Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  “I tried to steal Victor’s amulet today, not knowing it was Victor, of course. The power that guy’s got…. As soon as I sensed it, I played possum. Shut every ability down. I didn’t fool him. He let me go anyway. Found me too irrelevant to be truly troubled by.”

  Naomi could see Player’s jaw muscles clenching from gritting his teeth from where she was, perched high above, on a stack of crates. She liked her hawk-like perspective; she enjoyed seeing the big picture as a rule, which just made what Soren had said that much harder to deny than it was for the rest of them.

  “You think you feel small, right now, Player,” Stealy said, just to provoke him. She relished riling him. He had suspected for some time if she got too hot and bothered she might just lose control of all of her powers, and he might not be able to stop that. So she could test limits with him more than any of the others.

  “I don’t feel small!” Mumbling the rest, Player said, “And I certainly don’t feel irrelevant.” He lunged out of the chair. “What I feel is stymied. That little encounter today with the latest portal person shook my confidence, that’s all. I’ll have it back soon enough, and then I’ll be unstoppable, as always.”

  Stealy grunted. “Yeah, sure.” She knew the sarcasm alone would set him off. Sure enough…. It was like watching Old Faithful do its thing at Yellowstone.

  He whipped up the wind and slammed Stealy from cement support pole to cement support pole so hard he shattered every bone in her body. She looked like a broken marionette, with all the bones sticking out everywhere. Then she started healing, the bones slipping back into place, the tears in her skin mending, and the leaking blood sealing. It was like watching a film on rewind. She still hadn’t come around yet. It didn’t matter. She was moaning something as if in her sleep. Lar must have taught Stealy some words of power that would work, even from a semi-lucid state.

  The next thing Player knew, he was drifting inside the giant tropical fish aquarium—another throwaway. Some rich person was using it as a room divider before thinking it was more trouble than it was worth. Naomi’s posse had since filled it with piranha for moments like this, when unwanted intruders needed to be put down quickly. The fish were kept hungry as a rule. The only thing that saved Player’s ass was his water magic. He used it to catch up the nipping piranha in swirling eddies as he crawled out of the tank, gasping with a distinct sense of panic that had yet to ebb. His face was good and marked up from the fish bites. And to Naomi’s satisfaction, it was going to stay that way, possibly even leave permanent scars to cut into his pretty-boy good looks—if Stealy didn’t share some of her healing magic with him, perhaps with a kiss. Now that was an irony of ironies. Naomi couldn’t help but smile, figuring she was out of his peripheral vision this high up to provoke him with it.

  “Yeah, Mr. Unassailable,” Natura said mockingly. “Remind me, how do you spell that again?”

  “It’s spelled, F. U., bitch,” Player said, wiping his lip of blood and sending her into the tank on a gust of wind.

  She smiled at him from inside the tank. He’d forgotten about her way with creatures. Or rather, he’d been so mad and out of control at the time, he’d failed to factor that into his thinking. She waved back at him just to add insult to injury.

  In a mad fury he sent the water out of the tank, and the fish had no choice but to go along for the ride. Now Natura was frantic to save the fish. The others came to her assistance. Lar abandoned his desk and his library, set up off the floor and against a far wall—as far away from the throne chair as possible, in his own private Player-Retreat.

  Naomi held out her hand and supported the fish off the ground in spheres of water long enough for everyone to shift from panic mode and rescue mode to glaring-at-Player mode. With everyone wanting to take his head off, he decided he’d overplayed his hand and returned the water to the aquarium—just not the fish. That was left for Naomi to do. God forbid he accommodate Natura right now, even if he yielded to the group’s wishes. The latter was out of character for Player as well. He must really have been feeling out of sorts.

  It suddenly dawned on Naomi why. Fear of abandonment. Being left all alone was what he was really afraid of. His holding them hostage with his intimidation tactics…. And now that she was on to him, he would have no power over them at all. If she called him on it, she might well trigger a psychotic break. She didn’t want to break him, just to temper him. But right now, even that was out of the question. He was feeling beaten enough for one day. She could leave the project of helping Player to finish growing up for another day, in any case. They had bigger fish to fry right now—pardon the totally inappropriate Natura pun.

