Cherry Blossom Girls International

by Harmon Cooper

  About the only thing missing was the black blindfold.

  “That’s distracting,” I told her.

  “Gideon likes girls from video games,” Grace explained to Dorian and Veronique. “Japanese animations too.”

  “It’s not what it seems,” I said, looking in the rearview mirror at both Dorian and Veronique.

  Dorian smiled, while Veronique gave me a playful eyeroll that felt forced. Everything Veronique did felt a little forced, even if she was trying to put effort behind it.

  It was just her nature.

  “It’s a thing, you know,” I told them. “Cosplay.”

  “Yes,” said Grace as 2B, “and by the looks of it, you have spent a considerable amount of time looking at cosplay, even supporting a few cosplayers online…”

  “I wouldn’t consider giving them a dollar or two per month for, um, choice pics ‘supporting’ them. Besides, some of those ladies have real fans, rich ones, who will do something like pay them five hundred bucks a month just for some semi-lewd images.”

  “I could make a lot of money doing that,” Grace said, starting to morph into Morrigan from the Darkstalkers series.

  She suddenly had turquoise hair, and she was now clad in a purple and black bodysuit that showed a ton of cleavage. About the only thing she didn’t have was the wings sprouting from Morrigan’s head and back.

  “Yes, you could make a lot of money doing that,” I agreed. “But as you will see in Japan, it really is a thing.”

  “I can’t wait to go to Japan,” said Dorian. “I’m still not clear about how we’re going to get there yet.”

  “Leave that up to me.”

  It was true, we were planning a trip to Japan, to the location given to me by Dr. Kim. I didn’t know how we were going to find Damon Lord in Setagaya of all places, but after what the bastard had done to Fiona, when we finally found him, we would kill him.

  And I had no qualms about that.

  Killing wasn’t my MO, but the fucker had turned her into a crystal, which had led to her shattering. This was something I was constantly reminded of every time I looked down at my finger and saw the ring each of us now had from what was left of Fiona’s crystallized form.

  A little gruesome, sure, but our rings memorialized her death, that blue crystal a constant reminder that this shit was serious, that while there were a ton of people gunning for us, only Damon Lord had killed one of our own.

  “We’ll get him,” Grace said as she morphed into Harley Quinn, her hair in pigtails, wearing a cut off shirt that said Daddy’s Lil Monster and a pair of red and blue boy shorts. This was Harley Quinn circa the end of the 2010s, now considered a classic look.

  “You know, it is kind of hard to take you seriously when you keep doing things like that,” I told her.

  “Sorry, Mr. J!”

  “Well, the whole day has been a shitshow thanks to you,” Veronique said, “so why not have a little fun?”

  “What do you mean ‘thanks to me?’” I asked as the vehicle’s lane keep assist system rumbled the wheel, letting me know to stay in my lane. It had an auto drive feature too, but I wasn’t currently using it.

  I felt like being in control for a moment.

  “You are the one that emailed her, that set up the meeting which led to all of this.”

  “You know, we’ve already been over this before,” I told her. “I was trying to make our lives easier, to form an alliance with the government while we took out the supers who are using their powers for evil. Dammit. It sounds stupid saying that out loud, but you know what I mean.”

  “Gideon, you are hopeless sometimes. That’s not how any of this is going to work. You must understand that we are going to be hunted alongside them, no matter how many we take out. Those people out there,” Veronique said, nodding to a minivan driving next to us, one of the kids looking out the window and seeing Grace as Harley Quinn, “they hate us.”

  Of course, Grace waved at the boy, and gave him a Harley Quinn-esque wink that was definitely going to be the subject of that kid’s first wet dream.

  “They are not like us,” Veronique continued. “They were not raised like us, they do not have powers like us. I know because of my ability it is easy for me to think of them as cattle, which they kind of are, but even you have to agree that we have evolved past them. So it makes sense for them to be afraid.”

