We Could Be Heroes

by Harmon Cooper

  Sam’s nostrils flared, his head spinning with all the scents that came to him, from Helena’s desire for Sam to be inside her, to a little apprehension, to more of her privileged past. While she seemed confident in the moment, she was also nervous as hell.

  With Helena’s help, Sam was able to get his pants off as well, his cock springing to attention just as his underwear pulled over the head of his penis.

  Shifting away from kissing him, Helena crouched over his member, and slowly began to lower her wet mound onto it, Sam gyrating his hips slightly as he entered her, feeling her tightness, the strain on his cock, Helena letting out a little groan as he made it all the way in.

  For a moment, they held this position, Helena crouched above him, her hands on his stomach, but eventually, they flipped around, Helena showing just how flexible she was as she lifted her leg all the way up, holding it just under her knee, her foot practically touching the side of her face.

  Realizing that there would be a lot of options with Helena’s flexibility, Sam moved in from the side this time, his arms propped up, banging it out in a northwesterly direction.

  He was breathing heavily now, breathing out of his mouth, disregarding the metallic smell of sex, the hormones in the air, the smell the bedsheet produced as their bodies rubbed against it.

  Switching it up, Helena did the splits on the bed and leaned forward a bit, hiking her ass up, allowing Sam to enter from behind.

  She was growing more comfortable with their sex now, as was Sam, the newness of it all quickly being replaced with a willingness to make this first time memorable, to please each other.

  Still in this position, Helena pulsated the lips of her vagina, creating even more of a sucking action as Sam entered and exited her. Eventually, she brought her legs around, so she was now in a sort of kneeling prayer position, Sam’s thigh muscles starting to ache as he went at it.

  Sensing this, Helena told Sam to move to his back again and climbed back on, this time rocking some reverse cowgirl action for a moment until she bent backwards, still moving up and down, her neck stretching back until she was able to turn her head to the right and make out with Sam.

  Sam was breathing out of his nose again now, but he didn’t care.

  He was having way too much fun.

  Chapter Forty: A Cure for A Cure

  (Well, someone had to go out for a drink and make a terrible decision.)

  Zoe pulled her hood even further over her head, annoyed by her tiger ears and the friction it was causing.

  She walked through Helena’s neighborhood, an area known as the Amor District, the nicest neighborhood in all of Centralia and the safest too, which explained why many of the expansive mansions didn’t have gates.

  Zoe remembered coming here as a child with her grandmother, who had gotten a few cleaning jobs at some of the mansions to bring in extra income.

  It seemed like the rich people of Centralia had all the space in the world, bedroom after bedroom, multiple living rooms, gyms, dens, gardens and other spaces that many in Centralia had never seen or experienced outside of magazines and comics.

  Zoe knew the area well enough to head in the direction of a lane of rowhouses that had been converted into restaurants and coffee shops, which lined the border of the Amor District. She wanted a drink, so she walked into the first bar she saw, a place called Peace of Mind.

  After stepping around a few trust fund babies, she found the darkest corner she could at the bar, and sat, hoping to hide the tiger side of her face. At the moment, the bar wasn’t very packed, which was exactly how she hoped it would be.

  She scanned through a menu on the bar and ordered a glass of wine and a shot of wine concentrate, something that this bar specialized in, both drinks coming relatively quickly.

  Zoe threw the shot back, wincing as the liquor burned down her throat.

  The wine concentrate had more bite than a traditional shot of alcohol, but it also had a very floral taste to it, something that left her wincing for a moment.

  “Too much?” the bartender asked.

  “I just wasn’t expecting it.”

  Another customer waved him over, and the bartender quickly moved over to the woman and left Zoe alone with her wine glass, which she sipped from slowly, trying not to draw anyone’s attention.

  And the place was quiet too, at least for another thirty minutes or so, time enough for Zoe to have another glass of wine before a group of young men entered, all of them drunk non-exemplars who had already been kicked out of another bar.

  Zoe had picked all this up from context clues, her tiger ears twitching under her hood as they chortled, the smell of intoxication reaching her nose even with the fact she herself was drinking.

  She didn’t have a heightened sense of smell like Sam had, but she did notice that her sense of smell was better than it had been before. Everything was better, really, aside from the fact that half of her face was covered in fur.

  “Lemme buy youse ah dreenk,” one of the drunk men said as he sat next her, clearly being egged on by his friends, some of them whooping, calling his name, telling him to ‘go get it.’

  Zoe shook her head.

  “Come on, ladeeee, wuz under dat hood anyway?” he asked, his words slurring together. “Lemme buy youse ah dreenk, it’s my buddiez birfday, we’re out haveeng some phfun. Youse seem like ah fun gurl.”

  “Last chance,” Zoe told him as she finished her glass of wine.

  “Lass chanze fer wha? To buy youse ah dreenk?”

  The man called the bartender over, and ordered her a shot of wine concentrate.

  “She doesn't really like the stuff,” the bartender started to tell him.

  “I don’t geeve ah fug wha she likez. I’m ordereeng here, so get me thah goddamn shot!” the man said, one of his friends stepping up to his right, and placing an arm on his shoulder.

