We Could Be Heroes

by Harmon Cooper

  “It is a bit revealing,” Marie the designer started to say, “but it does allow you mobility. For you, I will design a schoolgirl uniform, just as you requested, but I will make sure it has accents that match the rest of your outfits. You will need some type of mask, correct?”

  “That’s right. We don’t want to be recognized,” said Helena. “Especially me.”

  “Why do I get the sense that you four are planning to get into some trouble?” Marie asked with a laugh. “It’s not my business, so no need to indulge me with what you are planning, but you aren’t fooling anyone, let me remind you.”

  “Please just make uniforms for us,” Helena said, and in that moment, Sam watched the bullseye twist across her pupil.

  “Yes, your uniforms,” Maria said, snapping to it, a measuring tape floating out of her pocket.

  “Wow,” Ozella said, embarrassment turning her cheeks red once the measuring tape met Ozella’s plump breasts, which it began measuring, Ozella biting her lip as her breasts pressed up and settled, the measuring tape moving right along.

  “Let’s start with a schoolgirl uniform that has some added protection. Can it be done? Of course it can, because you’ve hired me, and I’m an expert. You do know that I’ve been at this for thirty years now, right?”

  “You already told us that,” Zoe moaned.

  “Good, have you done anything for thirty years?” Marie asked, a curt smile on her face.

  “I haven’t even been alive for thirty years,” said Zoe.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. I hope in thirty years you look as beautiful as you do now.”

  Zoe sat up and looked at the woman, making sure she wasn’t messing with her. “You think I’m… beautiful?”

  “My dear, I’ve never seen a face like this, I’ve never seen with these two old eyes of mine something so unique, so original. I believe you could be a model!”

  Zoe smirked at her. “Been there, done that.”

  “I didn’t say a cocky model, I said a model, but in your new form. Have you thought about modeling as you are now?”

  “How did you know this form was new?” Zoe asked.

  “Because if you had already been a model, in that form, I would have taken notice,” said Marie. “I would have used you in one of my shows. That’s how I know.”

  “Let’s get back to the costumes,” Zoe said, the smirk on her face turning into a genuine smile. She liked receiving the compliment, that was clear as day, and now that the woman had given it out freely, Zoe seemed more inclined to work with her.

  “Before we do that, we need to establish colors for this team. What colors would you like to utilize? There are so many options, and we can put them together and use them in clever ways, but what speaks to you?”

  “Black,” said Zoe.

  “No, dear, black is not one of the options, maybe pearl black, but not your average color of black. You aren’t a team of ninjas, you are a team of adventurers. So pick an adventurous color.”

  “Up to you all,” Sam said, shrugging at the women.

  “Red is a good color,” said Ozella. “I also like white.”

  “Red and white?” Marie asked.

  “No, it’s too jarring,” said Zoe. “Sometimes we may need something that blends in some, so at the very least we should have a dark blue.”

  “Now that you have a dark color, you need a lighter color,” Marie the designer said matter-of-factly. “And it doesn’t have to be two colors, if you want to add a third, that would totally be acceptable.”

  “White is good, very hero-ish, I mean, adventurer-ish,” said Sam.

  “Dark blue, and white. Any thoughts, Ms. Knight?”

  Helena shook her head. “I’m fine with that for now, but I agree with Zoe that we should focus on the darker side of these colors, maybe just using the white as an accent.”

  “Very well,” said Marie. “Now, on uniform styles. I don’t want to take your whole day with this, because I’m sure you have something to do. This is why I brought a book of some popular designs,” she said, reaching into her tote bag as her measuring tape continued to zip around the room, measuring all four would-be heroes.

  Marie pulled out a large book bound in leather and opened it up on the table. “Aside from the schoolgirl, the rest of you gather around and choose designs, then we can work from there. How much time do we have?”

  “An hour,” said Sam, “then I have a meeting I need to get to.”

