Chapter 3

Melanie was waiting in the parking lot and she had the absolutely coolest car. It was an all-electric, Smart TwoFour, but the new one with the convertible top and the body kit. It was a bit of a squeeze for me, I had gained another inch this semester and was six one now. Her side was all fixed up for her height, with custom controls and everything. It was like a normal car, but sized down. I had no idea they could even do that!

The ride to the hospital was only twenty minutes, and we chatted about school, mostly, and about where she wanted to go to college. Me, I wasn’t all that convinced about college at all, but I had three more years of high school before it was a real issue anyway.

Elaine Sandusky was a spare, no-nonsense kind of woman, though she wasn’t unkind. She just seemed very focused, like she had no time for frivolity. She explained that her Bio power was about the same as Melanie’s, which surprised me since the Doc was supposed to be a T4. The difference, she said, was that she was a T3 level mentalist and a T3 level empath. She needed to touch her patient to connect, but those two along with her bio power made her an amazingly effective doctor.

We explained our confusion and she was eager to examine me for herself, never having had a chance to explore a pocket dimension. Melanie was able to point it out to her, so it took just seconds to locate it, and with her mentalist powers, she was able to show me, in my own head, how to look for it and recognize it.

She walked me through several exercises and, with her guidance, I was able to open up the portal! Suddenly I could feel it. It was like ... I don’t even know how to describe it. I could sense its size (about the size of a small closet) and its contents (nothing at all, at the moment). I could open and close it with a thought, now that I knew the key, and I was anxious to experiment.

Doctor Sandusky and Melanie both handed me things, starting with a stethoscope, then a potted plant, and finally a glass of ice water with a dozen ice cubes floating in it.

I could put the item in my pocket and pull it out again, exactly like it went in. The thing that shocked me was that I would still have, whatever it was, in the pocket. It was making duplicates! I had a stethoscope, a potted plant and a glass of water in there right now and I could pull out one, two, a dozen potted plants or glasses of ice water and still have one left.

It didn’t work like that with the stethoscope though and, after some experimentation with various items, we found that metal just didn’t duplicate. It didn’t seem to matter what kind of metal it was either. We tried aluminum, steel, even a titanium hip joint from a demonstration model.

Doctor Sandusky was very excited, saying that this was an amazing discovery. It was like nothing she had ever heard of and the League would be all over it once they knew! Melanie was a bit more idealistic, saying that I could feed an entire town, or give drinking water, or even duplicate things like diamonds or other gems and get rich! It was almost as if I wasn’t even there, with those two throwing ideas out and discussing them in machinegun fashion.

It wasn’t until I sat down, feeling drained and dizzy, that the doctor moved to my side. She put her hand on my head and demanded I empty the pocket, right that instant.

I had no idea how to do that, so I tried just ... wishing. Thinking the items gone? And it worked! It even gave me a tiny boost to my flagging energy and it hit me, I was creating copies of things in the pocket, but where was the energy coming from? I said as much and the doctor blushed, shaking her head.

“I should have thought of that, I am the doctor, the scientist. I am sorry, Mike, the joy of discovery was overwhelming my common sense for a while. I think you are right, Mike. I felt that power blip when you, well, consumed is a good word. When you consumed the items in the pocket dimension, you reclaimed the energy. I think you are using your own body’s energy to make those duplicates or, at the least, it is leeching energy to deposit and retrieve those items.

“I think you should be careful until you know for sure. It may be like a muscle you haven’t exercised that will get stronger, or it may be a hard, fast limit you need to define. Experimentation will be key, and I will get it scheduled right away. I will need a room, observers and at least one Bio, perhaps Melanie would be a good choice?”

Melanie looked excited at the discovery, less so at being roped into playing monitor, but I wasn’t going to let her get drafted without a fight.

“Slow down, doctor, please. I don’t recall signing up to be a guinea pig and as exciting as this is, I am not planning on being a test subject any time soon. Besides Melanie has her own stuff going on, just like I do, like high school?”

