Into the Doll’s house.
“Somehow, I thought there’d be more
Kool-Aid involved.” Doug said, as he perused the breakfast kart.
“Don’t be simple,
“Percy, his name is Percy.” Kitty
said angrily.
“We already scanned this room for
bugs ... Kristen.” Illyana said, putting an emphasis
on Kitty’s alias.
“I don’t care; all aliases, all the
time!” She said, as if she had said it several times before … which she had.
“The great Doll will be here soon and we must be on our best behavior,” she
said quickly. “Now slap on those fake smiles and let’s look nice and all
inclined to mindlessly obey,” she said, fixing her red-streaked black wig.
“Maim, I will throw fliers at
unsuspecting tourists, Maim!” Doug said in an ‘at attention’ pose, saluting
with the wrong hand.
“Shhhh ... someone’s coming,” Illyana
whispered, just as they heard a knocking on the door.
“Come in,” Illyana
said.
The door opened to reveal the receptionist, who took
their names and let them in, and another equally high-ranking woman. Both flanked
a lanky and tall man, who wore an all white jumpsuit and had wild graying red
hair.
“Ragdoll,
this is Kristen Bell, Amanda Seyfried, and Percy Daggs.”
“The third!”
Doug interjected.
“Welcome, children.” The skinny man
said warmly.
“Thank you, Mister Merkel.” Kitty
said with a nod.
“Mister Merkel is his name to
outsiders; here he is the Ragdoll.” The new woman
said strongly.
“Oh my God, I am so sorry. This is
just all so new!” Kitty said going into her best impression of a scared, naive
teenager. Much to her suspicion, the Ragdoll was all
too willing to comfort her in her “state”. He was quickly by her side and
embracing her very tightly. Kitty fought all her instincts that said to phase the man’s heart right out of his chest.
“It’s all right my child. You will
learn our ways soon enough.” He said, now rubbing her shoulder. Illyana feared their leader would lose it and she walked up
to them.
“So, Ragdoll,
what do we do first?” She said gently, as she nudged herself in between Kitty
and the stick-like man.
“Well, young one, all three of you
will come with me for orientation.” He said, smiling jovially. The receptionist
and the other woman walked up beside where he stood as he left the room. The
two women made sure to be by his side, motioning the others to follow.
---
Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin is a patient young man- at least, he
was trying to be. Five years ago, at the urging of his parents, Piotr took his sister Illyana to
seek out a life in
-Dear
bro,
I
am busy right now, you know busy: that’s what people are when they actually
allow themselves to have lives, get one and find out!
P.S.
- Kitty threatened to sing, if you can call it that, if I didn’t say hi from
her. So hi...when the hell will you two just book the
motel room and get it over with.
-Me
Piotr
smiled, despite of his anger at the note.
He had had a longstanding flirtation/mutual unspoken crush on Illyana’s best friend Kitty for nearly four years now. She
had been one of the first people they had met once they moved to LA. They had
met at the supermarket on a Wednesday afternoon … Piotr
would never forget it. He had learned some English before moving over here, but
evidently not enough. He was in line and the cashier was yelling at him for
something or the other he couldn’t quite make out. Then the cashier made some
gesture towards Piotr, while he said something to the
man bagging the groceries, and they both started laughing. All of a sudden, a
shorter brunette woman walked up to them, obviously enraged.
“God, man, you must be hung like an
ant if you need to make fun of someone who doesn’t speak English as his first
language just to feel like a big man,” she snapped.
“What did you just say to me?” he
snapped.
“Oh, so I guess we can add hearing
loss to the list of things you’re badly compensating for by being a jackass,” she
said angrily.
“I am very confused,” Piotr said hesitantly.
“What gherkin over here was trying
to get across is that you have too many items for the express line,” she said,
pointing to the sign and then to his items.
“Ahhh, I
see now,” Piotr said, his face blushing with
embarrassment.
“You know you should get in international
incidents more often,” she said as she turned to walk away.
“Why is that?” he said, hoping he
understood her correctly.
“You’re cute when you blush,” she
said with a wink, as she walked back to her cart.
“Thank you, I’m Piotr!”
he shouted, over-excitedly.
“Kitty,” she said simply, before
turning the corner down the next aisle. Piotr thought
about that moment often. It was the very next day when she and Illyana met and immediately hit it off but it wasn’t until
a few days later when Illyana invited Kitty to their
house that they met again. Piotr was at first worried
about the cultural barrier, then the age difference, and then ruining their
friendship. He kept making excuses for why he couldn’t make a move.
