“And you always have to wear a bathing suit?”
“I do,” she said. “Or I’d be naked.”
“We don’t want that!” Michelle laughed as she set the whipped pancake batter down on the countertop. I hadn’t seen her whip it, of course, and I also hadn’t seen her dash away toward the TV room and back, carrying a magazine that had some pancake recipes in it. “Can we make this?”
“Later, let’s just finish up here before Ingrid gets grumpy.”
Ingrid narrowed her eyes at me. “I won’t get grumpy!”
Stella came into the kitchen and sat at the bar. Veronique followed, wearing her country girl getup. She was cordial with the others, thank god, and as usual, she stuck with a cup of coffee. There was a hunger to her eyes though, and I could tell she wanted to feed.
Did you and Veronique take care of Adam this morning? I thought to Grace.
He is still out, but she hasn’t fed.
Okay, well tell her to go take a little off the top and to not kill him, I thought back to her as I started scrambling the eggs.
Veronique stood almost immediately and left the room. The only person to catch her leave was Dorian, who watched her walk away.
Michelle brought the pancake batter over to me. “I want to help.”
“You’ve already helped.”
“I want to help more!”
“You know how to make pancakes?”
She looked at Fiona and they both started laughing.
“What?”
“She doesn’t know how to make anything. We’ve never made food before,” Fiona said as if it was an inside joke.
“Do you want to learn?”
“Sure!”
Breakfast was served, devoured, hopefully enjoyed, and after, I told Stella to follow me to the couch. Dorian and Veronique had already started watching one of their home improvement shows and I noticed Veronique’s face was a little flush from feeding on Adam.
“Is it going to hurt?” Stella asked, a flicker of worry on her face. She lay with her feet facing the back door, giving me easy access to the port on her neck. Her throat quivered as I plugged in.
“Relax,” I told her, “it’s not going to hurt.”
Grace had taken Ingrid, Fiona, and Michelle out to ‘see the cactuses,’ which gave me a little breathing room to work. Had they been here right now, Michelle would have been peering over my shoulder looking at my phone as I scrolled through the options.
I wanted to avoid that. Not that I didn’t think she’d do it at some point in the future, I was just hoping that having the power to adjust abilities would give me some leverage with them, with a side of clout.
“Damn,” I whispered when a single folder appeared. There was no password prompt for Stella, and she hardly had any data aside from her base stats and abilities.
Stella, Subject St
Build: 002
Base height: 172 Centimeters
Base weight: 48 Kilos
Strength: 5
Intelligence: 5
Constitution: 4
Wisdom: 4
Dexterity: 6
Charisma: 4
Main: Vector Manipulation
Kinetic Energy Manipulation: 6
Quantum Manipulation: 2
Vibration Emission: 7
Inertia Negation: 2
Telekinetic Regeneration: 4
Tactile Telekinesis: 4
Deflection: 7
Velocity Manipulation: 3
Aversion Field Creation: 6
Overcharge: 7
“I see the culprit,” I said almost immediately. “Similar to the handicap they put in Dorian’s abilities adjuster, Overcharge is what’s causing you to overheat. Let me look through everything first and I’ll work on some adjustments.”
“Okay.”
Explanations appeared above the abilities as I passed over them.
Kinetic Energy Manipulation was self-explanatory, as was Quantum Manipulation. Ha! Only an asshole or a sci-fi writer would think they had a firm grasp on quantum mechanics.
I scrolled over it anyway, looking for a better explanation than just ‘quantum manipulation deals with quantum mechanics.’ I wasn’t disappointed, but I didn’t understand how her ability allowed her to manipulate quantum energy fields. What did it even mean? Could she make a wormhole?
Just for shits and giggles, I tried increasing it and found that the dial was locked at two.
Moving on. I then checked out Vibration Emission. This one was pretty sweet, allowing her to create shockwaves and cause small earthquakes. ‘Inertia Negation’ was simply a form of heightened agility.
“So you can sidestep anything if this is turned up,” I mumbled to myself.
“What?”
“After I make adjustments. You’ll be more agile.”
“We’ll see,” she finally said.
I explained what I’d discovered so far and that I was going to parse through the rest and begin the adjustments.
“That’s fine.”
“Your next ability is listed as ‘Telekinetic Regeneration,’ which means you can heal. Holy shit – you can heal!”
“I know. Why do you think I’ve recovered so quickly from yesterday?”
I hadn’t thought about that. Rather than talk anymore about that, I checked out ‘Tactile Telekinesis,’ which allowed her to manipulate her own vectors, to do things like create a protective telekinetic shield around her body or lift someone five times her size.
She’s the most powerful one, I thought to myself.
Is she? Grace asked, her voice as loud as if she were standing right there.
Download what I know in about three minutes. Her abilities are through the charts.
I hope she joins us.
Same.
Her next ability, Deflection, was self-explanatory as well. Velocity Manipulation allowed her to manipulate the speed and direction an object was moving.
