I lean across the table and whisper, "Why are they staring at you?"
"I was scanning people when we came in and I think some of them are able to detect it,” she says, without the least bit of concern.
"Stop scanning them! Now!" I say it a little too loud and look around. A couple people may have heard me, but there are enough people looking at us that it doesn't matter, we already have their attention.
Giving me the hand, she replies, "I already did. Geez, I wasn’t expecting it to be a problem. The ones staring at me all have something blocking my telepathy, anyway."
"I think we need to go." These science students are literally capable of anything, and I have no idea if they will escalate having their minds probed.
Carly stands up and starts to pick up her tray.
I say, "Leave it," grab her arm, and head for the emergency exit that is the closest way to get out of the building short of breaking a window. I have a feeling of dread when a couple people hold up their smart phones and take pictures.
We both break into a run when we get out of the exit and I point toward the nearest dorm, "That way! And don't scan anyone!" Carly may not be as fast as me, but she can run faster than any Class 1 I've ever seen. We get to the dorm and run through the lobby and out the rear entrance to put a building between us and the Oppenheimer Commons. No one is following when I look back and we slow down to a jog and then a walk as there is no sign of anyone coming after us.
"Why did we run?" Carly asks me, in confusion.
"Mad scientists are unpredictable and, in that environment, if one of them decided to do something about you scanning him, we'd never see it coming."
"How many mad scientists were in there!?!" She exclaims.
I tell her, "Two that I saw have been giving me the creeps every time I see them, but I couldn't tell you how many there were. It could be all of them for all I know. What did you do in there?"
Carly seems confused by their reaction, "I did what I always do -- gave the room a surface scan to see if anyone was having feelings of hostility. Which, I can tell you, was most of them. But, it was weird. I couldn't scan several of them. I could feel them, but they had a metallic flavor to them. Those are the ones that started staring at me. They had to be using some kind of technology for it to feel like it did. And, for them to detect me scanning them? On top of blocking me? That's some pretty serious tech!"
"Really? They all felt the same?" I ask.
She scrunches up her face, "Yeah, I can still taste the flavor of their minds in my mouth. It’s nasty."
Skipping past my curiosity of how telepathy has flavors, I start thinking out loud, "They're probably using the same tech. How many did you feel? I saw six that I can clearly remember. Two of them I've seen before."
Carly says, "There were five of them that tasted like metal. The sixth one was a telepath."
A mad scientist telepath? That can't be good, I think, "Which one was the telepath?"
"There were two on the left that were carrying their trays towards us. One was already looking at us, the one with him was the telepath,” she tells me, pointing back to the building we just fled as if she was going to point them out.
"The one that was looking at us I've seen in one of my classes. He’s creepy,” I say as I keep us moving.
"What the hell is with this place? Why do I feel like I'm in danger on my own campus? I mean, I can deal with the telepaths digging around in everyone's heads, but they’re not going to hurt anyone,” Carly says.
I briefly struggle with Carly’s trusting perception of her fellow telepaths. Telepaths are not going to hurt anyone? No. "I can't. Telepaths are scary as hell,” I finally say.
She looks at me like I’ve just declared the sky is not blue, "Yeah. Well, I hate to tell you this, but telepaths do that everywhere you go," she says it like it's a fact of life, "I'm talking about the hostility I feel here. I don't feel it from everyone, but there have been some really strong emotions of hatred directed - not just at me, I've felt it towards others too. I couldn't feel it from those guys back there, but I could see it in their faces. Did you see it?"
"I did, that's why we ran." Cutting across campus, we walk back to Carly's dorm. "I think I'm going to start keeping my repeller field on me around campus. I think you should too."
Carly laughs, "You need to come up with a name for that thing. Something catchy, because 'repeller field device' is lame." Then, "Do you really think you need it?"
I consider her question before replying, "I don't know. It's small though, so it's not like it's hard to carry. I know you're strong and can take a hit from a Mack Truck and not get hurt, but with the device you don't need to be concentrating on protecting yourself for it to work. Just think about it."
"All right. More is better." Stepping up to me and putting her arms around my waist, Carly says, "I like it when you're looking out for me. It makes me feel safe."
We take our time kissing good night. I'm not going to stay over tonight. Besides having school in the morning, Carly's roommate, Imelda, doesn't like me. I'm sure it is because she can't dig through my brain like a bum goes through a dumpster. Carly says Imelda’s boyfriend isn't telepathic and she has him do things and put on shows for her friends and he has no idea.
"I'll see you in the morning,” I tell her as I leave her room.
Smiling at me, she replies, "Let's stay at your place tomorrow."
Now she's talking.
Chapter 21
Super Powers class has been a letdown. I've already read the book and the professor isn't deviating from it at all. Carly has the repeller field device, which I've decided to officially call it a McCleary Repulser Field Projector. If that's still too long for you, I'm okay if you call it a repeller field, because that’s what I’ll be calling it most of the time. Carly laughs when I tell her the name and Professor Blake gets mad that we are disrupting his class. For a minute I thought he was going to make us leave. Anyway, Carly said she liked McCleary being in the name, especially since I’m the one who invented it. Yeah, it made sense to me too.
