Chapter Three: TimeGo to chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 Hi, folks. Due to lack of anyone willing to do this chapter, which is frankly the most boring one in our entire little saga, this is Ben Eldinson, better known as Time. Actually, people call me "Eldinson" more often than anything else, but that doesn't sound nearly as cool, so it gets the proverbial axe in favor of "Time." Before getting into the meat and potatoes of the story, I should explain a little about myself. My day starts at 6 AM, when I get up, wolf down breakfast, pack a lunch, and head to school. Like the rest of the team, I'm forced to show up by 7:30 at the front door of John Hancock High School, five days a week, and then listen to the experts tell us we need 8 hours of sleep a night. Stop whining, my parents tell me. You could get plenty of sleep if it weren't for those stupid video games, they say. When are you going to do something useful with your life? They have no idea what I'm really doing, of course, which is training to be part of a superhero team by improving my hand-eye coordination. For me, that's more important than it sounds. You see, I have two mutant powers, the one making the other possible. First, my brain runs at a hyper-fast rate, nearly 60 times faster than a normal human's. I don't notice this most of the time because all the extra resources are tied up with my other power, the ability to literally see the past and the future. When I look at a chair, I see the chair in three dimensions, but also extending forward and backward in time, for a variable length depending on the object's motion and the "temporal weather" of the area. For example, I can tell what the forest was like five years ago or will be five years from now at a glance, but my computer monitor is too unreliable for me to tell any length of time at all. When I put on my glasses, a mental block kicks in and I "shut my eyes" to my time sense, freeing my extra mental capacity for direct access. It's like living in a different world, one where it takes several "seconds" to blink, let alone move your hand - but I have so much time to choose the right course of action that I can dodge bullets simply by noticing his finger tightening on the trigger, visualizing the trajectory of the bullet, and starting to duck just before the bullet fires. Anyway, I slog through school, then take the bus home. When I need to work something off, I cut through a section of forest with glasses on, trying to go at top speed without cracking any twigs or leaves. It gets easier than it sounds with practice, but it's not like my life is going to depend on it even if it was difficult. I get home, collapse in my chair, and start up the latest reflex-based computer game: fighters, shooters, Tetris, you name it. Only online play is even remotely a challenge, because I have to deal with slow servers and actual humans, but I'm still way too fast, so it's more like work than straight fun. Without glasses, I can relax and enjoy the game, of course, but then I start losing and it's bad for my image. The challenge isn't interpreting visual input - I can fire up Street Fighter and see a punch coming five seconds away - but learning the precise finger control needed to react that fast when my nerve impulses have a fixed speed limit. Anyway, after my daily practice, I move on to doing some homework, worrying about my social life, talking on the Internet -- you know, all the things normal teenage guys do. I love the Internet: it's much easier to ignore people, much easier to erase a first impression, much harder to pity people in general. Much better than real life if you ask me. I have some friends in real life, sure, and one special situation named Kristen. However, that particular can of worms is one that I will not open at this time, even with a captive audience consisting of you, the reader. And so we reach the actual story, which as usual begins with me. * * * * About a week after our team's battle with Annihilator, I was sitting in math class, totally bored out of my skull as usual. I was actually wondering if there would be anything happening in our next team meeting, which was still a highly informal affair, basically a chance for our self-appointed leader Alex to check up on the rest of the team and make sure nobody was running into mutant-ability-related problems. Now don't get me wrong, I have no problems with Alex leading the team; it's certainly not a job I could do myself, much as I help him out. I prefer to think of myself as the power behind the throne, not exposing himself while still being able to do what he wants. Same game plan I follow in real life, when I have the luxury of doing so. Thus, it came as that much more of a surprise when I was called out of class because my mom wanted to talk to me. I had absolutely no clue what was going on, and I know better than to engage in fruitless speculation without adequate data, so I kept my glasses off. It's the little things that make the real difference in people's lives, when all is said and