Chapter Eight: SoulGo to chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 Another Friday night, another several hours spent in the bedroom of one Alex Brene with the door locked, just in case his parents arrived early. Becky pointed out to me the other day that I should totally start claiming Alex and I were making passionate love to each other, just to see the expression on his face. "What are you going to do? Chop me up and feed me to your dog? Sorry, all you have is a goldfish. Looks like I'm safe, then!" she said, teasing me. I'm glad she managed to defuse the situation with a little humor (at least I hope it's humor), but I can't help feeling guilty because I wouldn't tell her what we were actually doing and she knew it. Oh well, another thing to whine about to Alex, I suppose. He'd find it funny, or at least make an effort and smile for my sake. Actually, once I thought about it for a bit, my father probably thought that too. He was too polite to say he thought our meetings were, shall we say, not entirely business-related. That's how he'd put it, too; dry humor is his stock in trade. He hasn't said anything, though, and it's good to know that my secrets are safe with him, even if they are the wrong ones. Alex's parents, on the other hand... even Alex has no idea what they're thinking, and maybe they're not thinking anything at all. They really don't care what that boy does, unless he causes property damage or gets arrested or something. Not a way of life I'd enjoy, but Alex sure seems to have turned out all right. It seems so long ago that Ben handed out code names to us, bestowing "Soul" upon me with some glimpse of the future that he never told me. It must have been the future, though, because he told me I was the team's most powerful member weeks before the HSA confirmed it. I chose not to believe him, then, preferring to think that my power was unreliable, unhelpful, and generally of no account. I told myself, I'll keep coming to the Tuesday night meetings, because my friends are there. It was a comfortable way to live. Becky loves to tell me that ignorance is bliss, and for her, I suppose it is. She doesn't even know that I'm a mutant, and I like it that way. Mostly it's the fun of having a friend I can hang out with and feel normal, but I think that just a little, I'm afraid that our friendship will suffer if she learns who I really am. I've gone over this with the rest of the team; predictably, Rick was all for letting her in on my secret, as he would never dare to question Becky's integrity, because she's such a close friend of mine. Alex advised against it, though, on the presumption that more secrecy is better; when I asked Ben, he shook his head and said that telling me would only make the final result worse. If I told her, he said, it had to be out of trust; anything else would come back and haunt me. And with that, I left the matter. Another subject to ignore, to put in the dark file cabinets of my mind and hope it doesn't fester back there. So anyway, back to the topic. Friday night. Alex's room, which by now I could close my eyes and reconstruct as if it were my own. Particularly the east wall, with three posters: a favorite band, a swimsuit model whose name I never cared to learn, and the X-Men, with Cyclops in the lead. With careful probing I had gathered that the last was a sort of wry joke at himself, after reading his old comics and realizing how much his role as Reality tried to mirror Cyclops' compassionate leadership, how easily Rick fell into the role of Gambit, the loner allergic to orders who stays despite himself. He avoided the question of who I was, joking that I was Jean Grey, Cyclops' girlfriend with just enough power to make herself a target but not enough to save the team when everyone depended on her. He couldn't mean that, but it was no use asking him further, at least until I'd gotten him in the proper mood to talk, and that tended to happen only late at night on IM. Tonight, as usual, I stared at that poster, concentrating on the X-Men's features, their costumes, what it meant about the two of us and our mutant friends, and above all not thinking about what Alex was doing. I just activated my power, drawing in as much as I could until he said to stop or I collapsed, and hoped he didn't make too many mistakes. Tonight, he said, we were close. He'd got the design down at long last, all he needed to do was transform successfully. We'd only have one shot at what he was planning to do, so he needed my power to add a bit of luck on our side, a little boost to make sure he didn't shift slightly and kill me in the process. A couple weeks ago, Mind and Time had unveiled their "mindmeld" ability, a relationship that combined Mind's powers as a mentalist and Time's unusually speedy brain to mimic a true transfer of thoughts. Time, receiving impulses from Mind and sending back orders to use his empathic powers in whatever way was necessary, acted for both of them, combining their best traits in a union that everyone at the #topten IRC channel said shouldn't have existed in the first place. If all went well, Reality and Soul would do something much the same tonight: a transformation requiring both of us to put forward our utmost skill. But that's what he had said last night, when he tried only my left hand. It was still sore. I dragged myself back to the poster, refusing to think, keeping my power "on" as best I knew how. Sometimes I could control when it happened, sometimes not. Sometimes I flashed white, sometimes I didn't. (Ben theorized that the flash was due to a spontaneous generation of matter-antimatter pairs around me, their rate of random appearance and subsequent annihilation fantastically accelerated by my power.) "Lia," said Alex, "I realized what went wrong last night." "What?" I asked, shifting slightly to look at him. He was taller than I was - no surprise - and as he looked down, the lamp cast one side of his features into shadow, turning it a beautiful dark skin tone. Think about random things, that was the key. Pure observation, no desire to do anything but sit there, breathing in air still warm from the heater. But I was still curious to hear the answer. "I wasn't using my spatial sense, Lia." I raised my eyebrows, daring him to explain himself. "When I