Roman looked at her incredulously. Was there really any point in sharing tragic experiences?
“The worst day of my life, hmmm, that’s one I really need to think deeply about. Okay, I got it,” Phil said, and the fact that it had only taken him a second to “think deeply” worried Roman to no end. “The worst day of my life had to be, um, one of my last days in northern Centralia.”
“Did something tragic happen?”
Phil snorted. “Yeah, at the time it was tragic. I had my thesis due, and then my buddy told me there was this big sorority party going on, and they were even going to have some exemplars there, if you guys know what I mean, and well, like an idiot, I went. Long story short, I ended up pretty intoxicated and had somehow hooked up with a Type F and ended up in the Western Province—can you imagine that?”
A few in the room exchanged furtive glances.
“How did you get back?” a woman named Tara asked at the back.
“By sheer luck! I sent a mental message to my uncle, who arranged a military pickup. It took about twenty minutes before they came to get me, and let me tell you, I was pretty scared during that time. It’s a different world over there.”
Roman started to comment on the fact that “sheer luck” and “the benefits of nepotism” weren’t quite the same, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
“Moving on,” Selena said, a hint of annoyance in her voice. “Roman, you’re next.” She cocked her head to the side a little, causing her jowls to jiggle. “What was the worst day of your life?”
“Pass.”
“There is no passing. You need to take part in this activity so we can strengthen ourselves as a team.”
“Pass,” Roman said, louder this time.
“Everyone’s taking part in this, including you, Coco. Will it help if she goes before you, so you can see that even exemplars have to take part in this as well?”
Coco looked to Selena. “You want me to answer that?”
“Yes, if it will motivate Roman, please answer my question: Coco, what was the worst day of your life?”
Coco stood there for a moment in silence, her fists clenched shut. “I… My family is from the Western Province,” she said, her eyes narrowing on Phil. “When I was a girl, we went to visit my grandfather and grandmother, who lived near the border. My sister and I were playing outside when the field around us ignited. A battle had begun not too far from us, a team of Centralian exemplars tasked with bringing Centralian democracy to the Western Province.”
“Great story, let’s move…”
“I’m not finished yet,” Coco told Selena. “My sister has water mimicry abilities, so putting out the fire wasn’t very difficult for her. But what we saw next was our grandparents’ home had been partially destroyed. The supers had been fighting there, and there was collateral damage.” She sniffed, a single tear falling down her cheek. “I saw my grandparents’ dead bodies, and that was the worst day of my life.”
“Great, um, thank you for sharing, Coco. I feel closer to you now. Okay now, Roman, your turn.”
“Pass.” Roman said, and for once, Selena paid attention to the stone-cold look on his face. It was a good thing too, because had she pressed them, he may have done something drastic. Luckily, she moved on.
“Maybe we can circle back to Roman.” Selena offered the woman sitting next to Roman, Tara, a tight smile. “Tara, what was the worst day of your life?”
The retreat dragged on. A small part of Roman thought about playing with some of the people’s note-taking papers, turning them into little military soldiers and having them charge at each other across the tables and fight. But he didn’t want to create an issue, especially considering the fact that he wasn’t an approved exemplar, which still meant they could take his power away if he did something they deemed a risk or inappropriate.
The retreat continued on, with Selena leading everyone in discussions about their hopes and dreams, and how they related to one another. Of all people to be leading this, Selena seemed like the worst choice, especially since she commented on everything everyone said, from nice little comments such as “That’s nice” to mean and unnecessary comments like “Bonnie, you’re not going to win the super lottery and get the power to create money out of thin air. That’s just stupid.”
Lunch was catered, by a Centralian restaurant in the district that had pretty good fare. Their focus was on ingredients that were in season and didn’t have to be stored.
Roman placed a piece of the baked squash onto his plate next to a stir fry made of lamb and carrots, which was garnished in scallions. Hoping no one would join him, he took the seat at the back of the room, only to be joined by Phil.
The youthful senior advisor rambled on and on about his family in the Southern Alliance—how they had castles down there, and how Roman should come skiing sometime, but he would have to get his own ticket and visa to visit.
Roman commented occasionally, and rather than engage in conversation, he simply stuffed more food into his mouth.
In the afternoon, it was time for the collaboration with the Immigration Inspection for Fast Travel Department.
It was odd seeing Nadine in this setting, especially after last night, and while everyone was being introduced, Roman couldn’t help but give her a sidelong glance, waiting for her to make eye contact with him, to share that sense of recognition.
It never happened. Nadine remained completely neutral.
After Selena rambled off some details about their next teambuilding bullshit exercise and quickly chastised one of the employees for being late back from lunch, they were sectioned off into groups.
As fate had it, Roman was paired with Nadine.
“Hi, how are you?” Nadine asked, as they waited for their other group members to join them. They’d been placed in groups of four and told to go to the smaller breakout rooms.
“Doing better. Is everything still on?” he whispered.
“Is what still on?” Selena asked as she entered the room. “Sorry, Bonnie got sick to her stomach, so I’ll be joining your group. Phil should be here any moment; he had to use the restroom.”
