by Laura Kinney » Wed Nov 18, 2015 7:08 pm
X-23 pulled the collar of her jacket closer around herself to keep the rain from getting underneath. Just because she doesn't get sick doesn't mean she enjoys cold water running down her back. At this point she's been traveling for three days. She'd started out just hitching a ride on a passenger train to France and Germany. She hadn't bothered to buy a ticket, instead just relying on her instincts to avoid the conductors. It wasn't so much that she didn't have money (although she didn't actually bring any along) but rather that this felt more comfortable. It was a nice break from the school and she had to get into character a little anyway.
In Berlin she'd slept in the trainyard before hopping onto a cargo train towards Poland. She had trouble looking too haggard, any bruise or bump just disappearing within minutes anyway, so she went out of her way to get dirty instead. Torn clothes, dirty hair, worn out boots. She had to cram weeks worth of homelessness into a couple days to at least look kind of convincing. She dumped out her bag and repacked everything a bunch of times, just to make sure it was a proper mess. In the outskirts of Warsaw she traded some of her stuff with a bunch of drifters who looked at her like she was nuts but didn't question getting some halfway decent things in exchange for a banged up crap like a cup and canteen.
She was systematically shedding the luxuries of life at the school. It was a little frightening how easy it came to her, but with it came the feeling of having no one to be responsible for but herself. It was kind of liberating in a strange way. She knew how to handle this kind of thing, even if it wasn't particularly fun. The fun parts were at the end, or so she was hoping. In Belarus she started actively looking for refugees, other mutants that were looking to take Russia up on their oh-so-generous offer of asylum for prosecuted mutants. It didn't take too long to find a group in Vitsyebsk that was about to make the trek up to the border and now here she was. Surrounded by chainlink-fences on either side as they are waiting to be processed through the border. There's a distinct lack of barbed wire on top of the fence, probably in an attempt to look less imposing as to not discourage people, but she can see the spots where it used to be attached. Not to mention the guards are still carrying automatic weapons, even if they're trying not to flaunt them. There are a lot of them too, at least twenty she's spotted so far for maybe forty or fifty mutants that have gathered here. Enough that there were bound to be at least a couple that had the potential to be dangerous. Not counting herself, of course.
The lines moves slowly but after several hours she's finally at the entrance and the guard waves her inside.
"Name, nationality, mutation?" the man reads from a list with a thick accent, brandishing a pen.
"Matylda Gwozdek." she says with her best innocent-and-slightly-scared voice. She hates it but you can't argue with results. And she's dealt with enough people like this to know that they just love the idea of protecting poor little girls. Especially if they, as she suspects, believe what they're doing here is helping people. "American, but they wouldn't give me a passport, my grandparents came from--"
"Mutation?" the man harshly interrupts her, simply repeating the question.
"I'm strong and I heal..." No reason not try and fabricate something she can't prove if need be.
"Fill these out, you'll be taken to a refugee camp for further processing." He assembles a bunch of green papers he hands her along with a pen and gestures for her to leave through one of the doors at the other end of the room. Once outside again guards are sorting people based on the color of their paperworks into different buses and once hers fills up they're on their way. The bus is a repurposed prison transport and while most people might not notice, the cage for the passengers has definitely been reinforced. There also aren't very many people in the bus with her when it rumbles to life and heads north...