Kai (10 months ago)

When he first met those two, Jay had just been kidnapped by some guys in weird robes, so he was just a tad more unstable than normal, with headaches caused by the memories in his head that didn't make any sense, with voices accompanying said memories, none of them him, but all the same, very overwhelming. He covered himself up with whatever he could find once he realized that his powers worked through skin contact, but with Jay gone, there wasn't much that could be done about the voices and contradicting memories.

That was why, as soon as the one with the white hair accidentally bumped into him when he was looking at hunting knives (it was a hunting store), he had the other teenager by the arm, holding him against the floor with a hunting knife against his throat.

"What's wrong with you?!" the other boy yelled, trying to pull Kai away from his friend, only to get stabbed in the shoulder for his efforts.

"One more word, and the knife goes in your buddy's head next," Kai hissed as the other boy screamed in pain.

He couldn't have the two of them freaking out. He needed a good knife, and if the people at the store thought that he was insane or something, they wouldn't let him buy one.

Maybe he should get two. Maybe more.

Kai tended to lose his knives by forgetting where he put them, forgetting to take it out after he stabbed something, and sometimes, Jay would take them from him and refuse to give them back. He needed to arm himself if he was going to go after whoever took Jay this time.

He discovered their base of operations, with guards in long, white robes, armed with machine guns, always standing by, always ready to attack anyone who tried to break in. He in the shadows of the weird collection of buildings, watching them and watching for a place to sneak in and get back the one person who could help him.

He almost forgot that he was still in the hunting store, but thankfully, his hostage kicked him in the stomach to remind him. It would've hurt more if Kai didn't wear that bulletproof vest he stripped off that one cop who tried to take him in earlier, but it still surprised him enough for him to briefly let go of the white-haired teen.

In order to keep them both down, even for a little while, Kai smacked the guy who kicked him against the floor, hard enough to knock him out, then he used the duct tape sitting on the shelf by him to keep the other guy from screaming some more, wrapping him and his friend in a silver cocoon before going to the teller to buy an armful of knives.

"Sheez, but you're really going hunting," the lumberjack-like man with a beard like a jungle commented when he saw the knives. "How many guys are you going with?"

"Twenty-one," Kai grunted from behind the scarf obscuring his face.

"Large party…" the man muttered as he rang up the costs.

"Huntin' monsters," Kai gruffly told the man. "Going to kill 'em all."

"Then you're going to need some traps and rope," the man said helpfully. "Do you have a gun or do you need to check out those too?"

"Traps and rope," Kai told the man, doing a pretty good job of fooling the man into thinking that he was older than he really was. "Crossbow."

He considered a gun, a good one, but the man might ask him for a license, and sadly, Kai didn't have one. A crossbow was a much safer bet, and he knew how to use one.

"Bolts?"

"We're not going to shoot the knives," Kai told the man. "Gimme fifty."

"With the knives, the crossbow and the bolts," the man said, as he punched the numbers into the calculator, "it's three-hundred bits."

Kai pulled out his money-sock and emptied it out on in front of the surprised man. Coins, bills and a couple of stamps and photos fell out. He counted the money out for the man, then he shoved the rest back into the sock, putting it away in his coat pocket again.

He ignored the confused lumberjack-man as he left the store with his purchases and instead, walked straight to his bike, the bike he got from the same cop he took the bulletproof vest from, and put them in the side-car with the rest of his stuff, stuff that would usually include Jay.

He re-painted the bike and the helmet, as it used to be a police bike, turning it from blue and white to red and orange blue with blue flames going up the sides. The licence plate, he switched with another bike long the way to avoid getting caught, much to Jay's telepathic protests.

But he kept the siren.

It make him feel… cool… when he had the lights flashing as he chased after whatever bad guy the mysterious employer paid him to go after.

Jay changed the colours so they would flicker all the brightness of a Christmas tree when Kai turned the sirens on, which was considerably less cool, but kept the origins of the bike from being discovered.

Kai locked the sidecar and started to drive off, only to find himself grabbed from behind by the guy who he knocked against the floor like a hammer. At first he thought that it was Jay, who had escaped from his captors and somehow found him, but sadly, he still had to go up that mountain to get his little friend back.

Without giving the strange boy even the slightest bit of warning, Kai started trying to throw the other boy off his bike, driving as if he wanted his non-existent licence revoked.

Damn, but this guy could hold on to a person.

"Why! Aren't! You! Falling! Off!"

"You have to apologise for stabbing my friend!" the boy screamed in-between all the twists and turns the bike made. "Where did you even get your license?!"

Kai just laughed at that question.

He could see the other boy turn pale behind him. "Could you stop so I can get off this death-trap, please?"

"Did I ever strike you as the kind of guy who stops just because you said please?" he asked, raising his eyebrow in amusement. "You want to get off, you jump."

"What?!"

"Or, I can throw you off."

Then, something weird happened.

The plants growing along the sides of the road started moving, reaching out to him, trying to grab him.