When Kitty got her Private
Investigator’s license and started up Catseyes
Investigations, Illyana was the first to sign up. But
Illyana had always been a wild child and Piotr didn’t want her getting into anymore trouble than she
had already. He forbade her from continuing in the detective business. This made
him have to act more like a parent than he ever had before, making a bit of a
fence between him and his sister and her friends, including Kitty. This rule
against her being part of Catseyes slowly softened
into her doing it anyway and Piotr being in denial.
Now that Illyana
left the day before and said she would be back in a few days, his denial was
slowly faltering. He decided to work out his frustration and tension the only
way he knew how. Piotr was an art teacher at the
local high school; art was his passion. He went back into his studio and took
out his brushes and palette. He sat down in front of his latest project and
took off the sheet he had draped over it. Underneath was a half finished
portrait of Kitty Pryde.
---
The room was dark, save for three
lone lights shining on the three new recruits. Each of them sat in a small,
simple metal chair and squinted at the brightness of the light aimed right at
them. Before they could question the purpose of all of this, a clicking sound
could be heard like a microphone coming on. Then they heard the sound of
someone clearing their throat.
“Name?” the clearly electronically
transmitted voice asked. They all looked at each other and gave no answer.
“Name?” the voice asked again, and
Kitty shrugged and pointed to herself as the others nodded.
“Kristen Bell.”
“Power?”
“Negation of my
personal gravity.”
“Weaknesses?”
“The anti-gravity effect is
nullified by outside physical contact.”
“Name?”
“Amanda Seyfried,”
Illyana said, after a moments
hesitation.
“Powers?”
“Generation of
metal-like armor.”
“Weaknesses?”
“I am unpracticed and can only
generate it over my left arm and chest so far.”
“Name?”
“Percy Daggs
the Third.” Doug said, once again trying to make the last part sound overly
important.
“Powers?”
“Telepathic
communication with technology.”
“Weaknesses?”
“My powers are tactile-based. I need
to touch the technology that I want to talk to,” Doug said half-heartedly. He
hoped they wouldn’t test his “power,” as the others had ways to back up their
fake powers, but he only had a com-link with Warlock in his watch and he could
only hope Warlock’s technopathy worked through it.
Suddenly the lights went out and then the whole room lit up. Ragdoll and his two female assistants were suddenly in the
room and walking towards them.
“Very good,” Ragdoll
said, clapping nonchalantly.
“Thank you, Ragdoll,”
Doug said.
“Now that we’ve had orientation, the
tour, and now the interview, I think it’s time you get to know some of your
fellow Dolls. Please follow me,” he said, as he and his sycophantic helpers
turned and left the room. The three friends quickly followed. They were led
into a room full of teenagers, all smiling and chatting. The talking stopped
immediately as Ragdoll cleared his throat.
“My children, this is Kristen,
Amanda, and Percy. Please make them feel welcome,” he said warmly, as he left
the room. The group immediately gathered around the three newbies
and began to make overly nice greetings and several attempts at hugging which Illyana especially was uncomfortable with. The three gave
each other looks to signify that it was time to divide and conquer.
Illyana
found herself talking to a young woman with curly brown hair who introduced
herself as Rita Farr.
“So, are you a mutant too?” Rita
asked timidly.
“Yes, I am. I thought all of us
were?” Illyana asked, looking around.
“Well, this is supposed to a mixer
for mutant Dolls only, but some of the human ones sneak in to see if we’re
getting special privileges. Humans have such a hard time grasping the all-encompassing
love of the Ragdoll.” Rita said, doe-eyed.
Meanwhile, Kitty had been drawn into
a dry and mind-numbing bout of small talk with a physically mutated young man
named Barnell Bohusk.
“Yeah, so that is how a taffy pull works, you see?” he said, finally finishing his
long, exhausting, boring story.
“You know what’s odd?” Kitty asked,
forcing herself back to alertness.
“What’s that?”
“I could have gone my whole life
without knowing that,” she said bluntly.
Doug was about to approach a pretty young girl when
four new people came down a nearby staircase. They seemed to be higher ranking
mutants in the Dolls’ hierarchy. Doug was going to introduce himself to them
when he noticed one of them was the girl from Peter Merkel’s house, that clay
monster girl. He put his hand over his face and rushed towards Kitty. Without
even slowing down, he grabbed her by the arm as he sprinted,
now dragging her towards Illyana.
