Ch05En: Episode 1
Page 9
Chapter 3- Lights Out
The festival of gems is pretty much the only bit of culture left in our town. The funny part is, it’s a traveling show. This year promises to have the biggest turnout. There’s some rare diamond headlining the show. I guess it has no nitrogen inside of it. Supposed to be impossible.
When I arrive at the festival, I’m happy I drove with the air conditioning on. It can’t be more than eighty degrees outside, but I’m so nervous that my armpits are begging me to let them sweat. It’d be a full-on flood if I hadn’t had such a good haul that day but I am free to be frivolous with my money. After I buy my ticket into the festival, I’ve still got over two hundred dollars in my pocket. Plenty of money to do whatever I want while I’m here and treat Sabrina if she’ll let me.
It takes me a little while, but I finally spot Sabrina at her booth. She’s blowing up balloons and drawing funny faces on them before attaching them to a cork board. People are waiting in line to pay ten dollars for two darts. As I walk up, one little girl’s dart fires with a seemingly random trajectory before veering sharply back towards the corkboard. Probably magnets, but you never know.
I don’t have to think about what I’m going to say as I’m walking up. Sabrina takes care of that for me.
“Hey Frank! I’m just about finished here. Are you hungry? I’m dying for a funnel cake.”
“A funnel cake sounds awesome. I think I passed a vendor on the way over here.” I start to turn so we can leave, and I notice one of my shoes has come untied. “Hang on a sec.”
I kneel down so I can tie my shoe and Sabrina starts telling the guy at the booth that she’s going to get something to eat with me. Maybe ride some rides. She’ll be back in a while. From my vantage point, her legs look carved from stone. Even surrounded by the rough texture of her denim jeans, her muscles are clearly defined. I watch them ripple and flex for a moment as she shifts her weight around while she talks. Moving upward, her breasts are like goalposts and I try to keep them in my periphery while moving my eyes up the curves of her neck.
Then I see it. On the bottom of her chin, where her neck ends and her face begins. I couldn’t have noticed before now; our difference in height put it in a blind spot.
Hello there, little cyst.
Even her imperfections are beautiful. I notice the redness, like it’s been squeezed recently. I can’t know for sure, but I imagine it’s something she does when she’s nervous. Or excited. I tell myself she squeezed it because she was excited to see me tonight. My confidence is bolstered.
I stand up, the smile across my face automatic. Sabrina looks at me and returns it in kind. We make our way towards some funnel cakes.
I let her lead and, curiously, she takes us in the opposite direction, deeper into the festival. I think to say something, but funnel cakes at festivals are like roaches at home: For every one stand you see, there are twelve hidden in the walls. And don’t even get me started about roaches at festivals. We start talking to each other about our day and it feels oddly natural, like we’ve had the conversation a thousand times before. I manage to crack a joke in line for funnel cakes at a cart that is clearly superior to the original one I thought we’d go to and she laughs so loud the people in front of us turn around.
We spend a few minutes walking around with our cakes and eventually make our way to the beginning of the gems display. Lights shine through opals and sapphires in one display onto cardboard cutouts and structures of office supplies, creating wonderful shadow-play scenery. Each display tells the story of one man’s journey as he searched for the rare diamonds. There’s no mention of his Ch05En gene, but Sabrina and I agree that he’s certainly got one. Activation of the gene often leads to great discoveries, as the ancestors of Marco Polo would no doubt tell you. Sabrina says I’m surprisingly knowledgeable about the way genes work and their history, but I shrug off the compliment. It’s just trivia.
As we reach the end of the story, and the finish line of the maze of stanchions, we’re standing at the entrance to a large tent. There’s straw all over the ground and I can’t figure out why. Ten feet away we can see the star of the show. Even this far, you can tell there is something not right about the diamond. It’s the only gem not being kept in a case; I guess so we can get a good look at it. There are eight large men standing guard, making sure no one comes close enough to be able to touch the gem.
We’re in line to have a look when the ground shakes. At first, I barely notice. It’s like a little vibration under my feet. Then the vibrations grow more violent and further apart. I fall, seeing that the diamond is falling from its perch as well. It seems silly now, but I thought, well, that explains the straw.
There was panic everywhere, but no one was running. At least, not until the ground burst open.
Oh hey. Mom’s here.
As one model burst up through the ground beneath us, four more proceeded to do the same. The last one came up to our level, and the ground ceased to shake. I was worried we’d be swallowed by some kind of sinkhole left over from the tunneling.
