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~ The opposite of a regret, is a story.

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Tag Archives: superhero

Going After the Flying Man

08 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Fiction, Superhurt

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Fantasy, Fiction, free, Mind-reader, Mumina, Science Fiction, story, Superbattle, superhero

As Told By Mumina:

I remembered Thom was there only because Rita looked at him.  I felt her shock.  That’s the way it usually goes around him.  She frowned with her forehead, trying to keep from forgetting again, while he played it cool and tried to make himself unseen.  Bit by bit, the sharpness of her interest washed away.

This is when, usually, Thom disappears.  Not this time.  Something in his thinking snagged me.  I caught my breath and tried to listen; vibrations, like a purring motor, wrapped around me.  Suddenly I couldn’t see myself, or feel.  All around me was a maze of rigid boxes, collapsing and folding like a colorless kaleidoscope.  I was split, and splitting in his maze, a beam in a prism, breaking.  Streaks of me untying into channels, feeding his machine.  In another beat, I wouldn’t be myself.

There was a shudder, a crack, and all my streaks were snapping back to me like rubber bands.  Thom’s mind was around me, smoky and strong, gumming up his cogs – clinging to me, like a friend.  In another second it pushed me out again.

Thom and I stood across the room, screaming the same wordless horror noise.  His eyes were open in a thousand-acre stare.  Mine were, probably, too.  And then we stopped screaming and looked like normal at each other.

“I’m gonna go,”  He said.  And left.

I looked at Rita.  “What was that?”

Neither of us knew, before, that Thom had all that locked away inside of him.  He probably worked really hard to keep me away from that part of him. I wondered if he knew it was an accident, me going into his mind.  Now I knew things he didn’t want me to know.  Things about him, and things about others, too.  There were names, and places – things I had seen, in that maze, like shimmering reflections.  There were others who had been in his mind, gotten parts of themselves eaten by his machine.  But I didn’t see how, unless Thom knew a whole bunch of mind-readers he never told me about.

“Never mind that now,” Rita told me.  “Say the names again.  Say the place.”

“Skybach,” I told her.  There were other names I told her, too.  There was a place, deep under water in the middle of the ocean.  It had a name, and you could find it using satellite.  Rita read the truth in me and put it into words.

We’d all seen videos of Flying Man.  Before I met Rita, I wondered about him.  He’s almost an urban legend.  People who meet him swear that he’s real, and people who post videos all say the videos are real.  But some of the videos are definitely fake, and some of the people who swear that they met him are definitely liars.  Some people said he was white, and some people said he was black.  Some people said that he was aliens, a few of them, like supermans among us.  It was kind of cool when I met Rita, and you could show her videos and she knew which ones were real.

So when I saw him in Thom’s mind and thought he might be another mind-reader, we looked for him on the internet.  The first thing that popped up was this new video of him and a lady on his shoulders getting sucked into a twister.  No one knew who the lady was.  Rita could tell from looking that the twister was people like us, and she thought they were going to the secret underwater lair.

I didn’t want to go on a rescue-mission.  I’m not the judgmental type to weigh right versus wrong or good versus evil; from Thom’s perspective, it was wrong for us to even know about the flying man.  From my point of view, it was possible to die by following tornados, picking fights with guys who had superpowers, or going to the bottom of the ocean with no plan for how to breathe.  But Rita’s stubborn and I’m influenced easily.  Her perspective is, mysteries are more dangerous than tornados or powers or the bottom of the ocean.

We had to go, and we had to bring Jayson, in case we were hurt.  (Jayson’s a healer.  He’s roommates with Thom’s girlfriend.)  Sometimes Jayson and Thom act like they hate us because we bring them into drama all the time.  If I could find a way to make them like us that didn’t involve not getting into drama all the time, I’d do it.

So we went to them and Amare said she was coming, so that meant they all would come.  Then when we were all standing there excited and on the same page for once, it dawned on us what useless powers we actually have.  We spent like twenty minutes brainstorming ideas for how to get to this lair on the bottom of the ocean and shooting each other down.  Somebody – I think it was Thom – said I should brain-rape somebody with a boat until I knew how to drive it and steal it, and Rita listed reasons why I wouldn’t.  Amare excitedly grabbed a screwdriver out of her random junk drawer saying we could pry off her fingers and shoot them over the ocean in fireworks, then have Jayson heal her while we grabbed hold of her hair and hopefully his power would make us all fly over the ocean to meet with the reconstructed digits.  Then somebody – I think it was Thom – took the screwdriver away.  Jayson said no.