  “Soren’s right,” Naomi said from on high. “You need a daddy to go along with your mommy. Getting tired parenting the whole lot of you single-handed. You could use a hell of a lot more discipline than I can impart. I’m way too soft on you and forgiving of the acting-out behavior. And this is the result. We can’t stop tearing each other apart long enough to focus our energies on the enemy. Hell, who needs the Trumans of the world when we’re happy to do his work for him?” She hoped the gods of clichés would forgive her the barely cloaked one she’d just tried to slip past them.

  The piranha crisis averted, Lar was back at his book, fingering through the latest tome in his library. He must have landed on something he’d been searching for, for some time. His energy spiked with excitement—one might say he’d gone supernova on the room—even if his way of doing so was a bit different than Stealy’s; everyone could feel it. “What is it?” Stealy asked. Natura was still too focused on psychically consoling the fish to pay him much mind, her face and hands pressed up against the tank.

  The air as quickly went out of Lar’s tires—now Naomi was mixing metaphors. She’d have the gods of metaphor on her tail soon, too, if she kept this up. “Nothing. Thought for a second that I might have found the solution to Stealy’s problem. There’s a spell here that can turn her into a Sponger.” Naomi winced at the term. She still hadn’t revealed to the others what she really was. And for good reason. Putting those abilities on display would make her a target for every supernatural being on the planet convinced she was the one that had everything it took to end them, if not today, then someday, when she had absorbed more powers, including from one Victor Truman. For right now, as far as they knew, she was just telekinetic chick, on account of a guy she’d dated once—the most powerful telekinetic on the planet, if rumor was to be believed. They’d since gone their separate ways. She wasn’t even sure he was still alive. “But it’s a false alarm,” Lar said with another sigh. “It only works for a few minutes, then the magic wears off. I guess we can save it for when another of her attacks comes on, if we have any lead time, and I can remember the words, since I doubt we’ll have enough time for me to look them up.”

  “Start memorizing, Lar,” Stealy said, “because Player isn’t the only one feeling more insecure by the day. Just because I’ve put a hold on adding more powers, doesn’t mean I’ve stabilized the ones I have. The attacks are getting worse and coming in shorter intervals.”

  Naomi dropped down from her perch, using her telekinesis to land softly as opposed to giving herself shin splints, or worse, shattering her legs. There were no windows down here; the fact that it could have been any time, day or night, just played up the static nature of the team’s dynamic. That and the stale air. “I’ve had enough. I’m going to Soren and tell him we accept his offer to join up—and to co-lead us.”

  “Only on your life, sweetie,” Player said, getting in her face. He was so worked up the water was leaking out of his eyes, like tears, mocking his latest show of bravado. “Simmer down, Player, or I’ll give you the one thing you really fear.” She broadcast the image of the rest of them abandoning him into his mind; she did it so smoothly he wouldn’t pick up on the fact that she was also a telepath and thought projector. Courtesy of another boyfriend. Say what you want about nice girls; it paid to sleep around—at least when you were a Sponger.r />
  The trick worked. Player backed off. By the time he wiped the mock tears from his face, Naomi got the distinct sense they weren’t mock tears anymore.

  Naomi gave Stealy a nod Player’s direction, meaning for her to heal Player’s face. Stealy used it as an opportunity to humiliate him further, treating him like a child, grabbing his face with both hands, bending it down towards her, and kissing him on the nose. The magic spread from her lips to the rest of him, healing his wounds on the spot. “There, there, boo boos, all gone,” she said, running her left hand through his hair.

  He pushed her away. “Get away from me, bitch,” was the extent of his gratitude.

