5 Narrow Escape & Discovering the Wonders~ (2)

As I looked at the old, abandoned factory with cracked windows, a broken down roof, a caved-in wall and vegetation growing all over the place, I had to admit.

'It's better than nothing, but this place is still pretty sh*t.'

Opting to ignore the shelter I found while running around the city in the middle of the night, I thought back to the close calls I had. And man were they close!

Right after I had stopped in my tracks to look at my arm, I heard the engines of cars coming in my direction. Tens of them, in fact. The fact that so much manpower was being put into finding little ol' me had me feeling a bit of pride, but too bad that that was overshadowed by the overwhelming fear of capture with the subsequent possibility of either imprisonment or experimentation. Or maybe both. Because, honestly who even knew if this universe wasn't some amalgamation of comics and movie universes, and while Fury of the movies was just really paranoid, I'd rather not meet someone as ruthless as 616 Fury.

But useless rambling aside, I had to make a move before they found me, so I did the best I could think of in my panicked teenaged mind. I jumped into a dumpster and dug my way into the bottom. Then I covered my ears and tried to calm my rapidly beating heart, because although my arm could probably deflect bullets, the rest of me definitely couldn't. Or could it?

"Switching to infrared."

The rough voice speaking into his radio snapped me into attention. I didn't have time to focus on how I could hear him through pounds of garbage, since there was a bigger problem.

'He said he was switching to infrared, which I think detects heat signatures. And I can hear him right next to me. Crap.'

Thoughts of getting shot straight through the garbage surfaced in my mind, my creative imagination creating vivid images of my body being torn to hell, then getting pulled out of the garbage. And that horrible image was what triggered it. I was so distracted by the imminent possibility of death that I didn't even feel the transformation occur, changing me on a molecular or maybe an even more basic level into something living, yet.... not.

'Crapcrapcrap.

Imgonnadieimgonnadieimgonna-'

"Location cleared. Nothing on the sensors. Disengaging."

'-die?'

'He didn't see me? How?'

I heard the unmistakable sounds of footsteps as they got further and further away from my position and as I was wondering whether the sensor malfunctioned I realized something was different.

I rotated my head down just quick enough to see my body fade from a shining emerald to a brownish skin tone, all the way from the my feet to my neck, likely including my head.

'I guess the rest of me actually can be bulletproof. The crystals probably replaced my skin and blocked my body heat from being detected! Or I turned into crystals and nonono, I refuse to go down that line of thought. Lets just go with that first theory.'

As I pulled myself out of the dumpster, glad to get away from that putrid smell, I turned my head up front and froze. I then cautiously raised my hands while staring at the arrow pointed straight at my face. I knew I couldn't go into crystal mode before I got skewered so I directed my efforts to observing the man holding the bow. I saw Clint Barton A.K.A Hawkeye, who looked just like Jeremy Renner, watch me with the merciless eyes of a killer, studying me top to bottom, thinking who-knows-what.

It felt as though his eyes were dissecting me, analyzing any and all information he could figure out about me, and I had started to wonder if he had x-ray vision or something, but then, as if they were just an illusion, those merciless eyes melted into.... pity?

I could tell from his facial expressions when exactly he decided not to put me in a prison cell. Slowly, he stepped back, far enough away that I couldn't reach him and then, he lowered his bow and just stared at me for a moment, likely questioning his own mental health on making such a decision.

'Why? Is it because I'm a 16 year old, sitting in a dumpster, covered in garbage and running from trained killers/spies, with superpowers that I obviously barely know how to use? Actually that's probably exactly it. Well, let's not look a gift horse in the mouth.'

Then I slowly lowered my hands to the edges of the dumpster and when he made no move to raise his bow, I pulled myself up and out onto the ground. There was a strange silence as we both observed each other until he spoke out one word.

"Go."

And I ran like I'd never ran before. I half expected a tranquillizer arrow to hit me in the back, but it never came, and I went on running in a random direction, eventually ending up at the broken down and abandoned factory.

It was a humbling experience but not a puzzling one. That guy was someone who took in and vouched for the Black Widow, someone whom everybody knew not to trust, and surprisingly enough, he succeeded in reforming her. But although I was grateful for his trust, I didn't like it. That feeling of being at the complete mercy of someone else was something I never wanted to experience again and so, I decided that it would be better to start training myself sooner rather than later. Sooner being now.

'Let's work on offense from now, preferably long ranged since I'll probably get my a** kicked in close combat, which means learning how to shoot these crystals accurately. I have a feeling my new arm will come in handy for this.' I thought the last part as I looked in awe at my crystal arm that wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy world. Having a fake arm didn't really matter when it was made of CRYSTALS! Who wouldn't want something as cool as that? And besides, it felt just as real and even more flexible than my old arm.

Then I got up off my butt, and started lining up barrels a few feet apart against the wall. I stood far from those barrels with my feet spread, leaning forward with my palm facing out. Abruptly, I started firing multiple crystals shards larger than my arms slicing through the barrels and the wall. They then stopped mid-air and came back to me, and then started rotating in the air around me as a protective barrier.

'I wish.'

I was stuck in a weird pose for a few minutes until I figured out how to actually get the crystals out of my fingers individually and not just grow a clump of them on my hands. Instinct only took a person so far and let me say, holding things was straight up impossible when a person's hands are covered in crystals, which made me sound a lot richer than I actually was, considering I only owned a pair of pajamas and nothing else. The fact that the sharp edges sliced through anything I picked up didn't help.

Back on topic, I was able to figure out how to shoot one crystal shard from each of my fingers, although it completely missed the barrel and broke the wooden planks I was gonna use to put together a bed. At-least the way they sort of just phased through my skin and went out into the world looked awesome.

Well, sleep was for the weak, because I was not sleeping on the ground filled with moss, bacteria, germs and whatever other nastiness Mother Nature could conjure up.

I could tell that accuracy was something I really needed to work on, but the fact that I was getting tired allowed me to confirm some valuable data. Mainly that spawning and manipulating crystals used up an exponentially higher amount of stamina compared to other physical activities, as well the fact that minerals could be used as an energy source. And by minerals I really mean rocks. They tasted like beef jerky, not the best but I could definitely live on them for a while.

After about a straight hour of accuracy practice, I was able to accurately hit all five barrels easily although my firing rate was quite lacking. I made sure not to use my connection to the crystals I already hit the barrels with as a guide, which allowed me to get used to sensation of the crystals spawning from my fingers and get better at manipulating their size. I had decided though, although this was enough for today, tomorrow was going to be practice on my firing rate. At that moment however, I felt like I was gonna go into dreamland standing straight so I thought to review my current resources and take a quick nap on top of a conveyor belt or whatever it was called.

'Food, check!

Shelter, check!

Water? Guess I'll just steal some bottles from someone's house, so check!

Electricity, Wi-Fi, cell phone, air conditioning or heating and other amenities required by modern humans to live comfortably? Not check, but the key word is 'comfortably'. It's better to learn how to live in hardship sooner rather than later.'

According to the wikis and forums I browsed before my trip to this dimension, the gap between Thor and the Avengers was around a year, so I would have to get to New York in between that time. But, first things first! I had to get my powers on point, no matter how long it would take. There were only 3 guidelines I followed in life, 'Safety first', 'Pursue happiness not acknowledgement', and, arguably the most important, 'Just do it!' Thinking too much takes the fun out of adventures anyways and safety is important if I even want to have an adventure.

'Now, onto a blissful sleep, that'll hopefully not result in me being in a containment cell when I wake up.'