I slipped into Rita’s mind and got all swallowed by her icicles.  She keeps everything chiseled and pure and pointing out.  Looking through her at Amare, I sensed a cosmic snag; currents of awareness, always moving, tangled.  I shot out of Rita’s mind and into hers, and all the frosty goodness kinked into cotton candy.  Atmosphere Amare was pink and spiky – excitingly, teeth-sucking sweet.  It hurt like soda-burps out your nose.  Her memories scattered around me, loud and glaring, no real secrets but a thousand stories there was no point in telling anymore.  There were a bunch of them starting to pile up; ones she was avoiding, that she knew we’d like to see.  They collapsed around me when I leaned in – people and places and bank accounts spanning the globe, relationships untended, nothing entirely dead.

I snapped back into my skin.  “You were holding out on us!”  I yelled at Amare.  “Just to make us explode your fingers!”

Amare shrugged, then shouted, “Let’s go!”

We all went racing out the door after her.  Long story short, we used her secret money and things she knew about to fly to the closest island to that underwater lair and buy a boat – a big one.  She already knew how to drive it.

Amare has like, a lot of money.  She gave us all some decent cash before we left, so nobody minded that we’d be missing work.  Before we all took off, she floated the idea that we quit our day jobs and be a super-hero league.  Rita said yes, in pursuit of truth.  Jayson said yes, if she kept paying him this much every week, but Rita corrected him saying he was only in it to keep us all safe.  (He waited until later on the boat when she was throwing up to tell her she was wrong, and he didn’t make her better until Amare said she’d pay him extra.)  Thom didn’t say anything.  Or maybe he said yes.

Anyway, we were on the ocean for a few days before we reached the secret base.  We knew we were getting close when we spotted this eerie glowing ring in the air, like a halo.  In the middle there was a big metal shell, like a spaceship, and a woman sitting in a pretzel-shape and making gaspy sounds.

“They’re dead,” said Rita, looking up at the woman.  “She killed them.”

There was a sudden plunk, and next to our boat in the water was a white mess of foam, with three people gasping and writhing.

“Oh,” said Rita.  “Never mind.”  I looked at her until she explained:  “She only thought she killed them.”

We tried scooping the people out of the white mess, but the white mess came up with them, like a net.  Above us, the sky trembled, with little veins of shimmering branching off the halo.  The shimmering went black and rainy.  Then I understood – somewhere in the halo was the tornado-maker.  I stood up to see it better, opening my mind.

Suddenly I was in a world that looked just like the sky – slick and chill, with nothing extra.  This was the tornado-maker’s mind.  It reminded me of Rita’s, all fast and sharp.  The difference was the wind.  It burned against me right away.  I thought it wanted me to move, and I relaxed a bit to see where it would carry me.  But it wasn’t that kind of force – it didn’t nudge you like a breeze through sail.  It pushed against you to keep itself moving.  There was no pulse, no in and out.  There was only go.

The consciousness I wanted to read was pummeling against me, so intense it turned all other things to background.  Memories winking like shadows over frank lines of philosophy.  Staying still, I was nothing more than fuel.  If I wanted in on the thinking, I’d have to match its speed.

I’m good at adapting; I saw how right away.  My desire brought me here and nothing else should matter.  I let myself be hunger.  Imagine the difference between the pain of breathing when you’re running and you know it’s good for you, and the pain of being punched in the face.  Know what it’s like to have one turn to the other?  I latched onto the mind that tried to burn me, like it would make my blood pump clean.  It’s what you have to do if you want to catch up.  You have to want what isn’t very good.  So it seemed natural, while every bit of me but hunger was flying off and I was diving deeper in the speeding current of this mind, that there were echoes of a seering voice around me.  

Donny, you retard.  Stop running.

It got in the way of my wanting, slowing me down.  I realized I was coughing in the comet’s tail of a faster mind; the full thrust of consciousness was still ahead of me.

Look at what you’re doing, kid!  You’ll fucking kill us all, your little twat came back, get the fuck down here –

I couldn’t get away from the voice.  I gripped it – taking it, hearing it.  I let it get all in me and then I threw the full power of my will against it as a curse, self-biting: FUCK OFF!

The power made me fly straight into the core of the mind.  There was fast, and faster.  There was looking out at a world gone foggy and far-away, a scene through a dirty window: the sky wrinkled up with rainclouds, and mounds of them piling, making sounds like falling towers.  There was a memory, crispy and near – a pale-faced skinny woman scrambling with others under water.  Alive in a bubble that could pop at any time.

Come back…

The voice now stretched out slow and thick, hanging on despite our trying to leave it behind.  It was grime in the wind of this mind, reverberating like a cold.  We were going too fast to want to stop, wanting too hard to have to listen.  The past could open up if we ran fast enough.