  “A businessman, I like that,” said Marie with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Yeah, something like that,” Sam said, already regretting the Heroes Anonymous meeting he was required to attend.

  After a day like today, a day in which they’d fought their first successful battle and also got info on a pretty important drop tomorrow, it seemed entirely pointless that he was going to have to go to a goddamn H-Anon meeting.

  At least Helena had already agreed to go as his date (and she needed to attend a meet-up as well).

  So Sam decided to focus on what needed to happen after the meeting as Helena and Zoe looked through uniforms.

  He wanted to impress Helena tonight, and if he was lucky, well, he’d get lucky.

  ***

  “I am not a superpowered individual. I am not an exemplar. I have never had a superpower. I am not a hero, nor will I ever be a hero. I am not a superhero, I am half-powered. I will always be half-powered, I am a non-exemplar. There is nothing about me that is extraordinary. I am not a hero, I am not a superhero. I am half-powered. I will always be half-powered. I am a non-exemplar.”

  Sam Meeko grimaced at the words, annoyed that he had to recite them, especially with what he knew now.

  He saw the guy with white hair in the crowd as usual, a disgruntled look on his face. Sam recalled that the wind-using exemplar named Catherine, the one with the pink leather jacket, was having had some relations with the man. He had sensed she had a crush on this guy, and Sam really couldn’t see why.

  The white-haired man seemed too dark and brooding in a way that was the complete opposite of Sam’s personality.

  And while he had been breathing out of his mouth since they arrived, Helena to his left, her hair tucked under a cute hat, he decided to turn his nostrils in the direction of the white-haired man, who he believed was named Roman.

  One sniff in the man’s direction and Sam felt like a brick had hit him in the face.

  The man’s name was indeed Roman, his sense of smell giving him an almost telepathic understanding of the office administrator who sat before him, his hands curling at his sides, annoyed.

  But it wasn’t his attitude that had caught Sam’s attention. It was the fact that Roman was also…

  An exemplar?

  Sitting next to Sam was a curvy woman with red hair, who was… also an exemplar?

  “What the hell is going on here?” Sam whispered to Helena.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sam took another look to his right to see Roman and the slightly older woman.

  The redhead was his teacher, and there was a little chemistry between the two of them, which was why she had come here.

  Even with that info, Sam still couldn’t piece together why two exemplars were coming to a meeting like this, and as his nostrils started to flare, opening so he could get more details, Bill the session sponsor called him to the front of the room.

  “Shit…” Sam whispered as he made his way to the front. He took his place behind the podium and recited the mantra. Once he was finished, he began, “I think I freaked you all out last time with my story about the sex doll, whose name was Dolly. I mentioned that, right? A sex doll named Dolly. I thought you guys would appreciate that.”

  Helena smirked at him.

  She knew the story by now, and she’d given him a pass on it, which he was glad for because he’d felt like an idiot for getting caught in that way. To his credit, he’d thought he had privacy on his family’s land, but he didn’t, and he was lucky that he didn’t catch
any sort of public indecency or pedophilia charge once the schoolchildren arrived.

  “Ahem,” Bill cleared his throat. The big man’s arms were crossed over his chest, a skeptical look on his chiseled face.

  “Yep, back to the story. Sorry, Bill. Anyway, it really wasn’t my fault that school kids were visiting the vineyard the same day I was there with Dolly. My family should have told me. Maybe they wanted me to get caught. I don’t know.”

  “Sam…” Bill started to say. He glanced over at the H-Anon sponsor, noticing the frown on his face starting to sink even further.

  “Got it, I’ll cut to the chase. So all of us are non-exemplars,” Sam said, looking to the back of the room, to Roman, “and we all have some sort of slightly heightened power, usually endurance-based. I mean, well, I guess we have no one to compare it to, so how do we know if it is actually heightened? Stupid question, but have you ever thought about that? Is it just something they tell us to make us feel special? Beats the hell out of me.”

  “Sam.”

