1.7 – Awkward Topics

Wendy lurched forward at the unexpected lack of resistance, and caught herself with a hand that went through my knee and caught the edge of the chair under me.

“The hell?” She said in surprise, drawing back. “Wait, you – you are a spy. I’ve just told you my name and now I can’t hurt you. Fuck.”

I half heard her. I was looking at the wall behind her and thinking about how interesting rock looked, and how I’d never really looked at it before.

Pay attention!

“What? Uh, spy? No, no I’m not. I’m sorry, I didn’t know…” I looked down at the arms that were attached to me – that was how I was thinking of them in my detached state, rather than as belong to me – and I and noticed how I could see the floor through them, like they were partially translucent. Looking closely I could see shadows of the ulna and the radius, and the tunnel-like network of arteries and veins leading into one another around them. It was so interesting I sort of drifted off from whatever I had meant to say.

“You mean this hasn’t happened to you before?” She asked, incredulous. I’d moved on to thinking about how my cheek didn’t hurt, and wondered why I couldn’t feel pain if my nerves worked enough that I could still move around.

“Hello?” Wendy asked, after several moments passed.

I started, and my attention focused back on the here and now again. I slid out of the fugue, and gripped onto the way thoughts usually flow.

“I’m sorry, that was…weird.” I began, and then I became aware of Wendy’s incredulous look. “I mean yes, that hasn’t happened before. Although some…other things, have.” I hedged. “I’m glad to finally be sure I wasn’t imagining it, though. Well, I suppose I could be imagining you, but…”

“Wait, wait.” Wendy interrupted. “Do you have any idea how rare people like us are? When did this start happening to you?”

“Uh, yesterday.” I said, suddenly feeling inexplicably sheepish under Wendy’s scrutiny.

“Yesterday?!” Wendy shouted in disbelief, turning away. “The chances of that…”

A portly man sporting blue jeans, a ‘Keep Portland Weird’ T-Shirt and a brown goatee rounded the corner of a column and into sight. Randall, I presumed. “Maybe it’s not as spectacularly unlikely as you think, Wenn. I know I made a mess and attracted attention before I figured out what my power was and what was going on. We’re both lucky we didn’t get scooped up by Haas before we learned how to keep under the radar.” He smiled at me. “You, too.”

“Haas?” I asked. “As in David Haas, director of the FBI?”

Randall nodded. “He seems obsessed with the ‘threat’ of people who develop powers, like us. Or maybe that’s just an act to justify forcibly controlling us all. We’re lucky we didn’t have a very public coming out. You either.  I hope.”

“We try to find people before they do.” Wendy said. “We even made a trip to California three weeks ago to try to catch someone before they were whisked away by the FBI and ‘recruited’. But we’re rarely successful.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Randall said, pulling a chair out from under a neighboring workbench with the screech of rubberized feet on rock and sitting down across from me. “I want to know what else you can do! You said there were other things?”

“Oooh, yes! What else?” Wendy chipped in, the picture of eager curiosity.  A powers nerd; it made sense, considering.

Thoughts of my time in the hospital elevator in a different body came to mind, and I blushed. “I, uh. I don’t know that I want to talk about it.”

“It’s OK. You can tell us, come on!” Wendy implored. I fell for the puppy dog eyes.

“Well,” I started, trying to gather a coherent story that wasn’t horribly embarrassing. “I can run…”

“Oh, subsonic or supersonic?” Randall asked, leaning in with sudden interest on his features.

“Subsonic. Very subsonic. I just run like normal.”

“That’s…that’s not a power!” Wendy said.

“Except that now I never get tired. Ever.” I paused. “Well, I just tested it,” I corrected myself, “And I sprinted most of the day without getting winded. As long as I concentrated on the flow of the movement, that is.”

“That doesn’t seem very…” Randall began.

“Power-ey.” Wendy finished.

It wouldn’t seem that way if you were used to being normal.

“Uh, before this I couldn’t run at all. Too sick.”

“Oh.” Wendy said.

“So…” I started to fill the awkward silence, before wind began to whip and coalesce behind Wendy.

“Boo!” it said in a familiar female voice.

1.6 – Surprises

I turned around. My gas-operated friend from the night prior with the nuclear meltdown problem had come out of the same manhole as before, all of thirty feet away. I hadn’t realized I was so close. I had thought about peeking in while I was on my run, but decided I didn’t have the nerve.

