more quickly than he'd ever tried to move. And if she let him, he would turn that grip into a tight embrace.

"You're alive."

He would probably be getting blood on her pretty nature-themed clothing. Blood from the cut on his head, which he would try to press against her shoulder; blood from his hands, that was not his own. He wished it was. He could heal. Those men couldn't. But this woman was alive, and he was going to cling to that, as literally as she would let him. She was alive, and that was the only thing that mattered right now. He didn't know how anything else had ever mattered.

Xavia was barely aware of being pulled out of the chaos, she couldn't stop screaming. It was cold, so very cold, and she was clad in only a bloodied teeshirt and jeans, her coat shucked when she had been knocked out cold by the men who'd abducted her. Her teeth chattered with a mixture of shock, and the cold, her skin growing an angry red, like burn welts marking her limbs, while bloodied fabric stuck to her skin.

The sound of someone talking to her barely registered in the haze of her shock, "You're alive..."

Was she really alive, or was she in hell? Or was this just one nightmare that she would wake up from in the morning, in the bustling little city known as Kalamazoo, Michigan? Would she find herself daydreaming in the greenhouse where her beloved plants were?

Her head hurt, her vision swam with the force of that headache. She was frightened like she had never been before.

Now, because she was in such a worked up state, and her head hurt so... She did not recognize her savior as friend just yet. And when she was out in the cold, and practically defenseless, she had absolutely no say over what would happen next.

Because his hands were on her to help her, he'd be able to feel the sudden burst of thorns, protruding from skin that seemed to turn the green color of rose stems, the sweet scent of said blossoms filling the air around her. If he didn't let go quick enough, his hands would definately hurt from the pricks of those thorns. If he had already let go of her by that point, she was out of her mind enough to wrench herself away.

Nothing personal, she's frightened!

Xavia gasped out a few, dry sobs, and began to stumble down the cracked sidewalk, hampered by the cold. She ignored the strangers that tried to stop her, their voices echoing through her brain as people screamed at the freak that now ran stupidly.

Her form returned to normal, the thorns falling to the ground to wither away like the foilage in the van, and her color soon returned to that angry red from the cold. Random, random, random. A sign of someone who didn't have that, mind over matter thing.

She pitched forward, landing belly first on the sidewalk that was still milling with people, and a crowd gathered around her. She was dimly aware of this, but didn't try to get up again, as she had the wind knocked out of her good.

Where was she? She didn't recognize anything around her, didn't recognize any faces. This was not Kalamazoo. This was not the place she remembered as her home.

The bewildered young woman curled up into a ball, bursting into frightened tears. She wanted to go home, wanted to see her dad, wanted to be safe and warm in the plastic cocoon of the greenhouse, where the cold wouldn't touch her.

Where had those bad, bad men, taken her? For that matter, where was that nice coat she'd been wearing to ward her from the cold that seemed more extreme to her than any normal person. Why did her head feel as if she had been knocked out with a two-by-four?

Xavia didn't have much time to ponder this, she was losing all sight of reality again. So tired, so cold....

At last, the world went dark, and with it, came blessed relief...

Now, if anyone chose to follow her, they wouldn't have to go far, she didn't even make it two blocks down the road. Upon discovering her prone form in the center of the knot of people, browning rose petals would blow across their feet. Roses? But it was well passed the blooming time for roses! In fact, it was much too cold to grow a rosebush, unless one lived in the tropics.

Hell, this wasn't Florida, but Buffalo, NY, guarunteed to be of fridged wind unless there was that weird, indian summer, which wasn't the case.

She was just another freak, thrust into unfamiliar territory, and covered in the blood of one of the men who'd abducted her, her crumpled form surrounded by the gawkers of the world who probably pointed and whispered. They did not care that she was just a frightened soul, did not care that she was bloodied, did not care that she was in that van that had been overturned by a Volvo, and that she was the sole survivor out of the trio... They only cared that they were looking at this freak who ran like a madwoman through the streets of Buffalo.

(Just to clarify, the people pointing and calling her a freak are just hallucinations, there are no people milling around her)

There were thorns. Trying to bite, to stab. She was entitled to thorns after what he'd done to her, but he still jerked away from them, instinctively. And then she was running from him, off of the highway, and down into the main streets back to the city. She was healthy enough to run. He tilted his head at that. It was a good thing, wasn't it?

