Chapter 4

The Texas Hero League, a wholly owned subsidiary of the USNA Hero League, Incorporated, had its headquarters in Austin Texas. Austin was still the capital city of the Lone Star State, though many state capitals were destroyed, or just moved, when the old USA lost so much coastline.

The Hero League headquarters was a huge, gold-tinted, glass dome that sat on the ground where there used to be a convention center called the Palmer Events Center. When a chunk of the meteor plowed a four-thousand-foot-long, hundred and fifty-yard-wide furrow down the middle of Bouldin Avenue, with the red-hot, steaming chunk of rock finally coming to rest about a third of the way into the main building, the company that owned the Palmer thought selling the property would be cheaper than trying to fix things.

That chunk was the only major damage to the city, though there were thousands of smaller claims as bits of debris from Malkin’s Asteroid rained down across the landscape. The meteor wiped out twenty-four blocks of family housing when it damaged the Palmer Center, and the Hero League raised a hundred-foot-tall obelisk, ten meters square at the base and rising to a gold-capped point. It was engraved with the names and ages of every person who perished along that corridor of destruction; man, woman, and child.

The building itself was a perfect circle with an exterior diameter of exactly five hundred yards, which made it nine-tenths of a mile around. It only stood twelve floors tall, from the ground up, and two below ground, but that provided more than enough room for all the business offices, support, logistics, legal, education and even apartments for every Hero employed by the League in the state of Texas.

The old United States of America had a population, pre-Fall, of about three-hundred and twenty-eight million. It is estimated that ten percent, or about thirty-three million people died on The Day. Over the next week, another thirty million were infected with PRIME and began to change, for good or for ill.

Of those thirty million, nine million died right away, their bodies rejecting PRIME. Twenty million changed, with fully forty percent, or eight million, changing sexes and the other twelve million having obvious physical changes like racial swaps or simply skin color. Hair, ears, tails, eyes, all of these changes were lumped into Type Two, if there were no other changes to go with them.

Thirty thousand people developed powers with around three hundred of them registering high enough to be called, eventually, Type Fours, or Supers. PRIME didn’t stop there, with only the first day changes; people continued to change as the weeks wore on, until we were where we are today, with less than half the population of the civilized world left unchanged in some small way. The number of people who died outright, just like the number of those who were changed in some way, continue to add to the totals every year, with an average of seven hundred new Type 4s being discovered, nation-wide, every year.

Texas currently had two hundred and eleven registered supers, of which one hundred and thirty-two were employed by the Hero League in some form or another. Not all were Heroes, only seventy-nine did that, the rest were researchers and support in one form or another. Mental, physical, emotional and training support occupied the majority, though there were rumored to be twenty or more whose only job was to act as the League’s diplomatic arm among the various governments, both domestic and international.

Heroes, the men and women who put their lives and livelihood on the line to protect the citizens of the state, and of the United States of North America, were the best paid and, of course, the most recognized by outsiders. They were the very public face of the Hero League and were compensated in a manner commensurate with the risks they took. Even as a Junior member, only called on during emergencies, I was getting five thousand a month as a retainer, a stipend.

League Headquarters had one hundred and twenty-eight, identically sized, three-bedroom apartments, spread across four floors of the building. One hundred of them were reserved for Heroes, with the remaining twenty-eight provided on a first come, first served basis to the other Type Fours of every flavor. They were simply a bonus, a place for a Type Four to live, secure and among like-minded folks; a place they didn’t have to hide their identities or their abilities.

Type Fours employed by the League were not required to live there, of course, and any of them could buy a house and live where they chose, but many did take advantage of the services offered at headquarters.

The basement of the huge building was filled with training rooms as well as an Olympic pool and large health center. The second level basement was strictly maintenance and administrative, with storage and, in the very center, a secure room as isolated and protected as it was possible to build given the technology and powers available. This was the Control Center and it is where the League watched Texas, the USNA and the world for trouble spots.

