West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide

by Johnson-Weider, K. M.

  “I’m not seeing anyone right now and it’s none of your business anyway,” snapped Blue Star who was floating up to the second level.

  “Actually, it’s all over the tabloids so technically it’s everyone’s business.” Cosmic Kid leapt the last few rungs to the platform where three big guys were running towards him with baseball bats.

  Blue Star decided instead of using his ice powers to simply crash into one of the bat boys. Cosmic Kid frowned as two was not as exciting as three. He evaded one swing and positioned himself to use that guy as a shield against the other. He caught a second swing with one hand and kicked the swinger back into his other opponent, while keeping a strong grip on the bat so that he ended up in possession of it. Blue Star hefted his crumbled opponent towards a nearby blue zone.

  “No, it’s not,” said Blue Star irritably.

  “Oh my god, it’s not that you can’t find someone - it’s that you have a crush on someone! Is it someone on the team? Seawolf and you would have such precocious and sweet children.”

  Blue Star couldn’t help but laugh. “DSA would reverse policy and pay us to not have children. How about you, Kid - dating anyone?”

  “Trying to change the subject with a question reversal – nice, but I’m dating Emily, your granddaughter, remember?”

  “I thought you two broke up?” asked Blue Star stopping for a moment to catch his breath.

  “I’ve been trying to convince her that I’m a super who can handle a serious relationship,” said Cosmic Kid, waiting for Blue Star to start moving again.

  “How’s that going?” asked Blue Star as he started to walk forward.

  “Poorly,” said Cosmic Kid. His attempts to show his seriousness were grating Emily and he feared it wouldn’t be long before she simply dumped him.

  Blue Star stopped in front of the reinforced door that led to where the hostages were being held. He yelled out, “Operations, is there another way into the room?”

  Dr. Sterling’s voice boomed out over the intercom. “Nope – and in 30 seconds the blue zones turn green and everyone is back in play.”

  “Can you bust through this door?” Blue Star asked Cosmic Kid. “It sounds like you’re stalking Emily; if you are, I might have to get involved.”

  “What are you going to do? Get elected President and keep me off the President’s Team?” Cosmic Kid examined the door. The hinges were on the other side and it was a heavy-duty steel door. He couldn’t effectively knock it down without more mass for leverage, but he could probably blow the lock with one of the explosive charges on his utility belt.

  “You should respect your elders,” said Blue Star.

  “I do! You’re like a hero to me, except I believe in monogamy,” said Cosmic Kid as he set up the charge on the lock.

  “I do too,” said Blue Star grumpily.

  “I had dinner with Linda the other night,” said Cosmic Kid, stepping back from the door.

  “What? How? Why?”

  Cosmic Kid laughed. “Linda was in town and took Emily and me out for dinner.” He had been happy to meet Linda, the former Lady Titan of the Paragons, though he was surprised to see she was about 20 years younger than Blue Star. She was attractive, smart, and personable, though she had to have some judgment issues to have married Blue Star a second time.

  An explosion blew open the lock.

  “Emily isn’t related to Linda; she’s Gwen’s granddaughter,” said Blue Star.

  “Family is family,” said Cosmic Kid dashing into the room. He saw that most of the second string was inside, many armed with paint pellet guns, and in the back was another door, which probably led to the cheerleaders. He ran to the side as paint pellets flew around him, some hitting, and threw a flash-bang into the center of the room. It went off with a deafening crack and flash followed by a few chords of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or was it Ba Ba Black Sheep?

  Blue Star entered the room and began putting people on ice. “Yeah, Gwen and Linda get along; trust me, you never want your ex-wives to get along.”

  “I’m not planning on having an ex-wife, just a wife,” said Cosmic Kid as he knocked two ‘gunmen’ down.

  “That’s everyone’s plan at the beginning, Kid. Did Linda say anything about me?” asked Blue Star nonchalantly as he knocked down several others by dropping a thin sheet of ice on them.