Doctor Sandusky looked mulish for a moment, unused to being balked, but she shrugged and nodded her head.

“You are correct, of course, you are not part of my department and not even really part of the League yet, so I can’t tell either of you what to do. I tend to just forge ahead and damn the consequences when I get excited about something, so please, accept my apologies. You will test though, won’t you? It could be critical at some point, a skill you will need in an emergency.”

I knew when to give in and I didn’t want to chance refusing and having this forced on me. The League were the good guys, but even the good guys had a huge bureaucracy that could be scary to the little guys. Like me! I nodded to the doctor which seemed to make her happy.

“Fine, fine! Let’s talk testing protocols, shall we?”

The tests were to be methodical and involve as many different types of material as possible, in slowly increasing volume and weight. There would also be tests involving repetition, taking one thing out as often as we could in a given time frame, and testing the energy needs to refuel when I felt weak. This would take, probably, months, but I was okay with that. I wanted to learn too!

Those tests would take time and would be carried out over several weeks or even months, but we did learn, with a conference call to Austin, that what I could do was not unique. There had been three reported, but only one other currently registered as active at any of the world-wide organizations that tracked and controlled powers.

In the USNA it was the Transformation and Registration Authority and the League, but in Europe, it was Registre Européen, or European Registry and, in Asia, they had the Alien Powers Registration Bureau (एलियन पॉवर्स रजिस्ट्रेशन ब्यूरो). For the most part, they worked pretty much the same, though it was said China is going its own way and forcing Type 3s and 4s into government service.

In all the available registration data, only a man in Britain has a similar portal, But he could duplicate metals. His pocket dimensional space was reported to be about the volume of a shoebox, so mine was definitely larger. Whether this was good or bad, we didn’t know, but it was data. Little else was available in their system, so the USNA League would be asking for a full report from their European counterparts and said they would share what they found with me.

I was exhausted when I got home and, after filling in mom and dad on my day, I crashed right after dinner. It was probably the smartest thing I had done in a long while.

Like hundreds of other McAllen High students, I was in the school yard the next morning, waiting for the first bell to ring and the doors to officially open, when the world seemed to go mad.

“I ... will ... KILL ... YOU!” The voice started shrill and by the time it hit the word kill, it was dropping through the basement and becoming deep; like boulders scraping against boulders, deep in the earth, deep.

There were screams of terror and panic, followed by a sound like a high-speed automobile crash just happened in parking lot. Students were streaming away from the center of the parking lot like their lives depends on it, and they were not far wrong.

When I could see clearly, there was a ... a creature. It was twelve feet tall at least, and seemed to be made of living magma, like the god from an ancient volcano made metahuman, and it was stalking across the parking lot, leaving wrecked and burning vehicles in its wake. Each step would shatter the asphault surface, then turn the chunks into steaming, burning and melting tar.

Scrambling away from the creature was a guy in a letterman’s jacket, some athlete from one of the teams but not someone I knew.

“How dare you lay hands on me? Do you think you can hurt anyone you want? Do you think you can touch my breasts and I would be powerless? How many women have you molested? How many have you raped? I will melt your bones until they have to dig up the entire parking lot to bury you. Your own parents will not recognize what is left!”

The creature was toying with the boy, letting him think he was getting away, then sending tendrils of lava to cut him off again, making cars burst into flame, gas tanks explode!

This was getting crazy and I probably should have stayed the hell out of it, but I didn’t want that girl, even if she was now a huge lava monster, to spend her life in prison for that guy.

I reached out to the overflow pond across the road. When they had built the school, they had put in a big depression to keep the land from flooding during the frequent storms The Fall brought on. There was ten feet of water in that depression today, and I used my TK, scooping as much as I could, and dumped it on the creature.