The first floor above ground level was shopping and entertainment, with a five-screen theater complex taking up two floors of vertical space. The remainder of the second floor was office space and the only other floor that was accessible to the general public. The third floor was administrative, with the fourth being medical and diagnostic. Fifth was training spaces and a conference center plus special purpose rooms that could be configured as needed.

Six through nine were living spaces, with ten being the private offices for specialist powers, like the far sight intelligence folks and the technopaths. Eleven was the executive office level, and each Hero had an office there as well, and the final floor, twelve, being all the elevator and HVAC machinery space as well as indoor storage for helicopter maintenance and refueling tanks in support of the rooftop heliport. With Electric and Hydrogen being mandated, it was a lot less dangerous that it would have been pre-Fall!

The tour they gave to Jill and me when we arrived had our heads spinning, let me tell you! I was floored by how sumptuous the place was, by how spoiled the League Heroes were. I mean, okay, they put their lives on the line every day, but those apartments were sweet!

Jill and I got put in adjacent apartments, though we were told that they were not assigning us one until we became full members and active Heroes. We would also have smaller apartments, mostly efficiency spaces, at whatever satellite office we were assigned to when we went active. These, though, would be home.

We got to settle in and relax, with our evaluation starting the following morning at nine sharp, so I took Jill on a date. Well, sort of a date, I mean, we went out to eat at a very nice steak place on the first floor, so that kind of counts, right? We did a movie afterwards, and just walked around the huge, manicured lawns surrounding the interior structure under the dome.

About nine, we wandered back upstairs, and I invited her in to watch a little television, but I most definitely did not have television on my mind. I got us sodas and we snuggled up on the couch, flipping through the channels available (I think they had everything!). After the movie started, we lasted about five minutes before we were laid out on the couch, our lips welded together and the rest of our bodies trying to get maximum contact possible while still wearing clothes.

We had been moving pretty slow up to this point, though I knew we both wanted to go further. We had discussed it, some, and neither of us were opposed to the idea of sex, but neither of us had actually gone that far either. I could tell, though, that we wouldn’t be doing that tonight, by the way she pulled away when I got her bra unhooked.

“Wait, wait ... Mike, hold on, please? Look, let’s talk for a minute. I want this. Like, a lot. Something about you makes me so hot that I can’t think straight, but I am scared spitless.” Jill moaned, pulling back and putting her hands on my chest.

“I would never hurt you, Jill, you know that, and I told you the first time we kissed that we would move on your schedule, not mine. I mean, with mine, we would have made love the first night we patrolled with Laredo!” I joked, trying to lighten things up a bit.

Since she didn’t break anything when she smacked me, and the snort of amusement she made, I guess it worked.

“Shut it, dork. Look, let me get this out. Don’t say a word until I am done, okay? Not a word,” she paused, her eyes searching my face. Then, with a deep breath, she began speaking again. “When I first changed, the night those guys tried to snatch me off the street, I was terrified. Once I realized how powerful I had become, I thought my problems were over, that I would never be afraid again.

“Except, it doesn’t work like that. There was this guy I was sort of dating. We were not in love or anything, and we hadn’t done much more than kiss and a little, you know, over the clothes? Anyway, about two weeks after the whole kidnapping thing, he came over to visit and we were down in our family room, right? He kissed me and grabbed my butt, nothing he hadn’t done before, but I totally freaked and turned into Lady Steel. I never saw him again, socially, I mean.

“Okay, whatever, he wasn’t all that, but it got worse. I get, you know, um, horny, too. Well, the first time I...” she paused, blushing bright red and refusing to meet my eyes. “When I touched myself and had an orgasm, I turned into Lady Steel again.” She finished is a rush, her words flowing together.

When I had finally parsed that last sentence, I couldn’t help myself. I snorted and damn near ruptured myself trying to hold my laughter inside. I can see how that would freak her out, but the image in my head.

