by I'm Not Mister Mxypltk
Mick Harrison and Shirley Francis' room was one of the few places of the building that remained almost intact after the storm. But still, the window had broken and the wind and rain had reached all of the furniture and ruined almost everything they had inside.
"Where are my CDs, man?" Mick said, looking at the mess in the room. "It took me months to reconstruct the CD collection I had in Chicago."
"Ugh... All my clothes are ruined," Shirley said, opening the closet that was lying on the ground and taking out the wet clothes. She looked around and said, "God, look at this place."
"And we were the lucky ones!" Mick said, carelessly putting things out of the way to look for his CD collection. "You know, I don't think we're gonna be able to stay here any longer. We have to look for another place."
"Kit already found something else. It's not gonna be as nice as this, but as long as it doesn't smell or something, I think it's gonna be okay."
"Why would it smell? Don't be silly," Mick said as he continued digging through the things on the floor and finally finding a CD. "Aha! Here's one! And here's another!"
"Speaking of silly... is M'xy still unconscious?"
"The last time I called he was," Mick said, taking more CDs from the garbage and piling them up together. "I don't wanna risk calling him and ending up on the ground again!"
"But you have to!" Shirley exclaimed. "What if there's an emergency and we need M'xy?"
"But... what if he does wake up and doesn't want to let me back in control, like the last time?"
"I think we're gonna have to take that risk, honey..."
"Yeah, you're right," Mick said as he stood up and prepared to call M'xy.
When Mick said M'xy's name, a spark of light illuminated his eyes for one second before they closed, and Mick's body fell right on the piled up CDs, breaking many of the cases.
"M'xy?" Shirley said, getting closer to him. "M'xy, wake up! Wake up!"
Shirley looked at him. A smile formed on her face as an idea came to her mind. "A COW!" Shirley yelled.
"WHERE?!" M'xy screamed excitedly as he suddenly jumped, getting on his feet.
"Kidding!"
"Oh," M'xy said, looking disappointed. "I have to go to the bathroom."
"You have to...? Well, I suppose that Mick's body still has necessities when you're using it."
"Who said anything about necessities? I just wanna see the bathroom," M'xy said, floating to the bathroom door. "See ya!" he said to Shirley as he got inside.
M'xy got into the bathroom without turning the lights on. As soon as he closed the door behind him and was certain that Shirley couldn't see him, he stopped floating and dropped to his knees. He looked weak.
"Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee..." M'xy heard. It was coming from inside the bathroom.
"Who's...?"
"Just me," a female voice said as the shower curtain opened, revealing Daniela of the PSI-Unit on the other side. She was sitting on the tub, chewing an apple. "IIIII know your seee-cret," she said in a sing-song voice after a moment. "You must be reeeally weak now. It must have taken you a lot of effort."
M'xy didn't look at her. He lowered his head and stared at the floor. Daniela couldn't see the light coming from his eyes anymore.
"It did take you a lot of effort, didn't it?" she asked. "Deviating the hurricane so it would hit the island, I mean. That's gotta be really hard, even for you!"
M'xy didn't react in any way.
"And did you really think it would kill them? By now you should know that they're pretty freaking good. Me, I realized that soon enough to know that I didn't want to fight them... not yet. So I started playing nice after that Italian guy attacked me with that sword. Heh. He thought the sword absorbed my evil soul, as if something like that existed, when what the sword actually did was absorbing what was left of my soul... good soul, I suppose he'd call it. So, yeah, now I got no soul at all. He did me a big favor! Aaaa-nyway, I bet now you are wondering how I know what you did, aren't you?"
M'xy didn't answer. Daniela didn't seem to care and continued talking.
"Well, because of the shenanigans you caused, you're so weak now that it's easy for me to read your mind! Normally it wouldn't be so easy, you being 5-D and all, but I guess when you're tired, your mind is more accessible. Either that, or I'm getting better! And if you're smart, you should avoid that Phil guy at all costs, at least for now, or he'll do the same thing I did."
M'xy continued staring at the bathroom tiles and not reacting at all to Daniela's words.