It's Friday and I have time scheduled in one of the private labs. I already told Carly and she's cool with it because tomorrow we're going to drive into Chicago and stay the night so we can do a patrol downtown on Saturday night. We’ll be together all weekend.
Chicago's a decent sized city, but it's about as blue collar as it gets outside of the downtown area. High society commutes from the city to the suburbs and leaves the crime ridden city neighborhoods to the filthy masses. The supers that are protecting the city are as blue collar as the villains. It's one of those places a young villain can hone their skills and have a reasonably good chance of pulling off a job here and get away with it. Because of that, Chicago has one of the highest super villain crime rates in the nation. They're a bunch of bush league villains who are still working their way up, or who peaked too soon to be able to make it on the Coasts. They'd get stomped and hung out to dry in New York or LA, but not here. For Carly and me, bush league villains are major league and about as tough as I want to take on.
As soon as my last class is over I grab a bite from the nearest food court on the way to the student labs. I've brought what I need for tonight when I left my dorm this morning and have been hauling my big bag with me all day so I don't waste any time going back to pick it up. I have to get three things done before we leave tomorrow. Two of them I'm going to take with me and the other is for the suit.
Thankfully, I don't run into any of the guys I've been having problems with when I get to the lab, but my relief from that goes to crap when I discover my lock has been changed. That is, it's been changed with another lock that looks exactly like my lock and even works with my key. What's missing is my custom electronic locking mechanism that was on my lock. Whoever cut my lock off and replaced it didn't realize it had it. I tear open my locker and go through everything, but nothing is missing. Someone has been through my bags, but they didn't take anything. I reach back into th
e back of my locker to see if they detected the false wall I installed the second week of school. I put it in to create a secret storage compartment for some of the more sensitive items I keep in the locker. It doesn't appear they found it and all my stuff is still here. I check the memory sticks I use and none of them show marks on the insertion slots. I use an ultraviolet coating on the outside of the slots that easily wipes off whenever the stick is inserted so I'll know if my data is ever compromised.
I have work to do, so I will deal with this later. Grabbing my bags, I relock the cage with the new lock I've been provided so it looks like I don't notice anyone has broken into the locker, and head for Private Lab Six. The first thing I do is get the kiln going to its maximum temperature, which will be barely hot enough to soften the bonds of the many layers of graphene and my own nickel-iron-aluminum-graphene alloy enough for me to form the various armor plates I'll need to make up my suit.
The helmet pieces will be the hardest to shape, but I have all the forms I need and it should go pretty fast once I'm able to heat up the sheets to the proper temperature and run a six-phase current through the molten material to bring it up to the energy state needed for creating the alloy. The cool down will be the tricky part, but that's actually done by the computer controlled oven, and all I have to do is load the sequence for tempering the alloy. There will be twenty layers to each armor plate made up of three different profiles that all have to be tempered.
Once all the pieces are made, I'll be able to compress them together into the plates. I sort of ripped off the multi-layer, multi-characteristic alloy idea from a documentary I saw about the multi-layered, Chobham armor composites used on the old main battle tanks. The formulas for the alloys and tempering, however, are all mine.
It takes an hour to heat the oven to the right temperature and another two hours of heating and mixing before I can combine the molten components into an alloy. I’m also making a shield I designed after the large round hoplon shields used in ancient times by Greek Spartans that will make a huge difference in being able to defend myself from a wide variety of attacks: ranged, melee, and even elemental powers. While the oven is heating I also finish work on a weapon I've been working on to increase my hitting power so I can have a chance of hurting a Class 4 body type if I ever have the need. Hurting a Class 4 being the best I can hope for without a plasma beam projector, or a nuke.
For all intents and purposes, I've gone Medieval and made myself a war hammer. It's a leather wrapped, thirty-six inch long shaft, with a six pound hammer and spike head. The war hammer is a lot simpler to construct than the armor will be as i didn't do the layered design with multiple temper alloy like I did with the plates and shield. It's just a single solid piece with a middle of the road hardness to flexibility temper on the shaft so it doesn't bend when it hits something at an off angle, and an extremely hard temper with flexible core on the hammer head. I estimate I can get the head speed of the war hammer up to at least a few hundred miles per hour with a full swing. If you want to know how much force that is, square the head speed and multiply it by half the weight of the head of my six pound hammer, which comes out to about 120,000 pounds of force, if I hit you at full power and cleanly, in an area less two square inches. That'll put a major hurt on a Class 4 and seriously piss off a Class 5. The really, really cool thing is the war hammer, like my shield, is compatible with my repeller field, so when I energize the repeller field it will encompass the war hammer and amplify the amount of force I can hit with.
I finish up and get all my stuff in the ovens, then start on the tempering process. I finish and get everything into the ovens with about five minutes to spare before they kick me out of the lab. The ovens are reserved for private lab use, but are not included in the lab time limit just for this type of work. It's going to take twenty hours for the tempering process to complete and there is no way of making it go faster. I move my little operation over by the ovens and start work on the optic cabling control harness for my weapon systems for the suit as I wait for the ovens to do their work. I will have to put a lock on it later as staying in front of the oven for twenty hours is not happening. Until then, I can do the cabling without any machines, so it lets me stand guard over the ovens while I work since I don't trust the other science students to not mess with the oven settings.
