Utterly Mad

5 years before the cataclysm, X7
Dr. Gardener and the children of X7

Mica reeled as yet another smack of the bright purple wiffle ball bat made contact with the side of her blanket covered head. The act of the "blanket party" was an old ritual for Catnip and Mica. A deep seated hazing from there childhood which, to the children of X7, held an almost religious significance. Mica toppled over and tried to get up, looking like a caterpillar in the middle of it's arching step forward, and Catnip gave her a hard swats on the rump for her trouble. The bat was raised again, and as it was brought down, Mica's sister shouted...

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Alabaster brought his fist around and slammed it viciously into whiskey's kidney. As he did so, one of the other children shouted "promise breaker!" While another chirped up with "blanket party!" A third bellowed "snitch!"  Into his sheet covered face loud enough to deafen the poor mutant. Dr. Gardener watched it all with cruel amusement and turned the source of the party over in her hand. A screwdriver. Whiskey had promised Catnip he could get it for her. When he'd been caught, he'd told the doctors everything.

This ritual was familiar and fascinating to the doctors. As far as they knew, the hazing and the process which governed it we're entirely original. The children had just started doing it as a way to police the behaviors they most abhorred. Snitching and oath breaking. The children lied endlessly to each other, but never about anything serious, and if they didn't know a thing they would say so instead of trying to hide behind a lie.

Mica was up next, and Dr. Gardener leaned in for a better look. Mica was Gardeners favorite. She and Alabaster were the best X7 had produced. Alabaster was strong, but Mica was fast and clever. Gardener didn't know and would never find out that in a few years her colleagues would turn their finest candidate into a starving idiot. Mica laid into whiskey with a kick to the stomach that doubled him over. With her tail, the longest and most rat like of three tails among the children, she whipped him twice. Those strikes would hurt her as much as they hurt whiskey, but that seemed to be the point. Those Savage children down there had taken up the belief that what hurt one of them, hurt all of them and so they used their fists and feet instead of the bars of soap in socks one would expect.

Finally, it was Catnip's turn. As the one sinned against, to whom the promise was broken, she would go last and her treatment of whiskey would be the most brutal. Sure enough, Gardener caught the glint in Catnip's hand. The "sacred" load. Security had searched high and low for the implement but again and again they had come up empty handed. The object was a brass rod obtained probably by the girl currently holding it and used by the children for just this purpose. Catnip brought her loaded fist over in a right cross that took her brother high in the temple and dislocated the fingers of that hand. It was nothing compared to the pain of the electric shocks she'd been given for her attempt at getting whiskey to smuggle her contraband.  She swapped the load and used her now loaded left hand to break whiskey's nose under the blanket. Gardener waved over security after taking note that it was the same blanket as every other time they did this. Something significant about the blanket, she theorized. Not that the children would tell her or anyone else.

"They've got the bar, Catnip's got it. If they are still fighting, break it up." She directed. Security would get there too late to break anything up of course, not to mention too late to find the bar before it was once again sequestered wherever the children of X7 hid it. They would never find that item, not even after most of the children were little more than floating tissue samples in cold storage. Catnip hit whiskey one last time, then whipped the blanket from his bruised and battered form. She took his face in her hands, as was their strange ritual, and...

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Catnip pulled the sheet off Mica along the the belt she had used to fix it in place and took Mica's head in her hands. She placed a kiss on Mica's forehead and said simply, "I love you sister, will you stand?"

Mica looked into Catnip's eyes and rubbed her bottom, then responded "My-ka will stand."

Catnip kissed her again and finished the "ritual" saying, "Then stand by me. I forgive you."