transform, I'm holding the position of my own body. I can't get perfectly aligned with something unless I'm touching it, or it's rotating in three dimensions in front of me. I need to become aware of the object as fully as possible, memorizing its position in space and holding on to it. If I just go on my mind and guesswork, it won't be effective. "So it looks like Becky may have something to talk about after all." Becky? I wondered. What does Becky have to do with this? I was totally confused, but didn't get a chance to grasp his meaning before he bent down and kissed me, hard. He pressed me against him and I wasn't sure whether to congratulate him on a brilliant idea or slap him for not telling me ahead of time. Even boys without the spatial sense that metamorphs use to transform can tell you that they know even the slightest movement of a girl they're kissing. Still, I was about to decide on the slap, but before I could make a move, he started melting. Shocked, I reached instinctively for the part of my mind that controlled the use of my power, drawing in more than I ever thought I could. More than Mizuno had drawn, for sure. The rug slipped out from under my feet, I felt a shuddering pain through my whole body, and I fell backwards, onto the bed, mouth open to cry out. I hit the bed and from the sound of it, I weighed at least three hundred pounds. It wasn't a bad guess, actually; Alex had told me that he'd be gaining a lot of mass during this transformation. I felt like I wanted to slap the boy, and I felt close on its heels a trepidation that I'd get slapped by Lia. Confusion ensued, but at the speed of thought, a euphoric realization that the transformation had been successful, and then the confusion was redoubled. I was thinking my own thoughts, and I was thinking Alex's thoughts too. "So this is Armor," I said, and it was with my voice, and with Alex's soft traces of a Southern accent. It had worked, and Alex and I basked in the realization for a few seconds, controlling the urge to jump for joy. It was more difficult than either of us suspected, controlling our emotions; I realized that it was a positive feedback loop, my emotion being felt by Alex, who responded with his own emotion, which I sensed, and so on. Or maybe Alex realized it; it was getting harder and harder to tell the difference. I knew it was me that wanted to stay where we were, exploring our new symbiotic relationship with Alex using and adding to my brain with his own thoughts, and I dangled the bait before him of being able to explore my memories, if only I would call them up. (Given time, I suspect he could access my memories as well, but since our brains were structured differently, he would have to relearn how to access his own memories, which would simply take up too much precious time even at the speed of thought.) However, he was adventurous as always, and I moved to the window and opened it, barely able to climb out. Being part of Armor wasn't like wearing a regular suit of armor. Alex had built himself around my body, strengthening my bones and muscles to support the extra weight on them, with a complicated device worked into the helmet to excite my neurons to receive Alex's thoughts. Armor existed only as a design in the HSA's classified files, as a normal powered suit designed to be worn by a telekinetic, who could manipulate the helmet to provide forcible protection against mental attack. They never reckoned that it could be recreated by a metamorph, let alone modified to work with the one mutant who could support the machine perfectly with a routine exercise of her power. They also happened to be unaware that Reality had raided their files, since their chief mentalist Alnora had declined to tell them that they were being spied on by an extremely clever metamorph. All this information I learned in a fraction of a second, and I noted it distantly as I squeezed myself through the window, leaping out of the third floor in the darkness, falling swiftly until I decided (Alex, I think, giving me the knowledge of Armor's capabilities) to fly. My feet felt a pressure on them, but no heat, and I rocketed upwards at what I estimated as twenty miles per hour. An extremely good speed for this kind of boot jets, I noted. I left no trail behind: since the fuel was coming from Armor directly, which was really Alex in a different form, he simply reabsorbed it and transformed it into fuel. We spent an enjoyable evening listening to each other think, sometimes flying, sometimes running, once shouldering right through a tree. Whenever Armor needed to do something out of the ordinary, we would requisition Lia's and Alex's powers in tandem to have it change and reform better than it was before. I had read poems about magical nights next to a beloved under the stars, but even without the rose-colored glasses of love, those couldn't compare to the wonder of walking in someone else's shoes, and in your own, acting as one because you were one. When Alex was standing before me, and I was left with what felt like a roaring silence in my head, I smiled and said, "Next time, tell me before kissing me, OK?" He promised he would, and drove me home despite my protestations. No romantic tension for us; we both knew the situation better than we could have guessed when we started talking online, before I heard rumors of Armor's development and before we knew a symbiosis like this was possible. I wanted to try it again as soon as possible, I never wanted to do it again except in the direst need: good old conflicting feelings this time, not someone else's thoughts sharing my space. I avoided questions from my parents, saying only that Alex had finished the project he was working on, and that he would show it to the rest of the team on Tuesday. It took me a long time to get to sleep. I wanted to talk to someone and try to make sense of everything, but Becky and Alex were both out of the question, so I had to go it alone. * * * * That Tuesday afternoon, we showed Armor to the rest of the team. They were, to put it simply, horrified. I avoided Rick's gaze, and sensing my reluctance, so did Alex. That was fine, though; with my admittedly conflicted feelings for him, and Alex's quite different take on the situation, any time Rick was brought up in our thoughts the