Genosha - Stemming The Tide: Convoy!
May. 28th, 2012 05:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsDawn following the failed mission and the survivors head for safer ground.
Catseye was sensing a lot of nervous energy in the ambulance as she sped along the highway into the hills towards the rally point they were heading for. They'd made it out of the city after only two wrong turns and while being out of the city and away from the Citadel had allowed Catseye to relax a little, she was feeling a lot of tension in the ambulance. "Hey Meggan, you wanna see if this thing gets any music stations? I feel like we need some car tunes for our awesome road trip. Maybe some One Direction?" She smirked at her friend while using her tail to fiddle with her comm unit, still trying to get a signal through to see if anyone else had gotten away from the Citadel.
“Okay,” Meggan nodded, as she bent over to fiddle with buttons, so they could scan stations for anything that wasn’t static. What were the odds of it being something like Justin Bieber in this country? Even he had to be better than stressed out quiet—and it would stop her from frequently fidgeting to check the rear view mirror to her right, to make sure they weren’t being tailed by very quiet cars. Or worrying. Some of the stations seemed to be out of their range, she noticed, before the lyrics of something she couldn’t identify drifted out. “There are no Irish One Direction boys here. Just…I think this one is a station for 80's pop,” she offered with a shake of her head. She didn't know this singer.
Molly swung her legs back and forth on the gurney as she looked out the window, watching the road. It looked like a normal road. She thought it should look like an evil road. She didn't know what an evil road looked like but it probably had lightning and thunder and cracks in it or something. The radio made her turn her head as her feet bobbed along with the beat a little. She missed her hat. And she was cold now cause the air conditioner was on. Maybe they would find normal clothes soon. She really didn't like these.
Maybe a radio person would tell who it was eventually—it was just a weird tune to use for getaway music. But, Meggan noted in embarrassment, it was just loud enough to mask a growling and insistent stomach that was setting off every so often. She stared out the window at the passing view, to get her mind off the thought that it would have been nice if the previous drivers of the ambulance had hidden great heaping secret stashes of candy bars under the seats or in some crevice, or some kind of delicious snack inside a medical chest.
Maybe she was being too paranoid, but Meggan thought she had seen something getting closer while she was mindlessly staring. She peered out again, verifying with the mirror. A truck. A truck that was gradually getting closer. “There’s somebody back there,” she quickly told Catseye.
"Uh oh," Catseye muttered under her breath, peering in the rearview mirror to try and locate the truck Meggan had seen. "Does it have a Magistrate emblem on it? Maybe it's just someone going to work early?" At that moment she cried out and held her ear as static erupted from her comm. "Owwwww! Is anyone there? Cheetara here, can anyone hear me?"
There was an ambulance on the road ahead of them and that, in and of itself, wasn't horribly suspicious. Even the fact that it was traveling nearly as fast as the truck Wade had hotwired wasn't necessarily odd, given it was a rescue vehicle and there were a lot of people in Hammer Bay who needed rescuing. Wade didn't take any pleasure from the fact that several of them were in that condition because of him and his.
So while the ambulance wasn't really strange, the fact that it was traveling at such high speed away from the city caused alarm bells to start ringing in the back of his mind. Everything else that could have gone wrong on this mission had, so Wade wasn't ruling out any possibilities. "Possible hostiles approaching," he said quietly enough for only Jean-Philippe to hear. "Can you fiddle with your comm to see if you can pick up any chatter? Do those things even get different frequencies? I lost mine going out the window."
Jean-Phillipe's comm was specially shielded so that his powers would not immediately fry it. Which was a good thing, seeing as he'd used them quite a lot between the attack and then the frantic escape. He prodded his earbud, getting nothing but static as he had for a while. He suspected Wade's wouldn't have had much luck either, and besides, there had been separate communications networks because of the sheer scope of the attack they had attempted.
"...here, can anyone hear me?"
