Chapter One: PowerGo to chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 My name is Richard Hughes. My parents call me Richard, my friends call me Rick, my enemies call me Power. The last one is perhaps the most appropriate, 'cause power is my stock in trade -- but I'm getting ahead of myself. My English teacher says to start off with something that will grab your attention, even if it doesn't make sense, but my friend Ben says to begin at the beginning, and I have no intention of letting the teacher see this, so here goes, from the beginning, which was a cloudy night in late September. We're all heading back from Jonah's party, way out in the middle of nowhere. Somehow, I end up driving five people home, because I had the van. I'm not usually soft-hearted like this, but I figure it would just create more problems if I left them behind. Should have left earlier -- but of course now I'm glad I didn't. Anyway, I was driving the van, and the new girl Lia had grabbed the front seat early. She's smarter than she looks, but doesn't talk much -- your typical shy Asian stuff. In the back seats are the rest of them: Alex, Sarah White, Timothy Walker and Ben Eldinson. The only one of those I know well is Alex, who looks so respectable and serious it's no wonder he gets away with all the crazy stunts he does. I'm not a big fan of his friends, but hey, to each his own. It was about midnight, so those of us who weren't completely dead were still hyper. Behind me, Sarah was trying yet again to strike up a conversation with Timothy. Now there's a guy I don't understand: the girls all love him and he just brushes them off. He insists he's not gay, of course, but that doesn't mean much, of course. So I pop in a techno CD, get on the road, and wham! this truck comes barrelling through the intersection ahead of us, clips a guardrail and flips over, right in the middle of the road. We're doing, like, 50 here, there's no way I can get out. So I decide, it's now or never, even being a freak is better than being dead. (Hey, I'm already halfway there, so... but I'm getting out of hand here.) I push my hands in a big forward shove motion: Ryu from Street Fighter if you must know. Yeah, I'm a total geek, get over it. You'll get my excuse later. I'm panicked and I don't get to practice much, so I don't even think of anything but a straight-up blast. The windshield liquefies, the asphalt cracks, the truck scrapes forward a bit and barely moves at all, and I think, My bad. Nothing to do but keep doing it, slam on the brakes, and hope the truck disintegrates or something. Just then Lia flashes white, like really blinding message-from-God white, and slumps forward, and then things start getting really freaky. I start going crazy, and then I go all icy cold, calm to the extreme: there I am, in this van that's still going 35 barrelling into a truck, about two seconds to live, and I'm wondering if Lia is hurt, maybe I blew the windshield the wrong way or something, so I turn off my blast and look over to check, and then we're not dead anymore and the truck is behind us. I wasn't concentrating too much, but with the whole action-hero cool-under-fire thing going on, I realize that somehow the truck started spinning, just fast enough to let us through, and I'd better pull over before a cop comes through. So I stop the car, unbuckle my seatbelt and everything, reflexively take a look where the rearview mirror would be if it weren't in a million pieces all over the hood, and the calm is gone. Just like that, maybe it was seeing my van trashed that did it. The windshield's splattered across the hood and the road behind us, the back half of Lia's seat is gone like it was sliced with a knife, Alex is practically embedded in the middle seat behind me, and Timothy in the way back is going crazy and trying to open the window. Everybody's freaked out, but nobody looks hurt, so I ask Lia if she's all right, and she looks at me like I'm some kind of alien from Planet Zorg. It takes me about a second to figure out why, and then I realize I used my powers in front of her. "Shhhh!" I say, "Are you hurt? There was some kinda flash, do you have glass on you?" She shakes her head, breathes deeply, says, "I'm fine. What did you do!?" I lie, hating myself but doing it just the same. "I don't know. That was a pretty rough ride; everybody OK back there?" This to the rest of the van. A chorus of yeses, some more shaky than others, but four of them anyway. Alex comes up with the first bright idea he's had all night: "Everybody outside. That way we can explain everything, and maybe see if Rick's van needs to be fixed." Everybody gets out, although Timothy and Ben in the back take a while to do it. What are they talking about, I wonder. They can't possibly have been looking at me... but it's best not to take chances, so I shoo them outside with the rest. Alex is a natural leader and all that junk, but he's scared out of his mind just like the rest of us, so he swallows and clears his throat before he starts talking. "I think we all owe each other an explanation. Some pretty strange things happened in that car, and I think we have the right to know what was really going on. One rule, first: nothing about this is going outside of this car, period. We have enough problems without somebody's tongue slipping and landing us all in real trouble, OK? So let's