  “Make it a shot for me too, all of us,” his friend said, this one less drunk than his counterpart. “Now what’s up with this little lady over here? Why are you sitting in the corner with a hood over your head hiding that pretty face of yours?” the second friend asked.

  “I warned you,” Zoe said, her claws growing on her hands.

  “Sheeze ahn exemplur?” the first man asked, stumbling back.

  “Dude, she has a fucking tail!” the second man said.

  “No powers in here,” the bartender told Zoe, the man looking to the door as he nodded one of the security guards over.

  “I will leave then.” Zoe turned to the drunk guys next to her for the first time, the light revealing her face.

  “Holeee sheet! Sheeze a furball!” the first man shouted, stumbling backward again and ultimately falling on his ass.

  Zoe let her hood fall as she passed them, her two ears springing up, an indecipherable look on her face as she kept her claws at the ready.

  “Fellas, look what the cat dragged home!” the second guy laughed, pointing at Zoe. “Well, if it has a pussy…”

  Zoe lunged at the man.

  Her claws extended, she dug into the flesh of his shoulders, taking him down onto a barstool. the barstool gave way and both of them hit to the ground.

  The second man cried out at the pain in his shoulders, blood now dripping from Zoe’s claws as she stood, everyone else backing away from her, even the security guard afraid to approach.

  “You need to get out of here,” the bartender said. “Cops will be here any moment.”

  “Thank you for giving me the heads up,” Zoe told him as she turned to the exit.

  “You ugly bitch!” one of the drunk guys yelled.

  “Stop her!” shouted the guy she’d just taken down.

  But no one did anything as she moved past them, aside from one guy who thought it would be a good idea to spit on her.

  This was the last guy in the crowd of drunken friends, the one at the back who hadn’t said a word since they’d entered.

  As Zoe stepped past him, he spat on the front of her hoodie, whipping
her into a frenzy as she swung wide, her fist connecting with his face. She followed this up with a few more fists to his stomach, then a knee to his chin, her claw scraping across his back as she flipped him over.

  Once she was outside, Zoe took off running, anger swelling in her chest as the words some of the men had said to her echoed inside her skull.

  She knew they were stupid drunks, but she also felt that some part of it must be true, and given her half-breed face, it was most certainly fact.

  She was a freak now—everything she had wanted regarding an exemplar power was a joke. So Zoe made a split second slightly intoxicated decision to call a teleporter to take her back to the source of the incident.

  ***

  Dr. Hamza Grumio had been lying on his floor for some time now.

  He tried scooting around, and was able to get up onto his bed if he wanted, but something about being on the floor was more appropriate in his current position, the cold, hard surface nice against his skin, and close to the bathroom in case he needed to go. He had already gone once, and had been able to get to the bathroom, but not able to actually get himself onto the toilet.

  It was exhausting, all of it, but he didn’t want to call Scarlett the teleporter, aware that he would have to use her help sparingly.

  While he been lying around, not able to sleep, a thousand ideas had come to him, many on how he would be able to revert an exemplar back to a non-exemplar, but also ideas on how he could concoct a suit that would allow him to walk, and some of the people he needed to contact who could make this happen.

  But the problem was, Dr. Hamza had burned a lot of bridges.

  He used to share his home with his fiancée, a brilliant researcher, but Dr. Hamza’s obsession with self-experimentation went against her beliefs in the Centralian scientific method. So they parted ways. She now worked at a university in eastern Centralia.

  Her departure from his life also had taken a lot of his connections in the scientific community out of the picture, and he certainly didn’t want to contact her in his current state.

  That was another thing he had disliked about her—she had no desire whatsoever to bend the rules, even if it were to help a loved one, whereas Dr. Hamza thought all rules were malleable, that the rules were for simpler people.

  He needed some rest, but had slept through parts of the day, leaving him wide awake, irritated at the fact that he couldn’t simply fall asleep for a long stretch of time.

  “Who’s there?” he called out when he heard a light footstep in his living room. “Mia? No, please, Mia, you’ve done enough!”

  Silence swirled all around him, an excruciatingly long silence in which Dr. Hamza tried to push himself off the ground, to get in a more defensive position, cursing that he no longer had his wrist guard. There was another one in the other room, but he wouldn’t be able to get to it.

  Not now, not with someone approaching.

  Dr. Hamza watched as a shadow came into the room, a female, clear by her form, but obscured by the hood over her head.

  “Who are you?” Dr. Hamza asked.

  “Recognize me now?” the woman asked as she flicked on the light, removing the hood from her head, her tiger ears popping out.

  “You…?” It took Dr. Hamza a few seconds to realize who she was, only because he’d seen her only once, yesterday, when all this went down.

  “You did this to me,” the woman told him, pointing at the tiger side of her face, claws extending from her other hand.

  “I…”

  “And I want you to fix it,” the tiger girl told him before he could speak. “I want you to fix this!”

  “Fix it?” Dr. Hamza gulped. “Yes, fix it! Yes, I can fix it,” he promised her, “but I need my legs. The creature you saw, Mia, she destroyed my legs, paralyzing me. If you want me to fix it, I need to be able to move around my lab…”

  “You don’t need legs to move around a lab.”