I could go faster.  His hunger was regret and going back.  Mine was more.  I gripped it – that whole mind.  Took the desire, the regret, taking it in, getting full of it.  Then, with the might of my insistence, I shoved against his consciousness and I was faster than the fastest man alive.

That was all I’d wanted.

His whole mind took the blow of my push, and it slowed down.  Then my mind had nothing to desire; I stopped, in his way.  There was his consciousness again bowling into me, both of us crashing, jumbling my wants and his and all his thinking scattered, and all my pieces left behind came back.  The nasty voice caught up to us was howling, normal speed and pitch, and through the grimy window of his eyes the black storm rose above the spaceship.

I fell into my head.  The tornado-maker was a fast man.  He’d landed on the spaceship and was staring blankly out.  There were hailstones pelting the boat and lightning cracked nearby.  My hairs all stood on end.  A man in a bright blue suit stood beside the man, a hand on his shoulder, looking down at me across the water.

“Mum!”

Rita came running up beside me.  I guess she’d been helping the hostages; white webs were in her hair.  She stopped, looking at the ship, and her lips peeled away from her teeth in a feral scowl.  I looked away in case I got curious.  I wanted to stay in my skin.

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Olivia Pretty

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by shieldingc in Superhurt

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Beautiful People, Comic, Humor, Love at First Sight, Mob Violence, murder, Olivia, Olivia Pretty, Pretty, Princess, Privilege, Racism, rape culture, sexism, skate park, skateboards, skaters, superhero, superpower, Superstars, Thin Privilege

Some people don’t believe in love at first sight.

Those people have never met me.

I’m Olivia.  I have a faery godfather, who waited for my sixteenth birthday to introduce himself.  It was my first teenaged dance; there was alcohol and music.  The faery had opinions on my drinking, but he waited till the end of the night to tell me.  The party was, after all, a handy way to meet.

He explained that my life would ever be strange, because of my christening gifts.  One of the gifts was goodness.  The other, beauty.  That magic sealed in the baby glow of my skin, the bigness and openness of my eyes.  The colors of my flesh and lips and hair, the curves of my body, and my bones, all grew in a way inviting of gazes.  Like moth to flame, I draw people in.  Love at first sight, head over heels.

Nothing was ever asked of me at home but to be good and beautiful.  I suppose being beautiful makes it easy to be good.  I never had anyone be mean to me, so being mean to others doesn’t cross my mind.  And wherever I go, people stare.  You remember to be good when people are intensely focused on you.

I don’t quite understand how I got mixed up with all this supervillain business.  I was at a bookstore that sold coffee.  I stood in line, before the scrutiny of a plump man wearing a blue suit.  I smiled at him, as pleasant people ought to do.  He, rather than smiling, responded by wrenching his eyes from my face and fastening them onto my breasts.  I stopped smiling, aware and embarrassed that my face had gotten in his way.

“Can I help you?”  Said the man behind the counter, beaming.  I smiled again, looking for the number of my coffee order on the board.

You are fat tits.

I sucked in my bottom lip and held it in place with my teeth.  The thought had come out of nowhere and replaced every word I’d planned.  It was a man’s voice – not beautiful, and not good.  Still it took up all the space in my head and held on tightly, as if it belonged.  I looked helplessly into the cashier’s eyes, feeling as though we were creatures from two different worlds.  He looked back just as helpless – maybe knowing, and maybe not, that I was alien.

“Please…can I help you?”

Big fat moving jiggly wiggly…put them in my mouth right now!

“I’ll take…I’ll take the number…”  I cleared my throat, alarmed.  I did not want to say the words in my head by mistake.

Fuck you shitless piece of ass.

More people than usual were staring.  Everyone in line, and everyone behind the counter.  Everyone sitting at the tables, and everyone standing by the spoons.  The man in blue sat by the window, his face among the rest of the faces that watched me.

“Can I…pleeaasse…help you, Miss?”  Said the man behind the counter.  “Please?  Please??”

“I’ll pay!”  Shouted several people in line and several more across the room.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I can’t make up my mind, today.”

Juicy dripping bimbo.

The manager came around the corner, looked at me and whistled.  “The lady will have a spiced pumpkin latte, on the house, Paul!”  He winked a few minutes later as he handed me the drink.  “This here’s extra Irish for you.  Don’t tell nobody.”

I gave the man his due warm smile and took a beverage that I knew to be laced with liquor.

Tig ol bitties, ta-ta.

A man grabbed the door and was punched in the head by another man, who grabbed the door, and held it wide open for me.

