Super Powereds: Year 3 (112 page)

           
      
“It’s my fault; I’ve been meaning to fix it for days.” Phil stepped out of his room and walked over to Joan, who immediately felt the bags lift off her arms. He paused in front of the door and stared at it for several seconds, then turned and began heading toward the area set up as a kitchen, a parade of bags floating behind him. “Shouldn’t be an issue anymore.”

           
      
“Thanks,” Joan said, rubbing her sore arms. “Gerard and Quentin still out?”

           
      
“They should be back by dinner,” Phil informed her. “Though, at the speed Quentin keeps growing, I’m sure they’ll have to do another clothing run in a few months. I’d forgotten how fast they shoot up at that age.”

           
      
“Careful, if you ask him any clarifying questions, he’ll start talking about his days on the road, and we won’t be able to shut him up,” Persephone warned. In truth, she enjoyed when Phil went on his rambles about the years raising Vince. Bleak though they could seem, there was also a wholesome warmth to those stories. Things might not have been easy, but they were simple and honest in a way their lives could no longer be.

           
      
“Well then, I suppose I should know my place and start cooking supper,” Phil replied, flashing Persephone the sort of smile she didn’t understand how he was able to still conjure.

           
      
“Actually, before you go, there might be something you need to know,” Joan said. “I mean, it might be nothing, but I checked in with a few contacts while I was out, and someone is buying up a ton of muscle in California.”

           
      
Phil’s steps halted, and he slowly turned around to face her. The smile was gone from his lips; in its place was a somber expression that the others had learned to interpret as him being serious. It was the face of their leader, their champion, the man they had all placed their hopes in. It also often meant that things were going to get dangerous.

           
      
“Please, Joan, go on.”

           
      
“I don’t know that I have a lot more to tell.” Joan fidgeted a bit, more from pent up energy than nerves. Staying confined was harder on her than any of the rest of them. “I just heard that anyone with decent power, especially good muscle, could find work out in California. Someone with deep pockets is bank-rolling something big. Could be just a coincidence, but with your kid out there and all . . . seemed like something you should know about.”

           
      
Phil gave a short, somber nod. “Thank you, Joan. Would you do me the favor of seeing if you can find out anything else? You’re probably right about it being a coincidence—California is a big state after all—but I’d feel a lot better if I knew that for certain.”

           
      
“No problem.” Joan had been half-hoping for this outcome when she brought up the issue in the first place. Doing digging meant leaving the warehouse, running around, and finally getting to stretch her legs.

           
      
“I appreciate your help.” He turned back around and headed into the kitchen, floating grocery bags in tow. Despite his words, Phil didn’t quite believe it was as much of a coincidence as he’d like it to be. He’d spent too many years as a Hero not to know that when there were lots of things happening in the same area, more often than not, they were connected. Still, he could hope that this was one of the times where it was an exception.

           
      
Hope, at least, was one of the things he had left.

*          
      
*          
      
*

           
      
The explosion was a small one, and the fire was put out before it could spread, thanks to Vince. The smoke, however, was more difficult to mitigate as the various students coughed, choked, and hacked their way through the house and out into the clean night air of the backyard. It took several minutes of clearing their lungs before one of them was finally able to speak, and it was Will’s voice that filled the yard.

           
      
“I
told
you it wasn’t ready yet!”

           
      
“Oh, don’t give me that! You always say your inventions aren’t ready, and then, when I make you use them, things work fine,” Jill said, barely getting her words out between coughing fits.

           
      
“To be fair, his video immersion thingie fizzled out halfway through the movie freshman year,” Vince reminded her.

           
      
“Exactly, and that was days ahead of this project, not to mention far less ambitious.” Will hacked out a few more wisps of smoke, and realized he could faintly hear sirens in the distance. He dearly hoped those weren’t coming to their house, but logic told him they likely were. “A fully immersive, digitally rendered environment in a contained space is something beyond even my capabilities to create in a week.”

           
      
“I honestly still don’t know what he’s talking about,” Alice said.

           
      
“Basically, Will was trying to make a prototype of a holodeck, but with very limited projection materials,” Hershel explained.

           
      
“That in no way clarified things,” Alice said. “If anything, I understand what you’re talking about even less.”

           
      
“It doesn’t matter, because as we can clearly see, the whole thing was an unmitigated failure,” Will snapped. “Now, if you all would be so kind, I’m going to need help tucking away as much of my tech as possible before the fire department gets here.”

           
      
At that, the rest of the group finally noticed the impending sirens, and eyes went wide as realization set in.

           
      
“I could have been waiting on tables that under-tip me tonight,” Mary grumbled. But despite her protests, she and the rest plunged back into the slowly-clearing house to help Will hide his pieces of potentially destructive brilliance.

           
      
They would manage to get everything squirreled away before the fire department arrived, however, explaining how the fire had been put out would prove to be much more problematic.

208.

