Thankfully he’d learned never to allow uncopied originals into his office and all of his laptops were programmed to automatically back up to the Trident servers, so there was nothing lost that couldn’t be easily replaced. All things considered, it could have been much worse.
Nobody was dead. He could handle a few lost files.
He rinsed off in the chemical shower in his lab, peeled off his dripping clothes and changed into workout pants and a Cal-Tech T-shirt, leaving his feet bare as he grabbed towels and mops to clean up his office. The melted blob of desk and laptop refused to budge, fused to the floor, but he cleaned off the oozing foam and the rest of the debris until what was left looked like a weird modern art installment in the middle of the black-singed circle at the center of the room. So much for his hope that a metal desk wouldn’t go up in flames as quickly as the wooden ones had—the metal just made clean-up that much more of a bitch.
Eric collected another—wooden—desk and a fresh laptop from storage and set them up beside the modern art blob. The physical labor and familiarity of the actions seemed to pacify the fire somewhat, so his erratic “gift” still felt reasonably under control when he sat down to sync the new laptop to the Trident server.
He didn’t often get to feel like himself these days, like a scientist rather than a powder-keg looking for a spark. These rare moments when his mind was clear and the fire silent could not be wasted.
His email lit up, but he ignored it, logging on instead to the online forum he’d tripped across two weeks ago in his newest line of research, the line he privately called how not to die a horrible flaming death though the public title to the paper he was supposedly writing was Voluntary Suppression of Volatile Superhero Traits. Luckily his extensive work with super rehabilitation prevented anyone from wondering why Dr. Eric Eisenmann was suddenly so interested in power suppression. His past experiments had destroyed far more than desks, so for now he was able to keep his dirty little secret.
Something dark and hungry stirred in the back of his mind and he closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and pushing away the memory of how violently opposed to power suppression he’d once been, how envious he’d been of those with powers, how badly he’d wanted to spend just one day super, just one…
Be careful what you wish for.
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Super Bad (a Superlovin' novella) Page 14