Jean-Phillipe recognized the voice almost immediately. "Le chat! Miraculeux! Suis la! I am here!" He belatedly remembered to switch to English, as in his excitement, he had reverted to his mother tongue. "It is...ah, Sparky. And a few others. We are in a jeep. Are you..." The ambulance swerved and he winced. "O le bon Dieu, please tell me you are not driving the ambulance, mon chat."
Catseye let out a whoop of triumph. They weren't alone! She hadn't realized until the relief washed over her just how nervous the idea of being the only X-Man who'd gotten out had made her. "Of course I'm driving, Sparky! You think I'd pass up a chance to drive an ambulance?" She giggled, a little giddy now after everything that had happened. "Meggan, Molly, the truck is ours! It's got X-Men in it! Well, an X-Man," she corrected, wrinkling her nose. "Who else is with you, Sparky?"
Molly had jumped off the gurney the moment they started talking about a truck and was hiding behind it in a tiny corner of the ambulance so nobody could see her. When Catseye started speaking and sounded happy she lifted her head up curiously. He had an accent and she didn't know the voice but Catseye knew him and he was an X-Person so that was good. Maybe they could go home now. How far was home? She could see the sky outside but she didn't recognize anything.
"The ambulance is ours. Not hostile," Jean-Phillipe reported to Wade, before going back to his comm. Not everyone in his vehicle had code names, but he thought it best to be oblique in referencing them, just to be on the safe side. "There are five of us - myself, my cousin's boyfriend, Pixie, the boxer's son, and...well, I'm sure you can see our fifth passenger." It was hard to miss an 8-foot-tall man, after all. And at least his sense of humor was still kind of working.
Megan sat up in her seat. "More survivors," she said softly in awe. Despite what it seemed at first, maybe everyone had gotten out alive. She couldn't make out any details in the ambulance. "Who are they? Matt, can you tell who they are?"
"Shhh," Matt replied, he could hear her a little too well right now. Listening carefully, Matt smiled in relief, "I can't tell everyone right now, but I hear Molly," he would recognize her heartbeat anywhere. She was the closest thing he had to a best friend.
Fred, despite everything, tried his best to smile when he overheard the conversation about the ambulance. Was Callie in there? Angelo?...Yvette? If they weren't...no. If they weren't, they'd be found. They'd be okay. And they'd get the hell off this piece of crap island. If they weren't, if any of his friends were hurt or worse... Fred exhaled, trying to stop his heart from pounding or his body expanding any further...
Hours after the two vehicles meet, they come to the end of the road.
The roads had gotten rougher and narrower the further into the forest they travelled, until even the dirt track they'd been using became little more than a path with less trees and undergrowth. An alarming grinding sound had started from beneath the ambulance several rocks ago, and now there was a loud clunk and the steering wheel ceased to turn in Sharon's hands. She stopped her wrestling with it and killed the engine. This was as far as they could go.
"Alright, everybody out!" she chirped with false cheerfulness. "Now we get to go for a hike! Doesn't that sound like fun?" She was filthy from the air vents and the adrenaline she'd been running on since they'd gotten into the Citadel had disappated for a bone-weary exhaustion. But she knew they couldn't stop until they'd reached the rallying point. So she climbed out of the ambulance, taking the air vent cover she'd used as a weapon with her, and turned to greet the occupants of the Jeep who were also getting out to prepare to walk. "Fancy meeting you guys here!" she announced in the same chipper tone. "Great day for a picnic in the forest, huh?"
"Oh sure," Wade agreed, checking the girls over as he and his group approached them. "Before we leave, I'd like to go through the ambulance, see what's in there that might be useful. If anybody has any cuts or scrapes, broken bones, that sort of thing, let me know." He wasn't a doctor by any means, but field medicine in these conditions were definitely right up his alley. "Also, I picked up some clothes on our way out of the city. Nothing special - clothesline discounts, you know the drill. If anybody wants to change, let's do it fast."