*             *             *

I heard the voice again later, at the supermarket.  I had a loaf of bread in each hand and was comparing the ingredients.  A man at the end of the aisle saw my plight and came rushing over.

“Too heavy,” he said, yanking both loaves out of my hands and throwing them into my cart.

That face should launch a thousand ships.

I froze.  It was the same man’s voice from before, except it sounded close to beautiful.

“You’re welcome,” said the man who’d helped me with my bread.

That face could be my purring honeypot.

“I said, you’re wel-come!”

Be a good girl.  Come with me.

“’Bye,” I remembered to say, before spinning my cart around and making a dash down the aisle.

“Tshh…”  Said the bread guy.  “Conceited!”

I left my cart of groceries in the store.  The parking lot was empty.  It wasn’t dark yet, but maybe soon.  I started walking; not toward home.  There was a little park by the police station, and I needed that kind of air.  I needed to breath it more than I needed to worry about what light was left in the day.

There was a skate park right where the trees began; some teenagers teetered up and down a ramp.  They saw me walking, stopped, and shouted.  I can’t remember what.  I kept going, eyes fixed to a stony old willow.  There were other people hundreds of feet ahead on the common, walking dogs and watching their children play.

“Lady!”  Hollered one of the skaters behind me.  “Where you going so fast?”

I ignored the yell, but soon there were wheels screeching along the pavement and I knew that some of the teens were following.  Wheels gave them speed – one boy passed me and spun around, his eyes lit up.  More boards were grinding at me from the skate park then, and suddenly I was surrounded.  Six boys made animal sounds, pressing forward, boards in arms.

Here’s your rape, doll.

I can’t remember why I screamed – if a hand moved to grab, if I saw it, or felt it.  I do remember that one set of eyes coming close, that starving coldness, and the smile, just a crookedness of mouth.  All on a face so young.  My scream carried far, and there were shouts in answer.  I was down, squeezing my neck with my knees to my chest on the ground.  The teens were running, except one.  The good people at the park had heard my cry and come to save me.  Now they surrounded that one boy who couldn’t run fast enough, yelling and pressing in.  Then fists went into his ribs and chin and the back of his neck, and he fell.

“Stop,” I said, when I could.  No one listened.  His almost-child bones were cracking under ten or fifteen livid men.  There were a few women in there, too.  I couldn’t see the boy anymore, but there were bloodied dreadlocks flying up and landing at my feet.

Love at first sight.  Head over heels for you.

The people in front of me seemed not like people, but like a single creature, wild and reptile.  It was only alive to crunch and devour.  The kid got ripped to pieces, then stomped to nothing in its maw.  I cried as I watched.  Sometimes hard.  My tears were spent and gone before the mob had lost its passion.

It was amazing to watch the thing that everyone had become die down, letting ordinary people walk away.  Some still had fury on their faces, but most looked simply ill.  Some were guilty, and some were afraid.  They didn’t look at each other or at me.  They spread out and passed by in silence, leaving behind a gore-strewn stretch of concrete.

*             *             *

Nothing made sense, so I kept staring.

“Stop,” I said.  Just to myself, to see how it sounded.  There must have been whole minutes between what happened and this odd, quiet time.  Night was nipping at the dusk above me.  Little park birds hopped around, getting close to the murdered body, without pecking.  I thought there should be sirens.  There was the cop station, right there.  Someone should come out of it and tell me what to do.

“Come away from there.”

The voice was ugly but familiar.  It spoke again, behind me.

“You don’t want to get mixed up in this.  Come away, while you have the chance.”

I turned.  It was the man in blue suit, from earlier.  He was on the road side of a gate marking the end of the park.  Not far from me – maybe yards.

“I’m already mixed up in this.”  I tried to sound calm but I couldn’t keep the pitch of my words from tilting.  “I was here.  When I screamed, everyone ran to me.  And did that.”

Blue Suit whistled.  “That’s quite a power.”

“Power?”  I choked.  Disbelieving.  “You call this…power?”

“Didn’t I tell you that your face could launch a thousand ships?”  Blue Suit leaned over the fence, looking me straight in the eyes.  “You heard me say it, didn’t you?”

“Your voice…” I gasped.  “You were in my head!  And you knew…that I would…hear you?”

“Oh, yes.  See, that’s my power.”  Blue Suit put a hand on the rail, gripping firmly, then hopped.  He landed clumsily on my side of the fence, got to his feet, and looked me in the eyes again.  “Listen, now.  You don’t feel sorry about all this.  You shouldn’t.  Do you?”

Tears came out of me to answer him.

“Don’t feel sorry.  That thug was gonna rape you.”

“You don’t…know that.”

“I do,” said the man in blue, tapping his head.  “I know all about what boys his age are thinking.”

