Death's Mistress: Origins of Supers: Book One

by D. L. Harrison

  I frowned, and I got the idea this wasn’t going to be fun as I walked forward and touched them. Next thing I knew my body was on the ground and flapping around violently, and my hand hurt.

  He made a noise and lowered the target.

  “What was that?” I asked in annoyance, when I could control my muscles again.

  He asked, “Is your hand burned?”

  I looked at it, and nodded, “Little bit, but it’s already fading. The pain and the red mark. Answer my question, please,” I said that last word grudgingly.

  He said, “This was the energy test room, to see if you have it, or have resistances to it. It looks like your durability is physical only. Fire, a powerful Taser, electricity, or another energy-based attack would cause you to have a very bad day, if they hit you. Also, your energy power appears to be limited to providing light.”

  He was both right, and very, very, wrong, at the same time. Not that I’d known that at the time. But he was right about one thing, my light would never be a destructive weapon.

  He said, “Stand by please, this might be unpleasant. We have a few more energy types to test that don’t exist on the visual spectrum.”

  “That’s so reassuring,” I said sarcastically.

  Nothing seemed to happen for several seconds.

  Sound blared painfully in my ears. It must’ve been some harmonic sonic attack over a huge range, including above and below the range of human hearing, but don’t ask me how I knew that, I just did. It also shut off as my mind struck out at the pain.

  The whole room started to vibrate, and I heard Raymond drop the F bomb as he slapped a button. My money was on a big red button, but I honestly couldn’t say. I smirked at the window.

  He said, “Okay, you can control and create light and sound. Obviously that second one can cause some mayhem as well.”

  I objected, “I just redirected it I think, and kept it away from me. I didn’t create it like I did the light.”

  He replied, “Fair,” the target started coming up, “Try now. Sing a note or something, and then hit the target with it.”

  I frowned. I wasn’t sure how to visualize something like that. Flying forward, floating, or even glowing like a flashlight was easy to visualize. I stood there for several seconds at a loss, but then decided I was thinking too hard. I’d wanted to stop the sound from hitting me and it had. Maybe it was just that simple?

  I imagined the sounds leaving my mouth concentrating in a thin stream that hit the center of the target. I focused on that, and then started to simply hum. My ears heard it, but it was odd. It didn’t sound right, and I realized I was hearing the reverb of the sound waves bouncing off the target and filling the room from there. I focused on stopping that, putting all that force back on the target, making it feedback into itself and the room grew silent again.

  Raymond said, “Good, can you increase it?”

  My first thought was to scream, but instead I concentrated on raising the decibel level of my hummed note as it left my mouth. That seemed to do something, even if I couldn’t hear it, because the raised plinth with the target and sensors on it started to vibrate violently.

  He said, “Stop!”

  I let my focus go, and I let out a sigh that sounded normal. It was about then I really started to lose patience with this testing. I longed to get my daughter and go home. I missed my husband, and my life seemed colorless in that moment. I don’t know how long it was until he spoke again, but I felt lost.

  I just needed to get through this, then I could see my daughter.

  He said, “One moment… alright, proceed to the next room please.”

  The door on the other side of the room from me plinked loudly with the sounds of metal bolts sliding back. I stepped forward to the end of the room, and I pulled the door open and closed it behind me.

  The second room had the same silvery gray floor and slightly brighter walls, with a scale to my right, a large and solidly thick crossbar attached to a pair of much thicker round metal poles sticking out of the ceiling. The hanging poles reminded me of those pneumatic rises used to lift a car by their wheels at a mechanic’s shop, but slightly larger. Past that were a couple of stations. Station one had various objects on it including a squeeze ball attached to a cable. The second station looked empty to me.

  Raymond said, “Please step on the scale.”

  I got up on the digital scale, and the digital numbers slowly stopped at one hundred fifteen. I’d always been in shape, but it seemed odd to me I’d gained six pounds since yesterday since I’d probably lost fat on both my stomach and rear. It must’ve been the muscle tone that added it back on and then some. My body was far from muscled at rest. It looked mostly the same as it always had, but the muscle tone was a lot more apparent when I used them.

  He grunted, that couldn’t be good.

  “Problem?”

  He replied, “Not bad, just rare. Most supers who gain in strength and durability do so with increased muscle and bone mass, and they weigh up to half a ton. You have something else going on, which isn’t a bad thing. For one, you won’t have to buy reinforced beds, chairs, and couches. Go ahead and step down and walk underneath the crossbar and grip it. You simply need to hold it up.”

  I almost laughed at his sally, but my grief choked it off as I did what he asked. The bar was a little out of my reach. My flight power seemed to take my minimal focus and effort to reach it as a cue, because I rose a few inches off the ground as I fisted my hands around it lightly. The steel bar, or perhaps something else, was rather cold. Enough to be uncomfortable, which told me superpowers or not I’d still being freezing my ass off in the wintertime in six months.

  He didn’t say anything about me leaving the ground, so I just went with it.

  The wait went on long enough that I had the random thought to wonder what it was he was doing, and that seemed enough to activate my sound talent. Specifically, to bring the vibrations of the sound waves hitting the one-way mirror glass to my ears. In essence, I could hear him talking without the intercom on.