“This will be sick for taking out helicopters,” I whispered. And it was at that point – even after I’d watched the CBGs train and all that had happened – when an idea came to me: The next stage of Gideon Caldwell’s …
I haven’t been showing them how to use their abilities correctly.
I’d never really gone over their ability listings with them; I simply adjusted them as need be. I had to make them more cognizant of their abilities and help them learn to use them together.
Our fights would go much smoother if we knew what we were doing, and there would certainly be less ‘oh-shit’ moments. For example, what if Michelle used her superspeed along with Stella’s Velocity Manipulation? I had seen Grace and Veronique work together back in New Haven and it resulted in a massive explosion.
I’ve been going about this all wrong.
I checked the final two abilities. Aversion Field Creation allowed Stella to make a force field, which she’d done yesterday, and Overcharge was the handicap.
“Here goes nothing,” I said as I began playing with her settings.
After some tinkering, I was able to bring her Overdrive down by reducing Quantum Manipulation to one, Deflection to six, and Vibration Emission to five. This brought her Overdrive to three, so clearly not a point-for-point deduction, especially since I was able to also bring her Velocity Manipulation up to four and her Inertia Negation – aka uncanny agility – up a point as well.
Her final ability stats read:
Main: Vector Manipulation
Kinetic Energy Manipulation: 6
Quantum Manipulation: 1
Vibration Emission: 5
Inertia Negation: 3
Telekinetic Regeneration: 4
Tactile Telekinesis: 4
Deflection: 6
Velocity Manipulation: 4
Aversion Field Creation: 6
Overcharge: 3
“I think I’m done,” I told her as I unplugged.
“Think?”
“Feeling anything immediately different?”
“I
feel a bit lighter.” She sat up and rested with her elbows propped behind her on the couch’s low headrest, the position causing her chest to perk upwards.
“Is there anything you do that normally makes you feel like you’re overheating?” I asked.
She stared at me with her dark eyes. Stella was a bizarre combination of Grace and Veronique, as if they’d had a daughter. It was still hard to get used to seeing Grace’s soft features mixed with Veronique’s sharp ones.
“I know one thing,” she said as she pressed herself off the couch. “Can I try it outside?”
“Let’s do it.”
“I’ll need volunteers,” she said.
“I’m in,” said Veronique.
As I turned away from the living room, I felt a hand wrap around my elbow. I knew who it was without even looking over my shoulder. “You coming too, Dorian?”
“I am.” She dropped her hand into mine. “And I missed you last night,” she whispered.
“Did you?”
Veronique laughed, her eyes still fixated on the television.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Your face,” she said, an attempt at humor.
“Is it the scar? I thought the scar made me look better. Are you coming?”
“I guess,” she said.
Dorian’s hand was still wrapped in mine, but she let go as Veronique approached, offering it to the other woman instead.
My god, was my life awesome.
It was like I was the dude in a harem anime but instead of being a pathetic dumb-dumb and not getting with the girls, I was just doing what I had to do.
Enough patting yourself on the back, I chided myself as we stepped onto the back patio. It was a nice day outside, cloudless, the air crisp and peaceful …
My moment of peace was shattered when Stella asked Dorian and Veronique to attack her at the same time.
“Go light on her,” I said.
They moved away from me and approached Stella, predator-like. Dorian had her finger in her mouth, a gesture that would be salacious if not for the fact it meant she was about to charge up something fierce; Veronique had already made a wall in front of herself with bits of scrap metal from earlier battles.
Dorian teleported away and appeared behind Stella with a blast of purple energy. She was gone again, back at Veronique’s side when the energy bomb went off.
I had to blink twice at what happened next.
It was as if the energy had been sucked into a black hole, a wrinkle of time or some shit. It just completely … disappeared, reminding me of the way a calm body of water ripples when a stone is dropped into it and sinks out of sight.
Veronique tossed her metal scraps. The pieces bounced off Stella as if she were made of rubber, her Tactile Telekinesis forming a shield much closer to her body than I had anticipated. Her fingers spread wide and a crack appeared in the soil, zipping toward Veronique and cutting her off her feet.
Dorian spawned two humanoids of kinetic energy and flashed away, this time appearing in the air above Stella and dropping an energy ball on her head, which was engulfed by the black hole defense system Stella had enacted. As soon as the energy creations reached Dorian, they too disappeared.
Veronique lifted her hand to drain Stella, which I assumed would take.
Only it didn’t work this time.
Stella lifted her hand and Veronique’s red energy stopped at her palm, pooling into a large red blast that she fired back at Veronique.
Dorian appeared behind Stella, grabbed her hand and …
She was thrown backward, where she would have cracked her head on the ground had it not been for a last-second teleportation.
“Okay,” I said, steeling myself as I moved out onto what was becoming the battlefield. I had no idea what the owners of the place would think when they came back to the house, but there were definitely signs that some weird shit had gone down in their back yard.
Hopefully, they’d just think aliens landed.
I stepped over the crack Stella had left in the soil and approached her.
“How do you feel?” I asked nervously.
