New World Order Re-Written (TNE)

Chapter 9 - Road Rush

"Going up!" the mechanical voice twinkled. For an elevator it was infuriatingly cheerful.

Martin was racking his brain trying to remember exactly how the area above The Botanist's Village looked. Sun and Star Mail was not a building that he would ordinarily think of visiting and the area around was fairly out of the way. Martin had never felt an extreme connection to his home neighbourhood, even if leaving his parents did hurt. There was a certain scent from the bond of parent and child that he missed, the sensation of his mom's pretty dresses and how she would hold small fashion shows. The lengths she would go to make him feel included, even stapling paper to cardboard to make it appear as if he had a clipboard. Martin would make his voice deeper and try to impersonate the judges he had seen so often on television at his friends' houses.

There was always a bit of mess, but it never truly bothered Martin. He understood that his parents both worked long hours to keep him fed, although he did wish that there was more to do around the house. Unlike Geoffrey, The Botanist's Village had felt like one big playground to Martin from the moment he entered. All of the plants, greenery, and trees were places to climb and explore. Day after day he would look upon the village from the tallest branches he could find and watch as people would leave their houses and turn on the street lights. To geoffrey it felt as if he was a scientist watching the lab rats run around. Always squirming around in the distance. There was something incredibly peaceful about seeing the entire town go about it's day. He would occasionally take notes, but he ran out of pen ink surprisingly fast. Just out of his grasp the pen ink would drain from the pen when he wasn't paying attention. From instinct his spiky hide would scrape against the rough tree bark and leave a dent (to the tree), sending whatever writing device he had previously been using careening towards the ground. His control over the events below him were lost in that instant.

"Almost there."

"Yes. We get it!" shouted Martin impatiently. Plum grasped Martin's shoulder with a calm look that only made Martin more frustrated. For some strange reason, Plum's reassuring looks always put him in a worse mode. She didn't understand what he was going through at all, all she wanted to do was run away from home all her life. She doesn't know what it feels like to have a family who loves you and you love them lost in the ether distantly away from you. Martin envied Plum for the simplicity of her situation. It was as if the apocalypse were handed to her in a handbasket.

"Calm down, I would quiet this elevator if there was a way. It's probably better for the blind folks though." Geoffrey argued. He could tell that Martin's anger was only brewing. Every word his tongue slipped slowly under his teeth to reach the crunch of his teeth hard enamel against the soft meat of his tongue. Blood slowly slipped down the length of his chin. From the sight, Martin began to stare him down.

Plum looked into her pack. She had tissues that she had bought around town for situations just like this, or even worse. She found some oranges, her notebook, a collection of pens, pencils, erasers, and finally a cloth. It wasn't a tissue but it would work just as well. She pulled it out of her bag with a tug and turned around to face Geoffrey directly, but in the moment that she went to clean up the blood from Geoffrey's chin, Martin punched her in the chest. She fell to the floor with a clean rush. There was a moment where everything seemed to stop. Geoffrey looked towards Martin with a barbaric focus, the blood seemed to carve his smile into a wicked grin.

There is a small section of a pencil covered in metal directly beside the erasers. Under normal circumstances, these tiny bits of metal wouldn't even register to Geoffrey's powers. These were not normal circumstances.

Pencils from all corners of the room began to scathe Martin, and he jerked around uncomfortably. The spikes his body was coated in stopped mere pencils from causing any lasting damage, but it was still enough to get him riled up. Martin launched a punch against Geoffrey and he dodged it by slamming to the side. Martin punched instead, directly through the black coating and metallic exterior of the black elevator. The punch made it abundantly clear what Geoffrey's powers had truly accomplished. The walls of the black elevator were slowly shrinking. Compressing, waiting to fully collapse the three of them were stuck inside the black elevator until the floor was reached.