Lesson To Learn (Part Five)

When I woke up, I couldn't move. There were bright lights shining on me. So bright, I couldn't even see.

I felt tired. That in of itself was scary. I hadn't been tired in forever. And I was in the light. That was bad. Depending on how long I had been out of it, I could have been close to overloading. Was this what Ruth had been talking about?

I started to stir, my entire body hurt and I let out a sharp yelp the moment I tried to wiggle around.

"It would be foolish to try and move," A man's voice told me in warning, "It could serve to be quite painful for you."

"What the fuck?" I didn't want to hear any of that. I wanted up. I wanted out. And that was what I was going to get... only I didn't, "Aaaaaagh..."

"I told you not to move, boy," The person behind the voice seemed to take a measure of delight at my pain, "It was very tedious, hooking you up to our machines. Every nerve ending we could reasonably attach a node to, all meant to harness your undeserved power."

The blinding lights were turned down, giving me sight of a team of technicians, working on equipment that was hooked to me by thousands of tiny wires sticking out of my arms, my face, my legs. Seemingly everywhere.

I screamed, first and foremost. I screamed when I realized that I felt all of it. The man speaking to me had been serious. They had attached me to whatever they had attached me to by the nerves of my body, "What is this? Where am I?"

"There's no need for you to know about that, mutant," The man speaking to me stood off, observing from the side. He had long, blond hair and dressed in a well-to-do suit with a frilled collar underneath, "All you need to know is that for once, your abilities will actually do some good for humankind."

The dark grin on his face promised nothing pleasant for me, either in the immediate or the distant future.

I was about to be indoctrinated into the mutant school of hard-knocks for the very first time, courtesy of the first real shit-bag in my time as a student or an X-Man I was given a personal introduction to - Donald Pierce.