Chapter 26
Tench was too dizzy to make out
anything coherent, as he spiraled to the earth. Florence flew up right beside
him, finding herself in the same situation as before. She matched Tench’s
velocity, grabbed hold of him by hoisting him over her shoulder, and swooped
off, leaving his stomach behind. This jolted Tench awake and he got a look at
his savior.
“Again?” He shouted.
“My hero.” Florence retorted.
Tench rolled his eyes.
“Okay, stop, stop. I’m fine.”
Florence slowed to a hover, and Tench got off.
He floated across from her.
“Dang, what happened?”
Florence looked away, trying to locate the
enemy.
“Clive smacked you upside the head and took
Anne that way with Sarra not far behind.”
“How
are we going to stop her?” Tench asked.
Florence crossed her arms and smiled.
“Well Andrew, tell me how would you put a stop
to me if I went rogue?”
Tench paused for a moment, and then chuckled.
“Well, with ice, obviously.”
Florence nodded and stretched her arm to pat
him on the shoulder.
“Good. If that’s the solution, then let’s go
flank him.”
Florence flew off, her pink hair billowing,
and Tench followed along.
Sarra could have sworn that Clive went
into the previously empty lot. Piles and spreads of buildings, heavy machinery,
tools, raw materials and cars filled the area like a dusty attic. Sarra snaked
and oozed through the several loads and up with nothing.
“Dammit, how can Clive hide some girl in a
pile like this?”
Sarra was getting mad. She knew that it was
not good for her, but she believed in acting on revenge as soon as possible.
With Sarra being the newbie hero, and Clive a villain since 1958, that set the
challenge bar for Sarra far, far too high, and it was frustrating her to no
end.
“Come out you slimy fuck. I’ve got some calcium
chloride for you to rot in…”
Sarra peeked around a corner, and heard a
scream that came from her right. She undulated over without hesitation. Sarra
looked around the corner, to see her sister fall to the ground in the mouth of
a cave.
Chapter 27
Lora
hit the ground, hard. Her lightheadedness cleared up enough to allow pain into
her awareness. She gripped her arm and squealed. Her shoulder burned white hot.
Lora looked up to see someone kicking her in the stomach, casing a
comparatively dull pain.
“Stop please—!” She squeaked.
“No! I must finish my research! For many years,
I have wanted to take my revenge for this curse on us all, and I have never
been this close! The calm project must be set in motion immediately!” The woman
shouted.
Lora
could not think straight. She tried to get up.
“Morgan, she’s down!” A male voice yelled.
Morgan kicked Lora in the head to keep her from
getting up, and her vision faded in the corners. Suddenly, the spikes of pain
stopped and Morgan felt to Lora’s eye level. Lora moaned and looked away.
“Chill the fuck out, woman! My sister didn’t
have the luxury of being EnWol.”
Sarra stood on top of Morgan, disregarding
her. Morgan moaned and yelped.
“Can you get up?” Sarra asked, slightly
uninterested. Lora held her hand up and nodded, a very sour look gracing her
face. She retched and went on her hands and knees. Sarra looked toward the rear
of the cave.
“If I were you, I would knock this whore’s
block off when I got the chance. At least Clive wouldn’t have killed me.
Remember to fight back, too Lora. Grow some ovaries.”
Lora retched again in reply.
“Get off
of me!” Morgan ordered.
Sarra stretched her neck down.
“You cram it!”
Morgan looked at her, shocked.
“How dare you?”
There was a yelp of frustration in the back,
keeping Sarra from retorting farther. Anne flew out of the cave with a flying yellow
noodle chasing her. Sarra watched Anne leave, and timed herself so that her
entire torso wedged itself in with the cave. Clive’s arm passed right through
Sarra’s torso, creating a hole. She had forgotten to alter her viscosity.
“Come on!” Sarra yelled, unbelieving.
Clive ignored Sarra and passed the rest of his
body through as if Sarra were a thin membrane.
“I’m such a silly sod, how could I let her
escape?”