  “It makes sense, but there has to be a peaceful way we can resolve it,” Dorian said.

  “You’ve gotten soft,” said Veronique.

  “Not at all,” Dorian told her. “Some people out there, people like Gideon’s fans, get it and they don’t hate us. Clarence, Vince, Gideon’s parents, there are others. Carmen Hooper? She doesn’t hate us. She was on TV recently talking about us.”

  “Gideon’s fans? We can’t rely on sci-fi geeks and book nerds with what we are trying to go up against, comedians either.”

  “Hey,” I told her as I switched lanes to pass a granny driver. “I take offense to that. Those are good people; those are my people!”

  “Nothing is ever black-and-white,” Grace said, turning, well, black and white. She was pinstriped now, which was one of the stranger forms I had seen her take.

  “She’s right,” said Dorian. “Even if they hate us, we have to try to love them back. Well, maybe ‘love’ is strong word.”

  “‘Love’ is definitely a strong word,” I told Dorian with a chuckle. “Maybe ‘tolerate’ would be better. The point is, Veronique, I was hoping that we would be able to make it work somehow. Like, maybe we could have made a deal with them, or proved to them that we could actually do this, so they wouldn’t have to hurt anyone like the three of you, and me by extension, just because we have powers.”

  “Okay, tolerate,” said Dorian.

  “My point is: we should not be targets because we have powers. For me, my powers were given at a later stage in my life; but for you three, and the rest back at the mansion, aside from Clarence and Father, you are born with it. We can’t…” I thought of a way to phrase this. “I mean, you can’t be responsible for how you were born. You are responsible for what you do after, but the conditions in which you are born, that’s not up to you.”

  “Okay,” Veronique said, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s going to come a time in all this when you realize I was right; I just hope that we are able to get to safety when that happens. Because there’s always the chance that we may be in too deep.”

  “Duly noted,” I said. “Let’s keep discussing this; let’s talk with the others as well and get their input. Somehow this conversation got sidetracked. We were originally talking about Japan.”

  “And cosplay,” said Grace, who was still pinstriped.

  “Yes, that too. Once we get back to Colorado, we will figure out how to get to Japan. I have an idea, like I already said. Whatever happened back in DC, we will figure that out, we will also figure out who that albino woman was. But one thing we definitely can agree on: she was there on behalf of Damon Lord. So that is our target. We take him out, we figure out what he has done in Asia, we get one step closer to solving this.”

  Not quite world travelers, and not feeling like doing the makeshift Airbnb scheme that we had done in the past, the ladies and I found a swankish Hilton in downtown Richmond.

  One issue we immediately faced was the fact that we were all wearing superhero uniforms, all aside from Grace, who was able to morph. I could morph as well, but I hadn’t really attempted clothing, and I wasn’t going to be able to do it at the moment.

  “I’ll get us all clothing,” Grace said, reading my thoughts, “once we check in to our room.”

  “Okay, go in first, get a room for us, and clear the path to our room. Think you can handle that?”

  “Please,” Grace said as she got out of the car, morphing into a brunette with an intense tan and an American flag tank top. “I make this look easy.”

  “So patriotic,” Dorian teased her as Grace shut the door with her ass.


  “I’m guessing this won’t take too long,” I said, smiling back at Dorian and Veronique.

  “I can’t wait to explore downtown Richmond,” said Dorian. “We haven’t been here before.”

  “I’m hungry,” was all Veronique could say.

  “We really should take more vacations, shouldn’t we?” I asked as I adjusted my seat and got comfortable.

  “I like Colorado,” Veronique told me. “It is nice being away from everyone and staying up in the mountains.”

  “Not really a people person, are you?” I asked.

  “You know my feelings on people.” She smiled at me. “But I do like you.”

  And this would have sounded almost cute if she hadn’t said it in such a stilted way.

  “I like you too,” I told her.

  “And I like both of you, so let’s have some fun tonight,” Dorian said with a giggle.

