by Lucas Flint
It looked like the kind of mansion you’d expect a rich guy to own. The floor was made of sparkling clean marble, covered in lush red carpeting, while the walls and ceiling had fancy wood paneling that looked more expensive than a used car. Abstract paintings dotted the walls at five foot intervals, the kind of paintings that looked less like art and more like someone just splashed paint over a white canvas and somehow managed to con a rich guy into spending a small fortune on it.
But I didn’t really focus on any of it, because I was looking at the suit I wore. It was, according to Regina, my superhero costume; a full-body suit that was completely black, with red, glowing lines running down it. There was also a glowing red lightning bolt symbol on my chest, kind of like Harry Potter’s lightning scar, except a lot cooler. The suit fit me perfectly and was usually stored inside the watch on my wrist, which Regina told me was called a ‘suit-up watch.’ All I had to do was press a button and, presto, the suit vanished inside the watch. I didn’t know how such a small device could hold even an expertly folded suit like mine, but I was sure that there was an app for that somewhere.
Not only that, but I could feel my powers at last, too. I didn’t need to practice them or anything; they felt as natural as my hair color. That’s how I knew that Regina had been correct about me and her being superheroes. I just wished that I could remember what kind of adventures we’d been on together in the past, what kind of supervillains and crooks we’d fought together. I was sure it must have been exciting, but Regina had insisted that we had no time to reminisce and that it would all come back to me soon enough anyway.
Speaking of Regina as a superhero, damn did she look fine in her costume. She looked kind of like a magician, with a cape and a top hat and a small domino mask over her eyes. She even had a wand, which she held like a sword and I had no doubt she could use it like one if she wanted. She had changed into her costume while I had been changing into mine in the bathroom next to my room; she said she had a suit-up watch of her own, but I didn’t see it on her wrist, so I wasn’t sure where she kept her costume when she wasn’t wearing it.
Regardless, we were going to the mansion’s dining room, which, according to Regina, was where the meeting was supposed to take place. She said she didn’t know how many other people were going to be there, but that it was most likely going to be everyone else here. She said the meeting was going to be conducted by Thaumaturge, but she still didn’t know the exact contents of the meeting.
We hadn’t seen anyone else on our way to the meeting, but I assumed that was because we were going to be a little late. I had taken a little too much time showering, mostly because I was oddly grimy and had needed to get all of the dirt out of my hair. Regina told me that that was because I had slipped and fallen into the mud, but what was weird was that I had found some dried blood in my hair, and it didn’t seem to be mine, either. I hadn’t mentioned that to Regina, because I still remembered her sudden change in attitude earlier and wasn’t so sure I was ready to share that kind of information with her yet.
All of a sudden, one of the doors in the hall burst open and a guy in green and yellow spandex that looked similar to my costume stumbled out of the room. He looked like he was in a hurry; in fact, he was in such a hurry that he almost ran into me, but I stepped out of the way just in time to avoid having him run into me.
“Whoa!” said the guy, coming to a stop before he slammed into the wall. “That was close.”
“Hopper, what are you doing?” said Regina in annoyance. “You almost ran into Bolt.”
“Huh?” said Hopper, turning to face us. He brushed aside some of his dreads to look at me closer. “Hey, it is Bolt. I thought you were still unconscious from the, uh, accident.”
I shook my head. “Not anymore. My memory is still shot, but I’m still doing pretty good besides that. My memory will come back soon enough.”
“Good to hear,” said Hopper. “After all, you’re the most powerful among us, so we really need you to be on your best if we’re going to succeed.”
“Uh, sure,” I said. “Sorry, but I don’t really remember you. ‘Cause of my amnesia, you know.”
“Bolt, this is Hopper,” said Regina, gesturing at him. “His real name is Dwayne Masters. He can open portals that allow him to travel from one point of the planet to another.”
“Yeah,” said Hopper. “I’m not going to use it here, though, because then I’d kill us all and you really wouldn’t like that.”
“I wouldn't,” I said. “So how long have we known each other again?”
“Years, man!” said Hopper, throwing his arms into the air. “Don’t you remember back in elementary school? We met when we were ten.”
I was about to say that no, I didn’t remember Hopper at all, until I suddenly had a flashback to when I was ten. It was my first day of elementary school and, like my flashback to when I first met Regina, I was the new kid and didn’t have any friends. I was in the cafeteria, looking for some place to sit, but all of the other kids had formed little cliques and they all glared at me whenever I asked to sit with them. I ended up sitting at a table with Hopper, plus another girl who I didn’t recognize, because apparently Hopper didn’t have any friends and neither did the girl (whose face was blurry to me for some reason).
“Yeah …” I said, rubbing the back of my head, which started hurting again as I remembered the memory. “Yeah, I remember now. Sorry. Just my amnesia acting up again.”
Hopper—who had been frowning in worry just seconds ago—smiled at me in relief. “Good to hear, bro. I thought you might not remember. But of course, you’d never forget your best friend, right?”
I blinked. “We’re best friends?”
“Yeah, since we met in elementary school on the playground,” said Hopper. “Remember?”
