“Clumsy, pal. You’ve got to watch that.”
“Yeah. Same to you.” In an eyeblink I hit him with the gravity and inertia powers. During my training with those particular skills I’d developed just enough control to spin his arm through the air, causing him to punch himself in the face. As soon as he was down, I found myself hoping it wasn’t the girl. For some reason, I felt like Lionheart wouldn’t approve at all.
There was only the one Five-Share there -- the others were waiting nearby to teleport in and give the illusion of bifurcation. I turned around to bolt and wound up facing the observation room, way on the horizon. I saw we had a few more spectators now. Sindy and the Conductor were there, applauding me, and the Goop was bouncing around the room with a big doofy grin on his fluid mug.
Off to the side was Mental Maid, her eyes glowing, glaring at me.
Seeing her froze me in place. I couldn’t even move, and the ground began to quake beneath me. It wasn’t just her making me stiff -- I just hadn’t noticed that one of the other Rushes I was feeling was now coming from beneath.
“Not so fast,” a flinty voice growled. A shield of solid rock grew up around my feet and I realized I’d been standing on Fourtifier’s spread-out silicon form. My body was beginning to copy his rock-powers, and my joints began to growl when I moved. “Ain’t so easy to get away, is it?” his voice rumbled.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to shake Mental Maid. “Let’s see.”
One thing that always bugged me about certain Capes or Masks was the limited ways in which they used their powers. I mean... here we had LifeSpeed, a guy who could control something as fundamental as inertia itself, and he almost always used it for something as petty as simply running fast. When Fourtifier’s rock-form crackled up around me, I poured the inertia down, into his very molecules.
A quick mental review of 10th-grade science reminded me that solid objects are only those forms where the molecules are moving too slowly to pass through them. You speed up the molecules of a solid, it becomes a liquid. Speed them up even more, you’ve got a gas. So when I poured inertia into Fourtifier...
“Hey! I’m melting!”
“Quick study,” I said.
I hopped out of the puddle that Fourtifier was quickly becoming, only to slam face-first into Five-Share.
“You get one freebie, Shift,” he said. With a pop of his fingers, I was surrounded by the entire quintet. I was impressed -- if I didn’t know better I would have sworn he did split apart. My eyes began darting around for an out.
“Time to make your escape attempt,” Particle said. “Your route is straight up.”
I looked up the side of the bank building, totally clear, and smiled at a couple of the Five-Shares. “Catch you later,” I said as I cut off gravity’s effect on me. I pushed off the ground and rocketed up, up and away.
I glided along the side of the silicon and steel construct (more likely plexiglass and aluminum in this miniature form), viewing myself in the window as I went. At about the fourth floor I caught a glint of light. Two floors higher and I saw First Light arching down towards me, robes swirling around her. In the eighth floor window I saw her hand explode in a veil of light and, by the time I reached the roof of the bank complex, she had completely blanked out my vision.
I was racing upwards, flying blind. I couldn’t turn my gravity back on because, without seeing my way down, I’d most likely splatter along the side of the bank -- and that was assuming I didn’t get impaled on its spire.
I caught a breeze on my back. First Light was rushing past me in the air. I reached out instinctively and grabbed her robe.
“No!” I heard Particle shout in my ear.
“No!” First Light screamed.
“Yaaagh!” I howled as she flipped me through the air. I don’t know if it was because I was blind and new at this or if she was just a lot tougher than she looked, but somehow, with no leverage whatsoever, she made me lose my orientation. I had no idea what direction I was drifting in, but I knew I was moving fast.
“Shift! Josh, dammit, look out!”
My eyes picked that moment to begin to clear. I saw several humanoid shapes in front of me and thought, for a second, that Particle had sent a squadron of fliers to pull me down. When I saw the way the shapes -- Five-Shares, I now realized -- were thoughtfully scrambling out of my way, I decided it was far more likely that I was about to crack my skull open against the ground.
“Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap!”