Sarra lost her balance and fell backward. She
slowed her fall, shifted herself so that her back literally became her front,
and shot after Clive.
Lora and Morgan were left to ache together.
Lora smiled; she saw a light pulsating in
synch with her heartbeat.
“I guess that you’re the bad guy, huh?” She
asked without thinking and then promptly collapsed with a moan. Morgan curled
her lip and rolled over.
Anne raced up to Levan to execute Tench’s
idea, and she wasn’t going to let anyone stop her.
Anne did not understand her power in the
least. She was sure that she was able to fly, ‘ghost’ through nearly anything
(her tube that Morgan put her in was the first thing she could not phase
through), and project her innermost desires in a phantasmagoric form at will.
She was unsure as to why she was the only one
who saw those traits as normal parts of her life. She suspected that since
everyone she interacted with seemed scared of her power, that they repress their
own, only to use it to fight crime, of course. She had a fond wish to draw the
power out from others to show them that it was not as scary as they thought it
was.
With Levan, and her own experience with trying
to harness an overload, Anne was starting to understand why her power was so
revered, and why, in her own mind, not too many people put their own projection
and intangibility powers to use. With her newfound realization, Anne rushed to
Levan to try to help him to keep his own newfound powers under control.
Clive Ogden was right behind Anne and quickly
closing the gap between them with Sarra following. She felt a strong need to
hesitate because of how Florence approached her, but, as usual, Sarra used the
hesitation as power and it drove her further.
As Sarra slowed, she spotted someone flying
beside her. Florence pointed up at Clive and nodded. Sarra was miffed at how her
superior was contradictory, but she didn’t argue. She decided to take the
moment in to exact her revenge on Clive.
Sarra saw Tench rush up to Clive, fly up next
to him, and throw ice in his face as soon as se got a look at who had joined him.
Clive reacted accordingly and tried to brush the ice from his face without
success. Sarra laughed and looked at Florence.
She flicked her hand out in a similar manner that she uses to discharge
herself. She wanted Sarra to use her ice powers, and Sarra got the message. She
worked to draw in enough ice to encapsulate Clive, and got ready to attack.
Clive was surprised to see that the ice had
gone as suddenly as it came. He saw Sarra rushing at him, and ducked down at
the last second. Sarra threw her ice, her body working before her mind caught
up, and Clive dipped down to make an arc. He pitched herself upward so that
both Clive and Sarra would smack into each other, belly to belly.
Sarra
was still getting used to her elasticity, thus, she still had a low viscosity. Clive
collided with her from below and Sarra’s body exploded into several globs of
chrome. Clive rolled over and continued on his course as Sarra fell to the
earth, her body recovering from the shock. Florence was directly behind her,
hoping that her electrical charge mixed with Clive’s would be enough to send him
down.
Tench came up alongside Florence and flew past her. He rose over Clive
and doused his body from his feet to his shoulders with ice. Clive’s momentum
allowed him to fly past Anne and Levan, missing them by six feet. He reached an
apex and fell.
Anne was terrified to see that Levan’s nose
was bleeding. She whined as he did, both for different reasons, as she inched
herself over to him. Anne materialized a small teddy bear for Levan to hold. He
acknowledged it, but Anne was aware that he might not have cared. She probably
would not have either under that much pain. Anne held onto Levan’s hand and
started to reabsorb whatever bit of his excess power that she could take.
Clive’s body had too much friction against the
ice to be able to escape without a struggle. He had no fear of death from
falling at great heights, but it irritated him that he was encased in a trap
with only a time consuming method of escaping as the ground came closer and
closer. Clive took all of his inner silver that had not frozen, and forced it
up out of the icy prison, leaving a silver shell stuck to the interior. He let
his head and shoulders fly upward in the air, and then he drained herself in a
glob.
He took on a human shape, less than an inch
smaller all the way around, and watched the block fall. He was bemused to see a
hot spot form in the middle of the block before it blew up instantly, the
pieces turning to steam. Clive smiled as his half-inch shell returned to him.
“Morgan… Thanks, mate.”