I thought it had worked, at first. A massive cloud of super-heated steam shot skyward, and the cloud of water vapor enveloped the whole parking lot and the front of the main school building. It had a secondary effect of extinguishing multiple smaller fires caused by her footsteps and two nearby auto fires as well.

When the steam started to clear a bit, I could see the hulking figure had turned almost solid black, like water had cooled the outer layers and encased her in stone. When the rumbling started, slowly at first, but gaining in volume, crack appeared in the outer casing and the red-hot magma inside appeared again. The black outer casing began to fail, falling away in big chunks.

The inner creature was smaller, but no less angry.

This time, I acted directly, though I really wasn’t sure how much good it would do. This was a far cry from the tiny, marble-sized fireballs that Billie had sent my way! I encased her in a cylinder of force, leaving the top off this time, and began shrinking the cylinder to hold her in place. As I made it smaller, I tried to make it thicker as well, making it as strong as I could.

When she began to change shape, I knew that my plan wasn’t working. As the cylindrical walls closed in, she grew taller and slimmer, her hands reaching up, trying to find the top of her prison. With a wince, and a prayer, I closed the cylinder and, almost immediatley, the cylinder filled with smoke. The available oxygen had been burned up in a second and the fire was going out, but what about the girl? Would she revert to her regular form? Would she suffocate?

I was already almost at my limit, but I reached for the pond again, creating a second scoop, though much, much smaller. I was sweating profusely now, my knees feeling weak, as I positioned the scoop of water over the cylinder of force, matching sides exactly.

With a thought, and a second prayer, I released the top of the cylider and the bottom of the scoop at the same time, flooding the cylinder to about ten feet, but without allowing fresh oxygen in. Then, after a three count, I let the whole thing collapse and watched, terrified, as the water washed away chunks of lava.

It left behind a small girl, laying on the still steaming asphault, naked as the day she was born. She seemed overheated, her skin red as though sunburned, but she twitched and I let out a huge breath, trying to hold back the sob I could feel in my throat. She was alive!

I fell twice, trying to get over to her, I was feeling very weak and a little dizzy, but I made it at the same time as Vice Principle Samuels. He had whipped off his blazer jacket and was draping it over the girl. She was out still, though she seemed to be trying to wake up.

Melanie was the next to arrive and she pushed between the VP and I, laying her hand on the girl’s forehead and wincing. With a deep breath, she closed her eyes and was still for a moment. I knew Melanie was a Bio and, when I looked at Mr. Samuels, I could see he was aware too, but wasn’t happy about a student possibly giving medical treatment to another student. Well, to be fair, he wasn’t happy about about any of this.

Man, what an understatement!

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see someone coming closer, moving furtively. When I turned my attention that way, I immediately snapped my shield into place and I was barely in time. The jock, the one who had been crying and begging and crawling away, had grabbed up a chunk of asphalut the size of my head and had hurled it at the girl on the ground!

The chunk of parking lot bouced off my shield and, before the guy could grab another, I had him so tied up that I would be shocked if both of his shoulders were still in their sockets. I let him suffer for a bit, then loosened up a bit when Mr. Samuels lay his hand on my shoulder. Loosening up the cylinder allowed him to suck in a breath, but it also allowed him to start screaming, hurling insults and threats.

I learned something else new today, besides being able to create more than one construct at a time. I learned I could shape my TK in unusual ways, and the guy, whose name I still didn’t know, was shocked to find himself wearing an invisible ball gag. I thought, just for a second, about changing the shape even more, but if someone read him, like a cop, I wouldn’t want them thinking I tortured him.

School was officially cancelled for the day and I was in trouble again. Not trouble, trouble, but trouble all the same. I am not suspposed to intervene in power-related incidents as a minor. Especially as an untrained minor.

But, and you know this is true everywhere, success is its own reward.

While I was faced with hours of interviews; by school, the police, the feds, the League and, even scarier, my parents, I was never actually charged with anything. In fact, every one of those groups, in a totally unofficial, just between us kind of way, told me I had done well and probably saved some lives. The only super close enough to respond had been Iso, and this wasn’t really his wheelhouse.

