Excerpt: Catalyst

“Next stop, Fyrestone Depot. Time to gather up your stuff,” The grizzly man flicked the bobble head on his dashboard and chuckled, knocking over a bottle of booze. “Who’s gettin’ off the bus?”
The driver looked back at each of us through the large, grimy, rectangular mirror above his head. He paused on each of us, eyes traveling up and down, making judgments and building his own stories for us. He decided first to interrogate the strange man sitting across from me; he had earlier introduced himself as Mordecai.
“You, with the sniper rifle and the crazy mask? You look like a Truxican wrestler moonlighting as a dominatrix man!” His description of the hunter was a little rough but Mordecai did not protest. He was the quietest man I had ever met. The only thing that he had said the entire bus ride was his name.
“And you, soldier man? Are those armor pieces from the Crimson Lance you’re wearing?” I had no reason to trust any of these guys, but this soldier, Roland as he had told us, an African American man with a constant scowl on his face, was a former member of the Crimson Lance. I stared at him intensely, trying to fathom his intentions. A Lance soldier sitting on a bus with a bunch of mercenary treasure hunters that were out to take the Crimson Lance’s prize right out from underneath them…that wasn’t suspicious at all? As an escapee from the Lance’s laboratories, I wondered if he recognized me, if he knew me.
“And what’s your story, young lady? What can you do?” He held back a chuckle. “Ah, perhaps you can bake us all a wonderful cake!” At this, he could no longer contain his amusement and burst into a small fit of laughter.
My anger flared as the driver continued to laugh, and, as usual when my emotion got out of control, I momentarily left that dimension, glowing a fluorescent blue against the dingy bus seat. This bus driver was the most sexist pig I had ever met if he actually believed that all I could do was bake a cake. If I wouldn’t have gotten my anger under control, I would’ve baked him. Everything was alright though, I reassured myself, because while the driver wasn’t looking, I stole our bus fare back.
My story? I suppose you wanted to know how I got here and why I am the way I am. It all started a few months ago, when the Crimson Lance had discovered Pandora’s “great potential” for colonization.