Clive looked back up at Anne, and darted to
her, relying on his witch of a partner to get him out of a cryokinetic mess.
Lora watched Morgan stand at the mouth of the
cave, muttering to herself and orchestrating an unseen symphony. Lora felt like
throwing up. Her shoulder was throbbing and the spots in her eyes had dulled
significantly. Lora felt powerless to do anything but roll over and sigh. She
tasted bile.
Sarra reformed a good one hundred feet from
the battle area, feeling deeply annoyed. She shot up to Florence, who was
keeping an eye on Clive, wondering what she would do after the tomb of ice
exploded.
“Hey,
what gives? Why didn’t you prevent Clive from doing that with your own
electricity, huh?”
Florence’s face soured. Tench smacked his forehead
and moved away. Sarra was unaware of Clive’s escape.
“You are a stinker, aren’t you?”
“What’s up?” Sarra demanded. “This isn’t
pride, this is legitimate annoyance.”
Florence crossed her arms.
“Clive, the Electric Beaulieu, mind, has power over electricity. In this heroic
and tiresome game of roshambo, Clive struck gold when he became EnWol silver.
That newfound elasticity allowed him to become far more powerful after
absorbing his element.”
Sarra curled her lip.
“You’re useless then?”
Florence’s sour expression deepened. She did
not answer.
Sarra clicked her tongue.
“You are useless; I’ll take care of Clive myself.”
Sarra flew around Florence toward Clive.
Florence sighed.
“She’s torn her dress and her face is a mess…”
Tench said.
Florence nodded.
“That’s apt. Go help her.”
Tench nodded and followed Sarra.
Lora stood up; her knees were buckling. She
leaned on the side of the wall trying to rein in what was left of her curdling
nausea. She watched the fight above. Sarra got close to Clive and shot some of
her ice, but was smacked away. Clive got a part of himself incased in Sarra’s
ice, to which Morgan reacted and directed a spell to heat the ice and free Clive.
“She’s helping Clive from down here…” Lora
said to herself.
She inched over, feeling less like she would
throw up than the moment before, and wobbled behind Morgan. She watched the
back of her head for a moment, wondering if she should act at all. Sarra, Tench,
and Florence were busy with Clive trying to capture Anne, Clark had no idea
where she and Morgan were, and neither did any other hero available.
Lora saw that she had the advantage over
Morgan, who was busy tossing her riding crop of a wand around as if she was
trying to swat several flies with it.
Lora raised her arm to attack, and crumpled
silently when she realized that her dominant arm was also her badly wounded
arm. Cursing herself over her mistake, Lora decided to take a different route,
even if it would make her feel more ill. She prepared herself for the oncoming
sickness and bit her tongue. She spread her feet wide, crouched, and spun
around to kick Morgan in the back of the head.
The hit connected.
Lora fell to the ground and so did Morgan, the
latter without a peep. Lora made a loud gasp as she landed on her less hurt
shoulder, the shock going through it to her bloodied one. Lora tried to keep
from blacking out from the pain by standing up in a fighting stance.
Morgan
was holding her head, and Lora’s nausea returned in spades. Her stomach and arm
felt wretched. She walked past Morgan and picked up the wand.
“Look,
I’m sorry for kicking you, but you were keeping my friends and sister from
extinguishing the portal. You know, it was getting bigger when I last looked,
so it would probably gobble everything…”
Lora’s
hand tingled.
She
looked at the wand and the world around it turned black. An uncomfortable
warmth permeated her hand and went up her arm. Lora heard whispers emanate from
the wand. They echoed chants of hatred and got louder with each racing beat of
her heart.
“…Calm…
Morgan… Fire… Flight… Leon… Die!”
Lora
made a sharp gasp. She had to make the whispers stop! Lora gripped both sides of
the wand and snapped it in half. The world returned to normal.
Morgan looked up at Lora; her face contorted
with horror and anger. Lora dropped the two pieces while trying to catch her
breath. Her heart was a piston.
“You fool, have you any idea what you have
done?”