“Oh yeah, that’s not going to call
attention to us,” Illyana whispered sarcastically.
“Sorry, but look who it is,” he said,
nodding his head towards their former attacker.
“Well, if it isn’t old “clay-face,” Illyana said angrily.
“Damn, she could identify us,” Kitty
snapped.
“We have our wigs; let’s just not
let her see our faces.” Illyana said, rubbing Kitty’s
shoulder. They went back to mingling. Meanwhile, Doug continued to hover just
close enough to the four higher ranking dolls to see and hear them without them
seeing him. He suddenly felt a tap on his shoulder. He jumped slightly when he
saw Kitty two inches away from him.
“Would you calm down!” she whispered
loudly.
“Sorry but you can't sneak up on
people staking out dangerous criminals,” he said, regaining his composer.
“Yeah, yeah I’m. going to go phase
around and see what I can find. We’re going to meet up for our getaway at
“Okay.”
She patted him on the shoulder and then walked off
into the crowd. As he watched her walk off he, felt
someone tap his shoulder again. As he turned around, he once more was met with
a young woman standing right next to him. She was one of the four high ranking
acolytes of Ragdoll.
“Ah!” he shouted, as he jumped.
She laughed a bit as she gently put her hand on his shoulder.
“Are you all right? I didn’t mean to
scare you,” she said nicely, as she giggled.
“Yes. Sorry, I'm just a
little...nervous,” he said quickly.
“No need to be nervous; you are surrounded
people just like you: Outcasts, victims, mutants, and now friends,” she said
sweetly. Unlike Ragdoll, the receptionist, and some
of the others he had met, she seemed sincere when she said these things.
“That’s a nice way of putting it,”
Doug said, still not trusting her because she had been kind of buddy-buddy with
the clay-girl.
“I’m Constance D'Aramis,”
she said, kindly extending her hand.
Doug took her hand and shook.
“Pretty name.
I’m Percy Daggs... the Third.”
“Wow, very impressive sounding name
you’ve got there yourself,” she said.
“Thank you!” he shouted, adding
‘Finally!’ in his mind.
---
Kitty managed to shake the dull, but
ever so persistent, Barnell and made her way out of
the meeting room. She crept her way down the hall, and nonchalantly smiled and
nodded at two Johnny-come-latelys to the party as she
snuck around the corner. She found herself phasing in and out of rooms, finding
only libraries and common rooms.
“Come on...come on...” she said to
herself, as she phased into yet another bathroom.
“This is the most boring cult...ever,”
she said to herself, and phased through yet another
wall. This time she found herself in another hallway, a more sci-fi /evil
laboratory-looking hallway.
“Now, this could be good,” she said,
looking around. She slowly crept down the hall towards the sounds of human
voices. Suddenly she heard footsteps coming her way and phased into the wall.
“Miss Beecher’s room is this way
now; we had to mover her into the hidden wing after that novice stumbled upon
her last time,” Kitty heard one guy say to someone else as they walked down the
hall.
‘Miss Beecher...YES! This was easier than I
thought.’ She waited two beats and exited the wall and followed the sounds of
the footsteps on the metal floor. She found herself facing a Star Trek-esque door labeled with the number: 47. She stepped closer
and heard a whizzing noise as her proximity activated its opening. ‘DAMN!’ she
thought to herself as she quickly fell backwards, phasing into the floor. The
occupants of the room looked out as the door slowly opened only to see an empty
hallway.
“Door malfunction?” one man asked.
“Probably, but let’s check it out.
She‘ll be okay on her own for awhile.” From the floor Kitty heard them leave.
She made a mental bet with herself that the ‘her’ was Karen Beecher, the one
they had been searching for, and closed her eyes and prayed as she floated up
from the floor. She opened her eyes and her jaw dropped. Inside the dimly lit
room was a hospital bed where a young, attractive black girl was strapped down
and hooked up to several machines at once. She was horrified as she walked
closer.
“Karen? Karen...can you hear me?” she
said aloud.
“No, but I can.”
She turned at the sound of the all-too-familiar
voice. It was the mutant girl from Peter Merkel’s house.
“What have you people done to her?”
Kitty snapped at the devilishly grinning girl in the doorway.
“She is of much better use to
society this way. It does look a bit fitting, though, doesn’t it?” she said,
walking over to Karen and motioning towards the girl’s most obvious mutation:
her dark gold wings. “She’s like a pinned butterfly. Though, as an interesting
side note, we’ve found her mutation is more tied to the Bombus
distinguendus, the Great Yellow Bumblebee,” she said
pompously.