get started." An awkward pause, so Alex has to make the first move himself. "All right. For those of you who don't know me" -- a nod at Lia, although it's a safe bet Ben doesn't know him either, 'cause she's the girl -- "my name is Alex, and I'm a shapeshifter. This is the trick I used in the car." He kinda... melts... and in a couple seconds he's three inches shorter and completely encased in steel, except for, like, his eyes and nose and stuff. We're all astounded, I see, except Ben and Sarah for some reason, maybe they saw him do it. Well, duh, since Sarah was sitting next to him at the time, right behind Lia. Sarah taps him on the shoulder and sure enough, it's genuine metal, it clangs and all. After a few seconds he changes back to normal, and he's wincing a little. Could be just the pressure of being a mutant freak, or maybe physical pain, doesn't matter. Now I thought I was the only one around with some freaky power, so this just about blows my mind. Of course, Alex can't just leave it at that -- it woulda been good enough, but nooo, he's got to show us all exactly what we're getting into -- so he does a second transformation, and this time he's an exact copy of Sarah, down to the hairstyle and clothes and everything. Still wearing his ring, though, maybe he missed it. I'm still impressed a year later when he does the change-into-other-people trick, and seeing it for the first time I was just, like, Wow! Sarah leaps about two feet in the air and backs away, Ben raises an eyebrow (I'm thinking, is he stoned or something? What's his problem?) and the rest of us pretty much have our mouths hanging open. When Alex speaks, it's almost Sarah's voice, but not really. "Not perfect, but rather a good job, if I do say so myself." He can move, he can talk, he could probably fool my English teacher. I see some great slacking-off opportunities here; good thing I don't have his power, or you could kiss my grades goodbye. "You guys are the first people I've showed this to besides my parents in first grade," says Alex. "They told me never to change where people could see me, for obvious reasons. Of course, now that people have seen me, there's no harm in telling you the rest..." He trails off, rubbing that ring of his and looking for someone else to start talking. The rest of us are all too scared to talk, so he nudges Sarah and whispers something, and she begins her explanation. Little Miss "I'm on the cheerleading squad, watch me be happy" Sarah White is in fact ALSO a mutant with a power that makes slacking off in school easier. She takes out a locket she wears around her neck, holds it out, and opens a gateway for us, some kind of portal to an alternate dimension, straight out of the latest B-rated sci-fi movie. To us, it's just this black door-sized rectangle hanging there in space, until she reaches into it, rummages around, and comes up with her math book and calculator. Ben is kind of edging his way around our little circle while she does this, trying to see what a gateway looks like in reverse -- I'm still not sure, and I don't really care. Whatever. Alex is interested in whether her parents know she can do this. Surprisingly, the answer is no; maybe they just assume her room is clean enough or something, because she can always find stuff when she wants to. Whereas if I forgot my math book, I can maybe bust a hole through the side of the school and walk home, but that's about it. This is getting boring. To cut a long story short, this happened to be the mutant 20th anniversary reunion and I wasn't informed. Each of us is actually a mutant, with powers that have varying degrees of coolness. Actually, our little discussion cleared up a lot of our personality quirks: Timothy's "a natural" with the ladies because he can read their minds, and Ben just happens to be able to see the future, which is why all the pranks Alex tries on him never work. Lia does some weird probability-changing stuff even she isn't sure about (the white flash I saw was her directing my blasts to just the right spot to start the truck spinning, totally on autopilot), and Sarah has her little pocket dimension I told you about. Trust a ditz like her to have, like the coolest superpower ever, and then fill it with hairspray and sparkle pens and stuff. And then there's me of course. Like every kid my age, I played Street Fighter and then went around imagining I was Ryu and throwing fireballs at people. Only one day, I really did, and burned a hole through my bedroom door. Mom really didn't want to believe I was a mutant, so she pretended it never happened and I went to the park and practiced in my spare time. It's been about ten years, and I'm still kinda shaky on what exactly I can do; it's not like I can, you know, ask somebody how to work this. Plus, I don't have something generally useful like the others; sure, if anybody tries to beat me up, I can fry them with Terry's Burning Knuckles attack from the latest video game, but it's not like that happens much. I scare 'em off first. Now that we all know Ben is, like, this super genius fortune teller dude, we're pretty open to what he has to say, and what he says is that we don't just remind him of the X-Men, we should BE them. You know, like, fight evil and everything, live in a mansion in upstate New York with a bald super-smart mentor and his alien princess. I wish. So we become