Kai dodged the plants really well, actually. Maybe it was his own skills, maybe it was the skills he copied off of someone he touched in the past, but he got through with very little trouble, which seemed to upset the guy who was clinging on to him for dear life, which would end if he didn't let go soon.

"My friend is injured!" the boy screamed. "Because of you!"

"Is he dead?" Kai asked, slowing down a little. "If he's dead, I'll stop for a second, but if he's alive, I'm going to throw you off and let your puny little human neck break."

Kai stopped the bike a little too quickly and a little too suddenly for his unwanted and uncomfortable passenger to hold on tight enough, causing the poor guy to go flying through the air, saved from death by the quick thinking of a nearby tree.

"You're not human?" the strange boy asked, climbing down from the tree that caught him.

Kai climbed off the bike, not answering the boy.

Not sure what the answer was.

"My friend is okay, he was just a little surprised at being stabbed," the boy provided. "I did say that I was sorry for walking into you. There was no need to attack either of us."

There really wasn't. All Kai had to do was the breathing exercises Jay made him do whenever he was doing spring cleaning in Kai's head, and he wouldn't have gone into kill-mode the second he was touched, and they didn't even make skin contact!

Muttering something that probably didn't sound like an apology, Kai considered taking the strange boy back to the store where they met, so he could be with his injured friend and maybe help him, but he really didn't have the time.

He got back on his bike and started driving again, hoping that he wouldn't be too late.

He ignored the voice of the strange boy he was leaving behind in the snowy cold who was yelling at him for leaving him behind to die, and he ignored the strange memories and voices in his head, trying their darnest to make him loose his temper.

Usually, Jay would keep them calm, so Kai rarely let him go too far out of his sight, but about two weeks ago, the smaller boy was out of his sight for five very short minutes while they were doing grocery shopping in a way only two teenage boys with no adults could do.

He heard the screams too late.

Now, he was knocking out a cultist who he managed to lure a little bit too far for the others to hear him screaming so he could steal his hooded robe, which would allow him to blend in with the group.

It appeared that the man didn't wear anything underneath his robes but his boxers, and Kai wasn't a monster, so he put the man in a housecoat he took from Ronin last time they met up to keep him warm while he was tied to the bike, which, in turn, was chained to a very sturdy elm.

Kai was at the entrance of the base within the blink of an eye.

The guards let him in without a word.

He noticed the cameras.

He noticed the gasoline bottles standing ready.

He heard the cultists talking to each other, in low voices, some concerned, others less concerned, about the fact that they were going to be setting someone on fire later that night.

"It's just a little boy," a female voice whispered to her friend, "and we're going to kill him for something that he can't even help…"

"It's a monster pretending to be human," the woman's friend shot back, unaware that Kai was eavesdropping on them. "They say that there are many more like him. Other… unnatural… things… If we kill them while they're still young, then their unnaturalness won't be able to stay in Ninjago. Those "ninjas", they're no different from this thing, they're just worse at hiding it."

Kai ran on, knowing that Jay had to be kept in the room that was better guarded than the others.

A memory told him that the reason he was pushing so hard to safe the younger boy was because of another person he couldn't save, his sister, the memory provided, who was taken by skeletons right before the stress of being nearly choked to death by their leader, Samukai, caused his powers to awaken.

The guards were taken down with short, quick stabs with the knives he brought, and anyone who tried to stop him had a knife thrown at them with pinpoint accuracy.

The cultists either didn't realize that he would run out of knives at one point (after all, he only brought thirty-eight), or they decided not to risk getting killed by the final knife in his arsenal, because pretty soon, they stopped coming to him to try and pull him away.

Inside the room, which he entered much more easily than he expected, there was some kind of pavilion, bug enough to fit all the cultists living on the base, with a stake in the middle of it.

In the corner, there was a cage that either held a mid-sized dog, or a regular-sized Jay.

It was empty.

Neither dog not Jay could be found inside the cage. The stake was soaked with gasoline, but unused.

"You're his friend, aren't you?" the same soft female voice from before asked, startling Kai. "The one who was going to come and get him out. He told me all about you."

The woman looked nervous, so Kai didn't doubt her. "What happened to him?"

"He… he got away." The woman gave him an obviously forced smile. "You missed him by one hour. He didn't tell me where he was going. I think he went looking for you."

Then Kai hit the hard ground.

There was a flash of steel, blood, and then, some familiar screaming.

The boy from the store. The guy who stowed away on his bike's buddy.

In fact, both of them were there.

The woman fled the moment Kai threw the one he stabbed through the wall. The other one was distracted by the need to help his friend, giving Kai the perfect chance to escape through the perfect-sized hole on the wall, worried about his own friend, hurrying to find him before he was lost forever.

It's a little hard to explain how exactly the element of Amber works, since the show doesn't really explain it. I think of it as similar to Rogue from the X-men series, but without accidentally killing or hurting people when it's used. Please enjoy!