I reached out at a lamppost, hoping to regain my control, but it slipped right away from my hands.
“Crapcrapcrapcrap...”
I was ten feet from the ground now. Eight. Five.
Then, out of sheer terror, I reached out with Five-Share’s powers and teleported.
My stomach turned inside-out and the entire world fell apart and reassembled itself around me. Suddenly I was upright, on the ground and standing next to a Five-Share.
And then I was rocketing straight up again because teleporting failed to do two rather important things: cancel my inertia, or restore my gravity.
“CRAPCRAPCRAPCRAP...”
“Josh!” Particle was shouting. “Josh, calm down!”
I had trained for days to gain control over gravity and inertia, and I wasn’t that bad if I do say so myself. If I had paused long enough to think about it, righting myself would probably be child’s play. Unfortunately, by this point I’d already taken the perfectly rational precaution of panicking like a teen slasher movie actor with a pimple.
“MOOOOOOMMMMYYYYYYYY!”
“Retrieve him, Aquila,” Particle said.
Even before I could react (suspected reaction: “Crap! Mommy!”) there was a twirling in the air around me and a pair of clawed hands clasped my arms. The skin on the hands was rough, like the feet of a chicken, and the sudden burst of speed cleared my head. I saw the ground rising back up to me -- I was being guided.
“Wha--”
“Calm yourself, my friend.” My rescuer was a tall, powerful figure clad all in white and brown feathers. Around his neck dangled a tiny wooden bird, carefully hand-carved and painted. His eyes were blue and wise, the wings on his back full and lush, his beak and talons sharp and vicious. I recognized him immediately as one of my old favorites. He was among the proudest, noblest of Siegel City’s protectors. He was Aquila, the Spirit of the Eagle.
“Geez,” I said.
“What is it?”
“I-- nothing.” I couldn’t bring myself to say, “I can’t believe someone like you got caught up in this mess, too.”
Aquila placed me on the ground. “Thanks for the save,” I said. He nodded and his cheek muscles pulled back into what may have been a smile -- it was too hard to tell through the beak.
“Particle often keeps me on call when training newcomers.”
“God, I feel stupid.”
“Don’t,” said the gravel voice. Fourtifier ground up to me and clapped a dusty hand on my back. I felt my limbs begin to stiffen again. “It happens during a first rumble sometimes.”
“And I’m really sorry, First Light,” I called up to the floating Cape. She was shivering in the air.
“Perhaps... I overreacted. You merely grasped my robe. I remain clean.” I noticed she kept her distance, though.
“Hey, you did fine, kid,” a Five-Share offered.
“Yeah.” Fourtifier shuddered a little. “That melting thing was inspired.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Particle said, “but you certainly have room for improvement. Let’s
reset everything and try it again.”
ISSUE FIVE
ANIMAN
After three run-throughs I satisfied both Particle and myself that I wouldn’t go flying off the handle (so to speak) for the actual rumble, and he was ready to call it a day. He enlarged the Six-ers and me, then Aquila, who waited nearby just in case. Normal-sized, we joined the others in the observation room. Mental Maid, I was relieved to see, had gone, but the
rest of our audience remained -- most of them being abnormally sympathetic.
“Hey, it’s okay...”
“Happens to everyone...”
“First time out...”
“Geez, it’s like talking to Five-Share,” I muttered. I felt like an Olympic gymnast being comforted by his team after smashing his personal region into the pummel horse.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Particle said. “We’re not looking at this as anything more than one bad run-through and three good ones. And for a first-timer, that’s a pretty good ratio, as any of you can attest.”
“Yeah!” Goop barked, slinging one dripping orange arm over my shoulder. “Leave the little guy alone.”
“Initial snafu aside,” the Conductor said, “it was pretty good, Josh.”
“I was so proud of you,” Sindy said. I could feel the glow well up around my ears. It rapidly diminished when the cell phone on her belt buzzed.
“It’s Todd,” she said, turning on the phone and completely oblivious that she was using Noble’s real name in front of a “rookie.”