It took a lot of willpower to smile at Selena. So much that Roman dropped his eyes to his power dial to see if the red bar had gone up any.
It hadn’t.
“Who’s going to be our writer?” Selena asked on the tail end of a burp. The slightly obese woman had eaten three plates of stir-fried lamb, and there was still a small stain on the front of her blouse.
“I will,” Nadine volunteered.
Sheets of paper hung on the wall, each labeled with an empowering word like “engage” or “collaborate” or “together.” The hotbody of the group stepped up to the sheet of paper, in her perfect skirt and her blond hair in a bun, looking once over her shoulder at Roman.
“Are you planning to contribute to the group any today, Roman?” Selena asked. “Or are you going to just sit in the back and pretend to participate?”
“I’ll be here.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“I’ll be here,” he said again, gritting his teeth.
Phil entered and lightened the mood almost instantly. He was jovial as always, and Roman could sense that he was overcompensating for the fact that Roman despised Selena.
This was why Roman liked Phil—he was a good guy at heart.
“What’s a way we can engage?” Selena asked as she walked to the white sheet of paper with a pen in her hand. “Come on, people, think.”
“With each other or with exemplars?” asked Roman.
“Exemplars,” Nadine whispered.
“Wrong, both of you. You know, I thought the people in the teleportation department had a little more sense. Hmph. I guess not. Phil? Any ideas?”
“One thing we can do to engage is know each other’s names and each of our roles in the office. Going to the right person with the right question is better than asking around indefinitely and then later giving up. Also, sending an exemplar to the right p
erson to answer their specific question, to help them engage with the correct coworker, is another aspect of this.”
“I’m so glad to have you on our team,” Selena said as she wrote this information down. “What about you two? Any answers?”
“We can all go out on dates with each other and get to know each other better,” Roman said, casting a grin at Nadine. “Which saves us time to work when we’re here at the office.”
“Wow, and here I thought you had finally figured out that this isn’t some big joke, that this actually serves a purpose. But, like I have been every time I’ve made an assumption about you in terms of your work ethic and ability, I was wrong. Dead wrong.” Selena glared at the piece of paper in front of her as if it were Roman’s face.
“We can plan meetings with similar roles in other departments?” Nadine asked, coming to Roman’s defense and likely preventing him from cursing under his breath at Selena.
“Good! Write it!”
Nadine wrote down an abbreviated version of what she’d just said.
Roman’s fingers twitched. He imagined ripping the paneling from the wall and using it as a projectile to impale Selena. He even noticed one of the panels start to quiver, which reminded him that he really needed to bring his hatred down a notch.
“One way we can collaborate is by asking questions,” Roman finally said, practically forcing the words out at knifepoint.
“Great answer, except that we are still working on engagement. Please do not get ahead of the process.”
“Okay, one way we can engagement is by asking questions.”
Roman glanced up to see Nadine giving him a comical grin, and for a moment, he thought of her as a coworker, rather than a spy who was going to be manipulating him at some point. It was so clear to him. She was standing right there, at the same retreat, trying to “personally develop” herself.
Only it was all a guise, a ruse. Underneath all the bullshit, she was a woman from the Eastern Province, and he hadn’t started working with her yet, but Roman was already actively engaged in treason considering his relationship with Paris. Now he was in a similar boat with Nadine.
And this forced an odd, ill-timed grin on Roman’s face. He was working with the Eastern and Western Province. How long until the North or the South contacted him?
“What’s so funny?” Selena looked from Phil to Nadine, hoping they were supporting her continued belittlement of Roman.
Had she been Class A, she would have seen that Nadine had a great distaste for her, and that the Eastern Province spy had, in that very moment, been contemplating a way to poison her, only discarding the thought once she realized it wasn’t worth the risk.
If Selena had somehow been able to skim the surface of Phil’s mind, she would have found the young benefactor of nepotism trying to get a peek at her breasts, as he had a thing for bigger girls and had jerked off to Selena’s mental image a couple times now.
But she didn’t have any special abilities, aside from a little extra stamina, and all she could do was look for support. “One way we can collaborate is by respecting supervisors and being modest,” Selena finally said. “Write it, please, Nadine.”
Respect supervisors and be modest? Roman didn’t shake his head this time, but he wanted to. Damn, did he hate that woman. He thought about rearranging the ink to say something vulgar, but caught himself just in time.
And not a moment too soon. One of the letters Nadine had written started trembling ever so slightly.
Luckily for Roman, no one saw it; they were too busy focusing on ways to engage.
Chapter Thirty-Nine: New Faces
Roman expected a lot of things, but he didn’t expect to see Catherine, the Type III Class C from the Northern Alliance, waiting for him after work. He briefly recalled that she was a student at Southern Centralia, that she’d had a visa issue due to failing to enroll full-time that he’d fixed, and that’d she’d asked him out, but he’d declined.
Interesting, he thought as he stopped before her.
