“Never found an apartment, huh?”
“No, every place I checked out was too expensive or too skeevy, but it’s cool. I’m kind of looking forward to dorm life. It’ll be an experience.”
I both admire and envy this girl’s ability to roll with life’s punches — but I suppose when you grow up in such a unique family, it’s tough for anything to rattle you.
Meg loops an arm around mine and escorts me inside. “Now, tell me about this business you have with my maternal unit,” she says.
“Your mom agreed to help me try out some new tricks,” I say. “I want to expand my repertoire a little.”
“You’re letting Mom experiment on you? Brave girl.”
“With me. Experiment with me.”
“Uh-huh.”
Meg fills me in on college life as she leads me through the compound, toward Dr. Quentin’s underground lab, which the family charmingly refers to as “the dungeon.” She’s only been there a few days, but she makes the simple act of moving into the residence halls and attending orientation sound like a grand adventure. Her classmates are all awesome; she can’t wait to start classes; she’s dying to explore every last nook and cranny of the city...
“Hey! Watch where you’re going, Monkeywrench,” Meg says after Kilroy crashes into us in a hallway. “Jeez.”
Any retort he had in mind dies on his lips when he spots me. We both stiffen involuntarily.
“Carrie,” Kilroy says.
“Kilroy,” I say to his back as he skitters off.
Meg narrows her eyes at me. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“Don’t give me that. There was a heavy-duty awkward vibe between you two. What gives?”
I bury my face in my hands. “Ohhhh, God, this is so embarrassing...”
“What? What happened?”
In a tiny voice, I confess, “I made out with your brother.”
“You what?”
“I know.”
“Oh my God, Carrie, why? Don’t get me wrong, I love my brother to death, but why?!”
“Temporary insanity?”
“Insanity was definitely involved.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what happened,” I admit. “He came home, we started talking, one thing led to another...for once, he treated me like a person instead of a potential hook-up. He listened to me. He cared what I had to say. I thought he did, anyway, and it felt nice to have a guy paying that kind of attention to me. Ever since the break-up I’ve felt so lonely and needy and...”
I can’t bring myself to say the last part. Meg fills in the blank for me, lowering her volume to a just-between-us-girls level. She even chooses a polite euphemism.
“Frustrated?”
“Yes!” I hiss. “Which is so stupid! Malcolm and I had sex exactly once — one time — and it wasn’t even that great.”
“Astrid told me once that sex is like pizza; even when it’s bad, it’s still kind of good. I can’t say I disagree.”
“I don’t know. I’ve eaten some pretty terrible pizza.”
“Point is, you were vulnerable and Kilroy took advantage of it. It’s one of his more unfortunate talents. I’d be happy to slap him around on your behalf.”
“No. I’d rather pretend it never happened.”
“Full-on denial. Good call. Come on,” she says, taking my arm again, “let’s get you to the dungeon.”
Dr. Quentin’s test lab is a warehouse-sized space set deep underground, lined with reinforced walls and equipped with a variety of sensors and scanners (most of them of Dr. Quentin’s own design). Meg brings me in through the control room that overlooks the lab area proper. The control room is all monitors and keyboards and displays for the lab’s sensors. It’s like the bridge of the Enterprise on steroids (the starship Enterprise, for the record, not the aircraft carrier).
Dr. Quentin, who is feverishly pounding away at the central keyboard, has dressed for the occasion. She’s in her lab coat and her hair is up in an iron bun. She doesn’t look at us as we enter.
“Hey, Mom, your guinea pig is here,” Meg says.
“She is not a guinea pig, Megan, she is a willing human test subject,” Dr. Quentin says. How about that? We’re on the same wavelength. No, nothing disturbing about that at all.
“Have fun,” Meg says to me as she turns to leave. “And Mom? If you splatter her all over the lab, I will be very upset with you.”
Dr. Quentin spins in her seat and frowns. “That happened one time, Megan. One time!” she fumes. “And it was not my fault!”