emotions were too tangled for us to untie even with two brains. So we put up with Ben's rampant curiosity and Sarah's joking mood, while Timothy (who was obviously just as unsettled as Rick, but for different reasons) took Rick upstairs to explain the situation to him. He wouldn't admit it to my face, but it didn't take a mentalist to know that he was jealous. It was sweet, to know that he wanted to be close to me like that, but it was still... well... Rick. But enough of that. I avoided Rick in the hallways for at least a week. When he finally caught up with me, I thought he was going to say something terrible by his expression, but his face twisted with the effort of keeping his words from popping out and he continued in a voice as normal as he could make it, "So, you and Alex. I should have guessed." I had feared this much was coming. I protested, but knew it would do no use. I tried reason: "Don't you think Becky would have told you, even if I didn't have the guts to?" "She did," he pointed out wryly. The beginnings of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth, but he quickly suppressed them. Oh well, I thought, it was worth a try. I didn't know how to answer Rick except by telling him the truth - but maybe I shouldn't say anything. That would be far easier. Still, I think I owed him that much. I was silent for a moment, and Rick made as if to leave. I knew his emotions were gathering up inside him. Before long, he would burst, and I didn't want to be around when it happened. "Wait." He stopped for a moment before turning around, doubtless a technique he adopted from the grade-B movies he loved to watch. "Rick, I know how you feel, but there's nothing I can do to change what's happened. Alex and I are friends, and I'd like to think I'm your friend as well." Taking hold of himself, he swept his cloak around him. He looked me in the eyes and nodded to know he got the message, then favored me with a ragged smile and an attempt at humor. "Well, from what Becky's told me, I'm up to be *that* kind of friend anytime." He left, but I knew he'd be back. I only hoped he'd be back like he was before. Just close enough for me to feel his solid, reassuring presence, but not close enough to create problems. It's a fine line I trod, but I just didn't feel ready to say anything more. Maybe it would all work out. But I doubted it. I heard from Alex that Timothy had approached him, explaining why Armor bothered him so much. Since we were essentially both working through my brain, he felt our emotions as we felt them - swirling, always threatening to get out of control, often completely contradictory and at war - and it was not the mind of a normal human. It was the mind of a badly damaged schizophrenic, and it went against all his gut feelings. Plus, his emotional control was considerably less effective on Armor: since Alex's brain impulses were being fed into a different brain, he couldn't affect them directly, only attempt to counteract them actively. The long and short of it was that Timothy would work with Armor if he had to, but he practically begged Alex not to do it except in direst need. Alex remarked that the mere fact that Timothy complained about having to keep active watch on his emotional powers around Armor meant that despite his protestations, our resident empath had grown considerably in power since his battle with Mizuno. Alex suspected that he was able to gather some of Mizuno's methods, counteract them, and then expand upon them to gain the fine control that is the hallmark of a trained mentalist, the control that Venus of the Olympians had feared enough to attack Mind before Reality. "In a few months," wrote Alex over IM, "he will be good enough not only to accomplish his own ends, but to protect the rest of us from mental attack." It made me think about the rest of the team. Much as I hated to admit it, Ben was turning out to be right. We'd all seen Rick grow in skill and raw power with our own eyes, while Sarah put in far more sweat and tears than he did for the most meager result, like the ability to find things inside her gateway at a moment's notice. If Alex was right, the team was on a fairly even slope from Sarah and Ben, up to Rick and Timothy, with Alex and I at the top. I couldn't help feeling a little guilty, as I was possibly the person on the team who put forward the least effort. I pretended to be practicing, but what could I practice when I had no idea what would happen? All I could do is turn my power on or off and try to put myself in situations where I could think quickly and use anything my mutant ability dropped at my feet. I had no idea how I did what I did, only that by concentrating just so, I could make it happen. It still came unbidden at the oddest of times; old habits are hard to break, especially when I wasn't really trying. Like Timothy, I leaned on my power to keep me going, for fear that when I let it go, I would be revealed as no more than a sham, someone who got through life on the strength of genetics, the easy way. There were some things that I couldn't tell Alex, and this was one of them. I asked Ben at school on Friday what he saw for me. As usual, he was evasive, claiming I would only get the wrong idea if I were told too many of the possible future paths. Finally, he said, "Soon, your powers will be pushed to their limit and beyond. When matters come to a head, you must not flinch, or..." "Or what?" Ben was often depressing, but not like this. Cryptic was not a good sign, coming from someone who usually told the future as if he were telling last week's news headlines. Ben swallowed and looked away as he spoke. "Or Alex will die." Oddly, I didn't think of the battle or the awful load now placed on my shoulders, but instead of the pain Ben must be experiencing. And he sees this every day! I thought. On impulse, I pulled him to me and gave him a hug. Bewildered, he returned the embrace, and we stayed there for a moment, and I said softly, "It's hard to be a precog sometimes, isn't it?" All he said was "Yes," but I felt from his body language that it took a bigger toll on him than most of us realized. He walked away, and I hurried to class, thinking of how everyone seemed to be hiding beneath their accepted roles lately. Perhaps it was time for me to find some