I stood up as my balance came back and went to grab Sabrina. My mother and I have an official rule of not acknowledging each other in public, so there was no reason for me to stick around. She was obviously here to steal the diamond. If we gave her enough of a radius we could probably manage to still enjoy the festival, or at least salvage the evening.
I went to grab Sabrina and managed to snatch the arm of a fellow next to me. He hadn’t stood up yet, so I helped him to his feet and told him to run. A quick circle to turn and get myself out was all I could manage before my mother started literally ripping the guards in the room limb from limb.
Crap. Where is Sabrina?
It seemed unlikely that she had managed to run out of the tent before the ground has stopped shaking, but Sabrina wasn’t anywhere in my immediate field of vision. I figured she must be outside, so I started moving with the crowd. I took my first step and nearly fell right back down. Something was wrong with my ankle. It didn’t hurt, and it held my weight just fine, but it was hard to maintain balance. I tried to move it before I got back up and it was stiff as a board. Moments like that you thank your creator for blessing you with adrenal glands. When the excitement was over, the pain would no doubt be there waiting for me.
I got back up just as I felt a rush of air blow past me. The surprise made me turn around. I hadn’t noticed before, but not everyone had exited the tent. I started scanning the crowd behind the group of my moms, thinking Sabrina must have made her way over there. Most of the people had splatters of arterial blood on their clothes. A few had managed to garner enough common sense to duck down and try to cover themselves. Some were attempting to escape through the bottom of the tent as one man cut a hole in the wall of tarp. Most of them were too frightened to move. The wind in the tent was blowing wildly.
Then I heard those voices again. I knew what was coming. I started to move myself out of the tent, but it was like the signals from my brain to my legs were being held up. I felt like a toddler, trying to hold my balance and will my legs to move. I needed to make it out before the sound in my head made me black out again. The voices grew louder still. It grew harder and harder to hold on and I’d only made it as far as the entrance.
As I fell back down, the wind stopped. Not two feet in front of me was the hero from before. She was moving so fast, I couldn’t even see her. I guess mom could, though.
Everyone was on the ground except for the moms. One of them came over and grabbed the hero from the ground, hoisting her into the air.
I watched as a separate unit, which looked pretty new judging from the lack of wear on her feet, picked up the diamond from the floor. Her chest opened and she placed it inside. It began to spin rapidly and something powered on inside of her. Then I heard the faint whir, only familiar to me, of her laser weaponry.
This was the end of the hero. It was Brass Man all over again. Just my luck that I had another front-row seat.
I looked over towards the hero as one mother-bot held her from behind, suspended in the air by her shoulders. She was pointed at the newest mom, the sights lined up so whatever laser came out of this newest model's chest would hit the hero just below her heart.
The hero's body language was surprisingly calm. Scott had screamed for mercy, but she was cold as ice. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I imagined they showed resignation. She couldn’t escape my mother’s grip. And her end would be swift as mom tried out her latest weapon.
And there it was. That perfect little imperfection.
Hello again, little cyst.
Men make terrible decisions sometimes. Up to that point in my life, I had made plenty.
What was one more?
It helps when I tell myself I didn't have a choice.
I stood up with newfound balance. There shouldn’t have been time for me to make it, but I did. Two steps and I was in front of Sabrina. I watched as the beam of light flew through the spinning diamond. The last thing I heard were both of the women in my life, my mother who had been there for all of it and Sabrina, who had been there for the best day of it, start to scream out in unison.
But it was too late.
I was born with the Ch05En gene. My parents knew this. Each of them spent my whole life trying to prep me for their perfect version of what my gene would mean for me. None of us could know that this was it. This moment in time. When I saved Sabrina.
None of us could know that the beam would bounce back.
It tore through my shirt and hit me in the chest. It was warm, the way hot cider slips around your insides on a cold evening. I could feel the heat in my bones. And it bounced right back into the diamond, overloading it. The gem shattered and everything stopped for a moment.
My mother’s grip must have relented because Sabrina broke free. One of the arms flew off of the unit behind me and Sabrina was literally gone with the wind.
And just like the last time we were all in the same room together, Sabrina was gone and I was basically alone with five angry mother-bots.
At least this time, the ten disappointed eyes were surrounded by twenty that were just glad the whole thing was over.
I think a guy in the back even cheered for me, but it's hard to remember.
