We Could Be Heroes

by Harmon Cooper

  Reciting the Heroes Anonymous mantra didn’t make Sam Meeko feel anything, really. It was no longer the truth; he was an exemplar, dammit (!), he had an actual power, and sure, he wasn’t a hero, but he had plans to…

  A mental message came in, this one from Ozella Rose, the statkeeper from the cosplay cafe. Can we meet tonight? There’s something I would like to show you.

  Sure, Sam thought back to her, I’m with Helena, if that’s okay.

  That’s fine, Ozella thought back to him, I was going to invite her too.

  Blond-haired Ozella and her schoolgirl clothing was still somewhat of a mystery to Sam, even if he had already sensed she would be an important part of his future, and he hoped their little meeting later would shed some light on the role she’d play in all this.

  “Sam, did you hear what I said?” Bill, the Heroes Anonymous sponsor, asked.

  The bruiser of a man was up at the front standing behind the podium as usual, his chiseled arms crossed over his chest, a stern look on his face. The dude reminded Sam more of a brick than he did a non-exemplar, and as usual, just like he had at the last meeting, Bill was giving Sam hell.

  “Sorry, had an important message coming from…” Sam looked around, catching Helena’s eyes. She was trying not to smile at him, and had to avert her gaze to prevent herself from laughing out loud. “My mom. Yeah, my mom was sending me a message.”

  A few of the people at the H-Anon meeting chuckled.

  It was a small crowd that day, no more than five including Sam and Helena, which was a lot less than there’d been at the initial meeting a couple of days before. The white-haired guy wasn’t there either, nor did Sam really recognize anyone else.

  “Tell your mom that you’re busy,” Bill said sternly.

  “Um, will do.”

  “Good. Now, moving on, I would like to remind everyone that pledges are due at the end of the month, and I’m going to read each and every one of your pledges and follow up on them. I feel like I say this a lot, but it’s important to remember who we are, and who we’re not,” Bill told the small group of exemplar impersonators. “And like I always say, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t powerful in our own individual ways, but we all know the Centralian government regulations and you should all have Title XII memorized by now, which states that it is important non-exemplars recognize that they do not share the same powers as some of their peers. It does not make them lesser, only different.”

  Sam crossed his eyes at Helena and she slowly lifted a finger to his arm and flicked it.

  “And as part of our mission, it’s important for us to figure out other ways that we can help society. Like volunteer work. Which is what we’re going to do today.”

  “We’re going on a field trip?” Sam asked, cheeky as ever, but also secretly flirting with Helena.

  “Yes, Sam, we’re going on a field trip. To Central Park, where we’re going to help clean up one of the gardens.”

  Sam, who had been breathing out of his mouth throughout the entire meeting, almost inhaled through his nostrils. He stopped himself just in time, and instead went with the question that was at the back of his mind. “What happened in the garden?”

  “Well, as it turns out, some of the persimmons were explosive, and a bunch of them fell from a tree. Uncanny. At least, that’s the story that is going around. Anyway, they left a mess. I have a friend who works for the Centralian Park Service, and he was going to work on cleaning it up this afternoon, but I told him that we’d come help instead. You see, there are other ways to be a hero.”

  A couple of people groaned as Bill clapped his big hands together. “Now, everyone up, I have a teleporter on the way.”

  And sure enough, a chubby male teleporter appeared.

  Almost as if he had peeled away reality, the fat man in registered Centralian teleporter duds stepped out of a slit in the air. Once he was out, the slit stitched back together, as if it had never existed in the first place.

  “I’m looking forward to helping out,” Helena said, a smug smile on her face.

  She was standing now, her shoulders and her spine forming a perfect T, her chin held high as she lightly stepped over to the teleporter. Helena wore a pair of suspenders now that matched her hat, a clean pressed shirt, high waisted trousers that showed her ankles and ballet flats.

  The other three people in the meeting, some other wannabe heroes Sam didn’t know, made their way over to the teleporter as well.