This time, when she hit me, I thought my arm was going to fall off and I ended up on the floor in pain!

She was apologetic and, after I explained why I had laughed, she even giggled a bit. Then she glared at me and called me a jerk too, so that was a wash. My poor arm though!

The problem wasn’t that she turned into Lady Steel, it was that Lady Steel had a hymen and Jill didn’t. She had either never had one or lost it somewhere along the way when she was younger, but Lady Steel had one that occluded about ninety percent of her opening.

I was scratching my head, wondering about how that could be, um, fixed? When she hit me with the real fear that, she admitted, had kept her awake for several nights. What if, in that moment of passion, when they were making love, she turned into Lady Steel ... with me still inside of her. That thin titanium membrane could very well end my sex life for good!

Yeah, now I was going to have sleepless nights!

We talked about it for a while, and she was determined to talk to the doctors while she was here, see if they had a solution. Until then, she said with a smile, we had to satisfy ourselves with options that didn’t include decapitations! Once she had an answer, I had better watch out though!

When she rose and slowly peeled her blouse off, her unfastened bra sliding to the floor along with it, she held out her hand and led me to the bedroom.

“Our mouths are not in danger, but you should keep fingers and tongue on the outside, Mike, just for now.”

We managed to find ways around the no-penetration clause at least three times that night, and another in the shower together the following morning. I was a tired, but happy guy when I reported for my testing!

I was shown into a well-appointed office at nine on the dot. The occupant was an older woman, probably in her fifties if I had to guess. She had a welcoming air and a warm smile that was at contrast with her slate gray eyes and steel-colored hair. She looked like a corporate CEO but was, in fact, a mentalist for the League.

“Sit, sit, can I get you some coffee? A soda?” she offered, leading me to a comfortable seat and taking a seat herself around a small table. “I am Leona Walker and I am one of three senior Mentalists that do evaluations, testing and advanced mentalist training. You are here this morning because one of our mentalists judged you to be at least a Type Four, right?”

She waited for me to agree before continuing.

“Now, our mentalist in McAllen that evaluated you, stated that you have a very strong TK primary, but have three other minor powers. She also said she didn’t know what they were, just that they were there. You have discovered one, a very exciting one too, in your dimensional pocket ability. That is very rare and not a lot is known about them.

“We’d really like to schedule some time later, we can work around your school schedule, and study what you can and cannot do with that ability. In exchange, we will assign you a dedicated trainer to get the most out of the abilities you have, including the two additional abilities we will try to identify today.

“Normally, the smaller secondary and tertiary abilities are of limited use and the Hero can usually figure them out on their own, eventually. We don’t usually offer special training unless it is a critical skill, like precog, for instance. What do you think, Mike?”

What do I think? I think I would be an idiot to turn that down and I told her so! She smiled at my response and made a note in the file she had in front of her.

“Okay then. I wanted to get that out of the way before we got to the routine part. Let’s start by explaining what we are going to do today. As I said, I am a mentalist and that class covers a variety of abilities that used to be lumped under the Extra Sensory Perception categories, Pre-Fall. They are mind reading and manipulation, empathy and empathic manipulation, far-seeing, clairvoyance, clairaudio, aura reading and precognition.

“What I will be doing is placing you in a light trance and doing a full reading. As a full reading is very intrusive, we have to have your specific permission and have to inform you that we will be doing a scan of your memory and be manipulating your subconscious to provoke specific responses. We have to do this to identify and classify any latent skills you might have and, since we have to be in there anyway, as part of our government charter, we have to do yearly scans to make sure you are not a danger to yourself and others. It is a requirement for employment with the USNA Hero League and the Texas Hero League.

“Do you understand so far and do you agree to allow us to do this full scan?” she asked me, her tone and body posture screaming that this was no pro-forma request. This was important and I should take it seriously.

