Eric sat slouched at the counter, slowly pushing his mainly full drink across the wood. It had been just over an hour since they’d arrived, but it felt so much longer.
“You ok?” Kevin asked, leaving the group of ‘aliens’ that he’d been chatting with.
“No,” came the reply, “I thought I’d finally found a place where I'd fit in but nope. Even with other ‘lightning lads’ I feel like I don’t belong.”
“Well, to be fair, you’ve only been here for roughly a day.” Kevin pointed at the drink Eric was pushing around, “You going to drink that?”
Eric pushed it over in front of him and watched as he chugged half of it then put it back on the counter.
“I know, but that's the thing, I feel like I should at least… I don’t know. I really just don’t know.”
“Would a change of scenery help, we’ve got a nice storm above ground that's always going.”
“Sure,” Eric said, getting up from his stool, “if there's one place I feel at home it's in a storm.”
“Well then come on, there's a lift not too far from here. Granted, it doesn’t go all the way up, but we’ll get a nice view of the ocean.”
“Did you ever feel out of place?”
“Huh?”
“When you first got your powers. Did you feel out of place.”
“Well, I mean yeah, at first, but I’ve grown up in Trontor City, so I was already used to strange things happening, plus it was already expected that I'd have powers. At first I was actually excited, seeing as I could now control lightning to some extent.”
His expression turned down. “But after a couple days I realized that it wasn’t what I thought it would be. Everyone treated me differently, as if having this new power meant I had become a completely different person when I was still the same. Those who stuck with me, those who didn’t treat me all that differently, they were my real friends. Not that it mattered in the long run, as I was separated from everyone I’d know just a few months after I’d gotten this power. To, ’move me to a more suitable environment.’”They stood in silence while they waited for the lift, neither of them knowing what to say.
“I.” Eric started.
“I didn’t know anything was different for a while. When I first got these ‘powers’, it was more like a curse. At the time I didn’t even know I was the cause of it, but that doesn’t make me feel any less guilty.”
Kevin turned to look at him, “what happened?”
Eric let out a sigh, “About five years ago, there was a storm in the town that I lived in. One day, I got struck by lightning and woke up in the hospital. Miraculously, I was perfectly fine, and able to go back to my regular life… but. The storm never stopped, days, weeks, and then months went by, and the storm kept going. Several people got hurt, a couple were struck by lightning and died, and then one day I realized it was me. I was watching the news, and they were showing where the eye of the storm had been for the past day, and it was the exact path that I had taken that day. At first I put it off as a very weird coincidence, but the next day the same thing happened, and then the day after that.
So, to test it, I took a short trip to the closest town over, and low and behold, it followed. So I left, I found an island that no one was living on, and I spent the last three years living where the storm couldn’t hurt anyone else.”
“Eri-” Before Kevin could say anything, the ground shook and a loud rumble could be heard coming from the Hq.
“Shoot.”
“What was that?”
“No idea, but I’ve got to go report to the general incase she needs me.”
“What do I do?”
“Either head back to your apartment and wait for the PA’s to tell you more, or you can come with me and see if you're able to put those powers to good use.”
Kevin took off for the campus, and left Eric standing in front of the lift by himself. Eric looked in the direction of the apartments, then, after hesitating for a moment, took off after Kevin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Smith followed Phil as they ran down a hallway towards what appeared to be the main control room. An alarm blared from multiple speakers in the building, and someone had decided to turn the lights off and replace them with an eerie red glow.
“What’s happening?” Smith asked, having to yell so Phil could hear him.
“I don’t know, normally the PA tells us, but it's gone down. Without it to spread information quickly, we know about as much as you do.”
They burst into the control room. Only to find it abandoned and mostly destroyed.
Smith stood there in a stunned silence, not entirely sure how to react. Phil on the other hand, only had one thing to say.
“Oh my god.”
The PA finally crackled to life, but unfortunately didn’t have any good news.
“Warning! We have a breach in the command center! Danger unknown, Threat Level; Midnight. I repeat Threat Level; Midnight. Take your weapons off of stun because we’re in for one hell of a ride.”
From the darkness in the corner of the room came an awful growling sound, and the scraping of metal.
“How bad,” Smith said, “is Midnight?”
“Well,” Phil said, pulling out a gun that seemed to have most of it's barrel taken off, “There are eighteen different threat levels, all the way from Dawn to Midnight. The highest we’ve ever had before was 3pm.”
“So in other words?”
“We should get out of here, Now!”
There was an ear splitting roar, and out of the darkness burst what Smith could only describe as a very pissed off looking T-rex. They ran as fast as they could down the hallway, gaining a bit of a headstart as whatever was chasing them got caught in the doorway.
Smith glanced back just as it broke through the wall into the hallway, which was just big enough for it to fit, then he realized that it was definitely not a t-rex, since it's front legs where just as big as it's back legs, and it appeared to be covered in some sort of hard shell like material.
“Why,” Smith yelled in between breaths, “ are the hallways so big!”
“Because,” Phil replied, while barely doing better than Smith was at running, “not every being that lives here.” He said before having to catch his breath. “Is as small as we are.”
“Then why are the doors our size?”
“I don’t know, ok! Now doesn’t seem like the best time to be talking about our choice of Infrastructure.”
“Well I'd rather not talk about the fact that we’re running from a genetically modified dinosaur!”
“You think I do either! But we're here anyway, aren’t we?”
“So what do we do?” Smith asked, noticing that the thing was slowly gaining on them.
“Grab my hand and hope to John that our arms don’t get ripped off in the process.”
“Who’s John?”
“Does that really seem important at the moment?!”
Smith didn’t answer, instead he grabbed onto phills arm and then almost had his arm torn out of it's socket as Phil grabbed a door handle and swung them around in an arc that then launched them stumbling down an adjacent hallway. Less than a second later the thing shot past them while it tried skidding to a stop.
Fortunately Phil and Smith were able to find a decent hiding spot by the time it got back, and after it looked around a bit, it stalked down a different hallway.
After they had held their breath for as long as they could, they finally dared to breathe.
“What, was that?” Smith managed to say.
“That,” Phil replied after he had caught his breath, “is what we were trying to figure out before it escaped. Though it seems to have grown ten times bigger since then.”
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