Would changing really matter? The suits were bonded to them, Matt couldn't even push the sleeves up. And they smelled wrong. No one was clean our smelled good, but it was a familiar stink of unwashed bodies like the homeless in New York. This was different, more chemically. Matt didn't like it. "Hiking," he repeated with a sigh. "I am calling my social worker and demanding to go back to juvie if I survive this. It's safer," he paused as he stretched, "There anything I can use as a stick or something?"
Taking one of the larger knives from his belt, he handed it over to Fred. "We need a stick for Matt and camouflage for the vehicles - as much as you can hack off the trees farther into the woods. If you can think of a better way to handle them so they don't get found fast, go ahead and do it. Pinkie, looks like your wing's crooked. Let's check it out at the ambulance and then we're heading to the secondary location. Jean-Philippe, can you go with Freddie-boy here, cover him?" He'd been moving toward and ambulance, but he stopped next to Molly and sat on his heels. Voice low, he asked, "You okay, half-pint?" Because compartmentalizing worked really, really well when your people weren't standing in front of you, but when they were, it was way more difficult to remind yourself you weren't allowed to care right then.
Molly stared at the trees, watching people as they worked by the trees. Some of them wore funny suits with bright colors. Like Matt. She liked the purple but the rest of it seemed bad somehow. Then somebody moved in the corner of her eye. She glanced up. "Hi Wademan," she said.
Though she was happy to see him she was still not liking today. Today was not fun. Yesterday wasn't either. Her eyes lowered. She shrugged.
"I miss my hat," she said quietly. "And I wanna go home."
Wade nodded. "I know. I wanna go home, too. We're working on it. C'mon to the ambulance and I'll see if I can find you a hat. Maybe you could make one if we find some good stuff in there."
Molly shook her head, frowning. "I looked. There's just needles and gauze and stuff," she said.
She looked back up after a moment. "A gauze hat maybe?" Maybe it could look like her cloud hat. She liked her cloud hat.
Fred listened intently, nodding as Wade spoke. He watched the older man try and calm Molly down, and wanted to grin, but he couldn't. He handed the knife to Jean-Philippe, "Here. Ah'm gonna go uproot some trees further in and drag'em here. Cut em up when Ah get back. Ah ain't gonna need that knife...no matter what." If he was pulling foliage, or if he ran into any Genoshans...he'd only need his hands.
Meggan was still massively thankful that the car had been Wade and the rest, and had remained quiet until he’d asked after injuries. Clothes that weren’t a neon orange sign pointing out the status of being a prisoner would be welcome. “There’s just the cheek bruise here,” she said, as she gestured to it. “And—I think there’s a small cut in the middle of it, if there’s anything that needs looking after there.” It hadn’t bled since back in that cell. She had finally managed to get a brief look at it in the rear view mirror earlier. She didn’t think a bruise could be helped out. And then, there was the matter of the baton she was still clinging to. She’d brought it along in case anyone needed it, as they vacated the ambulance. She held it up now, for Wade. “Do you want this? It’s from a guard, on the way out.”
Wade took Fred's word at face value and decided he liked the guy. Uprooting trees in their current situation was definitely a useful skill to have. After grabbing the clothes from the truck, he went over to the ambulance and opened the rear, dumping the clothes at the edge and then climbing inside. He checked the cubbies and shelves, the cabinets and drawers. "Alright, Megs. Let's see what we've got." Gesturing her up, he tilted her chin so he could get a better look at her cheek. "We'll clean it up. Doesn't need a stitch or anything. Get some antiseptic on it and you should be fine. Keep the baton. I want everybody to have a weapon of some sort, so long as they can use it."
Putting words to action, the mercenary rubbed his hand down with antibacterial gel, cleaned the small cut on his minion's cheek, disposed of the bloodied gauze he'd used, and swiped a bit of antiseptic ointment carefully over it. He quirked a rueful sort of smile at her. "You're good for now. Just be careful of it. If it gets hot to the touch or's still hurting in a day or two, let me know." Rounding up some gauze and bandages, Wade hopped out of the back of the ambulance and headed over to Molly. He pulled a carefully wrapped needle and thread from his pocket and handed it to her. "It's all I got, half-pint. I'm gonna need the rest to make sure everybody's taken care of."
