Chapter three ~ Ages come...

I could think of several choice words right then. I'm sure your eyeballs would melt out of your sockets if I put them here.
The kid at the other end of the alley wasn't as considerate. "Holy ****!" He stumbled backward, turning as if to run away. I didn't give him the chance.
Just as he reached the end of the alley, a black, whip-like strand wrapped around his wrist, yanking him back toward me. At the same time, I grabbed a few strands of rope from a dumpster and tied up the unconscious terrorist girl on the ground, placing her bag out of reach, before catching the boy's arm in my grip and hauling him off and down the other end of the alley. It was a dead end, of course, but a fire escape provided another route. I whipped my tail up and jerked the ladder down, then shoved the boy ahead of me, ignoring his protests. Halfway up the ladder, he turned around and tried to punch me. I simply stepped aside, and thrust my tail out to keep him from falling over the edge of the iron structure.
Finally, we reached the roof. My tail whipped behind me like a velociraptor's, keeping my balance. It even morphed feathers on the end, for a few moments. I marched him over to an air conditioner and plopped him down, before beginning to pace in front of him. "What am I going to do about this?" I muttered.
"Hey!" It was probably the third or fourth time he said it when I finally acknowledged him. "What?" I asked, without stopping. My tail was morphing constantly in it's mercury-like way, from a spiny, dinosaurian appendage to a long, thin, snakelike thing. It even turned into a tree root for a moment.
He seemed surprised to have gotten my attention. "Uh... what... what are you going to do with me? What ARE you? What is that... thing?"
I flicked it, seeing that it had become it's second most-used form, which was a lion's tail. The tip of it twitched. I sighed. "That's my tail. And as for you, kid, I have no idea what I'm going to do with you. I can't let this thing," I wriggled the end of it under his nose, watching him go cross-eyed, "become common knowledge. I suppose I could escape any laboratories they put me in, but it's really not worth it to me to spend the next sixty years or so in hiding. It sucks." I plopped down on a vent across from him, placing my chin on my fist. "So... I guess you're just going to have to stick with me for awhile... at least until I can trust that you won't squawk on me."
The boy's eyes widened, then narrowed. "You can't do that! I have rights! And who are you calling 'kid', anyway?! I'm probably older than you by at least two years!"
I chuckled, humorlessly. "Rights, eh? A long time ago, people didn't have rights unless they had a lot of money.... come to think of it, that hasn't changed much. You rich?"
The question seemed to catch him off guard. "Uh... well, I'm not poor, if that's what you're asking. I've never really had trouble doing what I wanted..."
I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, you're rich. It was a rhetorical question. I already knew the answer."
The boy blinked, then glared at me. "You're avoiding my other question. How old are you?"
I shrugged. "Why does that matter?"
"You talk about 'how things were' a long time ago like you were there! You said you didn't want to go through sixty years of hiding from the authorities again." He glared at me. "But you couldn't be more than nineteen or twenty!"
I stared off into the distance. "Hmmm... nineteen or twenty... I can barely remember..." I snapped my attention back to him. "Well, you're not wrong. I DO remember those things. I'm a bit older than I look." He scoffed.
I twitched a shoulder. "Believe it or don't. It doesn't make any differen-"
"Yeah, but HOW old are you exactly?" He interrupted.
I glared at him. "You don't give up easily, do you?" He shook his head, mulishly. I sighed. "Fine. I'm not sure exactly what year it was that I was born, so I'm not exactly sure how old I really am... it's ceased to matter to me anyway. But it's somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand."