Meta (17 page)

  
Whoa. A real life, actual robbery.

  
"Screeew you," the drunk slurs back.

  
"Wrong answer," the robber says.

  
But before he has a chance to take this conversation any further, I am in between the barrel of the gun and the drunk. The instant nature in which I appear, startles the robber and the gun goes off. The bullet slams into my chest and falls to the ground. I don't take it personally, I'd be scared if a masked vigilante appeared in front of me in the blink of an eye, too. Actually nowadays, I'd take that as being pretty normal, but before all of this, sure, it would have scared me.

  
What I do take personally though is the fact that this robber had a loaded gun pointed at an innocent man's head. I reach out and grab the gun from his hand and crush it into a ball in front of his face. This makes his lower lip tremble and for the second time today, I'm trying to hide a smirk.

  
"Call the police," I tell the drunk.

  
"You call the palace. I dun haf a cell phone," he slurs back.

  
"Fine," I turn to the robber, "give me your cell phone. I'm calling the police."

  
"I don't have a cell phone either. Why do you think I was trying to rob this guy?" he says.

  
"Really guys? Neither of you has a cell phone?"

  
I'm met with blank stares all around. Technically I have a cell phone on me but it's under this suit, and I don't know how to just take part of it off to reach into my pocket. I don't know if it even works that way to be honest.

  
"All right, fine. Have it your way. I'll just take you to the police station myself," I say.

  
"And tell them what? It's your word against mine tough guy, and I'm not the one wearing pajamas, so I think they'll take mine," the robber says. He seems to have regained some of his earlier confidence, now that he knows I'm not going to kill him, and that I appear to not really know what I'm doing.

  
"Then I guess we'll just have to bring along a witness then, won't we?" I say.

  
And with that, I put one arm around the chest of the robber, the other arm around the chest of the drunk, and begin to lift all three of us into the air with the intention of heading to the police station. We're about three feet off the ground when the drunk starts screaming louder than I've ever heard anyone scream in my life, and that includes the mystical dragon that tried to kill me just the other day. I lower all three of us back to the ground.

  
"What is it?" I ask the drunk.

  
"Ima scared of heights. No. No. No. Don't do dat," he yells as he squirms to free himself from my arm. This is going to be harder than I thought.

  
Wait a minute, I can teleport!

  
And like that, all three of us are in the lobby of the nearby police station, standing in front of a clerk who seems entirely unimpressed that he's just seen three people, one of which is wearing an elaborate head to toe costume, appear in front of him out of thin air.

  
"Can I help you?" he asks.

  
"Yes. This man attempted to rob this other man at gunpoint and I prevented it. He needs to be arrested and brought in front of a judge," I proudly state.

  
"And I'm just supposed to believe that based on the word of this guy who's too drunk to stand and no evidence?" he asks.

  
I can't believe this. What happened to justice?

  
"Here's your evidence, right here," I say.

  
And with that I drop the robber's gun, which I earlier crumpled into a ball, on the clerk's desk. He looks at the gun which is now basically unrecognizable, then back at me. Again, there's complete and total silence. The silence is finally broken by the sound of a man vomiting. The man vomiting is the drunk I've brought here, and the place he's vomiting is, of course, all over my legs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

After filling out more paperwork than I ever imagined, I teleport back to the center of the city. I need some 'me time' so I hover a few hundred feet above the skyline where hopefully no one will throw up on me. The police wound up taking both of the men I brought to their station into custody. One to sleep it off in the drunk tank, and the other because he apparently had previous warrants out of his arrest. So I was somewhat successful in apprehending a criminal, even if the charges for tonight's robbery might not stick.

  
"Rough night?" A voice behind me asks.

  
I cannot overstate how startling it is to have someone sneak up behind you when you are hovering hundreds of feet in the air well after midnight. It's just not something you expect. I yelp like a five-year-old girl and spin around to find Iris, hovering right behind me. I try to clear my throat like I didn't just scream like a small child and ask in my best deep superhero voice, as if nothing was wrong: "How did you know?"

  
"Because there's vomit all over your legs," she says, pointing to the vomit which is indeed still all over my legs.

  
"Ugh," I say as I try to brush it off, "I thought it would have been left behind when I teleported."

  
"Never teleport a drunk person without warning them. That whole 'suddenly appearing in a completely different place' has a tendency to makes the spins a hundred times worse," she tells me.

  
The vomit's not coming off. This is disgusting. I'm not sure what material my suit is technically made out of and how it is that it can resist mach speeds, fire, smashing through concrete, etc, but isn't stain resistant. Wait. I know. I'll use heat vision to just vaporize it!

  
"Ugggggh! Stop!" Iris yells, holding her nose.

  
Yup. She's right. While vaporizing the vomit has made it disappear, the smell is very, very unpleasant. I try to hold my breath too as the smell is starting to activate my gag reflex.

  
"And never, ever use your powers to burn vomit. Come on," she says as she waves the fumes away from her face.

  
"Sorry," I apologize, "I'm kinda new to all of this."

  
"Yeah, I gathered that," she says.

  
"I'm Omni," I offer as I reach out my hand to shake. It feels weird to introduce myself like that. 'Omni'. It feels like I'm trying to pass off a cool nickname that I made up for myself, even when that totally wasn't the case.

  
"Yeah, I heard," she says, staring at my hand but not shaking it. I pull it back.

  
"And you're Iris right?" I ask.

  
"Wow, you're not so slow after all, huh?" she says, sarcastically.