Lora jumped and almost by reflex, she sprayed
Morgan with ice from her upper abdomen down to her feet. Morgan hissed at the
abrupt cold and started to shiver. Lora held her arm up, staring at Morgan with
disbelief at what she had done.
Morgan
narrowed her eyes and her lips rose with disgust.
“You may be green now, but you remember this
for when you are a professional hero, Pink Lemon. Heroes never have friends;
they only have those who fear them, and those who hate them. After several
lifetimes of fighting at the top, Pink Lemon, you will find that there are no
positive feelings harbored toward you. The citizens you saved will turn away;
your family will be shamed, and those who love you will be gone. Beware the
superman, they will cry, all because the so-called hero would one day hurt
those whom they had once tried to save.
Hate is the emotion that stems from anger at
others and it requires its opposite, the concept of another’s company to
function. However, the true opposite of love, Pink Lemon, is loneliness. Long,
dark, infinity. Alone. That is how those you save will shape your future and
create your fate in the void. Heroics, harm, fear, and loneliness.”
Lora stepped back, feeling both her shoulder
and heart throb. A fat blister of sorrow tried to burst from her chest. She had
a flash back to when she was inside Anne’s vortex, how both Tench and Sarra
vanished, and she was alone in the void of toys. In the purest form, nothing
was out there. No cities, no people, no apple pie, no love. Nothing.
Lora’s mind made the correlation for her
between Morgan’s curse and her experience with the very concept of infinity and
it made her want to scream.
Lora shut her eyes and shook her head hard.
She had to get away from Morgan before the poison spread farther. Without
watching where she was going, or even caring, Lora flew up into the air and
forced herself to find the eye of the vortex.
She dwelled on why she was even continuing as
she flew, why bother, why be the hero if there was an inevitable point where
she would do something catastrophic? Sure, she’s needed for that situation, but
how much would she be needed still and not be despised when the time came?
Lora wanted to lie down in her fluffy bed with
a romance novel and good chocolate wrapped in gold foil and forget about being
a hero, especially if the experience is as bad as the first day. Instead, she
wondered why she trudged on in spite of both what Morgan told her, and her own
feelings.
Morgan watched Lora leap up and fly away in a
zigzag. She reached for her broken wand bits and looked at them. Walter R. was
engraved in elegant lettering on the handle and Morgan could feel its unbiased magic
being reabsorbed back into Gaia’s immense reserve.
Morgan clutched the two bits of wand and wept
as they erupted in blue flames.
Lora watched as Sarra and Tench tried to
freeze Clive as the cloud got smaller. Clive knew better than to get cocky when
he was being helped. He was on guard when it came to who was beside him, and
who was not. He came close to grabbing Anne a few times, but he was forced away
by at least one annoying fly that did nothing but vomit ice in his face.
With Clive’s ability to electrocute people
only by touch, or arc if the conditions were right, and the heroes with the ability
to throw their ice at him from a distance, Clive decided to get crafty. If the
heroes were keeping him from his prize, in essence, his healing, then changing the game seemed like a good idea. He had
changed the rules when he ate Sarra to moderate success.
Clive drained himself from the ice that
covered a little bit of his torso. He let his stuck and icy thin skin fall to
the bay, knowing that the covering would come back. He closed his eyes and
concentrated. Clive’s head split in half down the middle, and it continued down
his torso.
Lora flew up to Sarra as she examined Clive.
“What’s he doing, Sarra?”
Sarra sneered.
“There’s no one new to eat, so I don’t know.”
Florence and Tench arrived and joined in on
the villain watching.
“How’s your arm?” Florence asked.
Lora just moaned.
“Are you delusional from the blood loss?”
Sarra asked with a sarcastic bite.
Lora
shook her head.
“I
don’t know.”
Clive was literally split down the middle. He
willed his body not to reform itself
as he felt himself splitting as well.
The two halves of his body each formed an identical whole, their height
shrinking by half to compensate for the other half.
Clive Ogden had become two.
“What
is he doing?” Florence asked. “All that EnWol can achieve by splitting is
synchronicity, how can he expect to gain an advantage if he’s using an
impossible method to—” Florence interrupted herself as the two Clive halves
flew off in different directions. Florence
frowned.
