One day I was sparring in a large clearing with Nightshade. A fellow trainee, Nightshade was a big muscular guy who moved like a panther despite his size. We were armed with sticks the size of my wrist and the length of a broomstick. We whacked each other like piñatas, or at least we did when one of us could penetrate the other’s guard. I was so slick with sweat thanks to both exertion and the hot day that it was as if I was taking a bath.
We were not allowed to use our powers while sparring with weapons, otherwise I would have telekinetically ripped Nightshade’s stick away from him and beat him over the head with it. The rest of the remaining trainees sparred with partners around me and Nightshade under Athena’s watchful and critical eye. Athena, her powers being what they were, was of course our principal instructor in the use of weapons.
Nightshade had gotten the better of me in our sparring session so far. The special fabric our uniforms were made of dissipated the force of Nightshade’s blows somewhat, but not entirely. The fabric was formulated out of the same chemicals that composed spider silk. It was therefore incredibly strong and durable. Even with my uniform giving me some measure of protection from Nightshade’s blows, I felt like a giant, aching welt.
I said before Nightshade and I were whacking each other like piñatas. That was actually not quite accurate. Nightshade was whacking me like I was a piñata; I was busy trying to not split open at the seams like a piñata. Part of the reason I was getting hit so much was Nightshade’s size and quickness. The other part was strategy. The Academy had taught me that guys like Nightshade, because of their size, tended to not have the best endurance. It took a lot of energy to fuel his big muscles and move them around. I was letting Nightshade whack away at me while I played mostly defense. It was a rope-a-dope strategy. If I could keep myself from getting pounded to a pulp or knocked out long enough, Nightshade would tire himself out. Then, perhaps an opportunity would present itself that I could capitalize on.
There! Nightshade dropped his guard a little, obviously tired. Striking like a cobra, I hit his left wrist with my stick so hard that the impact made my forearms shudder. Nightshade cried out in pain. His left hand let go of his stick. I took advantage of the opening. I shoved my own weapon inside of the space between Nightshade’s arms, pulled back, and twisted. Nightshade’s stick went flying out of his hand, sailing through the air before hitting the ground. Getting disarmed meant the sparring session was over.
Despite the fact I had won, I slammed my own stick to the ground in anger and frustration. I was overworked, in pain, and exhausted. I felt like I was at my breaking point. How was swinging a stick like a monkey on crack getting me any closer to defeating the Meta who had killed my Dad?
“I’m so freakin’ sick of playing with sticks and stones,” I fumed to Athena. She was standing nearby. “Are we learning to be superheroes or cavemen?” When I first came to Camp Avatar I never would have dreamed of talking to Athena that way. I had since learned you could talk to her or the other instructors any way you wanted, especially now that the numbers of us trainees had been thinned out considerably. I had once overheard Athena say approvingly to Carbon Copy that a trainee “had spirit” after he had sassed her. As long as you did not cross the line into being disrespectful and as long as you did what the instructors said—preferably while at a dead run—you could talk to them the way you wanted to. I rather liked that fact. It made me feel like a grown-up.
“You’ve got some sort of problem Carolina?” Athena asked. The look on her face was that of smug amusement. It was the expression that was normally on her face. I wanted to pick my stick back up and use it to wipe the smugness off. I knew it was more likely that Athena would disarm me and use my own stick to cave my skull in. I had sparred with her before. It had been like fighting a ghost.
“Yes I do have a problem,” I said. “Why in the world are we learning to fight with guns and knives and sticks? We have superpowers. Shouldn’t we be focusing exclusively on those?”
“Gather around infants,” Athena said in a raised voice, calling out to the rest of the sparring trainees. The other trainees lowered their sticks and formed around where Athena, Nightshade and I stood. “Carolina here poses a good question, namely why are you all learning to fight with weapons other than your superpowers. Suppose a supervillain somehow neutralizes your powers? What are you supposed to do, stomp your foot like an angry child and accuse the villain of not fighting fair? Take your ball and run home to tell your mommy? No. You pick up a rock or a stick or a gun or whatever else is handy and defeat the supervillain anyway.”
