The time passed quickly and quietly for the most part. The one notable event occurred when Paramount came walking through on the way to his test, followed by a gaggle of reporters, all vying to get his attention for a second. As they went past me, one of the reporters on the outskirts of this small mob suddenly stumbled, having snapped a heel on her two-inch stilettos. I reacted quickly, standing up and catching her before she could fall.
“Crap!” she shouted, angrily taking off the shoe and its mate. “As if there wasn’t enough going wrong!”
“Sorry,” I said. “Next time I’ll let you fall.”
“What?” She seemed to notice me for the first time. She put a hand up and pulled back her hair. She was in her early twenties, and actually kind of cute. “I’m sorry, not you. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“It’s just…I really needed a good story here today. This is my last shot.” She suddenly looked kind of tearful. “I thought if I could just get a question or two with someone like Paramount, it could get my career back on the right track.”
I chuckled. “Unless you’ve got an audience that numbers in the millions, you can give up on getting anything out of him, or Vestibule, or any of the other household names.”
“Great. Just great.”
“Hey, if it’ll help, you can interview me.”
She looked skeptical. “And you are…?”
“Kid,” I said. “Just Kid,” I added, when she looked like she was expecting more.
“And what makes you so special that we should get you on tape?”
“Because,” I said, “in a week, you won’t be able to get this interview.”
She thought about what that meant. Normally, after the Super Trials, any teens selected were forbidden to give interviews, and media access to them was restricted in the extreme. Interviewing a teen who later made it onto a superhero team was a coup for reporters at these events. Telling her that I wouldn’t be available for interviews in the future was dropping a hint that I was someone special.
“Alright,” she muttered after deliberating for a few seconds, “but you better be worth it, kid.” She emphasized the last word, implicating it both as my moniker and as a generic designation. “Sid, let’s get set up over here…”
She motioned to someone behind me - a cameraman that I hadn’t noticed before. She then had me step over to a nearby wall, which would serve as the background. She ran her fingers through her hair again and then spent a few seconds straightening out her clothes.
Sid held up his hand, palm open. “Ready to go in five, four, three…” He folded his fingers into his fist as he counted down, going silent on the last two digits.
The newswoman gave a beaming smile. “Hi, I’m Sylvia Gossett, reporting to you live from this year’s Super Trials. I have with me one of the hopefuls…”
We had about a five-minute interview. As with so many other things that happened then, I don’t know what made me go on-camera with her, as I had intended to keep a low profile. (Again, I attribute it to the altered brainwaves.) To this day, however, it remains the only known interview with - and one of only two pieces of film footage containing - the infamous Kid Sensation.
Following the interview, I didn’t have to wait long for my name to be called. I was ushered down a short hallway by a pretty redhead who was assisting with registration, and into what was basically a large conference room approximately twenty by thirty feet in size. At one end was an elongated table at which sat three superheroes - two men and one woman: Mouse, Rune, and Esper, each with a laptop in front of them.
Mouse was a fairly new member of the League at that juncture, and as such no one knew much about him - a fact that didn’t change much over the next few years.
Rune was an enigma and a true human spectacle. His entire body was covered from head to foot in strange designs: ancient symbols, weird hieroglyphs, obscure characters. He was generally considered to be some type of magician. Because of his appearance, he was one of the less-popular superheroes; speaking bluntly, the runes that covered him gave most people the creeps. Even more disturbing, some of them appeared to be moving.
Esper, the telepath, had a two-fold job here. In addition to observing participants demonstrate their powers, she also took a cursory glance into their brains to make sure that people were who they said they were (i.e., nobody was a supervillain or a mole for one).
“Next contestant,” said Rune with a grin, “come on down.”
As I approached, I could feel a slight probing into my mind - Esper - and I knew what she’d see. Again, I had been trained by Nightmare, a psychic who - in his prime - had known no equal. As such, I had learned the trick of having a steady stream of male-teenager thoughts running along the surface of my brain: “Cute girl…”, “Video games…”, “Football…” and the like were on a continuous loop in my head, but outside my mental castle. Satisfied, Esper withdrew from my mind as gently as she had entered, and it’s a testament to my grandfather’s training that she never knew that I had been aware of her presence.
Mouse looked up from his laptop. “The Kid,” he said with a bit of a snort. “It says here you can fly. Let’s see it.”
I floated up about a foot off the floor, waiting silently as they eyed me.
“Technically, that’s not flying,” said Rune after an eternity, although it was really about fifteen seconds. “It’s floating.”
As if to illustrate his point, a pen on the table suddenly floated up into the air. “Or, if you’re some kind of fakir, it might even be simple levitation. Flight, on the other hand, implies speed and direction.” With that, the pen suddenly began circling around him at a dizzying velocity.
For a second there, I thought he’d said “faker,” as if I were a fraud. Even after I realized that he’d said fakir, the anger continued building in me. Still airborne, I dashed forward and snatched the circling pen, then flew back to my original position. I held out the pen and then let it drop. I flew to the back of the room and then zoomed back, catching the pen before it touched the floor.
