"Absolutely not!"

"You're being unreasonable," I told the older boy while staring him right in the eye. I had to crane my head up to do so after his last growth spurt but the discomfort was nothing compared to everything any of us had gone through in the past few days and we'd be all damned if I didn't stand up to him. By the way everybody looked away from our very public argument in the middle of the cafeteria, nobody else was willing to speak up. "The monsters are getting worse. If we don't search for a way out or at least prepare against them, we'll be overrun."

"Have you even looked outside?" he hissed back, fists clenched. "Everything's covered by mist, you won't be able to see where you're going. And yes, the monsters are getting stronger. One of them nearly took us both out. Trying to face them out in the open... we'd just get ourselves killed."

"That's because it took us by surprise, Tomio," I huffed in exasperation. Why was he being so insistent? Was it fear? He didn't look or sound terrified to me. "And it was a flier while both of us were ground-bound." Mostly and not quite, but I wasn't willing to fess up that particular secret while he still kept mum about his powers. "It's only been two days and nobody's killed any monsters in the school but us. Most of them should still be normal zombies or at least those skinless freaks. If we meet another flier we can just retreat."

"Even if that were true," and it was, no matter how much he insisted it wasn't, "you want to leave the base right now?" He spread his hands wide, indicating the still trashed tables and scorch marks around the cafeteria from our latest battle, the terrified kids without powers huddling against the most fortified wall, Dr. Beth treating more minor injuries after fixing the worst injuries with his potions, including both Tomio and me. Half the mist-spewing crack still gaped in the ceiling above, though it was slowly being covered behind a growing scaffolding of rebar thanks to Debate Girl's - Liz's - efforts. "That would leave us all wide open to another monster attack."

"Better than hiding behind walls until monsters powerful enough to break them anyway attack. Most of the people here do not have powers at all, let alone combat ones. It'll be just us two that will have to stop something like that." Several of the kids pretending not to be listening shuffled awkwardly in their hiding places at that. Dr. Beth just raised a healing potion and gave me a mocking salute instead... except it was more than that, wasn't it? "Oh wait! That attack happened fifteen minutes ago and we defended ourselves splendidly. There's a giant crack in the ceiling and everything!" The awkward shuffling escalated to mumbling and fearful whispers. Dr. Beth just winked; his potion bottle had been pointing at the ceiling after all.

"Stop talking..." Tomio growled through gritted teeth, his eyes glowing like two purple coals as his three hundred pound bulk loomed ominously. "...right now."

"You disagree?" I quipped, pale eyebrow raised, because if he did he had to talk this out. Threatening me into shutting up wasn't going to work, especially when everyone here had just seen how secure the school cafeteria wasn't.

"...no," he grudgingly growled, visibly backing down and showing he had at least a smidgen of smarts. "But charging blindly in the dark isn't the answer either. Just roaming about without a plan will get us killed even faster... or did the great monster huntress forget the times she was way over her head?"

"I didn't suggest any blind charges!" Mostly because we hadn't gotten to the point of planning any outings as he'd been against going out at all. "Just that we need to do something to improve our situation. Staying stagnant never works." Everyone who'd ever trained for any competitive sport could tell him that much, even if being a student hadn't. Then again, high school drop-outs still existed even when we should all know better.

"Complaining instead of offering a solution doesn't work either," Tomio informed me smugly, despite having nothing to be smug about. "Fortunately, there's a plan in the works."

"Is there now?" Where the fuck was that plan fifteen minutes and a hell of a lot of arguing earlier, then? Not that I said it out loud. Seemingly calm once again or not, he was getting increasingly erratic and would probably explode if I pressed any harder.

"I did find you while searching the school, didn't I? Brief sorties for scouting and supplies we've already been doing for days. We'll just have to do... more." Yes, because that totally explained everything. Did he have a plan at all?

Before I could tell him exactly how much this didn't constitute a solution to our problems, the Brunette Twins strolled into the cafeteria as if nothing of significance had happened since their disappearance from the kitchens an hour before.

"Julia. Awesome," Tomio said, his simmering glower shifting from yours truly to Double Trouble.

"I know I am, but compliments are always welcome," the multiplied girl said and giggled annoyingly. "What's up, big guy?"

"I've been looking for you but you weren't in the kitchens," the boy commented, all the anger he'd shown both just now and back when he'd been looking for the other girl evaporating in an instant. "There's been an attack," he pointed around the cafeteria at the obvious damage, "and some of our plans need to be sped up."

