I focused on the picture I had of Pinchface in my head. The light in BT’s mind shimmered, started taking on color and form. It was an oval at first, an upside-down egg that began assuming features I recognized: cheeks, eyes, a nose.... Suddenly, the face solidified in all its detail. I withdrew from his brain.
“Got it,” BT said. “I’ll check it out and let you know.”
As I said, BT trucked in the area of information. He’d have no trouble finding out who Pinchface was.
“You also said that you didn’t notice him initially because you were distracted,” he continued. “A new power?”
“Yeah - good guess - but I don’t know what it is yet.”
“But you have the sensation that usually accompanies a new ability?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmmm…maybe it’s an augmentation of your existing powers rather than something new. Care to run through some exercises?”
I shrugged. “Sure thing. I’m in no rush.”
We then went through a quick series of exercises that involved me using each of my powers. We started with invisibility. As usual, when I turned invisible, my vision automatically switched over to the infrared spectrum. It was another ancillary power; once my eyes became invisible, I couldn’t see across the visible light spectrum the way normal people do, so I used infrared (although, in truth, I could also see across other wavelengths of light).
After invisibility, we went through all of my other primary and secondary powers as well: flight, teleportation, phasing, and so on – the whole shebang. It took a little bit of time because, to be frank, I’ve got way more powers than the average super.
“I’m not seeing anything outside the ordinary – for you, that is,” BT stated, shaking his head when we’d finished. “In all honesty, though, I still don’t fully understand your power set.”
“What’s to understand? I’ve got super powers, just like a lot of other people.”
“It’s not quite as banal as you make it sound. There are roughly seven billion people on this planet. Approximately two million of them are supers, or metas, or whatever term you like for someone with super powers. Ninety-nine percent of those have powers that barely register as anything above normal, like being able to float half an inch off the ground. That remaining one percent consists of those individuals who have powers that fall into Levels A through D, the ones that generally come to mind when we think of supers.”
“And A-Level - as the highest-ranked - would be along the lines of the Alpha League, I take it?”
BT nodded. The Alpha League was the premiere superhero team on the planet. Led by the invincible Alpha Prime, they were the best of the best, the superheroes all others were measured against.
“But,” he continued, “even among groups like the Alpha League, you’ll usually find that most people only have one or two primary powers – nothing like the smorgasbord you’ve got.”
“Well, you just said it yourself: some people are born with no powers whatsoever. It only stands to reason that someone would be born at the other end of the spectrum with lots of abilities. I guess I just got lucky and hit the jackpot.”
“Yes, but a lot of your powers are completely redundant. For instance, you don’t need super speed and teleportation; one is almost just as good as the other. You don’t need shapeshifting and the ability to turn invisible; both are camouflage techniques, but why have two of them? Likewise, I’m not sure that you need to be both a telepath and an empath – knowing what people are thinking as well as what they’re feeling – although those two often go hand-in-hand.”
“So basically, when they were giving out powers, I had a special two-for-one coupon in my pocket.”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it. Except your powers keep expanding – even though you already have almost all of the highly-regarded abilities.”
“Except super strength,” I reminded him.
“Yes,” he acquiesced with a slight nod, “but you can mimic it well enough that you don’t need it.”
I knew what he meant. Basically, when I’m moving at super speed, much of what I can do is amplified and can give the impression of having super strength. As an experiment, BT had once had me hit a baseball at normal speed. I got off a good hit, but nothing to write home about. He had then had me hit a second ball at super speed; it landed almost a mile away.
Still, being able to mimic super strength and actually having it were two different things. Personally, I preferred to have the real McCoy, and I stated as much.
“Talk about ingratitude,” BT said, shaking his head in mock disappointment. “Most people would give their right arm for just one of your powers, and all you can do is cry about what you can’t do.”
“Fine, I’m a big baby. So if that’s it, I’m going to go home and cry myself to sleep.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Give your mother and grandfather my regards.”
Chapter 3
After finishing with Braintrust, I teleported home. My real home. Although the apartment was effectively my secret lair, I actually lived with my mother in a quaint little two-story in the suburbs. I appeared upstairs in my bedroom, and almost immediately found myself under psychic attack.
A good telepath is like a professional safecracker. They can stealthily sneak into your mind, deftly spinning the tumblers of your psyche until they find a way in. Then they take whatever valuables they can find and leave without you ever being aware of it.
Of course, some telepaths don’t care about being nimble. Rather than adroitly picking the locks of your brain, they come at you like a SWAT team on a raid, using a battering ram on the door of your mind and rushing in to suppress any resistance and take control of the premises. This attack was of the second kind.
Thinking of the mind as a house is a pretty good way to conceptualize it, although a better analogy is probably a castle with a lot of nooks and crannies. Just like a real castle, you need to fortify your defenses; it doesn’t hurt to give yourself a mental moat, high walls, etc.
