Sonic Squad

1 ~ I Forge A Spear

This is a really, extremely, colossally bad idea on so many levels. Adrian is out of his damn mind. And, you know what? I guess I am too for going through with it.

It's enough to have rumors floating around that I, and by association, my friends, are, well, freaks, for lack of a better word. It's another to confirm them myself in my own words, recorded for all time. The worst part is that this is probably only Part One in the epic crap show I insist on calling a life.

Now where to start....

Maybe I should start the story when Blaise almost set me on fire the day before school started.

*****

Call me strange, but I've always found the term "normal" extremely insulting.

My whole life, people have always tried to tell me what normal means. It's normal for people to hide parts of themselves. It's normal to have days where you just don't want to talk to anyone or be in another human's presence. It's normal for some people to have only a few friends and be socially awkward around everyone else.

Really, what could I possibly know about normal? What could my friends know about normal?

What qualifies as normal for me is hanging out with my only two friends in an abandoned bomb shelter from the Element War. There's really nothing special about it, other than it has decent internet and cell service while also being nearly undetectable. (I say nearly undetectable because it doesn't show up on radar, satellites, whatever, but I was able to find it.)

"Tare," Blaise said, a set of tan fingers (hers) snapping in my face. I snapped out of my thoughts and check her eyes to make sure they're their normal shade of dark chocolaty brown instead of glowing crimson.

"Sorry, Fox," I replied, rubbing my temples.

"Another migraine?" she asked, her Arab accent seeming crisper than normal.

"Yeah," I groaned. "Feels like they're getting worse."

"You are not the only one." She pulled herself up onto her computer desk and laid back, raising her index fingers and lighting them on fire. Her obsidian bangs fell across the cocoa brown skin on her forehead, their tapering points to hanging in her eyes.

"Think it has to do with school starting?" I asked, moving over to my designated flora area. "We're going to have to go back to hiding who and what we are. Freaks of nature that can't be trusted."

She snorted, letting the flames on her fingers begin to take shape in the air. "I would not put it like that. I would say," she said, shaping the flames into our school mascot, a panther, "humans with certain...anomalies."

"Anomalies. I like that." I picked up one of the plants and a fallen petal from one of the flowers, fusing the petal to the plant. The petal began to grow into an exact replica of the flower it had fallen off of, straight out of the middle of the dracaena limelight plant. "This is an anomaly," I said, holding up the Franken-plant. "We're just weirdos, in all sense of the word."

"You can do all the cool stuff," she grumbled, turning the panther into a dragonfly.

"Right. Like I'm super useful around here. Tell me, back in Luxor, weren't matches and lighters a dime a dozen?" The room's temperature went up by about ten degrees and I noticed the calm red of Blaise's eyes change to an angry crimson as her flame dragonfly turned into a sword.

"Back in Luxor, Elementals' deaths were a dime a dozen," she said pointedly. "Majnun."

"Yeah, yeah, I know I'm a fool," I deadpanned, returning the dracaena to its place among my plants.