As I watched, Myth closed his eyes. He started to glow a bit, like the hands of one of those glow-in-the-dark watches. He started to shrink in on himself, like a collapsing building. Glossy and wavy black hair sprouted out of his bald head, growing until it reached well past his shoulders. His body became more rounded, more feminine. His hips swelled; full breasts formed. The rest of his body became even more slender than how Myth had started out. His skin went from brown to a blueish-green. The shape of his face changed, becoming more angular, with a smaller nose and poutier mouth than Myth had started off with.
The slight glow Myth had been giving off during his transformation stopped. He—or rather, she—opened her eyes. Unlike the brown eye color Myth had started with, these eyes were azure and pupilless, surrounded by long, thick eyelashes. Her skin and Academy uniform had beads of water on them, as if she had just stepped out of a pool.
Much shorter now, Myth looked up at me. She saw the look on my face. She stomped her foot in a way I can only describe as daintily.
“Stop staring at me like that,” she demanded. Her voice was high, like an anime character’s. “This is what a Naiad—a water nymph—looks like.”
“Oh I don’t doubt it,” I said. I was trying not to laugh. Myth balled her tiny fists.
“If you so much as giggle I swear I’ll punch you in the throat.” It was like being barked at by a Chihuahua.
“I’m not sure you can reach that high,” I said. “You’re very pretty when you’re angry. If this whole Hero thing doesn’t work out for you, you can always try Little Person beauty pageants.” Myth raised her small clenched fist threateningly, advancing a step. Laughing, I backed up. I tripped on one of the mops we had brought, and fell backward. Acting instinctively, I caught myself with my powers. I didn’t hit the ground, and instead floated a couple of inches off the floor.
Myth laughed too. “That’s what you get for insulting a lady,” she said with mock dignity, flipping a lock of hair out of her eye. She laced the fingers of her tiny hands together and cracked them. “Okay, let’s get down to work.”
Myth stretched her hands out in front of herself like a maestro about to conduct an orchestra. In the meantime, I righted myself with my powers, and stood back up again. Even though I had not used my powers since my fight with the Meta who killed Dad, I had stopped myself from hitting the floor without even thinking about it. Maybe using them was like learning to ride a bicycle—once you learned how to do it, you never forgot.
As I watched, Myth’s azure eyes grew brighter, as if they were lit up by a light from within Myth’s body. All of the faucets over the various sinks in the latrine turned on. I heard the simultaneous flushing of all the toilets. All of the showers turned on. Then, the water from the faucets and showerheads started whipping around the room, like the latrine had turned into a giant dishwashing machine. Myth and I remained dry, though. Myth apparently had formed a small bubble around us that she was not letting the water penetrate. Watching all of the powerful jets of water spraying around the room reminded me of what it was like to sit in a car when your vehicle went through one of those automatic car washes. The roar of the water around us was terrific, like standing at the bottom of a waterfall.
After a minute or two, Myth shut off the faucets and the showerheads. She lowered her arms. The light of her eyes faded. The sudden relative silence was deafening. The only sound was that of water flowing out of the floor drains of the latrine. Already the place looked much cleaner.
It was my turn. I activated my powers again, picking up the various containers of cleaning powder we had brought with us. While still standing near Myth, I used my powers to move the containers of cleaning powder all throughout the latrine, upending the containers to sprinkle powder everywhere. I did not have control enough over my powers to pick the powder up directly instead of using the bulky containers it was contained in. Maybe I would be able to pull that off after I practiced in the use of my powers some more. I had come so far already from when my powers first manifested in the bathroom with the Three Horsemen. That incident seemed like it happened in a world far away from where I now stood.
Once the cleaning powder was distributed everywhere, I picked up with my powers the brushes and mops we had brought. Still using my powers, I got busy mopping and scrubbing everything in the latrine. I was able to keep five things going at once; anything more seemed to be too much. Again I wondered if I would get better the more I used my powers. Digging up those sweet potatoes with Amazing Man had been good practice for this.
“You missed a spot,” Myth said in her high voice. She pointed at a sink I had just cleaned with one of the scrubbing brushes. While my mops and brushes did their magic, Myth had been leaning against a wall near me with her arms crossed, whistling. I recognized the tune. It was Whistle While You Work.
“You can always grab a brush and help, you know,” I said through gritted teeth. Keeping all these mops and brushes going was hard, as hard in its own way as the weight room workout I had gone through the day before. Myth shook her head.
“Nope. Can’t. Though I’d love to help, Athena said to use our powers to clean this place. I do as I’m told. I’m a stickler for following orders. I’m well-known for it. I even thought about naming myself Stickler instead of Myth. Besides, it was my idea to clean the place this way. I’m the visionary. The job creator. You’re the little guy who goes out and executes my bold vision. That’s capitalism. I’m too busy supervising you and thinking about the big picture to pick up a brush myself.” Myth lifted her hand to her mouth and yawned into it. “Supervising is a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.”
“I don’t know how you work as hard as you do.” Sweat was pouring off my forehead due to the effort it took to keep the brushes and mops going. “The sacrifices you make for the team are remarkable. You’re truly selfless.”