  It was the beginning of a new era, in more ways than one, Naomi thought. And she wasn’t sure who was spearheading it, Victor Truman or Soren Stein, short for Frankenstein—it’d be their little in-joke, once she shared it with him. Maybe it wasn’t as funny as all that; she wasn’t quite the humorist that Soren and Player were—at least back when Player had a sense of humor. Leave it to a teenager to find sarcasm quite the turn on.

  Whoever was bringing this new age into being, Naomi had to hope she and the rest of the gang weren’t too late; that their reticence to morph from the Fab Five to the Serious Six hadn’t cost them the future and the planet.

  SIX

  “So, the kid’s a budding chi master, eh?” Victor thought, pondering his new nemesis, Soren, who’d morphed himself into Dr. Frankenstein and the Frankenstein monster at the same time in his determined attempt to amplify his chi channeling abilities. Victor could well appreciate the provocation. With bad-ass monsters on the rise, even a Shaolin monk was going to get overwhelmed trying to bowl them over with chi energy alone.

  Chi, alternatively known as Qi—which utilized underlying energy body dynamics that acupuncture also focused on for healing—was indeed a powerful force. In Star Wars it was referred to simply as the Force. In Chinese medicine—to a few adepts who hadn’t forgotten the teachings of the Taoist master who had given acupuncture to the world—it was understood as the true fountain of eternal youth.

  Soren had managed to awaken his telepathic abilities, but so far, nothing else. He was a long way from being a true Chi master that could be a concern to Victor. For right now, Victor wished him the best. By perfecting those abilities he was following a branch of scientific study that Victor didn’t have time to pursue—but that would yield answers every bit as important to his research. So long as the kid could be played, he was an employee of Victor’s, nothing more, even if Soren hadn’t quite grasped that truth yet.

  Soren had divined Victor’s designs on the planet. What he hadn’t seen was Victor’s designs on the cosmos. With this kind of power, he could rule it all; not just this universe, but all parallel universes in the multiverse. Nothing short of that was at stake.

  That meant, ironically, that his enemies were his greatest teachers—providing they were more powerful than he was. He had to find out who they were, at all costs. Because the only way to climb this ladder to heaven, one rung at a time, was by defying all odds and besting far superior adversaries at each rung of the ladder.

  The sad fact was that he didn’t have enough worthy adversaries. It was all he could do to build them up. Because not until he could shoot down far more powerful players would he register on the radar of anyone who mattered. Such a wizard was in all likelihood not even located on this planet. He would not be confined to any one planet. Until they met up—there was no playing this game at a higher than planetary level. And let’s face it; Earth is small potatoes. Who cares who rules it in the final analysis? Did the biggest fish in a small pond really scare anybody?

  Victor fiddled with the mandalas—complex geometric shapes of sublime beauty—made of pure energy before him, like picking the combination locks of two safes, side by side, simultaneously. They glowed against the night with a rainbow of colors—not just shiny orange, as they had glowed in the Dr. Strange movie—because the fact was that the original mandalas were drawn with a full rainbow of colors by the Tibetan Buddhists who used them as a meditation device of the mind. To attune their consciousness to the Divine Ground—as they called it, a kind of godless god, or a god which was beyond all definition and limits and so transcendent even to the title of “God,” which gave too fixed of an idea of what such an entity might be like. To help the monks attune their minds to the All, it made more sense to use the full palate of colors; the rainbow but a prisming of the white light; symbolic of the many parts of the All.

  Victor had allowed himself to become hypnotized by the mandalas, wholly focused on them, using them to sharpen the concentration of his one-pointed mind. Much like the monks who drew them out of colored sand on the floor of their monasteries, only to sweep them away afterwards in the most glaring testament to the power of sacred geometry—too powerful to leave unguarded—too powerful to expose anyone to who was not an initiate in the rites themselves of speaking directly to the Godhead—when Victor was done, his energy imprints on the sky would likewise dissolve into nothingness.

  Victor was standing on a tongue of energy formed by interlinking energy mandalas, just beyond his penthouse window, now in permeable membrane form—no longer made of impenetrable glass, but of pure energy magic. And he was broadcasting from his palm chakras the two mandala shapes across the sky like the Bat signal in Batman. Like the police commissioner of Gotham, Victor, too, was calling for help. He was calling upon the concentrated psychic power of an entranced metropolis.