I could have walked away then.  The thought flapped through my consciousness, lofty and unreal.  I could have gone and brought the sirens here, that no one else would bring.  It might be hours before the boys’ parents came here looking.  And there was a cop station.  Right there.  I could have brought the sirens.  And the doctors, and the parents, and the crying, and the questions only I could answer, but I couldn’t, figuring out and writing down who’s fault.

So he man in blue was wrong.  But of course, he was also right.  And he had been right along – all wrong, and still not wrong.  He was magic like the man who’d met me at sixteen and given me the reason I was always to feel strange.  Magical men were always watching, always wrong.  And always right.

“Olivia.”  Blue Suit stood looking into me.  It wasn’t magic to him.  “Olivia,” he said.  “…it wasn’t your fault.”

“Oh…” I gasped, feeling his words so hard.

He let me stand there feeling it, then stepped, by one foot, closer.  “Don’t be afraid.  And don’t be ashamed.”

“Stop,” I whispered, eyes closed tightly.  Salty tears kept falling.

“So pretty,” he said.  “And so good.  I can see what all the fuss was about.  Come away from there.  We’ll go.  You don’t want to be around this town when it comes out what happened to that boy.”

“Go where?”

“A safe place, just for people like us.  Our kind.  People with powers.”

“You have a power.”  I pointed at myself.  “I don’t have anything.”

“Whatever you say, kiddo.”  Blue Suit chuckled.  “Stop crying, Olivia.  Open your eyes.”

I shook my head.

“Come on.  Let’s see that smile.”

“You go to hell.”

He came and raised my chin with his fingers.  I opened my eyes, and unsheathed tears made messes down each temple.

“Come on, Princess.  That smile is our ticket in.”

“Where?  Where is this some safe place you want me to believe in?”

“Not here.”

We both looked at the splattered body on the pavement, or at the birds that covered it.

“No one could have saved that kid.”  Blue Suit looked through me.  It was wrong, but he was right.

I didn’t want to be here.

I took clearing breaths, and then did what he wanted.  Found a smile in me.  I had to rise above a stickiness like tartar in my heart, but I found it.  It was bright as any I’d use to say thank-you for the coffee in the morning.

In the next instant, we were standing in what appeared to be a breathtakingly large aquarium.  The tank arched overhead and formed the walls on either side, forming a long corridor.  The floor looked just like gold.  A man wearing a blue bathrobe and a towel on his head clutched a toothbrush in one hand.

“Do you have to be so fucking creepy about the way you say everything, bro?”

Blue Suit smirked.  “You were thinking it.”

“You made me think it!”

“But you’re still thinking it.”

The two of them laughed and patted each other on the back.

“Excuse me,” I said.  “Can I trouble either of you gentlemen to find out where I am?”

“He just told me you had a nice smile, is all,”  The man in the bathrobe answered.  “I’m Jason.  I teleport for a living.  You are beautiful.  Let’s go get you checked in, you can meet our boss.”

“Oh, no,” said Blue Suit.  “You’re not claiming credit on this one.  Olivia, come with me, we’ll get you checked in, and you can meet our boss.”

“Split the credit, then.  We’ll take her together.”

“Deal.”

The two gents helped me down the hall, and through some rooms, to an office marked “Professor W.”  I don’t know why, but when a woman opened the door, I felt more lost than before.

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Donny Dashing

26 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by shieldingc in Superhurt

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Tags

Action hero, Donny Dashing, Free literature, New Villain, Short Story, superhero, Superspeed, Supervillain, Winner

I’m Donny Dashing.  You listen and you listen good.  Since I’m fast, my time’s worth more than yours.  I don’t stop, and I don’t listen.  Smelling flowers, waiting in line, taking turns – all of that is for the birds.

It started when I was twelve and I missed the bus to school.  I didn’t want to get a piece of the old man’s mind that morning, so I ran to catch it.  Ordinary-fast didn’t cut it.  I ran faster.  By the time I caught up, I was going too fast to stop.  I ran past the bus, and kept going.  Past the school, down the main drag out of town.  On the road I raced other busses and trucks, then cars, then bikes, then faster cars, then faster bikes!  Ran on highways, did a dine-and-dash whenever I got hungry.  Thought I’d run all the way around the world, keep running until I was dead or old.  Didn’t remember the oceans.

The farther I ran, the harder it was to find trucks and cars and bikes to race.  Alone with the road is great, it’s the best way to go, but when you run out of restaurants it’s a problem, cause running makes you hungry.