“Yes, Ma’am. I mean yes, I understand and yes, I agree to the scan. Um ... ma’am? What happens if I fail, if I have some weird mental thing that I didn’t even know about?” I asked, suddenly a lot more freaked out than I had been. What if?

She seemed to relax a bit and smiled at me again. “It is exceedingly rare that we find anything major in these scans, especially with someone so young. If we found something, something we thought would cause problems later, we would get you any help you need to work on that. Even, if in some bizarre twist of circumstance, you couldn’t be a Hero, you could still work for the League. We have a lot of Type Fours, like myself, for example, in support positions.”

“Okay, that helps, I guess. I am as ready as I will ever be. This won’t, like, hurt, right?”

“Not a bit. Just close your eyes and count backwards from a hundred, like you see in those horrible television programs. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninnneeetyyy-sssss...”

It was really weird. She started counting and then it was like everything slowed down. Even sound! I am not sure how long that lasted, but I have these strange impressions ... fire and water, earthquakes, a tub filled with what looked like blood and a dog with a broken leg? Bizarre to the extreme, but then the world started speeding again and things got faster.

“Foouuuurrrr, thhrreee, twoo, one, and we are done! Okay, just relax for a second. You might feel a little light-headed for a second, you were sitting there for about thirty minutes and when the blood gets moving again, you might feel a little achy.” Mrs. Walker said softly, patting my hand where it lay on the table.

Wow, that was weird!

“So, that’s it? I mean, I just assumed testing would be like, I don’t know, seeing how much I could lift or how fast I could fly.”

She nodded and smiled again, seemingly relaxed, which helped me relax a bit. “Oh, you will be doing all of that, it is why we have you here for two weeks. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday will be testing what you have, what you can lift and that sort of thing.

“Thursday and Friday will be a complete medical workup and body scan. We know you had the usual medical checks in McAllen, but for Type Fours, we go much deeper in depth, as each scan helps us to learn more about this new world we live in.

“The weekend is free and then next week, you will spend all week learning about your secondary skills and how best to use them. We will help you integrate those into your primary so you can be the best, most effective you possible.”

“Very cool, I am excited to learn where I stand. I am curious about how I stack up against the other Heroes, you know, if I can really be a help or if I am just fooling myself.”

“Trust me on this, Mike, you will be a Hero, mark my words. Now, do you want to know?” she teased, arching an eyebrow.

“Yes, please!”

I had a decently powerful illusionist ability as my third, and my fourth was a touch of telepathy, but it was tied to the illusion ability in ways she wasn’t sure of. Neither of them was level four powerful, so I wouldn’t be luring bad guys into elaborate traps or reading bad guys minds or anything, but it was good to finally know what they were.

She spent half an hour to show me where the two abilities were in my mind, and how to trigger them. She was going to send me to another who knew more about the specific uses and how best to integrate those with my TK abilities. Mrs. Walker’s specialty was the in-depth scanning, and while she was good at figuring out where and what they were, utilization was someone else’s skillset.

She did take a few minutes to explain that nothing she saw would be of any concern to the Hero League, Inc. or the authorities, and that I was a typical teenage guy with an overactive imagination, but no hidden, horrible secrets. She did remind me that full scans were a yearly requirement, as well as being something the League could, and would, mandate should it be suspected that I came in contact with a criminal mentalist. They didn’t need sleeper agents inside the League!

Trip Davies was a mentalist trainer whose specialty was identifying triggers and helping people get the most from their abilities. While he was not strong enough to do the security screens and histories, he seemed especially sensitive to minute changes in the person’s brain as they used their powers, and was able to direct people into more efficient, and effective, ways to do things. That made him a highly ranked Type Three and a valuable asset to the League.

If this had been my primary, or if either of the weaker powers had been any real threat, we would have been relegated to a secure room in a basement that was fireproof, armored and shielded! As it was, we did go into a room devoid of anything but walls, floor and ceiling.