backbone myself. I only hoped I could do it. * * * * I had just gotten onto the subway for home after a movie outing with my friends on Sunday night, having politely refused Rick's offer to travel a half-hour out of his way to drive me home as well as Becky, when I remembered that I had left my favorite pen on the bench waiting for the train to come. Looking around quickly, I saw nobody was looking at me, and so I risked a little exercise of my power. A very small flash this time, which meant either that I was getting better or that only a small change was needed for a noticeable effect. Unfortunately, no pen was forthcoming as the door closed, and the train started moving. The train was jam-packed, so I was unable to find a seat that wasn't between a lady weighing three hundred pounds and an old man who looked ready to explode with fury over some imagined slight. My semi-random use of power did indeed come in handy, as I was grabbing a rail when the train jerked to a stop just before it finished leaving the station. The doors to the car behind mine opened smoothly, a man in a navy blue three-piece suit and deep red tie walked in, and the train was off just as quickly as it had stopped. A couple passengers swore at the driver for stopping for someone after the train was underway, and a couple more threw frightened glances at their loved ones, realizing what I had immediately thought. The man was a mutant, and one powerful enough to control a train without any outward signs of exerting effort. I made my way back to the car he was sitting in with just a shade too much haste, causing some passengers to look at me suspiciously. He was switching his Washington Post for today's Wall Street Journal when he noticed me. "Hello, can I hel--" He took a second look, and started his sentence anew. "Soul! How nice to finally meet you in person!" He grabbed my hand and shook it. I'm afraid that I almost fainted. I'm not usually a flighty person, but I've always been afraid of being exposed and shunned as some kind of mutant freak, one reason it was difficult to tell my parents about my power except with Alex there to prevent me from backing down. Besides, there should be nobody outside the team who could recognize us on sight; Timothy took care of that after each of our missions. The man rose from his seat instantly, seeing I was about to fall. A strong hand on my arm steadied me, and when I was able to focus my eyes again I noticed that not only was he looking at me with concern, but several other passengers as well. I must have made a noise or something. He took a quick look around, then dragged me down to the seat beside him so we could have some measure of privacy. "Wait a minute," I said. "How do you know my name?" Since he knew me but Timothy hadn't worked on him, he must also have access to the HSA's IRC channel. A white male from the HSA's ten most powerful mutants list - that could only be four people, and I had a sneaking suspicion I knew which one it was. Of course, I preferred to appear ignorant rather than have him assume I knew too much, though, so I kept all signs of recognition off my face. "Come on, a bright girl like you should have figured it out by now. Here's a hint!" He proffered me a monogrammed handkerchief, with which I promptly blew my nose. Clogged sinuses are pretty much the exact opposite of a dignified appearance, but the whole fainting like a schoolgirl bit had already put me at the bottom of the dignity barrel, so I figured one more little concession wouldn't hurt. The monogram was JT, which was the clincher. "Mars." My voice was steadier than my thoughts, which were still whirling. Was this the moment I would be put to the test? One on one, against the most powerful mutant in the country? "Right you are, Soul. Although frankly, I think I might go back to being John Tyler for a while. All this supervillain posturing is really a drag. I bet you know just how it feels. Here you are again, off to save the day with your ragtag band of high-schoolers. Tell me, are you considerate enough to do all the work yourself, or do you let them risk their necks and clean up afterward?" His eyes sparkled with merriment. He was poking fun at me, completely relaxed. Not a bad conversationalist, either, and nice enough to keep his voice down so no one else could hear us well enough to realize what we were talking about. Still, he was a little too arrogant for my tastes, and I needed to save some face badly, so I decided to see just how far his cocky attitude extended into reality. "Actually, I'm not the team leader. Reality is. He's a metamorph, and I daresay nearly as powerful as I am." I had the satisfaction of seeing him draw back a little, on the defense. But his calculating expression soon shifted to amusement, and he was back to his old self again as he said, "Nearly as powerful? Think one-hundredth of your power." He paused, studying my face, which was a mask of skepticism that the disparity between Alex and I, who only a week ago had stretched our powers to new heights together, could be so great. He quickly divined the source of my skepticism, though. "Oh, you haven't been on IRC lately. Alnora has his new results up. You're third place!" I could only whisper "Third..." as control of the situation slipped more and more out of my grasp. Mars was piling information on me too fast to assimilate, and his unshakable self-confidence only made it worse. He probably saw it as giving me a little ego boost, showing that I was more powerful than I suspected. To cover for myself for a bit, I asked, "So why don't you just attack me, if I'm so powerful? One day I could be a threat, you know." No laugh this time, just a smile. "Actually, I was thinking of doing that sometime this week. Since your team is in school this week, would Saturday afternoon be good?" I had yet to stammer out a reply when he announced, "This is my stop!" and motioned me to get out of my seat to allow him to pass. I did so, shaking my head as he opened the doors with a thought and walked right off the moving train. He flaunts his power, I thought, daring me to match him in brazen self-display, knowing his confidence will serve him well. I suspect that if he could, he would have flown off like Superman; instead, he hovered a few feet above the ground