That’s the one thing I honestly dislike about this family. They say stuff like that all the time and I never know whether they’re kidding.
“Hey, tell Sara —” Meg stops herself. “Tell everyone I said hi.”
“I will tell everyone,” I say with gentle emphasis on everyone.
Dr. Quentin pauses in her labors. “I take it then that Sara is still vacillating over whether to date my daughter?” she says, betraying no opinion on the matter.
“I wouldn’t say she’s vacillating. I’d say...I’d say she is aware that she isn’t in the best headspace to explore a serious relationship, and doesn’t want to pursue anything until she’s confident she won’t be setting herself up for failure. Believe me, Dr. Quentin, the last thing in the world Sara wants is to hurt Meg.”
Maybe I’m imagining it, but maybe Dr. Quentin is in fact smiling in approval.
“Give me a few more minutes and I’ll be ready for you,” she says, returning her attention to the keyboard. “I need to recalibrate the instrument suite. Everything is currently calibrated to read magical energies.”
“Magical energies?”
“Mm. I had a fascinating and enlightening session with Dr. Enigma earlier in the week.”
“Huh. Didn’t realize you two were on speaking terms, much less playing science sisters,” I say.
Doctors Quentin and Enigma are a study in contrasts on darn near every level, but their personal schism is at its schismiest when it comes to their respective disciplines. Dr. Quentin has expressed in the past an undying hatred toward magic because it refuses to be stuffed neatly into a scientific box. Dr. Enigma, perhaps the most powerful sorceress on the planet and a legit scholar of magic (she holds an actual doctorate in parapsychology) doesn’t care to be treated like a freak of nature. Go figure. They were forced to bridge the gap during the Kysztykc case, to find a way to mesh science and magic, and it appears that’s led to a collegial relationship. I somehow can’t see them ever becoming best buds, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.
“We’re cooperating on a project to analyze the nature of magical energy,” Dr. Quentin says. “Things are going quite swimmingly, but calibrating the instruments to detect Astrid’s unique energy signature is a Herculean labor in and of itself. One more minute, please.”
When she finishes, Dr. Quentin sends me into the dungeon and has me stand in the dead center of the room. I feel tiny.
“Systems are green across the board, cameras are recording. Are you ready to proceed?” Dr. Quentin says over the lab’s PA system.
“Let me have it, Doc,” I say with more confidence than I honestly feel. “What’s first?”
“Invisibility,” Dr. Quentin says, straight-faced.
“For real?”
“I think it’s the best place to start. As Lightstorm, you generate light, in the form of personal luminescence and focused emissions.” Translation for the science-impaired: I glow and shoot lasers from my hands. “I’ve observed you adjusting the intensity of your output, and I believe that is your pathway to invisibility.”
It wouldn’t be true invisibility, she notes, meaning I wouldn’t be turning my body transparent — which, I’m told, would create its own set of problems, namely the fact I’d be blind. The human eye works by picking up on light reflected by physical objects, Dr. Quentin explains. If my corneas, lenses, and retinas were all completely transparent, light would pass through
them, and I wouldn’t be able to see. The flip side of this mechanism is, if there is no light bouncing off an object, there is nothing for the eye to pick up, and what Dr. Quentin wants me to attempt is light absorption instead of light generation.
Dr. Quentin sets the control room’s windows to automatically adjust for lighting conditions so I won’t blind her when I crank my aura up to full blast, which is the first thing she tells me to do. I hit peak output instantly. The windows turn jet black.
“Very good. Now, take it in the other direction,” she says. “Go as dim as you possibly can.”
I’ve never turned my aura off completely, mostly because I’ve never had a reason to, but I can take it down to a soft glow.
“Back up now, to full intensity,” Dr. Quentin says, and then she tells me to dim it down again, and then back to full intensity — back down, back up, over and over. “Good. Continue cycling through like that, but I want you to focus on how you feel as you do. Be aware of any physical sensations that accompany the extremes and the transitions.”