My attacker came at me like a blunt instrument. It was an attack on all fronts at once. However, there was no strategy involved; it was merely an attempt to overwhelm me with sheer force of will. In short, my mind-castle was under siege on all sides.
I fought back valiantly, mentally firing arrows and dumping hot tar on my attacker. He didn’t give up, though. What he lacked in strategy, he made up for in strength, and it wasn’t long before he found a crack in my walls. He worried at it, expanded it, and soon he had an army pouring through. Which is exactly what I wanted.
My nemesis soon came to realize that his makeshift entry into my castle was a dead end; it led nowhere. But before he could get back out, the exit sealed up behind him. Then the walls started closing in. He hammered at them without avail, gave a mental screech, then evaporated from my mind.
With that, contact broke off. I beamed; it may have sounded like he had some complaints, but that was high praise coming from the old man, my grandfather. I vaulted down the stairs two at a time and headed to the kitchen for a drink.
“Jim?” It was my mother. As usual, she was in her office. Mom was a moderately successful author of superhero romances (albeit under a pseudonym), so she tried to spend at least four hours per day writing.
“It’s me,” I answered. “Just getting a drink of water.”
“Have you eaten yet?” I heard the slight squ
eak of her chair as she rose, and the firm cadence of her footsteps as she headed towards the kitchen. “Do you want me to make you something?”
“No, I’m fine,” I stated as she came into view.
In typical mom fashion, she came over and began picking at my clothes, removing inconsequential strands of hair, lint and the like.
“So, any big plans for tonight? It’s Friday, you know.”
“Not really,” I replied. “Probably just stay here and play video games.”
“You’ve only got a few weeks before school starts again. Don’t you want to go hang out with your friends?”
“Mom, I don’t have any friends. You know that.”
“Acquaintances then. People you know. People your own age.”
I was exasperated. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this.
“Mom, I’m fine. We both know I’m not like other kids. Normal kids.”
“All the more reason for you to be around them. Or at least other people who could be considered your peers.”
“Fine. I know where you’re going with this. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll go to the stupid football game tomorrow.”
Suddenly she was glowing. “Cool!”
“Mom, only geriatrics say ‘cool’ any more. Or shut-ins who haven’t kept up with the times.”
“Well, this geriatric shut-in has a date tonight.”
I stood in stunned silence and just looked at her. Mom was about five-ten, with straight, dark hair that dropped a little below her shoulders. She had a complexion that was slightly darker than mine, and huge almond-shaped eyes that gave her a striking appearance. It had come as a great shock to me years earlier when I found out that most people considered my mother to be exotically beautiful. (And it didn’t hurt that she looked a lot younger than her actual age.)
“Hey!” My mother snapped her fingers. “Say something.”
“Uh…have a good time?”
“Don’t you even want to know who it’s with?”
Her eyes, which normally appeared blue, flashed purple, indicating mock anger. This was one of the two physical indications of her odd genetic inheritance. The other was her pointed, elfin ears, which gave her an even more exotic appearance when seen. Outside the house she wore contacts to hide her eyes, and she always kept her hair over her ears.
I shrugged. “No, you’re old enough to make your own decisions. I trust your judgment.”
She gave me a mock punch on the arm, then a hug before going back to her office. I grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and headed out the back door. I twisted off the cap and took a swig as I walked towards the apartment where my grandfather lived above our garage.
Technically, it was his house that we lived in. Mom and I had been on our own before moving here eleven years earlier, living on the other side of the country. My father had been out of the picture since before I was born (plus we never really talked about him), so my grandfather was the only family and support system we had.
Even though the house actually had four bedrooms, Gramps had decided that he needed his own space and moved into the garage apartment, giving us the main house. As I walked up the stairs to the entrance, his voice rang out in my mind.
I opened the door and stepped inside Wonderland.
Frankly speaking, I loved coming to my grandfather’s apartment. Gramps was a telepath – at one time the most powerful on the planet, possibly the most powerful who ever lived. Known as Nightmare, he could invade the mind of any villain, know their plans, make them see their worst nightmare (hence the name), take control of their minds, etc. He could incapacitate with a thought, changing the course of any battle in seconds.
His apartment was full of mementos and keepsakes from his time as an active superhero. The mask of a famed supervillain, the deactivated weapon from another, photos of him with famous people. Coming to his apartment was, for me, like going to an amusement park. Plus, I had grown up on his stories, which had made me dream of one day being a superhero – until the train wreck of my tryout.
Gramps was sitting on the sofa, watching television and eating cookies. Despite being in his sixties, he had the frame and appearance of someone twenty years younger. His dusky skin had few wrinkles, although his hair had begun taking on a salt-and-pepper hue a few years before.