“Fascinating,” Kitty said, as she
backhanded the girl, who moved backwards with the hit.
“You witch!” the mutant girl shouted
as she was about to attack.
“That won’t be necessary, Mattie,” an
overly friendly voice said from behind them. The villainess dropped to her
knees at the sound of her name. Kitty turned, and saw the wild-haired and oddly
lithe form of the Ragdoll.
“I see you found our dear Miss
Beecher,” he said, as if the girl wasn’t incapacitated and attached to very
questionable devices.
“I’ve found what you did to her,”
Kitty snapped back.
“She is of much better use to
society this way,” he said with his wide smile.
“Yeah, that’s what silly-puddy back there tried to sell me,” she said, pointing
behind her to the still-kneeling Mattie.
“Mattie Hagen told me that three PIs
were looking into Karen’s disappearance. I never dreamed that they would be
boorish enough to actual try and enter the home of my children,” he said even-toned,
with the same grin.
“Your ‘children’ are brainwashed
drones, who follow you out of coercion tactics- not love or loyalty!” she
shouted.
The man drew his hand to his mouth, as he began to
stifle a laugh.
“What is so damn funny?” she snapped.
“Private Joke,” he said, looking at
her like she was foolish and beneath his attention.
“You know what, share it with the
Manson family and the Ku Klux Klan at the next annual BBQ - I'm sure it’ll get
a big laugh! Meanwhile, I am phasing Karen and myself
out of this joint!”
She turned to grab the comatose mutant girl when the
Ragdoll cleared his throat.
“I would not do that!” he said loudly, but still in
a maddeningly giddy voice.
“And why not?” she asked, not even
turning around.
“I’ve had some chances to enquire
about the mutant detectives Mattie had her run in with at my house, and, judging
by your comment, I’m guessing you’re Kitty. My contact says your particular
brand of intangibility tends to ruin electronic equipment,” he said casually.
“Who is this contact?” Kitty said,
ignoring his creepy, yet true, statement.
“In good time,” he said smugly.
“I don’t care if I mess up your
stupid equipment. I checked this girl’s complete medical history; I am not a
novice at this. She has no condition that would require such excessive
treatment. Unless you want to admit that you did something to her that hurt her
so badly she needs extensive medical attention?” Kitty asked slyly.
“We have not hurt Miss Beecher, but
you will. If any of these machines is tampered with it will cause her an unforeseen
amount of medical damage,” he said, still in his pompous tone.
“Get her out of them now!” Kitty
shouted.
“No need to get rude. We’re all
friends here,” Ragdoll said.
Kitty just scowled at him. ‘Think Kitty.’ She
thought to herself, ‘Illyana, I need to get Illyana. She can get Karen and the machinery out,’ Kitty
thought as she dove through the floor.
“Shall I go after her, Ragdoll?” Mattie said compliantly.
“No, it’s been taken care of,” he
said mysteriously.
---
Kitty emerged from the floor just
outside Doug's room. She phased inside and saw Doug sitting on his bed.
“Doug, where’s Illyana?”
she said, wildly looking around, knowing that this would be one of the first
rooms they'd go too.
“She hasn’t gotten here yet,” he
said confusedly, as he rose to his feet. “We still have some time till we were
supposed to meet, so I'm sure she’s fine,” he said, sounding concerned despite himself.
“Do you know where she is? It is a
matter of life or death!” she said, listening near the door for sounds of
Mattie or another acolyte coming after them.
“Kitty, what is going on?” Doug said, a little scared. Suddenly, Kitty heard a bumping
sound. She listened closer to the door but when she heard it again it
definitely sounded like it was coming from inside the room. “What the hell was
that?” Doug snapped.
“Shhh!” Kitty snapped, putting a finger to her mouth
as she crept near the closet, tightening her other hand into a fist. She
counted to three and than practically ripped the door open. Suddenly, the
unconscious body of Illyana Rasputina
fell into her arms.
“Oh my god, what happened?” Kitty
shrieked, turning around just in time to see the blunt end of a fire
extinguisher connect with her face. Doug grinned and threw the fire
extinguisher to the floor as a woman came inside from the hall and grasped his
hand lovingly.
“Look at them lying there together
so peacefully,” Constance D'Aramis said, as her eyes (and
a second later Doug’s eyes as well) began to glow red.
“Yeah, they’re my best friends... I
love them.” Doug said, his grin matching the sinister one on
To
Be Continued...