  By now, most of the citizens would be standing out on the streets, entranced by the same phenomenon that held Victor entranced. Or they might be held transfixed staring at the two mandalas from the windows of their high-rises, or from the rooftops of those high-rises.

  Once enough minds were in phase with his, he’d have the psychic power he needed to reach the next level. To summon a being into existence that no one could stop this time. Not even him. At least until he could figure out how to stop it, and possibly, with that understanding, earn his way off this off-the-grid world that, up until now, no one of psychic import could even be bothered with.

  He was sending out a challenge at the same time to Soren. That translated to: “Race me to the finish line? Let’s see who can put down this entity first, you or me?”

  The being was beginning to manifest.

  But, even with all the help Victor was getting from the citizenry of Syracuse, he was feeling the strain. Having anticipated this, he was wearing his bodysuit, a form-fitting flexible body armor of his own design. Truthfully, he was never out of it anymore; his Tuxedo, top hat, and cane—his about-town ware—were teleported on and off him, to and from his clothes closet, by the very precise recalibration of the space-time warping geometries of the suit itself, without him even having to think much about it.

  Laced with mandalas powered by a hive mind of nanites, the bodysuit had enough capability to relieve him of some of the computational strain in his head when he was overreaching. And, these days, overreaching had become a bit of a thing, explaining why he no longer took off the suit, despite eschewing superhero and supervillain getups of any kind; he felt ridiculous in them. The space-time altering properties of the suit were so fine-tuned, bathing, even relieving himself, were entirely unnecessary. The overall’s hive mind tracked his person for unwanted matter and simply removed it automatically.

  Under the strain of manifesting the being, various mandalas were reconfiguring themselves on the suit, and lighting up to indicate their activity. More of the complex geometries were being recruited with every passing second.

  Victor felt the being taking shape on the other side of the dual mandalas he was projecting onto the sky. But first he’d have to bring those mandalas together. He’d have to get their very complex geometric patterns to complement one another rather than compete with one another for the eye’s attention. No small feat. His rational mind alone couldn’t go it; possibly a supercomputer, but not the human mind. Unless the altered state of conscious
ness was locked in enough.

  Here you go, Victor. Time to see if you’re able to hold the necessary concentration long enough this time or not.

  He brought the two patterns together. Wrestled with their order. Virtually every mandala in the suit was lit up by this point. Like Spock playing three-dimensional chess in Star Trek, he was now coordinating superimposing patterns, which could only be done by considering the battlefield from numerous perspectives at once. For right now, the overlaid colors were actually subtracting from the rainbow of possibilities; he needed every hue to come forth on every band of that rainbow.

  Some more shifting of the overlaid geometries, and it was done.

  The patterns came into alignment.

  And in through the open door of the portal stepped the latest entity.

  My, my. He did look intimidating indeed.

  A face as big as the sky that made Lucifer look like a bit of a pacifist. It lingered long enough to assess the world that had summoned it. And then it descended like a genie in reverse, a genie which had been so long out of the bottle that he wished only to go back inside—only this bottle took a humanoid form. One Victor could not discern from his heights above the city. But something told him the entity would not go unnoticed for long.

  ACT TWO

  “Masked Man”

  SEVEN

  “You come here when you’re scared too?” Naomi asked, surprised to find Soren at her favorite refuge from the world.

  “Not exactly,” he said, before peeling his eyes off her to take in the giant face in the night sky. Its many somber-hued iridescences, the way it morphed in the sky along multiple plains at once, as if it didn’t exist entirely in any one dimension…. The movie-like tableaus streaming across the face… as if it were simultaneously staring into several worlds at once, deciding which one to actually land on. The face, without changing expression noticeably, communicating a panoply of emotions—whichever one sucked you in. As strangely beautiful as it was strangely terrifying and strangely everything else.