Of course, Laura made it into the car eventually…

It wasn’t because Sprite wanted to stop, but because Laura’s speed only increased and Sprite was sure the young girl would catch up to the vehicle eventually…

Sprite figured it was best to allow Laura to see her as someone magnanimous, instead of continuing to drive…

Typical power move, but Laura was too young to know that, so when she saw the vehicle stop, Laura actually felt a bit grateful in her heart…

Laura genuinely believed that Sprite was not so heartless to leave her behind, especially now when Tyrone’s status was unconfirmed…

Little did she know how ruthless Sprite’s heart could become at times…

But with her memories returning in segments, Sprite was much more receptive to humanity as a whole…

Then again, Sprite closed her eyes in contemplation ‘Even I get lonely sometimes…’

And as if sensing Sprite’s loneliness, Laura behaved a bit more unruly than usual, using her claws to shred the car seats with a smug smile on her face…

Sprite was forced to grit her teeth and simmer in the intense anger until Tyrone was found…

If a fight were to start, Sprite was confident the battle wouldn’t stop until one of them died, and she didn’t like her chances at victory when Laura could heal from almost anything…

‘When did humans become so tenacious!’ She wondered, hoping Mutations wouldn’t happen in her Universe until she had long left the planet…

“Conduce más rápido…” Laura urged, and Sprite intentionally decreased the strength of her leg on the gas…

Sprite and Laura were like fire and water, they would do the pettiest of things to annoy each other…

“Conduce más rápido!”

“Conduce más rápido!”

The more Laura told Sprite to speed up, the more Sprite did the exact opposite, just short of stopping the car entirely…

Actually, Sprite was a borderline away from having a mental breakdown and reversing the car…

“¿Qué pasa si Tyrone espera en su lugar?” Laura questioned, and Sprite didn’t even need convincing to jam the gas pedal into the car…

“You’re right…” Sprite whispered, swerving left and right while sliding up and down the seat to ensure her feet could reach everywhere necessary for driving “If Tyrone knew we were going to take you to your ugly father, he would be there waiting for us!”

Laura rolled her eyes, grumbling countless curses inside her mind…

At this point, Laura was starting to think that Tyrone may have committed suicide to get away from the demon known as Sprite…

And honestly, she wouldn’t blame him…

“You know… this is the first time we are truly alone…” Sprite commented, trying to spark a conversation with the young girl she would soon abandon…

Laura snorted…

“Feminism… am I right?” Sprite joked…

Laura growled in disagreement “Si no lo dejaste, no faltaría…”

“You’re too young to understand relationships…” Sprite used Laura’s comments as a teaching moment with her infinite sagely wisdom “As long as the girl is pretty, unlike yourself, the guys always come running back…”

Laura internally scoffed, but she couldn’t keep the thoughts in her mind to herself “PLANO!”

The car stopped abruptly, and Sprite spun in her chair like electricity was coursing through her veins “What did you say you small fucktard of a little animal?”

“F-L-A-T…” Laura pronounced letter for letter, glaring into Sprite’s eyes as she did “Los hombres no vuelven por chicas planas...”

As soon as the words left Laura’s mouth, she regretted it…

Any other time, Sprite would dismiss it as a normal joke, but without Tyrone to play the peacemaker, Sprite was a bit more fragile than usual…

Laura’s comments hurt her feelings a bit…

“Okay…” Sprite responded, eyes as cold as the coldest winter as she started the car once more…

The car started with a buzz and a rev that gave Laura the impression Sprite would ram them into a hill or something, but after five minutes of driving, that didn’t happen…

Though, the rest of the drive was traveled in silence – a tense kind of silence that whispered of the terror to follow…

“Arrepentido…”

“It doesn’t matter…” Sprite whispered, but the sadness in her voice couldn’t be hidden “After I drop you at your father, I will leave to look for Tyrone since that’s what he would have wanted… if it wasn’t for Tyrone, I would have killed you and hidden the body…”

Laura didn’t reply because she knew nothing she could say would change anything…

Sprite was just that delusional…

Laura had seen it before on the face of her mother…

Laura knew Sprite’s current face was the look of a woman on a mission that may very well spell their end…

Sprite knew it and Laura knew it, but neither of them was willing to speak it aloud…

Speaking about it meant materializing it into reality, and neither of them was ready for that…

Yet, they both knew that Tyrone was dead, or perhaps even worse, captured…

Yes… capture was very much worse than death…

Laura had personal experience in this category because, as much as she wanted to, she could not die, and for the people at Transigen, that just meant more experience…

So, Laura hoped that Tyrone could die if he was captured since immortality was a curse as much as everything else…