Pixie smiled at Meggan as the girls swapped places. "I don't know if there's something you can do for my wing? It's bent and it feels creepy and I just wish it could straighten out. But it'll be a while," she told Wade.
"We'll see," Wade said, giving her a smile as he dug through a couple more drawers. He found something he could use as a splint, then set it aside. "You've got some scrapes and bruising going on," he muttered, checking her head and neck to make sure nothing was too serious. After confirming she hadn't actually hit her head on anything and didn't have a headache, Wade turned her around and frowned at her bent wing. Before he touched it, he looked over the others, checking to see what looked normal. "This might hurt a bit," he said, fingertips gently brushing over the delicate membrane. "But it's better to get it straightened out now than for it to set wrong and have to be broken again, okay? So take a deep breath for me."
Once the wing was straight and splinted using as little gauze as he could manage, Wade nodded and said. "Sorry, that can't be comfortable. It's the best I can do for you now, though. Don't fly with that, though. I've sure we've got other ways of getting information if we need it."
"I've been shifting to BigCat too much," Sharon announced, stripping out of her trainee uniform so she was just wearing her clothes collar and handing her comm unit off to Jean-Phillipe, "I need to go hunt. I'll bring something to the rally point; I'm sure we can start a fire to cook it. I'll roar if there's trouble and if I'm not back by noon I'm probably dead so, y'know, someone tell my brother. Don't send anyone after me." She shrugged when she said it, shifting into BigCat again and bounding off through the brush.
Jean-Phillipe wondered what it meant that people kept trusting him enough to hand him knives. Merde, this was like being an RA. He was one of the Responsible Adults now. Whatever had happened to the young angry mutant and gay rights activist he used to be? Fred was going to be busy with...trees. Sometimes the things that powers could make commonplace still amazed him. Still, he supposed that left finding Matt a walking stick was best left to him.
He cast about the clearing, and found a likely candidate. It was perhaps a bit longer than necessary, probably two meters, which was even taller than him, and he was not precisely on the short side. He picked it out of the pile of leaves and other smaller sticks and shook it off. It seemed solid enough, no rot, so he began to trim branches and such off of it with the knife. He made some extra noise stepping over to Matt, to ensure that the young man's enhanced hearing would make note of his approach. "Voila, Matthieu," he said, presenting it at arm's length for the young man. "A staff." And quite a hefty one at that.
Looking over at Wade and his gaggle of young ladies, he chuckled. "Perhaps we can make you a striped tunic, mon frere, as you make a very passable nurse." While Wade attended to the girls, the Frenchman levered himself into the ambulance and squeezed past, finding a duffel and putting extra medical supplies in it. It would be good to be prepared for eventualities. When it was full, he hopped back out of the vehicle with it slung over a shoulder. "How far do you think the point is from here?" he asked Wade. "Perhaps two miles?" It was probably more, from what he remembered, but better to underestimate and keep spirits high for the younger members of the group.
After Wade answered, there wasn't much else to do but move on. The ambulance and truck were stripped for everything useful that they could carry, then Fred pushed them as far into the scrub as they would go before covering them in the trees he'd uprooted. Before moving out, Wade made sure he wiped down the steering wheel in the truck as well as the cabinets in the ambulance, made sure to cut off the small section of the seat that had his blood on it, and nodded. It wouldn't do to have his DNA or fingerprints showing up in an international database when the vehicles were discovered.
With Wade and Jean-Phillipe taking point, Fred taking the rear and the girls assisting each other in the middle, they headed into the forest, the roar of a large cougar not so far away notifying them that Catseye would be rejoining them, once she'd fed. The rendez-vous wasn't excessively distant, but it was far enough that they'd be walking for several hours and and they'd need to get there by nightfall.