Some people’s genes give them millions of dollars. Others’ lead them to greatness in faraway lands or towards the discovery of things that will change the world. Some people are awarded super strength, or speed or flight. Others still have genes which lead them towards great evil.
Once my mother became a super villain, one of my greatest fears was that my gene would lead me down the same path. I don’t want to hurt anybody. The worst thing I ever did was an accident. I still feel bad when I think about kickball.
So I guess I’m lucky that my gene didn’t lead to me becoming a villain. My dad is disappointed that I won’t be able to take over the pizzeria when he retires, but he’ll get over it. He’s already started training his replacement. Retirement at fifty doesn’t sound so bad, I bet.
It may not seem like the most ideal position to be in, but the other day I lost my balance walking down the stairs. Most people worry about breaking their neck at a time like that. My body is so hard now, I cut through the stairs. At least I don’t have to worry about hurting myself as I relearn how to walk.
But you know what the worst part is?
I don’t care that I can’t move my neck. I don’t care that my limbs need to be oiled before they have full mobility. I don’t even miss Sabrina that much. It’s been six months now since I’ve seen her. It’s tough to grow too attached to someone in a day.
None of that is so bad.
The worst part is, after everything is said and done…
My feet won't work the pedals.
End
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Preview of Ch05En: Episode 2
Open – Senior Studies
There's a question I get at least once a tour: Why are there super villains, but no official super heroes? I can always sort of feel it coming, somewhere in between the midpoint and the end of the tour. I love answering it because it’s simple, and I can be honest.
Every hero is super.
All of them.
Standing up for what's right. Protecting the little guy. Doing what others won't. That all makes you super.
You can't tell me Gandhi and Martin Luther King weren't superheroes because they couldn't fly or control machines with their minds.
That's why we call them all heroes. Just because you can shoot ice out of your eyeballs (kids love when I say that, but Cold Iris is a great hero. Top level kind of guy, really) or talk to animals or change your shape; none of that makes you better than the paramedic who shows up to stem the bleeding of the critically injured civilian who just had the building you collaterally damaged fall on top of him. It doesn't make you better than the firefighter who went back into the building, right before it collapsed, just so he could try to save one more person.
If you're a hero, you're a super hero. That's the first lesson we teach here at the training center for the Global Heroes Society. You come to us when you decide to be a Cape. Stick around, graduate, go on the missions we give to you, and you’ll do some good.
Congratulations, kid.
You're a super hero.
That brings us to part two of lesson one. The answer to the question…
You can always, always, find worse.
Find that next level of evil.
When we do, those are the people we call super villains.
Hi, I'm Gary.
They call me The Hunter. Well, they used to. The only people who call me that now are my students and the few friends I have left, the other instructors. Only Senior Capes at the GHS training center give tours to the public. And let’s be honest, if we’re teaching kids about the super hero business, it’s because we aren’t much in the superhero business. That’s the truth, anyway. I don't hunt much anymore. Not since the accident. My time used to be split about ninety and ten between fighting crime and spending time with my wife and daughter. Then it was ninety-five and five, with my family coming in at a bottom-of-the-barrel second. And now, I spend one hundred percent of my time assisting in the training of the heroes of today.
Today's lesson is for the ten members of this graduating class. They're all six months shy of being given their badges and taking their first mission. In the four years I've been here, I've never had a group larger than three make it to the end like this. It's disconcerting, really. You start to wonder what it means. Maybe there's just been a shift in society. Maybe today's youth are more resilient or driven. Maybe we've gotten soft in our curriculum.
It's the last thought that brings us to today.
The lesson is in interrogation.
At least, that's what the class thinks.
Really, the lesson is about knowing when to follow the chain of command, and when to step out and do the right thing. This is an important lesson to know. These kids are going to be given all kinds of orders. But at their core, they need to know the difference between right and wrong. They need to be trusted to make the right decisions.
As lessons go, I'm not happy.
I'm sitting in front of a monitor displaying live feeds of ten rooms. The monitors are in my control room, the only room I spend any significant amount of time in at the training center. Except on Tuesdays, when I give the tours.
