My Math Skills Actually Apply in Life

Yeah, that's right. I can escape a high security prison AND I have awesome multiplying skills.

Hey, wait, I did.

He yelped as his glasses went flying, and landed on the ground. I watched, smiling, as yesterday's fiasco played itself out again, only this time, he stepped on his glasses. Thanks to my outburst, the guards quickly grabbed me, but it was worth it.

"You little monster!" he shrieked while searching in vain for his shattered spectacles.

"Me?! You should talk!" I screamed at him, struggling against the guards that restrained me. "You drove a five-year-old little girl to insanity, turned her into a monster! I should kill you where you stand!" I was absolutely wild with grief and animosity towards this evil man. Tears streamed my face, and I wailed, screamed, kicked, bit, punched, and slapped all the way to my room. Dumb and Dumber tossed me into my room, and I landed in a crumpled heap. Before I was thrown, however, I glimpsed my room number; C5.

"I'll take you back to your sister tomorrow." the scientist poked his head in before it was closed, and I let out a howl and charged him. He squealed, quickly withdrew his head, and shut the door. I banged on the door and screamed to be let out, but no one answered.

I finally sank to the floor in defeat. It was then I remembered my plan. Stupid, stupid, idiot! I smacked my forehead, and vowed to do it tomorrow. This time, though, I would make a break for it as soon as they opened the door. I was not going back to that awful room.

After inhaling the food they gave me (Instead of the sludge they served in the cages that was dangerous to you health, they served bland but safe gruel) I slipped into my bed, even though the lights hadn't been switched off yet. I would sleep early, wake early, before they got here, and catch them by surprise.

I was really going to do it.

I was going to rescue everyone in those dreadful cages; I was going to rescue Damien.

Damien.

The name started a fluttering in my chest. I remembered our laughs, our cries, our talks, our jokes.

Our kiss.

On the day before they moved me, we were talking, and our faces both pressed up against the hole, that he had made even bigger, when he suddenly leaned over and kissed me. When he finally pulled away, he stared at me, his cute smile decorating his lips, and his dimples standing out.

"Wow." I murmured, cringing when I realized how stupid that sounded. Damien laughed, throwing his head back, tossing his hair.

He kissed me again, and this time, I kissed back.

I took a long, happy breath at the memory, and shut my eyes, waiting for sleep to claim me. After only minutes of waiting, my eyes shut completely, and darkness filled my consciousness.

A soft click awoke me, and I was alert at once, but kept curled up in my bed to trick them.

Quietly, the scientist padded in with his thugs. A faint light was let in by the door, and I watched with my eyes barely cracked open. The scientist chuckled softly as he gazed down at my body.

"She's quite a looker, that's for sure." he whispered, and gently brushed back a strand of my hair. I forced myself not to slap him, but I was getting major creeper vibes. Then the scientist noticed the open door. 

"Shut the door, you imbecile!" he hissed at Dumber, who lumbered over to the ajar entrance. This was my chance.

I leaped out of my bed, kicking the shocked scientist in the face. Shoving my way past Dumb and Dumber, I sprinted as fast as humanly possible through the door and down the hallway. The lights went out, which made me slow a little, but then a giant blaring siren started up, accompanied by flashing red lights, and so I pressed on with blinking lights.

I conjured up the impression of Damien's mind, and tried to locate it, bracing myself for a shock.

Tendrils of electricity snaked up my body, but it was way less than the time when I had tried to communicate with Damien, so I gritted my teeth and ran on, past startled guards, who tried to shoot and stop me, but their reactions were much too slow.

Damien! I discovered his position, and tried to guess which ways to turn to get to the cages.

After a while, my sides were heaving, and sweat glistened on my forehead. I was relieved when I neared the door, Damien's mind so close. A scientist with her long red hair pulled back in a ponytail flattened against the wall at my approach, and I slowed, long enough to punch her as hard as I could. She went sprawling, and whimpered, trying to staunch the flow of blood from her nose.

"What's the code to the cage room?" I demanded, trying to look as intimidating as possible. It worked.

"34B87KR!" she bleated. "Please don't hurt me!" I didn't answer her, dashing away and chanting the code under my breath.