I do as told, but I wouldn’t call what I feel a physical sensation, not in the conventional sense. There’s something there, though, something I can focus on. Turn the volume up. Turn the volume down. Bright as the sun, dim as a Kingsport High linebacker.
Dr. Quentin lets me get used to that then instructs me to try taking the sensation past its lowest point. Don’t think about diminishing my aura, she says; feel it. With each cycle, I take it down a little more. I synchronize the sensation with my breathing: inhaling as I brighten, exhaling as I dim and pushing out as much air as I can with each exhalation.
Whoo, getting light-headed here. Ha, light headed.
“Carrie, stop,” Dr. Quentin says.
“What? Is something wrong?” I say, looking up toward the control room to see a pair of astonished Quentin Frisbee eyes looking back...except Dr. Quentin isn’t looking at me, not directly. “Dr. Quentin?”
I hear the clack of her hands on the keyboard. A panel in the floor slides away and a monitor on the end of a mechanical arm rises up in front of me. The monitor flares to life, displaying a shot of the lab from a camera in the corner of the room. There’s a bizarre blank spot there, and by blank I mean a shape that I can’t rightfully call black, but I can’t think of another way to describe it. It’s a total void — in the approximate shape of a person, I realize upon closer inspection.
“What am I looking at?”
“You’re looking at yourself. Miss Hauser,” Dr. Quentin says with an air of great ceremony, “we have achieved the first step toward invisibility.”
4.
“Knock Knock.”
Sara looks up from her book. “Hey. How did it go?”
“Dr. Quentin didn’t dissect me and put the parts into jars, so I’d call it a good day,” I say.
“You sound tired. Want some tea?”
“Tea sounds wonderful,” I say, and I follow Sara from her room down to the kitchen. “Oh. Meg says hi.”
Sara freezes, her hand on the kettle. “Oh,” she says. “I thought she was at school.”
“She is. She was home to get some stuff for her room.”
“Oh,” she says again. She fills up the kettle, carries it back to the stove, and sets it on the burner, her back to me. “Did she ask about me?”
“No. But in a good way, if that makes sense. She’s obviously thinking about you, even if she didn’t say so.”
She nods then turns the burner on to hide the sound of her sniffling. “Anyway,” she says, composing herself, “did you learn any new tricks?”
“One or two, yeah.”
“Cool. Like what?” She turns. “Carrie?”
“I’m right here.”
Sara flinches, her eyes darting around the room. “Carrie?”
Okay, this was a mean trick to play, but I couldn’t help myself. Sara yelps as I drop my invisibility field. She gawks at me, incredulous and a little freaked out, and then bursts out laughing.
“No. Freaking. Way,” she says.
I give her the short version of my day, which Dr. Quentin and I spent mostly on getting physical invisibility down — and I got it down. Absorbing light was the easy part, but appearing as a Carrie-shaped black nothing is only so useful, so Dr. Quentin and I tinkered with the process until I wasn’t absorbing light, but warping it around me. After a few hours of practice, I was able to vanish from sight instantaneously, becoming invisible to human and electronic eyes alike. I still showed up on thermal imaging as well as anything that detects a solid object (radar, sonar, et cetera), but Dr. Quentin firmly believes that, with further practice, I could become completely undetectable.
“I’d have to learn how to manipulate certain forms of radiation — and yes, that is as intimidating as it sounds — but Dr. Quentin thinks I can do it,” I say.
“And who are you to argue with the smartest woman in the world?” Sara says.
“Who, indeed?”
“Now that you can do this, you realize what you have to do?”
I grin wickedly. “Go scare the living crap out of Matt?”
“Exactly.”
Because that’s what friends are for.
FIVE – KUNOICHI AND THE ENTITY
FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL (I) – INNER DEMONS
1.
“Hello in there,” Mom says through my bedroom door. “Missy? Wake up, honey. You don’t want to be late for your first day back to school.”
Says you.
“I’m awake,” I say.
“Now get out of bed.”
“I’m out of bed.”
No I’m not.
“No you’re not.” Mom pokes her head in. “Come on, lazy bones. Up.”
