Chapter 10

Monday, January 10th, 2022
Colorado Springs, Colorado

The inside of Meghan’s apartment was filled with a riot of plants and art of all kinds. It should have looked insane, but everything worked well together. How she got an art deco couch to live happily in the same room as a south western curio cabinet I don’t know. But, everything worked in the space, and I found my eyes moving from piece to piece and wondering what I would find next.

Meghan finished packing pretty quickly and I offered to carry the bag for her. I wanted to have something in my hands when she spoke to Mr. Roman anyway. Just for appearances sake. She made a final look around to be sure she had all she wanted and we headed for the door.

We knocked on another first floor apartment a few doors down from Meghan’s and an older gentleman answered. Carl let me know he was getting a good look.

He said, “Hello Meghan, what can I do for you?”

Meghan replied, “Hi Mr. Roman. I wanted to ask you to look at a leaky faucet in my bathroom when you get the chance. I won’t be around tomorrow to show it to you, but you can’t miss it. I’ve been meaning to let you know about it for a few days, but it kept slipping my mind.”

Mr. Roman replied, “Sure thing. In fact, I’ve got some time before dinner is ready to come out of the oven. I can probably take care of it in a few minutes. Were you heading out?”

She said, “Yeah, if you need me for anything you know my number. If it becomes a bigger problem than you expect, just let me know. Hey, I’ll probably be running to the mall later. Do you need anything I can pick up for you?”

He said, “Nah, I’m good. Thanks for offering though. Have a good night.”

Meghan waved goodbye and said, “You too. Thanks Mr. Roman.”

We headed out to her car and Meghan asked if I wanted to stop anywhere before heading home.

We arrived at Jan’s and headed in. She was in the office and we joined her there.

I asked, “How’s it coming?”

Jan said, “There is so much available information about starting a business I feel like I’m drowning in it. I found a couple promising law firms that claim to specialize in this sort of thing. I was just about to call one. Here check out this website.”

She showed us a nice looking site that said all the right sort of things I would be looking for. It was a good looking website, and for myself I probably would have gone to meet them and seen how I felt after meeting them in person. But the “meet the people” section of the site were a handful of wealthy looking old white men. I’m sure there is a decent chance they are all nice men, but I somehow got the feeling they might not do their best for my girls. Sexist and patronizing as that thought may be, it’s what I felt.

I explained my issue to them and we kept looking a little more. It didn’t take us long to find a female attorney that had a great website and also seemed to be perfect for our needs. We tried calling her office even though it was after 5 pm already and a secretary asked a few brief questions and passed us on to Denise Avers Esq.

Jan had the call on speaker phone and Meghan and I listened in as she and Denise discussed what we were wanting to do in broad strokes. She said she would be happy to help us and they scheduled a meeting at her office tomorrow morning at 10 am.

A much smaller happy dance ensued, then Jan showed us the website she had found for looking up drivers license photos by names. We entered Paul Johnson into the search bar and left it looking at all states. They wanted to get paid before showing results and Jan went ahead and paid them. We went through something like 10 pages of results without any good matches. On page 11 we found a guy who was pretty much perfect. His only negative was that he wore glasses, and he lived in Vermont. That wasn’t really a downside, it would be an interesting trip I was sure. We requested a more in depth report on the guy, for another fee, and we went ahead and paid that too. It’s amazing what you can find out about people on the internet. Scary really.

Meghan said, “I feel like we made a lot of progress today. I need to call somebody to see who might be able to cover my shift tomorrow. I plan to go in just to speak to Brandon, but I want to make sure I don’t screw over anyone else.”

Jan said, “I need to do the same thing, and I can’t think of a better time than the present. We could do some more online research into business options, but with the meeting tomorrow I’m not feeling rushed about it. I’d like to clear off my “quit job” from the list and settle in for the night. What do you guys think?”

Meghan was already on her phone looking through her contacts. I just gestured for Jan to go ahead. Jan was able to find someone to replace her shift after making only two calls. Meghan’s third call got her the coverage she was looking for. When she finished up that conversation she turned to us and said, “Okay, Kim is going to come and help me open the place. It will be worth waking up at 4 am one last time just to tell Brandon I’m not going to pretend to be his minion anymore, the slimy toad.”

I asked Jan, “Do you need to go into Denny’s and handle things?”

She replied, “I should just go get it out of the way. Do you guys want to come?”

I declined but Meghan was interested in going. They headed out and once they were gone I got the shovel and dug up the money again. I went through much the same process as the first time, but I had to steal extra dirt from the area by the fence to fill the hole again. Now that I was living here, burying it in the backyard made no sense. We might want to get a gun safe at some point. In fact, I was going to make sure we did. In the meantime, I needed to find a temporary, less than obvious place for the rest of the money. I wasn’t worried about the girls taking it as much as I just wanted to have a safe place for it.

