by Baron Sord
I walked from the kitchen back to the immense marble entry hall.
Stefan stood at the top of the stairs, staring at me thoughtfully and wagging his tail.
I didn’t want him barking, so I ignored him. Grabbed the doorknob, keeping an eye on him to make sure he didn’t make a break for it and run out of the house when I opened the door.
He yipped.
“Shhh.”
He yipped again and his tail wagged into overdrive.
I twisted the knob quietly and opened the door.
“Are you leaving?” It was Vanessa.
I was already halfway out the door, but I didn’t want to be rude. I sighed and turned to thank her. “Sorry, Vanessa, but I really need to—”
Damn.
Vanessa stood at the top of the stairs.
Naked.
She looked like a pinup princess. The kind of woman Adam Hughes would draw, only real. Although she had fake boobs, they were the expensive kind, and you could barely tell. They were also as tan as the rest of her, the nipples were taut, and they were demanding to be squeezed and kneaded.
Oh, man.
She smiled, “What do you think?”
I thought that I didn’t want to sleep with a married woman. That said, after hearing her disappointed thoughts while she showered, I didn’t want her to feel like I was rejecting her because of her looks. I heaved my own disappointed sigh and said, “I think you’re married.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“No, but… Look, Vanessa. You’re gorgeous. I mean it. If you were single, I would ask you out in a heartbeat. Maybe I would even… right now I might… Rgh-em!” I sighed and cleared my throat. “Vanessa, you’re married.”
She walked down the stairs in all her naked splendor.
From this angle, I could see everything. And what an inviting sight it was.
She purred, “What if I was single?”
“But you’re not.”
“I could be.” She stopped inches away from me, her tan skin glistening and damp.
I could feel her naked heat and I was paralyzed with desire. Yes, I was a man.
Selenium, Bromine, Krypton…
That’s right.
Kryptonite.
A naked beautiful woman was every man’s kryptonite.
Even mine.
My heart hammered in both my heads.
Vanessa draped her arms around my shoulders and whispered sensually, “Come on, Doug. Let’s go upstairs…”
“Yip!” Stefan trotted down the stairs and hopped off the bottom step. He clicked over to me and once again licked my toes.
That broke the spell.
“I’m sorry, Vanessa. I have to go.”
“Don’t you want some clothes?”
“No thanks!” I dashed out the front door and closed it before Stefan could get out.
What a tease, she thought with immense frustration that bordered on rage. Oh! Does he have any idea what he’s doing to me? I can’t believe he—!
I ran down the front walk and out her gate as fast as I could while cursing my fricking principles.
—: Chapter 12 :—
When no one was looking, I hopped the side gate to Arnold’s house.
Thankfully, I was ravenously hungry and incredibly thirsty. Thankful because both factors helped me forget about Vanessa.
While pacing up and down the long asphalt drive between the front gate and the main house, I saw the copy of Lady Liberty #1 I’d set inside the gate. Picked it up and set it on the front doorstep of the guest house.
Continued pacing the asphalt drive.
It didn’t take long before I noticed my feet getting hot. During summer, the black asphalt got plenty of direct afternoon sunlight. On a hot day like today, it was always too hot for bare feet. Nothing new. What was different was the fact it wasn’t burning my feet. I felt the heat, but it wasn’t painful.
Did I still have the ability to extract heat? There was no reason to assume my powers were permanent.
Time to run some tests.
I imagined pulling heat from the asphalt up through my feet, picturing the heat transfer in my mind. Again, I saw a rainbow of mental colors corresponding to the shape of my body and a portion of the driveway.
That proved I hadn’t been imagining it earlier.
The familiar tingling vibration climbed up my ankles and slowed when it reached my calves. This time, the intensity was much less, but I was containing heat energy. I felt it drifting upward from my legs and slowly circling in my torso. I could also envision it as a dim red swirl. Correspondingly, the tingling in my legs was now gone.
Could I channel the energy to my arm?
