Entering into the camp was surreal. The aliens, a several dozen of them to maybe a hundred at most, had decided to set up camp outside and were in the process of creating their own primitive fortifications. The mood was focused and angry but it wasn't hard to tell why. Only a few of the civilians had survived and none of the older people. Considering that the majority of the camp was made of pissed off warriors, it was surprisingly calm. They had set up a stage next to the bunker's entrance and several prominent members of the group used the extra height to direct the others and oversee the process. And there, at the center of it all, was the human woman who had left the rest of her group to die.

Despite all this there wasn't a lot of commotion when we entered the camp. The others noticed us but were mostly ambivalent about the fact that we were all here.

"What now?" Dimitri asked, looking over at Clark despite it angering Jeong.

Jeong spoke up with a glare, trying to take back the command. "Now we go and say hello to the people in charge, we must see what is going on here."

There were some murmurs of agreement as nobody seemed to have any better idea of what to do. As long as I could get some time alone with the robot and didn't end up getting noticed too much by the person in charge everything else should be good. So of course the first thing our small group's 'leader' did was to go straight to the lady in charge and try to talk with her.

"Hey! Yo there! Do you have a minute to talk!" His tone was insistent, less like a question than a statement given with full knowledge that it would be followed. The affect was somewhat ruined by how his hands were fidgeting and the barely suppressed pace of his frantic movements.

"Yes, of course!" she answered while smoothly walking toward us. She was a woman in her late twenties to early thirties with hair and eyes of a matching soft brown and very lightly tanned skin. Her height was less than dominating but she made up for it by standing on the second step from the bottom, rather than coming all the way down to the grass where we were standing, and this left her just a little higher than any of us. "My Name is Celestia, my last name wouldn't mean anything to you. It is so good to see you all here today coming to join our growing group."

Jeong nodded along but stopped as he herd her last words. "Uh, I don't know that we are all going to stay. We haven't figured that part out yet." He glanced over at us as he awkwardly said it. "But that is something we can work out later."

She nodded and smiled with interest. "I'm sure you must all be extremely capable people to have survived so well against the enemies that came before us all. How did you overcome such powerful foes?" Her words took on a different meaning with my knowledge of her capabilities, and a slight stiffening of Donnie showed that he understood as well. She was asking if we were useful. I could only hope that we wouldn't come across as 'useful' and so would be allowed to leave.

Our fearless leader looked a bit uncomfortable with the question. "Uh, well, we mostly ran away," he admitted. "We tried to attack when they first appeared, and our full group definitely slowed them down, but eventually we were forced to pull back." He faltered a bit and I was happy to hear him badmouthing our abilities. Then he opened his mouth again. "But before that we did manage to hold them off for an extended amount of time. I myself repelled three of their attacks before the fatigue became overwhelming."

I held off on my facepalm to glance at my friend who had actually been there to see the battle. The eye roll response told me all I needed to know.

"Really now!" she exclaimed. "Is this true?" Clark and Veronica looked away uncomfortably, unwilling to directly contradict his words but not supporting them either.

Dimitri had no such reservations. "Yeah, for all of two minutes."

"You are just jealous that my contribution forced them to retreat, however briefly, while yours wasn't enough to keep us from getting surrounded." Jeong sniped back.

Celestia seemed somewhat surprised by the back and forth. She settled on a simple question, "How did you end up in charge of your group?" She turned toward our overenthusiastic fire mage as she asked but glanced at everyone else in an open invitation to respond.

Our 'leader' answered back first, though his words were ignored by everyone. "I was the most powerful non-supporter in the group, the obvious choice for a leadership role." That was, at least, similar to one of the arguments that had been made in his favor during the earlier argument. Though the argument itself was more that he could still contribute through leadership even after blowing his load, a massive impact all at once, even while the supporters and our magical girl attacker were busy. I could kind of see how he took it to say it was his large impact that put him in charge, assuming I squinted and remembered his big ego's influence.

Our earth wielder gave another answer that came across more definite. "Who else were we supposed to put in charge? The only other options were the sneak and Mr. Too-Nice-For-His-Own-Good." He nodded toward myself and Clark respectively as he spoke. "And I'm a defender, it isn't like I can go off on my own."

Stolen story; please report.

She nodded in openly displayed understanding. "In that case, wouldn't it be better to join our group? There is safety in numbers and people who know how to defend in a war." She turned to nod toward the many alien warriors around us and, more distantly, the beginnings of solid area defenses.