I ended up just putting all but the $50K for the business in my suitcase in the closet. It would be fine there and after a while of looking for a better spot I just gave up. I left the five packs of money on the desk in the office right next to the mouse pad.

That’s where the girls found me when they got back. I was killing time, looking at afghan blankets as they came into the room. Meghan piped up, “Oooh, that’s a nice one. Good price too, the shipping is too high though. It would be hard to recover the cost.”

Jan said, “Good thinking, we definitely have to be keeping all associated costs in mind as we look for products. But maybe the seller has other things we could use and we might be able to work a bulk deal that also combines shipping costs. Or maybe we try to get a bunch of purchases in a certain area and we make a road trip to pick it all up. We could be hitting other venues in the area at the same time and we could write off the trip as a business expense I bet.”

I said, “Look at you two go. I love the way you girls are thinking. Road trips can be fun too. You could plan out intelligent stops along the way and optimize clusters of purchases to make. Maybe fly out and rent a truck to haul it all back with. I don’t know if I would want to do it all the time, but a trip like that once in a great while might be worthwhile. Sounds like a great way to kick start your inventory. Hell, this might actually be a decent little business anyway. That would be hilarious.”

Both girls were smiling brightly and I could practically see thoughts bouncing around in their heads. Meghan suddenly sucked in a deep breath and I looked at her. She was staring at the desk. Jan quickly did the same as she saw the stacks of bills. I smiled and handed two stacks to each girl.

Jan said, “I know we talked about the numbers before, but man seeing the cash with your eyes is a different thing altogether.” Meghan just nodded and kept fanning the stacks with the thumb of her other hand, apparently mesmerized by the look and feel of it.

I said, “That reminds me, we need to get one of those tall gun safes and find a good place for it in the house. The living room would be less than ideal. I figured we might want to talk to our Interior Designer about ideas.”

Meghan snapped out of her daze and said, “Hmm that’s going to be interesting. We really don’t have a lot of great options. My first thought is to put it in this closet, but I’m going to need that if I move into the room. Let me give it some thought and I’ll get back to you.”

Jan just smiled and went to hand me the money back. I said, “You might as well hold onto it. I would bet there is a good chance you will be depositing all of that tomorrow. Maybe you can get a quick turnaround from the bank you end up dealing with, but just in case there is some delay in getting checks or cards or anything, I want you to also have this last $10K stack. It might be smart to keep it in cash, it might be smarter to put it in your own account. See what your lawyer thinks about it.”

I handed the last stack to Jan and Meghan did the same with her two. Jan added them to her purse and asked if we were ready to talk about powers.

I said, “I’m ready. Are you two comfortable here, or do you want to hit the couch?”

Meghan said, “I wouldn’t mind a glass of wine.”

We all agreed that was a good idea so we each got a glass and settled in the living room.

I took a sip and said, “Okay, let’s go over what my powers can do and how they work first. I just imagine the changes I want to make and then I push the power from my pool into the process and it basically happens. I can’t seem to make myself significantly bigger or smaller, but I can move my mass around. For example, when I got rid of my thumb before, that mass got shifted around and probably evenly distributed around my body.”

“I haven’t tested any specifics of that yet, it’s just my gut feeling about what happens. We are probably going to want to dream up ways to test that idea. Like, can I make myself only have one leg, and does it change how much I weigh? Do other parts of my body get bigger to compensate? Can I decide what to do with it? Things like that.”

Jan said, “Hang on I can see I need the notebook. We might as well write these ideas down.”

I said, “I bought a notebook the other day, let me grab it instead. It might be wise to make sure we keep this information in separate notebooks that we keep very secure. We don’t want anyone but us to ever see it. Let me grab it and take a quick bio break.”

I verified the location of the notebook in the nightstand and headed for the toilet.

I sent, [Hey Carl?]

He replied, [Dude, you only talk to me when you’re on the shitter, I’m gonna develop a complex.]

I chuckled and said, [Shut it asshole. You know it’s just a convenient place to have a conversation without looking like a crazy person. You probably already know what I want to talk about, we’re the same basic person after all.]

He sent me the sensation of nodding. [You are thinking about telling them everything.]

I sent back, [No, I still don’t think we can tell them about being able to modify others. While I trust them a lot, I’m not quite ready to trust them with a secret that could turn us into a science experiment. Maybe someday we can find that our powers now let us do that. I’m not there yet.]

He replied, [I agree with holding that back, but what’s the real value of the rest?]

I sent, [It demonstrates further trust in them. It lets them understand what is really going on in that side of things. They are going to be helping us experiment. Trying to hide parts from them seems counterproductive. I don’t see the downside except the slim possibility they decide we’re crazy.]