image created by JulieOh

Chapter 1: Hindsight
(Wherein Things Explode and JC Grows a Tail)

They probably shouldn't have taken the tour.

Hindsight being 20/20, that was the first thing they realized. The second thing, Lance thought through the ringing in his ears, was that they should have known something was off when their tour guide suddenly began mumbling something about a call he'd forgotten to make and left the room, closing the door firmly as he went. They had only been shut in with the nuclear reactor core for a few moments when the damned thing exploded.

"Guys?" His voice was weak and hoarse with smoke, so Lance coughed and tried again, pushing his abused body up onto his hands and knees. "Guys? Anybody... alive...?"

Someone groaned a few feet away. "Oww, damn, my head...."

"Jayce? That you?" Justin's voice came from somewhere on the other side of the darkened and smoke-filled room. "Lance?"

"Thank God," Joey muttered, almost right in Lance's ear. "Chris?"

The silence echoed louder than the explosion.

The four sore and sooty group members struggled to their feet and migrated to the center of the room, looking around fearfully. "Chris?" Justin called, a little louder.

"C'mon, man, answer us!" JC's voice was high-pitched in panic, and Lance was aware of the same feeling causing his own heart to pound much too quickly.

"Wait...." Justin closed his eyes and cocked his head to the side, listening closely. Then he smiled and heaved a relieved sigh. "He's alive," he breathed, gesturing to a dark corner in the far side of the room. "Just unconscious."

Joey looked at him suspiciously, not daring to hope. "How do you know?"

Justin shrugged. "His heartbeat's strong and steady, and his breathing's fine."

They all stared at him. "Um, Justin," JC said, speaking very slowly so as to be understood, "You can't hear breathing and a heartbeat from across the room."

Justin's eyes widened as the supposed truthfulness of JC's words hit him. "But.... But I do!"

Joey rolled his eyes and made his way to the corner Justin had indicated, and Lance followed as Justin and JC continued to argue the impossibility of Justin's claim.

"How is he," Lance asked as Joey sat down beside Chris and carefully pulled the unconscious man's head onto his lap.

Joey leaned forward, his cheek hovering just inches from Chris's slack face. "He's breathing and all, like Justin said," he noted, silently counting the slow breaths. "Looks like he hit his head pretty hard, though." He lifted his fingers and Lance sucked in a sharp breath, resting a shaking hand on Chris's shoulder when he saw the blood.

Then Joey was staring at him, and he heard JC across the room break off in the middle of his argument, yelling, "Holy shit!"

He blinked. "What?"

"Lance...." Joey gulped, his hand making an aborted motion as if to touch him. "You're glowing."

Lance looked down and didn't see anything unusual, so instead he turned to look at Justin and JC, and they were glowing. Then he looked back at Joey and Chris and they were glowing, too.

"Oh, crap," he said.

~*~

The door was locked from the outside, so they were all stuck there. The smoke had cleared out through the vents, though, and the emergency lights had come on, so at least it wasn't dark and smoky anymore.

Chris woke up swinging, for some reason, but when his fist hit Joey's nose, he just ended up with sore and bruised knuckles. Joey said it tickled.

The shell of the reactor core kept right on glowing, and so did they. They tried yelling for help, but apparently no one could hear them. Finally, they all sat still in the middle of the room, giving themselves an a capella concert.

It was in the middle of a particularly piercing rendition of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" that Lance's voice suddenly dropped out and he sat there staring blankly into space.

"Lance?" Chris quit singing in mid-screech and reached out a hand, laying it carefully on Lance's shoulder. "You okay?"

Lance shook his head slowly, more to clear it than as an answer. "We...." He shook his head again and started over. "Something's happened to us."

"Yeeeaaaahhh," Chris agreed, drawing the word out slowly. "We got blowed up."

"No—I mean, yes, but... there's...." Lance squeezed his eyes shut and tried again. "It did something to us. I can feel it... changing us."

Joey gave a nervous laugh. "What, are we all gonna grow tails, or something?"

"No...." Lance thought about that. "JC might...."

"Wh-what?!" JC leapt to his feet and strained frantically to see his backside. "Where?!"

Chris collapsed on the floor laughing and Justin rolled his eyes. "Naw, man, you don't have a tail. Chill."

"Changing," Lance said again, and shuddered.

~*~

Shortly after JC stopped chasing his own behind looking for a tail and Chris finally stopped laughing, they grew bored with singing and simply lay on their backs, staring at the ceiling. Justin kept insisting there was a spider up there, so Joey finally just flew up to where Justin was pointing and killed the thing.

"There, satisfied?" he asked with a smirk, still floating about three feet above the floor.

"Umm...." Justin stared up at him, eyes wide. "Sure."

"Joe," Chris said, his voice hushed, "You're floating. Flying."