Catherine was a bit mousy with white hair, a strand of which was dyed red and braided behind her right ear. She wore the high-end fashion that was common in the North, where it was warmer, less overcast.
“A couple days ago you said something about coffee, to talk about being an immigration advisor. I mean, I could’ve had a telepath look you up, but I thought that would be inappropriate, so I figured I would come here and just wait for you to get off work. Shit. I hope this isn’t awkward. It’s definitely awkward, isn’t it?”
“It’s fine,” Roman said as he took in her form. There was a sexual predator in him that was hard to suppress once it showed its ugly head. Staring at the fit, slender rarity from the Northern Alliance was definitely sparking his interest. Not that it mattered, but he had never been with a Northern woman, and he didn’t think it would be difficult here.
After all, she’d come to him…
But he had a Heroes Anonymous class to get to, and two animated sex dolls waiting for him at home, on top of the fact that he was supposed to see about his wife tonight—and possibly see her for the last time. Plus there was Harper, who had sent him a flirty message earlier, and Paris, who would likely be at the Heroes Anonymous meeting.
He would have to throw this one back. Roman’s real life was a train wreck. He needed to sort some things out before he added another potential casualty.
“Look, you seem like a smart lady, and I would love to talk to you more about this position, and what you may encounter in the North, even with the more—pardon me in saying this—isolationist viewpoint the North has on immigration. But I’m absolutely swamped today. And probably will be for the next few days.”
She looked down at her feet, which were enshrined in cute ballet flats with buckles shaped like dragonflies. “It’s fine, I figured it would be a bad idea to show up like this. What can I say? I have an elemental ability that allows me to utilize the wind, and because of that, I can be sort of impulsive, also like the wind. At least this is what I tell myself.”
“It’s fine, next week. You and me. What do you say? I need to sort some things out first.”
“A meeting with a non-exemplar, huh?” she asked as a smile moved across her face.
“You’re the one that came to me,” Roman reminded her.
He could tell by the way she was smiling at him that she’d meant this in a funny way, yet at the back of his mind he did think it was odd that she would frame their relationship in this way. This was to be expected of an exemplar, just not in such a verbal manner.
“I’m a little superstitious… Okay, I’m really superstitious, and it feels like what I’m supposed to do,” said Catherine. “Does that make sense? My ex was a non-exemplar too. I’m attracted to them, apparently. Oops, I’m saying too much! So, get in touch with me next week; let me know a day ahead of time. I’m giving you permission to contact me now, so do with it what you will.”
Roman started to crack a grin, and by the time he could bring his hand up to his chin to consider how odd this incident had been, she was gone. And her disappearing act had been fast, too. The bottom half of her body had vaporized and zipped away in a tornado, the rest of her form dissipating in an instant.
Roman shook his head as he walked to the trolley.
There would be more time to deal with the wind-powered super named Catherine, but that time would be later.
He had more pressing matters.
“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.”
The big half-powered named Bill smiled at all the fresh faces in the audience. Roman stood beside him, the first to be called to the podium to tell his sad tale. Since all the people were new aside from the sex-doll guy named Sam, Bill wanted to start off the Heroes Anonymous meeting with something familiar, a fact that bothered Roman because, like most of these meetings, he didn’t want to be there.
And his one incentive for coming to these meetings, possibly meeting women, had been nullified by the fact that there weren’t any in attendance.
“My name is Roman Martin and I’m not a hero,” he said to the group. “I’ve been coming to these meetings for a while now, and I wish I could say that a few of you have heard my story, but I don’t recognize any of your faces, aside from you, sex-doll guy.”
“Sam.”
“Hi, Sam, great story the other day.” Sam waved at some of the others, proud to be called out, which wasn’t quite what Roman had been hoping for. “Show of hands, who’s new here?”
To confirm what Bill had already told him, six of the seven attendees raised their hands.
“Yeah, so welcome, and I hope this program is as meaningful to you as it has been to me. I want time for each of you to be able to tell your story, so I’ll make mine quick.” Roman paused for moment, figuring out how he would frame this.
“I, um, was convinced I had the power to seduce women into having sex with me. An increased charm, Type IV, Class C by my estimates.”
A few of the men in attendance chuckled. Bill scowled as Roman continued:
“To elaborate, I thought I had this power to adjust pheromone levels and make women want me. So, I walked around like a rooster, my chest out, my white hair slicked back, whistling my own tune, thinking it was my power that was getting me so much tail, not the fact that I’m a relatively handsome guy, fit too, who can be charming given the right type of wine.”
“Roman,” Bill started to warn him.
“Heroes Anonymous is no joke, and lying to people is a bad thing. And this is how I ended up at an exemplars-only resort in eastern Centralia, near the border to the Eastern Province. I had a friend who worked at the registration office and was able to have my ID modified, so I figured I would pick up some hot supers using my charm power.”
Roman shook his head bitterly.
“I guess you could say I was just playing the role, convinced of my own power. I met this one super, a Type III, that had the power to multiply herself. If you’re thinking crazy orgy, you’d be thinking correctly.”
House of Dolls Page 18