as he shot past the train tracks, over the freeway, and to his destination. The tabloids picked up a "mysterious flying man" the next day, with "exclusive photos" that told me nothing I didn't already know. I had a date - Saturday - and now I had to get the team ready. Fortunately, we had a leader precisely for these occasions. * * * * Friday night, I was unable to sleep. Even a couple sleeping pills did no good, and I stayed up until the small hours of the night doing nothing but surfing the Internet aimlessly. Ben's words kept ringing in my mind, and Alex's advice: "Get some sleep, Lia. Against Mars, what we're going to need more than anything else is luck, especially since our most powerful team member is likely going to be our adversary's first target. Take care of yourself!" I checked the IRC channel on a whim, and Alnora informed me that Mars planned to attack us tomorrow morning. When I told him that we had, in fact, arranged the whole thing, he was understandably upset. He didn't like having the first- and third-place slots on his list fight it out. Not only would he lose a valuable opportunity to study the prime of mutant power (since both of us were now in the Washington area, Alnora could examine us telepathically from HSA headquarters), but in this kind of a fight, innocent bystanders could be hurt. A lot of innocent bystanders. I wasn't sure whether his promise to make sure that all civilians would be out of the way when we fought was intended to be a threat or not, but it eased my heart a little. I fell asleep nearly three hours after I had planned, still feeling no better about the whole situation. * * * * Rick parked his van a considerable distance away from the site of the battle, a public park mysteriously empty despite the fact that it was a perfectly serviceable day. OK, an overcast day, but I knew there would still have been a crowd of admirers had Alnora not stepped in and cleared the area. He wouldn't stop our fight for some reason - perhaps the HSA higher-ups had put some regulations around legal use of his mind control - but he could make sure it stayed a family matter, so to speak. Mars was waiting for us, with a picnic basket and his usual suit and tie. As we arrived, he looked up and carefully took off his suitcoat, and switched ties for a black one instead of the red I'd seen him wear. "My fighting clothes," he explained, as soon as we were in earshot. "Red is my favorite color, but I used black in my very first serious battle and it's stayed with me ever since." Our team was attired in similar outfits: not good enough that we'd have wasted money should they be damaged, but respectable and indicative of our personalities. I was, of course, wearing purple, a commemorative shirt from a Washington cultural fair or music festival or something. I love purple, and unlike Mars, I didn't have to worry about whether my tie would change color when I regenerated. Actually, I'd rather regenerate with different clothes than not at all, but that's beside the point. As per the plan, we moved to encircle him. He was still talking, not out of nervousness (that had, I suspect, been bred out of him long ago) but simply to pass the time. "Now, I know a lot of villains like to bore you with talk about their awesome and unbeatable power, so I won't. I prefer to let my actions speak for me, as they say. I don't need to be reminded that I'm the best, so I'll refrain from doing so to you, I hope. In fact, just to see what all you have planned, I'll let you strike first. Give me all you got, and see how long it takes before Soul steps up to the plate, that's what I'm going to do." As an afterthought, he added, "Of course, if you decline to attack, you can just concede defeat, we'll all eat a couple sandwiches, and I'll deliver you to the hospital with only minor injuries. A broken bone or two apiece, we'll say, to make it look like you put up a good fight. You can even claim nefarious tactics on my part, I don't mind." He held up the picnic basket, making a jest out of the whole thing. Taking a quick look around, he shrugged, pretending to be disappointed. "Oh well, I didn't think you were going to surrender anyway. Besides, this way lets me gain more knowledge about your powers, and every mutant has at least something to commend him." Time said nothing, merely raised a handgun and pointed it squarely at Mars' chest. He paused, cocking one eyebrow at our adversary. "I'm not wearing armor, if that's what you want to know. My defenses, such as they are, don't have convenient gaps that you can shoot through with what I presume is your genetically superior marksmanship. Although--" Mars was rudely interrupted by a shot straight through his right eye, placed to get to the brain even if the man had an unbreakable skull. He yelled in pain, shimmered and dimmed a little bit as if a cloud had passed over him, and his wound was healed. Time had shifted his aim, and as soon as Mars started to heal his wound, put another shot square in his heart. Mars choked a little, and promptly healed that one too. Even his tie, blown to one side by a slight wind, was back to its normal straight position. I could see the wheels turning in Time's brain as he emptied the rest of the clip at Mars, who took several bullet hits and then healed again, once for all his wounds. My heart began to sink; if bullets couldn't even slow him down, what hope did the rest of us have? In all the movies, when someone is out of ammunition, they have to pull the trigger at least three times to make sure that yes, it is out. Time had simply been counting bullets, and as he fired off the last shot (which shattered a kneecap) he was already in position to load in a new clip. I was next to him, so I saw what I don't think anyone else did: as he reloaded, he flicked a switch on the bottom of the clip. With a snarl of anger at being thwarted, he leaped forwards, hurling his gun at Mars as he attacked. Mars caught the weapon neatly in midair, turned it to Time, and fired. Time, however, had expected this, and cut his jump well short of Mars. By the time the trigger was pulled, he was nearly on the ground, and so was driven downwards instead of blown back as the gun exploded, taking an entire hand with it. Even I jumped at that; I knew Time had some trick up his