  “What are you suggesting?” I asked, trying not to sound like a horndog.

  “Dinner, drinks, and then…” She stuck her tongue out at me. “You are already overthinking this, aren’t you?”

  “He overthinks everything,” Veronique said. “That is part of his charm.”

  “I won’t think about anything if that’s what you want, if that’s what it takes to…”

  “Takes to… what?” Dorian asked.

  “Takes to show you to that I have a plan, and I know what is going on. Yeah. That’s what I’ll show you, that I really am the fearless leader of the CBGs.”

  Veronique shook her head. “He is so sad, really. Especially after what just happened in D.C.”

  “Give me this,” I told her, joking. “Just give me my moment, dammit.”

  “Well, you may or may not get your moment tonight. I guess it depends on how you play your cards,” Veronique said as Grace returned to the car.

  I started getting out as soon as I saw her, Dorian and Veronique following me. All of us were clad in our uniforms, both Dorian and Veronique’s lacking leg armor.

  It wasn’t practical, but superhero uniforms weren’t supposed to be practical, right? Actually, it had been their request, and Vince Porter had honored that request.

  God bless that man.

  After a quick check to make sure no one had pulled into the space, we followed Grace to a side entrance, where we stepped out into an empty hallway, Veronique immediately disabling the cameras.

  “I need to give the guy at the front the contact information for this car,” I reminded Grace. “I want to make sure it gets back to the owner.”

  “I’ll handle that,” she said as we approached elevator, and took it to the tenth floor. We found our room, and once we were inside, Grace took the card with information on it and bid us farewell.

  “Cool clothing,” I reminded her as I looked around the large space, noticing that there was another room connected to the main living space. “Nothing too crazy. We are trying to blend in here, and I will be going as old man Gideon.”

  “Don’t worry; I’ll find the coolest clothing possible,” Grace said as she left, the door clicking shut.

  “Let’s hope so,” Veronique said after she’d gone.

  I relaxed onto the couch, Dorian sitting on my right and Veronique on my left, crossing her legs over my lap.

  Sure, I sort of had a harem thing going on here with the CBGs, and I wasn’t ashamed of it.

  It was just how the situation worked out.

  But that didn’t mean everyone was part of this harem, including Stella, who seemed to constantly vacillate between liking me and disliking me. Chloe, the sound manipulator, and I had had a few intimate moments over the last month, but it was hard to get away, and she wasn’t the sharing type.

  But these three, the original three, they were the sharing type, even if we had to be careful with Dorian, considering her bodily fluids could explode someone.

  I remembered reading about a guy living like this, probably back when I was still a student at Southern Connecticut University, and thinking it was a strange way to exist.

  But looking around at my life, the powers I had, the destruction I’d seen, and the potential of those around me, everything was a strange way to live depending on who looked at it.

  The people that met each other in high school and were together forever, never having another lover—that was sort of strange. As were the cucks, the swingers, the guys and gals who were asexual, the forty-year-old virgins.

  The list went on.

  And while I sometimes thought about the relationships I had with the other CBGs, it wasn’t something I let bother me anymore.

  If it happened, it happened, and I was even starting to see it less as pure sex and more as an expression of how we felt about each other, a way for us to feel intimate with one another and to connect on a level that we couldn’t normally connect with just dialogue.

  Ha! says the writer. But things were what they were, and it didn’t seem to be causing any issues.

  So I just went with it.

  “Who is ready to see what the television is saying about us?” Dorian asked as she turned on the TV. She cycled through to MS-CNN where she found find a blonde anchor practically shitting herself as they took in a bird’s eye view of the destruction in D.C.

  They hadn’t completely blamed it on me yet, but they were mentioning that witnesses had seen the writer of the “infamous” Mutants in the Making series of books there, and that this was probably an attack orchestrated by him.

  But they weren’t a “biased” news organization, so they hadn’t confirmed it yet.

  I had to laugh at this.

