Resist

39

After the shock that Xavier was looking to exterminate us had passed, Tucker came to his senses first.

"Guys," his voice was quiet and then grew in volume when no one heard him over the babble of our worry. "Guys!" We all stopped and turned to him, eyes big and waiting for whatever his epiphany had been. "We have uniforms, we have weapons, we even have sets of armor; we can attack him."

The moment that the idea took to sink in was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. Then chaos erupted, ideas spurting from everyone's heads like flocks of birds disrupted from the trees by feral cats.

"We have to go now," Brody kept saying over and over, his accent thicker with the way he emphasized this. "We have to go now."

Will actually sat down, head in his hands, as he absorbed Tucker's words and the plans now running like rivers from everyone's mouths.

"Hey!" James finally shouted, putting us all into silence again. "We need a logical plan here, we need to talk this out civilly."

"We also need to work quickly and do something before Xavier knows we have the stuff," I told them, pointing out the limiting factor. "We only have until he realizes this wagon is missing, and then he will be suspicious of everyone and there's no way we'll be able to do anything within the vicinity of the castle."

"Well since we have drastically less fighters than him, the obvious tactic is stealth," Will reasoned. "We wear the uniforms, sneak in by pretending to be the soldiers with the wagon, search the castle, get Jack, and get out."

"But we need a bunch of the stuff that's in the wagon in order to go in," Brenton pointed out. "They'll notice quicker that items are missing if we bring them the empty crates than if the wagon simply seems delayed."

There was a moment of silence as everyone mulled that over.

"So we leave the wagon, it'll be quicker without it anyways, and show up pretending to be from a group stationed in the city," I said. "We know that there are scouting groups of some sort that stay out in the city, we've run into them a number of times"

"What if no groups are supposed to be back today?" Bower questioned.

"We say there was an emergency of some sort, someone come up with something," I requested, unable to think of a logical reason myself.

"The house collapsed, wall caved in, and we can't stay there anymore," James said, the lie rolling off his tongue so quickly I wasn't sure if I should ever again trust a word that came out of his mouth.

"But we also need to be able to search once were in the castle, we can't have an escort taking us to Xavier to present our fake problem," Bower pointed out. 

"Maybe we just have to sneak in, get inside stealthily and then pretend we're supposed to be there," Tucker proposed. "It's the only way to have the freedom to search."

More things we're brought up, more plans schemed, but Tucker's was the only one that we could count on allowing us to be able to find Jack. Getting in alone wasn't enough, our goal was to find him, so we finally agreed to that plan and began taking the wagon back towards the city.

"So the castle is further than The Recovery, that gives us time to grab others, we need everyone if we're going in," Tucker began, planning as we walked. "We'll send someone back to grab others while the rest of us ready, then we assemble, change into the uniforms, grab weapons, and head out. We'll probably get to the castle as the wagon should have been arriving so he won't have realized it's gone yet. Then he'll just assume it's late as we secretly search inside. We each take a part of the building and look, meet in the middle, get out, and come home."