Reaching the door, I swore as two guards readied their guns upon sighting me, but took it back when I found out that their minds were not protected. I transmitted an impossibly high-pitched frequency in their brains, and they fell to the ground, clutching their heads in pain. I accidentally bit my tongue as the shock raced up and down my body, pain overtaking almost every other sense. I forced myself to stagger over to the keypad, ignoring the pain. Taking a gun from one of the guards and punching in the code, I kicked the door open and rushed in, pausing only to lock the door behind me, changing the code so no one else could get in. Just in time, too, as the sound of my pursuers reached the door and commenced punching in the original code. I spun around, to find only a shocked Frankie.

This was going to be awesome.

I tried to suppress a smile as I whipped out a gun and pointed it at his chest.

"Okay, don't try anything stupid." I warned him. "I'm just going to-" I cut my sentence short and fired the gun. Frankie thudded to the ground. I looked at his body, and discovered that my gun only had tranquilizer darts, probably because the gun's previous owner had been guarding the cages, and if any kids escaped, they'd only want to incapacitate them, then use them for experimentation.

One guard down.

I searched Frankie's pockets, stealing his cage key, and sprinted down the rows of cages, taking out four more guards on my way. Strangely enough, the few kids that even noticed me did nothing to cheer me on, only stared at me with sympathy.

Apparently, I was not the first to try an escape.

I stopped in front of Damien's cage. He was asleep, curled up in a corner.

"Damien!" I hissed, jiggling the key in his lock. He started, sitting up and staring blearily at me. "Come on, I need your help!"

"Adri?" he stared incredulously at me.
"No, the Easter Bunny." I rolled my eyes, and pulled his cage open. "Come on! I'll go unlock the rest of the kids while you go take out the guards." He nodded, and grabbed a stun gun from a nearby and unconscious guard. As he hurried away, I went back to the first cages and started unlocking.
All cages were unlocking just fine, until I got to a certain girl's cage. It was that girl who had been stretching herself, and her cage had some sort of force field. I stared at it, perplexed.
"You can't open it without using some sort of remote." the stretch girl informed me sadly. "The remote is somewhere in their control room, I think, so it's kind of impossible." I sighed, examining the device, when I thought of something.
"Hey, Damien." I called to Damien, who had incapacitated the remaining six guards and had joined me in unlocking cages. "Come over here for a second." I commanded him, and he willingly trotted over.
"What do you need?" he crouched down to be level with the cage on the floor.
"Do you think you could reach through this?" I pointed at the force field. He pushed his hand though the field, grimacing, but without too much difficulty.
"I need you to rip out the power cell for the field, which I think is embedded in one of the walls of the cage." I told Damien, who nodded. He shoved his hand past the energy barrier, and started prying the two layers of plastic that made up the wall apart.

On his second try, he found a green, glowing device, about the size of a fifty-cent piece, hidden in the right wall. Upon Damien crushing the pulsating thing, the force field flickered, and died. I unlocked the cage, and the girl crawled out. She seemed to be in shock, so happy to be out, and just wandered away with a look of wonder.
As I continued to unlock cages, I happened upon one boy with pale skin, lots of freckles, and orange hair curled up in the corner of his cage. As I rattled the key in the lock, he stared at me with surprise. Suddenly, a smile which I guessed was supposed to be sexy spread across his face.

"Someone call Heaven, I found their missing angel." he flirts coyly, and I roll my eyes. After the cage opens, I move on, but the guy follows me!

"I know not who you are, nor how you came to be, but I must say you are the most beautiful creature you have ever seen." he continues to try and catch my attention with lavish compliments, then has the nerve to grab my hand and kiss it.

"Listen, weirdo, I don't care who you are, but you better back off or you'll lose the ability to have children. Got that?" I snap fiercely, slapping his hand away. Damien shows up, his hand sliding protectively around my waist.

"Problem?" Damien asks, sounding calm, but glaring daggers at my creeper. The red headed boy looked at Damien's arm with resentment and anger.

"No problem." he replies testily, then storms off. Damien turns to me.

"You okay?" he asks, and I nod.

"Let's just finish the unlocking." I tell him tiredly, and we both move on.

Within about fifty minutes, the rest cages were unlocked, the other four force fields had been destroyed, and Damien was lugging all the asleep guards to a closet. As he locked the guards in the rather large closet, he came over to me with a clipboard, along with the rest of the guns that were found on the guards.
"Hey, Adri, look at what I found." he said excitedly, handing the papers to me. I flipped through the pages, and found all the names of all the kids here. Names, ages, powers, genders, hair/eye color, location, all those things were listed. I found my name, Damien's name, Peter's name, even Auriela's name. Besides Auriela, Peter and three other people were in a different room, actually pretty close to Auriela's room. 

