In the oppressive heat lies Death Valley. A hot sandy area that is virtually inhospitable to life. A place that would make an excellent prison.

And a prison it has become, as the camera goes lower and finds a lone transport hovercraft skating the desert sands. On board, a new group of Empowered. Dressed in prisoner grays consisting of a simple shirt, a pair of pants, and soft slippers, each also wears a bulky device attached to their right arm. A power inhibitor.

The transport drones on with it's chained prisoners in it's belly as it skirts the sands approaching a floating fortress. The size of a few city blocks, it hovers there on several turbines that maintain it's steady station above the blistering sands. A 're-education camp' for Empowered.

Few guards patrol the instillation, but few are needed. The weakened Empowered have nowhere to go that would be safe. Dropping to the sand below would likely break a limb, and the trek through the desert with no supplies would kill them in their weakened state.

And it is to this prison we find our heroes travelling to. Strapped to their seats, weakened and their powers inaccessible, no hope in sight as they sit among the other few beings similarly imprisoned.

Besides our heroes, there sits three other men and two women. These others seem beaten down, one of the men severely bruised up, and the three guards in attendance ignore the prisoners, but they do keep their guns at the ready just in case.

Having tasted power - the ability to soar the skies, unnatural levels of strength and vitality, the capacity to dispel the pains of a human body, to re-knit flesh and bone with only a touch - this sort of abject helplessness was even more aggrieving.

As many times as Nora Caravello had railed against what she'd been given - and more significantly, the tragedy it had precipitated  - she would have given fifteen years of her life to have it back now.

Mostly, she'd been sitting there, throughout this trip, with her gaze cast toward the floor.   Portraying the cowed captive, not giving her captors any reason to put attention on her.    While her thoughts were active, considering details, reviewing ideas, and coming up with nothing that would get her out of this mess.

She had no problem admitting that she was feeling more than a little fear.  As well as beyond fed up with her life being upended, thrown into chaos, over a fluke of genetics.

She found use for both the fear and outrage, however.  To keep herself focused.
This message was last edited by the player at 22:31, Sun 27 Oct 2019.

Melissa (not Clarissa, not any more) felt hot, tired, scared and pissed.  Most of all pissed.  At the world.  And at herself.  College tuition was a stone bitch even with her former skating prize money.  So, to get a little "pocket change" she'd leveraged a few of her old contacts in the skating world to get some enhancement drugs for some of the Sharks who wanted an edge (or were scared they'd get cut).

And they got caught.  And gave her up.  And in the arrest she got tested, her supe powers got found and she'd wound up here.  All because she'd wanted a little money for clubbing and movies.  Fuckers.

And it had been some decent money.  Because she did have "equipment" that everyone had either missed or discounted.  A Copper IUD.  Because once she was out of the skating game, Melissa had decided she was damned well going to fuck and get fucked without messing with pills, condoms or any of that other shit.  If she could reach the strings and pull it out she could maybe short out the power cuff and...

Probably electrocute myself.  Or, get shot.  And if not then what?  Fight three armed fucking guards with my ice shit in Death Fucking Valley?  Fuck that, she decided.

So far Melissa had been doing something she almost never did.  She'd kept her mouth shut and just looked the fuck around.

The guards were split up right now with one youngish chunky white guy in the back, one older and also chunky white guy in the front and the other one, a youngish thin black dude who should have been doing a walk up and down the aisle had gone to the cockpit to chat with the driver, a black girl who looked kind of cute for a prison pig.  The one in the back was fucking with his I-phone.  The older white one in the front was reading an honest-to-White-Aryan-Jesus paper version of Freedom Watch magazine, the Nazi cunt.

As for her fellow prisoners, except for the beat-up guy, Melissa hadn't really focused attention on them yet.  And the beat-up guy was stupid enough to let himself get beat up, so kind of a why bother.

A light buzzing noise from front show that the Nazi cunt had dropped his mag and gone nighty-night.  Phone dude was still texting like shit to somebody.

And across the aisle was one other captive, a tallish blonde girl who looked a little pissed off.  Even in the shitty prison garb, Melissa decided she wouldn't mind getting some Orange Is the New Black action with the blonde, who was a kind of hot Melissa didn't mind at all.  So, since the guards were otherwise distracted, Melissa decided to make contact.

"Hey, I'm Mel," Melissa stage-whispered to the blonde as she hooked a thumb toward herself.  "What're you in for?"
This message was last edited by the player at 00:53, Wed 30 Oct 2019.

She glanced up at the petite Asian.  And, her impression remained the same as when she'd first glimpsed the girl's face.  That she was familiar. From somewhere.  But she couldn't place it then, and still could not, now.