In my mind, red tendrils slowly climbed up my chest and flowed out my arm, leaving my torso and legs dark purple. The red energy pooled in my hand, brightened slightly in my mind, and tingled noticeably. Nothing like the car fire. More like pins and needles when your foot fell asleep.
I opened my eyes.
Held up my palm and released the stored energy.
POOF!
A small puff of flame shot upward a few inches.
Hardly impressive.
No better than magician’s flash paper. Obviously, the amount of heat I’d withdrawn from the asphalt now was exponentially less than what I’d sucked from the gasoline fire earlier. Ergo, I had much less to release.
Sadly, it appeared I couldn’t simply “Flame on!” like Johnny Storm, who seemed to always have heat at the ready when he needed it. I would have to fuel up in advance. No different from any power tool or vehicle or weapon. You needed to keep a ready supply of electricity, combustible fuel, or ammunition at hand.
Preparation was key.
The question was, how quickly could I draw heat energy from exterior sources? Could I do it quicker in an emergency? How much could I hold? How long could I store it without burning to a crisp?
Earlier, when I’d held the heat from the car fire, I’d felt like I was going to explode, so I’d released it. Now, I could’ve endured the pins-and-needles feeling for a long time. Obviously, holding a wisp of energy for hours on end wasn’t useful.
With the car fire, could I have released half and kept the rest? Could I have held that half for a minute? Ten minutes? An hour?
Long term storage would be very handy.
I’d be a walking flame-thrower.
That made me wonder, could I shoot rocket blasts out of my hands and feet and fly around like Iron Man?
The first issue I would have to tackle was generating enough thrust.
Could I?
Possibly.
Franky Zapata’s Flyboard Air came to mind. It was a hoverboard that actually worked. You wore a backpack of fuel that gave you a whopping 6 minutes of flight time, and you held a small controller attached to the Flyboard strapped to your feet.
While you could truly levitate in the air and fly horizontally at speeds in excess of 90mph on a Flyboard Air, you could not do the acrobatics you saw in the Iron Man movies. Main reason being, the Flyboard wasn’t powerful enough and it didn’t have an airfoil (aka a wing) to generate lift. Most of the thrust generated by the jet turbines was wasted on fighting against gravity, which required continuous vertical acceleration, which in turn continuously burned fuel. Whatever remaining thrust your power plant had left over could be dedicated to horizontal acceleration.
Unless you added an airfoil.
Enter Frenchman Yves Rossy’s Jet Wingpack, a flying fixed-wing backpack. The wing allowed you to increase your flight time and, with all your thrust dedicated to horizontal flight, go faster. 120mph or more in a dive.
For all their awesomeness, neither Flyboard Air nor the Jet Wingpack could fly like Iron Man did in the Marvel Comics movies or the comic books. Not even close.
Why?
Power.
It always came down to power.
Neither device could generate enough.
Picture a classic Saturn V rocket climbing slowly up from
the launchpad on a tower of white-hot fire while rumbling the earth beneath your feet.
Totally badass.
Thing weighed 6.5 million pounds.
You put enough power under anything, and you could fly it to the moon. But only 107,000 pounds of the Saturn V’s initial 6.5 million made it all the way there. More on that in a second.
Back to Iron Man, who had no wing. Given enough thrust, he could fly like a rocket. The question was, where did he put his power supply in that sleek suit of power armor he wore?
Why, in the 2-pound Arc Reactor mounted inside a hole in his chest! Problem solved. Oh wait. What about thrust? Did the Arc Reactor generate it? Sure, why not? It generated arc thrust. Arc Reactors can do just about anything. Okay, how does one move thrust from Iron Man’s chest to his hands and feet? Why, nanotubes, of course! Haven’t you heard? Nanotubes can do anything. And! And, and, and! The best part?! The Arc Reactor never runs out of arc fuel.
Ever.
Okay, okay.
I was being sarcastic.