Mouse looked at me stonefaced, while Esper raised an eyebrow in appreciation. Rune clapped his hands and threw his head back in laughter. “I like this kid!” he exclaimed.
I turned and left the room. I didn’t really know where I was headed - back to the waiting room, I supposed.
“Hey!” a voice shouted in my direction.
I turned to look and saw the assistant who had shown me into the room. She touched a hand to the side of her head and cocked her head slightly while walking towards me, obviously listening to an earpiece.
“You’re in,” she said when she got close. “Follow me.”
She led me back down the hallway and through another two corridors before stopping at a nondescript door. She took a magnetic key card out of her pocket and slid it through a card reader set in the wall. The door audibly unlocked. I waited, looking at her.
“Go in,” she said, raising her hands palm up in exasperated fashion. I opened the door and stepped inside as she walked away, shaking her head and muttering.
I was in another holding area. However, there were decidedly fewer people in here than the previous waiting room. This was the short list, teens with powers or abilities worth looking into a little more. There were chairs arranged in two sections, with an aisle down the middle of them. I took the first seat I came to and sat quietly.
Paramount, of course, was there, the center of attention as usual. I was one of the few who wasn’t hanging on his every word. Another was a girl who sat across the aisle from me. She had straight black hair, a smooth complexion, and a simple appearance unadorned by makeup or jewelry. It took me a second, but I quickly recognized her as Electra.
Electra had an unusual backstory. She was allegedly an orphan who the League had found as a baby. Because she exhibited super powers even as an infant, the entire Alpha League had gotten itself appointed as her guardians. She actually lived here at League HQ on one of the residential fl
oors of the building. The only other person who had lived their entire life at League HQ was Paramount, and - like him - she was also expected to be a sure thing as far as being selected by a superhero team.
Over the next thirty minutes a few more people trickled in. Following that, no one came in for the next hour. During all this time, Paramount talked incessantly and inanely about anything that came to mind. Finally though, even he seemed to run out of mindless chatter and sighed grumpily.
“When are we going to get this show on the road?” he asked.
Of course it was a rhetorical question, so we were all shocked when a voice answered.
“Oh, I was just waiting on you to finish. I didn’t want to disturb you in the middle of one of your anecdotes.”
We all looked to where the voice had come from. In a chair a few rows in front of Electra sat Rune. I didn’t recall him being there before, and no one had come into the room. Had he been there the entire time? Briefly I wondered if he were a teleporter, but quickly decided it didn’t matter.
“If you’re done, then,” he stated, pointedly looking at a now-silent Paramount, “we’ll get underway.”
Rune stood and cast his gaze about the room.
“You’re about to be taken to the next part of the trials. This will be a testing ground where we subject you and your abilities to examination to determine if any of you have the rudimentary requirements to be a superhero.”
He closed his eyes, and one of the symbols on his forehead began to glow with a bright, yellow light. Rune began chanting in a language I didn’t understand, but with words that intoned power with each syllable. Almost imperceptibly, the room began to vibrate, starting out as a dull hum. Rune’s chant continued, but I was surprised to discover that I could now understand the words:
Universe and cosmos, bend to my will;
Make distance between here and there nil;
Time and space rip apart without scar,
May the distant be near, and the near far!
As he spoke, the yellow glow became blinding. The room’s trembling grew more violent, and I heard empty chairs vibrating slowly across the floor. I felt an odd sensation, a tugging at my being, as if my body was trying to be two places at once. It wasn’t like teleporting; with that, I was simply either here or there, in one place or another. With Rune’s spell, and I somehow knew that to be what it was, it was as if I were ubiquitous to a certain extent, and in several places simultaneously.
Then, without preamble, everything came to a halt, and the world normalized again.
“We’re here,” Rune announced, and then turned and left out the door without further explanation.
Within a few minutes we had all followed him out of the room. Rune had obviously performed some type of trickery, because we certainly weren’t at the League’s HQ any more.
We were in a gigantic room, with hardwood floors, stone walls, and high arches. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave a panoramic view of a large domed stadium, lush well-manicured lawns, and hundreds of acres of forest. Looking around, I could see that the room was filled with all kinds of games: pool tables, air hockey, table tennis, etc.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder and pointed up. Above the arches was a large sign:
WELCOME TO THE ALL-LEAGUES ACADEMY
Now I knew where we were: the Academy, where heroes-in-waiting got their training - if they were lucky enough to be selected by a superhero team.
“Yes, you are at the Academy,” Rune spoke in response to unasked questions. “You will stay here for the next three days while participating in the trials. We have made room for you in the dorms – at opposite ends of the campus, based on gender – and will provide you with a change of clothing for each day’s events.”
He waved his arm to take in the entire room. “This is the student break room. Whenever you are not being tested, you are free to be in here, or participate in some of the outdoor activities. Tennis, anyone?”