  “Sorry, Bill. Yeah, so I don’t have much endurance,” said Sam, flexing his muscles in a playful way. “But I do have a damn good sniffer, and I’m not talking about the size of my nose. I’ve had it since I was a kid, and I’ve tried to get classified as Type IV Class C, but Centralia’s messed up system…”

  “Sam,” Bill sighed.

  Sam was lying at this point, he’d never actually tried to be classified, but if he was going to take this risk and admit a power in front of the group, he wanted to at least sound somewhat legit.

  A mental message came to him from Helena:

  What are you doing?

  He replied to her in an instant. They’re not going to believe me anyway, might as well have a little fun.

  Sam looked to Helena to see her shaking her head, but he gone this far now, so there really was no turning back.

  “Centralia’s messed up system doesn’t have a good classification system. What can I say? We all know that. I mean, how many classes are there?” Sam asked.

  “Seven in Centralia’s system,” Roman said from the back. “Class A, telepathy; Class B, shifter/absorber; Class C, elemental mimicry/organic manipulation; Class D, kinetic/energy related; Class E, intelligence-based; Class F, teleportation; and class H, healer.”

  “See what I mean? All those classifications and nothing for the people who have heightened senses.”

  “That would be intelligence-based,” said white-haired Roman after whispering something to the woman next to him, “Class E. And you don’t have heightened senses.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow at him. “Want to bet?”

  “We don’t bet here,” Bill said, his eyes twitching.

  “Well, what will it be?” Sam asked, still challenging Roman.

  He saw Helena now giving him the ‘cut it out’ gesture, and he was just about to when Roman spoke up again.

  “How does your power work?” the man asked.

  “Enough…” Bill started to say.

  “No, let me finish, Bill,” Sam told the H-Anon leader with a wave of his hand. “It’s easy, really, I can get a sense of the history of something just by smelling it.”

  Roman shrugged. “That’s it?”

  “We’re not here to test supposed powers,” Bill reminded both of them.

  “All it takes is one sniff,” Sam said.

  “And what do you mean by getting something’s history?” asked Roman.

  The red-haired woman next to him whispered something to him again, but Roman seemed to ignore her.

  “I mean I can get… images, like moving thoughts or something, okay, flashbacks, secrets. I believe that’s the best way to describe it.”

  “You can smell the past?” someone from the front asked, a woman, who Sam saw at every other meeting or so. “That’s a cool power!”

  “But my power isn’t so heightened; I mean, I haven’t had any exemplar training, which would really let me develop it,” Sam said, again lying. His power was heightened, but he was starting to realize that this little confessional was probably the worst way he could have gone about doing this.

  The small crowd talked in hushed whispers as Roman stood, taking off his jacket. He made his way up to the front of the room.

  “It’s a new jacket,” Roman told Sam as he handed it to him. “Tell me about it.”

  “This has gone on too far…” Bill said.

  A wild look splashed across Sam’s eyes as he brought Roman’s jacket to his nostrils. He was just about to sniff it when he decided to blow his nose instead, which he did into a handkerchief he had in his back pocket.

  “Sorry, it’s best to do this with clear pipes.”

  “I can’t believe I’m allowing this to happen,” Bill grumbled. “But it’s a good example of what not to do when someone who doesn’t have a power claims they have one. Hurry up, you two, others need to speak.”

  Sam took a big whiff of Roman’s jacket and gasped, dropping the jacket to the ground. He was being overly dramatic, he already knew what he needed to know about Roman, and sniffing the jacket would only allow him to drill down.

  “Hey…” Roman started to say.

  “You’re… you’re an exemplar?” Sam asked. “You bought this jacket with fake money. No… counterfeit money. That’s it! He’s an exemplar!”

  Roman slowly started to shake his head. “Are you serious?”

  A few in the crowd started to laugh. Helena continued to give Sam a forgiving smirk, at least that was what it looked like.

  “That’s quite enough, Sam,” Bill said as he ushered the thin guy off the stage.