He showed me where my memories live, where my autonomic responses were, even showed me where my TK was centered. Then he took me into dark alleys and tiny rooms where it was hard to navigate. At the end of the trail was a bright spot and that, he told me, was my ability to create illusions.

When questioned, he could only shrug, telling me there was no way for him to know how useful it would be, or how big an illusion I could create without testing further. He could only say that, based on the apparent power level, he doubted it would be very big. The last illusionist he worked with was twice as powerful when scanned, and could create illusions the size of an SUV, but anything larger looked insubstantial.

The second area we found was brighter, but only by degree. He studied it for a moment then led me out of the darkness again. We spent a full hour just navigating to and from the areas, until I could find them quickly and without getting lost. He told me I needed to practice until it was second nature, and I could reach them, even in an emergency, when I was scared or hurt.

The last thing he did was to show me how to trigger the abilities individually and together. He walked me through creating a big beach ball illusion, coaching me, and helping me make it realistic looking. He went over how light reflects from various surfaces, and changes as the angles change. He showed me about shadows and texture. By the end, I was able to make a fairly convincing beach ball, if viewed from a distance, but it still looked a little hinkey up close. It would require a lot of practice, I think!

The telepathy started out as a real head-scratcher. I was transmitting something. Everyone who could detect it, described it as just static. “Like a carrier wave with no actual transmission,” was the way one described it. It was only when I activated my illusion ability, while the telepathy was still active, did the figurative light come on. It was funny too, at least to me.

Trip and been standing in front of me, watching for the illusion and letting his own telepathy monitor my ‘static’ wave, when he looked shocked and almost fell on his butt. I had changed, right in front of him! Instead of being a teen-age white kid with unfortunate hair, I had become a teenage black kid with a mini fro.

When he got a hold of himself and got back to his feet, he asked me to turn on and off first one, then the other of my abilities. It was obvious that the use of both at once made me change, but it wasn’t until he got someone else in the room did things get weirder, and the answer become clear.

Another trainer, a woman who was taking a break from working with another client, described me as appearing to be a woman of middle age, not unlike the trainer, but with a slimmer, almost boyish figure. I was displaying two different images to two different people at the same time and that was the clue! My carrier wave was not sending thoughts or pictures or words or even emotions, it was sending a suggestion. It was telling the observer that I was ... someone familiar.

The single common element between both trainer’s descriptions was that I looked familiar, like they should know me but couldn’t recall from where or when. My telepathy was making them identify me as friendly, as someone they knew, so every person who saw me would see something different, but within the parameters set by the illusion.

To test this hypothesis, I created the illusion of a small cube and, sure enough, the face they knew was populated on the side facing them. That I was, in effect, a floating cubical head, was beside the point! A small ball, a child, a giant, they were all the same effect!

I was very excited about the possibilities, but it would require some real thought, and a lot of practice, to come up with a repeatable avatar that I could use as an alternate identity.

By the time we were done with all of this, including a break for lunch, it was already three in the afternoon and he cut me loose for the day. I had to be back in the same area at nine in the morning, but I had the afternoon and evening off.

Jill was still out, wherever she was testing, so I called my folks and crashed on the couch for a bit. That testing had wiped me out and a nap sounded awfully good!

I woke to the chiming of my communicator and saw that it was Jill.

“Heya, beautiful! All done for the day?” It was almost five, so her day had run longer than mine, she had to be dragging.

“Yeah, we got done with the mental stuff and I am a mess, but you knew that already,” she said with a giggle, then signed heavily. “I am wiped out, Mike, totally destroyed. Do you think we could get some takeout, maybe eat in tonight, just watch some television or something? I don’t even want to go anywhere or do anything but eat and sleep.”

“Anything you want, babe. Tell me what you want, I will go and get it and bring it over. You can set your door to accept a one-time code, and give that to me, then you can go and relax in a nice hot bath while I get dinner set up. Sound good?”