sleeve, but explosives that powerful had to be illegal, or at least extremely difficult to get as a minor. Of course, less than a second later, Mars was just as he'd always been, although his expression was a little less pleasant. He knew we meant business. "An admirable try, Time. Unfortunately, that ploy could only work on me once, and someone tried that on me in 1912. I lost my left arm in that fight, and it took me an entire week to attain the concentration necessary to regain it. I spent the rest of the year training, under every kind of pain imaginable, until I had my regeneration down to a reflex. Even decapitation won't stop me now, since as soon as the blade touches my throat I have already started the regeneration process." "My, aren't we gregarious today?" muttered Time, rubbing the elbow that he'd landed on. An infinitesimal nod from Reality, and Space grabbed her locket, then sent her gateway hurling in a sphere towards Mars. The old grenade trick that Mizuno had invented. I wondered at the use of this, since it had already been proven that most physical attacks were ultimately ineffective against him. Indeed, Mars simply laughed, until the gateway reached him, then stayed there, moving to his center of mass even as he tried to throw himself away. It slowly grew larger, eating more and more of him. He screamed then, an surprisingly pain-filled scream from one who'd just boasted of enduring pain. His eyes blazed, he gestured with one hand, and a lightning bolt streaked out of the sky directly onto Space's locket, shattering it into a hundred twisted bits of metal. The gateway disappeared without the locket for Space to focus through, and Mars was whole again a moment later. His voice had lost all pretense of humor as their eyes met. "Touch my person with that gateway again, Space, and I will kill you. You have been warned." Straightening his tie (although it was, of course, unnecessary), he looked around. "Next try?" He was promptly blown off his feet and three yards to his left by a blast of what I suspected to be plasma from Power; certainly the portion that splashed off Mars started fires in the grass where they fell. Time and Mind backed out of the way, and the rest of us moved to re-establish our circle where he got up. "Almost good enough, Power!" he taunted. In answer, Power blasted off with his trademark jets, then called down a lightning bolt on Mars. Fascinated by Power's mutant abilities, Mars took the bolt head-on, and gave another cry before he regenerated. Then, he smiled again, and said, "Well, if you want an old-fashioned duel, you shall have one!" With that, he copied Power's jets and the lightning strike. Power diverted the bolt away from him, but Mars promptly diverted it back, obviously anticipating the move. Power shoved himself out of the way with another burst of self-propulsion, and a laser shot from the pointing finger of his free hand. Apparently he didn't believe everything Mars said, as our opponent's head was soon falling seperately from his body. To my dismay, Mars' head soon returned to its rightful spot. Finding self-propulsion boring, he settled to the ground and sent a column of energy upwards beneath Power. My power activated instinctively, prompting Power to twist barely out of its way as part of his preparations for a strike with sound waves to hammer Mars until he could get close to him. The strike never reached him, as Mars countered with another, even more powerful sound wave that overrode the first. I felt a cold knot form in the pit of my stomach, and I frantically reached for my power. Before the attack reached power, a gateway flashed in front of him, absorbing the sound waves, then blinked out and reappeared to send it back at Mars. Space sat there gaping at what she'd just done. As I'd saved my life a long time ago by altering Power's attack, now I saved his with Space's gateway. She tried moving the gateway, and to her surprise, it worked normally, despite her locket having been blown out of existence. I supposed I must have removed a mental block or something preventing her from using her power except with the locket; I'd have to ask Timothy for the full explanation, and since the result was good, I didn't really care. This I'll say for Space, she's quick on her feet. The gateway yawned wide behind Mars, and her locomotive crashed into him, grinding him beneath its wheels at fantastic speed and disappearing into the gateway. Or at least that's what it was intended to do; instead, Mars, forgetting his notion of toying with us, annihilated the whole thing, leaving it a haze of dust, before it could return into the gateway. Space's eyes widened; seeing what had happened, the rest of the team leaped to the attack. Time and Mind rushed to join each other, starting their mindmeld at a safe distance from the rest of the team. I ran in a wide circle attempting to flank my enemy, keeping (or trying to keep, at least) my power on as I ran. Reality flowed to the attack, his form rippling into a thousand different shapes, each presenting a new menace. Mars was momentarily set back on his heels by Reality's attack, forced to regenerate as fast as he could think, save perhaps a laser blast or two to keep Power on his toes. Space was helpless, as any attack on Mars would involve Reality as well. We'd never been willing to take the risk of putting Alex inside the gateway, for fear that he would be unable to sense his body's presence any more and have to rebuild his mass from scratch, an exercise that he might not be powerful enough to perform at all. Finally, seeing Power create his skin-tight shield to protect against one attack, Mars applied his own shield, forcing Reality to retreat to within a couple inches of him. To show off his power, the shield quickly became a sphere, destroying all in its path, vaporizing Reality's current many-bladed form into its component atoms as it expanded. Mars was thoroughly enjoying himself now, delighted at the prospect of victory using only the powers used against him and his natural regeneration. "Come on, Reality, you've got to have taught your kids more than that!" Reality reappeared, yelled "Attack!" and promptly transformed into a rocket, which landed right next to me before he transformed back. He looked at me and I knew what