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The dizziness was starting to go away. Standing up took a concentrated effort for Kaitlyn, but she knew that this was a bad place for her to be She needed to find Aura and Amber and go home. With much attention paid to remaining upright, the girl ambled towards the freshly renovated flower shop's new, larger doorway.

The sight that lay before the child nearly made her fall over. Those people are dead. Her blast must have killed some of them. No, Aura had killed them. There she knelt, smiling. Sharpening what looked like a bone. Where did she get that bone? The child didn't want to think about it. This couldn't be happening. Aura couldn't be doing this.

If only she could remove what happened next from her memory.

This was all wrong. All of it. Hadn't she decided that Aura was a good person? Good people don't do things like that. Good people don't... throw up on... what!? All of this was disgusting. Sickening. Part of her wanted to throw up. Part of her wanted to scream and run away. None of her wanted to believe that any of this was happening.

"...Aura?"

Tears fell from reddened eyes.

>>“You are a Homo Superior. I am a Felis silvestris catus."

"...Oh." Kaitlyn gave the cat a quizzical look. He didn't answer her question; she still didn't know what a

>>“The nature of reality is, on occasion, best left unquestioned.”

There's a weird answer. It wasn't really an anwer, though, was it? He could have just said 'I dunno,' or something along those lines if he didn't know. The cat could have even shared a theory with her. Such as, 'she's a mutant.' That would be a good example of--

...Oh. She's a mutant. Duh. Maybe that's his nice way of telling me not to ask stupid questions.

The girl did as she was told in silence. When the clothes had all been transplanted from one machine to the other, the child took several paces away from the washing machines and turned around, one hand covering her closed eyes while the other held onto the towel.

"What's a Homo superior?" The girl asked, "I thought that all of us were Homo Sapiens." She remembered this much from her science classes. Humans like herself and Calley were Homo Sapiens, or at least this is what she had been lead to believe.

>>“You did not explode anything when she appeared. Wasn’t that ‘surprising’?”

Kaitlyn considered this in silence.

"I guess," the kid said eventually, peeking into the crack between the wall and the laundry machines where the cat-person-mutant was hiding, "But... I think it was more confusing. I still don't know how she knew my name."

The sound of the man's collision with the wrecked van gave Kaitlyn a jolt.

That sounded bad. Really bad. How badly did she hurt him? Was he okay? The girl couldn't tell; he was hidden behind a ruined van, which she had already damaged with the first blast.

Kaitlyn stared at the wrecked vehicle in front of her, thinking. Getting nervous. She just destroyed a majority of the Vehicle Bay's vehicles, and she might have just seriously injured this guy, even though he told her to do it. Regardless, his was at least ten times worse than when she messed up the Dining Hall. Everyone would be furious with her. They might even kick her out of the Sanctuary for it.

No... That was an awful thing to even think about. The girl liked her new home. She didn't want to lose it. But how could she--

Phweeeaak!

The noise was barely audible above the whines of the continuing car alarms, but a flash of light drew the girl's attention to the rubber duck that the man was holding, visible to her just above the warped metal of the van's hood. Kaitlyn didn't know what to make of this. Did the man just get hit so hard on the head that he went crazy?

She decided that she should go to check on him. Maybe if he had gone crazy enough, she could somehow blame him for the explosions, and people would believe her. Then, she noticed the rubber duck as it flew over the wreckage. With her eyes on the airborne squeaky rubber fowl, she couldn't have noticed the rolling piece of pipe that she was just about to trip over.

Concrete met face. Pain ensued. Oow... what was that? It was a pipe with a lit, sparkling piece of string attached to it. A piece of string that many would colloquially refer to as a fuse. Was it a bomb!?

The sputter of the fuse as it finally ran out was almost inaudible over the car alarms, yet the child was acutely aware of it. She cringed. There was no explosion, but the entire fuse was eaten up.

>>"You're still here, aren't you?"

"...Yeah," she said hesitantly.

Was that a dud bomb, or something else? Did the man roll it at her from under the car, or did it come from somewhere else?

"What..." she was going to ask about the bomb, but decided against it. If he actually sent a dud bomb at her, it would be stupid to tell the truth about it. She changed her question: "Are you... okay?"

>>"You r-really c-can blow stuff up,"

"Yep." Kaitlyn took a closer look at Amber. "I think I got some of it in your hair, too. Sorry." She reached out to pick a blue shred of wire from the albino's hair before their battle resumed.

The games continued into the night, as did Kaitlyn's Xbox controller explosions. Supposedly these accidents were getting less and less frequent, and the girl's pride showed whenever this fact was mentioned.