“What good will a rock or a stick or even a gun do against someone with superpowers?” someone asked. “If you threatened someone like Mister Sinister with a stick, he’d laugh at you while making your head explode. Rogues like him are too powerful to tackle without superpowers.”
“In the hands of the right Hero, any weapon will serve to defeat many supervillains,” Athena said. “Or no weapon at all. What you have to understand is that there’s no such things as an inherently powerful weapon or superpower. There are only powerful people. And what makes you powerful is in here,” she said, tapping the center of her chest. “The cliché ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,’ is a cliché for a reason—because it’s true. Our goal at the Academy is to turn you infants into powerful people who can face anything with confidence, weapon or no weapon, superpower or no superpower. Or at least not wet your pants and run in the other direction. Why will you be able to face anything with confidence? Because you’ll have been in tight spots before here at the Academy, and you managed to get out of them. Part of our job is to give you the skills to be a Hero. To teach you how to be a Hero. But perhaps even more importantly, our job is to teach you to think like a Hero, to teach you to approach every situation like there is nothing you can’t handle.”
“But—” someone interjected. Athena waved them quiet.
“Don’t interrupt Grandma while she’s pontificating,” she said. “The motto of this place is ‘Society before self.’ It’s written over every door here. Why? Because we want you to internalize what it means. It means that you think of the rest of society before you think of yourself. It means that when everyone else is running away from danger, you are the ones who will run toward it. It means that if someone fires a gun at a civilian, you step in front of the bullet. And, it means that you not only know how to use your superpowers, but any other weapon you might need to subdue that guy who shot at the civilian. You have to be ready for anything at any time.”
Two shuriken—Japanese throwing stars—materialized in her hands. Without warning, she threw them at me with sharp flicks of her wrists. The shuriken zoomed toward my head.
Lifting my hands a bit, I altered the trajectory of the shuriken with my powers. The shuriken whizzed past my ears, curved around my head like satellites orbiting the Earth. They spun back toward Athena, a slight push from my powers adding to the momentum they already had. Athena raised her forearm in front of her face. A small wooden shield materialized on her arm. The two throwing stars hit the shield, embedding deeply into it with loud thunks.
Athena lowered her shield. She looked down at the shuriken. They were embedded into the shield about eye-width apart. They would have hit her eyes had she not stopped them.
Athena looked up at me.
“Not bad,” she said. “And I see you’re not even complaining about an unfair sneak attack. Take note, everyone: there’s no fair or unfair in a fight, no Marquess of Queensbury rules. There are only winners, and losers. If you don’t learn to be a winner, you won’t be able to get a Hero’s license. Even if you somehow slip through the cracks and become a Hero anyway, if you’re not a winner, you won’t be a Hero for long. Not a live one, anyway. Some Rogue who is faster, stronger, tougher, smarter, or simply better prepared than you will come along and put you of your misery. The world is what it is, whether you’re ready to deal with it or not. You’d best be r
eady.”
Athena turned her attention back to me. “You’re learning, Carolina,” she said, pointing at the throwing stars. “There’s hope for you yet. Though I see I still haven’t been able to break you of the habit of moving your hands to focus your powers. We’ll work on that some more later.” The shield and the shuriken disappeared. Athena clapped her hands together. “Okay, let’s get back to work. If you infants think you can trick me into letting you goof off by getting me to shoot the breeze, you’ve got another thing coming.” We all retrieved our sticks. We resumed sparring.
Athena was right: I was learning. I had used my powers to evade the throwing stars and send them back at Athena as instinctively and automatically as one might swat at a biting mosquito. I had not even consciously thought about it. I had just done it. It was my first clue I was no longer the innocent farm boy who had fearfully stepped foot into Camp Avatar weeks before.