Iso was a spy, an operative, an intelligence agent for the League. He could turn invisible and insubstantial, had an idetic memory and flight powers. He wasn’t prepared to go against teenage lava monsters, but he would have done as trained and tried to control the scene until help arrived. This time, it was over before he got there. He gave me a thumbs up and a clap on the shoulder when he pulled me aside though, which was pretty cool!

His only question was an odd one, and one that I didn’t have an answer to at the time.

“If you can store water in that pocket dimension of yours, do you have to get it all out at the same time? I mean, one glass in, one glass out? Or can you get it out a little at a time, say a spoonful from that glass? If you can, maybe storing some water in there, then using a, I don’t know, a hose sort of thing made by your TK, you could have played fireman too, saved a few more cars!

“Listen, Mike, I am not criticizing, don’t think that, you were awesome today. I was just wondering ... my mind goes all kinds of ways and comes up with crazy stuff all the time, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.”

My first foray into the Hero business eneded with me being down at the Hero League building and being interviewed again by the little old lady, this time with my folks present.

“You are getting stronger, Mike! And you have discovered one of your talents, good for you. It’s hard to tell until you actually discover what they are, but I think there are, maybe, two more? I see potential, bits of your brain that seem to be, well, waiting. I think that is the best description I can give. They are getting energy from the rest of the brain, but seem dormant, each in its own way.”

Then she was gone again, and still with no introduction or even explaination of who she was!

Instead, I got shoved into a room and made to perform like a trick pony. A pair of mentalists watched as I put my dimensional pocket through its paces, hemming and humming and hawing like I was some particularly fascinating bug. This lasted a half hour until I refused to do anymore, feeling dizzy again and absolutely starving.

Thankfully, my League contact, Jim Baker, was there and, with my mom on the warpath, they freed me from the science types and fed me.

Not that this was a completly a good thing, mind you, because it was Mom’s turn to interrogate me and even Jim Baker couldn’t rescue me from this one.

“Mike, what the hell were you thinking, getting involved in that mess? You are not a Hero, young man, you are a fourteen year old, high school freshman and not Texas Star or Captain Canada.”

“I was thinking that it would be a shame if that poor girl had to spend her life in prison for killing an asshole.” I told her, then winced, mentally kicking myself. Mom hated foul language.

“Language, Mike! What do you mean, I am talking about that lava monster on the news. You do know that half the students at the school were filming that on their phones, right?”

“Mom, the monster was a traumatized girl. The guy it, she, was chasing had grabbed her breast or something and she snapped. I think she probably emerged, you know, got her power just then. Like Chris did, but, well, a different ending, thankfully. Anyway, she was chasing the kid who attacked her, screaming about harassment and rape, and I didn’t want her accidently killing someone when she was the real victim. Besides, I just reacted, did what I thought was best.”

Mom stared at me for several minutes, long enough for me to finish my burger and make a dent in my fries, anyway.

“Well, okay then. Just don’t do it again, I am too damn old to start over again with a new kid and diapers and daycare ... lord knows I have a hard enough time with you and you are mostly potty trained.”

Jim Baker abruptly left the table, his shoulders shaking and a hand over his mouth. I was pretty certain he was trying not to laugh but I supposed his slice of pie could have been bad or something.

“You are just a sentimental, nurturing teddy bear, aren’t you, mom?” I joked in return, starting in on my milkshake. Man, my stomach felt lots better after that meal!

“You did the right thing, Mike, but it is a mother’s perogative to worry.” she paused and smiled sadly. “They didn’t show the part with the girl, or what was said, just a blurred pinkish spot on the ground with you, the Vice Principle and that blue girl standing around. You did good, kid.”

One good thing came out of this. Well, I think it is good, but mom called it ass-covering bullshit.

I know, right? Language! She almost never cusses and, when she does, watch out!