“I’m getting up,” I say into my pillow.
“Get up now or I’ll come in there and pull the covers off.”
“You’re mean.”
“I’m the worst.”
“No, you’re not. You’re awesome.”
“See you downstairs.”
People are always wicked surprised to find out I’m not a morning person. They’re like, I bet you’re a morning person because you’re always so perky, and I’m like, nuh-uh, mornings suck. Boo mornings. I hate you. Go away.
School mornings are the worst. They suck extra hard, and the morning of the first day back to school is, like, the king of suck.
Except maybe this year. Normally I hate the first day of school because it means my summer is over, and summers are awesome because there’s no school and lots of sun, and I’m outdoors a lot, and I really like being outdoors, but I didn’t get to go out much this year. I was in the house most of the time with a broken leg. I got that when my friend — former friend, ex-friend, whatever — Sara threw me across the school auditorium and I landed in a row of seats. It hurt. A lot. It was like someone shoved a super-hot fireplace poker right up my leg and twisted it around.
So yeah, I was in the hospital for a while with my leg in a cast and hanging by cables and stuff. When I got out I couldn’t really go anywhere unless I was on crutches, but I was too bummed out because I can’t do anything in a stupid cast even if I did leave the house, so I just stayed home and played my guitar a lot. Like, all day, every day. I got really good and learned a lot of new songs. I also watched a lot of game shows and trashy daytime talk shows.
Don’t ever watch The Jerry Springer Show for five straight days. Ever. Bad. Bad bad bad.
Anyway, I hate going back to school, but I can walk again, and I’m getting out of the house, so I probably shouldn’t be too upset about it.
I shower, get dressed, and head downstairs. Mom’s already on her way out. She kisses me on the head, tells me to have a good day, and runs out the door.
“Pft. She kicks me out of bed and she’s the one running late,” I complain to Dad, who’s in the kitchen eating his usual breakfast of black coffee and dry white toast. Come on, Dad. We had such amazing breakfasts, like, every day when we visited Uncle Seiji in Japan, and you went
back to the Boring Old Man Breakfast? Jeez.
Dad chuckles. “You know your mother,” he says. “Always in a hurry and never on time. Looking forward to going back to school?”
I shrug. “Yeah, I guess. First day’s always boring. All we do is run around trying to find our classrooms and listen to teachers tell us how great the year’s going to be.”
“And you’d rather get right to learning.”
“I’d rather get right to the weekend.”
“I know you’ll hate me for saying this,” Dad says, putting his coffee mug down so he can fold his arms at me, all judgmental, “but you need to start buckling down on your schoolwork. Senior year will be here before you know it, and that means college will be right around the corner, and you do want to get into a good school, right?”
“Yeah, because I can’t wait to graduate from college and move back home with you and Mom and work a crappy retail job so I can pay off a million dollars in student loan debt like Gordon.”
“Who?”
“Stuart’s brother. He got out of law school last spring. Stuart said he couldn’t find a job so he had to move back home.”
“Ah. Nevertheless, you’re much better off with a college degree than with a high school diploma.” Dad pauses and purses his lips, something he does when he’s about to say something important. Or that I won’t like. Or both. “That said, I obviously want you to honor any commitments to your team. School is important, but so is your other obligation.”
It’s weird that Dad knows about the Squad. I mean, yeah, I’m happy I don’t have to keep it a secret and lie to him, but most dads wouldn’t tell their daughters go ahead, be a super-hero, fight crazy people who want to kill you, I’m cool with it. Dad’s totally cool with it.
“The team’s still kind of all over the place,” I say. “Neither me or Stuart are talking to Sara, and she doesn’t have her powers anymore...”
“Wait, what’s this?” Dad says. Right, I didn’t tell him about that.
“After everything that happened, Sara asked Mindforce to take her powers away because she was sorry she hurt me and didn’t trust herself anymore, so she’s a normal person now.”
Action Figures - Issue Five: Team-Ups Page 10