done. If I hadn't had my time vision available at that moment, I don't know what would have become of Team Infinity. But fortunately, I closed the door softly behind me, looked over, and saw not my mom, but a woman I'd never seen before. I looked a little into the past, and saw some of the most vivid recent events in her life. Notably, last Sunday night she had robbed a jewelry store, destroyed all electronic records of her presence, and walked calmly out: her work for the month. Needless to say, this piqued my curiosity, so I looked a little deeper. I'm told by reliable sources that when I take a good look into the past or future, it looks like I'm visually scrutinizing someone, like I'm trying to tell them they have a mustard stain on their pants or something. Of course, I am giving them a closer look, but I don't really care about what they look like at the moment. Who needs appearances, when you can have the real thing? We were alone in the hallway, except for random passersby who don't really count anyhow. Before she had the opportunity to introduce herself (and I could see the expression of surprise on her face), I knew that she was an evil mutant like Annihilator, and substantially more dangerous. To explain a surprising statement, instead of blowing things up physically, she does it mentally, somehow using her mind to incapacitate at a distance and erase their memories afterward. I also gathered that she was the leader of yet more mutants, somewhat like my own team but for the purpose of creating mayhem, havoc, and some quick cash, and that she had somehow discovered our team and planned a contest between our two groups, again for no particular reason other than to have fun injuring a few innocent bystanders. With this in mind, I turned to face her as she opened her mouth. (See, I told you I can think quickly when I need to.) "Sorry for the deception, but I needed to talk to you, alone. My name is Venus. I understand that you are Ben Eldinson, one of the five people responsible for Annihilator's recent defeat?" I played it safe. Until she at least told me her name, I couldn't know what her game is or how much I could accidentally have revealed to her mutant mind powers. "I'm Ben, yeah. But what do you mean, 'defeat'? He just went crazy and blew himself up - more like self-defeating, if you want my opinion." She was visibly annoyed, probably because she had something else to do. I couldn't concentrate on what it is; her future was changing too fast at the moment, meaning this discussion was important to what she'll do later today. Nice to know I warranted that much attention on her personal scale. She snapped, "Don't play the idiot with me. We have information that shows other mutants were involved besides he." How much do they know, I wondered. Putting on my glasses to figure it out from previous hints she may have dropped would be too suspicious, so I had to fly this one by the seat of my pants. "This is patently ridiculous. No matter how much you overestimate me, there's no way I could have beaten him alone, with other kids to protect while I did it. What are you suggesting?" I asked. "You're not being honest with me. Whatever you're trying to conceal, it won't work, so tell me what I need to know now and save us both some trouble." If I had to guess about my facial expression at this point, it would be "rolling of the eyes and weary sighing". In any case, I had no patience left for her intimidation and secrecy. Besides, even an experienced rogue mutant couldn't be immune to surprises, so I wanted to give her one. "Cut the trash, Venus. I know what you're going to say. You want to match the five members of your little club of second-rate supervillains against the bunch of kids who beat Annihilator and left in a hurry, show them what it really means to be a mutant, show them who's boss in this neck of the woods. Unfortunately for you, I'm the last person you should have gone to in order to issue your challenge. I'm not about to hand you free information by telling you why, but I can tell you that in a week we'll be in top shape, ready to turn the tables on you guys with ease." Now this came as a shock to her, I noted with no small amount of satisfaction. Her eyes narrowed with perfect suspicion; obviously she'd had a lot of practice being suspicious, something I suppose comes with being a career criminal. "You can't be a telepath, or I would sense the ability in you. No, the telepath used a delicate mindprobe to sense me as I entered the building, then fed the information to you, presumably more expendable," she mused. An idea struck her, and she continued in a quite different tone, "Is this the way you want to be treated? Just a go-between for your classmate who thinks he's more important just because he found me first?" I didn't get much of an opportunity to use a condescending smile back in those days. Still don't, but that's beside the point. However, this was the perfect opportunity for such a smile, as I proclaimed, "Lady, you couldn't be more wrong if you tried. If you want to