The Hero League changed my status from Provisional to Junior Member. I was now an official Hero, albeit a junior one. I wasn’t allowed to patrol without a fully trained Hero along, but they could call me out in time of need if there were not enough Heroes around to control a situation. Mostly, my job would be to go out with Heroes when I could, to train with them, with coordinating activities, and to learn the contents of several large binders!

Man, I had homework on top of homework, and then more homework from my high school classes. I thought being a Hero was fighting bad guys and getting keys to the city, not studying until my eyes burned!

The part that made mom so mad was that I was a fully registered and employed member of the Hero League now, and I was allowed to fly. My very first assignment, as an employee of the USNA Hero League was to get my safety certification and flight ID from the FAA. I would need it to respond to natural disasters, civic emergencies and calls from the League in times of need.

No more school bus for me, baby! Ha!

The other thing that annoyed her was my takehome pay! Even though still a junior Hero, I was getting paid! Well, she wasn’t angry about the money so much as the amount. I was bringing home, before taxes, almost as much as Mom made a year and she thought that was ridiculous. At the same time, she was proud of me, and scared for me, and she seemed unable to come to peace with all three feelings at once.

Oh, and lest we forget, she was also upset by my new League communicator. It was a phone but with a lot of neat features, some that were not publically available! Mom had always been against phones for kids, that is why I didn’t own my own phone. We had a ‘house’ phone for emergencies or, if I was going somewhere, and they wanted to put an electronic leash on me.

Well, they said “In case there is an emergency” but it was more often a case of them using the GPS to make sure I was where I said I would be. Anyway, she was some annoyed about the requirement, let me tell you.

Dad would handle it, he seemed to be the only person in the world who could calm mom down when she got really upset, and vice versa too! I tell ya, all jokes aside, I want to find a woman who will get me like that and be as happy with me as they are together!

The girl from the Lava Monster Incident (tm) was Laura Tanner and she had just emerged under the stress of the incident. She had been the victim of an attempted rape just a few weeks earlier, though it hadn’t been violent. Someone had slipped her a drug at a party and she was saved by a classmate who got her home safely.

Still, she was traumatized and Troy Baker, the one who had grabbed her breast in the parking lot and precipitated her emergence, had been the one who drugged her. She hadn’t known that at the time, but the cruel pinch of her breast and the comment he made, “I missed getting a piece of that the other night, babe, how about we hop in my car and fix that problem?“, made her completely lose control and the rest is history.

A court order, based in part on his attempted murder of the girl after the event, was enough to get a mentalist in to question him. The whole story came out and three members of the football team and, surprisingly, two cheerleaders, were all charged with conspiracy to commit a felony, distribution of illegal substances, possession of illegal drugs, assault with special circumstances and Troy got an attempted murder rap too.

Laura, the poor girl, was moved out of the district and she was going to face some extensive counseling, as well as court monitored oversight for several years to make sure that this was not the start of a career in crime. She wasn’t charged, given the nature of the breakout, but any further incidents could mean she would spend years in a fire-proof prison cell. There were rumors about mentalists being able to supress some powers, locking them tight so they could not be used. I think that would be worse than prison!

School was closed for three days while the state did a structural inspection on the main building. They determined that it needed a good power cleaning and there was some smoke damage, but the building itself was safe to use. The parking lot, however, was toast and would require weeks of work.

This upset the juniors and seniors the most, since the teachers were parking in the student lot and some students had to catch rides or take the bus! Man, you would have thought the world was ending on Thursday morning when half the student lot was roped off and a security guard was directing traffic.

I got a, mostly, warm welcome back to school on Thursday. The general consensus among those who knew that I was even involved, (not many) was that I had been the Hero of the day, though there were some idiots who tried to make it seem like I had been grandstanding or something.

Friday was another thing, when the football players and cheerleaders were arrested Thursday night. One thing about justice after The Fall, with mentalists on the case, it is swift and certain, no question about their guilt. The rumors going round were amazingly far-fetched and only a few of them even had a kernal of truth to them at all.