  A strange voice said, “She’s not imparting any down motion at all on the sensors, nor is she pushing it up. Her powers argue for kinetic manipulation of some kind when taken together and given her weight and lack of increased muscle and bone mass. Even her vulnerability to heat and other less physical forces suggests it.”

  Raymond said, “We’ll find out when we finish the tests doctor. We don’t know that she has invulnerability of any kind yet, or even resistance. Our scans aren’t picking up telekinetic energy, so if that’s what she’s using it’s got to be highly controlled and contained within or near her body. Telekinetic energy also wouldn’t account for her ability to block and redirect sound waves bouncing off a target fifteen feet away from her.”

  I didn’t know what to think about any of that at the time. Except that they seemed to be getting conflicting data. Or at least, they were confused about how my powers worked and the source of them.

  The doctor grunted, “Proceed.”

  Raymond’s voice came over the intercom, “Just resist the push down as long as possible. The bar only extends so far, so go to a knee when it becomes too much.”

  I nodded at the window, not trusting my voice in that moment. I started to feel some small resistance and focused on not moving and resisting it. I really didn’t want to be a super, but I couldn’t help a small smirk when I heard the gasp in the booth and something about my feet not touching the floor yet.

  When I heard it was applying forty tons of force, and I still didn’t really feel it I almost threw up at the thought. What the hell had I turned into? I’d never liked supers, but I knew what everyone else did about them. The famously strong ones bragged about being in the fifteen to twenty-ton range. My body felt relaxed, and not strained at all, which is when I gave the doctor’s observations some more thought. I suddenly doubted that I was holding the weight with muscle at all, it had to be my mind.

  I mean, even a professional weig
ht lifter feels the resistance of picking up a thirty-pound package. I should be feeling something besides a slight pressure, shouldn’t I?

  When it got up to fifty tons and the metal started to protest, the technician was counting it off for the doctor. I decided to experiment and lowered to the floor while focusing on keeping the bar where it was. I’d been so sure it would work. When the bar followed me until my feet were flat, I doubted my previous surety. Unless it was a very local phenomena and I had to be touching for it to work? But as Raymond had said, that wouldn’t account for the sound manipulations, the one he knew about and the one I was continuing to do at the window thirty feet away from me. The second room was much bigger.

  Unless, my abilities all had different root drivers. Or it wasn’t any form of telekinesis at all, and was something completely different but similar? It would be quite a while before I’d discover the full truth of my abilities.

  When it hit sixty tons, I actually felt the strain of it, just not on my body. It was like a feedback in my own mind, telling me I was pushing too hard. The mechanism was also straining, and when the metal started to pop slightly, I dropped to my knee gently and stopped when the pneumatic poles were fully extended.

  Still, three times as strong as the strongest known super wasn’t exactly shabby.

  “How did I do?” I asked innocently. I’d been asking questions the whole time, and I wasn’t about to stop now, just because I could hear them. I didn’t want them to know I could hear them.

  The doctor hissed, “Don’t tell her.”

  Raymond said over the intercom, “You did very well. The first station will help you learn control. The ball attached to the cable is a pressure ball. You’ll want to squeeze it. A human can generate as much as four hundred pounds of pressure in that way. It should let you gauge the feedback of your hand to your mind.”

  I frowned at the should, and at the same time disagreed. My body’s proprioception was giving me the same feedback at any weight, from turning on the shower faucet to holding up sixty tons. There was no muscle strain feedback at all. Which meant I needed to ignore that old sense completely, at least as far as figuring out the pressure I was applying to the things I touched.

  There had been feedback of a different sort in my mind’s awareness, when I’d reached sixty tons. A mental strain that told me my strength had reached its limits. I’d need to concentrate on that new feedback, and I hoped it was subtle enough that I just hadn’t felt it, or understood I was feeling it, before that moment.

  I walked over to the pressure ball, and gently picked it up. The texture of it felt a little strange, and I wondered what it was made of. Then I lightly squeezed, and the pressure reading jumped to ten thousand pounds per square inch. I frowned, imagining picking up my daughter. That just wouldn’t do at all.

  I felt frustrated with it, because I was searching for that feedback and wasn’t finding it at all. Was it possible I’d only feel it when my strength was redlining, so to speak? How could I live like that? I’d break and shatter everything I picked up.

  But, if that was true I’d have broken the shower. It only occurred to me in that moment that I’d have also torn my clothes when I desperately pulled them on earlier not wanting to make Raymond wait any longer. I’d been embarrassed that I’d been in the shower for almost an hour sobbing. I hadn’t been thinking of my strength at all while I’d been getting dressed.

  That’s when I had one of those leaps of logic, and a feeling of visceral certainty settled in my gut from intuition.

  Freefall’s warnings and paranoia, as well as my own fears, were responsible for this. It took very little focus for me to use any of my powers, they were very natural to my new state. They were no harder than closing my eyes and touching my nose. In that moment I decided I was my own enemy in this. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to squeeze the ball lightly enough, so of course I’d been right. My mental state as a super very much determined my reality.