  “That you’re younger than I am,” said Cosmic Kid, tossing a cornerback into a defensive end. Linda had been pretty uncharitable to Blue Star, but did admit he had his moments. Though she really wouldn’t go into detail about when those moments actually were.

  “I don’t think that’s a compliment,” said Blue Star, flying towards the second door.

  “Hey, at least she doesn’t think you’re old – that has to be a plus,” said Cosmic Kid, following him on foot. “Anyway, enough about your problems, I have a problem you can help me with.”

  “If it involves Emily, I don’t want to hear about it.” Blue Star slicked the floor of the room to slow down the football team while they dealt with the door.

  “No, I don’t have problems with women,” lied Cosmic Kid. “However, I think I botched a patrol with Starfish a few days ago. I was a real ass, trying to show off before the experienced team member.”

  “Showing off is what supers do – we naturally compete and that’s what makes us better.” Blue Star created ice in the hinges and wall around the door causing it to expand and crack.

  “Yeah, but you can compete in a nice way or a mean way, and I went the mean way. Believe it or not I can be arrogant at times,” said Cosmic Kid, slamming into the iced door.

  “No, you’re kidding,” said Blue Star sarcastically.

  “Seriously though, I showboated,” admitted Cosmic Kid. “I’m just not meshing well with Starfish.” The door he was slamming against gave way into the next room, in which five more football players were each pointing a paint pellet gun at the head of a cheerleader.

  “Surrender or the cheerleaders will die!” said one of the football players with a smile. He obviously hadn’t seen what had been done to the rest of the team.

  “It’s mutual; the two of you don’t respect one another,” said Blue Star. “I was in Ops with Dr. Sterling during the patrol and heard everything.”

  “I know you have to earn respect, but he does treat me like a kid sometimes.”

  “That’s because you are a kid. If I treat you like a kid, you can take that, because you look up to me as I am pretty much a superhero legend and because I don’t mean anything personal by it. Starfish treats you like a kid because you’re a threat to his status as team genius and resident wit,” said Blue Star, who continued to lower the temperature in the room.

  “So you think I was mean to him because he doesn’t respect me because I don’t respect him?” asked Cosmic Kid.

  “Respect is a two-way street.”

  “Hey, we have hostages!” said the leader of the football players who shivered slightly.

  “Sorry, one moment – I’m about to have an epiphany,” said Cosmic Kid.

  “You wish, Kid - she’s out of your league,” said Blue Star. “Psychics are more trouble than they’re worth.”

  “Fortunately for you, Linda isn’t a psychic,” retorted Cosmic Kid. “She isn’t seeing anyone and you two were married twice before – you guys must have some serious connection. It would also mean a lot to Snowflake.”

  “You know Katie?” asked Blue Star.

  “You know you have never asked me that question in all these months, and yes, I do know Catherine. Teen Infinity and Teen Ultimate teamed up to deal with that wannabe anti-Christ last year. Your daughter is cool, literally, but she would be happier if her dad was more involved with her life.” Snowflake was a few years younger than Cosmic Kid and was born during Blue Star and Linda’s brief second marriage. She was a nice kid, but lacked confidence. She was the daughter of two superhero legends, but like every kid from a broken marriage she had more than her fair share of issues.

>   “She doesn’t like me and for good reason,” said Blue Star.

  “Respect is a two-way street. You have to respect yourself before you can expect others to respect you.”

  “Harsh, but probably accurate, Kid,” said Blue Star with a sigh.

  “Hey, I’m going to shoot Tina!” said the football player.

  “Go ahead,” said Blue Star who gestured at Cosmic Kid. They advanced menacingly on the five football players. Three of the players wisely dropped their ‘guns’, probably because if they had shot the cheerleaders they would have faced grief for months over it. As for the two who pulled the triggers, they discovered that the paint pellets had jammed due to the cold. Blue Star and Cosmic Kid had tested out the paint pellet guns’ tolerance for cold a few nights previously to toss a surprise back at Dr. Sterling.