There would be other clues.
16
Weeks became months. Trainees continued to either quit or be thrown out, but not nearly at the rate they had left at the beginning. What had started as a torrent of trainees leaving was now reduced to a trickle. Those of us who were left were either too tough to leave, or too stubborn. Or, just too stupid. Maybe all of the above. I was not sure. I was too busy working like a dog and running from place to place and from assignment to assignment like a squirrel on a busy highway to give it much thought. The expression “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop” may not have been invented by Academy instructors, but it may as well have been. If we trainees were not asleep or eating, we were busy.
Once we had dropped to where only a fourth of us who had started as trainees remained, it was as if a switch was flipped. All of the trainees moved out of the men’s and women’s barracks, which were essentially huge open rooms that afforded all the privacy of a cow pasture. We instead moved into another building on the camp’s grounds, one with apartments for the trainees. Actually, the word “apartments” overstates the matter. Each apartment was nothing more than a single room with cinder block walls containing two beds, a plain desk and a chair, and a desktop computer. The bathrooms were communal. The women were on the first floor of the apartment building; men were on the second. There was no prohibition against us trainees fraternizing, but if anyone ever hooked up, I did not see it or hear about it. Everybody was likely too tired. I knew I was. If you had told me back when I was at USCA I would soon be too tired to care much about girls, I would have laughed in your face. Assuming I even heard you. I might have been too busy watching that cute girl from English 101 walk away.
We got to choose our roommates when we moved into the apartment building. Myth and I of course roomed together. Smoke roomed with a woman named Warpspeed. Warpspeed was a bit of a loner and no one else was anxious to room with her. Myth and I tried repeatedly to befriend Warpspeed until she pointedly told us to stop. So we did. Some people preferred to be alone. Smoke wound up with Warpspeed because she was still a bit of an outcast among us trainees due to her early admission she had been trained by a supervillain. People tended to be tribal. Even in the Academy where your race, gender, color, appearance, and ethnicity were irrelevant and the only thing that mattered was your performance, there was still an us versus them attitude. Here, the us were Heroes and the them were Rogues. Though trainees respected Smoke’s abilities, skills, and work ethic, they were still wary of her. She was guilty by association.
In addition to the trainees moving out of the barracks and into apartments, we also started taking classes and doing all the reading and homework that entailed. For many of those classes, new Hero instructors were brought in to teach us, all of whom were experts in their fields. Our daily exercises and combat training were cut back on to accommodate our academics. They were not cut back much, though. I would not have thought it possible to squeeze more out of a day, but the combination of our physical and academic workloads demanded it. Sleep became an even more prized and rare commodity. Even sleep did not give us an escape from work, though. Most nights we listened to audiobooks on various subjects as we slept. One of our new professors assured us our unconscious minds were absorbing the information like sponges, especially since a Hero named Hypnotist was brought in one day to prime our minds to assimilate all that information while we were asleep. I was skeptical about how much good that alleged nighttime learning was doing until one day in class I effortlessly and perfectly recited the opening lines of Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English. I had never in my life read Canterbury Tales, much less in Middle English. I had listened to it when I was asleep, though.
We all were required to take certain core classes: Hero Law; English and Literature; World History; the Science of Superheroes; Hero Psychology, Strategy, and Tactics; Metahuman Math; and Heroic Feats, Ethics, and Theory. It was like being in college again, only a lot more demanding. In addition to those classes we all had to take, each trainee had specialized tutelage. Myth, for example, was tutored in mythology (duh!) and art. He studied art because drawing and painting various mythological creatures helped him visualize and internalize them so he could transform into them later. The better he was able to conceptualize a mythological creature, the more powerful he was as that creature. His drawings and paintings of griffins, pegasuses, ghosts, angels, dragons, manticores, and other creatures I did not even know the names of soon filled the walls of our tiny room.