Sprite took a turn into the sand, away from any visible dirt roads, and Laura could see a house in the distance…

If it could even be called a house…

The house seemed like it had seen better days, but considering the scent, Laura could detect from miles away, she had no doubt this was the right place…

It smelt like cigars, blood, and isolation… with perhaps a bit of terror mixed in somewhere…

Also, it smelled a lot like Laura herself…

‘Definitely the right place…’

“I smell it on you…” Laura said, and Sprite pretended as if she didn’t hear anything “The anger hiding deep below… when they took samples from me, I felt the same way…”

“You can’t understand how I feel…” Sprite replied “I was finally getting over it, but… Tyrone went missing and as much as I hope he has been kidnapped, some small part of me thinks he just got tired of me…”

“No lo haría…”

“It has happened before…” Sprite said disheartened, thinking about several instances in the past when she had been abandoned…

Laura didn’t reply because she had nothing positive to say, and Sprite’s pitiful attitude was beginning to get on her nerves…

“We’re almost there…” Sprite pointed out, slowing the speed of the car “Have you thought about what you’re gonna tell your father?”

“Hambriento, dinero, escolta…”

“That’s…” Sprite giggled “strangely accurate and direct to the point… I like it… the next best thing is to ask for all that back-child support…”

A couple of minutes later, Sprite pulled the car into the fenced barren land that served as a yard…

It somehow seemed more desolate than the desert landscape…

Sprite had no problem getting around the fence since it was filled with large holes large enough to fit an elephant through them…

 It was appalling that the house had a fence at all…

‘Shitty gates are good too…’ Sprite thought…

With the car parked, Laura was the first to hop out of the car, cutting the door clean off its hinges with her claws since she was too lazy to manually open it…

Needless to say, since meeting Sprite and Tyrone, who didn’t mind using the abilities every second of the day, Laura had also become a bit restrained…

“Fuck… we might need this car to run away later!” Sprite cursed, walking out of the car and waving her hands so it could disappear behind them…

Sprite wasn’t about to leave the car behind when it had all the jewelry and wealth they stole from the casino…

If finding Laura’s parents didn’t work out, Sprite still had some hope in her heart to buy a private island somewhere and live her life peacefully…

Originally, Tyrone should have been at her side in such a scenario as a man-servant/husband, but Sprite had to work with what she had…

But now, she was stuck with Laura…

Actually, now that the time had come, Sprite was reluctant to leave Laura behind…

The little girl made for an excellent thief after all, and it would be stupid to give away such a lucrative source of income…

Mid-thought, Sprite felt something brush against her mind, and instantly sharpened her gaze, searching for the threat she knew would come…

Seeing Sprite’s subtle reactions, Laura also sniffed the air and started to growl, staring at the entrance to the home ahead…

Something was coming, and whatever it was – it was sick?

At least, it smelled sick to Laura’s nose…

Out of the nearby shed came a man in a wheelchair, Charles, or at least, what was left of his shattered mind…

One look at Charles and Sprite and Laura could tell there was something both beautiful and terrifying about the man…

He seemed confused and hopeful – two things that don’t usually mix since you had to know what you were hoping for…

Sprite frowned and looked at Laura “Don’t let the old man touch you… I don’t think he is your father…”

Laura shrugged “Pero parece una buena persona …”

“Lo siguiente que sabes es que te dará dulces y para entonces ya es demasiado tarde, así que confía en mí y evítalo...” Sprite whispered, her voice low enough so only Laura could hear it…

Laura frowned, then took a couple of steps until she was next to Sprite…

As much as the two girls despised each other, they couldn’t help but depend on each other when an unknown threat was nearby…

“Hel… Hell… Hello there children…” Charles rolled his wheelchair down the ramp, and onto the dirt yard, staring at Laura more often than he did Sprite “Ah… you’re looking for someone…”

Of course, Sprite noted that Charles didn’t guess this information, he simply extracted it from the surface thoughts of Laura’s undefended mind…

Luckily, he couldn’t do the same to her…

At first, Laura didn’t respond, but even without responding, she could somehow sense that she could put her trust in the professor…

“Come here, child…” Charles asked, extending his hand to show Laura that he had no ill will “I will not harm you… nobody here will harm you…”

Laura was inclined to believe, already taking a couple of steps from her cover behind Sprite, but she suddenly noticed something amiss…

Something was wrong with the smell…

The atmosphere shifted at that moment…

Laura’s senses went into overdrive, trying to figure out what changed, and then she finally peered through the illusion Sprite had made…

---DING---

Nobody knows when it happened, or how it happened…

Perhaps, Sprite had always been there and was just waiting on her opportunity to act…