  
Is this flirting? It feels like flirting, but it also just kinda feels like her being mean, too. Why can't I ever tell the difference between those two?

  
"So, what brings you up here tonight?” I ask her in a way that sounds a little too much like a cheesy pick-up line. Maybe this suit is making me a little overconfident after all.

  
"Same thing you are, I assume. Patrolling. Except I don't waste my time with that kind of rookie league stuff that you just did," she says.

  
"Rookie league?" I ask incredulously. "I saved a man's life tonight!"

  
"Arguable," she says, turning to look off in the distance.

  
"Arguable? A bullet bounced off of my chest!" I yell.

  
"A bullet that might not have been fired if you hadn't scared the hell out of that guy."

  
"Oh, so now you're taking his side? And by the way, thanks a lot for helping out, since it sounds like you apparently saw the whole thing from up here."

  
"Look," she begins, "you have to pick and choose your battles. Those charges are never going to stick, and that gun would have never gone off if you weren't there. Kudos for stopping a robbery, but you've got a lot to learn if you think anything you did tonight will actually result in whatever your idea of
justice
is."

  
Now I'm starting to get pissed off. Fine. I didn't do a perfect job tonight, but who the hell is she to judge me?

  
"You've got an awful lot of thoughts about how to be a meta for someone who's been one for what, a week or two, at most?" I say.

  
"I didn't say I have more experience. Just more common sense," she says.

  
I don't have a reply for that one, but it does make me boil inside. Why does everyone think they know how to do my job better than me? Whether justice is served or not, there's a man who might be dead if it weren't for me, who's safe tonight, and another man behind bars, even if it is only for a night.

  
"How can you be so cynical already?" I ask.

  
"I'm not a cynic, I'm just a realist. And more efficient," she says.

  
And with that, she takes off towards the west side of the city in a blur of black and purple. In all of five minutes, she's managed to completely get under my skin in a way that even Midnight would be envious of. I watch the blur that is Iris continue towards the docks. Maybe she wanted me to follow her?

  
She probably wanted me to follow her, right?

  
I should follow her.

  
I take off after her at supersonic speed and catch up immediately. She might have a quicker wit, but I'm still faster.

  
"Where are you going?" I ask her as I sidle up alongside her.

  
"What's it to you?" she asks.

  
"Maybe I can help?" I suggest.

  
"Ha!" She laughs before coming to an abrupt stop. I'm about a mile over the Pacific Ocean before I realize I've lost her and double back. I find her crouched down on the roof of a warehouse where I ease myself down next to her.

  
"What are we doing here?" I ask.

  
"Shhhhhhhhhh!" She practically yells into my ear. "Shut up! God! I didn't ask for your help, so the least you can do is not completely and totally blow up my spot. Fair?"

  
"Sorry," I whisper.

  
We both sit in silence for about thirty seconds before the anticipation gets to me.

  
"So," I begin, "what are we doing here?"

  
"
We
aren't doing anything here.
I
am waiting for someone," she snaps back.

  
Silence.

  
"Who?" I ask.

  
Iris rolls her eyes and turns back towards me.

  
"A bad guy, okay? Is that simple enough for you to grasp and understand?" she whispers at me.

  
"Okay," I say, "you don't have to be mean about it you know."

  
All right, now I can hear myself and realize I sound childish so I shut up. Just then a truck approaches the gate leading to the docks we're watching.

  
"You're still here?" Iris asks me.

  
"Yeah I'm still here. I want to help," I tell her.

  
She sighs.

  
"So what's the plan?" I ask.

  
"The plan? The plan is we wait for all of them to get here, then we go down there and beat the hell out of them," she says.

  
"They're metas?" I ask.

  
Iris sighs again.

  
"No. Obviously they're not metas," she says before turning her attention back towards the gate, where there is now a stream of incoming eighteen-wheelers pulling large shipping containers.

  
"But if they're not metas, and we go down there to 'beat the hell out of them' as you so eloquently put it, it's not so much going to be a beating as it is a mass execution," I explain.

  
Iris turns to me quickly. She's fed up and obviously frustrated at what are apparently stupid questions to her.

  
"Really? Really? Do I have to explain everything to you? Do you not even know how to use these things?" She asks, holding up the metabands on her wrists.

  
I don't know how to respond, so I stay quiet. This elicits another sigh.

  
"You turn the dampeners on and bring the power output down a bit. That way, if you punch a regular non-metahuman in the face, you don't wind up knocking his head off his shoulders in the process."

  
"Dampeners?" I ask.

  
She's done explaining and instead grabs my right hand and drags my index and middle fingers across the top of my metaband. A series of ten white, rectangular lights glow from the metaband. As my fingers drag across them they turn off one by one until only two remain illuminated.

  
"Holy crap. I had no idea they could do that!" I exclaim, once again almost giving up our position to the growing ranks of bad guys below us.

  
"Of course you don't, you're being taught how to use your metabands by a wannabe who's never spent a second of his life actually using them himself. No wonder you've been dazzling so many people with your
heroics
. You're running around there with these things turned up to eleven. I'm shocked your batteries haven't died on you yet, running them that hard."

  
"These things have batteries?!" I whisper.

  
"Battery status," Iris says without averting her eyes from the trucks idling alongside the dock. A series of green, yellow and red lights shine through both metabands on her wrists.

  
"Wait. So this foreign, alien technology
just
happens to use the same color lights to indicate their battery status as my cell phone? That seems like an awfully big coincidence. I don't buy it," I say.