“Why’s he texting you?”
“He just wants to know where I am.”
I had to fight back a snarl. “What, he doesn’t trust you to be by yourself?”
“He’s just concerned,” she said, letting out a depressing, full-body sigh. “I’d better see what he needs. I’ll catch up with you later. Nice run-through, Josh.”
She walked away, steel door to the Arena gliding shut behind her. There was a beat and then myself, the Conductor and no less than three of Five-Share mumbled the word “Jackass” simultaneously.
“Good run, Josh. Now go rest up. You’ll be doing the real thing in a few days.” Particle gave me a firm, reassuring handshake and walked out, Flux and LifeSpeed close behind. I gave congratulatory handshakes to the Six-ers, all but First Light, and they left too.
“You’re gonna be good, little guy,” Goop said. “Goodgoodgoodgoodgood!” He complimented me with a squishy hug, interjected “See ya ‘round,” and happily bounded away.
Aquila, the Conductor and I walked out into the hall, me shaking off a little Goop residue. “Want to head to our room and clean yourself up?”
“Yeah, I’d appreciate that. Wait a minute, ‘our’ room?”
“Yeah. Animan here is my roommate.”
“Who?”
Aquila smiled as much as he could with a beak and wrapped a hand around the little wooden eagle-totem around his neck. He closed his birdlike eyes and bore down. There was a twinkling of light and the towering figure next to me began to convulse. The long, proud wings folded in upon themselves and his beak and talons lost their points, shrank and eventually morphed into an ordinary face and hands.
Once the transformation was done, the brilliant figure of Aquila was gone, replaced by a short, happy-looking man with mocha-colored skin surrounding his jet hair and eyes. He wore a simple green shirt and blue jeans with white Keds and, except for the eagle dangling from his neck, there was nothing out of the ordinary about him at all.
“Ah,” he said, stretching his muscles. “The real me. This is a much better fit, right, bud?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Much. Geez, with the wings and beak and all, it never even occurred to me that Aquila could have a secret identity.”
The newcomer cast a wry glance at the Conductor. “He don’t know me very well, do he?”
“Native American eagle totems and Bugs Bunny imitations,” I said. “The culture in this room is astounding.”
“Come on, Josh,” the Conductor said. “Have we got something to show you.”
As we turned the corner into the dorms, Hotshot rounded the corner. Just as fast as I felt the Rush from him I also felt a well of disdain. The Conductor must have felt my emotion, because he raised an eyebrow and glanced at me.
“Hey guys,” Hotshot said. “How’d the rehearsal go, rookie?”
“I survived,” I said in the coldest voice I could muster, and I sped up, tromping down the hall.
Animan waited for him to leave hearing range. “What was that about?”
“Let’s just get to your place. I need to get cleaned.”
I saw the quarters on Hotshot’s tour, but I hadn’t seen one decorated yet. Straight through the front door was a living area, complete with a kitchenette, TV area and couch that more than likely had been discovered on the side of the road. In short, it looked like any of a dozen post-college apartments I’d seen.
“What am I here to see?” I asked.
“This way.” Animan led me to an abbreviated hallway in the back, which featured a bathroom in the middle, flanked on either side by a sleeping area. I caught a glimpse of what I figured was the Conductor’s room. The stacks of Classical Thunder CDs and the Phantom Regiment Marching Corps banner were the giveaways.
The other bedroom, Animan’s, was like stepping into the Discovery Channel. The walls were covered with ornithological and ichthyological charts, the bed was barely visible beneath the zoology textbooks and the shelves were lined with cutaway models of birds, whales and mountain cats. The only spot that didn’t belong in a college zoology class was the full-length mirror hanging from the back of the door.
A work-desk ran along one side of the room and nearly the entire wall behind it was covered with pegs. Small wooden totems dangled from many of them, each about two inches long, carefully crafted and hand-painted. Many more pegs stood empty, as though they were waiting for a totem to occupy them. As I examined the rows of creatures -- a falcon, a puma, a dolphin, a starfish -- Animan removed the eagle-totem from around his neck and hung it from one of the empty pegs.