Myth made a great show of examining her nails and buffing them on her uniform. “I think so too, but I didn’t want to be immodest and come right out and say it.”
“Both modest and beautiful? You’re going to make someone a terrific wife someday,” I said. Myth picked up a wet sponge and sent it rocketing toward my head. I saw it in time, stopped it in mid-air with my powers, and sent it shooting back at Myth. It hit her dead in the middle of her face. She sputtered, wiping suds away.
“See, my mistake there was throwing something at a telekinetic,” she said, as if to herself. “It’s like throwing slop at a pig. Next time I’ll know better.” I stuck my tongue out at her triumphantly. I picked up the mop I had let fall when I had turned my attention away from it long enough to hit Myth with the sponge.
After a while, I finished. I had mopped and scrubbed every inch of the latrine. I retrieved all the brushes and mops, floating them over to us. Myth was up to bat again. As before, she used the water manipulation powers of her Naiad form to spray every nook and cranny of the latrine with jets of water. She again used her powers to shield us from getting wet. Once everything had been rinsed, Myth let the water drain away. What did not drain away on its own she “encouraged to evaporate,” as she put it.
One she finished drying everything, Myth closed her eyes again. Her body again glowed. It slowly stretched out and morphed back into Myth’s male form. In a few moments he was his normal human self again.
“I think I liked you better with boobs,” I said.
“That’s the creepiest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” Myth was a bit pale, and looked as tired as I felt. Apparently him using his powers drained him as much as me using mine drained me. Though using my powers to clean the place had been hard, hanging out with Myth also made it kind of fun.
We took a moment to look around and admire our handiwork. Every surface of the latrine gleamed and looked like new. The latrine smelled like someone had brought a pine tree into a sterilized hospital ward. Though we were tired, it had taken us a far smaller amount of time to clean the latrine with our powers than it would have taken us had we done it b
y hand.
Myth and I high-fived one another.
“Not bad, Theo. Not bad at all,” Myth said. “If we ever have to face a supervillain named Pig Sty, he won’t stand a chance against us.”
We went looking for Athena. We found her in a huge clearing on the camp’s grounds along with the rest of the instructors. They were drilling the other trainees in the use of their powers.
“We finished cleaning the men’s latrine,” I said to Athena. “Do you want to come inspect it?” Athena looked at me as if what I asked was the stupidest question she had ever heard.
“Like I said yesterday, a Hero does not lie or cheat,” she said. “Are you two telling me the latrine is as clean as you can make it?”
“Yes ma’am,” Myth and I said.
“Then I’ll take your word for it. Now fall in and stop tugging at momma’s skirt. I’m busy.” She turned away from us and resumed yelling at a young female trainee. The girl’s eyes glowed red like a demon’s behind her mask. Her lips were quivering. She looked like she was about to cry. “Shoot the target,” Athena yelled at her. “Not everything but the target. Sweet Jesus! Pretend like it’s a Rogue trying to kill you. If you can’t hit him, at least get close enough to make him nervous and think twice about attacking you.” Red energy beams blazed out of the girl’s eyes with a low humming sound. Off in the distance, the ground exploded where the beams of energy hit it. She had missed the target she had been aiming at by a country mile.
Athena shook her head in disgust. “Congratulations,” she said to the trainee. “You missed the Rogue rushing toward you. You’re now dead. Is your plan to come back as a ghost and scare him to death?”
As ordered, Myth and I moved away from Athena and the young trainee to get into line. “What do you think about her?” I asked Myth about Athena once we were out of her earshot. Myth shuddered.
“I try not to,” he said.
After training with our powers, as the day before, half of the trainees went for a run and the other half of us hit the weights in the gym. When the runners got back, they swapped places with those of us in the gym.
After what seemed like forever, dinnertime finally arrived. As with the day before, all the trainees assembled in the mess hall to eat. As there were no drill instructors present, the bulk of the talk was about them and what kind of parents gave birth to such monstrosities. While I agreed with the general sentiment, I was starting to respect Athena and the other drill instructors, much the way a deer respects a lion. If I possessed the kind of skills and experience those Heroes had, I had little doubt I would have been able to stop the Meta who had killed Dad.
One day, I thought. One day.
I again sat with Smoke during mess. Myth joined us. I was happy to see that Myth and Smoke hit it off. Everyone else gave Smoke a wide berth. She noticed it—it would have been hard not to—but did not seem to mind. She did not seem to mind much. She gave the impression that if she had been on the Titanic when it hit that iceberg, she would have shrugged, finished her dinner, and then calmly made her way to the lifeboats. Though she was only a little older than I, her composure made her seem much older than the rest of us trainees.
I was so glad when the day finally ended. I was mentally and physically spent. I crawled into my simple cot, as happy to see it as an old friend. Though exhausted, I was not as sad as I had been the night before. Though Dad’s absence was a hole in my heart that would never be filled, I had made new friends. First Smoke, now Myth. That was two in as many days. It was a new record for me.
I forced my drooping eyes open. I had almost forgotten. I pulled out the Academy manual, flicking on the penlight to examine it in the dark barracks. In seconds I found what I was looking for.