Catseye was sensing a lot of nervous energy in the ambulance as she sped along the highway into the hills towards the rally point they were heading for. They'd made it out of the city after only two wrong turns and while being out of the city and away from the Citadel had allowed Catseye to relax a little, she was feeling a lot of tension in the ambulance. "Hey Meggan, you wanna see if this thing gets any music stations? I feel like we need some car tunes for our awesome road trip. Maybe some One Direction?" She smirked at her friend while using her tail to fiddle with her comm unit, still trying to get a signal through to see if anyone else had gotten away from the Citadel.
“Okay,” Meggan nodded, as she bent over to fiddle with buttons, so they could scan stations for anything that wasn’t static. What were the odds of it being something like Justin Bieber in this country? Even he had to be better than stressed out quiet—and it would stop her from frequently fidgeting to check the rear view mirror to her right, to make sure they weren’t being tailed by very quiet cars. Or worrying. Some of the stations seemed to be out of their range, she noticed, before the lyrics of something she couldn’t identify drifted out. “There are no Irish One Direction boys here. Just…I think this one is a station for 80's pop,” she offered with a shake of her head. She didn't know this singer.
Molly swung her legs back and forth on the gurney as she looked out the window, watching the road. It looked like a normal road. She thought it should look like an evil road. She didn't know what an evil road looked like but it probably had lightning and thunder and cracks in it or something. The radio made her turn her head as her feet bobbed along with the beat a little. She missed her hat. And she was cold now cause the air conditioner was on. Maybe they would find normal clothes soon. She really didn't like these.
Maybe a radio person would tell who it was eventually—it was just a weird tune to use for getaway music. But, Meggan noted in embarrassment, it was just loud enough to mask a growling and insistent stomach that was setting off every so often. She stared out the window at the passing view, to get her mind off the thought that it would have been nice if the previous drivers of the ambulance had hidden great heaping secret stashes of candy bars under the seats or in some crevice, or some kind of delicious snack inside a medical chest.
Maybe she was being too paranoid, but Meggan thought she had seen something getting closer while she was mindlessly staring. She peered out again, verifying with the mirror. A truck. A truck that was gradually getting closer. “There’s somebody back there,” she quickly told Catseye.
"Uh oh," Catseye muttered under her breath, peering in the rearview mirror to try and locate the truck Meggan had seen. "Does it have a Magistrate emblem on it? Maybe it's just someone going to work early?" At that moment she cried out and held her ear as static erupted from her comm. "Owwwww! Is anyone there? Cheetara here, can anyone hear me?"
There was an ambulance on the road ahead of them and that, in and of itself, wasn't horribly suspicious. Even the fact that it was traveling nearly as fast as the truck Wade had hotwired wasn't necessarily odd, given it was a rescue vehicle and there were a lot of people in Hammer Bay who needed rescuing. Wade didn't take any pleasure from the fact that several of them were in that condition because of him and his.
So while the ambulance wasn't really strange, the fact that it was traveling at such high speed away from the city caused alarm bells to start ringing in the back of his mind. Everything else that could have gone wrong on this mission had, so Wade wasn't ruling out any possibilities. "Possible hostiles approaching," he said quietly enough for only Jean-Philippe to hear. "Can you fiddle with your comm to see if you can pick up any chatter? Do those things even get different frequencies? I lost mine going out the window."
Jean-Phillipe's comm was specially shielded so that his powers would not immediately fry it. Which was a good thing, seeing as he'd used them quite a lot between the attack and then the frantic escape. He prodded his earbud, getting nothing but static as he had for a while. He suspected Wade's wouldn't have had much luck either, and besides, there had been separate communications networks because of the sheer scope of the attack they had attempted.
"...here, can anyone hear me?"