make a formal challenge, send Alex Brene a message tonight. We'll be there, and us six -- Team Infinity -- will decide whether or not to accept your gauntlet. I have a hunch we will." "Well then, my Olympians are ready and waiting. Wait, you said six? The police indicated there were only five!" "Wrong again. And I thought mentalists were supposed to know everything. Thanks for the advance warning." With that, I went back inside, feeling great and leaving her spluttering. With good cause, I think; it was one of my more successful postcognitive-ability moments. I was beginning to think that today might not be so bad after all. The only thing that remained was to convince Alex and company to get their butts in gear and train to beat someone and put the team really on the map. * * * * As it turned out, the team was less than enthusiastic. Lia in particular, being new to the school with all that implies, wanted to make a good impression on her teachers, and had trouble accepting that she wasn't going to fail her physics test no matter how much she slacked off. A slight exaggeration on my part, actually, as she did have about a seven percent chance of failing, but good enough for government work as my mom always says. As usual, I had to sic Timothy on her to get her to tell us anything, much less support her position. It's always fascinating to watch Timothy at work. He's not insanely attractive by any standards, and had spent less than four minutes that day on personal hygiene to boot. (Four minutes is simply my approximation based on the condition of his clothes and hair as he walked down the stairs. I wouldn't discount less, he's getting sloppier as he gets more powerful in other areas.) Without even being consciously aware of it, he delivers a one-two knockout punch to the ladies: he reads their minds to determine how he should act, and then shifts their emotions to be more responsive and favorable to him. Of course, how much of this analysis is itself colored by his influence I'm not sure, but I do admire him on a professional level quite apart from how cool he is as a person. At one point, he even put his hand on Lia's shoulder, something she usually shirks from with the standard shy Asian girl aversion to physical contact. He didn't manage to convince her to be gung-ho about the whole fighting evil mutants thing, but at least got her to come back for some impromptu training sessions this week, which I suppose is good enough. The rest of our new Team Infinity was sort of receptive, as I predicted. I must be getting better at reading people without the aid of postcognition or something similar. Rick wanted to show off his powers some more, of course. If you pricked that guy with a needle he would explode into big shards of ego when it comes to anything he enjoys, and there's nothing he likes more than blasting fireballs at people. Well, maybe wearing black and feeling sorry for himself, but I digress. I approached Alex earlier than the rest 'cause he's the leader, and he gave it the go-ahead for strategic reasons which I can understand but don't think are really necessary. He just doesn't know what I know about ourselves and the Olympians, and he never will. That's why I try to keep him updated as much as possible, even when he may not want to be reminded of his duties. Too bad, he'll just have to deal with it. Alex convinced the aforementioned Timothy, who took all of ten seconds to convince Sarah and then worked with Lia for a while so we could make it unanimous. Timothy's a great guy and all, but I think he's a wee bit spoiled by his powers. Sarah, like approximately half the school's female population, has a mild to serious crush on him, so training with him after school for a week, or just being in his presence for extended periods, was a no-brainer. On the positive side, that's one person I won't have to nag about being on time. I gave the team a little pep talk. Depending on how much we trained and some other factors I couldn't put my finger on, we had about a seventy-five percent chance that night of beating the Olympians next week. So with that in mind and a reminder for everybody to be here tomorrow, we adjourned to the next item on the agenda, which included several bowls of popcorn and Alex's big-screen TV. The next day being reasonably nice outside, we wandered out of the house and started work. The first training session's agenda was to determine the extent of our powers, which were disappointingly raw and unrefined, except for Alex and I of course. Space was surprisingly adept at finding anything she put into her gateway at a moment's notice, or even making it drop out of the gateway by itself, but getting her past a rectangular vertical opening just big enough to fit a backpack in took some work. With a little questioning, I discovered she had some rudimentary abilities to change the size and shape of a gateway, so I set her to work trying to fit gateways around various parts of Alex's car. To keep her happy, she'd also be working with Mind, who wasn't sure how much he could