...Wait. Had she just turned a little green, there? He snapped out of it with a jolt. No. No, not a good thing. Injured girl running into the city. Injured, clearly-a-mutant-girl running into city. Oh, and she seemed a liiiiittle out of her mind, right now. Not that he was the dictionary picture of stability. Which is probably why he shot to his feet--wobbled for a second--and chased after her. Blood covered animal boy chases blood washed plant woman. Clearly, this was the start of something special.

He didn't have far to go. She'd pretty much straight-lined it, before her collapse--or before someone had gotten to her. There was a crowd surrounding where she lay. He pushed through them easily enough--easily enough, because with all the not-too-friendly mutters and not-going-to-interfere, just-here-for-the-show silences from this crowd, Calley had held out his hands to his sides as he ran. And quite suddenly, there had been two very large cats running with him. That tended to part a crowd quickly enough. "Excuse me," he said unconsciously, as he bowled through. The tiger came to the same skittering stop as his other two selves, its head twisting around to hold one flickering ear next to her mouth. She was on her stomach--should they move her? Was that wise? Probably not. She was breathing right now, even if she seemed out of it, and they probably shouldn't do anything that might change that. The Italian teenager did two things, in a succession that made them seem almost simultaneous: he kicked off one shoe and scrapped off the sock, and then he swiftly drew a small communicator from his back pocket. Simultaneous they may have seemed, but that order was very important: Calley didn't know how to make splinters that acted independently of each other. He had to remain in direct physical contact with the two cats, or they wouldn't be doing much of anything at all. His hands had been curled in the hair at the bases off their necks; as the shoe kicked off, the second of the cats--a lion--shifted its foot over to step on his own, and he was able to free the hand he needed to take out the communicator. It looked a little like a cell phone. A cell phone that the Mansion's technomancer, Chip, had had a bit too much fun with. All the X-Men and X-Trainees had one now, as of the last meeting.

Calley flipped his open, and pressed the line for the DocProf. Yes, the DocProf had his own line. That probably said something about their team. A hurried conversation did not mean he stopped paying attention to the crowd. It hadn't dispersed: if anything, it had grown larger. The teenager was talking into the communicator fast enough to prove his Jersey origins and the tiger was only paying attention to the girl, but the lion was watching the crowd with a silently straight back that had them keeping a respectful distance. And Calley's consciousness was directing all three of them, in a way that he hadn't practiced nearly enough with. It wasn't helping his headache.

The DocProf was on his way. ETA: 20 minutes. He closed the communicator, slipped it into his pocket, and curled his hand back into the lion's mane. His bare foot shifted over to the tiger, who was gingerly laying itself down along the girl's length. She was cold. Freezing. And since she'd shown no signs of being a plant and ice mutant, that couldn't be good.

It was the lion that noticed the rose petals. Noticed them, and immediately shifted its golden gaze back to the crowd.

Dimly aware of the soft fur against her, she stirred. "Ohh... Ugh..." Fur, nice and warm... Ahh, so good.. Without opening her eyes, she rolled onto her side and snuggled close to the delicious sensation of warmth.

Murrr, yes, heat... Cuddle. Drool.... "Warmmmmmmmmmmth!"being said out loud. Precious...... *Ecstatic sigh, with the crossing of her eyes beneath her closed lids.* "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh..." Also... being said out loud.

Wait, fur??? She blinked her eyes open some, and found herself staring at a large cat... What the? No more needs to be written about her reaction, she did that classic, double take, and had a comical expression speaking volumes about her confusion and such.

With that, the plant girl seemed to give a squeak, and clung to the beast, more because the beast was the lesser of two evils at that point. It was either death from the cold, or death by... Tiger?

So, yes, there she lay, sucking the heat out of the giant feline, unaware of the crowd gathered round that she had thought was in her imagination, ignorant to the fact that the one who had pulled her out of the car wreckage was trying to get in touch with someone, possibly to help her.

She was only focused, by that point, on the heat, and drifted off to a more restful kind of sleep.

((ooc: Continued in "Flower print and stripes".))