We laughed at this as a glowing blue racket appeared out of nowhere in his hands, and he took a few swings at an imaginary ball.
“Anyway,” he continued, as the tennis racket vanished, “you’ve had a long day, so the rest of the evening is yours. We’re fortunate enough to have some student volunteers – who took time out of their own summer break – help us this year.”
At this, a number of older teens filed into the room from a nearby hallway.
“These volunteers will show you to your rooms.” As he spoke, he began fading, like a ghost winking out of existence. “As I said, you’re free to make use of this break room, but I would advise getting a good night’s sleep.”
And with that, he was gone. I took his advice and, allowing a student volunteer to show me the way, went to my room and went to bed.
*****
The trials were basically assessments of our powers. On the first day, they separated us based on our abilities. Out of two hundred of us, there were only seven flyers.
Unless you had another superpower (like super strength), a flyer could usually expect to have a recon role on most super teams. Fly here, scope out this area, report what you see. Your primary role wouldn’t be to mix it up with the bad guys (although that happened just as often as not). Thus, the flying trials would be pretty straightforward attempts to gauge qualities such as speed and perception.
The first part of the test involved flying up to a comfortable height (whatever that was for each individual flyer) and then staying there as long as possible. I flew up to what I judged to be about a thousand feet, then stayed there for four hours (or more specifically, until they called me back down). I was proud to see them label my ability to remain aloft as “indefinite.”
Next, I had to chase down an aerial drone and manually tag it with a homing beacon. It led me on a merry chase for almost thirty minutes, through wooded areas, around abandoned buildings, and all over the testing grounds. It had been an effort not to display too much speed, but I’d had fun all the same. I had assumed that they were judging my speed, so it was a bit of a shock when, after I was done, the test administrator - a flyer known as Sky High - began asking me odd questions.
“Did you see the bear?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“When you were chasing the drone through the woods, did you see a bear?”
Of course! Being recon, flyers were expected to observe what was going on around them. I went back over the flight in my mind, thinking furiously.
“Yes,” I finally answered. “I actually saw two bears - a mother and her cub.”
Sky High grunted, apparently surprised, then went on with a barrage of questions that I believe I answered correctly: “Did you see a mailbox…? How many blue cars…? What was the color of…?”
There were other assessments as well, but nothing I found too difficult. In short, over a two-day period, I passed all the tests they put me through. (Or at least I believed I did.)
The third day was just for winding down. The superheroes would discuss and assess the merits of each participant - maybe even meet with a few of them one last time - and let us know at the end of the day if we made the cut. Someone mentioned that there was a paintball range on campus, so a few of us decided to play while we waited.
The Academy’s paintball range, although in a well-forested area, was fairly high-tech. Each player could be tagged out by getting hit with a certain number of paintballs. The number of paintballs it took to tag someone out varied based on a computerized assessment of their abilities. For example, the computer would tag me out with seven registered paintball hits. For someone like Paramount, the number was one hundred hits, which was as high as the system would go.
There was a break area set up where teams could rest between rounds. It had lots of refreshments, as well as video screens that carried live broadcasts of teams currently competing. There was lots of good-natured betting on which team would win each faceoff.
There were six of us who decided to play together, three to a team; it wa
s a good match per the computer, which assessed our abilities as being comparable and pegged us all at the same tag-out level. We were in the process of putting on our pads - my team was in blue, the other team was in red - and getting our gear when the prior combatants came into the equipment room. One of the teams included Paramount, who was cheering in obvious victory.
“That was great!” he screamed. “I love it!” I tuned him out as he kept shouting, thinking instead about getting out on the range and discussing strategy with my teammates. We were just getting ready to start our round when the members of the red team approached.
One of them, a telepath called Mindburst, spoke. “We, uh, we, we’re going to let those guys take our place this round.” He nodded in the direction of Paramount and his team, who stood on the other side of the room, glaring at us.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Well, they really seem to like it, and we’re not really big paintball fans anyway.”
This was in direct contradiction to what they had previously said, but it seemed impolitic to mention that at the moment. He and his teammates were clearly nervous and feeling anxious. And that’s when I realized the truth: other teens weren’t in awe of Paramount. They were afraid of him.
“Suit yourself,” I said, shrugging. “But you’re missing out on big fun.”
With that, I marched out to the paintball range. It didn’t occur to me until later that I had never asked my teammates for their opinion on the subject.
The paintball game itself was a serious mismatch. The discrepancy between the tag-out numbers for my team and Paramount’s was just too great. There was no way we could win. Nevertheless, we devised the best strategy possible under the circumstances.
The paintball course had several hunting blinds set up in random spots. Each of us would take one, then - using the blind as cover - attempt to shoot the other team whenever they got close. It wouldn’t even come close to getting us a victory (we wouldn’t be able to shoot them enough times before they got to us), but it was all we had.
The Kid Sensation Series Box Set Page 6