"Oh?" For a moment her newly improved faces scrunched up in confusion, followed by surprise... and a wide, eager smile. "Oh! When do we start?"

"Immediately. I hope you're ready, it won't be nearly as easy as before." Julia pumped her fist - both of them - and dashed back towards the exit.

"Now wait just a-"

"Maya, we can't leave the base completely undefended. Nor can we get everyone out at once." No shit, but him going out with Julia as he obviously intended wouldn't solve anything. "You stay here while Liz finishes the steel reinforcement just in case."

"Are you out of your mind?" The way he'd done a one-eighty the moment the argument had stopped going his way certainly indicated as much. Not to mention that he didn't explain anything about his supposed plan. "I didn't agree to this!"

"Weren't you just saying that we need to get out and do something?" He smirked.

"Yes, but-"

"Do you want to leave everyone else here, undefended?" His smirk widened.

"No, but-"

"Do you want to get a dozen people without powers to fight unknown monsters for the first time?"

"That they don't have powers isn't something we can solve now!" Not with as dangerous as the monsters were becoming.

"That's what you think," he told me, then turned around and walked away.

...the fuck was going on here?

xxxx xxxx

"Why didn't you speak up?" I demanded the moment I barged into the infirmary.

"Do you really think rudeness will get you what you want, Miss Wennefer?" Dr. Beth said evenly as he sat behind his desk, grinding pills in a small mortar and pestle. "In my experience, being calm and thinking things through before acting tends to work significantly better."

"Don't patronize me," I told the old man, pacing across the small empty space a dozen times in a few seconds. "You fled!" I accused him, because he had. "One moment you were there, tending to everyone, the next you were gone as the argument was escalating. You didn't speak a single word."

"Some contributions are better than words, wouldn't you say?" He poured alcohol into the pestle with the ground pills, stirred until the mixture took a greenish sheen, then poured it into a dozen different vials. "Besides, what was there to say you hadn't already mentioned and would make any difference?" He carefully added water to the small glass vials, diluting the mixture. Strangely enough the greenish sheen intensified to actual glow... but I didn't care about that.

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"Bullshit!" I called him out on it. "You're faculty, an adult. If you had weighed in, people would have listened."

"This is not exactly how I remember things working before this disaster, young lady," he countered, and he wasn't exactly wrong. But this was an entirely different situation, he couldn't just not speak up. "Besides, I'm just a doctor. How much weight do you think my words would have?"

"Quite a lot, actually." I had listened to him, hadn't I? "That can't be it. What's your real reason for not saying... well... anything?"

"Like most people your age, you do not think things through." He paused, apparently focused on stoppering the vials and putting them in storage. "You are decisive and impulsive both... and now you have a gun."

"What-"

"Miss Moore has a gun, young Timothy Dalton has a gun. Tomio Kuroda certainly has a gun." He packed away the little chemistry set he'd been making potions with, stored it in a cupboard full of dozens of glowing vials. "Well, I say 'gun' but the reality is all of you have far more dangerous and varied arsenals now. Arsenals you've made use of in actual battle to defend yourselves and kill enemies, however inhuman they might have been." He locked the cupboard with a tiny little key, the simple lock not much of an impediment to even normal people... and suddenly I could see what he'd been trying to tell me. "Do you truly believe, after all the life and death situations you've successfully faced, after stress added to youthful impulsiveness was pressuring both sides, that either side would have listened to the words of just a doctor?"

"When you put it like that..." I blushed and looked away. Did he have to be reasonable now and not... well, I suppose Tomio had not been willing to listen to anyone. Why though? "Dr. Beth, what's really going on? Tomio was not acting... he was being unreasonable, even for him."

"I am not entirely certain, though that's partly by choice." He sighed, fell back to his chair heavily. "There are many of you kids needing my help, most without powers. Getting involved too much is something neither I nor they can afford."

"That bad, huh?" Something about this whole situation did not fit. It was an impression I got the first time I walked into that cafeteria, one that had been growing, an uneasiness growing in my mind.

"I cannot say. You, Miss Wennefer, would know your fellow students far better than I." He shrugged. "What I can tell you, beyond the irrationality you've noticed yourself, is that Mr. Kuroda has taken all the students with powers in his patrols at least once. Always one student at a time, though only Miss Moore went with him more than once."

"He seemed paranoid about defending the base here," I mused, then shrugged myself. "Maybe it's guilt? He told me Coach and the other jocks died because the group had gotten overconfident?"