Then Jeong spoke and, for likely the only time in memory, I was impressed. "Thank you for the offer, but we would like to keep our options open at this time." He gave a small bow of his head in respect before continuing. "Perhaps, in the future, we could discuss the options more fully, but not at the current moment." His final words came out a bit choppy and forced, but he was still standing firm to our earlier decision.

Her smile cracked but was back in an instant. "Are you sure you can't rethink your decision?" She moved forward as she spoke, stepping down from her place on the stairs and taking his hand in hers in an overly flirtatious move. "We, I mean our group, has so much to offer. I'm sure it would be in everyone's best interest to stay."

Our sacrificial leader paused at her advances, seemingly stunned into immobility. If I hadn't known better I might have thought that it was her romantic advances that swayed his mind. There was close to half a minute of her looking into his eyes, holding his hand endearingly, while his face flashed with signs of expectation and responsibility and desire. And then, finally, he gave his acceptance with a nod that saw her relax.

She beamed up at him, taking a couple steps back. "I'm so glad to hear that. I'm sure that there is so much that we all can do for each other."

Dimitri, for his part, spit on the ground angrily before giving me an annoyed glare and stomping off farther into the camp.

We all stood there for a few moments, whatever flow there had been completely broken by the interruption. Veronica and Clark began whispering to each other, having given themselves a bit of distance, and Donnie glanced at me with a worried expression. Not that the whispering was a hinderance to my super senses, but their words of disbelief and unsureness didn't really add anything new that we weren't already feeling.

The mind controller took that moment to reestablish herself in the conversation. Her smile had a more brittle quality but was still present as she spoke. "I know this is all so sudden, but I'm sure we can all realize the value in what we all can contribute to our survival."

Jeong took this as his que to speak up with some new information. "That's right. We all have our skills that can be helpful to the group. Clark is a dedicated magical healer and Johnny has super senses he uses for scouting and has a hidden item box that he uses to carry everything in. We even have some guns that we took from the last round attackers!"

The rest of us just turned and looked at him in shock. "Is that so?" She asked, turning her full attention toward me.

I didn't have to fake my discomfort at her gaze but I did take the time to figure out a response. As some sort of mind controller, possibly a Mind Mage, I couldn't count on being able to lie to her. What Mages lost out on from Supers in terms of power and stamina they more than made up for in versatility. I looked away, hoping she couldn't read my mind, and then discarding the fear because it made no sense with the questions she had asked and the fact that she hadn't already ordered my execution. Relaxing a bit might have been a mistake, but I decided to play it off as though I was agreeing to her unspoken demands.

Reaching into my Hammer Space I pulled out one of the repeaters without unlocking the controls. "We took these off of some enemies that were dead. Problem is..." I carefully pointed the weapon at the ground away from anyone and theatrically pulled the trigger in order to create nothing more than several hollow clicks. "You don't happen to know if the techie soldier guy survived? He might be able to make them work?"

There was a brief moment of annoyance that flashed across her face. I had been watching the camp since it had first come into view, just to see who all might have survived to join the group, and he was conspicuously absent. We both knew he wasn't around anymore and we both knew it was her fault, but I wasn't going to be the one to say it. "Unfortunately he wasn't among those to make it to this round." Her admission was also valuable because it proved rather well that she wasn't able to read my mind. Thank goodness for that.

I shrugged. "I figure I would try messing around with it for a while and, if nothing worked, we could always try selling it at the market." Another truthful statement, that was.

She nodded, showing some displeasure but not anger. "And everything else?" she asked. I had hoped that she wouldn't remember that there was anything else she could try to take from us but wasn't going to take her lightly at this point. She obviously was smarter than the average person to have gotten as far as she had.

I reached back into my storage, thought that invisible hole in reality and grabbed one of the boxes of MREs. "There are a few of these. I think they are food or something? Where do you want them?"

She pointed back toward the bunker as she spoke with a note of dismissal. "There should be someone in that direction who can make best use of them." The conversation was effectively over. She thought she knew everything important and I now knew the limits of her ability and what would likely be necessary to deal with her.

Outwardly I nodded, accepting my dismissal as she turned toward Clark. Then I started to walk away. But first, I turned aside to speak to Veronica. "Be careful of that woman. Don't let her put her hands all over your man if you don't want her to steal him away." I warned. It was a simple thing but it would compromise the debutante's ability to make any more inroads with my group. Safety in numbers was a good argument, after all, but I didn't personally want to end up like the rest of the military faction.

As for Veronica, her response was almost comical to watch for the few seconds it continued. Denial, embarrassment, and paranoia warred over her features for a few seconds, preventing any actual words from coming out beyond a stifled squeak. Then she shyly nodded toward me and went off to stand next to our group's support.

I smiled to myself as I stepped away.