Being realistic, a real flying suit was theoretically possible. For power, your best existing modern option was the jet turbine. Put two of Yves Rossy’s little turbines on your back. Done. Oh wait. Rossy used four. Okay, go with four. Top speed: 120mph. Unfortunately, that wasn’t nearly fast enough to use the non-aerodynamic human body as an airfoil to produce lift.
You needed to add pure vertical thrust.
Not a problem.
Mount two jet turbines under your armpits, two more on the sides of your hips. Design both to pivot for added maneuverability and thrust vectoring. Not exactly a sexy suit of power armor. I could hear the taunts from the teenagers already:
“Hey, it’s Chest Engines!”
“Look! Up in the sky! It’s… Booster Boobs!”
If you really wanted to taunt the teenagers, put another turbine between your legs.
“Hey, look! It’s Rocket Crotch!”
Yeah, no.
Instead, maybe you stick with two belt-mounted turbines and maybe two on the sides of your shoulders. Don’t forget the four on your back, so eight turbines total sucking massive amounts of fuel.
Oh yeah.
Fuel.
For aeronautical engineers, deciding how much to carry was always a compromise. If you wanted longer flight times, or had more and/or bigger engines to power, you had to carry more fuel. Unfortunately, fuel wasn’t weightless. Carrying more of it meant burning more of it to carry the extra weight. The more you carried, the more you burned, ad infinitum — and therein lay the reason for the immense weight of the Saturn V, and the reason only 1.6% of its total weight made it to the moon. Even less made it back to Earth.
It was a vicious circle of compromise.
If you wanted long flight times, where did you put the fuel? In another huge tank on Iron Man’s back?
How was that badass?
“Hey, bump back!”
And, a big fuel tank with lots of fuel added weight that knocked you back into that vicious circle of compromise.
Blame gravity for there being no badass real-world Iron Man suits of power armor that performed like cutting edge fighter jets.
Could I tackle gravity with my new super powers?
Experimentation was in order.
Question was, assuming I could overcome gravity, would stable flight be possible?
Either way, there would be a potentially deadly learning curve. I seemed to be more resilient to physical punishment than ever before, but that didn’t mean I was invulnerable. One good high-speed crash might end me. If it didn’t, I might accidentally end someone else. Or destroy billions of dollars worth of people’s property.
Imagine the lawsuits.
Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) had the deep pockets to pay off anyone.
I did not. I could barely afford car insurance.
That wouldn’t stop me from trying to fly.
Practice would be key. I would need to find someplace safe to do it. The first thing that came to mind was the middle of a calm ocean. Assuming I didn’t slam into it at 150mph, knock myself out, and drown, it might by ideal. The only problem, other than death by drowning? If I were to fly out to the ocean, well away from the coast and the boats, getting there would require… you guessed it…
Fuel.
Okay, how much?
How about an hour’s worth? That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
Of course it was. Ask Franky Zapata and his 6 minutes of flight time.
I hadn’t stored the heat from the car fire for more than 5 minutes. For now, that would be my maximum flight time, making ocean practice unlikely unless I rented a boat.
Zapata’s 6 minutes wasn’t looking bad at all.
No doubt, Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch, had it way too easy. That was Marvel Comics for you.
As for getting my heat fuel in the first place, there was rarely a car fire handy when you needed it, especially not in the middle of the ocean or on a boat. Even on land, I couldn’t rely on random car fires or even building fires in emergency situations. There was no predicting them.
Would I need to make my own fires?
I couldn’t reasonably carry around gas cans and matches, and go lighting random fires when I needed to fuel up. That would officially make me an arsonist.
Could I simply draw sufficient heat from the environment? There was more than enough of that to go around.
Maybe that was the key.
I closed my eyes to concentrate. Felt the hot asphalt beneath my feet and the warmth of the summer sun on my skin. When I started to visualize colorful heat flowing up into my body from the ground, the front gate rattled open.