“That’s weird,” I said, scratching the back of my head again. “I remember we met in the—”
Abruptly, I found myself watching a new memory. This one showed me, Hopper, and the girl (who I now knew was named Sarah) playing tag on the playground at our school. Apparently, I had just joined in and didn’t even know their names until the game ended, at which point I introduced myself to them and they to me and we swore to be best friends forever from that day forward, a promise we’d apparently kept.
“Bolt?” said Hopper. “You look out of it.”
I put a hand on my head, which was starting to ache. “It’s … it’s nothing. You’re right. We met on the playground.”
Even though I said those words, I didn’t believe them. I had just remembered that we had met in the cafeteria … didn’t I? Maybe it was the amnesia, playing with my memories and making me remember things the wrong way. That explanation felt hollow to me, though, but I didn’t know how else to explain it.
“Well, you’ll be better soon enough,” said Incantation, grabbing my hand and causing me to look at her. “Let’s keep going. The others are probably wondering where we are and Uncle doesn’t like it when we’re late.”
Incantation suddenly pulled me down the hall, causing me to stumble before I regained my balance and followed her. Hopper followed behind me, but when I glanced over my shoulder at him, I noticed that he had a very brief but serious look of worry on his face. And not because of me; it looked like he was worried about something going wrong, though maybe he was just worried that Thaumaturge was going to be upset at us for being late.
Soon, we arrived at the dining room, where the meeting was going to take place. It was a huge and opulent room, much like the rest of the mansion, with a crystal chandelier hanging above the long oak table. The table was set with a beautiful white tablecloth that looked more expensive than the table itself. The room smelled vaguely of bacon, eggs, and coffee, most likely because they’d just had breakfast, and it looked like the table had been cleared of dishes fairly recently based on the tiny impressions I saw in the tablecloth’s surface.
Seated at the table were four other people. There was an athletic-looking girl with a
mechanical right arm whose name I couldn’t remember, with another, fatter girl with short green hair sitting next to her who wore weird thick framed glasses. Sitting opposite them was a tall, angry-looking man with skin so dark he looked black, his skin covered in what appeared to be tattoos, though none of the designs made any sense to me.
And sitting at the end of the table was a man in magician robes, who I instantly recognized as Thaumaturge. He had his fingers steepled together, his gray beard flowing down his chest. He looked like your stereotypical wizard, but I could tell he was not just dressing up as Gandalf. He was the real deal, and when he saw me, he smiled.
“Ah, Bolt,” said Thaumaturge. He sounded like a grandfather happy to see his grandson, though as far as I knew we weren’t related. “I see you have recovered from your fall. How is your memory?”
“Getting better,” I said as I took a seat with Incantation and Hopper at the other end of the table. “But it’s still kind of a blur and I don’t remember much.”
“Do you remember me?” said the athletic girl I’d noticed before, leaning forward to look at me better.
I stared at her blankly. “No, I don’t—”
Without warning, I saw another memory. This time, I was perhaps a couple of years older, starting my first year of junior high with Hopper and Sarah. We sat down in the cafeteria to eat with a nervous-looking girl who looked just like the athletic girl, except minus the mechanical arm, who introduced herself as Polly. She then bonded with us over the course of the school year, until she was an accepted part of our little gang. I even had a crush on her at one point before it went away and I met Incantation later on.
“You’re … Polly,” I said, pointing at the girl. “Right?”
“So glad you remembered,” said the girl with a smile. “Polly Jones is my normal name. My superhero name is Technical, because I am very good with technology. I even built my mechanical arm myself.”
The girl held her mechanical arm up, which functioned so naturally that it was like she’d been born with it.
“Cool,” I said. “But … I don’t remember how you got that mechanical arm. What happened to your normal one?”
Polly suddenly frowned. “It’s … not something I like to talk about. I already told you, anyway. You’ll remember it eventually.”
I hated it whenever someone said that, but at the same time, I couldn’t argue with the obvious fact that I’d lost a lot of my memory. I wished there was some way to speed up my memory recovery, but I guessed that it wasn’t important for me to remember how she had lost her arm right now. It must have been painful, though, however it happened.
Then I looked at the girl sitting next to Polly. She was hideous, probably the ugliest girl I’d ever seen. Her mouth was stuck in a perpetual scowl and when she looked at me, I didn’t see any joy, just anger and fear. It was kind of weird, because I hadn’t even said anything to her yet.
“And you,” I said. “I don’t remember you, either.”
All of a sudden, the girl burst into tears and slammed her face into her hands, in which she sobbed uncontrollably. I started and looked at Incantation wildly. “What’d I do?”
“Offended her,” said Hopper, causing me to look at him. He was looking at me like I’d just disappointed him. “Offended one of your best and oldest friends in the world.”
“But I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I just said I don’t remember her. That’s the truth.”
“How could you forget Sarah?” said Hopper. “Don’t you remember her? She was there when we first met on the playground.”
I thought about that, trying to see if I could remember what Hopper was talking about. I did recall seeing a girl named Sarah in my memory of my first meeting with Hopper, but the elementary school girl I saw in my memory looked almost nothing like the sobbing teenager sitting at the table with us. The girl in my memory, for one, had normal colored hair and was a lot thinner.
