Sensation: A Superhero Novel (12 page)

            “…this while we’re in the middle of an op to get Kid Sensation!” Mouse was saying.

            “You don’t need an op to find Kid Sensation!” Electra retorted, before gesturing wildly in my direction.  “He 
is
 Kid Sensation!”

            “And just how do you know that?” Aqua asked.

            “His bioelectric field!”

            “What?” Nemesis responded, confused.  At this point, I was interested myself, so I moved even closer.

            “His body’s bioelectric field,” Electra slowly repeated.  “Everybody has one.”

            “So what?” Aqua asked.

            “She can sense them,” Mouse responded, before Electra could speak.  “Bioelectric fields. It’s part of her power.”

            He turned and looked at me before continuing. “With her, a bioelectric field is as good as a picture or a fingerprint.  She can identify somebody with it the way you and I can pick people out of a lineup.”

            I couldn’t help but laugh this time.  All that crazy stuff that I’d gone through to maintain my anonymity: shapeshifting, removing fingerprints, altering brainwaves…and then someone just identifies me by my bioelectric field.

            “What’s so funny?” Herc queried, but I ignored him and kept right on laughing.  Mouse turned his attention back to Electra, ignoring me for the moment.

            “You say that he’s Kid Sensation,” he began.  “Assuming he is, when did you figure that out?”

            “Today, at the football game,” she replied.  “I knew as soon as I got close enough to him to feel his field.”

            “Well, why didn’t you tell anybody, instead of going through all this?” He made an expansive gesture that took in me, the cell, and more.  I sobered up at this, my laughter dying away; here was an explanation I wanted to hear.

            “Because he reads minds!” she exploded.  “I’ve been trying to keep my thoughts penned up all day, the way Esper taught me, in case he was listening in, and covering up what I was really thinking with stupid things like how I hoped it would be a good movie, and how cute he is, and how I want butter with my popcorn, and-”

            “Wait a minute,” I interjected.  They all turned to look at me, as it was the first time I’d spoken since I got locked in the cell.  “You think I’m cute?”

            Electra grunted in irritation, then turned back to Mouse without giving me the courtesy of an answer. 

            “Bottom line:  I tried not to think about it because he might be listening in.  I tried not to get too close because Esper says contact or even close proximity increases the possibility of a telepath being able to read you.  Plus he can teleport and phase through walls.  Basically, I didn’t tell anybody because I never knew when he might be eavesdropping.  So I came up with this plan.”

            Mouse rubbed his chin, nodding and staring blankly into the air - apparently in deep thought. He seemed to buy her explanation, because he now turned his attention to me.   

            “Well,” he said. “There’s a lot of logic to what she’s said.  Moreover, there’s the fact that since you’ve been in that cell, your face has changed.”

            
Oh jeez
!  My hand went to my face instinctively.  I’d completely forgotten that I had made some alterations. 

            “It hasn’t changed a lot,” Mouse continued, “but certainly enough to be noticeable.”

            I was in shock.  This night had quickly devolved into something unrecognizably horrible.  And earlier I couldn’t imagine how this date could have gotten any worse.  I almost started laughing again at the irony of the situation.

            “Listen,” Mouse said, “I’m not asking whether or not you’re Kid Sensation.  We’re actually in the middle of an op right now to locate him - an op that’s based on excellent information - so I don’t know how much of anything I just heard is true.   I just want to talk to you about this situation.”

            He looked at me as if he expected a response.  When I didn’t give him one, he went on. “With that understanding, if I turn off the nullifier, do I have your word that you’ll give me a minute of your time to discuss this?”

            I pretended to think about it, but it’s not like I had a lot of choice.  I wasn’t going anywhere as long as I was in this cell and the nullifier was on.  Plus, I was curious about this op they were running. After a few moments, I nodded my head in assent.

            Mouse reached over and turned off the force field and the nullifier.  Just as a test, I teleported out of the cell and right next to him.  It probably removed any doubt as to who I was, but I was no longer planning on just walking out of this place anyway.

            If having me pop into existence right next to him was startling in any way, Mouse did an excellent job of not showing it.

            “Clock’s ticking.” I tapped my watch. 

            Mouse wasted no time.  “Look, what happened following the trials two years ago wasn’t your fault–”

            My laughter, harsh and resolute, cut him off.  “You think I blame myself for what happened? You think I’ve been moping around with guilt like I did something wrong?  It was the League’s pet monster Paramount who started it.”

            “We know that,” he admitted, not trying to argue, “just like we know that the team members who were there probably didn’t respond as they should have.  But they thought they were in the presence of a threat.  After all, the first thing most of them saw was you walloping Paramount.  Then you did who-knew-what to Alpha Prime.”

            As always, just thinking about what had happened made me angry.  In my head, I had longed for the day that I could call the League on the carpet for what had happened, but right now I was struggling just to control my temper.  I glanced at Electra and her friends, but nobody said anything.  A couple of them even looked away.

            When it became clear that I wasn’t going to respond, Mouse went on.  “The bottom line is that nothing that happened should be construed as something that would have kept you from being one of us.  And frankly speaking, we could use you right now.  There are some things going on–”

            Mouse stopped abruptly as the air in the room suddenly shimmered, and a hologram of Esper appeared.

            “Mouse, this is Esper.  We’re at the target location.”

            “It’s okay,” Mouse responded. “I’ve got new information on the target.  We can call off the op.”

            “I don’t think we can do that.  We’ve got a situation here.  You need to see this.”

            “Okay, expand the hologram to panoramic view.”