Dorian appeared next to me, her hand landing on my arm just in case we needed to teleport away.
Stella’s shoulders relaxed a bit as a grin cut across her face. “I feel great. It worked!”
Chapter Sixteen: Super Teens
“I’m in,” Stella said, her eyes still trained on me. A light breeze picked up, whipping around a few strands of hair that had come loose from her braid.
Nope, it wasn’t a breeze. It was Michelle, who now stood between both of us. “What happened out here?” she asked, looking from us to the smoke wafting off a few craters caused by Dorian’s energy creations.
“We were just testing some things,” I told her.
“Michelle, go get the others, it’s time to make a decision,” Stella said. “Do you all mind giving us a moment?”
“Sure,” I said.
Dorian and Veronique moved over to me and we took a few steps onto the patio. I smiled at both of them.
“Her power is incredible,” Veronique admitted once we were out of earshot. “But I don’t know about being a babysitter to the other three.”
“Yeah,” Dorian chimed in, “we really should have discussed this before they made their decision.”
“Are you two opposed to it?” I asked.
Dorian shrugged. “It just makes things a little bit more difficult. We’ll need a bigger vehicle to travel and a bigger house to stay in, that sort of thing.”
“I never thought of myself as a minivan type of guy, but a Suburban or Cadillac Escalade? Something like that would be choice.”
I could see myself now in a black Cadillac Escalade cruising down the highway, the vehicle full of supers, the moonroof open and bikini-clad Dorian halfway poking out of it, launching purple fireballs. I could even hear Matthew McConaughey say, ‘The open road is yours, latch on,’ or whatever the hell pseudosexual advertising campaign they had going these days.
A good image, but real talk: I knew nothing about taking care of teens; hell, I could hardly take care of myself.
And what about school? I didn’t know how much they learned at the facility. I could teach them about literature, but who the hell would want to learn about that stuff anyway aside from a sadist?
Grace, I need you.
Grace came outside, followed by Fiona and Ingrid, both of whom formed a football huddle with Stella and Michelle.
“Grace, I –”
“Don’t worry, it’s the right thing to do,” she said with a finality that silenced Dorian and Veronique.
“So you think they’ll say yes?” I asked her.
She nodded, “That’s what they’re talking about right now.”
“Damn.” I scratched the back of my head. “Well there’s going to be a few things I need to change around here then. First, we need to get a vehicle and a new location. We also need to get them some new clothes. Oh, and we need to get rid of Adam, the little fucker. Also, we never finished destroying the New Mexico facility, which is something I still think we should do. But regarding that, I’ve had an epiphany.” I used my hands to express just how big my epiphany was.
“Epiphany?” Dorian asked.
“I think I can contribute more to the CBGs by paying attention to everyone’s abilities. I never really explained to you three what your abilities actually are. I assumed you knew. But that was a stupid assumption to make, and maybe if you knew more about them, you’d be able to use them together more efficiently.”
“We could stop our enemies faster,” Veronique said.
“Exactly.”
“Gideon!” Michelle called over to me. She appeared by my side half a second later. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes, I heard you,” I said and followed her over to the other Super Teens.
“We’re going to join you,” Stella said from behind Michelle. “For now. We’ll need to know more about your mission, and we
need to figure out a better living arrangement.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that last one; I’m already working on it.”
“And then there’s Adam,” she said.
“We’re getting rid of Adam ASAP,” I told her. “Okay, that was a weird way to say that, but you know what I mean. Adam is a risk to our mission; it’s better that he goes back to the facility, or wherever else they’ll take him. All this to say: where should we drop him off? Any thoughts?”
Ingrid stepped forward. “Well, we don’t want him working with them to find us.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Stella. “But that may be inevitable.”
If they didn’t look like superheroes before, they sure did now.
Dorian stood next to Veronique and Grace with her hands on her hips. Ingrid and Fiona were near the three women, resolute expressions on their faces, hair fluttering in the wind. Stella was behind them all and Michelle had positioned herself in front of me, bouncing from foot to foot.
I could see it as a comic book cover now, one with a cliffhanger ending: Will the Super Teens join the Cherry Blossom Girls?
Well, they already told us they would, but I’d leave that part for the next issue.
So no cliffhanger here; the Super Teens were with us, and now we had to work out the details.
And one of those details was Adam.
“Where do you think we should drop him?” I asked Grace and Veronique.
“I’m only going to say this one more time,” Veronique said. “If we do not kill Adam, they will use him against us later. It doesn’t matter where we drop him off. We will have to do something about him later.”
“Fine. We won’t join if you kill him,” Stella said firmly. Ingrid, Fiona, and Michelle all nodded. Michelle’s nod didn’t look serious though, mainly due to the fact that she was still bouncing from foot to foot, head bobbing up and down as if she was jamming some K-Pop.
“We’re not killing him,” I told Veronique. “And that’s final.”
Grace calmed everyone with her soft, all-knowing voice. “I can wipe his mind on the last twenty-four hours,” she offered. “That will make it a little harder for them to figure out anything.”
Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set Page 54