“That sounds like heaven! I am going to do just what you said ... and ... there, I sent you the door code. See you in a few, handsome!”

A quick call to the concierge desk for the apartments and I found the small convenience store offered a few different scented candles as well as drinks and snacks, so I stopped there while I waited for our to-go order. I just ordered a selection of popular Chinese food since I wasn’t sure what she liked, and I was up in her apartment, setting out our meal, in less than half an hour.

Dinner was fun, and even more so since Jill had dressed in a mostly opaque, but still slinky and silky nightgown with a matching robe. She looked amazing and I have to admit, it was hard concentrating on the very good Chinese food when all the blood was occupied south of my belt line.

We still were not ready to fool around, she’d talked to the doctors and they said they had a solution, but she needed a specific healer. She blushed and stammered a bit, but she finally blurted out, “I have to do it! Um, to, you know, myself.“ It seemed she needed to break the hymen herself, while transformed, then a healer could guide her body to healing it in the ‘gone’ condition, if that makes sense. Jill said the healer would be able to convince her body to thin the membrane even more, beforehand, but she would have to take that final step herself.

We both knew we were headed there, and that added to the spice. The anticipation made even this, admittedly odd, discussion into a kind of foreplay! We had discussed it, you know, or talked around it, actually, before we even made the trip. We both wanted a whole night to get to know each other that way, and this was a perfect time and place, away from parents, to do this. I think if she hadn’t been excited by the prospect, the way she had to arrange things might have caused her to rethink the whole thing!

Still, after our late-night playtime last night, and a rough day today, we decided to just cuddle up and relax tonight. We ended up falling asleep on the big sectional couch and, frankly, even in her normal form, she was a big, strong girl. No way I was carrying her to bed! Instead, I got blankets and pillows from the bed and we bunked down in the living room.

My first tests of the morning were all physical. They gave me some shorts, a t-shirt and some sports shoes to wear and we went out so they could get a baseline. They wanted to know what I could do without using any of the abilities I have, just my body.

I ran the forty-yard sprint, the four-hundred-and-forty-yard dash and a timed mile. Then I did pull ups, pushups, sit ups and they measured both my standing leap and my distance leap.

I was in mediocre shape for an incoming high school sophomore that didn’t play any sports. My numbers, while low, were not horrible. When I added my TK, I did the timed mile, from a standing start, in fifty-three seconds. Compare that to the eight minutes and sixteen seconds for my unpowered run and, well, you could see the advantage! The other numbers were very similar, but we didn’t really push things in those tests, that would come later.

We tested how much I could lift off the ground, fifty-one metric tons, if spread over a square yard, but only about five feet off the ground. Next was how fast I could move one metric ton one hundred yards, from a dead stop to a dead stop without damaging it (six and a half seconds). Next was seeing how much pressure my TK could withstand and this time, I surprised them. I had been practicing with shapes and free-form movement, with containers and even with building underwater.

For this, I built a lattice, like the honeycomb they used to cushion tanks they drop from aircraft, and it was reinforced by I-beams and braces. When they started putting pressure on my construction, I didn’t even really have to strain until it hit one-hundred and sixty-two tons. I was able to keep it up, with no more than one inch of movement was the standard, until they reached one hundred and ninety-four tons.

That was with plenty of time to prepare a special construction though, and they asked me to do it again with just a single platform, one-yard square, holding up the weight and using only my power to keep things level. That test was a major disappointment, I have to admit, with the weight reaching only fifty-three tons for two minutes.

The testers all seemed very pleased though, telling me that I had done well. I had been practicing a lot, but I was trying to use more finesse, since the only heavy weights I could use without endangering someone (or something) was seawater.

Twenty-three tons is only about fifty-three-hundred gallons of seawater, or about seven hundred and twenty cubic feet or so. That was the equivalent of something like a sixteen-foot storage container full of water. Not so impressive when you think of it that way!