Once the tempering is completed I do a hot application of a carbon coating to the surface of the hammer and shield that gives it a flat black finish. Most of the patrols I've ever done have been at night and I like the idea of being hard to see more than I care about looking like a bright shiny superhero. I know, it’s not very superhero like, but I’ve always preferred practicality over appearance.
Chapter 22
While I'm pulling an all-nighter playing the mad scientist over at the lab, Carly gets a full night's sleep and is up early Saturday morning to rent us a car at the Rent-A-Reck just outside the campus gates. She loads her stuff up into the Chevy Volt I reserved for us under a fake corporation I set up some time ago. I had set it up for purchasing restricted materials for my projects and, since I have not been arrested, I think it will hold up under scrutiny should someone try to trace it back to me.
When I leave the lab, I make sure to re-use the replacement lock that was left on my locker to make it look like I don't know it isn't the original. I would just as soon they think I never discovered my locker was broken into. Grabbing my bag with the equipment I only keep stored in my dorm, and the big case of my now ready to use, fully tempered and layered, armor plates, shield, and war hammer, I head back for the dorm to meet Carly. I'm only an hour late, so I'm doing pretty good.
I spot Carly coming out of the Commons and she heads over to meet me. "Sorry I'm late."
"That's okay. How'd it go at the lab?"
"C'mon, I'll tell you upstairs. I'm beat." We head up to my dorm and I don't tell her about the lab because we're both asleep five minutes after we get to my room.
We only get four hours sleep and I'm up and about the room getting my stuff ready to leave on our trip. Securing my equipment and armor plates in my locker, I grab the bag I packed yesterday, and the bag holding my new shield and war hammer, and we head out.
I'm a little worried about my stuff in my dorm locker, but the lockers in the dorms of Atlas Quad are built to withstand the strength of the super strong students that live in the dorms and are far more secure in design than the Oppenheimer Quad student labs. I don't really have a choice but to trust my stuff will be okay. In reality, it is far more safe in the dorms than in the lockers in the labs. Carlos is asleep in the room and smells like he went on a bender last night, so I try not to wake him and we're on the road well before noon.
"So what happened at the lab?" Carly asks me.
"Someone broke into my locker." I have to point back to the road to stop her staring at me. "They were slick about it, too. They replaced my lock with an exact duplicate and I could barely tell my stuff had been moved."
"Wait. So how do you know they broke in if they didn't disturb anything and it was the same lock?"
"It wasn't the same lock. My lock looks like an Drake Heavy Duty Security Lock, but it's not. I modified it so it has an electronic key as well as the regular key and you can't see the electronic key from the outside of the lock. I'm guessing they cut off the lock and didn't notice when they put on the replacement."
"So, what did you do?"
"Nothing. The stuff I keep in the locker isn't unique enough for a mad scientist to want to steal. I think they were looking for my designs or something I created." Pointing at the road again for both our benefit, I continued, "I don't want them to know that I know they got into it. So, I'm just going to use their lock like it was mine." I blow out an annoyed breath to relieve a little stress, "There's nothing I can do about right now, anyway."
"Who do you think did it?"
“I don’t know, but I’d bet it was those same guys I've been having problems with. There's something not right about them – more
than just being weird." It feels relevant to distinguish. "They went to some trouble to hide that they broke in. If they were just being jerks, they would have just trashed my locker and everything in it. So, I don't know."
"Well, what if they come back? Are you going to report it?"
"It doesn't matter, and no."
I'm watching Carly and I can tell she is trying to solve the mystery and will likely have more questions. She knows I'm not going to report it, so that only leaves the two of us to break the case. Fortunately, she’s not into 'what if' questions. They don't really fit her style. But, sometimes she'll just keep asking me questions when we're talking and this feels like it's about to be one of those times. I'm beginning to wonder if it's a telepath problem she has communicating with me since she can't read my thoughts. Carly has never had a boyfriend whose thoughts she couldn't read, or who was not a telepath themselves. I'm the first, and it's one of the reasons she likes me. She used to hear every disgusting, perverted, lying, cheating thought her baseline boyfriends ever had, along with everything else they were thinking, and never had to ask questions before. She was always fully informed before anything was said. Even the one telepath she tried to date would broadcast his thoughts all over the place. Even more than the baselines. It turned out his parents believed telepaths should all share their every thought and live in harmony, which sounds great except that just about every open society telepath commune there has ever been has ended up in the nightly news for a mass murder for one reason or another.
I can see her continue to struggle with how to continue the conversation, so I decide to help her move on, “Let's not talk about it anymore. They'll still be there when we get back. Today, I want to have some fun, and tonight, bust some bad guy heads."
"Okay." Carly says, but I can still see she has unformed questions she’s working on.
It's interesting to watch. She doesn't want to know everything I'm thinking, but she is so used to knowing everything other people think, that it's uncomfortable for her. "You okay?"
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