"Nora," she offered in return, deciding quickly how little or much she wished to say, with the guards in earshot.   Of course, they might well have read data files concerning their prisoners.   But, she didn't wish to delineate why she'd once been dangerous, in case they had not.    She shrugged, smiled faintly, replied in her accented English-

"Being politically incorrect.  Breaking Instagram's terms and condition.  Healing without a license.  Not sleeping with the right people. Eh, not in that order." 

It was both facetious as well as mostly true.   And left out the incidental violence.

"How 'bout you-?"   

"Got greedy and got stupid," Melissa replied with a shrug.  "Wasn't even a power thing.  Got arrested and tested and there you go."

The other girl's accent was... Italian.  And not American Italian.  Actual Italy Italian.  Skating had taken her a lot of places to hear a lot of accents.  For her own part, Melissa's parents had pushed assimilation pretty hard, so her speech was pretty much pure California.  Though she could do a decent Vietnamese one, which she thought of as her "me-love-you-long-time" voice thanks to her dad's weird obsession with Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket

Melissa scanned the area again.  Still flirting, texting and snoring, she noted.  Well, the two in the cabin were texting and snoring.  The one who went into the driver's area hasn't come out yet and it was probably difficult to fuck and drive.  So, flirting, most likely.

"Somebody rat on you?" Melissa asked Nora.

"And healing?  Cool.  I'm a frigid bitch myself," Melissa told her, put a slight emphasis on "Frigid."

At this initial impression, Mel seemed to possess a certain amount of spirit, Nora noted.  In spite of her plan to just keep to herself, it was a little heartening to speak to someone.   Who didn't strike her as broken, nutty, or stupid.    Generally, it took an intelligent person to realize that they'd done something stupid.

"No, nobody ratted. Not exactly. They tried to extort me.   And, I resisted that.  In a stupid way." 

She believed she understood what was being alluded to, in terms of Mel's power.   Like an Asian Elsa?   That sounded promising.    If freedom were somehow attained. She realized Mel was obliquely eying the guards.  Whom were not exactly the cream of the crop.    But, given the circumstance, it wasn't like they needed to be.

"So. You know anything about this 're-education' we're supposed to get?"  She asked it of Mel, but audibly enough that the guards could overhear.    Just in case any were inclined to intimidate, boast, or otherwise wag the jaw, and supply info which might be useful.

There was a tense moment and Melissa felt a chill up her spine that was intensely unwelcome despite the dry heat.  But then... texting.  Snoring.  Melissa pursed her lips and glared at the Nora, tilting her head toward the older guard in dreamland.

"Jesus fuck!" she whispered quietly but harshly.  "Keep it down.  The sleepy old fart up front?  He's a Sons of Freedom fan.  Got the Freedom Watch mag and everything."

"You really wanna wake his Hitler Senior ass up from sweet dreaming of jackin' it to Patriot's corpse?" Melissa asked her, then nodded her head toward the injured man.  "You want us to end up like that shit head?"

Melissa deliberately shut her mouth a waited a few second, letting her own emotions dim slightly before she brought shit down on them.

"No, I don't know about their camps... But.  But my granddad got my grandmom out before the end of the war," Melissa whispered to Nora.  "The, uh, Vietnam war.  But he did time in their reeducation camps.  A couple years.  Came over on a boat and they had my dad."

"I never got a chance to meet him," Melissa told Nora.  "The camps were bad.  They fucked his health.  He died when my dad was like 15, way before me.  Figure if shit like that is where we're headed, we best take a fucking detour, ASAP.  I might have a way, but it's a super-long shot."

"Too soon for details," Melissa cautioned and then indicated the other Empowered.  "What's your take on the rest of these mopes?"

"What's your take on the rest of these mopes?"
This message was last edited by the player at 22:46, Thu 31 Oct 2019.

Nora's voice dropped to a quieter tone. "I am sorry about your grandfather. Sounds like a brave, kind man.  As for shit-head, I believe he ran afoul of today's finest power-dampener technology.   Works real well. Got rewarded, for trying to prove otherwise.  That's why they don't give two shits about us merely talking.    Some of them might be cruel in a petty way, but many don't see the need, is my experience so far.  Some of them, at their level at least, are  just drawing a paycheck, waving the flag, because it's part of what they get paid for.   Or, naive enough to think of themselves as the good-guys."    Nora glanced briefly in the guards' direction, then again back at Mel.

"Which mopes?" she asked, addressing the question.  "Other guards, or fellow prisoners? I think not so much difference.   We are all just pawns, in a bigger game.  Just like in the war, that screwed your grandpa.  Little pawns on each side die. While a sovereign gains in power. It is good to be king, eh?"

Naturally, she wasn't going to inquire about Mel's 'way', but she was much curious.   As well as very reluctant to attempt anything at the wrong time.   Which was probably right now.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:45, Thu 31 Oct 2019.

"The prisoners," Melissa quietly replied, adding a mental Duh!