we had to do, even as Time called, "Reality! Get into your Armor form right now!" Ignoring the propriety of Ben ordering Alex around, I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around his neck, looking over his shoulder to see how the rest of the battle was going. It was now Power and Space's turn to show off their two-man attack. Forbidden to touch Mars with a gateway, Space instead flickered it rapidly between Power, who was pouring a long continuous energy blast straight at him, and at different angles around, above, and even below Mars, making protection by anything less than a full shield impossible. At the same time, Mind started a mental assault, doing I don't know what, but it seemed to be working, as Mars was constantly regenerating, his shield flickering. I didn't have time to see any more, because Reality said softly, "God be with us!" and we formed Armor. The boot jets served us well, and we came down right on top of Mars, with automatic weapons blazing away in my armored hands. Our adversary threw himself out of our path, dusted himself off, and exclaimed "Finally, the heroine steps up to the plate!" He snapped his fingers and created an earthquake, knocking everyone off their feet except for me; a judicious flash of power and the earth under our feet remained solid, with cracks ringing it. Mars, surprised, stopped his attack. I strode forward slowly until I practically looked Mars in the face, and knowing my thoughts, Alex slid Armor's helmet back so my face was clear. "For the world's most powerful mutant, you're more ignorant than you look," I said, looking up at him with a challenge in my gaze. I knew what I wanted to say, but it was Alex who provided me with the courage to say it. "Our powers are opposites, you and I. You use up the energy around you to do what you want, and I create it to do what I want. You should have known the first time you saw me flash. When you use your power for something major like regeneration, you dim, because you're absorbing some of the light particles around you. When I use mine, I flash, because I'm increasing the rate of particle collisions around me." I smiled, caught by a sudden thought - his or mine, I don't remember. "And I thought physics class was useless!" "You can control anything you want, except for me. Our powers cancel each other out; whatever you use to attack, I can deflect, avoid, or counteract, and since mine is instinctual, I'm even faster than you are. You can, of course, defeat them," - this with an offhand gesture to the rest of the team that made Rick bristle - "but they don't really count, do they? What matters is that the mighty Mars has been forced to a draw against a whiny schoolgirl." Mind had indeed kept his promise: he read our emotions, discerned our plan, and ever so subtly tweaked Mars' mind to accommodate it. Mars responded accordingly; he raised his hands and a small piece of flame appeared in each of them; then he moved one in front of the other and they were a gigantic pillar of fire rising straight up from his palms. "You want me to try to kill you? Very well, I won't hold back. It's your funeral!" He raised his hand, and we were engulfed in flames. For all my vaunted power, I had very little experience with being shot at, burned, attacked with energy bolts, etc. and so I allowed Alex's superior instincts to take over. I remember little of the battle Armor fought with Mars, only that wherever he turned his head, there was another death-dealing weapon in my hand. An impossibly sharp whip that cut him in two before he started feeling pain, a full-fledged missile launcher, a tiny bag of antimatter particles that blossomed into a fireball even Armor could barely withstand, or just an armored foot with more than its weight of force behind it. But for every blow we dealt him, there was another threat coming at us. Everything from the usual assault of lightning, fire, wind, earthquakes and extreme cold, to a physical attempt to rip Alex off of me (which failed only by a small margin as Alex intensified the supports that molded him to my body) or a cloud of impossibly potent acid that required a complete chemical change of Armor's surface and a "lucky" reapportionment of Mars's next wind strike to blow the cloud away. We faced everything, and I learned how it felt to be a champion on the field of battle. As a stray lightning bolt hit Ben before he could dodge it, causing Space to run to his side and slap up a gateway above the two of them, Mars wiped sweat from his brow (forgetting that he didn't have any physical sweat, only mental exertion) and rasped, "Enough." He folded his arms, sat down, and closed his eyes. Armor's internal sensors went wild. Radiation, thought Alex. No, Alex, I thought back. A nuclear blast forming, right next to us. He's gathering material for a very small but very effective hydrogen bomb, and there's nothing we can do to stop him that we haven't already tried. And then an idea came to us. "Time!" I shouted. "Space!" he shouted in turn, grabbing her shoulder and pointing. Armor peeled away from me -- I felt the last lingering thoughts of Alex's being pulled away -- to enclose me in an ovoid of the strongest, most radiation-absorbent material he could imagine. Space put her gateway around the whole area, a sphere that cut off all light, making me unsure which closed over first, Reality's shell or Space's gateway. Mars pressed on. The light struck me first, and then the roar of sound, and then the explosion. I could not tell where the light was from, my own flash or the explosion, but I felt my power being stretched to its limit and beyond as my brain frantically worked to protect me. A... fold... in space opened up around me, everything drawn past me like air over an airplane wing to rush smoothly into the gateway, which disappeared. Two seconds later, I held in my arms the body of Alex Brene. I staggered under his weight and almost fell. I can't feel his breathing! I thought frantically. Was he dead or merely unconscious? I realized that this was what having to create a new body from scratch took out of him: his previous form, the shell, was drifting as individual molecules somewhere inside Space's gateway, where he could not access it. I wanted nothing more than to help him, but I had no choice. I