Jean-Phillipe recognized the voice almost immediately. "Le chat! Miraculeux! Suis la! I am here!" He belatedly remembered to switch to English, as in his excitement, he had reverted to his mother tongue. "It is...ah, Sparky. And a few others. We are in a jeep. Are you..." The ambulance swerved and he winced. "O le bon Dieu, please tell me you are not driving the ambulance, mon chat."
Catseye let out a whoop of triumph. They weren't alone! She hadn't realized until the relief washed over her just how nervous the idea of being the only X-Man who'd gotten out had made her. "Of course I'm driving, Sparky! You think I'd pass up a chance to drive an ambulance?" She giggled, a little giddy now after everything that had happened. "Meggan, Molly, the truck is ours! It's got X-Men in it! Well, an X-Man," she corrected, wrinkling her nose. "Who else is with you, Sparky?"
Molly had jumped off the gurney the moment they started talking about a truck and was hiding behind it in a tiny corner of the ambulance so nobody could see her. When Catseye started speaking and sounded happy she lifted her head up curiously. He had an accent and she didn't know the voice but Catseye knew him and he was an X-Person so that was good. Maybe they could go home now. How far was home? She could see the sky outside but she didn't recognize anything.
"The ambulance is ours. Not hostile," Jean-Phillipe reported to Wade, before going back to his comm. Not everyone in his vehicle had code names, but he thought it best to be oblique in referencing them, just to be on the safe side. "There are five of us - myself, my cousin's boyfriend, Pixie, the boxer's son, and...well, I'm sure you can see our fifth passenger." It was hard to miss an 8-foot-tall man, after all. And at least his sense of humor was still kind of working.
Megan sat up in her seat. "More survivors," she said softly in awe. Despite what it seemed at first, maybe everyone had gotten out alive. She couldn't make out any details in the ambulance. "Who are they? Matt, can you tell who they are?"
"Shhh," Matt replied, he could hear her a little too well right now. Listening carefully, Matt smiled in relief, "I can't tell everyone right now, but I hear Molly," he would recognize her heartbeat anywhere. She was the closest thing he had to a best friend.
Fred, despite everything, tried his best to smile when he overheard the conversation about the ambulance. Was Callie in there? Angelo?...Yvette? If they weren't...no. If they weren't, they'd be found. They'd be okay. And they'd get the hell off this piece of crap island. If they weren't, if any of his friends were hurt or worse... Fred exhaled, trying to stop his heart from pounding or his body expanding any further...
Hours after the two vehicles meet, they come to the end of the road.
The roads had gotten rougher and narrower the further into the forest they travelled, until even the dirt track they'd been using became little more than a path with less trees and undergrowth. An alarming grinding sound had started from beneath the ambulance several rocks ago, and now there was a loud clunk and the steering wheel ceased to turn in Sharon's hands. She stopped her wrestling with it and killed the engine. This was as far as they could go.
"Alright, everybody out!" she chirped with false cheerfulness. "Now we get to go for a hike! Doesn't that sound like fun?" She was filthy from the air vents and the adrenaline she'd been running on since they'd gotten into the Citadel had disappated for a bone-weary exhaustion. But she knew they couldn't stop until they'd reached the rallying point. So she climbed out of the ambulance, taking the air vent cover she'd used as a weapon with her, and turned to greet the occupants of the Jeep who were also getting out to prepare to walk. "Fancy meeting you guys here!" she announced in the same chipper tone. "Great day for a picnic in the forest, huh?"
"Oh sure," Wade agreed, checking the girls over as he and his group approached them. "Before we leave, I'd like to go through the ambulance, see what's in there that might be useful. If anybody has any cuts or scrapes, broken bones, that sort of thing, let me know." He wasn't a doctor by any means, but field medicine in these conditions were definitely right up his alley. "Also, I picked up some clothes on our way out of the city. Nothing special - clothesline discounts, you know the drill. If anybody wants to change, let's do it fast."
