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Things to do in the Sanctuary...

"The rec room has a bunch of stuff in it. Like air hockey, pool, board games, video games, stuff like that. You can usually find people in there to play with you, too." People who, for the most part, didn't try to win against Kaitlyn because they didn't want to upset her. This made these games rather dull for the little girl.

Kaitlyn scrutinized Amber for a moment. Maybe the albino would actually play to win against her. That sounded fun...

>>"D-do you go to s-school?"

School. What an odd thing to ask about. Kaitlyn didn't go to an actual school; Ms. Dallas the bird lady met her in the library and taught her. But this wasn't normal. Most kids don't have their own teacher, do they? No, they go to school. They all sit down in a classroom, and the teacher draws things on the dry erase board and shows it to the whole class and teaches them about it. And there are worksheets, textbooks, quizzes, tests, and stuff like that. Especially spelling tests. There are lots and lots of spelling tests.

Why do I know these things? I've never gone to school, have I?

The younger girl had been staring off into the distance. She hadn't answered Amber's question yet. "No, I don't. Ms. Dallas shows up and teaches me in the library, though."

But who cares about school? School was a boring place that was boring to talk about. Boring. They should change the subject to something less boring. Like what they were talking about earlier. "We have a library here too, by the way. Do you want to go see it, or do you want to go do something fun in the rec room? They're right next to each other, so we could do both if you want."

And just like that, Joe's day was becoming extraordinarily bad.

This wasn't in his job description. He had only come here for... business negotiations. Yeah, that's the word for 'em. He was a businessman, and a respectable one at that. Furthermore, Joe was not a fighter, but a lover. Sure, he had to break a few kneecaps every now and then, but that was business. Now more than ever, he wanted to go home. To hug his wife and his son. Take a few days off. Show up to one of the kid's baseball games. his kid still played little leagues, right?

First, he had to make it out alive.

The businessman drew his .45 just as Tony got ripped to shreds by the mutant chick. Who was this chick, anyway? Part of the Order? Sure sounded like it, what with her bull about humans treating her kind badly. If only she knew that Tony was a mutant. He could shoot lasers out of his damn eyes. Too bad they were both rolling around on the floor right now, entirely disconnected from his head.

There's some nightmare fuel.

The Order already had a good thing going, with their 'Mutant Insurance' policies. This wasn't their turf. And Joe wasn't about to let the Order muscle in on the Family's turf. As Otto's arm cracked under the force of Ms. Mutie's crazy hammer, he ran right by her, leveled his handgun to her head, and fired.

And the bullet bounced off. Suddenly, he wished that he had invested in some of the Order's mutant insurance. "Screw this, I'm ou--"

He never got to finish his sentence.

Kaitlyn couldn't understand what was going on. She didn't try to understand what was going on. She didn't want to understand what was going on. The child wanted to look away. Away from the blood splattered on the window, which Aura had just liberated from that poor man's body. Away from the gunshots. Away from that man's arm, which the kid was sure should not be bent that way. But she couldn't.

Aura couldn't be doing this. She was a nice person. Kaitlyn had talked to her personally, so she knew that she was a nice person. Nice people don't go on murderous rampages at the slightest provocation.

>>"You should l-leave!"

Was that Amber? Of course it was. Nobody else had black eyes like that. As much as Kaitlyn wanted to leave, she couldn't. She had no idea where the Sanctuary was from here. The child needed their help if she wanted to get back home. So there she stood, still unable to move. Unsure of what to do.

Another gunshot. This one hit Aura right in the back of the head.

It probably killed her. Kaitlyn couldn't hold it in any longer.

The resultant explosion knocked a large hole in the street-facing wall of the flower shop, sending glass, tables, and wall chunks flying at its inhabitants.

Luckily, all of the other pedestrians had run away after the first gunshot. Only a few unlucky taxi drivers were caught in the blast, their cars knocked through the air and sent into other nearby stores.

Up collided with down. Left collided with right. Face collided with sidewalk. Ow... The girl fell flat on her face, too dizzy to even tell which way was up.

The child felt dejected. Calley was afraid of her. He wouldn't even let her scratch his ears.

>>"Blow up that towel, please.”

"Uh... sure." There was very little certainty in her voice. Kaitlyn sat cross-legged, as if meditating, and stared at the towel in her hand.

...What do I do now?