do consciously or if he could even read emotions at all beyond his natural unconscious abilities. When Reality saw my little arrangement, he tsked a little at me but let it slide, obviously because he saw how I killed two birds with one stone. The two of them wanted to spend some time together, but any budding romance would quickly be quashed as she found out how creepy it is to have your emotions manipulated while you watch. The other two I had to attend to were Power and Soul - as it turns out, another potential couple in the near future, possibly because of the time they were going to be spending together. Reality forced Power to admit that he really didn't have any idea what he was doing with his abilities, just riding on instinct like the rest of us. He's working in a nice open field, blasting away until he finds out how he really generates rings of fire around his feet. When he needs a real target in a couple days, it would be mighty convenient to have Soul as test dummy, but I really doubt he'd intentionally shoot at her. I don't have to be an empath to see how much he likes her - can't tell what he sees in her, but it's probably not my business. Oh well, I'll see if Alex is willing to get shot at a little, it won't hurt him. Soul herself is another problem case for us. She's incredibly shy and doesn't want to admit to herself that she even has mutant powers at all, so I didn't tell her how much power she has. Of all our team, I'm not exactly the one with the most impressive powers, or even the most raw potential, although I do have some things I could expand on and I'm working on those. That honor goes far and away to Soul. You see, a little precognitive scrutiny revealed that her power somehow tinkers with reality itself, altering probabilities and causing minute shifts at the precise location to make the difference in a chain reaction that ends up looking like magic. Like Mind and me, she does it all the time, without thinking about it, and by all evidence has done so for as long as she can remember. She doesn't have one spot of acne, has never been sick a day in her life, is a star student, and several other small things I could name that are all easily coincidences except that they aren't. Given the proper training and ability to focus and/or enhance her powers, she could use those small shifts (which are accompanied by white flashes like the one I saw in the car crash or against Annihilator) to take us all down in different, unexpected ways without raising a finger. Nobody in the team can give her that kind of training, but it's a definite future possibility for her, so I wonder what will come out of the woodwork, if anything, to give her the information she needs to face the Olympians and more. Alex and I really didn't have anything we could do to be productive, so I did some research on mutant powers in general and the Olympians in particular while Reality helped the others attempt to stretch their limits. A productive day, but nothing to write home about. I saw signs that first day that worried me - the probability of us emerging victorious was growing steadily smaller, and I wasn't sure what I or the other team members were doing to make that happen. Plus I did a little homework on the side. It was going to be an interesting week. * * * * When Saturday rolled around, we had been training for a week - but I use "training" figuratively. I had overestimated the group's enthusiasm, failed to provide sufficiently attractive training ideas, or something else which escapes my grasp, but our prospects of a clean victory were less than forty percent, with a significant minority of the other 60% being "utterly crushed". Not a good prognosis, but not one I was about to tell anyone but Reality. We showed up as promised, in an unused section of the parking lot behind the discount warehouse, and so did the Olympians. All in all, rather more of a ragtag group than I expected, comfortingly like our own. There were five of them, ranging from one young recruit who could easily still be in school like us to a balding man in his sixties whose power, as far as I could tell from his history, involved some kind of telekinetic ability to sculpt metal like clay. After giving each of them a once-over in my "normal" vision to get a sense of their past, I flicked the glasses on and started talking to the team as fast as I could figure out concrete details. Perhaps twenty meters away "Venus" was doing her equivalent, reading our minds and telling her team what she saw. Her strategy was, again as expected, rather grandiose and not well thought through: perhaps Soul's power coming out at a moment of crisis (I wouldn't know, she was out of my field of vision at the time and nobody else can remember for sure) but more likely Venus' inborn stupidity. Ordering each of her teammates to attack the one whose powers seemed closest to their own, she started walking slowly forward towards Mind and left Soul alone. A stroke of luck on our part that didn't need any mutant powers to happen: since Soul wasn't really sure