I took a cookie and sat down next to him on the sofa. He was watching the rebroadcast of a football game from years earlier. In fact, it appeared to be a Super Bowl, but I couldn’t recall from which year. I was chomping at the bit to tell him what happened with Drillbit and he knew it, but we sat there watching the game in silence for a few minutes until they broke away for a commercial.
“Alright,” he said, turning to me. “Spill it.”
I could have just said that I popped Drillbit into a nullifier cell and gassed him, but I’d learned from my grandfather the art of being a good storyteller – especially where supervillains were concerned. Thus, I did a reverse CliffsNotes and dragged a ten-second anecdote out into a full-length novel. By the time I finished, he was grinning.
“Not bad,” he noted, “but Drillbit’s not what I would consider a real challenge.”
He didn’t elaborate further, but he didn’t have to. Super powers don’t equate to a super brain, and Drillbit wasn’t the brightest bulb in the socket. Gramps looked lost in thought for a moment, probably reflecting back on one of his old battles. Whatever story it was, I’d probably heard it a hundred times before, but I was ready to hear it again if he wanted to tell it. (As I said, he was a great storyteller.)
I glanced over at the mantel where my grandfather kept several of his most treasured keepsakes: pictures of the alien princess Indigo. My grandmother.
One of the photos was of them having a picnic. I looked at the photo, seeing the source of my mother’s exquisite features: the elfin ears, the exotic eyes. My grandmother’s white, porcelain-like skin stood in stark contrast to my grandfather’s dark complexion.
Their marriage had been a great scandal at the time. Even though Indigo technically wasn’t even human, she bore enough resemblance to a White female that the mere thought of a relationship between them had been enough to elicit protests. Violent reactions and hate mail had followed the announcement of their pending nuptials.
Nevertheless, they had persevered, and the union had even produced a child, my mother (although, as I understand, they had needed a little help from science, as their DNA had not been fully compatible). They had been happy, and would probably still be together had not an emergency on her homeworld called Indigo away. She had left and never returned, leaving my grandfather with an infant daughter to raise on his own.
Also on the mantel was a picture of me as a five-year-old. If you looked closely you could almost see the streaks of tears on my face. I hadn’t wanted to take the picture then, but Gramps had told me it was important and I’d want a picture to remember that day, and he was right. It was the day I first developed my powers.
It was before we moved into my grandfather’s house. My mother and I were living in a small, one-bedroom efficiency in an inexpensive but well-kept apartment complex. It would have been a very nice time in my life if not for a hulking brute of a bully named Bobby Trione.
Bobby was only nine, but of course he was much bigger than me, a five-year-old. He ruled the small playground at the apartment complex with an iron fist. In particular, there was a treehouse that Bobby had claimed as his own personal residence. In fact, there was a sign taped to the outside of it that said “Trione’s Treehouse,” and he took great offense at other children playing there without his permission.
Whenever Bobby wasn’t around, I’d sneak into the treehouse and play inside anyway. However, one day I made the mistake of leaving one of my action figures there. It was a fatal error.
Bobby and I attended the same school, and one day shortly thereafter he cornered me and confronted me about playing in the treehouse. He had my action
figure as proof, and when I was too slow in denying it, he started punching me. He punched hard and fast, screaming at me all the while to stay out of his treehouse, and before long I was bawling and doing little more than trying to curl up to avoid the worst of his blows.
As he hit me, I felt an odd pressure building in my brain. It was like a balloon, slowly filling with air, getting blown bigger and bigger. Then it popped.
Suddenly, there was no more shouting. No more punches. No more Bobby. In short, Bobby had disappeared, literally, and I was crying worse than I was when he was wailing on me. I knew Bobby was gone, and I knew that it was because of something I’d done - something terrible - but I didn’t know what. I ran off wildly, heedless of where I was going, just wanting to get away. I eventually found my way to a corner of the school basement and hid there, crying for what seemed like forever.
A short time later, I heard voices and looked up to find my grandfather there. He was in town visiting – babysitting me, actually – while my mother attended a writer’s camp. He’d kept a telepathic tab on me in those days and, having felt my mental distress, had come to find me. I tried explaining things, but couldn’t quite get the words out. My grandfather shushed me, then slowly, gently, carefully peeked into my mind, pulling back thoughts and memories like onion layers, to see what had happened. After a few minutes, he chuckled and told me everything would be fine.
It turns out that I had developed my first power – teleportation – and sent Bobby back to his treehouse. Early on, however, I wasn’t very good at teleporting people, and if I did it the person had a tendency to arrive at their destination a little disoriented. That’s what happened to Bobby. I popped him into the treehouse, but he couldn’t get his bearings; he fell out and broke his arm. (And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.)
My grandfather took the picture of me that day. After my mother returned from her workshop, he had a very pointed talk with her, and three days later we moved across the country and into my grandfather’s house. Shortly thereafter, he introduced me to BT, and they began training me to use my powers, among other things.
The Kid Sensation Series Box Set Page 3