  Soon the cheerleaders were free, though they were fast approaching hypothermia. The football team gave up at that point. Hopefully with their Season starting in a little over two months, they would have time to heal up. Cosmic Kid wondered if Dr. Sterling’s training sessions were one of the reasons that West Pacific College’s athletic program lost most of its games.

  “Dr. Sterling is developing another secret raid against the Infinite Circle. I want you to head it up with Starfish and Camille,” said Blue Star later as they showered in the gym after the training session.

  “Really? What’s the target? Shouldn’t Starfish lead it? He’s the most senior.”

  “You need to practice being in charge, I’m not going to be around forever, and this is a chance for you to make a connection with Starfish. As for the mission, the details are confidential up to deployment.”

  “Alright, thanks,” said Cosmic Kid. “How about you – are you going to see Linda? She’s going to be in town through the weekend.”

  “No, I’ve burned that bridge twice already. You have to go forward, not backwards in life.”

  “Then you definitely are after someone else, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not saying, Kid,” said Blue Star with a slight smile.

  “Please tell me it’s not Camille.”

  Blue Star scowled. “I don’t do that. The only marriages I’ve ever screwed up are my own, Kid.”

  “Well, good luck, I hope it works out with whoever it is,” said Cosmic Kid who still suspected that Blue Star was after someone he shouldn’t be. The man had a serious self-destructive streak.

  “It never does,” said Blue Star with a laugh. “But that hasn’t stopped me from trying yet.”

  Chapter 32

  11:45 a.m., Thursday, June 20th, 2013

  100 Lighthouse Road

  West Pacific, CA

  Injured Reserve stretched on like a Lady Liberty movie marathon: mind-numbing tedium punctuated with long stretches of irrelevancy. Dr. Sterling responded to all of her messages with Put your HoloBerry down and get rest! Starfish didn’t respond at all. Both of them probably thought that the more she knew about the investigation, the more likely she would be to go do something foolish. She could call Paul, but he would just take it the wrong way. So Seawolf puttered miserably around her lighthouse. Every attempt to work on her art failed; the creative spirit seemed to have abandoned her. No book was able to keep her interest. She looked longingly at the ocean, but Dr. Gavriel had made it quite clear that if she got any water in her ear, she might never hear again. Restless and irritated, she turned to the Internet.

  Reports on the Season so far were mixed. The capture of Dr. Wraith and a host of minor supervillains had catapulted the team to #4 in the West Coast Conference. It was the highest the team had been in the rankings for years and Seawolf had almost nothing to do with it. Then came the Avalon One fiasco. While she sat on the sidelines, a tsunami hit West Pacific. She had refused to evacuate from her lighthouse when Dr. Sterling refused to let her help with disaster relief. Injured Reserve was Injured Reserve, even if the city was submerged. Fortunately, her lighthouse survived mostly intact, but the team’s ranking did not. The irony was that it wasn’t just the tsunami but also Keystone leaving to join the High Rollers that had dropped West Pacific Supers to #8. Keystone, who had sat out the Season and done even less for the team than Seawolf, left, and everyone thought the team was worthless without him. The worst insult was that the Cool Kids of LA were at #7 and the only heroics they ever did were in their lame movies. The so-called experts were discussing the whole situation constantly, but never stating the obvious: the rankings were meaningless. What could you expect when the voters for the rankings were retired supers whose last heroics had been done decades ago and reporters who had never done anything more heroic than meeting a deadline?

  Eventually bored with the Industry news, Seawolf turned to her fan site. She didn’t have much of one, just the page that the team web designers had put up on the main WPS site. That was her own fault; she had never actively cultivated a fan base the way that Camille, for instance, always did. The last post on the Seawolf fan forums was from eight days ago, someone advertising that they had a 2002 Seawolf action figure to sell. There had been no responses. Seawolf was tempted to buy the damn thing herself. She got even more annoyed when she linked over to the other team member’s fan sites. She had expected Cosmic Kid to have a booming site, but Blue Star? The man was an aging superhunk who had been involved in a public altercation with a superazzi! And Camille – she had been gone for years, but apparently the lunatic masses had been desperately awaiting her return. Forty-six posts just in the last two hours, including several candid photos taken of Camille on patrol. Seawolf couldn’t think of when the last time was that someone had taken a photo of her on patrol. Not that she wanted to be stalked or anything, but it would be nice to think that someone cared.

