by Kay Cordell
Phenom
Kay Cordell
Published by Ink in the Gutter Publishing, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 Kay Cordell
All rights reserved.
No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Photography from Pexels.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Phenom
Phenom is only the beginning…
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
But wait, there’s more!
ODDITY
BTDubs… | Who Wrote This Book Anyway?
Dedicated to my awesome family
who has been amazingly supportive.
To the friends and family
who read so much of my writing
(not all of it spectacular)
that came before this.
And to my niece and nephews
who inspire me everyday.
Phenom is only the beginning…
When the Everett Sisters got their powers in a freak accident, it happened with the whole world watching. Now, they’re superheroes, but without the luxury of secret identities. Saving the day is easy. Navigating relationships—with friends, crushes, and each other—in their very public lives is the hard part.
Four very different sisters. Four unique stories in a larger-than-life world of heroes, villains, and crazy superpowers.
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in the Yesterday’s Heroes series.
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1
For once, Erin Everett isn’t running late.
In fact, she’s strolling quite leisurely across New Amsterdam University’s South Quad, appreciating how the early Spring sun hits the old brick and stone buildings. The lawns are crowded with students eager to appreciate the unseasonably warm March weather. The temperature had made it into the lower 60s earlier in the day.
Even this late in the day, they’re spread out on the still-mostly-winter-brown lawns catching up on reading or chatting with friends. A few toss a frisbee around. Others in striped, hippie sweatshirts kick a hacky sack back and forth. The dignified, centuries-old buildings stand sentinel over it all.
A few eyes wander in her direction, watching her cut across the Quad. She gets a couple of smiles and nods from students she doesn’t know. A couple more from familiar faces she’s seen in class. But mostly, her peers ignore her. New Am U has grown accustomed to seeing their resident celebrity superhero around.
When she and her sisters very publicly got their superpowers in a freak accident last semester, it was all anyone could talk about on or off campus. People were calling it the biggest news story of the 90s. Nothing would top it. Not the superpowers part, mind you. That bit about it all going down with the eyes of the world on them. But now it’s six months later and her fellow students aren’t impressed by her anymore.
It’s not like she’s the only supe flying around New York. Even the novelty of Erin and her sisters being the only superheroes without secret identities has worn off.
She checks her watch again and smiles. The dollar movie at the University Center isn’t starting for another twelve minutes. Her friends will die from shock when she saunters in, not just on time, but technically early. As long as she can make it across campus without any superhero shenanigans slowing her down.
No sooner has she congratulated herself on her bomb time management skills when she hears it. Not a supervillain. Something scarier.
“It’s Phenom! It’s Phenom! Hey! Hey! Phenom! Over here!”
Superfans.
Erin still can’t quite get used to people reacting to her as if she’s Tony Braxton or Sarah Michelle Gellar or some real celebrity.
But she comes to a reluctant stop, slaps on her great, big hello-fan-I’m-glad-to-hit-pause-in-the-middle-of-what-I’m-doing-and-sign-whatever-scrap-of-paper-you-happen-to-have-on-you smile.
By the looks of it, the two girls bum-rushing her are high schoolers visiting the Ivy League. One wears flower-patterned petal pushers and a midriff-revealing fuzzy pink sweater. The other’s in a cute little plaid skirt and matching yellow cardigan set.
None of the students actually enrolled here bother putting that much effort into their appearance. Especially not on a random Thursday. Who has the time?
“I told you it was her!” the girl in the fuzzy sweater says. “I told you!”
The taller girl, the one in the cardigan set, only says, “omigoshomigoshomigosh,” quietly over and over. She’s so tense and rigid, a bulldozer wouldn’t knock her over.
“I’m obsessed with the Forever Family!” Fuzzy Sweater says.
Forever Family. That’s the moniker the media came up with for Erin and her sisters. Because there are four of them, and their last name is Everett. Get it?
“And you’re my all-time favorite superhero,” Fuzzy Sweater continues. “I dressed up as you for Halloween and everything.” She points to the tall girl beside her. “Ellie was Stunner. Our friend Carla was Oddity and our other friend Morgan was Essence. She just wore her normal clothes and put a name tag on that said ‘Essence.’ Isn’t that funny? Omigosh! They’re going to be so jealous! Can I have your autograph? Make it out to Lily. That’s me, by the way. My name is Lily. Take my picture, Ellie!”
Lily thrusts a black and yellow disposable camera at Ellie. Still a statue of shock and awe, Ellie slowly takes the camera with trembling hands. But that’s all she manages before freezing up again.
“Here. Let me,” Erin says, her fan smile firmly in place.
Reaching out with her mind, Erin plucks the camera from Ellie’s hands. The camera appears to move through the air on its own as Erin raises it high and flips it so that the little round lens faces her and Lily.