“Oh my…”
Florence looked right at Sarra, but spoke to
everyone.
“I’ll get Clark to call for more help, you all
fire at will! Go!”
Tench and Sarra, with a smug smile, left
toward a Clive half as Florence went the other way. Lora held her arm and
followed her two partners.
The two Clive halves laughed and twirled
amongst each other, glad that the mitosis had worked and that their minds were
still linked. As if it were instinct, one left to rush after the hero cavalry
and the other went to Anne.
Anne looked up at Levan as she tried to
reabsorb enough of the power for him to deal with. The entire cloud had a
radius of one hundred feet, and Levan seemed to be coming to. His breathing had
stabilized, and he seemed only very tired. His crusted blood cracked on his
upper lip.
“Is it all better yet, mister?” Anne asked.
Levan nodded.
“Yeah, the aberration and torment shall
ultimately cease once the young miss sorts out the nefarious tribulations.”
Anne giggled. None of them had a clue what was
just said.
Clive came up behind Anne, slowed himself to
prevent breaking her spine, and took her away. Levan’s arm stretched out with a
jolt, it still being elastic from acquiring Rachel’s power from a slap after
stealing her radio.
“Confound it, viscoelastic wench!” He looked
up at the portal, the eye a small pinprick, and plugged it with his finger. The
cloud dissipated instantly and left Levan wondering how he knew that that would
happen. He looked for the Clive half, wondering how he knew what he was about
to do would be effective.
The other Clive half was delighted to see that
the three heroes flew in a formation worthy of a professional flight exhibition
team. He let the group come to him.
“What is he doing?” Tench yelled through his
radio to be heard.
Sarra snarled.
“Who cares?”
Tench
looked at her. Sarra looked terrified. He frowned.
“You sure, Sarra?”
“Just go!” Sarra snapped. “I’m not going to
let him pull that horrible trick on
me again!”
At the last moment, the Clive half’s chest had
a creature burst forth from it. The several tendrils tipped with blood waved
back and forth, their hairs matted and irregular. In the center was a single
normal looking eye, sky blue and friendly. Underneath was a mouth with no
teeth, gnawing aimlessly at whatever it could find for sustenance. It shrieked.
The Clive half looked on with a wicked smile,
entirely whole behind the creature.
Tench paused, surprised by the sudden change. Sarra’s
heart caught and she stopped completely. This surprised her.
Lora
plowed on without missing a beat.
Clive focused on grabbing Lora by using his
sticky tendrils. Lora swooped up and down and dodged every swing while trying
not to cry. She was terrified. After what Morgan had told her about being alone
several years down the line, along with Sarra’s reaction to Clive’s transformations,
and the experience in toy land, she had a right to be.
Lora
wondered why she bothered, why did she care? Why had Morgan’s words struck her
so hard in the gut and yet she persisted in opposition? She didn’t know why she
endured, but she knew that to defeat Clive, she had to kick her fear to the
curb.
Lora
approached Clive, roared, and kicked him square in the face. Ice exploded from Lora’s
foot, and Clive’s head sped away from his body, stopped in suspended animation
by the ice.
The horror shot back into Clive’s chest and
the husk of the body fell, limbs flailing madly.
A thought came to Lora and she started to
laugh. She covered her mouth, the giggles growing in spite of both her hurt arm
and emotional state.
“Oh
my goodness. Brain freeze.”
Lora enjoyed her joke and kept to her attack.
She swung her arms and prepared to cover Clive in ice with only seconds before he
recovered. Lora gasped and stopped when she saw Sarra fly directly into her
path. Sarra dove after Clive and got ready to unleash her own attack. Lora
moved out of Sarra’s way so that she could add to the blizzard.
An ethereal sound wafted in from out of the
blue with Sarra hearing it first. She lost focus and felt her ice changing back
into a gaseous form.
Sarra shook her head.
“No, no, no! Stay with it!”