Well, the old man caught up to me right around then, giving me an earful.  He’s got a way to get into my head.  It’s telekenesis.  “Listen up you little fuck,” I heard him say.  “Cops came by here asking why you’re not in school.  You better pray they find your sorry ass before I do.  You’ll never be shit and you know it, come home.”

No can do, Pop, is what I thought, but he can’t hear what other people think.  He can just put his voice in your head.   Anyway the interference slowed me down, like cell phones do to airplanes.  I don’t know about cell phones and airplanes, and I don’t care if you do.  I got off the highway and ran on sad little hokey roads without any restaurants.  I shoved a deer against a tree and it died, but I didn’t want to skin it and cook it and I didn’t know how.  Found a cabin in the woods, knocked on the door and traded the buck for three squares and a sleep in the bed.  Also learned to skin by watching the guy who’s cabin it was.  Took a lighter and knife when I left the next day.  I kept running till I was faster than fast bikes again and got back on the freeway.

There are two kinds of running: running away from, and running after.  The kind I like to do is after, so every day I make myself go a little faster.  And every time I beat a record I find a new thing I can do that other people can’t.  I learned that I could fly first.  Learned it at a skate park that some adrenaline junkies threw up in the middle of the night in a parking lot.  Running up and down ramps in a baggy sweatshirt.  Flying isn’t fun, because then you aren’t running.  Next I learned to make a gust of wind, and a little after I could make full-on tornadoes by running around in a circle.  Then I was going so fast I turned myself invisible.  At that point you’re going too fast to see, but so what?  You go a little faster than that and anything you touch disintegrates.  Then particles can’t get out of your way fast enough, and you’re running on pockets of percussion.  You don’t ever have to touch the ground.  I could run all the way around the world now ignoring the oceans if I wanted.  By then the whole world was small potatoes.  When I went any faster, I was going backwards – time unwound around me.  Diana the Dime Machine thinks she’s so great for that one power of hers.  I can do it, too, easy-peasy!

At first when I went back in time, I didn’t know how to go forward again.  Didn’t care, either.  I had my records to beat.  Go fast enough, every rule stands on its head.  The faster I ran, the faster time unwound.  I ran backward through the centuries, eating mutton, drinking ale.  Stealing was a breeze, when you found the folks who had the stuff to steal.  The farther back I ran, the harder it was to find those folks, and it’s a problem, cause running back in time is hungry work.  I had to stop more and more to find animals that I could catch and skin and cook.  Catching them was easy.  Standing still long enough to find them was hard.

“You know what your problem is, Donny-boy?” I heard my father say.  I’d been waiting half-an-hour by this tree with a petrichor smell one time I was hungry.  “Your problem is, that you’re a piece of shit.”

There were leaves moving above me.  I was thinking I should climb.

“Your sister’s gone.  She ran the fuck away.”

There was a gleam of iridescence, a flapping, paper-tearing sound.

“You hearing me, boy?  Your sister’s gone.  She’ll be living in the street, now, probably selling ass, because you’re too good for what’s yours, and now she thinks she is, too.”

A beetle jumped out, the size of my torso, and tried to fly.  I dashed my way up the tree and knocked the thing into the trunk.  It fell, with pieces of wings crunching off – I caught it and bit through the shell, eating its squishy guts raw.  There wasn’t a reason to stop anymore.

I ran back and back and back in time, trying to go faster, past the glaciers and the dinosaurs and the times when there wasn’t any air to breathe and the times when the whole world was like a hot puddle.  I don’t need to breathe when I run.  I like to, but I don’t need to.  It’s how the power works.  Going as fast I go, nothing can hurt you – not heat and not cold, long as you never stand still.

I ran till the earth became nothing, drifting away from its gravity first.  Nothing can stop me.  It’s the only thing that can.  I heard my father’s voice in my head, just in time before I started to slow down.  I don’t know what his power’s made of but it always tries to slow me down, same as gravity.  Anyway, that was the thing I had to push against in empty space – his voice before every step, polluting pure zero as it came pouring out.  Maybe it does work two ways, because every time I thought I was going to die, my father’s words were already there for me to use.  I ran on past stars that I couldn’t see, going faster and faster, getting to know all the rivers of gravity going like water down a drain.

I ran back all the way to the genesis, the big bang, event horizon – and at that point I ran straight through the screen between worlds and came shooting out the other side, where the universe began brand-new, and I was moving faster than what moves you backwards, and forward again.

“Donny-boy, it’s been years.  When are you going to talk to me?”

There was a gravity in me reaching for home, along a path of psychic friction.  I couldn’t help but run straight toward the time and space I thought I’d never see again.  I was at the planet and the town and the second where my father expected to find me, when the voice in my head shut suddenly all the way off.

“Don.”