Ellie’s eyes go wide.
“She’s doing it!” Lily squeals, hitting a frequency that only teenaged girls and supes with master-lever abilities to control sound waves can reach.
“Getting in the picture, Ellie?” Erin asks.
Ellie squeaks—which is much easier to the ears—but doesn’t move. Erin steps to her side instead. Lily comes with her, no prompting required.
After snapping a few photos and signing the campus maps each girl carries, Erin makes her apologetic exit.
She checks her watch once more. She can still make it in time, but walking won’t do it. With a thought, she rises into the air as smoothly as if she were born with the power of flight. There’s another squeal of excitement from the high school girls.
A blinding light erupts from the campus below.
It fills her vision and has a distinctly supernatural feel to it. After doing the superhero thing for a while, a girl starts to get a feel for the difference between mysterious flashes of light caused by technology and those caused by more mystical forces.
The light fades as quickly as it had appeared.
Then comes the shouting and screaming.
2
Superhero shenanigans.
Or, to be more accurate, supervillain shenanigans.
Yes.
Goblins.
The Quad has been transformed into a cramped, disheveled medieval marketplace. Or at least what medieval marketplaces look like in movies. Fabric draped stalls, carts loaded with goods, inexplicable piles of hay. And then there’s the small but ferocious-looking pointy-eared creatures darting through it all. What should have been a straight shot across the lawns to the safety of the buildings has become a confusing maze for the terrified students.
From her vantage point above it all, she makes out a giant hexagonal grid spread across the ground. Not exactly in keeping with the quasi-medieval theme.
“Just another day in New York,” Erin mutters. She checks her watch again, though not even a minute has passed since she last checked. “I can still make it.”
There’s one nice thing about not having a secret identity. Other heroes have to run off and find some dark alley or phone booth where they could change into their super suits, all for the sake of hiding who they are behind the masks.
That’s never an issue for Erin. Everyone in the world already knows who she is and what she can do. No need for a change of wardrobe before jumping into a save-the-day situation.
She dives back toward the ground in time to pull the two high school girls out the way of a huge pair of dice, each with too many sides, that fly in from nowhere. But winces as the die bounce off the ground and go flying again, knocking a chunk out of Willoughby Hall.
What they have to do with goblins and a quasi-medieval market place, Erin can’t even begin to guess. But all of this could only be the work of Mr. Mytholic. His manifestation always have that telltale, otherworldly glow. Besides, causing random disturbances—spontaneous moments of whimsy, he likes to call it—is just his style.
She activates the small, round comm she keeps on a chain around her neck. A gift from a friend. “I could use some backup here, Tech.”
Between the goblins and the endlessly bouncing dice, it’s all Erin can do to keep up with the people needing last minute rescues. She lets out a huge sigh of relief when a familiar silhouette arcs through the sky.
She knew he would come. He always does.
TechStorm’s dark, metal form hovers above the mayhem a moment, taking everything in.
“Take your time, Tech,” Erin calls up, “not like I have somewhere I need to be.”
“Is it too much to ask for these supervillains to check your schedule before springing their diabolical schemes?” he says, his words filtered through an electronic voice.
“I’m saying.”
His face, the face of a machine, offers no expression. But they’ve teamed up so many times in the last few months that they’ve earned the privilege of relentless sarcasm with each other.
She throws a grin at him. “At least I’m in good company.”
“Likewise.”
That one word makes Erin ridiculously happy. But she shoves it aside so she can focus on clearing the way for a pair of students making a run for the library.
TechStorm’s body falls apart.
At least that what it looks like. Really, it’s the dozens of small Bots that make up his form separating and going their separate ways. The links between the Bots are so seamless that if she didn’t know any better, she’d never have guessed that one machine could become many.
The dark Bots move beautifully together, sometimes reminding Erin of a graceful school of fish arcing and twisting through the deep sea in unison. Other times they remind her of an angry flock of birds on the attack.
“It’s Raid on Shadow City,” TechStorm says through a Bot that sticks by Erin’s side.
“Huh?”
“This whole thing. It’s like a life-size version of that RPG board game. Raid on Shadow City.”
She spares a glance around. “Oh, yeah. I see it now. It has the fighting tokens and everything.”
“Combat tokens.”
“Whatever.”
She’s played Raid on Shadow City before, but only because she’d been roped into it a couple of times last semester, which really goes to shows how good a friend she is.
“This is weird, right?” Erin asks as she hefts a toppled street lamp with her mind and hurls it at a horde of goblins before they mow over a pair of fleeing college students.
“Define ‘weird.’” TechStorm says, zooming by after one of the humongous die. Or rather, parts of him zoom by.