"Oh, by the way," she said, "I know the other thing, too. And I gotta warn you, I've been snooping around your friends' minds, and that Aussie guy, Danny... He knows it too. But don't worry, he doesn't know that he knows. He knows subconsciously. How does he know? Well, remember when you pretended to have a moral dilemma about whether to stop or not stop the hurricane, and you said you had to go away to think, but really you were just trying to stay out of the picture so you didn't have to help while the others faced the hurricane? Remember that Danny followed you and found the place where you were hiding?"
Danny Hearn followed the cows for a while, until they disappeared. "Dammit! Bloody things just faded away!" Danny said.
"Shut up, H-- Wait, what's that?" Danny said, after noticing something near the place where the flying cows disappeared. "Is that a door floating in the sky? That's weird."
He paused. "Hold a second... The cows didn't disappear! They crossed that door!" Danny said, speeding up his flight. "That must be where M'xy is!"
Danny reached the door and placed his hand on the knob. "Fuck that," Danny said, opening the door.
As Danny crossed to the other side, both brains inside his head were flooded with completely non-understandable information, giving Danny a headache of epic proportions. At that moment, his senses sent so many error messages to his brain that it felt like he was using Windows 98.
Between the terrible confusion, he was able to understand the words, "Wait, let me fix that!"
Soon, his mind cleared, and Danny found himself in a small, normal-looking, three-dimensional living room, with all the elements a normal living room had, although some of them were perhaps a little bit forced, like a mom and a dad.
"That should keep your brain calmed," M'xy said.
"Danny saw you in your 5-D form, but he didn't understand what he saw. But still... he saw you in your true form. He knows you're K'tl."
K'tl moved his head slightly. He said nothing.
"But he doesn't know how that is possible. Only I know that you switched places with M'xy when you came back from the Castle of Crossed Destinies, and I know it because I read it in your mind. So... I was thinking... since both of us have deep, dark secrets, maybe we could help each other! We could destroy the team from the inside! What do you think, eh?"
K'tl didn't answer.
"Answer me, dammit!" she said, loud enough to show her anger but quiet enough so Shirley outside wouldn't hear her. "All right, you don't wanna team up? Okay, okay, give me a reason why I shouldn't tell the rest of the team what I know. Well? What can you say for yourself?"
K'tl raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were covered in darkness. "Boom," he said, answering Daniela's question.
At that moment, Daniela's head blew up, leaving K'tl and the walls of the bathroom covered in blood.
Then the door opened. It was Shirley.
"What's going on there?" she said.
She turned on the lights and saw M'xy floating in the middle of the bathroom, surrounded by tiny flying cows of different colors. The cows were singing cartoon tunes.
"Can I help you?" M'xy asked, looking at Shirley as if she had interrupted something important.
"Um... I thought I heard something explode. Never mind. Keep doing... whatever it is you're doing," she replied. Great, she thought to herself. Now he's never gonna leave Mick's body.
"Close the door behind you, please!" M'xy said.
As soon as the door was closed, the lights went off, and K'tl's illusion disappeared. Daniela's corpse was still there, and there was still blood all over the place.
K'tl felt very tired, but he had to take care of this mess. He made the blood on the walls turn into water, and it wasn't a problem anymore. Then he teleported Daniela's corpse to six feet under the backyard of the building. But there was another problem. Soon, the team would realize that Daniela was gone. He had to do something.
He focused all his energies in creating an illusion that looked like Daniela. It wouldn't do much, and after a couple of months it would fade away, but it would serve its purpose, for now.
Now K'tl was really tired. Daniela was right; it did take him a lot of energy to change the course of the hurricane, and it didn't even kill everyone like he had hoped. He had to rest for a while, for a good, long while. Then he would come back and finish the job, and this time he would do it directly, kill everyone and walk away, as simple as that.
He disguised himself as M'xy again by changing the darkness in his eyes to light and using M'xy's top hat and coat, opened the bathroom door, and saw Shirley outside. She seemed to have been waiting for him.
"Umm... Say, M'xy, you watch a lot of TV. Could you tell me what actor this is?" she asked, showing him an old magazine with a 1940s comedy star on the cover.
"Of course! That's Mick -- ey Rooney!" Mick said.
"Come here," Shirley said, hugging him.
"All right," he replied, hugging her back. "What the hell's an Eyrooney?"
Continued in Chapter 70: The Metahuman Brotherhood of Liberation