  Scratching his belly first, Sam took his place next to Helena, the gray-haired beauty moving just a few inches closer to him, so her hip was rubbing against his.

  “All right, everyone, let’s try to keep it to thirty minutes,” Bill said, “I have something to do after this.”

  Sam nearly asked Bill if he had a date, but bit his lip just in time, taking an inhale through his mouth. And by that point, the teleporter had started to peel away reality, the park appearing on the other side.

  One moment they were in the H-Anon meeting space, the next they were standing in Central Park, a light breeze rustling Sam’s tangled black hair.

  “Holy shit,” Sam said when he saw the destruction.

  Roots had been ripped up from the ground, exploded dried fruit was everywhere, flies zipped around the leftover remains, some of the branches were stripped off and overturned rocks littered the ground. It looked like a war had taken place in the garden.

  “Persimmons did this?” Helena asked.

  “That’s right,” a thin man wearing a green park service outfit said. He stood near a small vehicle, likely developed by the Eastern Province, which had several rakes, two rolls of bags, and three trash cans in the back.

  “All right, everyone, let’s get started. This is real heroes’ work,” said Bill as he grabbed a rake.

  “You heard the man,” the park ranger added.

  “Real heroes’ work,” Sam said under his breath as he grabbed a rake.

  Sam wasn’t lazy. He liked working outside, and his favorite thing to do was to clear underbrush, as it allowed him to dig things up, swing a machete, rearrange the world in a way that was satisfying to him. But cleaning up a bunch of fruit guts wasn’t really his idea of a good outdoor experience.

  Yet Sam went along with it anyway, and he had just started on the quadrant nearest to the front of the garden when he accidently took a breath through his nose.

  Sam stopped dead in his tracks, a lump appearing in his throat, everything coming to him at once.

  Well, not quite everything, but he did see a struggle between a man and some type of…

  Beast morpher?

  Sam looked at the ground, noticing the spot where something had landed.

  While the others continue to work behind him, he moved over to the spot to get a closer sniff. After checking to make sure no one was looking, he bent down and took a big whiff of the overturned dirt.

  “Looks like you got yourself a real winner there,” the park ranger told Bill, loud enough for Sam to hear.

  “Hey,” Bill called over to Sam, “what are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Sam said, not wanting to show Bill his face, not wanting the H-Anon sponsor to see the horror in his eyes as he realized that whatever had landed there wasn’t an exemplar, it was a non-exemplar who had…

  No, Sam thought as he continued to look around, using his rake to scrape against the ground, as if he were suddenly highly engaged with scraping a random bit of grass.

  “The exploded persimmons are over there,” the park ranger told Sam, nodding to the others. “Really, Bill, this guy is a dumbass.”

  “Hey, let’s not go that far,” Bill told him. “Sam, are you coming over here, or what? We don’t need to rake the whole park.”

  Helena stopped shoveling some persimmon goo into a bag and looked to Sam.

  As casually as possible, he slowly lifted a finger to his nose, and pointed at it.

  “This fucking guy.” The park ranger started cracking up. “I’m not going to say anythin
g, Bill, but now he’s gesturing to the gray-haired lady that he wants to pick her nose. I mean, that’s what it looks like to me.”

  “Sam…” Bill said, barely covering the annoyance in his voice.

  “I’m coming,” Sam said, turning in the opposite direction, so Bill could no longer see his face, or see that Sam’s eyes were closed, that he was sensing something else.

  Sam almost knew what had happened here, almost, and from what he could tell, it had been…

  He glanced around until he saw a small sparkle on the ground, a few feet outside of the entrance to the garden. Sam moved there quickly and picked up the shiny vial, bringing it to his nose, his eyes going wide as he sniffed it.

  Chapter Seventeen: Tea and Stats

  (Sam sees the future in Ozella’s last statement.)

  “I wish Zoe could have come,” Ozella said, her cheeks flushed. She was in a different schoolgirl costume this time, something a little less revealing than the one that Sam had seen her wear the last time they met.