"Huh?" Joey looked down, yelped, and fell heavily to the floor. Then he looked up at them, wild-eyed. "I flew!"

"Yup," Chris agreed authoritatively. "You sure did."

JC chose that moment to suddenly turn into a little brown puppy, prompting Justin to yell, "'C, you did grow a tail!"

And then when puppy-JC started crying pitifully, Chris picked him up and started crooning to him, scratching him behind his floppy ears and holding an honest-to-God conversation with him, even though all the others could hear from the furry little bundle were little whines, barks, and growls.

After a few moments, Chris seemed to suddenly notice that they were all staring at him. "What?" he asked innocently.

"You, uh.... You understand him?" Lance asked carefully.

"Yeah...." Chris looked down at the puppy staring adoringly up at him. "Is that weird?"

"Chris," Joey whined, "he's a dog!"

"Oh." Chris shrugged. "So he is."

JC barked.

"What...?" Poor Joey looked like he was about to have a coronary.

Chris decided to try to figure things out. "Okay, just... just calm down. We can figure this out. Look, we all got zapped by radiation, or something, right? So it just... changed us, like Lance said." He stared into space, still absently petting JC. "Justin, you heard me across the room, right? My heartbeat? So I guess you've just got really good hearing. And you saw that spider on the ceiling, so your sight is probably really good, too. Joey, you flew, that's pretty obvious, and when I punched you in the nose, you said it tickled. Now, I know I'm not that weak, so you've obviously gained some, like, strength, or invulnerability, or something. Or both, probably. JC, I'm guessing you have some kind of shape-shifting ability, because I seriously doubt you've turned into a dog permanently. All you have to do is figure out how and why you changed and you can probably change yourself back. Lance, yours is a bit harder, but you said you could feel us changing, so you've got some kind of psychic thing going on, I'll bet. Me, I could understand JC, so maybe I can talk to animals. I didn't hear the spider, but then I wasn't really listening, either. Anything else?"

He looked up and saw that they were all still staring at him. "What?!"

"Wow," was all Justin said.

"Chris Kirkpatrick," said Joey. "Su-per geeenius."

Chris thought about that for a second, then grinned. "Yeah. Cool, huh?"

~*~

It only took JC a few more minutes to figure out how to turn himself back into a human, and with that done they set about once again trying to find a way out of that blasted room. Joey decided to test his supposed super-strength and punched the steel door. He made a really, really big dent, but it didn't open. Then Justin shot lasers out of his eyes and cut out a large, neat circle, which crashed to the floor outside the room with a hard shove from Joey. "Word," Justin said.

They made their way slowly out of the room, appalled to see the rest of the building in basically the same kind of shape. Things were smoking, smoldering, glowing, falling apart... basically looking blown-up and radiated to hell. How they hadn't been killed was beyond them, but their new su-per geeenius surmised that the same radiation that had changed them had also protected them from the blast. Joey observed out loud that Chris was using really small words for being a genius and all. Chris cuffed him on the back of the head for it, then hopped up and down in agony, complaining about his "broken fingers." Lance just took his hand and squeezed it slightly, and all the hurt went away. "Word!" said Justin again, staring at Lance.

Lance just shrugged shyly. "Yeah."

"Look, I think that's the exit!" JC pointed to a sliver of light that was blocked by a pile of burnt-out timber and smoldering metals. "Joey, d'you think you can get that stuff out of the way so we can get the hell out of here?"

Joey shrugged. "One way to find out." He stepped over to the pile and began patiently lifting the blockage out of the way. Then some of the timber began to move itself, and when they looked around to figure out who was doing it, they saw Lance standing stock-still, face frozen in concentration. "Hey, thanks," Joey said. "It'll go much faster now."

They were almost done clearing away the wreckage when Justin heard a suspicious groaning noise. He looked up just in time to see a large steel support bar beginning to detach itself from the ceiling—directly over Chris's head. "Chris!" he yelled, terrified, knowing his warning would come too late.

The beam crashed to the floor, right where Chris... had been. Chris skidded to a stop and slammed into the wall on the opposite side of the room, bouncing back and landing painfully on his behind. "Oh... Ow."

Justin heaved a relieved breath. "Thank God."

"Hmph," JC said, envious. "Super genius and super-speed!"

"Yeah, said Chris, one hand rubbing his sore bottom as he stood, the other trying to staunch the flow of blood from his broken nose. "Ibagine that."

"I am not laying hands on your ass," Lance asserted firmly, when he finished healing the break. "You'll just have to bruise."

Then Joey lifted away the last of the wreckage blocking the door, and they stepped out into the sunlight.

As they stood there, staring down at the large crowd of gawkers, fans, and news cameras gathered outside the police and crime-scene tape, listening to the hushed silence that descended like a shroud as soon as they came into view, Lance turned to the rest of them and said, "You know, hindsight being 20/20...."

Chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Epilogue

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