The Cure For What Ails You (Part Two)

The next day, we did our squad practice as usual, only to receive a visit from Miss Frost in the middle of our drills. For once, she was all smiles upon seeing us, which was rare with anything that involved me.

"Well done, children!" She honestly seemed proud. It was kind of off-putting to see her so positive in my presence. I wasn't sure if I liked it, "You thwarted an attack that had the potential to take dozens of lives."

I was always down for heaping praise onto my Paladins, but this was not a team effort, and I needed it expressed as such, "No. We didn't do anything. Laura thwarted an attack. The rest of us were getting suits and dresses and crap."

Miss Frost's blue eyes drifted over to Laura, who seemed unwilling to meet her gaze, "Well, I guess all the praise should go to you then, dear. You could stand to make things a bit less corpsy for the next time, but I'm sure Logan will be happy to hear about this," She again addressed us all as a whole, "You also saved us quite a bit of time digging through the brain of a bigoted zealot."

Again, I felt the need to step in and give sole recognition, "-That was a Ruthie thing only. I actually told her not to."

Miss Frost huffed at me, "You really don't make it easy to give you credit for anything good, darling," All I could do was shrug. I loved taking credit for things, just as long as I actually did something to earn it.

Mister Rasputin spoke up at that point, having been fully briefed by both us and the X-Men proper, "Apparently, mall in town with mutant school nearby was better target than school itself," He said, "Especially week of dance."

This was news to us. The mall was targeted when it was because of the dance. Eddie waved his hands to prompt our advisor to stop, "Wait-wait-wait. Why do they know Homecoming is this week?" Ruth hadn't managed to nick that little detail out of our new friend's head before the X-Men arrived.

Miss Frost didn't seem to know, as that detail was likely too high up the totem pole for the lowly gunman Laura had taken down to know. At this point, all she could do was speculate, "There's a good chance someone in town is a sympathizer and feeds off details to groups like these… Sapien League individuals."

Another organization. Sapien League, Reavers, Purifiers. Whatever. By now, the names of these groups were bleeding together in my head. To me, they were all the same when it came down to it; just another crew of ultraviolent crazies who wanted to take a chunk out of us. What was a problem though, was that these Sapien League guys were new. So new, that when Hisako and I went to study up on them in an effort to be proactive, there wasn't really a lot in X-Men archives. There were a few pages worth of material starting from a few months ago. Not much to go off of.

"Is not all bad," Mister Rasputin assured us, "We were able to get the location of safehouses in area."

Eddie floated off of the ground and over to the headmistress, "Ooh, can we go when the X-Men head out to kick their asses?"

Miss Frost raised an eyebrow at Eddie's exuberance and gently swept him out of the way with her hand, "We try not to make it a habit of siccing students on mutant-killers, Wing. Besides, it's been handled already."

"Aww, man," Eddie planted himself back on the floor and walked back to the rest of us dejectedly, "I'm like the only person on the squad who hasn't proved they're ready for prime time X-Men action yet."

"Give it some time," Hisako quipped, "You seem to be hanging with the right crowd."

"You've been saying that since before summer break!" Eddie complained, "Fighting Sol's jackass son from the future doesn't count!"

For some reason, I felt offended, "Hey, don't call my son a jackass," Only I could call my child horrible things. And boy, did that ever sound awful once I thought about it in hindsight.

The luster from what happened at the mall had by now worn off, and Miss Frost remembered how much of a headache dealing with me and mine could give her, "Right. Well, again, good work," She rolled her eyes when I clicked my tongue and gave her a thumbs up, "Ugh."

Vexing that woman was one of the simple things that gave me life.