Milan and Quentin meet.

[x-cypher.livejournal.com]

The Notorious K.I.D. Omega

Milan discovers Quentin Quire's dislike of Doug Ramsey, and the pair meet and become... well, maybe friends isn't quite the right word.




Quentin sat back looking at his blog post and sighed. He knew he'd have a few comments before the next morning. Probably at least one of the anti-mutant trolls that seemed to keep hunting him down and getting his accounts banned, but he didn't give a damn. He was Kid Omega - maybe not in the real world -yet- but online, he was whoever he wanted to be.

Closing the browser window, he pulled up his online poker simulator. The tournament wasn't for another... 37 hours. He'd be fine as long as he didn't let Ramsey rattle him too much. Would Xavier have sent him as a spy? Checking up on Quentin? After all, the last of those "ethics" talks that they'd blackmailed him into had been a year ago. More of that Uncle a-Tom-ic Xavier's double standards. Go out into the world and do whatever you want, so long as you're one of "his" people.

Screw all of them, Quentin thought as he blinked back tears. Must have been something in the profiteroles. He turned his attention to the computer showing him a series of hands. The math was easy, the odds were simple for a genius like him, anyway.

Hit 2, raise, raise, call. Win.

Fold the pocket twos.

Take a risk on the inside straight. You couldn't see 'tells' online, but he knew who else was in the tournament, and he'd programmed the simulator to respond to bluffs like he knew they would.

Along the bottom of the browser window, where normally the chat from the other players would be and blank now, appeared a line of text. It was garbled for a few lines, a mix of English and ascii characters and symbols from the Windows Dingbats font. The unintelliglble mix of characters cleared in a long series of blank spaces, and then the original message, sans interupption, repeated itself.

"Hello to you, Quentin Quire also Kid Omega. I am Milan, and I would like to chat with you about your blog post."

Quentin froze, hands poised over the keys of his laptop. This program wasn't even online - it didn't have an online mode, it was just a simulator. He clicked on his virus and spyware scanners, but this didn't look like any bug he'd ever heard of.

What the hell? he thought. Why not humor it?

"Hello, Milan," Quentin spoke out loud as he typed. "How did you find me?"

"I saw your blog post about a Doug Ramsey and how he was your tormentor and I think that we have something in common."

In his very comfortable 'acquired' hotel suite, Milan lay on the bed with his sock-clad feet propped up on a pillow, and his head on another, eyes closed. Without help, without Cortez, and without the drug, staying connected to Quentin's laptop required real effort, but he really needed to do this. Quentin could be his friend, they had so much in common, and it wouldn't be like Cortez had been. With a real friend, he wouldn't just be used for his skills and then thrown away like a bad pizza.

Quentin blinked at the screen. This had to be someone on the other end of the conversation, or the world's lamest use of an ELIZA script. But he had to admit, the idea of a confidant was something he'd been looking for.

Assuming this wasn't one of Ramsey's pranks.

Thinking for a moment, Quentin typed again, voicing as he went along. "You've got some skills breaking into my laptop. How do I know you're who you say you are?"

"It is not a skill, it is my power. Which I am very skilled with!"

Two years before, Milan would've been crushed that someone didn't believe him when he said he wanted to be their friend. Why wouldn't he? But now he understood that sometimes people used other people like that, and he felt like he had come so far. He understood the world so much better now. And if Quentin was like him, bullied and tormented just because of a few mistakes, then he knew just how the other man felt about the prospect of being used again. He would just have to show Quentin that he didn't want to do anything like that.

"I am staying in the same hotel as you, the Malik Dubai, and I could meet you for lunch or dinner, and you could see that I am not an imposter. I have a passport and a drivers license from Italy!" A suspended license for driving recklessly, nevermind that he could safely control a car so much better than everyone else, no, the laws were written for flatscans and of course, no one would bother to change them to support people with superior abilities, and a handful of passports, only one of which was valid and he wasn't traveling on that one, but it did say he was Francisco Milan.

This was definitely a Ramsey prank, Quentin thought. But he wasn't going to fall for it. He'd learned martial arts since his last run-in with the bastard. Well, he'd been to one TKD intro seminar that was obviously only geared to the steroid-popping fake-tan Jersey boy set, but he'd rented videos. He'd seen The Protector like twenty-seven times. And Ramsey didn't have that big gorilla bodyguard to have his back this time.

Quentin laughed to himself and cracked his knuckles, hunching over his keyboard. "All right, Milan," he said as his fingers sped over the keys. "We should meet."

"This is very great!" Milan sent back. He concentrated briefly on calming himself. This could go badly. They could not like each other. Quentin could be a jerk or not sympathetic at all, or it could be some kind of trick. "There is a restaurant in the hotel, they have excellent Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. It is very good, even if they should not be calling it pizza because it is nothing like pizza at all. I would like to meet you there in..."

He paused. A headache, a bad one, was creeping up on him, and he had to take his meds still to keep the worst of the twitches out of his system. "Three hours? Is that okay, yes/no?"

Quentin nodded, then waited a few long seconds before he reached over and awkwardly typed into his computer. "Yes. I will see you there."

Without another word, he shut the laptop and threw himself back onto the bed. If this was Ramsey, he was going to get the surprise of his life. But if it really... god, if it really WAS another mutant, someone who had some kind of ability that could hack a network and reprogram things on the fly...

Quentin smiled. Either way, that son of a bitch Doug Ramsey was going down.

--

The headache took almost the whole three hours to defeat, and a double-handful of chewable aspirin, grape-flavored, before Milan could open his eyes without the lights pulsing in time with his heart. And then he had to take his meds, and -that- kept him in the bathroom for fifteen minutes gargling mouthwash because the pills still tasted so bad. And why couldn't medical science make all medications taste like grapes anyway? It would make things so much easier!