  She was scrolling irritably through the team pages when a link caught her eye: the Mutant Dating Service. She paused for a moment and clicked. Seawolf had heard of the Mutant Dating Service, of course, few Federal programs had ever attracted such a level of public ridicule as the MDS did when it was proposed. Some people even went so far as to say that President Cardile lost his reelection bid due to his unabashed support for the program. Republican Presidential candidate Carlington derided the program as shamelessly wasteful Government spending. She remembered the headlines at the time: Taxpayer dollars used to find soulmates for freaks. Even most mutants considered it to be excessive Federal meddling.

  What the media failed to play up, however, was that the program was shepherded through Congress with bipartisan support and quietly signed into law by President Carlington early in his term. Seawolf knew that Republicans saw the MDS through a different lens. The spread of China-backed Celestial revolutions and the rise of the Evolved Coalition, especially in South and Central America, scared the hell out of a lot of people, especially when mutant birthrates started to skyrocket in Celestial countries. American military analysts talked about a “mutant gap”, with many promoting genetic engineering and cloning programs. The Mutant Dating Service was a benign, watered-down version of these ideas.

  MDS was billed as a way for mutants, particularly mutants with severe or obvious mutancies, to find someone to settle down with. However, MDS also had several less publicized follow-up programs, such as genetic counseling and financial support to cover health issues associated with difficult pregnancies and challenging births that resulted from MDS matches. Five years into the program, the public had largely forgotten about it, and it was no longer considered controversial - or successful. The biggest obstacle MDS continued to face was resistance from mutants themselves. Seawolf knew all too well that only the lonely and desperate signed up for MDS.

  The problem was that she was lonely and desperate. It made her angry to think of how easy it was for some of her teammates. Camille had been a slut in high school and now she had Jules and Meghan. Blue Star had a string of wives, girlfriends, and children too long to remember. Cosmic Kid practically had to fight to keep the women away. Whereas for someone like her or Starfish, it was almost impossibly
difficult. Life was patently unfair for obvious mutants.

  Of course, there was Paul. She still couldn’t fathom why he had asked her out. It would never work between them. She’d learned the hard way back in college that normal men didn’t see mutants the same way they did other girls. Most were repulsed by the idea of being intimate with an obvious mutant. Even worse were the fetishists, who viewed scoring with a mutant as some sort of personal victory. They didn’t stick around for a second date, or even until the next morning, for that matter. No, mutants like her needed to stick to their own kind. But the rare hook-ups she’d had over the years - usually meeting up with a fellow desperate and lonely obvious mutant at a conference - just weren’t enough. Seawolf sighed. She was going to turn 40 next year and the way she felt when Paul looked at her was one more reminder that what she really wanted was a committed relationship. Plus, her fantasy that Grey Wolf would stop in to visit Blue Star, pass her in the hallway, and spontaneously ask her out, didn’t seem likely to happen.

  Seawolf clicked over to “Find the MDS location nearest to you!” and typed in her zip code. There was an MDS office in the Department of Super Affairs West Pacific City regional branch office. The building was downtown, not more than a few miles from the harbor fish market, where she was planning to go tomorrow anyway. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to stop by and get some more information.

  The DSA regional branch office took up several floors and Seawolf didn’t want to ask directions, so it took her a while to find the right place. She waited until no one was around before pushing open the door marked “MDS”, which led into a small waiting room decorated with posters of happy mutant couples. Over the receptionist’s desk was a disturbing image of a winged man and a reptilian woman looking down lovingly at a little girl who was covered in both feathers and scales. Seawolf shuddered.