what her power was in the first place, Venus dismissed her as not having a controllable power at all and thus not worthy of serious consideration. Soul hadn't gained any shattering insight in a week of practice, save perhaps that her fellow teammate Rick might be dateable after all, and so it's hard to estimate her impact on the battle since even I can't tell how or when she was influencing events. Consequently I will ignore her just like everyone else. I suppose I might have felt pity for her at the time, but now I don't bother anymore. I still had my glasses on, thankfully, when she gave the order. I settled into a combat-ready position and waited for my opponent, the kid Venus insisted on calling Mercury, to arrive, and with my copious free time I watched the others fight their battles. No sooner had Venus closed her mouth than a lightning bolt shot out of the relatively clear sky halfway between Power and his match, a fairly nondescript white-collar worker whom no one would normally suspect of going by the name of Jupiter. The names were very handily symbolic, I suspected, as this Jupiter proceeded to make the lightning lance out in a line between them, obviously the line to cross if Power wanted to do battle. He opened his trenchcoat and ran forward, yelling something inane from one of his video games while some kind of energy trailed behind his outstretched hands. Much as he annoys me, Power is the man for the job when one is up against lightning bolts, and so I left him unconcerned that he would find some way to duel in a pyrotechnically spectacular fashion. Keeping one eye on Mercury, who had run almost to the street at the end of the lot and was starting to run at me, I checked how Space was doing. Curse that fool woman! She hadn't listened to my warning not to touch her opponent, the vampiric-looking old man Pluto, and had instead procured a staff of some kind from her gateway and was attacking him with it. He obviously wasn't as old as he looked, as he neatly sidestepped her hasty attack and grabbed the staff. He grabbed her face with both hands, and the two of them disappeared nearly instantly into the ground, presumably into a gateway like the one Space controlled. I didn't have time to calculate her chances, because at that moment Mercury revealed the extent of his powers. I knew Mercury's special ability involved some kind of running, and from the name I guessed that he was simply a faster runner because of some quirk of leg muscles, streamlining, et cetera. It was one of the few times I have ever been completely wrong, as I missed both the genesis of his gift, a localized gravity field in front of him that both propelled him forward and deflected away air and oncoming objects, and the extent of it, which I estimated as about one hundred seventy-five miles per hour. You have no idea of how terrifying it is to be in the world I live in with glasses on, a world where nothing ever moves at more than a crawl including myself, and to see someone running towards you as if they were walking in real life, far faster than you're used to seeing cars pass on the freeway. Trust me, I never want to see it again. His power kicked in instantaneously but only when he reached a dead run, showing that he, like us, had developed a mental block to prevent him from activating his super speed accidentally. He planned to simply shoulder by me with enough speed to knock the wind out of me, then circle around the block for another pass and finish me off. Fortunately, Venus hadn't thought through my power, assuming that I simply thought faster than the average bear. She (and by extension Mercury) didn't anticipate the total control over my motions and top-of-the-line natural speed that I can produce when I have all the time in the world to do it. I thought fast, like I always do, and jumped right into his path. A well-trained human can react to a given stimulus in one-tenth of a second; since Mercury was obviously used to being fast, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for my calculations. That gave Mercury about twenty-five feet from the time I started leaping to the time he noticed I was doing anything at all, and another hundred feet (less than a half-second) to do something about it. He started frantically braking, putting his gravity field behind him to get him back down to a more manageable speed. I was pleased he reacted so quickly instead of doing the idiotic thing, which would have been continuing to run forward and killing us both in the collision. We connected with a thud that was much more painful for him than me, as I was expecting it and could soften my fall, plus my fist connected with his torso by quick thinking on my part and a healthy dose of luck. My glasses were knocked clean off, and so the few seconds I saw stars while waiting to regain my senses were only seconds instead of minutes. I got up before he did, but not by much; he grabbed a hand painfully at his chest to indicate a broken rib. At that point, I became immersed in the rush of a close battle, the feeling