by Mia Archer
This was going to be the most interesting semester of Surviving A Heroic Intervention ever.
I reached under my desk and pulled out a tiny rod. It was a prototype of what eventually became one of my wrist mounted multicannons. It wasn't as stylish as the wrist mounted unit, but it'd get the job done. And, more importantly, I hadn't ever used this one outside of the lab so there was no chance of Fialux recognizing my handiwork and swooping down to take me out before I had a chance to catch her by surprise.
I pointed the rod to the roof of the lecture hall and flicked a switch. A blast of plasma energy shot out from the rod and slammed into the ceiling. I waited for the space of a breath to see if Fialux was going to instinctively leapt forward and try to catch the roof as it fell, but no such luck. Damn it. I flicked another switch and the antigravity module built into the device flipped on and stopped the debris just before it hit the students in the center of the room who were staring up, slack-jawed, with their hands held out as though that would stop the mix of plaster and building material from slamming into them.
I stepped out from behind my desk and slapped the rod into my free hand as I delivered my first practical lecture.
"Can anyone tell me what the people sitting under that debris did wrong?"
Most in the room were too preoccupied with shielding themselves or looking on in terror to respond to the question, but one guy in the front row raised a shaking hand. I pointed the rod at him and he flinched, but lowered his twitching hand when he realized I wasn't going to blast him with it.
"Yes?" I asked.
"They didn't get out of the way?"
"Exactly!"
I glanced up to Miss Solare and saw her looking down at me with casual disinterest. Good. By the way she was concentrating on not looking at me every ounce of her attention was on me. If that makes sense.
"Think back to any video you've seen of a heroic intervention," I said. "When you see pieces of a building falling down towards people what always happens?"
I paused for a moment and waited to see if anyone would raise their hands. Another person, this one under the pile of debris still floating in the air just inches above their heads, raised his hand and bumped against a piece of ceiling tile that went spinning.
"They just stand there and wait for Fialux to get the debris out of the way?"
"Right again," I said. "But what happens if Fialux isn't there to swoop in and dramatically save the day? What happens if she’s preoccupied fighting off the villain of the week for the fleeting moment it takes a person to go from living biomass to compressed nonliving mass?"
This time the person who spoke up didn't bother to raise her hand. I couldn't even tell who it was in the sea of young faces. But the voice rang out clearly through the otherwise silent lecture hall.
"They die?"
"Exactly!" I said.
I looked up once more to Miss Solare. She was staring at me with an unreadable expression on her face. No other student in the room was looking at me with that level of attention. Most of them were too preoccupied with the debris hanging there thumbing its metaphorical nose at the laws of physics, not that a journalism major would have any grasp on even basic physics. Maybe if I couldn't get her to rescue somebody I could get her so angry that she lashed out. That would be out of character, but it was the best I had for plan B.
"That brings me to your homework assignment for the next class," I said. "I want you to compile a list of every journalist who's died during a heroic intervention as a direct result of Fialux failing to save them in time."
I glanced up one last time. Oh yes, definitely there was definitely something lurking just under the surface there. Rage? Anger? Annoyance? Hard to tell, but I had plenty of time to find out.
12: Dining Hall Dalliance
I glanced through the material on offer at the dining hall and frowned. This definitely was nothing compared to what I was used to when I was working in my lab thanks to my mastery of reconstituting anything I wanted whenever I wanted. It was a pleasant fringe benefit of developing teleportation technology.
The stuff in the dining hall though? What a disappointment. Typical university fare that I’d come to expect from my time working as a graduate assistant, which meant that it was your typical cafeteria crap.
Definitely not the kind of thing that I’d enjoy, but whatever. Beggars can’t be choosers and all that.
Besides, if I was going to play the role of a college professor then I figured I might as well play the role completely. And right now that meant dining on cheap food. The kind of stuff that even college kids could afford while the University was milking their parents’ bank accounts dry. None of that milking was coming my way if the meager paycheck I got was any indication. Another reason to be happy about getting out of academia.
I scanned the room as I made my way out of the food line. College kids. College kids everywhere. The last people in the world I wanted to interact with right now. Especially after all that first class had taken out of me. It’d been so long since I had to teach a class that I’d forgotten how exhausting it could be. I’d forgotten exactly why I’d gotten out of the whole teaching business in the first place. Only now it was all crashing back to me as I looked around, as I saw them talking about who they hooked up with last weekend or what regrettable decision they were about to make the next weekend.
Definitely not my cup of tea.
Not for the first time since I hatched this plan I wondered if it’d be easier to use a general area of affect mind control device to let everyone think I was spending my time on campus. But no, the mind control devices were already so haphazard and unreliable. It was taking a sledgehammer to a problem when I usually preferred going at them with a scalpel.
I’d also consider using a holographic projection to make it seem like I was on campus, but that had its own series of potential mishaps. What happened the first time somebody tried to touch me and they ended up going through the projection, or even worse touching the antigrav projector at the center? I’d be found out and lose one of my projection units which in turn risked those assholes in Applied Sciences getting their grubby hands on one of my antigravity units.