a super hero team -- Team Infinity, pretty cool name for a bunch of geeks and losers like me -- and we agree to meet tomorrow night. Meanwhile, we pile back into the van, start the car up again (at least it works), and try to figure out how to explain it to my mom and dad. I just can't think of something that will please them, so I have to tell them the truth, or at least most of it. I wasn't lying, not really. I said I used my powers to save us from a car crash, and it blew the windshield out, and that's true as far as it goes. Anyway, Mom was so happy to see me alive, I guess, that she didn't care about the car. Dad was a little less pleased; hey, he's not exactly my biggest fan, so when I trash the van I can expect a little talking-to. But even he couldn't argue with what I did, not when we all would have died otherwise. He asked if anybody had seen me do it, and I had to say yes, but I said it was only Lia and Ben that knew anything. (I would have said just Lia, but I thought since Ben knew everything already, he could figure out what to say to my folks if anything like this happened again.) Now you know, and the rest of the story is in someone else's more capable hands. * * * * LiveJournal user purplelia46 [Lia] wrote on 2002-09-29: Welcome to my LiveJournal, everybody. Hope you enjoy the stay. Not that any of you will be reading this. I fully intend to keep the whole journal locked up until it can no longer be concealed. Last night, I got home about midnight, in a car which was probably in violation of state safety regulations even before the front windshield broke. Because obviously I have so much sense, I decided to create a LiveJournal and write it down. Not the smartest thing to do, but really, I'm afraid of forgetting what happened. Party last night at Jonah's place was a lot more fun than I expected. I wasn't even going to go, I didn't really know anybody except Rick and Becky, I'd probably just hover around the drinks and get fatter than I already am. -.- But somehow I ended up in Rick's van with five other people, my parents really worked up after I called them a half-hour late to say I didn't know when I'd be home, having a blast. Maybe somebody spiked the punch or something. I probably made a fool of myself. Hey, at least I met some new people, like Timothy. He's, well, the most distinctive thing about him is that such a nice, good-looking guy isn't already taken. From what I heard, he's gone out with every girl in the grade once or twice, then dumped them flat. The general consensus is that he's either gay or just waiting for the perfect mate, but he vehemently denies the first, so we keep trying. Off the subject. Jonah's karaoke machine is high quality, because nobody really cares how bad a singer you are as long as you're funny. Come to think of it, I gess I really was funny. At least to some people. Becky is so nice to me, I really don't deserve it. Except for certain comments, a smack upside the head for her about those. Keep quiet, will you? ^.^ We weren't even on the Parkway on the way back home when the car crashed into an overturned semi. Well, almost crashed, and that's the real reason for this entry. I thought Rick was sullen and quirky just because he's a gothy, geeky kind of guy, nothing wrong with that in principle but not very endearing when you're trying to make new friends. He's a mutant, the kind straight out of a comic book that you never ever expect to happen in real life. I kept repeating to myself, Rick throws fireballs, Rick's got crazy mutant powers, but it took a while to sink in. That's how he broke his windshield, he vaporized it by firing a blast to push the truck aside from the driver's seat. What's even crazier is that I think I may have had something to do with it. Nobody has ever given any indication that I was a mutant like he was. I mean, I know, I've read the statistics, it's just as likely to happen to me as the next guy, but you think, at least you would know who you are, right? Wrong. I've been told that I have mysterious extraordinary powers tonight by a mind reader, a crystal ball reader, and an X-Men reader (Rick, you see), within the space of ten minutes. So who am I? Pretty much everybody in the car except me saw me give off a sort of white flash, I couldn't get a more accurate or detailed description. It's not like this happens every other week, I mean my mom says I sometimes seem to glow but that's different. I don't even know what I did. Ben (Eldinson, one of Rick's buddies) says that I unconsciously directed Rick's energy field, blah blah blah. I'm not even sure I really am a mutant, for that matter. After all, it's not like the others know exactly what they do in the first place either, so yeah. The easiest explanation is that it's Rick doing something he didn't know he was doing. There's no evidence to support the existence of my magical probability powers in theory, let alone with me. But even Alex seemed to take it seriously, and he's seen a bit more of the nitty-gritty world than I have, I suspect. Gave me a couple questions: Have you ever been in the hospital? No, but my life isn't really all that exciting. How often do you win at poker? I can't play poker, but I do well at card games in general. I'm just the master of Capitalism from summer camp, is all. More on this later. I have to go, my mom is banging on the door. Bye! |