of power that comes from being tested to the limit in a contest of skill. It's the andrenaline high I get from playing the very best competition in video games (well, my only competition), and what I presume star athletes feel on the field. I shook myself off, grinned like a maniac, and crooked a finger at Mercury to say "come here" in a parody of the scene from the Matrix. Yes, I know I'm unoriginal, but the opportunity was too golden to pass up. He rose to the challenge and we flew together, not at his full speed of course but just as deadly. I hadn't had a good old-fashioned fistfight since I got suspended for beating up that gang of bullies in eighth grade. (Only the fact that I had been taking karate lessons at the time prevented me from having to reveal my powers in that instance.) Without the glasses, Mercury actually stood a chance at close range, and so I planned to see what tricks he had up his sleeves while keeping an eye on the others. As expected, but still a disappointment, Venus was now gloating over Mind's crumpled form to my right. I didn't expect him to be able to handle an experienced telepath anyway, just keep her busy long enough for the rest of us to do our work. A flash from over Mercury's shoulder as I dodged his punch heralded an energy blast from Power, as he parried Jupiter's lightning strike by creating his own bolt next door and diverting both right behind him. He clenched his arms, whipping dust about his feet, as he prepared for a counter-move while Jupiter still vainly tried to steer the lightning back to his foe. That battle was going well. Space and Pluto were still nowhere to be found, but I didn't expect Space to be able to take on Pluto on literally his home turf. Unfortunately, a vicious gut punch from Mercury I had to take the brunt of forced my head down so I couldn't see how Reality, our only member who could possibly have had experience with fighting other mutants, was doing against his assigned Olympian. I'm not one to fight with honor, as Mercury quickly became aware of when I delivered a nice old-fashioned karate chop to his throat, punched him in the solar plexus, and swept his feet out from under him for good measure. I was going to kick him in the stomach as he collapsed on the ground, but decided not to waste my time and delivered a curt "You lose" to him as I walked off (rather painfully, I hate to admit) to deal with the other Olympians before they meddled in Power's fight or something. While searching for my glasses, I almost fell into Pluto's gateway as he came back up, carrying an unconscious Space with him. He came out faster than I expected and, throwing the girl aside, reached for me with a satisfied grin. I managed to avoid his grasp, but only by throwing myself backward, and as I wasn't used to doing anything quickly without my glasses, there was no way I could avoid him forever. I yelled for help, and fortunately Power answered, calling, "Get down!" (Perhaps too fortunately, but perhaps not; I didn't have time to ponder whether this particular stroke of luck was Soul's work, another reason I was wishing for those glasses more than ever.) Getting down was an easy trick for me - I simply stumbled off my feet instead of catching my balance. To keep Pluto from following me down, I used my feet to fling Space's staff, still on the ground where she'd left it, toward his face. The Olympian reflexively grabbed the staff with both hands and chucked it at Power, just as I'd hoped he would. Wrong move on his part, of course. Power had finished charging up and released a tight wave of sound at about waist level in all directions, so powerful you could see it ripple the air like a mirage. Pluto was hit in the back and was knocked off his feet; he landed hard with blood trickling from his ears. My ears felt like they were going to bleed when I heard the small portion that reached me, too, but I got back up. Jupiter, the old fool, had also been hit, and Reality had dispatched his opponent and avoided the shockwave, leaving Venus as the only remaining Olympian with four of us still standing. We all winced in anticipation as the sound wave hit the nearest cars, shattering some windows that I was thankful had no owners inside. The situation didn't look too good for our telepathic friend; in fact, I suspected her pride was seriously hurt. Certainly my future vision revealed that she'd have some serious logistical problems getting four team members home, even without the property damage Power's blast had caused and for which the police would likely hold her responsible. Plus she still had to defeat us. So she grimaced, gestured, and took us out one by one with a mindblast. Power was the first; his body went slack and he dropped as surely as if he'd fallen asleep. I was next, and although I understandably don't remember much of the incident, I'll describe it as best I can. Getting hit by a mindblast is a lot like being bored. You know that feeling of apathy that comes upon you when you've been doing a repetitive task for too long or are trying to put off