I’d left this place so those pricks couldn’t get at the technology I was inventing, the technology that was so many years beyond anything they could ever hope to produce. No, I wasn’t going to risk any of my toys falling into their hands after I’d went to so much trouble to prevent anything of the sort happening in the first place.
So here I was stuck eating cheap food in a campus dining hall pretending I was happy to be here. Or at the very least pretending I was supposed to be here. I would have much rather been back in the lab working but for the siren call of Fialux. She was out there. She was waiting for me. She didn’t know it, but she would be mine.
At least, assuming things went as well with her as they had with Shadow Wing. There was a part of me that was terrified of sneaking up on Fialux and using the anti-Newtonian stasis field on her. Not because I was worried about what would happen if she managed to break free from the field again. If that happened then I’d just go back to the drawing board like always and try, try again until I got everything right.
No, my true fear, the thing I was afraid of admitting even to myself, was rejection. That same age-old fear that everybody had from the first time they realized they were interested in the opposite sex. Or the same sex. Whatever. I was still reconfiguring how I thought of these things, the pronouns I used in my head, since this recent change up in my preferences.
Rejection. That was the real terror. What if I caught her, confessed my feelings to her, and it turned out she didn’t feel the same way? How was I going to handle that? One of my strategies for avoiding rejection, for avoiding this very conundrum, was just avoiding the whole dating question entirely. At least since I’d accidentally transported my last boyfriend to coordinates unknown in the middle of the galaxy somewhere.
Not that I dwelled on that much anymore. H
e was the one that put in the faulty coordinates after all, even if I was the one who’d invented the long-range matter teleporter. Not that the damn thing was any good anyways. It had melted down after that first transport, sealing his fate and preventing me from trying to pull him back.
I shook my head. I needed to concentrate on the here and now. I needed to get rid of these terrified feelings and just move forward with my plan. Being rejected was a danger I was going to have to live with if I was moving forward with this plan to confess my feelings to Fialux.
Of course there were other problems. Bigger problems in their own way than trying to capture the most powerful hero on the planet. Like how I was going to explain all of this to CORVAC. He wasn’t a big fan of changing the plan, ever, and I was throwing one hell of a monkey wrench into this plan. Though to be honest I wasn’t throwing a monkey wrench into it or changing it so much as I was going with my own plan and not telling him about all the details. Not yet.
With a little luck I’d never have to give him all the details, though I hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to pull that off without having him fly into a homicidal rage. I figured at the very worst I could just resort to a focused electromagnetic pulse and hope he didn’t have any surprises lying in wait for me. Or maybe I could hide behind Fialux’s invulnerable hide after she’d confessed her love for me.
Fat chance, but a girl could dream.
I shoveled cheap food into my mouth, but there was no enjoyment. I had too many problems. Too many issues. Too many balls I was trying to juggle, except instead of balls I was juggling grenades with the pins pulled and at any moment one of them could blow up in my face and ruin my day, my life, my villainous career, in a major way.
I needed to avoid adding any more complications to my life.
“Is anybody sitting here?”
I looked up. Oh joy. It wasn’t enough that I was adding a seemingly infinite number of complications myself. No, now the complications were tracking me down.
“No Miss Solare, no one’s sitting there.”
Selena Solare hesitated as though waiting for something that I didn’t offer. No invitation for her. I just looked up at her expectantly, feeling butterflies raging through my stomach. Butterflies that were on fire, butterflies that were exploding in small blasts of flame all throughout my body. I felt lightheaded just looking up at her. Just staring at that beautiful face. Damn it. I was acting like a teenage girl with a crush, which is about what I’d been reduced to since I saw Fialux for the first time.
Not that I could be one hundred percent sure this was Fialux. I just had one hell of a hunch.
I felt so awkward. I didn’t like feeling awkward. It was a feeling that hadn’t happened for years.
Finally she sat down across for me. As she sat she fished her telephone out of her back pocket. I didn’t understand kids these days or why they insisted on keeping an expensive piece of computer equipment like that in a back pocket where anybody could run up and snatch it or where they could accidentally sit on it and smash it. She placed it down on the table next to her tray which seemed to be the fashion with the kids these days if the dining hall full of zombies staring into their glowing screens was any indication.
She pressed the button on it briefly, scanning it checking for whatever it is college students were looking for when they let the glowing mind control device take over, then looked up at me with a radiant smile. A smile that made me weak in the knees. A smile that’d force me to sit down if I wasn’t already.
Apparently Miss Solare didn’t take the hint that I didn’t want her sitting there, even though I wanted nothing more than to have her sitting there. Complications. I took a swig from my drink and regarded her. I wasn’t sure how the hell to proceed. I wasn’t sure what the hell I was supposed to do.
“So that was quite a performance in class today,” she said.
“Performance?” I asked.