Maybe if she stared at it really hard, it would blow up. That just might work. The girl held on to the towel as tight as she could until her knuckles went white. Her eyebrows were as furrowed as they could possibly be. Her eyes focused on the same spot on the towel for the whole time. She blinked only rarely.

>>"2 people"

The girl looked up from her towel to find... somebody writing notes and muttering to herself. She looked up from her towel to stare.

>>"Felis silvestris catus is not a cat but family of a cat. Cat's have a family. Hi Calley, Hi Kaitlyn, have a nice day."

Kaitlyn returned the wave with a sheepish one of her own, not saying anything until the strange girl had left the laundry room. "Who was that?" she whispered to Calley, inching her way to his hiding spot behind the washing machine. "How did she know my name?"

Amber. Amber has a stutter. That was mildly off-putting, but Kaitlyn wasn't about to let it show. The kid took her hand and shook it.

Kaitlyn glanced at her carrot. "Oh, this?"

She paused. What would she say about it? If she said that she was trying to blow it up with her mind, she'd sound crazy. Or she would sound like a mutant. A solid majority of the other Sanctuary residents already knew about her power, anyway. "I'm trying to blow it up with my mind," she said matter-of-factly.

Albino. That didn't sound like it was very fun. Amber must have been burning her face up just by coming outside.

"Sure," she said, pocketing her carrot and standing up to hold open one of the golden doors for the albino. "Do all albinos have eyes like yours?" She remembered hearing that albinos usually had weird eyes, but she didn't remember exactly what was supposed to be weird about them.

The street was rather quiet today.

Every few minutes, a car would make its way down the road, or another pedestrian would pedestrian his merry little way along the sidewalk. Normal people, living normal lives, off on normal errands. Such normal individuals would never be able to comprehend what was happening just outside of the Sanctuary's golden doors.

Occasionally one of them would turn his head to glance at the little girl, sitting cross-legged by the doors, staring intently at the carrot in her hand. She must have been sitting there for half an hour, maybe longer, doing absolutely nothing but stare at her carrot. What could she possibly be doing?

Kaitlyn intended to blow up this carrot with her mind.

When she walked into the Sanctuary's kitchen to retrieve this carrot, many of the staff had stopped what they were doing immediately, to watch her. They feared this little girl, and she knew it. At any moment she could lose control, and everyone in the room would start to have a very bad day. All of them knew it.

This was why she had decided get the carrot in the first place. The child thought back to her meeting with Calley. Since her power wasn't going to go away, she needed to learn how to control it. If she could trigger it on purpose, it would probably help her learn how to get more control over it. Why the carrot? If she was holding something, that something would blow up, and the explosion would be much smaller than if she wasn't holding anything.

So here she was. Sitting. Staring at the carrot. Concentrating on it. Visualizing the carrot blowing up.

What does an exploding carrot look like, anyway? Hopefully, she would soon find out.

That should do it as far as getting the blue out. She moved to put the towel back on its cabinet handle--

>>“So. What do you plan to do, to learn how not to explode things? Keep holding that towel, please.”

or not. The girl walked over and sat down next to the talking cat, still holding her towel. Plan. What could she possibly do? She had no idea where to even start. "I don't think I have a plan," she said after a while.

Cats like being scratched behind the ears, right? The child reached out to do just that, so to ameliorate herself to her new feline overlord.

The washing machine looked... blurry. As did everything else. After fumbling around to find dials that she could barely see, she leaned in and squinted at them. Squinting did nothing to help her see what was written on the console. Rather than own up to the fact that her vision was currently impaired, Kaitlyn turned the largest of the dials in what she hoped was the right direction and pulled it before making her way to the sink.

Huh. That was an unusual sound for a washing machine to be making.

>>“What makes the difference between one of your room wide explosions, and a small one like that?”

This blurry object looks like a towel. That blurry object resembles a sink. Fumbling with a gray splotch on the latter blurry object seemed to yield water. After she had dampened the former and begun to use it on her face, she realized that it was actually somebody's dirty old T-shirt.

eew.

The child looked over at the blurry thing which may or may not have been her new feline overlord as she shrugged. "I dunno. One kind's bigger than the other?"

No. Think.

She just blew up a bottle of detergent. She had also blown up a cup of milk. These were the small ones. "...Oh. With the small ones, I was holding something. With the big ones, I wasn't."