As for me, I was tutored in advanced physics. Studying physics helped me understand the potential I had as an Omega-level Metahuman. Myth could turn into dragons and breathe fire; Smoke could turn into gases that could do anything from knock a crowd of people out to burning a hole through steel; Brute could pick up a small airplane like it was a baseball bat and smash it over your head. There were lots of trainees who had powers that would make your jaw drop. All I could do was pick stuff up and generate force fields. At first, my powers seemed less than awesome in comparison to some of the other trainees. But, my studies at the Academy soon taught me the potential of my powers. I started to understand that what I did when I moved stuff around was manipulating its atoms. I could do it on a macro-scale, like when I had moved the mops around in the latrine or changed the vectors of Athena’s shuriken. But, I was learning I could manipulate atoms on a micro-scale as well.
Late one night as I lay in bed, I literally could feel the swirling atoms of everything around me, from the atoms that composed the air, to the atoms that composed the sleeping bodies of the trainees in the building, to the atoms of the building itself. The atoms in the building in particular resonated with me, almost like they were calling to me. The energy that bound them together seem to cry for release. Half-asleep, I almost unleashed that energy, just to see what would happen.
Fortunately, I resisted the temptation. The next morning, before heading to the gym for my morning workout, I sat down to figure out what would have happened had I done what my sleepy self had been thinking about the night before. E=mc2. In plain English, that equation meant energy equaled mass times the square of the speed of light. Einstein had taught us all that long ago. In other words, energy was but another version of mass, and vice versa. The speed of light was 186,000 miles per second. Multiply that by itself, and you had a huge number. Armed with all the new information I had been taught in various classes, I did a rough estimate of the mass of the building I was in. I then multiplied that by the square of the speed of light.
Wow! The result had so many zeroes at the end of it, it shocked me. The energy I would have generated had I broken up the atoms of the building would have been massive. In essence, I would have converted the building into a massive nuclear bomb. My hands shook a little as that realization sank in. It was no wonder Amazing Man had urged me to train in the use of my powers. Without training, I was an unwitting danger not only to myself, but to everyone around me. It scared me a little to think about the things I could already probably do and the things I would one day be capable of if I kept training and studying
.
Speaking of the Old Man, he stopped being an ivory tower figure whom we trainees rarely saw. Once classes started, we started seeing him every day. He was our professor for Heroic Feats, Ethics, and Theory, or simply Feats as the full name was a mouthful. Feats was my favorite class. In it, we dissected the provisions of the Hero Act of 1945, analyzed how the Sentinels stopped the V’Loth alien invasion in the 1960s, mulled over why female Heroes tended to wear form-fitting and otherwise revealing outfits and whether that was sexist, debated the merits and demerits of a secret identity, argued about whether President Theodore Roosevelt had been a closeted Meta, and any and everything in between. It was interesting.
“All right,” the Old Man said one day in Feats, “let’s find out who actually digested yesterday’s reading assignment and who merely moved their lips as they read the words. Supernova, thanks so much for volunteering.” Supernova jumped a little at the sound of his name. He straightening up in his seat. He had been dozing. I could sympathize. I was half-asleep myself. I could not remember the last time I had gotten what I used to consider a full night’s rest. The concept of not always being tired now seemed as mythological as the creatures Myth turned into. “Can you tell us what the advantages of becoming a licensed Hero are?” the Old Man asked Supernova.
“A Meta has to become a licensed Hero in order to legally use his powers under the Hero Act,” Supernova said. The redhead visibly suppressed a yawn. “If you use your powers without being licensed, you are deemed a Rogue under the Act. Or, a supervillain as most people call them.”
“Yes, that’s true as far as it goes,” the Old Man said, “but that is stuff they tell you when you register as a Meta. I’m looking for something a little more specific. Go back to sleep. Perhaps the answer I’m looking for will come to you in a dream. Yes, Myth?”
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