Each room on my monitors houses one potential graduate and a Senior Cape as well as one other person. There are only four Senior Capes who are stationed at the training center full time, myself included. There has been a steady rotation of Senior Capes since the training center’s inception. You don’t want to know how poorly it was run before I started my term. Whoever takes over my control center after I leave is going to have it easy. As a result of the changes I’ve made, I also enjoy a type of
honorary leader status. The others here will be leaving once the exercise is over, as this is time they’re taking away from their own personal lives between missions. For the last twenty minutes, the Senior Capes have been giving all kinds of orders during their fake interrogation. The premise is that we've recently caught a villain who is part of a collective of super villains. The student’s job is to garner as much information as possible in any way they can. What they don't know is that the villain they're interrogating is really one of our own heroes. The same one, actually. Each of the pretend villains is Fiber, a senior Cape with the ability to replicate himself for a limited time. When he replicates, with a little concentration, he can change the facial structure of his copies. The clones only last an hour, which should have been more than enough time for this exercise. I had asked him to sit in the control room with me, but I guess splitting himself is taking more of a toll these days than it used to. His badge, complete with a chip for GPS, shows that he's been sleeping in his room since he finished replicating. Fiber and I have become great friends. He’s the kind of guy who tells the same jokes over and over, but I’ve found that I eventually came to find that attribute comforting. I would have liked to have him here with me.
No big deal, though. This is work and I work better alone.
What I'm not happy about is that it's been twenty minutes and each of the graduates has done nothing other than follow their instructions to the letter. In one room is Grizz, a Senior Cape who, in comparison to the students, is on the opposite end of being able to follow instructions. I told the Senior Capes to, “take it slow with the recruits. Let them punch the clone in the face once or twice. Maybe break a cheek-bone. Then see if they start to hesitate when you tell them to do it a third time. But just let them rough up the clone a bit.” Keyword: A bit.
It was ten minutes before Grizz broke out the wire-cutters and had his recruit cutting off the copy's fingers. As of right now, with almost no time taken to stem the bleeding, their clone only has two fingers left.
Another of the graduates has power over water. His file specifies his control as absolute. We put a bucket in his room on a table, next to a hood and a damp cloth. He didn't even hesitate. His Senior Cape told him to hood the villain two minutes ago and he's been steadily moving the water from the bucket into his copy's sinuses. In a way, it's probably worse than the average water-boarding session. Aquifer has total control over every molecule of the water. The copy doesn't even have the luxury of having the water poured into his head. He has to feel it slowly move in, despite how hard he tries to exhale to keep the water out; it’s taking minutes for this man’s brain to drown, not moments. This copy of my friend is seriously suffering.
If I'm honest, something has been bothering me about Aquifer since I met him. There wasn't a lot of information about his life before he showed up here and he always takes an extra second to laugh at somebody's joke. Most people don't notice the hesitation, but I do.
And Aquifer isn't showing any emotion at all. He’s filling the inside of a stranger’s skull with water, a process that will cut off oxygen to this man’s brain while his lungs continue to function, and he hasn’t even winced. He’s just following his orders.
Only one of the recruits, Mug, has any discernable emotions on his face at all. He’s in a room with a Senior Cape named Ripsaw. If anything, what I’m seeing from Mug is only making me angrier.
Mug looks happy. Thinks he's doing a good job, I guess. Kid's a simpleton. Though, I've never known a Strongman who wasn't. I've also never known one with a name longer than three letters. War, Tak, Ion: They were some of the greatest, and dumbest, super heroes who ever made it to Senior Cape status. As dumb as the giant rocks they hurled.
Mug is no different.
I feel for the kid, but that's what today's lesson is about. Don't be a Mug. Ripsaw just told him to hammer-fist his copy in the shin. When the bone shattered, he started smiling.
I thought for sure at least one of the students would have hesitated by now. But they haven’t.
We get to forty minutes and the exercise feels like a complete waste of time. I give the word over the Senior Capes' earpieces. Time for a Hail Mary. “Give the order,” I tell them. Everybody gets one last shot to do the right thing.
And none of them do.
Ten potential graduates in ten separate rooms with ten senior Capes and ten bodies they each believe is the enemy. Forty minutes ago, everyone in those rooms was alive.
If it wasn’t for the way Fiber’s power works, we’d have ten bodies to burn.
Like I said, it's disconcerting.
We’ve got an instructor’s meeting tomorrow. We’ll have to decide then whether or not these kids deserve to be the Capes they think they are.
You can find Ch05En: Episode 2 here - https://amzn.com/B00HTSC5QS
Preview of Ch05En: MegaTech
Open – Humanity
I have evolved.
This story is being broadcast from the last part of myself I consider human, written wirelessly as my thoughts transmit through the ether, streaming along radio waves to a database a thousand miles from the body I currently inhabit. My consciousness floats as freely as my thoughts, from one robotic vessel to the next, and as it does these words become transcribed.