Athena had been right. Just as she had said, I had left out the word “appropriately” from the last sentence of the second paragraph when I had recited that page of the manual to her that morning.
Of course she was right. I should not have been surprised.
15
Hours became days, and days became weeks in a blur of exercise, training, fear, and exhaustion. Trainees dropped out of the Academy like flies. Of these, most left voluntarily. Others were thrown out, mostly for disobeying an instructor or for being lazy. A handful got seriously hurt and were medically discharged. “The scaredy-cats never showed up and the weak bitches are revealing themselves,” Athena said dismissively one morning when she noted our numbers had dropped by almost two-thirds. Happily, neither Myth nor Smoke had dropped or washed out. I had come to be good friends with them and would have missed them if they were gone. Except for Myth, everybody still called me Carolina. Even Smoke.
I rarely saw Amazing Man during this period. Every now and then he would show up at a powers training session or while we lifted weights. He did not say anything to anyone. He just watched for a while and then left, like the principal of a school who took a decidedly hands-off approach. All the trainees had heard of his Heroic exploits over the years, so we all viewed him with awe. When it got out that Amazing Man had personally recruited me to enter the Academy—I had made the mistake of telling Myth, who was only capable of keeping his mouth shut if his lips were stapled together—the trainees started looking at me with awe, too. Except for Smoke, that is. It’s likely not even Jesus’ Second Coming would have awed her.
The drill instructors—Athena, Carbon Copy, Sprint, plus several others—when they talked about Amazing Man at all, referred to him as “the Old Man.” The nickname was partly a recognition of the fact that Amazing Man had been a Hero longer than most of the drill instructors had been alive. Even more than that, though, it seemed mostly a term of endearment, a nickname born out of affection and respect. Following the drill instructors’ lead, we trainees had started calling Amazing Man “the Old Man” too. Never to his face, though. Nobody had that kind of chutzpah. Not even Smoke, who did not seem scared of or intimidated by anybody.
Though I did not drop out during this period, there were more than a few times I wanted to. I felt like the dog who caught the car he had been chasing: now that the bumper was between my teeth, I did not know what to do other than hold on for dear life.
As far as I knew, I was the only Omega-level Meta going through the Academy. The drill instructors must have known I was Omega-level. In addition to the Old Man knowing, I learned that my records from when I registered as a Metahuman had been transmitted to Camp Avatar for review by the drill instructors before I had even arrived here, as had the records of all the other trainees. It confirmed that Athena and the other instructors had known more about us when we first arrived than they had initially let on. Despite the fact I was supposedly a once-in-a-generation Metahuman, the drill instructors treated me like they did everybody else: namely, harshly. But, Smoke, Myth and I had a hypothesis as to why the instructors treated us this way and pushed us so hard: they were culling from the herd the people who could not stand up under pressure. As Athena kept telling us, being a Hero was not for the meek or for someone who would turn tail and run at the first sign of trouble. Heroes ran toward trouble, not away from it. The instructors were hardening us, tempering us for the adversities we would surely face if we became licensed Heroes, like steel is hardened in the heat of a forge.
Besides, once over half of the trainees dropped out, the drill instructors’ attitudes toward those of us who remained shifted subtly. They certainly did not start to treat us like we were their equals. They were Heroes and we were not, after all. But, they did go from treating us like stray dogs they were trying to scare away to treating us like puppies who were not housebroken yet—ignorant, and liable to pee on the carpet from time to time, but trainable.
Even though I started to understand why the drill instructors were so tough on us, that did not mean that I enjoyed this hardening process. I did not. Whoever said “To understand all is to forgive all” clearly had never gone to the Academy. For one thing, we ran constantly. The drill instructors’ philosophy about moving from place to plac
e seemed to be that if you were going to go somewhere—whether it was simply to the latrine or through the surrounding woods—you should do it while running as fast as humanly possible. I got to the point where I started praying God would put wheels on my feet. He did not. As I knew all too well, not all prayers were answered.
In addition to seemingly running the circumference of the Earth several times over, we trainees also extensively weight trained. Initially it was every day, then it was reduced to every other day. I did countless deadlifts, squats, bench presses, chin-ups, dips, and a bunch of other exercises I had never heard of until coming to Camp Avatar. It got to the point I started dreaming about working out. I used to dream about girls before coming here. A barbell was a poor substitute for a girl.
Weight training was reduced to every other day because we started combat training a couple of weeks after arriving. I had expected to learn to use my powers to fight. That was why I had come here, after all. What I had not expected was to learn to fight without them. We studied karate, judo, savate, boxing, Muay Thai, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, and hapkido, among other martial arts disciplines. Sprint was our principal instructor for the unarmed martial arts. Sparring with him was no fun. Even when he was trying to not use his super speed, his heightened reflexes made it nearly impossible for those of us who did not also have such reflexes—which was most of us—to lay a hand on him.
Not only did we train in unarmed martial arts, we also trained in the use of so many weapons I cannot even remember them all. Knives, swords, guns, blowguns, darts, slingshots—it did not matter what it was. If someone had figured out an implement to kill or injure another human, we trained in its use. Even sticks. Yes, sticks.
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