On the back of the clipboard was a map of the entire facility. My room, C5, was kind of small, while rooms next to it-rooms C4 and C6-were much bigger. The rooms were listed with letters A to Z, and each letter had one hundred numbers (A16, Q99, etc). As for the rooms that didn't have a letter-number name, there were about forty bathrooms, the Cage Room, Control, and a few other rooms that didn't have names at all. As I looked at the map, a plan began forming in my mind.
"I have an idea." I told Damien, and hurried to the front of the room. Kids milled about the room, chatting quietly.

"Hello, everyone, if I could just have your attention." I called, and the whisperings ceased, while I felt hundreds of eyes staring expectantly at me, which totally threw me off for a second. "Um, right. Okay, we need to figure out how we are going to truly and really escape, and I think I have a plan." I paused to let that sink in. "First off, we get rid of the personnel, which does not mean we kill them, understood?" There were some grumbles about this, but they quieted soon enough. "Now, is there anyone here that could make their time out there uncomfortable, without leaving this room?" Five kids pushed their way through the crowd and came up to me.

"I can turn off their power through that keypad by the door." A short boy with longish black hair and a pale complexion offered. "I'm super good at manipulating computers."

"Okay, do that, and then go wait by Damien over there." I pointed. "We'll need you later on." He nodded, and dashed off.

Guns were being fired over and over again at the door, but it held steady. Moving quickly, I had one girl release swarms of vermin, like mice and cockroaches, into the ventilation system, while the computer boy shut off most of their power. The firing at the door stopped soon after that, probably because the bugs and crap were scaring them away.

Another boy used his breath to blow gases through the vents that would put almost half of the personnel to sleep, while one girl created a hundred copies of herself and sent them out in the hallways to make some trouble. And yet another girl sent waves of water down the hallway, only waist-high and would only last mere seconds at a time, but still would scare the crap out of the people out there.

Screams of terror were now very audible, and we all listened as the screams first intensified in volume, then slowly lowered in volume, most likely as more and more personnel either fainted or fell asleep. I decided to start my plan, and gestured for the computer boy to come over to the keypad by the door. He willingly hurried over.

"Can you use this keypad to connect me to the speaker system? I have something to say to these people." I told him, and he scoffed.

"Can I?" he snorted. "I could do it in my sleep. Their systems are beyond easy." I refrained from rolling my eyes, and leaned against the wall to do some fast thinking.

As I scanned the clipboard's papers, it said that there were a total of eight hundred forty-six children in the facility, including Peter, Auriela, and the three others. We obviously couldn't stay in the facility, and when we did leave, we couldn't stay as one group; that would be impossible. We would have to split into smaller groups, and some quick figuring in my head figured that it would be best to split into ninety-four groups of nine, by random selection.

"Hello?" the computer boy was tapping his foot over by the keypad, appearing bored. "I finished."

"Okay." I straightened. "Damien, get over here." Damien hurried over, still holding the guns. I quickly informed them of my plan, and they stared at me.

"Are you sure?" Damien asked dubiously. "Sounds awfully risky."

"Got a better plan?" I replied shortly, and got no answer to that. "Thought so. Okay, how do I use the speakers?"

"Just speak into the box, and hold this wire. I only had to rearrange a couple wires and bypass one hundred thirty-two systems." The computer geek responded readily. I nodded, wiping sweat from my palms. The full force of what I was going to do was beginning to sink in, but now was no time to chicken out.

"You okay?" Damien questioned worriedly, seeing my suddenly pale face. I started to nod, but shook my head instead, then lowered it. "Hey, you can do this." Damien held my chin and gently raised my head back up. "If anyone can do this, it's you. Who else would be able to escape her prison, by herself, and run all the way back here to save the lives of eight hundred other children she barely knows? I only know one person who could and would do that." I managed a small smile as Damien kissed me softly on the cheek.

"Only Adri would do that." Damien whispered. "Only Adri. Only my Adri." A single tear slipped down my face, before I was able to take the wire. I slowly, hesitantly, moved my face closer to the box.