One moment Sprite was next to Laura, guarding the small girl protectively, and the next moment, she was standing behind Charles with the daggers in her hands…

The daggers had barely pierced through the surface skin of Charles’s neck, but it was stopped by something at the last moment…  

The daggers would have decapitated the Professor entirely, if not for the adamantium claws that locked Sprite’s dagger in place…

“How did you find me?” Sprite turned to her right and asked the wild-looking man, Logan, standing next to her…

He appeared silently and had a ferocious aura not dissimilar to Ancient Deviants…

Sprite didn’t even sense him coming, and it was only at the last moment, just before she was about to commit the kill, did Sprite become aware that Logan was standing next to her…

In her mind, he was a true predator…

Logan coughed a couple of times, and Sprite tried to press her daggers into the arteries of Charles's neck, but as weak as Logan looked, Sprite could tell the old man was still very strong…

He denied her even an inch…

“I have dealt with illusionists like you before…” Logan growled in the same way Laura sometimes would “Your illusions are better than most, but it still smells like strawberries… girls only smell like strawberries in movies…”

“Maybe you just haven’t met the right girl…” Sprite winked, a mischievous smirk on her face…

And, of course, like always, Sprite only acted mischievously when she was trying to distract someone from paying attention to something else she was trying to do…

---TING---

---TING---

But Logan couldn’t be fooled so easily…

Logan frowned, and the next instant, two sparks appeared in the air…

Sprite and Logan exchanged two blows, and though Logan was weaker, Sprite also correctly judged that she wouldn’t be able to kill the old man without Logan killing her as well…

And Sprite wasn’t in the business of fair trades…

“GGGRRRR!” Logan growled, pushing Sprite away from the Professor…

Sprite rolled on the ground and disappeared in a flash of light, reappearing a second later with her hands around the neck of someone hiding in the nearby shadows, Caliban…

“Please don’t kill me…” Caliban immediately started to beg “I hardly know these people… my worth as a hostage is abysmally low…”

“Don’t move!” Sprite threatened, her hand gripped tightly around Caliban’s neck…

It didn’t matter what Caliban spouted because Sprite noticed how Logan flinched when she captured the hostage, and that was all the indication she needed to know that Caliban was worth something in Logan’s heart…

Sprite dragged the abnormally white man from the darkness and into the sun…

But the moment Caliban stepped into the sun, he screamed as his skin began to sizzle…

“AAAAAAHHHHHHH!”

“Stop!” Logan yelled, claws ready to strike, but Laura’s claws extended from her wrist as she threw herself between Logan and Sprite…

“GGGRRRRR!” She growled, contesting Logan’s Alpha status through her actions…

Their Mutation meant they were a bit more primal than normal humans, so Laura’s actions meant a thousand unsaid words…

Logan’s actions seized, and that gave Sprite the time to form the illusion of a cloud above Caliban, stopping the sun from reaching his skin…

After all, it would do her no good to kill the hostage…

What she wanted was to kill the Old Man, Charles, before something ominous happened… she could literally taste the decay of mental ways radiating from his body…

It was beautiful, but also terrifying if not controlled…

“L…Lo…Log…Logan…”

“Not now professor!” Logan growled, staring at Laura intently as his mind traveled to every woman he had slept with in the past ten years…

There were quite a few, but Mutants were a dying breed, so it was impossible for him to breed, pun intended…

“L…Lo…Log…Logan…” Charles called again…

“Not now Professor!” Logan growled once more, unwilling to remove his eyes from Sprite for even a second…

“ARGH!” Sprite grunted, feeling something brush against her mind…

But it was a precursor to something much worse…

It felt as if something was building, and given her mind was stronger than most, Sprite knew that whatever was building up had to be something truly powerful…

“Laura, you have to kill the old man!” Sprite warned, not removing her eyes from Logan either…

“¿Esta?” Laura asked, pointing at Logan…

“No… the other one!”

Laura looked at Charles and could also sense something was wrong with the old man…

He was whispering babble in his wheelchair while clutching his head in pain as if to try and contain something contained inside his mind…

“Logan…” Charles yelled, and finally succeeded in making Logan turn his head away from Sprite…

“Oh fuck!” Logan, Caliban, and Sprite cursed simultaneously…

BBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZBBBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZBBBBBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZBBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZBBBBBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZBBB

It was like the ringing of a bell right next to their ears, only their brain was the bell and something was smashing against it…

Sprite passed out in the first five seconds, but she had enough time to see Laura and Logan crawling towards Charles, who was the epicenter of this powerful mental attack…