The totems were some of the most beautiful carvings I’d ever seen. I couldn’t even imagine the precision of the blade used or how fine a paintbrush was needed to create those lines. “This is incredible stuff, man.”
“Thanks,” Animan said. “I carve and paint it all myself, once I finish researching an animal.”
“Animan’s an expert on every animal he crafts,” the Conductor said. “By now he’s got enough rattling around that otherwise-empty head to rack up half a dozen PhDs.”
Animan nodded. “Check out my new one -- it’s on the desk.”
I looked down and saw a half-whittled shape that I could tell, even in this preliminary stage, was going to be an antelope. It was crude and had no details yet, but it was already a remarkable piece of work.
“You do all this yourself?” I said, turning to face Animan. “You’ve got some serious talents, ma--”
I shouted out an unintentional expletive as I turned to see Animan gone, replaced by a snarling, snaggle-toothed beast with flashing eyes and gaping, salivating jaws. I fell backwards into a bookshelf and a frog model slipped from its peg, bonking me on the head.
In the doorway, the Conductor was laughing so hard I thought his band uniform would pop open. He wheezed and held onto the doorframe for support. In front of me the carnivorous visage that sent me crashing backwards calmed itself into a smile and began to utter a low, guttural canine chuckle.
“I am sorry, Josh,” the Conductor said, gasping for breath. “Oh, geez, but if you had seen your face...”
As calm returned to my limbs I examined the hairy, fanged creature in front of me with his tattered, brown shreds of clothing and short snout sniffing at the air. For the first time, I noticed the animal totem about his neck -- it was a dog, I thought. No, a...
“You’re Wolph,” I said. Wolph was a Cape in the same vein as the Gunk -- widely considered monster by the general public, but who, more often than not, wound up helping the very people who despised and feared him.
“I apologize for frightening you, friend Joshua,” he said in a sudden British accent. (A werewolf with a British accent. I felt like I was in a movie.) “Sometimes my passion for the dramatic overwhelms me.”
“You’re Wolph,” I added for clarification. By now they were probably wondering if I was sitting on a parrot totem. “And you’re also Animan,” I p
ointed out, just to break the monotony.
“And Aquila,” said Wolph. “And many, many others. Each totem you see here represents another champion.” He grasped the wolf-totem at his neck and concentrated. The fur went back beneath the surface of his skin, his teeth dulled and he was once again the good-natured guy I’d met a few minutes ago.
He handed me the wolf-totem. “Fact is,” he said, “I’m pretty much any animal-based Cape you can think of. Llamaman, K-9 Kop, Moray...”
“And that’s why they call you Animan?”
“Yeah. ‘Manimal’ was taken.”
I examined the wolf-totem closer. “Hey, you know, the first few times I was around Capes who couldn’t turn off their powers, you know, like the Gunk or DoubleGum Man, I automatically shifted to whatever form they were in. That didn’t happen just now.”
“Didn’t happen when Goop was around either,” the Conductor said.
“Maybe I’m getting better control over my powers. I do feel a Rush from you, though.”
“Maybe it’s that the forms I take aren’t really powers,” Animan said. “The forms are what happen when I use my powers. My only inherent talent is to absorb the characteristics of my magic totems.”
“They’re magic?”
“Yeah, it was some Indian Shamen or Mayan priest or something, I forget what Morrie’s guys suggested. Truth is I just research the animal, make a carving and I use it to bring out their phenotypes on my own body. I’m not quite sure how I do it, but I do it.”
“Can anyone else use them?”
“Nope. They’re attuned to me. I make ‘em, I study ‘em, only I can use ‘em.”
“Really?” I said. I raised the Wolf-totem to eyes and imagined myself... hairier.
Other People's Heroes (The Heroes of Siegel City) Page 8