Arnold’s white Prius drove up the drive.
That was quick.
I stepped off the drive and onto the lawn as Arnold drove past. He stopped beside me and rolled his window down.
He smirked, “Nice flag. What happened to your clothes?”
“Long story.”
“Let me park the car and you can tell it.” He drove his Prius into the 3-car garage behind the house.
I didn’t know exactly what Arnold did on a day-to-day basis at SPAWAR because his work was classified, but I did know he designed and developed communication and information systems for combat and non-combat applications for the Navy.
Unlike me, Arnold had used his Computer Science degree to get a cool job. He didn’t make bank working for the government, but he didn’t care. He liked what he did and his bills were minimal because his family had paid off the craftsman mansion we called home decades ago. Now his parents were retired and lived in Newport Beach in a bigger mansion. The Beaks family had done very well for themselves.
My bills weren’t quite as minimal as Arnold’s because of my student loans, but I did have my job at YouDoIt, Inc. Nothing like testing software for a DIY tax accounting software company to bring in the Benjamins!
Yeah, baby!
Did I mention, back in high school, I had papered my bedroom walls with poster-sized tax forms? Heck yeah I did. 1040 Long Form was my favorite. Had it enlarged at Kinkos to 3x4 feet. Hung it right over my bed so I saw it every night.
If you’re gonna dream, dream big!
Okay, that was sarcasm.
Arnold came walking out of the garage and pushed up his eyeglasses with one finger. He glanced at my cape-kilt and grinned, “Did you get mugged by a roving band of evil cosplayers at the Con or what?”
“Something like that,” I chuckled.
“Damn, man. Are you juicing?”
“What?”
“Steroids. When did you get so ripped?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” he chortled. “You don’t just stumble into a body like that. Wait. Are you taller? You seem taller.”
“I’ll tell you inside. Can you open the guest house first so I can get some clothes?”
“Sure.”
I grabbed the Lady Liberty comic off my doorstep, then he unlocked t
he front door with his jingling keys. I set the comic on my nightstand by the bed and got dressed. We went back to the main house kitchen where I opened the refrigerator and grabbed sandwich fixings.
“You want one?” I asked.
“Sure. Tell me your story already.” Arnold tossed his keys on the counter and sat down on a barstool on the other side of the island while I made roast beef and cheese sandwiches for both of us. Feeling hungrier than usual, I made two for myself.
I considered what to tell him.
Arnold was my closest friend by far. I trusted him implicitly.
He said, “Are you gonna make sandwiches all day or tell me already?”
“How about I show you?”
I walked over to the stove and turned on one of the gas burners. I held my palm over it and lowered it to the blue flame until I was touching the ring of gas jets. To my amusement, the pressure of the gas against my skin was more noticeable than any heat.
Arnold gasped, “Stop! What are you doing?!” He jumped off his bar stool and rushed around the island. “Are you insane?! Move your hand, Doug!”
“Wait. Just watch.” I sucked the heat into my hand for about 30 seconds before pulling away. I held up my palm to show him. “See? It’s fine.”
“What the…” Adjusting his glasses, he examined my outstretched hand. “Can I touch it?”
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
“Wait, you didn’t get burned. That’s not possible.” His eyes goggled.
“Neither is this. Stand back.” I held up my hand. I was about to release the heat when I realized I had no idea how big the flame would be. I didn’t want to accidentally set Arnold’s house on fire. “You know what? We better go outside.”
“Why?”
“Trust me.”
We walked out to the infinity pool behind the house. It overlooked the San Diego bay. The view was incredible.
Arnold said, “Okay, now what?”
I grinned, “Now watch.” I pointed my palm at the pool, aiming for the deep end. I wanted to test out whether or not I could fire the flame horizontally. So far, I had only tried vertical.
FWOOM!
A medium sized blast shot from my palm and hit the water, releasing a cloud of steam.
“No fucking way!” Arnold laughed and jumped up and down. “Do that again!”