  All news organizations in 2030 were biased, and there wasn’t much that I was going to be able do about it. People watched the news that they wanted to hear. It was quite the phenomenon, and it really had become a form of entertainment in every sense of the word.

  And having been a part of the circus, especially right before the release of Mutants in the Making, I wanted no part in it.

  “This is only going to make it worse,” Veronique said as they kept announcing the death count, the numbers scrolling on the screen, going up, going down, pundits weighing in. We finally had to switch stations when they had eight people weighing in at once, all the talking heads like something out of a dystopian Brady Bunch.

  “I’d better report in with Father,” I said, glad when Dorian settled on Home & Garden Television.

  I had watched more HGTV with the CBGs than probably anything else, but it was always good to watch, easy on the brain, perfect for getting our minds off of what was actually happening.

  I pulled up the email account that Father and I had jointly started, and typed a message, saving it in drafts.

  I wouldn’t send it; I knew he would check the draft folder and see the message. He would reply there as well, which was how we communicated. It had been his idea, and since he seemed to know more about tech than me, I went along with it.

  “I hope Grace brings cool clothing,” Dorian said. “If we’re going to be fugitives again…” She smirked at me. “If we are going to be fugitives again, I at least want to look good. We can get some tattoos as well. You have been promising…”

  “Maybe,” I told her, “but not if we’ve been drinking.”

  “Tattoos at some point then, ‘cause I’m getting drunk,” she said as she threw her head back, laughing.

  “You know, for two people who love to preach about saving the world, you two are off to a fine start,” Veronique said, patting my arm.

  “This may be the last night we have to do something like this for a while,” I reminded her. “Once we get back to Colorado, and I go over plans with Father and pick his brain a bit, we are off to Japan. Seriously. And who knows what things are going to be like at that point.”

  “Okay, have your night, and have your fun. But I’m eating,” she said, starting to drain some of my life force.

  “Yes, go ahead, feed,” I told her as I cringed at the pain. “But don’t take too much;
I need to be able to heal myself as well, and if I pass out...”

  “Don’t be a baby. You should be used to me doing this by now.”

  Chapter Four: Demons be Gone!

  “Real funny,” I told Grace as she presented the clothing she had ‘bought’ for me. She had been gone all of forty minutes, and I was starting to get worried when we heard a knock at the door, the psychic shifter stepping into our hotel room now in the form of…

  “I know exactly who you are!” Dorian said as she approached Grace, taking some of her bags from her.

  “Like totally,” Grace said in a California valley girl accent.

  Her hair was golden blond now, her eyes blue and her skin orange in a way that reminded me of a former president. She was in a USC tank top and hip-hugging jeans torn at the knees. Matching DisNike kicks rounded out her outfit.

  “Is she supposed to be someone?” I asked as I got out of my superhero uniform. A pearl snap cowboy shirt and a pair of tight Wranglers? Someone call Hap and Leonard, there’s an East Texas crime to solve!

  “Don’t forget the bolo tie,” Grace said, still with her valley girl accent.

  “She’s supposed to be Sandy Summers, you know, from the show.”

  “There’s a show?” I asked Veronique.

  “We have watched it together before.” Veronique took one of the bags and emptied the clothing out onto the bed. I almost laughed at the way she did this; sometimes she really had no finesse.

  “Let me guess, this is a HGTV show, right?”

  She nodded. “They flip homes that are two bedrooms and up, turning them all into sublets. In the episode we watched, they took one three-bedroom home and turned it into six sublets, each with a separate entrance.”

  “You really don’t remember it?” Dorian asked as she stripped out of her uniform, now in her bra and panties.

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  While I looked like a rodeo reject, especially with my shiny leather shoes that totally didn’t go with my cowboy get-up, Dorian ended up looking pretty hot in a black turtleneck and dark gray jeans. Grace had also gotten her a black hat, which Dorian wore after pulling her hair into a ponytail.