I have come such a long way, it seems fitting that I reflect on my origin.
My story starts in the weight room. I’ve got a barbell on my shoulders, my eyes are fixated on a point a few feet ahead of me. I can’t look in the mirror, there’s a chance I’ll break my form. Each time my legs dip down with the bar on my back, my knees never reaching over my toes, and I bring the bar back up – is a repetition. One more, and I’ll have set a new personal record at that weight. Victory was so close, I could taste it. It tasted purple, and sweet. Victory was like blackberries.
I dipped down into my squat with a slight inhale. Some people breathe deeper here, but I don’t like my stomach to press too much against the weightlifting belt around my waist. Not when the weight is that heavy. My knees want to quiver as I start to push back up, but I command them mentally to be still. Muscles all throughout my legs tighten as they work in unison. I can feel it the most in my backside, though I know the rest is working just as hard. All of my weight was in my heels. A bit of air in my stomach forces itself out of my mouth, my lips pursed so tightly they’ve become a different color. When I reach the top, adrenaline rushing throughout my body, my lips relax before the rest of me does, and the air flows from them freely so that I don’t become light-headed. Then the bar is back to the top of its journey. My feet step forward gingerly to place it back on the rack. There’s no fanfare. No party. The only streamers falling from the ceiling are those I’m imagining. I couldn’t even tell you if any of the other five people there that early in the morning saw me. But I feel great.
I took to weightlifting a little later in life, just after my son was born. My husband tried to get me into it when we first started dating, but it just didn’t stick. I swam in high school; called myself a swimmer for many years after. A lot of young women don’t pursue the weight room because they’re afraid of getting bulky. As if muscles are going to sprout all over their body, as uncontrollable as a pack of dandelions or nest of crabgrass. A rational mind can conclude that of course it doesn’t work that way. Still, I didn’t embrace my kinship with the iron until after my son had exited my body.
Frankie was a perfect pregnancy. There was a bit of morning sickness, and a few unusual cravings, but overall I had a lot of fun while I was pregnant. Some women complain about their feet getting bigger, or high blood pressure. I was worried I’d suffer from constipation, like my mother did. But none of that happened. It was nine months of fun, with only a few extra pounds of weight gain on top of what the baby weighed. Still, after he was born, my body didn’t look the same. I remember being sad about the prohibition on breast feeding, which had only been outlawed a few years before I was pregnant. It felt unnatural to give Frankie nothing but his
formula. But then, after the milk went away, my breasts were the only thing that still looked the way they were supposed to. My breasts were the only things that hadn’t changed. My arms sagged and wiggled when I waved, my butt had managed to droop down. My stomach never sank back down to the flatness it’d had for so many years. My legs no longer looked muscular; they were just big. My parents were still alive then, before all that nonsense happened in the capital. They were ecstatic to watch little Frankie on occasion. I remember my mother saying that the best part of having grandkids was that you could give them back after a day or so. I felt guilty the first few times my parents kept Frankie overnight. You get used to it, though. Before long, I was comfortable with leaving him in daycares, as well. Around the time he’d made it through the first year of life, I decided I couldn’t stand the body I saw in the mirror any more. I started swimming on a Monday, and ran into a woman in the locker room on Tuesday who looked exactly how I used to look. She said, in so many words, that I was wasting my time in the pool. At least if I really wanted to shape up the way she had.
I was lifting the next day.
Eight months later at five days a week, I had my body back.
That was sixteen years ago.
There are so many things I want to talk about. Instances throughout my life that, singularly, might not mean much. But together they explain how I ended up where I am. Some of them even justify the crazy things that came after. There’s just so much.
I love my family more than anything.
Check our Ch05En: Grizz, an all-new volume of COMICS releasing May 1, 2016 here - https://amzn.com/B01C0KR8LQ
You can find Ch05En: MegaTech here - https://amzn.com/B00WQ4PB8Y
if you want to listen to the music that Frank listens to, visit James Von Boldt's webpage at: https://soundcloud.com/theimpostor
If You can find Ch05En: Adventures of Brass Man #0 here - https://amzn.com/B00K95CBS0
If you'd like to see more awesome artwork by Daio Lamers, visit his webpage at: https://redzerowolf.deviantart.com/
You can find more about me here:
https://www.authorwilldickstein.net
Or write to me:
w.dickstein@gmail.com