"Hello?" I jumped as my voice came booming through the speakers in the cage room. "This is one of your prisoners, Adriana. I speak for all the poor souls you have added to your-how shall I put this-collection.....for all of us that are left after your despicable experiments." I began to gain speed as I talked.

"You have murdered our families, taken everything we ever owned or knew, just to satisfy your disgusting scientific theories. We are imprisoned in literal cages, with inedible food, unfit sanitation, and not enough room to even stand up. You hold here, in this, this, hellhole, until we die a slow, painful death, from starvation, disease, or on the operating table, and only for the reason we're different. We're just kids, kids with gifts, and because of that, you have taken everything away from us. You people are monsters, and deserve worse things than death." I paused. 

"We, however, will be much, much, more lenient. I give a chance, to those of you who can, to go to set locations, and wait for whatever help you sent for to come. If you do this, you will be spared. Remember these rooms: C4, C5, and C6. That's C4, C5, and C6. These are the designated locations; we don't want any trouble, just do as we say, and this can go about without casualties." I started to drop the wire, before adding, "You have one hour." The wire fell, hanging limply from the box.

I allowed myself one second to recollect my thoughts, before pushing myself back to the front of the crowd, still gripping the clipboard.

"Find a fast and easy way for ninety-four groups of nine to leave this place without being tracked, and also for their power to completely shut off after we leave and their systems to be scrambled." I ordered the computer kid. "Got that?" He nodded, and jogged back to the keypad to figure out the computer.

"Okay, everyone, listen up." I announced loudly, and everybody was instantly attentive. "When we leave here, we can't stay as one group, right? We have to split up into smaller groups, and each team will have nine people. These people in your group become your family, the most important thing in your life, and you have to keep them alive. Understand this; when I say they will be your family, they will be your ONLY family. If you run into trouble, no group will be obligated to help you, and they certainly won't help you if it puts themselves and their group in danger. After today, other teams will be basically nonexistent, because you will be with only your own group." I hated having to say this, but it was true.

"If we want to survive out there, we always have to put our groups first, and it will increase our chances of living. After today, all communication with other groups will be cut, and you'll be on your own." I waited as the crowd committed this to memory. "When we have seized the building, we will split into our groups. Be ready for that." I trotted back to the computer boy.

"It's been an hour." he informed me.

"Good." I answered. "Give me the wire." He placed the wire in my palm, and I began to speak. "Your hour is up." I announced. "We are going to move out of our cage, and we will not tolerate any resistance." I handed the wire back to the technology kid. "Can you lock the doors to the rooms C4, C5, and C6, and did you find a way to get out of here?"

"Yeah." he flipped the clipboard in my hands and pointed to the map. "Right here, by Control, there's a huge garage, with enough vehicles for each group to have their own. While you divide them up into groups, I'll have to be in the Control room, turning off the cars' tracking devices and scrambling their systems. Room A1, right next to Control, is big enough to hold everybody."

"Okay then." I headed to the door, my hand on the handle. "Let's go."

Then I heard a clap.

I whipped around, to find Damien grinning from ear to ear, and slowly clapping his hands. The computer boy joined in, and more and more kids added to the applause, until the volume grew to a thunderous roar. I just stood there dumbly, as they all screamed, hooted, whistled, and clapped for me, letting the feel of it fill my body with renewed vigor to escape. A smile sneaked onto my face, and grew bigger and bigger.

"Yes!" I laughed. "Let's move out! Let's take these b******s!!" I threw open the door, and hurried down the hall after Damien handed me a gun. He, the computer boy, and the next eight people that exited the room received stun guns, and created a line of armed kids that stretched across the hall, covering the rest of the crowd. We marched along the halls, me using the clipboard to navigate the confusing hallways, and any unconscious bodies we chanced across were carried by three or four kids per person.

Stopping in front of the three rooms I assigned as prisons for the personnel, I asked the computer kid to open room C4. He complied, and I readied myself to enter, holding my gun tightly, and motioning for only the people with guns to follow.

Here we go.

Author's Note

This is kind of a lengthy chapter, but their escape deserved that much, of course.

Reviews

[CrimsonBlaze]

Oh yeah kids kick a*s every time dont they? And yess! Adri X Damien 4ever!!! It doesnt matter if the chapter was lengthy. I think it was fine like that. If you put too little, then you may not have described it as much. But this way, everything was said in great detail, explained in short yet precise quips and the revealance of every kid with the powers intrigue each reader I assume. :3