“Performance, lesson, whatever,” she said. “Either way, you were really getting into that. I could tell you’re very passionate about what you teach.”
“Let’s just say it’s a subject near and dear to me,” I replied.
Damn it. Were we really doing this? The whole thing where we sit down and have a conversation pretending we don’t know who we are but in reality we had a sneaking suspicion? I always hated those conversations, but the thing is I wasn’t even sure I was having that conversation right now. I couldn’t tell if she was on to me or if she was oblivious and just making conversation with the new teacher.
It didn’t help that all of my usual senses were completely off kilter because I was so distracted by how damn gorgeous she was. She smiled and leaned forward as though she was getting ready to pull me into some sort of confidence. I leaned forward as well without thinking. When I realized what I’d done I was shocked, but it was too late. I’d already done it. I was under her control and I didn’t like it one bit. I was in her thrall and I loved it.
“I have to admit I was a little surprised when I saw you walk into class today,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
She shrugged. “Usually professors are stuffy older types. I definitely wasn’t expecting…”
She looked me up and down for the briefest of moments and I felt a thrill run through me.
“…You.”
Was I imagining things? That look had to be wishful thinking on my part because it sure as hell looked like she’d just given me an appreciative once over. No. That had to be my imagination. That had to be me inserting a hell of a lot of wish fulfillment into reality. I was well aware that the mind could play tricks, especially when you really wanted something. Best to ignore that look. Pretend it never happened.
“I’m not your typical academic,” I said.
“You seem very passionate about the subject,” she said.
I scowled without realizing it. I looked up at her and something about the look on my face must have been surprising, because she was staring at me wide-eyed.
“I’ve been personally affected by a heroic intervention,” I said.
That wasn’t exactly a lie. I had been affected by heroic interventions on multiple occasions. Of course I was usually the one who was putting down those heroic interventions. It wasn’t until Fialux came to town and started causing trouble that I started having trouble. Only I’m sure that wasn’t exactly what she was thinking when I said that. I’m sure she was thinking I had some tragic back story. Maybe a favorite pet that was killed by a hero and villain duking it out in the middle of downtown or some other sob story.
Whatever it was, she seemed to be buying it. She leaned forward and then her hand was moving across the table. Touching my own.
I’ve accidentally brushed my hand against one of the isolinear chips that contain the majority of CORVAC’s memory and personality while doing a repair on one of his systems. The shock was powerful enough that it blasted me across the lab and very nearly stopped my heart.
I guess the point I’m trying to get across here is that I’ve been on the receiving end of one hell of a shock before, and yet that was nothing compared to the feeling of her hand brushing against mine. I was shocked at just how amazing her hand felt brushing against mine. Just the possibility of her being Fialux brushing her hand against me was sending a wave of pleasure crashing through my body that was almost as intense as anything I’d felt with Shadow Wing, and we’d done a hell of a lot more than holding hands.
“Is something wrong?”
Her eyes were searching my face. She smiled, but looked concerned. My breath caught. She looked beautiful no matter what, and feeling her tracing her finger lightly against my hand was causing me to think thoughts. Naughty thoughts. Impossible thoughts.
Of course I was also thinking this would be the perfect moment to try and catch her off guard, to test out my anti-Newtonian stasis field, but no. I didn’t know for sure that this was Fialux for one thing. The resemblance was uncanny, but I’d already had CORVAC run her stude
nt ID picture and compare it to what we had of Fialux. Apparently her glasses were enough to trip up even the most advanced facial recognition software CORVAC could throw at the problem. Who knew?
The second reason why I didn’t go ahead and break out the stasis field now was that we were in the middle of a crowded room. There were students all over, and the last thing I wanted was to cause potential collateral damage by picking a fight with Fialux in the middle of a crowded area.
Something told me that a dining hall on the bottom floor of a university dormitory that had been built a good fifty years ago and then rebuilt and refit to hell and back because the administration was too cheap to cough up money for a new building wouldn’t stand up to a fight between Night Terror and Fialux in quite the same way that the reinforced skyscrapers downtown did.
Of course the third, final, and most compelling reason why I didn’t do anything had absolutely nothing to do with any of that crap. No, the real reason why I wasn’t going to break out the stasis field right now was because I was enjoying the feel of her hand on mine. I wanted this moment to last forever, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything to interrupt it. I wanted to close my eyes, sigh, and melt into her. Not try and capture her.
CORVAC would be furious if he could see me right now. If he knew my reasoning for not trying to capture her right now. He might understand the first two, but I sure wasn’t going to tell him the third.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Just working some things out.”
Selena pulled her hand away and I wanted to cry out. As it was I just sighed. Her hand felt good on mine, felt right, and I was going to miss that contact. I suddenly found myself wondering if maybe we were going to run into each other on campus more often, maybe have more of these moments. That’d definitely give me a compelling reason to play the studious professor role and maybe enjoy my time on campus instead of looking at it as torture.
Though as I looked her up and down it occurred to me that it might just be a different sort of torture.