               Alice felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and unabashedly flipped it out to see who was texting her. She didn’t have to listen that closely to the old man speaking down at the bottom of the lecture hall, anyway; he had pre-recorded his classes years before and hosted them online for students to listen to. It was why he got away with such massive class sizes, since being able to hear him in the first place scarcely mattered at all.

           
      
To her surprise, it was Nick, checking to see if she was free on Saturday for a lunch. He’d been a bit aloof since their day out with the others, but it looked as though he were finally taking the bull by the horns. Tempted as Alice was to text back with immediate agreement, she forced herself to stop and check the calendar function on her phone. Their lives were a bit hectic, and after all their dancing about, the last thing she wanted was to have to reschedule with Nick.

           
      
It turned out to be a good thing she had checked, because Alice was signed up for her mental training session that Saturday afternoon. Vince had already gone and found the whole thing to be uneventful, though he did say he felt a bit more relaxed after his session. That might be good; a mental massage before her big date.

           
      
Alice’s well-manicured nails flew across the touchscreen as she texted Nick back, letting him know about the conflict. She also told him that she’d have declined a lunch date anyway, after this long, it was dinner or nothing. In truth, she probably would have accepted if not for the conflict, but it didn’t hurt to make sure Nick was aware that there were expectations to be met.

           
      
She put her phone back in her pocket, then turned to face the teacher once more. This time, however, her thoughts weren’t even cursorily on the material. No doubt about it, she was going to have to re-listen to this entire lecture if she wanted to get anything from the day’s class.

           
      
It was a trade she was happy to make.

*          
      
*          
      
*

           
      
“All in all, you put forth an exceptional effort.” Professor Cole stood in front of her students once more. The first day back from spring break had finally arrived, and with it, her evaluations of their exams. “Despite all my preparation to keep you in the dark as to who you would be working with, most of you came together with a fierce efficiency. Granted, this was not exactly what it will be like in the field, since you may have no idea what the other Heroes you work with will be capable of, but nonetheless, you all still did well.”

           
      
The students could just barely make out her green eyes through those cloth bandages, but no longer was her strange style of dress a point of curiosity. Now, they understood it for what it was: her shield and sword. Professor Cole came to class every day with the tools she needed to kick ass. It might have been odd from some teachers, but for their Weapons instructor, it made perfect sense.

           
      
“Those of who fared best of the lot were the ones who quickly determined what your role in the team would be, and then fulfilled it. We didn’t spend all of last year teaching you teamwork for nothing, and I was genuinely impressed at how many of you remembered your fundamentals. On top of that, the majority of you truly turned your weapons into tools, and obviously, that was a big part of the exam as well.”

           
      
Roy involuntarily tightened the grip on his bat, which rested in his right hand. He’d had a sling for it that went over his back, but after five tries at drawing the weapon carefully, he’d gotten overexcited and ripped the thing apart. Now, he just carried it. The weight was good. It kept his muscles at least partially engaged all the time. He’d probably miss it when it was time to say goodbye to this class.

           
      
“Now we, of course, still have final exams coming up, but it’s about time for you to all start thinking about what you want your HCP major to be,” Professor Cole told them. Around him, Roy could feel some of the others bristle. This was a thought that weighed heavy on all their minds as the deadline approached.

           
      
“I took some of you aside this morning and spoke with you about how things went in the exam. For those students, the final will be a very crucial moment in whether or not they are allowed to continue on with Weapons. For the rest of you, so long as you don’t completely fail the thing, you have shown me enough skill and competence that I will sign off on training you for another year. You can still screw this up, but I want you aware that Weapons is a major you can seriously consider undertaking.”

           
      
Roy resisted the urge to look around. He hadn’t been one of those told he needed to make the final exam count, and he didn’t really want to know who had been. For him, Weapons was always a second-place priority, but that didn’t mean there weren’t others in the class desperately hoping to make the cut. To have something you wanted so bad and find it out of reach . . . Roy didn’t need to see those people’s faces.

           
      
He flexed his hand against the bat once more. There was no more getting around it: Professor Cole had made a lot of valid points throughout the year, and he might be better off doing Weapons over Close Combat. Roy was past the point of caring what most strongmen did, or how using a weapon was perceived. It was about power, at the end of the day. What made him the strongest Hero he could be. If it were the bat, then he would wield it. If it was his fists, then the bat would be cast aside. The one thing Roy couldn’t afford to do was guess. He needed a test. Not one delivered by the HCP, but one that gave him results he could believe in.

           
      
Roy knew what he had to do; he just hoped he could manage to pull it off.

209.

               Chad could hear Roy coming before the young man even entered the Melbrook lobby. Despite the fact that there was a television on, tuned to the news, Chad made it a point to always stay as aware of his surroundings as his abilities allowed. It was a trait that some would have called paranoid, while others—mostly, experienced Heroes—would have deemed it smart. Still, Chad thought nothing of Roy’s entrance (he did live there too, after all), until the tall Super’s shadow fell across the couch where Chad was sitting.