            I watched for a few seconds as the scene began to expand.  Then I reached out and tapped Mouse on the shoulder.

            “Minute’s up,” I said.

            “No, wait–”

            That’s all I heard as I teleported away.

Chapter 10

            I popped into my apartment, in the bedroom.  I really should have gone home, but - despite the hour - I had a sneaking suspicion my mother (and maybe Gramps, too) would be waiting up to hear how my date went.  I didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now.  I flopped down on the bed and stretched out, mentally ticking off everything that had gone sideways tonight.

            Movie:  middling.

            Date with pretty girl: disastrous.

            Anonymity as Kid Sensation: blown completely to smithereens.

            I was thinking that things couldn’t get any worse when I heard voices.  Coming from my living room.

            I went invisible and my vision instantly switched over to infrared.  I crept to the door and phased through. 

            I saw two people in the living room, male and female, standing almost side by side.  The woman I immediately recognized as Esper.  The male appeared as a huge mass of dark, swirling crimson.  Alpha Prime.   

            This was obviously the op they were running.  Somehow they had tracked me down.  I thought I’d been careful but it’s pretty clear that I was becoming lax in some way.  I glanced around the room to see if anyone else was present.  I didn’t see anyone else, but something seemed…off.  Then I saw it. 

            There were odd blotches on the  wall and floor near where AP and Esper were standing. There were even some on the ceiling.  I briefly wondered if this was some kind of mold or mildew festering almost under my nose.

            “This is bad,” Alpha Prime was saying.  “A whole lot worse than just having an on-air brawl with the League.”

            “Agreed,” Esper said.  “I don’t know that we have any choice here.”

            “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” said a third, unseen voice.  Recognizing it as Mouse, I was a bit startled.  How was he here in my apartment?  Could he teleport, too? And where exactly was he? Then I remembered: holograms.  I cycled my vision out of the infrared and through various wavelengths of light until I could see Mouse.  He appeared as a pasty white, spectral presence between the dark gray humanoid forms of Esper and Alpha Prime.

            “I’m not certain this would be jumping to conclusions,” Esper stated.  “I mean, look at this.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it.  The type of person who could do this…”

            Her voice trailed off, and for the first time I noticed that they were looking down at something near their feet.  Something in the midst of all the splotches I had seen on the floor.

            At first, I couldn’t make it out.  It looked like some three-dimensional rendering of Cubist art.  There were jagged edges, sharp jutting angles, odd shapes…

            
Oh, no.

            Almost involuntarily, I spun my vision through the light spectrum again until I came to something approaching normal.  I didn’t want to see it, but I had to.  And I saw exactly what I expected. 

            The splotches on the wall weren’t mold. It wasn’t mildew on the ceiling.  There wasn’t any kind of infestation on my floor.  It was blood.  All of it.  Blood.  Everywhere.  Blood. Everything. Blood.

            And the body…it should be a crime to even conceive of doing something like this to another person.  The culprit was deranged, had to be.  And it was clear that no ordinary human had done this.

            I felt an immense amount of sorrow for this person, whoever they were.  I didn’t know how they came to be in my apartment, but they didn’t deserve to die like this.  That’s when I realized that the person’s face had barely been touched.  Even more, I recognized the victim.  It was Pinchface.  I sighed sadly and teleported to my house.

**********************************

            I popped into my bedroom at home.  Just a few hours earlier, I had left practically on cloud nine about my date.  I returned having been nearly electrocuted, “outed” as Kid Sensation, and probably wanted for murder.  I couldn’t imagine being more depressed.

            I felt a questing probe from my grandfather.  As I had suspected earlier, he and my mother had stayed up and were down in the kitchen, awaiting a full debriefing on my date.  I clumped down the stairs heavily, my footsteps announcing my presence in a way that was atypical for me.

            When I saw them sitting at the counter in the kitchen, I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth.  So I made up a story about having a great date with Electra, but jointly deciding that we were better off as friends.  They both offered me their sympathy and encouragement for whomever my next date might be with.  Then, my mother went off to bed, leaving “her boys” to have a little man-talk.  No sooner had her foot hit the stairs than my grandfather sent a stinging probe that jabbed me like a mental stick-pin.

            really
happened.>

            Rather than talk about it, I simply opened my mind and laid out the whole sordid mess.  It took about fifteen seconds, after which he sat still, regarding me silently.

              he asked.  

            I suddenly got a feeling of warmth from him, an enveloping emotion of joy and smiling pride. It was the answer he’d wanted from me.  He nodded and headed out the back door.  I sighed, locked the door behind him, then headed up to bed.

INTERLUDE

            Omen stood in front of an odd machine.  That it was a complex and complicated device was evident, not so much because of its appearance - which was a curious mosaic of integrated circuitry, intricate components, and fused microelectronics  - but because of its current state of being.  It was semi-solid.  Some parts could be touched and interacted with, while others were more ethereal. 

            Standing around Omen were the rest of his cohorts, all in person.  Even Slate had dispensed with his golems and was here in the sickly yellow flesh. 

            “We stand on the precipice,” Slate uttered with glee.  “In very short order we shall be indomitable.”

            “Victory is not yet assured,” Omen announced. “The Transdimensional Nanite Induction Platform is still fickle in some respects.  We must still proceed with care.”

            “And let us not forget Kid Sensation,” muttered Summit, who dwarfed his companions. “We have not yet closed the loop on him.”

            Omen smiled as he touched a dial on the device and colorful sparks began to fill the air and dance back and forth.

            “Do not concern yourself with Kid Sensation,” he stated with disinterest.  “Our plans for dealing with him proceed unhindered.”