something and just wasting time, the feeling that you really can't get any work done 'cause you can't concentrate on anything? Imagine that, intensified a hundredfold, to the point where you're literally unable to think of anything. You lose muscle control simply because you're not paying attention to whether you're standing up or not. If it hurt when I hit the deck, it certainly didn't register at the time. I woke up, as best as I can estimate, about five minutes later. Venus and her friends were gone, and Reality had the rest of the team already loaded up in Power's van. He hustled me in, slammed the door, and we peeled out at teenage-hooligan speed just as local security arrived. Not as successful a mission as I'd hoped, especially considering that I had to explain how the whole thing went to Space and Mind, but it could have been worse. I suppose I should have recognized that my powers hadn't exactly been fully developed at the time. There was a lot I could have done had I had the foresight and speed to do it, and I don't doubt Reality felt the same way. But at least the Olympians wouldn't be bothering us any time soon, and I had convinced the others, except of course for Soul, that we should make this superhero thing a regular event. As Winston Churchill put it, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." Like a good little boy, I'll close the chapter with a teaser: Little did I know that there was going to be quite a bit more shooting going on in the near future. Something I should look into, actually. I'm usually quite good at predicting the future. The best, in fact. * * * * LiveJournal user evilken [Rick] wrote on 2002-10-10: A very productive day today. Unlike most days, which are complete wastes of my time. Not only did I discover I wasn't having that Spanish quiz today after all, so I wasn't totally screwed, I got myself two good CDs and something to do over the weekend besides play GTA3 over again. Really surprised me, I wasn't being, you know, all that serious or anything. But apparently we're going over to the movies - me, Kev, Lia, and her friend Becky, and maybe Jake and Bryan too, but Jake doesn't think his parents will let him. No surprise there, I don't know why he keeps asking, they've practically banned the Discovery Channel over at his place... [journal entry edited for relevance --Editor Ben] * * * * LiveJournal user evilken [Rick] wrote on 2002-10-13: My week has just been getting better and better. Plenty of compliments on my new trenchcoat, at least from the people who matter. It's not like I care about the people who didn't like it anyway. What do they know? So after school on Friday, I got to relieve some of that stress on Spanish - test today, totally failed, you know the deal. Today I got to practice my accuracy on Alex, which I really shouldn't have had fun doing but rocked anyway, totally awesome. I'm a bad person and I know it, shut up. Way better than Thursday, where I couldn't hit Lia with a brick wall even when I got mad and actually tried to. She's definitely got something going on, and it's not just 'cause she's so cool. I love being around her, even doing this kind of boring stuff, and it's always fun to let loose every once in a while. I'm not sure if she's got an LJ yet or if she's even reading this at all - if she is, I might have to be a little more secretive about it. I'm not usually the complicated plot kind of guy, but I can keep a secret when I have to. Friday night was also the coolest ever. The movie wasn't anything special, something Becky was really dying to watch. Becky's actually surprisingly cool for someone with her kind of friends. Nice people and all, but way too normal. Plus I had the perfect seat, between Lia and Kev so I could snicker with him or spend time around her. Lots of fun driving Kev home afterwards, too, music blaring out the windows rocketing along the Beltway at a speed that was way too high, whatever it was. Saturday there was some awesome Team Infinity action going on. The guy comes at me with his lightning bolts and he's all, "You can't touch me," and I can see what he's doing. It's really natural, I've probably done it a couple times myself by accident, just give the ground a little nudge and zap. So I do some of my own, mess with his aim a bit, and then bust out a standard, no-frills Dhalsim-style ball of fire at him. Nothing special, just seeing how he'll react. He's got nothing new to show me, he just runs out of the way and almost fries me with some more lightning before I can remember and do the same myself. I need something that he can't dodge, but a Sonic Hurricane is the best thing I can come up with that I remember even vaguely how to do. I warned everybody, but the other guy was pretty stupid and didn't see it coming, so I took down two of them at once. Pretty great if you ask me, especially considering our high-and-mighty fearless-leader only managed one. Who's your daddy? Yeah, me, that's who. I really should shut up and get offline, have to do homework tonight, ugh. Hope it's not too painful. |