laid him down beside me and lifted my head to see Space's counterattack. More swiftly than she had ever dared before except in the most mind-numbing drills in Alex's backyard, a sphere formed around Mars. As soon as it was complete, she summoned the explosion, only slightly diminished by its work destroying Reality and traveling a few meters of space. Because there was no opening, I heard and saw nothing but a silvery globe where Mars had once stood. I knew that Space would keep pouring the explosion through the sphere, from different directions, until not even Mars could regain his form long enough to start another regeneration and he would die. Victory was near, I thought. His most powerful weapon had turned against him. But like Space, I did not reckon with the instincts of a man who had spent over a century as a warrior, and an extraordinarily powerful and versatile mutant warrior at that. The fold I had created around me instead forced a wedge open in the air above us, pushing the gateway aside as it pushed space itself aside. It took only a fraction of a second for Space to turn off the explosion, but too much of its force had been lost, shooting straight up. The cloud the concentrated nuclear blast hit on its way up was flash-heated out of existence and disappeared as if God had taken an eraser to it. Mars shot up out of the hole in the gateway, leaving both arms and much of his shoulders behind, for the hole was too narrow, as he was propelled into the stratosphere, and triggered his regeneration five hundred feet up. His tie was, as usual, black, and in perfect condition, as he began falling. Mars had taken several direct nuclear blasts, attacks that should have annihilated him instantly before he had a chance to fully regenerate, and torn a hole in the fabric of spacetime itself to get out. And he wasn't even ruffled. Ben's words came back to me now. "If you don't... Alex will die." He spoke truer than he knew; by the look on his face, Mars was ready to kill all six of us if it meant having his revenge on Space. The girl who had always been the weakest of us, the one whose specialty was in protection and procuring supplies, had showed just how far she'd advanced. Just like all the rest of us, except for me. I knew that it was time for me to see how far I could go. Time to prove Alnora and Alex and Ben and all the others right, instead of wrong, for a change. Mars flicked a finger at Space, who was thrown twenty feet in the air, came down painfully, and got back up extremely slowly. Power and Time got the same treatment; Mind was already on his knees, with what looked to be a twisted ankle from a stray shot that Armor had dodged. Another finger at me raised me into the air level with him, propelled by Mars's powers creating a gravity well above us that exactly balanced out Earth's pull. (We'd found out he flew this way when Armor's first missile shot detonated above his head instead of going straight; future missile shots were always aimed downward to compensate, as Alex would have said.) "There's one really gratifying thing about being a supervillain, Soul," he told me, bringing me to him and cupping my chin in one hand as he looked into my eyes, searching for something I was too scared and andrenaline-high to figure out. "When you use your full power, you can make it as flashy as you want. And then when you win, you can kill the heroes slowly and painfully." The last words were drawn out with hatred; Mars was only human, I realized, and all this regenerating and exerting of power had taken a toll on him. He pushed me away, and we stood some distance apart on thin air. Mars, laughing, stretched out his hands, and the world erupted in chaos. I had thought I was facing the fiercest assault I'd ever seen when he attacked Armor with one thing after another, different every time. This was all of them at once. And to make it deadlier, some of them weren't attacking me at all. They were after my friends, my teammates. I closed my eyes, yelled as Alex and Ben had taught us to do when performing a martial arts strike, and opened the floodgates of my power. I seemed to recede from my body and mind, a part of me distantly watching myself rage against energy and death of every kind, fully aware of what I was doing and how I was doing it. I was ashamed to have ever doubted Alnora, who long ago must have seen the potential hidden in me, saved for the day when I would be just crazy enough, pushed to the brink of despair and removed of inhibitions as Timothy's gift to me before he was knocked out, to let it all go. When the comic books talk of these moments, they describe them as horrifying and yet exhilarating. I can say now that only "horrifying" does any justice to what I experienced. I was beyond exhilarated, I was consumed by my power, matching Mars stroke for stroke whatever happened, stopping his efforts in their tracks or diverting them or even reversing them. Flowers grew under Reality's prone form that a second ago had been razor-sharp blades of grass, and the next second would be a pool of gasoline struck by a match. I had never been this out of control in my whole life, but in the way that mattered, my instincts served me best: true to my boast, I was just as fast as he was, if not faster. Space later told me she saw me shining as if I were a floodlamp, my power in use so much it was a constant stream of light, while Mars had seemed to recede under a dark haze, over half the light rays that struck his body being absorbed and reused to feed his power. And then Mars stepped up his attack. We warred with our rips in space, with our fountains of pure energy wherever he created them, with all the power that lay in the air and the earth and any other object that was handy. Rubble accumulated on the edge of my functional range, fragments of a thousand things Mars and I had created and in the next instant destroyed. There was nothing he couldn't do, and nothing I couldn't match him in. Space, fatally wounded by a Kleenex driven through her chest at ten thousand miles per hour, rose to her feet and fled from us, perfectly healed. We pushed each other to ever greater heights, and then a black light blossomed in my eyes, I felt pain beyond Armor and beyond anything I had imagined could occur, and I remembered no more. |