I did tell the group at the Types table what had happened, and what I had heard. I was careful to stick to publically available info though, Jim Baker had warned me about talking out of school. Billie gave me a hug and batted her eyes at me. In a joking tone, she said she was going to tell her children she knew me before I was famous! Her girlfriend, Sherrie, looked a little uncomfortable, but seemed to settle down when I pretended to be skeeved out by the hug.

Billie and Sherrie were officially a thing now, and no one so much as batted an eye, except me. I, on the other hand, was getting a lot more attention than I was used to, and I was really uncomfortable with it all.

I wish I could have had some time to talk it over with Billie, but she was in luuuvvv now and didn’t have much time for guy talks. I had four numbers from girls, on bits of paper stuck into my locker or handed to me, and that was before lunch!

Then, at lunch, a freshman girl named Anne Davis, a T3 with some water-based powers and usually sat with the Types at their tables, chose to sit next to me. I wasn’t sure, exactly, what she could do, I just knew her plans were to be a marine biologist someday. We hadn’t really done more than exchange hellos since I started here, so it was odd she chose to sit with me.

She engaged me in conversation as soon as she sat down, telling me she had heard all about what happened, and how I had stepped in to help Laura Tanner, a friend of hers. She thought it was great that I tried to help, and not just try to stop her and protect the jock. She said she had been proud to tell her parents that she ate lunch with me every day.

“I hope you don’t think I am terrible, but I was just so excited when I heard about it, and so proud that you were, you know, like one of our group. I am sure you are getting a lot of attention right now, but, um, do you think you might like to go out some time?”

Would I ... mind? She was adorable. She had auburn hair and cute freckles, wire-framed glasses and a surprisingly big rack for a girl her size. Not huge, like Dolly Parton big, but big on her small frame. She was only about five four or so, and thin, but not in a ‘OMG, I had a saltine and I am STUFFED!‘ kind of way; more in an athletic way.

“I think I might enjoy that. I wouldn’t mind getting to know you better, though I have to admit I have a lot going on this week. Let me give you my number and we can talk, plan something for next week, maybe?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t pushing it. I wasn’t lying to her, I was studying tonight and Friday so I could take my FAA test Saturday. I was flying to school next Monday if it killed me!

Next week I had training on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and I promised Doctor Sandusky, not that I really had a choice now that I was an employee, that I would let her see what my testing had discovered with my dimensional portal. Maybe, by next Friday, I could have enough free time to go to the movies or something.

As the bell rang and ended our lunch break, we all split up to leave and I got a significant look from Billie and a kiss on the cheek from Anne. I am not sure which of those made me the most nervous though.

By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around, I had completed my testing and had a freshly laminated flight safety ID in hand, and Billie, unexpectedly, on my doorstep. She wasn’t alone, either.

Thursday night, Anne had called and we talked for about a half hour before I told her I really had to study for my safety exam on Saturday, and we could talk next week. Friday night was the same thing, she called and kept me on the phone for almost an hour before I could get away.

The thing was, she talked almost non-stop about her. Granted, I asked about her to learn more about the girl, but it was really wierd how everthing was about how life affected her. Even our potential date discussion was about how the girls she knew were jealous, and how it was a step up for her socially, and how we should plan to go places where we could be seen. Then the discussion turned to how being the girlfriend of a Hero was a real feather in her cap and how her mom had told her to lock me down right away with sex, and did I think poorly of her for thinking it was a good idea?

Yeah, so I had a damn good idea what Billie wanted to talk about, though I wasn’t all that happy about her bringing Sherrie along. I know they were dating, but I didn’t know her, really, and if Billie was coming over to tell me about Anne, then I thought it should be just Billie, you know?

Still, it was Billie, and I had been missing her. Maybe it was just sour grapes on my part and there was no way in hell I was going to turn my best friend away.