By the time he was done all that, he was running late, and had to take a dose of the drug to convince the elevator to go past it's preset speed limits. The drop was almost enough to make Milan throw up, but he didn't, and patted himself on the back for it.

Bolstered by his success with the elevator, and the slight buzz from the drug that he always got, he almost ran to the restaurant. He knew what Quentin looked like, he had activated the hotel's surveillance cameras in Quentin's room. So it was easy to find him.

"Hello! You got a large table, which is very good because it has room for laptop computers." Milan said as he sat down, putting his own laptop bag on the table, across from Quentin's. "That was very thoughtful of you, so that I can show you what I can do!"

Quentin jumped slightly, startled at the dark-haired man's sudden appearance. "Who the hell are you? You're not... wait, you're Milan?"

This spaz was the guy who'd hacked his laptop? Oh well, if he could do everything he said...

Quentin opened his laptop and left the screen blank, smiling over it at Milan. "Okay, then. Show me."

Milan sat down at the table, and tapped the top of Quentin's laptop. The computer powered up, briefly showing a background image of a leggy red haired woman before it flickered away, to show a series of images from the hotel's interior. The restaurant they were seated in, the check-in desk and it's faceless 'concierge', the hallway outside Milan's room, the parking garage where Quentin's rental car was parked. "Pick a room number. I can show you the interior. Or maybe you want to see where someone you know is staying?"

His hand never left the laptop's case, and the image switched to a large suite, with unfamiliar luggage. "I think they are not in, but this is the room where John Henry Forge and his girlfriend Princess Crystal Amaquelin are staying." The view flickered again, switching to another room, this one occupied by a tall blonde man pulling a t-shirt over his head, and mouthing something. "I did not activate the audio, because your laptop has a problem with it's volume controls that I cannot fix without tools. But this is the room where Douglas Ramsey is staying. The guest register says he is staying there with Kyle Gibney and Laurie Olivia Collins."

Quentin blinked in astonishment. "Oh. Oh, this is very good. This is... wait, you said Ramsey's booked in a room with... who? Is there a Marie-Ange Colbert registered in the hotel?" After Milan's short pause and a shake of his head indicating the negative, Quentin's eyes widened.

"Ramsey, that bastard. Goes out of town on a 'business trip' and shacks up with some... probably some skank and her frat-boy boyfriend. What a douchebag!" Quentin snarled, closing his laptop in disgust. He turned to Milan, trying to put on his best poker face. "So... Milan. You've got a beef with Ramsey too?"

"A beef? That is like having a problem with him? No, but his friend, John Henry Forge, he embarrassed me and he made it so that I was kicked out of a club, when all I wanted was to show them what I could do!" Okay, perhaps it wasn't quite like that but he wasn't going to tell Quentin that he cheated.

"And Forge bit me! On the hand, right here." Milan held his hand up, breaking the contact with the laptop, and it's power light blinked off.

Quentin felt a sudden kinship with Milan at that moment. He'd heard of this Forge guy - inventor, wrote a book or something - but Milan seemed to react to that name the way he reacted to Ramsey's, and if Forge and Ramsey were friends...

"Hey, you know what they say," Quentin quoted with a smile. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I'm a mutant as well, you know..." But almost instantly, his face fell flat. "...but I have to be able to touch someone for my power to work on them, and the last time I tried, Ramsey did a bit more than bite me on the hand."

"I have to touch the machines to control them." Milan admitted, glancing at the laptop's dark screen and blinking a few times. "I had a friend, I thought he was a friend, who helped me overcome that but he was not a true friend at all, he was a jerk, like Forge and like Doug Ramsey. But...." He looked around the restaurant to see if anyone was listening, and then frowned, unable to figure out if anyone was or not. "But there is a ... well, it is a drug, but it is not like cocaine or the reefer or heroin, it does not make you a meth junkie with no teeth. It helps your powers be stronger."

Quentin's eyes widened in realization. "Kick? I mean, I've heard of it, but... can't that mess you up?"

Milan waved his hands in the air, obviously alarmed. "No, this is not like that! Kick is very bad. This is ... it is like when you buy children's aspirin from the store instead of getting extra-strength ibuprofen because it gives you ulcers and heartburn and headaches." The hand waving continued on for a few moments after he stopped speaking, and he obviously needed effort to stop it. "It is like having a coffee! Or maybe like having two or three coffees but it is not like ... like a bad drug."

"You've tried it?" Quentin asked earnestly. He looked around furtively, then leaned in over the table. "Do you... um, do you have any? I mean, with you. Not like with you right here with you, but... yeah."

"That is how I got into the hotel's systems." Milan admitted. "Without it I could not ever get into so many systems all at once without having a very bad nosebleed or perhaps not at all. They have a very complicated system here, it is distributed computing, like the SETI project. Which has still not found any alien lifeforms, which disappoints me greatly. I even helped it for a few months until ... " He did not want to talk about being arrested for fraud at all, and Milan's mouth snapped shut with an audible click of teeth.

If this drug could make Milan's abilities do that, Quentin thought, suddenly realizing the things he could do without the limitations on his power. "Milan, you are my new official best friend. So what are your thoughts about some serious revenge?"

Milan smiled very widely and nodded his head enthusiastically. "Yes, that is exactly why I have wanted to talk to you like this! Because our tormentors must be punished and I do not think I could just do it alone, but together we can make them very unhappy and ruin their vacations!"

Quentin tried not to roll his eyes. Milan was thinking small, but there was room for improvement. "That'll do for a start."