Pizza was soon delivered to the rec room by a human, much to the delight of several Sanctuary residents, who went to great lengths to intimidate him with their mutations. A member of the dining hall staff would later apologize to the terrified delivery man and give him a sizeable tip.

It was later revealed that Eric was the youngest mutant in attendance other than Amber and Kaitlyn. He was part of a small group of university students who had decided to stay in the Sanctuary for free room and board instead of in the dorms among other humans. The other university students had spent Modern Warfare night studying and preparing for finals, and the older mutants in attendance derived great pleasure from holding this against Eric, who would only laugh in reply.

When it reached 10:00 PM, the majority of the other players decided that Kaitlyn should go to bed, although the child tried to sway them from this decision with copious pouting. "Kaitlyn," one of the men said, "you know that going to bed late can make it harder for young mutants to control their powers. It's not for your sake, it's for ours."

With resignation in her voice, the child wished everyone a good night and left.

After the Modern Warfare players were certain that the kid was out of earshot, somebody remarked, "I can't believe that she still falls for that one."

Kaitlyn looked at Eric, then at Amber. There was something distinctly wrong with what he had just said, or at least how Amber took it, but she couldn't put her finger on it. The fact that all ten of her fingers were soon occupied by an Xbox controller wasn't a help to her discernment skills at all.

And so the battle began. Eric and Amber made up one team, Kaitlyn and another mutant, Jared, made up the other.

"You shouldn't feel bad about your eyes." Eric said to Amber as the game went on, "You and I have some freakin' weird eyes. That makes us freaks. Kaitlyn, on the other hand..."

His voice trailed off as his character tossed a stun grenade at Kaitlyn's. With a flash and a bang, Kaitlyn's fourth of the screen became blurry and distorted. The xbox controller in the child's hands shattered into tiny flying bits of plastic and circuitry, and the game paused. Some of the spectators began to cheer. With a smirk, she reached into the "SHRAPNEL" box for another controller. It was nice to not be afraid of her own powers, even if it was only for one night a week. Thanks to her, the Sanctuary boasted the ability to hold a weekly Call of Duty tournament "with real shrapnel." It was one of those rare times when people actually encouraged her to use her power, even if it was accidental.

Eric turned to look at Amber as he continued to speak: "Kaitlyn accidentally blows stuff up like that all the time. That makes her a freak, too. We're all freaks here in the Sanctuary. I always thought it was better to just embrace the idea."

Nobody ever wanted to fly Kaitlyn around in the helicopter.

The kid always thought that it was such a simple request. Because there was a helicopter in the Sanctuary's vehicle bay, there must have been at least one person in the Sanctuary who knew how to fly it. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much of a point to keeping a helicopter lying around, now would there?

If there were any helicopter pilots in the Sanctuary, they must have been keeping it a secret. Kaitlyn had been asking about it for months: "Do you know how to fly a helicopter? Do you know anyone else who knows how?"

The answer was always "No."

The girl had all but given up when she overheard a certain conversation near the library's computer area. She hadn't been eavesdropping, but one remark in particular caught her attention: "You can learn ANYTHING by searching for it on the internet."

Inspiration! Why go searching for a helicopter pilot when she could simply teach herself how to fly one? A quick Google search revealed several helpful web pages which outlined the basics of helicopter flight. There was a lever that makes the helicopter go higher or lower; a joystick to make the helicopter move forward, backwards, left, and right; and a pair of pedals to turn the helicopter around. Being a helicopter pilot sounded so easy that even a nine-year old could do it. That's exactly what this nine-year-old intended to do when she entered the Vehicle Bay one evening.

There was one major flaw in her plan, and she saw it as soon as she walked in: the Vehicle Bay had a ceiling. It was obvious that the portion of ceiling directly above the helicopter could open to let it through, but Kaitlyn could find neither a button, a switch, nor a lever that would do this.

To say the least, it was a frustrating situation to be in. Her well laid, ingenious helicopter joyriding schemes were all coming to an abrupt halt. What better way to express this frustration than by kicking a car?

As it turned out, there were a significant number of better ways for this girl to vent her frustration. The girl could have kicked the wall, the door, a bucket, or any number of other inanimate objects in the garage. She could have even kicked one of the other Sanctuary residents. Any of those things would have been preferable to kicking this car. The car in question was outfitted with a car alarm.

The screech of the car alarm was a surprise to everyone in the garage at the time. So was the explosion that a certain surprised little girl created only moments afterwards.

CRACKOOM

She watched as the cars near her got knocked into the air by the blast, and windows turned into shattered bits of glass as the shock wave reached them. All of this happened in eerie silence for the girl. Deafness was an occasional side effect of her power being triggered. It quickly wore off, and she soon heard that even more car alarms had been triggered by her explosion.

It was definitely time for her to leave.