"I don't want to move too soon either, but I think if we get where we're going, we lose options," she noted.  "You know how on those Dateline murder-porn shows on HLN and shit the murderee gets nabbed, taken somewhere else and whacked?  We've been nabbed.  They're takin' us someplace else.  You really wanna stick around for the whacking?"

"So, thoughts?" Melissa asked Nora, examining the other prisoners herself.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:16, Sat 02 Nov 2019.

Nora did her own mental 'Duh' once Mel began citing television as a basis for planning and estimation.     Seriously-?

Not that she thought their being killed at the destination was by any means impossible.   It had crossed her mind more than once.  But it was an obvious possibility.    She didn't need a TV show to fire her imagination.

"Being stuck in the desert with active dampers is like suicide, not escape.  If our powers are working, that'd be different.  If you can make ice, then you also make water.   And, as far as transport, I don't need a vehicle to fly."  Her eyes flicked briefly toward the other prisoners.

"I know nothing of any of them.   Power, personality, whether or no their spirit is broken.    Or, if they actually are psychotic or criminal."  She shrugged again.

"I've done nothing but go over and over ideas to get out!    Aside from stupid crap, like playing ill, that only works in fiction, I can think of nothing.  So what about this 'way' of yours?" 

Melissa took another sidelong glance around.  Sleeping, texting.  Flirting/fucking?

She leaned in as close to Nora as her restraints would allow and softly whispered, "Got a copper IUD up my hooch.  We could use it to short out a power inbitor but I don't know how.  Especially not how to do it without electrocuting somebody.

Then Melissa slowly moved back and took a long, careful look at the other prisoners, hoping somebody at least seemed to be a nerd.

The door separating the flight control area opened and a man stepped out. He wasn't someone you've seen on the trip so far, so he must have been up front the entire time. He's got a streamlined combat armor on, in a deep red trimmed in yellow and gold.

The guards have snapped to attention, and the one guy's magazine seems to have disappeared.

"Well now, we are almost at our destination and I wanted to let you all know how this is going to work." He looks over the line of people, almost casually. It seems like this isn't the first time he's done this.

"You are being escorted to the Death Valley Empowered Holding Unit, where you will be spending quite some time. As you already know, you're surrounded by desert and no good way to escape. Which brings me to the point of the trip where someone decides to do something stupid and get themselves, and potentially others, killed. So I'll try the blunt approach. Those fancy arm units you have on have enough juice in them to fry a bull from raw to well done in less time then it took me to say that. You try and pop one open, you die. You try and rush a guard, the kill switch activates. Then you die. We're not here to play games, we're not here to babysit. We're dropping you off, then we're leaving. Our pilot has orders that if she hears any of us cry out, she hears a gunshot, she sees through the cameras that you are up to no good, she hits the big button and you all die. We are not taking any chances. There's only a few minutes left, and this is where people get desperate."

The prisoner who had been beaten stands up and pulls back a fist that looks more like a ham then an appendage, stepping forward with a roar of rage. There's a sharp popping noise, and he screams as he pitches face first to the deck, smoke beginning to seep out in bits from his arm device.

The man shakes his head. "Always one."

One of the guards secures his rifle, grabs the body, and drags it slowly out the back.

"I'm assuming one was enough?" he asks with a raised eyebrow. Usually after one goes the rest settle down, but he's seen enough to know that sometimes another thinks he'll be the one that manages it. The other Empowered there just put their heads down, not wanting to look at where the body was, or the man who is in charge.

Okay, well that butt-fucks Plan A, doesn't it?  Melissa thought as Guard Texter dragged the well-done corpse down the aisle, letting everyone get a good look (and smell).  Nobody puked or shat themsleves, though it looked like it was a near thing for Texter Guard.

The commander waited perhaps expecting (hoping?) somebody else would volunteer to be the second barbecued entree.  Of the guards she'd seen so far, he was the one who scared Melissa the most.  Because of the boredom.

Melissa recalled one video she'd seen that PETA had taken in some meat plant in France.  A bunch of workers stood around a rotating conveyor belt area filled with tiny yellow ducklings.  They'd grab a duckling and examine it to determine its sex.  Male ducklings were placed in one area for further processing.  Female ducklings were tossed into a vat with a hole that dropped into an area where the females were chopped and ground (alive) into bits.  The workers weren't even malicious as they toss the terrified baby ducks to their deaths.  Just bored people doing their work.

This commander was a bored guy doing his work and he'd kill the lot of them as swiftly and casually as those French workers killed the baby ducks.

Aside from which, Nora aside the rest of the "Empowered" seemed as worthless in terms of saving themselves as those ducklings had been.  And the ducklings had at least been cute.

So, much as it sucked, Melissa was going to have to wait and hope for a better opportunity.  Or at least better potential co-conspirators.