  The dirty blond twenty-year-old was healed up completely too, as if she had never fallen from the wind turbine.

  “Have you thought more about moving in with us?” Helena asked after a quick greeting. Helena wore a little newsy cap, her gray hair jutting out, and a blouse tucked into a pair of waist high slacks that showed her ankles.

  Yep, she had actually gone home to change before their dinner with Ozella.

  Sam didn’t quite know how to feel about this, and Helena definitely didn’t act like she was in diva territory or anything, but it did strike him as a little odd that she would teleport home and change into an outfit that pretty much resembled what she’d been wearing before.

  They were at a diner, a family run joint called Star Diner, which served breakfast twenty-four hours a day. The joint stunk of fried pig fat and sticky pancake syrup, which was the last thing Sam wanted to let into his sniffer.

  But he couldn’t help himself, forgetting to mouth breathe as he sat across from Ozella. It was one hell of a smell combo too.

  In that sniff he not only understood the history of the place and the origin of the food, he also got a better understanding of the family that had passed the diner down from generation to generation, non-exemplars, originally immigrants from the Eastern Province, which explained why the menu had an Eastern theme to it, potatoes and carrot dishes mixed in with breakfast staples. Foods that were rooted, earthy.

  “Yes, I want to move in,” Ozella finally said, avoiding eye contact. “It’s sudden, I hardly know you, but it feels right.”

  Sam and Helena had been waiting for her answer for at least a minute now, which would have been awkward had Sam’s thoughts not drifted off, jumping from concept to concept, as he tried to actively focus on mouth-breathing.

  “That’s great,” Helena said with a smile. “And you’re right, it is sudden, but that’s usually how I operate. Gut instincts and whatnot. I have the perfect room for you, across from the study. You’ll love it.”

  “I still have to pay rent at my current place for another month.”

  “Then pay it, and move in anyway; you don’t have to pay rent at my place,” Helena told her.

  “Really?” Ozella asked, her eyes lighting up. “Thank you, that’s really kind of you.”

  Another sniff through his nostrils, and Sam understood Ozella’s apprehension.

  She wasn’t normally this forthright with people, and even though she had grown to be an incredibly beautiful woman, she still saw herself as something else entirely, which was at odds with the way she looked and dressed.

  Even in Centralia, where exemplars and non-exemplars of all shapes, sizes and colors shared the streets, the schoolgirl look was something that was very noticeable, even with all the cosplay that happened in the city. It was as if there was a subconscious part of Ozella that made her dress the way she did, a part that ignored her better intentions or her outward personality.

  The waiter came by, a burly man with forearms that showed he either worked out, or that he frequently jerked off with both hands.

  “A pot of tea for all of us,” Helena said. “And what light options do you have?” she asked, her menu still closed.

  The waiter snorted. “Ha! We don’t really have light options.”

  “Then tea it is,” said Helena.

  The large waiter stomped off, not too happy that the three of them were just going to sit there and drink tea all night.

  “Okay, here,” Ozella said, opening a notebook that sat on the table before her. “This is my Book of Known Variables.” She clenched her eyes shut for a moment, starting to blush. “At least that’s what I call it. I wanted you to know how I ranked you, and to check if this information is more or less correct. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Ranked us?” Sam asked, looking to Helena, who was preoccupied with sending mental messages to her assistant, Bryan.

  “I can be helpful; that’s what I’m trying to say,” Ozella told him. “Just take a look, and tell me what you think. This is based on what I know so far.” And with that, Ozella looked to the left, squinted for a moment and returned her gaze to Sam. “Sorry. I don’t know all the details yet. I can fill it out. In pencil.”

  Ozella turned her book to Sam and opened it to a page with his name on the top.

  Sam Meeko

  Cleverness: 6

  Charisma: 7

  Corruptness: 2

  Gullibility: 6

  Attractiveness: 9

  Kindness: 8

  Neediness: 2

  Known Trigger Points: Smells.