"I cannot say that either." Dr. Beth frowned, stared at nothing as he thought deeply, then shook off the trance. "He did mention his previous group to us, but only joined Mrs. Perez and I after we formed this group with the cafeteria survivors." We both remained silent for a minute or two and this time the old doctor broke it first.

"Is there something else you needed, Miss Wennefer?"

"Yes, actually." I glanced at the cupboard full of potions and Dr. Beth caught it. "How good of a painkiller can you give me?"

"Oh dear," he fake-lamented. "This already sounds like a very reckless scheme."

xxxx xxxx

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y3m7d

Powers [2/13 pts]

Force Adjustment II

Forced Acceleration II

Progressive Regeneration II

Proximakinesis I

Super Suit I

Attributes [2/13 pts]

Might 8, Agility 8, Reason 2, Vigilance 3, Ego 6, Luck 1

Five days. Had that many passed since the first zombie crawled out of a portal in the middle of our Physics exam? Worse still, it was the third day since Jerry and Mandy's disappearance. Three days with no sign of them anywhere, not even as clothed zombies, victims risen after their deaths. More than half of that time I'd actually spent unconscious, recovering from my wounds. And while a good percentage of the rest had been battles with monsters and frantic searching for my missing friends, far too much had been just sitting around in a not-so-safe fortified cafeteria, or the kitchens behind it. If I stayed much longer here... I really didn't know what I'd do. So I wouldn't.

I was back in the kitchens and I was alone, the sole surviving cook probably resting somewhere that wasn't where her fellow cooks had died horribly and she must have fought for her life, surviving by a hair. Or maybe I was just projecting. Dr. Beth's pale yellow painkiller potion was probably to blame. It couldn't block the smell, you see. And it was uncomfortably appetizing.

I took my arm off the gas stove's blue flames, inspecting the blackened, flaking flesh with a strange, almost detached calmness. Even as I watched, burned skin, fat and muscle sloughed off, rapidly replaced by new growth. It had taken almost five minutes to get the burn that bad as regeneration worked against the flames, less than ten seconds to heal, another ten till every sign I'd ever been burned faded away. My other arm I kept slamming against the series of recently sharpened meat knives, Force Adjustment used to decrease my durability and make the process easier. The cuts disappeared quickly enough there was no new bloody mess that would have to be cleaned, unlike all the other times over the past hour. Forced Acceleration sped both my moves and the healing itself but no matter the hurry, itchiness was already turning into mild stinging.

The one hour of total pain immunity Dr. Beth had promised was coming to an end and my regeneration against both fire and cutting damage was four, maybe five times faster than it had been during my fight with the little winged demon. The next time I faced one it would be that much harder to be incapacitated; it'd have to do.

I immediately spent a point into Ego, raising it to seven. My hair became a bit more lustrous, gold silken waves falling down my shoulders as everything else, from bones to ligaments, to muscles and the soft flesh over them adjusted, became more comfortable and probably closer to fabulous. Every other time I'd be ecstatic to have the beauty of a major idol with none of the effort and chemical or medical cheating to achieve it; just this once I was more interested in the mental effects. For the first time since boosting Might, I felt truly comfortable in my skin, better than before all the powers and monsters. Any doubts and second thoughts I'd had about this course of action went away, my willingness to go through with it solidifying like metal cooling in a cast. I was a regenerator and had felt no pain; what I did had only benefited me, improved my abilities with no downsides. There was no reason for any unease.

I put the second point into Might; I was myself, the only one with the right to judge whether my appearance looked good or not - and it did. Being taller, stronger, was only said to be ugly because insecure people felt intimidated. Why should I pander to such flawed opinions when I could become objectively stronger and healthier? Besides, this was my power and it conformed to my desires; the changes were fewer, smaller than before as strength was added to my image rather than the other way around. Then two power points were added to Proximakinesis without delay and it was done.

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y3m7d

Powers [0/13 pts]

Force Adjustment II

Forced Acceleration II

Progressive Regeneration II

Proximakinesis II

Super Suit I

Attributes [0/13 pts]

Might 9, Agility 8, Reason 2, Vigilance 3, Ego 7, Luck 1

I jumped once, twice, feeling the slowness of the fall. The third time I came to a stop mid-jump, still several feet from the ground. Whether it was looking into Tomio's secrets, going after my friends, or just killing monsters to protect everyone else, stumbling from horror to horror like a zombie movie protagonist simply would not do.

It was time to be an actual superhero, and everybody knew real superheroes could fly.