Darkness splashed away and time came pumping in.  There was no big explosion, no giant crater where I stood.  All the impact shriveled into me, blocking pores and clogging minor veins.  I stood there as quiet as if I’d been walking.

Old Pop stood in silhouette against the empty road.  The sun was behind him, setting red.  “Welcome home.”

I knew, I always knew, that a power like mine wouldn’t be just an accident.  Got it from the old man, same as my sister got hers.  She can always tell when people tell the truth.  I can’t, but when Pop started telling me how he can give people powers, it didn’t seem like a lie.  I didn’t care.  I hated his voice.

“You know what?”  I said.  “I don’t really like you!”

I got to work re-arranging the old man’s teeth.  He was calling me names in my head, but I didn’t listen, until he said, stop, he had a job he wanted to tell me about.  Usually when people say, ‘stop’, I say ‘shut up,’ and still don’t listen.  But the company he worked for needed me to do a job, and I liked the sound of it.  Guess they wanted a real go-getter to go-get some real good stuff.  I took the card from my Pop and that’s how I got my first job.

I guess I’m a villain, if you want to use the classical definition.  Buildings and people and cars will blow up if they get in my way.  Sometimes people don’t listen to reason.  I use violence then.  But you have to understand that I’m fast.  I’m different and better than everyone else.  So instead of saying ‘villain’ all the time, why don’t we choose a word that rejects society’s binaries and isn’t loaded with judgment?  Let’s just go with, ‘winner’.

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Time-Machine Marches On

14 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by shieldingc in Superhurt

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Action, Adventure, Fantasy, great, hero, superhero, superpower, Superpowers, Time-Travel

My eyes were closed before the dust had settled.  This was the right thing to do.  The vision I’d glimpsed through a veil of powdered concrete stayed in my mind as a question.  Had I, or had I not, really seen a fast man burst through the wall and pick up Priscilla to take her away?

The other girls were breathing in their normal, adequate ways.  If it was real, they were all just pretending to sleep, and they’d stay with their eyes closed through the night until the morning bells were ringing.  Then they’d get up and move on with their eyes down, not glancing at the wall until it was certainly fixed.  It’s not the polite thing to notice when there are holes in the wall.

If it was real, Priscilla would be gone.  No one would speak her name.  We’re learning to be charming here, and it’s rude to suggest one’s classmate would just leave in the middle of the night, without so much as a by-your-leave.  We would have to act as though she never were here.  And I would have more opportunity to question in private whether I’d concocted a figment.

Julian Furbeus Rex had sent me here to learn charm, as a punishment, I suspect, for my tears.  He did not consider them proof that I had travelled back through time.  So I was working on finding more sufficient evidence.  Now when I had strange dreams, I wasn’t sure if they were dreams.  They could be my movements through time and space.

I listened to the buzzing in my ears – what could have been leftover from the bang of a wall exploding, or my heart beating fast from a very alarming dream.  The memory of the vision wasn’t proof that the vision was real.  The buzzing in my ears wasn’t proof.  The smell of the plaster-in-air was thick and chalky.  The smell in my nose was a dust-cloud.  Surely this, this must be proof.  It was real, if real only in some far-off and bygone time.  I would never imagine dust just for fun.

Deciding this, I had another thought.  Priscilla had no friends.  No one spoke to her.  Teachers never called on her.  Merely mentioning her name was enough to create an uncomfortable silence, or prompt a change in subject.  I’d assumed all of this was because she climbed walls and spit trails of mucus at people and offered eagerly to dispose of others’ tampons.  However, it might also be possible that no one spoke to her or about her because no one else could see her.  As in, Priscilla might be one of those things from a distant past which only I could recall.  If I could remember her all the way into the present, she might be my proof of time-manipulation.

And a fast man just stole her through a hole in the wall.

I opened up my eyes.  The wall was there, all right, with the hole.  I got up and ran through it, into the hallway, and through the hallway, to where the other wall was broken.  The sky was right there.  The shreds of a portal trailed it like ghost tails.   I got on my knees right where the floor ended, the wires and pipes hanging out.  The air was smarting.  Ripples throbbed, looking like heat waves with glimmering points.  Remembering where my power started, I closed my eyes, and breathed, letting in the broken air.  Red-raw momentum sizzled and pinched at my nerves.  I was groaning, smoking through all of my spaces.  The air opened up a bright blue, biting through me.  I could feel it try to heal, but I held with my bones to the searing pain, and with it, made the sky remember.