Would changing really matter? The suits were bonded to them, Matt couldn't even push the sleeves up. And they smelled wrong. No one was clean our smelled good, but it was a familiar stink of unwashed bodies like the homeless in New York. This was different, more chemically. Matt didn't like it. "Hiking," he repeated with a sigh. "I am calling my social worker and demanding to go back to juvie if I survive this. It's safer," he paused as he stretched, "There anything I can use as a stick or something?"
Taking one of the larger knives from his belt, he handed it over to Fred. "We need a stick for Matt and camouflage for the vehicles - as much as you can hack off the trees farther into the woods. If you can think of a better way to handle them so they don't get found fast, go ahead and do it. Pinkie, looks like your wing's crooked. Let's check it out at the ambulance and then we're heading to the secondary location. Jean-Philippe, can you go with Freddie-boy here, cover him?" He'd been moving toward and ambulance, but he stopped next to Molly and sat on his heels. Voice low, he asked, "You okay, half-pint?" Because compartmentalizing worked really, really well when your people weren't standing in front of you, but when they were, it was way more difficult to remind yourself you weren't allowed to care right then.
Molly stared at the trees, watching people as they worked by the trees. Some of them wore funny suits with bright colors. Like Matt. She liked the purple but the rest of it seemed bad somehow. Then somebody moved in the corner of her eye. She glanced up. "Hi Wademan," she said.
Though she was happy to see him she was still not liking today. Today was not fun. Yesterday wasn't either. Her eyes lowered. She shrugged.
"I miss my hat," she said quietly. "And I wanna go home."
Wade nodded. "I know. I wanna go home, too. We're working on it. C'mon to the ambulance and I'll see if I can find you a hat. Maybe you could make one if we find some good stuff in there."
Molly shook her head, frowning. "I looked. There's just needles and gauze and stuff," she said.
She looked back up after a moment. "A gauze hat maybe?" Maybe it could look like her cloud hat. She liked her cloud hat.
Fred listened intently, nodding as Wade spoke. He watched the older man try and calm Molly down, and wanted to grin, but he couldn't. He handed the knife to Jean-Philippe, "Here. Ah'm gonna go uproot some trees further in and drag'em here. Cut em up when Ah get back. Ah ain't gonna need that knife...no matter what." If he was pulling foliage, or if he ran into any Genoshans...he'd only need his hands.
Meggan was still massively thankful that the car had been Wade and the rest, and had remained quiet until he’d asked after injuries. Clothes that weren’t a neon orange sign pointing out the status of being a prisoner would be welcome. “There’s just the cheek bruise here,” she said, as she gestured to it. “And—I think there’s a small cut in the middle of it, if there’s anything that needs looking after there.” It hadn’t bled since back in that cell. She had finally managed to get a brief look at it in the rear view mirror earlier. She didn’t think a bruise could be helped out. And then, there was the matter of the baton she was still clinging to. She’d brought it along in case anyone needed it, as they vacated the ambulance. She held it up now, for Wade. “Do you want this? It’s from a guard, on the way out.”
Wade took Fred's word at face value and decided he liked the guy. Uprooting trees in their current situation was definitely a useful skill to have. After grabbing the clothes from the truck, he went over to the ambulance and opened the rear, dumping the clothes at the edge and then climbing inside. He checked the cubbies and shelves, the cabinets and drawers. "Alright, Megs. Let's see what we've got." Gesturing her up, he tilted her chin so he could get a better look at her cheek. "We'll clean it up. Doesn't need a stitch or anything. Get some antiseptic on it and you should be fine. Keep the baton. I want everybody to have a weapon of some sort, so long as they can use it."
Putting words to action, the mercenary rubbed his hand down with antibacterial gel, cleaned the small cut on his minion's cheek, disposed of the bloodied gauze he'd used, and swiped a bit of antiseptic ointment carefully over it. He quirked a rueful sort of smile at her. "You're good for now. Just be careful of it. If it gets hot to the touch or's still hurting in a day or two, let me know." Rounding up some gauze and bandages, Wade hopped out of the back of the ambulance and headed over to Molly. He pulled a carefully wrapped needle and thread from his pocket and handed it to her. "It's all I got, half-pint. I'm gonna need the rest to make sure everybody's taken care of."