  “But I know what I smelled!” he said, much to the audience’s amusement.

  Roman started to laugh as well as he turned back to his chair. “Trust me, Sam, if I had a power, I definitely, definitely, wouldn’t be hanging out at H-Anon meetings.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Birds and Bees

  (Skip if you’ve never wondered how birds and bees are supposed to have sex, and where the hell this phrase comes from.)

  The pressure was building between Sam and Helena during their date night that followed the botched H-Anon meeting.

  Details not important enough to expand upon include a nice dinner Sam and Helena had at a place famous for its homemade noodles, Sam barely able to get them down but trying his best; a quick stroll that they took in a lovely green area called Empyrean Park which, according to Helena, her grandfather had helped fund before she was born; another detail not important enough to really, well, go into detail about, would be their quick stop at a local candy store, known for its unique sweets, or the quick make out sesh that happened on a park bench near the candy store.

  All these things were nice, and Sam and Helena enjoyed their time together, but the main event was at the forefront of their minds.

  Both were well aware that the tension between them was too strong now, that they needed to see things through, and by seeing things through that meant uniting their bodies, and by uniting the body that meant literally putting one piece of one’s body into one piece of the other’s body, and by putting…

  Well, the picture should be clear now.

  “Hey,” Ozella said, a determined look on her face.

  Sam and Helena had just arrived at her mansion, the teleporter named Lance disappearing in a bitchy golden flash. Ozella sat on the couch, surrounded by books, that same glazed look in her eyes.

  What she was discovering would be super important to the group later, and Sam could sense this with a single sniff, but he could also sense how much Helena wanted him in that moment, especially after both of them had shared a bottle of champagne.

  “And how was the meeting?” Ozella asked, not looking up from her book.

  “The H-Anon meeting was…” Helena raised an eyebrow at Sam. “Let’s just say, it was interesting.”

  “I’ve never been to one of those, I’d love to go.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Sam assured Ozella, who was in yet ano
ther schoolgirl uniform. It was like she had a dozen of these uniforms, each slightly different than the rest, some a little bit tighter, others looser.

  “They aren’t fun, but Sam definitely made it interesting.” Helena grabbed Sam’s hand. “We’ll see you in the morning; we have some training that we need to do.”

  “Yes, I’ll be there for that. Tomorrow’s the big day…” Ozella said, but by this point, Helena and Sam were already slipping into his room.

  Zoe’s door opened at that moment, the woman with tiger features watching her ex and her sort of rival disappear into her ex’s bedroom.

  She looked to Ozella, bit her lip, and stepped back into her room, returning a moment later with a hooded sweatshirt on, pulling the hood over her face.

  “I’m going out,” Zoe announced.

  The walls were too thick for Sam to actually hear this little interaction take place, and by this point, he wouldn’t really have given a shit anyway.

  Helena was kissing him passionately, her hands on his chest, his hands on her lower back. Everything was a bit mechanical until Sam sensed that he should relax some and just let her lead, and doing so turned out to be the best decision he’d made that night.

  Helena took charge like the CEO she was destined to be and pretty much already was.

  She lightly laid him on the bed, crawled on top of him, pulling her loose-fitting blouse out from the top of her trousers. Swaying her hips, she began unbuttoning her blouse, grinding against Sam’s erection.

  Her blouse came open, but she still kept it on as she unfastened the front clasp of her bra, a vertical swath of flesh now visible, her nipples still covered by her blouse.

  Helena dropped her hand onto Sam’s erection, a smile on her face as she bent forward and kissed him, unbuttoning her slacks, Sam helping her pull them down.

  Her lower half was nude now, Sam’s hands moving over the soft flesh of her ass, and coming under her shirt, his thumbs grazing against her nipples.

  He was trying not to breathe out of his nose. There were way too many smells with sex—Sam was keenly aware of this—and it was hard to breathe out of his mouth while she was kissing him.