But I did see the resemblance, so I said to Sarah, “I’m sorry, Sarah. I didn’t mean to offend. My memory’s just been out of whack recently thanks to that accident I was in.”
Thankfully, Sarah stopped sobbing. She raised her face from her hands and looked at me, but there was still anger in her eyes, like I’d just kicked her favorite puppy. “O-Okay, but I still don’t like it.”
“Are we still friends, at least?” I said. I found myself strongly disliking Sarah the more I talked to her, even though we’d been friends since childhood. Maybe it was just her attitude at the moment that made me dislike her.
“I guess so,” said Sarah. She wiped away her tears. “Just don’t offend me anymore, okay? I can’t handle it.”
“Um, okay,” I said. “I’ll try not to do that, then. So what are your powers? I don’t remember them.”
Sarah looked like she was on the verge of tears again, but then Thaumaturge threw her a brief but pointed look and she just sniffled. I had no idea what that was about, but given that Thaumaturge’s look seemed to stop Sarah from bawling again, I didn’t question it.
“Telepathy,” said Sarah, looking at me. She sniffled again. “I can read minds and do other things with my mental powers.”
“She inherited the ability from her grandfather, the Visionary himself,” said Thaumaturge. “She’s therefore very important to Vision.”
“It’s also why she’s so emotional,” Incantation muttered to me, so low that only I could hear her. “When the Visionary was knocked into a coma and taken into custody by the government, it broke Sarah. That’s why she’s so easily offended; a lot of things remind her about her grandfather.”
“Ah,” I whispered back. “Gotcha.”
But I didn’t. Not really. Something about Sarah’s sobbing seemed too … practiced, like she’d done it before. Something in the back of my memory told me that Sarah had cried like this before at some point, but I wasn’t sure if I had actually seen her do that at some point or if my amnesia was just mixing up memories again. In any case, I decided not to worry about it for now, though I made a mental note to avoid offending her again.
I looked across the table at the guy with the tattoos. Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t a teenager. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties at most. He wore a dark cloak, looking like a sorcerer about to cast a dark spell on me.
Uncertain if this guy would also burst into tears if I accidentally offended him, I said, “So … who are you? Do I know you?”
“No,” said the man. “Not as well as your friends, at any rate, though I’ve been in Vision for a long time and was one of the Visionary’s first disciples along with Thaumaturge.”
“Then what’s your name?” I said. “I don’t remember it.”
“Call me Wrath,” said the man. “That’s the nickname that the monks who kicked me out of the monastery I used to work at called me, anyway.”
“Wrath?” I said. “Like the sin?”
Wrath laughed. “Worse than that, kid, worse than that.”
“Wrath is my second-in-command,” said Thaumaturge, causing me to look over at him. “Since I succeeded the Visionary, Wrath took my place as his right-hand man. You must show him the same respect you’d show me.”
“Okay,” I said. I looked at Wrath again. “What are your powers, then?”
“Emotional manipulation,” said Wrath. “I can make you feel whatever I want you to feel whenever I want you to feel it. And you won’t even notice it until it’s too late.”
Wrath sounded gleeful about that, but it sounded like a very creepy power to me. “Uh, okay. Are you using it on me now?”
“No,” said Wrath. He tossed an annoyed glance Thaumaturge’s way. “Because Thaumaturge told me that I’m not allowed to use my powers on fellow Visionists.”
“Because that would cause unnecessary division among us,” said Thaumaturge in annoyance. “Only a unified Vision can change society. Thus, there is no need to pointlessly antagonize one another with our abilities.”
“True, but that doesn�
�t mean I can’t have a little fun,” said Wrath. “You’re sounding just like those monks that kicked me out of the monastery. Boring.”
Thaumaturge rolled his eyes. “We can discuss this later. For now, we need to start the meeting, now that everyone is present.”
“Is this everyone?” I said, looking up and down the table at all of us. “All of Vision?”
“No,” said Thaumaturge. “Our numbers are much larger than this, but we cannot all be in one place at the same time. It would make it far too easy for our enemies to crush us if we were all congregated in the same place at the same time.”
“Besides,” said Wrath, folding his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair, “we don’t need everyone for this particular meeting. We just need all of you.”
“Exactly,” said Thaumaturge. “As the Visionary once wrote, ‘not all houses need the same hands.’ We can accomplish this mission with only you five.”
“What is the mission, exactly?” I said. “What do you need us to do?”
Thaumaturge pulled out a tablet from his lap and placed it on the table. “Well, since we are all here, I might as well start.”
Thaumaturge tapped the tablet’s screen a few times and then it projected a hologram above it that depicted a tall, confident-looking older man wearing what looked like a wig on his head. He was dressed in a very presidential-looking suit, which added to his overall important appearance.
“You are going to break into the White House, where President Adam Lucius Plutarch, the current President of the United States of America and an enemy of Vision, is,” said Thaumaturge.
“Wait, we’re going to break into the White House?” I said in shock. “Why?”
“Simple,” said Wrath. He sat upright and leaned across the table, looking at me with a disturbing grin on his face. “It’s his fault that the Visionary ended up in a coma. This is our revenge.”