Pixie smiled at Meggan as the girls swapped places. "I don't know if there's something you can do for my wing? It's bent and it feels creepy and I just wish it could straighten out. But it'll be a while," she told Wade.
"We'll see," Wade said, giving her a smile as he dug through a couple more drawers. He found something he could use as a splint, then set it aside. "You've got some scrapes and bruising going on," he muttered, checking her head and neck to make sure nothing was too serious. After confirming she hadn't actually hit her head on anything and didn't have a headache, Wade turned her around and frowned at her bent wing. Before he touched it, he looked over the others, checking to see what looked normal. "This might hurt a bit," he said, fingertips gently brushing over the delicate membrane. "But it's better to get it straightened out now than for it to set wrong and have to be broken again, okay? So take a deep breath for me."
Once the wing was straight and splinted using as little gauze as he could manage, Wade nodded and said. "Sorry, that can't be comfortable. It's the best I can do for you now, though. Don't fly with that, though. I've sure we've got other ways of getting information if we need it."
"I've been shifting to BigCat too much," Sharon announced, stripping out of her trainee uniform so she was just wearing her clothes collar and handing her comm unit off to Jean-Phillipe, "I need to go hunt. I'll bring something to the rally point; I'm sure we can start a fire to cook it. I'll roar if there's trouble and if I'm not back by noon I'm probably dead so, y'know, someone tell my brother. Don't send anyone after me." She shrugged when she said it, shifting into BigCat again and bounding off through the brush.
Jean-Phillipe wondered what it meant that people kept trusting him enough to hand him knives. Merde, this was like being an RA. He was one of the Responsible Adults now. Whatever had happened to the young angry mutant and gay rights activist he used to be? Fred was going to be busy with...trees. Sometimes the things that powers could make commonplace still amazed him. Still, he supposed that left finding Matt a walking stick was best left to him.
He cast about the clearing, and found a likely candidate. It was perhaps a bit longer than necessary, probably two meters, which was even taller than him, and he was not precisely on the short side. He picked it out of the pile of leaves and other smaller sticks and shook it off. It seemed solid enough, no rot, so he began to trim branches and such off of it with the knife. He made some extra noise stepping over to Matt, to ensure that the young man's enhanced hearing would make note of his approach. "Voila, Matthieu," he said, presenting it at arm's length for the young man. "A staff." And quite a hefty one at that.
Looking over at Wade and his gaggle of young ladies, he chuckled. "Perhaps we can make you a striped tunic, mon frere, as you make a very passable nurse." While Wade attended to the girls, the Frenchman levered himself into the ambulance and squeezed past, finding a duffel and putting extra medical supplies in it. It would be good to be prepared for eventualities. When it was full, he hopped back out of the vehicle with it slung over a shoulder. "How far do you think the point is from here?" he asked Wade. "Perhaps two miles?" It was probably more, from what he remembered, but better to underestimate and keep spirits high for the younger members of the group.
After Wade answered, there wasn't much else to do but move on. The ambulance and truck were stripped for everything useful that they could carry, then Fred pushed them as far into the scrub as they would go before covering them in the trees he'd uprooted. Before moving out, Wade made sure he wiped down the steering wheel in the truck as well as the cabinets in the ambulance, made sure to cut off the small section of the seat that had his blood on it, and nodded. It wouldn't do to have his DNA or fingerprints showing up in an international database when the vehicles were discovered.
With Wade and Jean-Phillipe taking point, Fred taking the rear and the girls assisting each other in the middle, they headed into the forest, the roar of a large cougar not so far away notifying them that Catseye would be rejoining them, once she'd fed. The rendez-vous wasn't excessively distant, but it was far enough that they'd be walking for several hours and and they'd need to get there by nightfall.
