Never the Same - Team Crafted Stories (DISCONTINUED)

Part I Chapter 7: The Mutant

Quentin's POV

I'm not a fish.

Hey, what's up? I'm Quentin Backers, or HuskyMudkipz. I'm twenty-one years old. I'm a part of Team Crafted, and I'm the only mutant on the Team.

A Mudkip mutant, to be exact.

But before I get into the whole story about how I became a mutant, I need to tell you more about myself. I lived with my family, in a small village in the Edenton Swamp. For some reason, we always lived alone. But we had a good life. Our houses were on one island, and the island right next to it was where our crops grew and the animals lived. Pretty sweet, huh?

My family was pretty darn big. I had a lot of aunts, uncles, and cousins living in the same village as me. My twin brother Brandon and I don't look anything alike - or at least, we didn't while I was still a human. Brandon and I weren't really the siblings that were always fighting; we were more like friends. And then there were the millions of cousins. Well, there weren't really millions of them, but you get what I'm trying to say. I barely could keep all their names straight, and I can't remember any of them now.

My aunts and uncles were from both my dad's and mom's sides. Funny really, because my dad died in a zombie attack when Brandon and I were really little. I don't remember him at all. My mom was the one who raised Brandon and me by herself. My dad had three sisters and two brothers, and my mom had four brothers and two sisters. So we had a lot of family around us.

One of my favorite hobbies was mechanics, a skill that's useful to me today as a part of Team Crafted. I played around with spare machine parts that no one used. I made a lot of gadgets, but half of them didn't work. The ones that worked were the ones that could be useful someday, like a radio communicator. If you ask me what was my favorite thing to make and use, it's TNT. I made a huge crater behind the village from my TNT explosions. It's still there. I made a huge mess with it. And you shouldn't trust me with any explosives, by the way.

As I grew up, I always enjoyed myself, playing in the swamps and exploring with Brandon and my cousins. Since there were so many kids, I didn't have to do much work on the farms. The older kids handled that. When I would turn ten, then I would get more responsibility on the farms.

But I didn't spend my tenth birthday in the village.

When I was eight years old, I was kidnapped. I was sent to the Mineature Labs, the place that changed my life forever.

A few days after I arrived, another boy was thrown into my cell with me. His name was Dakota Anderson. We became friends almost immediately. We talked nonstop, and more than once, the guard outside told us to shut up. The scientists took him away and performed experiments on him every day. At the end of each day, Dakota would come back to the cell crying and screaming from his new wounds. It was painful to watch. And it was scary because I knew that eventually, the exact same thing would happen to me.

I was in that cell for a long time before anything happened to me - five years, I found out from Ian later on.

The guard to my cell was a boy who was a little bit older than me. One day, while Dakota was gone, he got so bored that he started talking to himself out loud. I'd respond to his questions because I had nothing better to do. He'd snap at me a few times, but then, a few days later, we started having actual conversations. His name was Ian MacLeary, and his dad was the one who ran this lab of torture. Our conversations didn't consist of much at first, mostly Ian making fun of me because I was a prisoner here.

The days passed. One day, Dakota told me he could escape the Labs, because the scientists had forgotten to reattach his tracker. He escaped, and I never saw him again. I was sad to see him go, because that meant I'd spend my days alone in the cell, waiting to transform, with no human company except the guard boy outside who hated me.