I was just asked a question.

“Oh, right.” I said. “Um, bleeding, but not shot, I think.”

“Thank goodness.” It said, its word choice out sync with the neo-Victorian gentleman’s speech of the night prior. “I have medical supplies downstairs. You already know it’s there, so I suppose there’s no harm in showing you.”

I touched my bleeding face and winced at the contact. “Not radioactive, I hope.”

“No, no. That was fixed about an hour after I beat my retreat, and there doesn’t seem to be any lingering secondary radioactivity from the neutron bombardment. If anything, the medical supplies should be nice and sterile now.”

I sighed.

~ ~ ~

The passage definitely wasn’t a regular storm drain, despite the manhole we passed through on the way down. The walls looked like they were ruddy rock pressed smoothly into shape, not the gray of municipal concrete. A sturdy steel floor grate seemed to grow from the rock, allowing stray water to pool under the pathway.

I followed the clanking footsteps, and we went some fifty feet forward and slightly down. Dim orange overhead lights illuminated the tunnel enough to see by. The path ended in a heavy metal door that looked like it belonged on a bank vault. As we approached it quietly swung open for us.

Someone took the care to counterweight that. My mind noted.

Beyond the door a grand chamber opened up, with plentiful white light illuminating the cathedral-like space, replete with pillars and vaulted ceilings, all of the same pressed rock as the entry tunnel. It was cluttered. Tables covered with electrical and mechanical components everywhere, I saw at least one pile of pizza boxes, and what looked like a milling lathe and a C&C machine that was busy carving something out of a block of steel, the metallic squeal quieted by the plexiglass but still audible.

“Over here.” It said, leading me to a side table covered with neatly labeled tupperware boxes and a chair. “Have a seat while I take this off.”

“You aren’t seriously going to show a stranger your face as well as where we are, are you?” Came a young man’s voice echoing from somewhere else in the maze of pillars as I sat down.

“I don’t think he’s a spy.” It said as hissing gas vented from joints in copious quantities.

“He could have had himself mugged for show.” He said.

“If he’s a spy and had himself mugged for show on the offchance that we would interfere rather than just forcing his way in, then he’s such a brilliant spy that he’s wasting his time working for the government.”

What was now clearly a steel suit opened up in the front like a cabinet, with the head tilting up and back to provide egress. The rider’s shoed feet stepped out from their position above the suit’s backwards knees, explaining why the whole suit was so tall. And I was surprised to see that the rider was a curly blonde-haired she in her twenties.

“Misdirection.” She said with a grin, seeing my surprised expression. “If the authorities are looking for a ‘super villain’ man who is seven feet tall with backwards knees, I’m the last person they’ll suspect when I’m outside of the suit.” She went through the tupperware containers, pulling out tweezers, a sterile cloth, and a bottle of isopropanol, and had at my bloody cheek full of pebbles, taking them out one by one. “And the extra leg means I can kick harder or fall further, and have the pneumatics cushion it.”

That would work. But what about the main problem with any sort of powered exoskeleton?

So I always wondered…” I began, trying not to wince and thereby give her a moving target. “Doesn’t the power to weight ratio of batteries make powered armor impractical? Maybe if you had an engine, but I didn’t hear one…”

“Oh, my power is to make steam.” She said. “An old boiler in my apartment building exploded and instead of getting scalded, it didn’t hurt me. Ever since I could just make steam out of thin air. Couldn’t tell you why.”

“Huh.” I said. “So that’s why you use gas pistons in your suit; you can power them without having to lug a power source around.”

“Why don’t you just give away all our secrets while you’re at it?” Shouted the man’s voice in the distance in a sort of faux angry resigned tone.

“Quiet you!” She shouted back. “That’s just Randall, don’t mind him. He’s the one that can manipulate rock. He made this place, and catapulted your mugger.”

“I can hear you, you know! You told him my name?!”

“It’s only polite.” She shot back. “I’m Wendy.” She said more conversationally. “We’re supervillains.”

“That’s, uh, that’s nice.” I said, wincing and then forcibly unwincing again. I tried to focus on dissociating myself from the pain, a trick I had learned many years ago. You sort of focus on the body as something separate from yourself; they are just arms, not my arms. Done right you enter a sort of fugue, and…

…that’s when Wendy’s arm with a cloth of antiseptic isopropanol came up to my cheek and then went right through me.