I opened my eyes, and the portal was there, whole and shining as it had been minutes ago, and ready to melt again.  I ran out onto it, a trail hot and grainy, like sand, underfoot.  Below me, through howling screens of air, the campus seemed to pulse.  The portal pushed past the trees, over and through a forest and on, into wetlands.  It was invisible except that it moved, and by turns it was hissing and cracking and quiet.  Often it started flaking away, and my feet would sink in lower.  When the sounds softened from tinkling glass to lapping waves, I’d stop and feel for the memory, pins-and-needles, weak and spattered.  Feel it until it became a tight anguish, patterned with the force of air broken open.  The portal would steady, and I could move on the tension of it again.

Once I looked back, and could see myself, as a metered progression of people stretching as far back as could be seen.  Interesting, but I told myself to keep moving and stop looking back.  I was after a very fast man.

I went until the portal with me rippled over the ocean, and a big moon’s light flicked in the fissures.  The portal went down – straight down.  I fell, shoving my shoulders against shocked walls of water whenever I could.  I felt the way down as lurching horror, making sure my guts would remember.  Soon it was curving out again, and the portal ended with a porthole in the wall of a very big building.  I drew from my bones a memory from moments ago that belonged to the wall and the water –trembling, bursting bubbles of space unwinding, and there was the portal half-opened.  I raced through and was in an entry room, before another door, which was shut.  In front of the second door was the fast man, Priscilla on his shoulders, a sharp look on his face while he waited.  The portal closed behind me, and Priscilla moved.  The fast man cursed.

“Who are you?”

The second door was opening.  Priscilla turned to look, her nose wrinkling.  “Oh, no,” she sighed.  “Diana.”

I was confused by how annoyed she appeared.  I had always been certain she was the unpleasant one.

“Are you fast, like me?”  The man demanded, getting up in my face.

“I prefer to speak to your manager,” I replied coldly.  The fellow was obviously not upper-management.  He had the look of someone’s assistant.

He cursed again.  “Follow me.”

I nodded, nonchalantly meeting Priscilla’s eyes.  She hated me, I understood that now.  This could have been her moment, and I’d stolen it.  No matter.  Winning never made people like you.

Fast man went at human speed.  This more than drove home his subordinate status.  His swiftness destroyed the integrity of air and left holes in the ocean, but when he came to the undersea lair he was not be at liberty to move his wrecking-speed.

We arrived at an office door marked “Professor W”.  I waited for the fast guy to open it up.  He shut the door halfway and tried to talk privately about me to his boss, but I slid around it and then around him to face the professor myself.

“Diana Delaetful,” I said, holding out my hand and speaking over the assistant’s protests.  “I believe we can be of use to one another.”

The professor had a finger to her chin.  “How were you able to follow Mr. Dashing?”

“I just finished asking her that, professor!”  Dashing complained.  “She said she wouldn’t talk to me, only to y-“

“I time-travel.”

The professor’s eyes lit up.

“Have you not got a time-traveler yet?” I asked.

“We have not.  Dashing, you may leave.”

“Wait!”  Dashing insisted, setting Priscilla down.  “I found the girl who can climb walls.”

“Good evening,” said Priscilla.

Professor W almost waved her away.  “Later.”

“That’s not all I can do!”  Priscilla argued.  “I’m dead.  I can jump off cliffs, and drink blood.  They call me…Spider Bitch!”

“No one calls her that,” I whispered, and Priscilla heard me say it.  She jumped for the wall above my head and spat down foaming spray that hit my face and glued my eyelashes together.  She laughed while I struggled to speak around a gob of white goo covering my mouth.  My breath made the goo blow up in a bubble that popped and got stuck in my hair.  I stopped moving and tried to remember what my skin felt like before getting hit with the spider-snot, but the memory wasn’t strong enough.

“I am your greatest discovery,” Priscilla insisted.  “Pay attention to me!”

Professor W. considered her again.  “Does being dead make you immortal?”

“Yes!”  Shouted Priscilla. “I’m sure of it!”

The Professor looked at me, then at Priscilla – Spider Bitch – then at Dashing, and back at me.  She smiled broadly all of a sudden.  “I sense a great need for growth opportunity in this room!”  She announced.  “I may need to send all of you out on assignment.  There will be a new office in store for whichever of you manages to distinguish yourself above the others.”

“What’s the assignment?”  Dashing demanded.

Professor W. swiped her phone and brought up the selfie of a chiseled, gleaming, naked man and a fully-dressed other man with a name-tag.

“I believe this man can fly,” she told us.  “Bring him here, to me, tonight.”

“The last three assignments have been capturing people,” Dashing muttered.  “When are we going to start doing other things besides recruitment?”

“Get yourself an office and maybe I’ll let you in on the Master Plan, Mr. Dashing.  At the moment, this is all high above your pay-grade.”

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