  Of course, the next step eluded me for a while, and I realized I wouldn’t have even had the leap at all if I hadn’t been listening to their discussion behind the window. First, I tried focusing on the sense I felt at holding a mug of coffee, or a glass, but of course that didn’t work. My power had no baseline or experience to draw upon in the past, and I’d have to build that.

  Or… could I turn it off? Like switching off the light. Just the thought of using my real muscles for the task seemed to be enough. The strain on my hand hurt, as the pressure ball expanded violently and strained the muscles and tendons in my hand. I cursed myself in the depths of my mind. Fortunately, healing seemed to be a perk, and just like the burn from earlier that sharp pain went away over the next ten seconds.

  I squeezed the ball as hard as I could, and it settled on three hundred and eighty pounds, my body giving me back all the feedback I was used to. It was a matter of confidence and mindset. I dropped the pressure ball and started to pick up the relatively fragile items on the table there. A glass, an egg, a rubber ball, and others. I was also sure I could and would train my super strength ability to handle delicate tasks, but that could wait and would take more effort. The important thing was I was sure I could hold my daughter without causing harm.

  My whole body quivered in relief at that thought.

  Although, perhaps I’d just given my new power what it needed, a point of reference now that it was active. I picked up the ball again and squeezed lightly with my super strength while focusing on what I’d felt earlier, and it settled right at three hundred eighty. It was a start, but I’d have to relearn it all by switching back and forth, and I wasn’t about to do that here. I dropped the ball. I was able to lift up all the items as well, like doing it before with my muscles had somehow trained my power how to be delicate.

  The doctor said, “Looks like she finally figured it out. Ask her how she did it. It may give us additional information on her powers.”

  Crap. I’d have to be careful how I answered that, or it might tip them off I was listening. At the same time, I needed to stick to the truth as much as possible. I didn’t want to skew the test results. I just didn’t want them to know I was listening.

  Raymond asked, “Excellent, can you describe how you gained fine control?”

  I replied, “It’s a matter of focus and experience. I also think I was sabotaging myself earlier, from all of Freefall’s dire warnings of breaking things it became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.”

  Raymond grunted, “Please move to the next station, and stand in the footsteps.”

  I walked over, and there was no table. It was a three-sided steel wall box, with an open side. There were two dark silver footprints on the floor in the middle of it and I stood on them. That put me facing the blank side, which stared across the room at the one-way glass.

  “What is this one?”

  Raymond said, “Physical resistance tests. This may be slightly unpleasant. You need to speak up quickly if you feel you’re at your limit. There will be a ten second pause between rounds during which you can abort the tests.”

  Yeah, not comforting, and I felt a little nervous, but I took a deep calming breath. What they didn’t know, and I did, was that I didn’t even feel the impact of the car hitting the water. So I knew I had some resistance to physical damage if not true invulnerability.

  I wasn’t surprised to see a pneumatic tennis ball shooter rise up out of the ground. I’d figured they’d start with something even a normal human could withstand if with a painful sting. I flinched slightly and my heartrate picked up when the first ball slammed into my chest, but I didn’t really feel it at all outside of a light pressure.

  Very much how I felt in my hand, when picking up or holding anything. Which told me my strength and physical damage resistance was very much linked together. Even if the healing, light and sound powers might be unique. Maybe flight too? I wasn’t sure.

  The tennis balls started to come fast and harder, and at some point, they were replaced by baseballs after
a ten second pause. It all just felt like a light pressure. I’d compare it to getting hit by a nerf ball as a normal human. The baseballs slowly ramped up, until they were coming at me over a hundred miles an hour. Then it just stopped and lowered into the floor while a second machine came up. It continued for quite a while, and each successive projectile was slightly more powerful.

  Guns seemed no more powerful than the tennis balls, to my senses, as the calibers slowly raised up until I was being bombarded by a spray of fifty caliber bullets. That started to get a little uncomfortable, but not from pressure, from heat. They also had absolutely no effect on my clothes, no more than a nerf ball would have.

  Curious, I held the bottom of the sweatshirt and slowly pulled it out and away from my body, but in a way that didn’t show any skin to my watchers. They must’ve approved, because they didn’t comment. The sweatshirt wasn’t perforated until it was about three inches away from my skin, and I released it at that point.

  Chapter Three

  The testing rooms seemed to go on and on without end, and they asked me how I was doing often. Of course, I was cranky, angry, and devasted about my husband. My temper was on a short fuse and I kept having to squash it. But physically I was fine, I didn’t feel tired at all. I snapped back my answers a couple of times in frustration, but I never truly lost my temper.

  I also didn’t have any other powers, or at least none that the tests revealed. Super strength, physical damage immunity, flight, night light, fast healing which was common to almost all supers, and sound manipulation seemed to be it. That was actually a lot, but not statistically odd. Four to six powers were pretty common actually among the small percentage that could be supers. There were far more with one or two powers, often a silly one, that just went back to their normal life if they survived the circumstances of their quickening.

  There were still depths to be plumbed with my light and sound abilities, but I hadn’t realized it at the time and the testing didn’t bring them out.