  Exemplar or Non-Exemplar: Exemplar.

  Astrological Sign:

  Temperature Preference:

  Family Relations: Lives with family. Now living with Helena Knight.

  Idiosyncrasies and Nervous Ticks: Smells.

  Known Lovers and Sexual Preferences: Zoe. Helena.

  Willingness to Try New Things: 5

  Public Awareness: 2

  “Just let me explain before you ask,” Ozella said, actively ignoring something to her left, which kept taking her attention. “I like observing things. And I have one book,” she said, reaching into her bag and showing them another notebook, “that has basic info for anyone I observe, which I call the Book of Templates. Just the basics. I use that first, then I transfer someone to my other notebook, the Book of Known Variables. If you make it to this other book, then it means you are now an active part of my life.”

  “Good to know,” Sam said, watching Ozella glance to the left again and blink rapidly.

  “Anyway, you seem like a nice enough guy, Sam. So I based yours off a template I have called Good Guy Dave. Not everything is set yet, but as I get to know you, I’ll make some adjustments. If you ever want to see it, you can let me know.”

  Sam didn’t want to do it, and he knew whatever he sensed would likely make him think she was even stranger, but he slowly inhaled through his nostrils.

  Sam gasped as he saw the ghostly woman, the same female who he’d seen bent over Ozella after her fall.

  The woman sat in the booth adjacent to her, her skin somewhere between transparent and blue, nude, the woman’s hair down and nearly reaching her nipples.

  “Known lovers and sexual preferences: Zoe and Helena. How did you know this?” Helena asked with a soft laugh.

  “I just observe,” Ozella said, her face growing white now. “I just observe very well.”

  “Well, ahem, if you need some help filling this out…” Sam said.

  “No, I can fill it out myself. Just tell me the answers.”

  “Okay then,” Sam said, doing his damndest to ignore the ghostly woman sitting in the booth next to them. “Um, my astrological sign is Ventus, and my temperature preference is…” Sam looked to Helena. “Warm? No, hot. I like it hot.”

  Helena raised an eyebrow at him. “I like it cold,” she said, her lips parting ever so slightly as she looked at him.

  Ozella took her notebook back. “Good, I’ll
make a note of this.”

  “Wait, I want to see what you wrote about me,” Helena said. “And my astrological sign is Glacio.”

  “You guys don’t think I’m strange for showing this to you, do you?” Ozella asked, her hand on the book.

  “Not exactly,” said Helena.

  Her hand was on the notebook as well, and Sam hoped it wouldn’t become a little tug-of-war situation. Luckily, Ozella eventually let go, allowing Helena to check it out.

  Helena Knight

  Cleverness: 6

  Charisma: 7

  Corruptness: 5

  Gullibility: 4

  Attractiveness: 10

  Kindness: 4

  Neediness: 5

  Known Trigger Points:

  Exemplar or Non-Exemplar: Non-Exemplar

  Astrological sign:

  Temperature Preference:

  Family Relations: Wealthy family who owns multiple apartments in Centralia.

  Idiosyncrasies and Nervous Ticks:

  Known Lovers and Sexual Preferences: Sam

  Willingness to Try New Things: 8

  Public Awareness: 9

  “I based your basics off a template I have called Gym Rat Pat. You are very fit.”

  “Thanks,” Helena said with a corporate grin on her face. “I’ll admit, it is a little strange, but you got some of the details right. I would increase my cleverness a bit though, I think I’m smarter than a six.”

  “You didn’t hear me debating my rankings,” Sam ribbed her.

  It was an attempt to play along, but he couldn’t help but take more inhalations through his nostrils, trying to understand more about this strange ghost woman sitting near them. All the smells in the restaurant only made it that much harder to nail down some concrete details.

  “You need to stop,” Ozella scolded Sam, taking her notebook back. He was peering at the ghostly woman now, who remained in the booth next to them, a soft smile on her face.