The song slunk across the Dogpatch district,
playing itself for the heroes. Tench, Lora and Juno were confused by the new
music, but the remaining EnWol were enchanted. Juno watched Florence and Clark,
interrupted from trying to strategize and make sense of what Clive had done.
Clark turned to silver at his own feet,
quivering; his top half bleed from over the table.
“This tone confuses the human brain on a level
of physical perception; a quality that the EnWol body no longer has. Why are
they affected into hypnosis?” Juno wondered. She looked up at the heroes and
villains above, trying to make sense of the new situation.
Lora flew back to Tench; he was looking for
the origin of the sound.
“I’m definitely sure that I’m hearing this,
Lora. How about you?”
Lora nodded.
“It’s pretty.” She said.
The
Clive carrying Anne heard the slow tempo, high-pitched music and unwittingly
shifted his body to a silver blob. Anne, who had been having trouble with her
intangibility, slipped out from Clive’s grasp. Clive kept flying; he had not
noticed that his detainee had escaped.
Anne gulped and flew off to Levan.
Levan!
Anne could easily see which mark among the sky
he was since there were refractive waves searing off of him. Anne arrived and
watched him for second. The sound came from his head, yet it was not vocalized.
“What’cha doing? That’s scary music.” Anne
said.
Levan shook his head.
“I am most uncertain young miss, yet I know in
my heart that radiating my thought patterns into an audible frequency shall
assist us greatly in this terrible plight.”
Sarra tried to block everything out in trying
to keep her focus. The sound was affecting her on a mental level; it penetrated
her to her core and made her melt, no matter how hard she tried to block it out.
She kept her eyes from seeing light years through San Francisco, she kept her
focus on the ice long enough to hold onto it, and she kept control long enough
to see her gloved hands melt into reflective stumps. The mild shock was enough
to force Sarra off the edge, and she melted away, unable to help herself by
surrendering to Levan’s song.
The two Clive halves suffered the same fate. They
lost control and became unaware that they were shooting back at each other in a
straight line, like two rubber bands that were tied together and simultaneously
let go.
Tench watched the two shoot toward each other
and smiled when he realized what was happening. He patted Lora’s back and she
turned to look at him. Tench leaned in with his lopsided smile.
“Let’s go kick some ice.”
Lora could not help but giggle and she could
feel herself melt for reasons unrelated to Levan’s song.
Tench flew past Lora to the point that he
guessed the two Clive’s would converge. Lora followed and caught up. He noticed
her beside him, and he had begun to orbit her. Lora felt low temperatures
radiate from him as he spun. She worked to do the same. The two quickly orbited
each other, creating a reserve of ice in their center.
“You got it!” Tench yelled over his radio to
Lora.
Lora laughed as the ice and snow at their
center grew larger and more frantic.
The two halves of Clive collided with each
other, not a thought between them as the song played. They both conglomerated
into a mass of yellow spotted silver with bits of hair and random shapeless
limbs poking out.
Lora and Tench got within twenty feet of Clive.
“Do as I do!”
Lora nodded. She watched Tench make a motion
to grab the reserve, and the two hurled themselves around Clive like a gravitational
slingshot. They completely covered him in a three-inch thick layer of ice within
six passes, making special care not to leave any openings.
The two broke off and twirled upward, leaving
a whole, immobilized and deformed Clive to fall to the ocean. Lora and Tench
met at their spiraled pillar of excess ice and Tench held out his hand for a
high five. Lora returned it with her good arm and gave him a hug with a
boisterous laugh…
…and gasped when her bad shoulder protested
the action. She chuckled nervously and rubbed it.
Tench laughed.
“Hey, don’t let the arm be a killjoy, we did
it. Enjoy the moment, Pink.”
Lora
smiled and nodded.
“Sure!”
Tench
returned the smile, leaned in and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Lora’s face
flushed and she beamed. She squealed and hugged Tench with her good arm, her
warmth radiating and melting his ice to its core.
If you would like the whole book, a souvenir of the experience, check it out at Smashwords here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/87111
If you would like the whole book, a souvenir of the experience, check it out at Smashwords here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/87111
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