  “I will be faster,” Dr. Hamza promised her. “I can move faster and work faster to fix your condition.”

  The tiger girl crouched before him, looking him over. “You said your legs were broken?” she asked.

  Dr. Hamza could smell a bit of alcohol on her, the molecular structures also making their presence known. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him with her catlike eyes.

  “Yes, by Mia, the woman you saw transform.”

  “If they were broken, then they can be healed.”

  A puzzled look came across his face. “There are no healers in Centralia…”

  “It’s going to take me a day, and I may need some supplies,” she finally said. “If I bring you a healer, do you promise to make a serum that cures this?”

  She pointed at her face.

  “I’ve already thought of how I could do it. It’s what I’ve been thinking about, to be honest, because I wanted to go after you and your friends. But if you help me, I’ll forgive all that, just please help me.”

  “You wanted to go after us?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

  “Look what you’ve done to my life,” Dr. Hamza said. “You’ve destroyed everything!”

  “And look what you’ve done to mine!” She turned her back to him, her tail floating up ever so slightly. “And if you don’t help, good luck finding that healer…”

  “Wait!” he cried, reaching his hand out to her. “I promise I will create a cure. If you can help me with mobility, I will create a cure. A cure for a cure, how does that sound?”

  “Like I said, it’s going to take me a day,” the tiger girl finally told him, “and I’m going to need some supplies.”

  Chapter Forty-One: Ozella and Zoe

  (A chapter about people with the letter ‘z’ in their names.)

  Ozella Rose wasn’t getting freaky that night, nor was she in the process of betraying her team. She was doing what the other three should have been doing had they not been so distracted by useless (?) worldly pursuits—Ozella was preparing, figuring out more about her powers.

  She was in the study, surrounded by books, Dinah sitting across from her, the nude ghost woman with her arms crossed over her chest, a bored look on her face.

  “We’re going about this the wrong way,” Ozella told Dinah, even though Dinah never spoke back to her. “We need to know more about our powers, and then once we know more about them, maybe then we can figure out how to use them better, or even turn them off.”

  Spread open on the table before her were books on human anatomy, a neuropsychology book written by a famous telepath, a book of unknown exemplar powers and famous superpowereds, and there was even her old collection of Kingdom Cards, which she’d had a teleporter deliver from her parents’ home.

  Ozella was aware that if she wrote something in her notebook, it would appear next to the person, seemingly floating in thin air. She did not know the limitations of this, and she really hadn’t tested it. It could definitely prove useful if they were interrogating someone, or they needed information on the fly.

  She looked at Dinah again. The ghostly woman was braiding her hair, her blue form semi-transparent at the moment.

  Unfortunately, Dinah didn’t have any stats. Ozella wished that the woman did. Not only would it give Ozella a clue as to who she was—or better, what she was—but it would also allow her to test out some theories she had.

  In the meantime, she needed to work some things out. It was still a bit primitive, but this was what she had worked out so far:

  Sam Meeko

  Codename: Nosy

  -Enhanced Orthonasal Olfaction

  -Psychometry

  -Memory Reading

  Known Limitations: An abundance of scents can cause issues, cannot turn power off, cannot identify chemicals by name (classification issues), nasal congestion could lead to diminishing returns, no combat capability.

  ---

  Zoe Goa Ramone

  Codename: Tiger Ears

  -Biomorphing

  -Heightened Agility

  -Heightene
d Senses

  *Olfactory

  *Auditory

  *Visual

  -Strength

  -Claw Retraction

  Known Limitations: Halfway morphed and cannot morph back, no long-range capabilities.

  ---

  Helena Knight

  Codename: Ballerina

  -Mental Inducement

  -Enhanced Persuasion

  Known Limitations: Must make eye contact with target for power to work.

  Ozella needed more information about Helena’s power, and she didn’t want to list the agility she already exhibited as part of her new skillset, considering that she’d had her agility before. Then again, it could have been heightened, but Ozella had no way of knowing that yet.

  She had set up a little work area in the study, and while the place was clean, no dust, it was clear that Helena rarely used the space. The longer Ozella stayed here, the more she felt that this would become a space for her, a space that she could utilize to further her research.

  An idea had taken root in Ozella’s brain, something related to what she had seen when she wrote the word “name” in her Book of Known Variables, and the person’s name appeared.

  But this would be something else she would have to test tomorrow, while they were training.

  She looked at her own stats, knowing that she would also need to classify herself if she wanted to get better, even though she could only see the stats when she looked at herself in the mirror, or down at her hand or something.

  It was clear to her that her power was tied to Dinah in some way, but she didn’t know the best way she should classify it.

  Ozella Rose

  Codename: Human Shield

  -Dinah Healing

  -Dinah Wound Transfer

  -Enhanced Mental Imagery

  -Pattern Sense

  Known Limitations: No combat ability.

  Ozella’s own power was a mystery to her, but the name was something that made sense. Because she could take and sustain so much damage, her usefulness to the group would likely be through this ability, acting as a human shield.