“You know,” she says, reaching out to catch the dice. “Weirder than anything else we’ve ever fought.”
“Weirder than when King Kraze turned Central Park into a zero-gravity field?” he asks.
“Yup.”
A group of Bots surround the captured dice. She lets it go, trusting TechStorm to keep it secure while she concentrates. She feels for the very molecules that make up the dice’s form and then disperses them. What remains of it blows away like sand.
“Weirder than that cruise ship appearing on top of that skyscraper?”
“Oh, definitely.”
Erin halts a volley of rocks midair. A group of goblins had catapulted them at a gray-hair professor scurrying into Willoughby Hall. Again, she pulls at the molecules and reduced the rocks to sand. If she were strong enough, she’d disperse every aspect of this crazy construct all at once. But she has her limits and does what she can despite them.
“Weirder than that time all those Miss Capybara clones were running around?”
“Okay, maybe not weirder than that,” Erin concedes. “But still, who turns a lame board game into a campus-sized gauntlet?”
“Everyone stay off the red combat tokens,” TechStorm booms out through several of the Bots scattered across the Quad. Erin recognizes these Bots as his Scouters, the handful of Bots that always remain separated from his composite form and above all the action, allowing him a fuller picture of everything that’s happening. “If you step on a red combat token, the game’s monsters will engage you in a battle.”
The manhole-cover-sized “tokens” are positioned throughout the area. In board game form, the player would flip them to see what monster they have to battle. She manages to disperse a few of them before a screaming bystander draws her attention and she’s back to deflecting goblin attacks.
“C’mon,“ TechStorm says to her, “you gotta admit that this is pretty cool.”
“Not you too,” she groans.
“What?”
“You sound like my friend. He loves this game. He’s in heaven right now if he’s seeing this. But my other friend would hate this,” she laughs. “He literally has a list of 1,001 things that are cooler than RPG boardgames.”
Erin gathers a handful of kicking, hissing goblins together. A pair of Bots borrow rope from a nearby quasi-medieval marketplace stall and begin wrapping it around her catch.
She bites her lip in concentration. Holding on to the squiggling bundle of fury is so much harder than handling inanimate objects. And unlike inanimate objects, she can’t reduce a living thing to a pile of sand. Or, more likely, goop. Actually, she probably could do it, but exterminating lifeforms isn’t something she’s felt inclined to try.
“I’m assuming this is the same friend you always have an anecdote about?” TechStorm asks. “Nate, right? Ever notice how you bring him up in conversation pretty much all the time?”
“Do I?”
“Watch out!”
Quicker than a thought, the tiniest of the Bots click together to form fingers. The fingers attach to more Bots becoming a hand that wraps around Erin’s elbow and tugs her out of the way of a flying, flaming boulder. Pulled off balance, she tumbles, her individual braids flying around her head. A pair of artificial arms catch her.
TechStorm h
olds her, having pulled himself back into the form of a metal man that she jokingly started calling his “techform” months ago. The term stuck.
“Should I be jealous of this Nate guy?” he says.
“You don’t have to be.” She meets his glowing white eyes. Allows the look to linger. They might be the eyes of a machine, but somehow they’ve never seemed empty.
A new surge of yelling draws Erin’s attention back to the situation below them. She hoists herself out of TechStorm’s arms and he scatters into his separate pieces again.
“What is that?” she yelps. Though she already knows the answer.
The enormous monster of bones is as tall as the school founder’s statue in the middle of the Quad. It moves on six tree trunk legs and tosses its giant tusks. A humongous, scorpion-like tail whips wildly behind it.
The game’s designers may have overdone it just a little when coming up with this creature.
The huge Skelebeast charges out from between Barnard Library and Pratt Hall, and some guy lying beneath a tree with eyes closed and headphones over his ears somehow doesn’t notice any of the chaos churning around him. Not even the six-ton monster headed right for him.
“Seriously?” Erin says.
Speeding toward him, she reaches out with her mind and snatches the guy from the grass seconds before he’s trampled. He just manages to catch his Discman, but its lid pops open and spits out its CD.
“My Chumbawamba CD!” The guy exclaims, then he seems to notice that he’s a lot further from the ground than he’s supposed to be. “Oh, it’s you. Wait. What’s going on?”
Erin deposits him in front of the library’s stone columns, telling him to stay indoors until this is over. “And stop listening to your music so loud. You’ll ruin your hearing!”
“Who are you? My mom?” the guys says, but he shuffles inside.
Shaking her head, she returns to the field and reaches out with her most unique sense once more. Her mind feels the Skelebeast’s molecules as solidly as if she’d stretched out her hand and grabbed each individual bit. She hefts it into the air. The giant, hellish creature thrashes against her grasp and swats TechStorm’s Bots away with its tusks and tail.