Chapter 65

With reservations made, Kelli off to Scottsdale, and nothing on my agenda before tomorrow morning's meeting with Mrs. Trinh, it was time for more practice.
Bud was keen on getting us used to the suit's exoskeletal strength. This required another visit to the sleazy tanning parlor I'd found in South Santa Rosa.
I, on the other hand, was keen on figuring out how to use my telekinesis to power the suit without hurting myself.

"No, we will not be doing that yet," he insisted. There is too much risk."

"At least explain to me what we will be doing, so I can try to understand the danger."

"If I explain it enough for you to understand the danger, you will know enough to try it. No."

"Look," I said while silently letting Harley know I wanted him to lock the suit and lift us five feet of the cavern floor. "We do have something we can do in the meantime. Or we can go looking for other ways to charge the suit. What would happen if I went found a high tension power line and grabbed it with a glove?"

"The Impervilon would convert it and transfer the energy to the kinetex. If this was a major power line, you would fully charge the suit in approximately ten minutes. The power drain would be very noticeable to those that maintained the power grid, though."

"Could we bring the grid down?"

"No, our drain would be large, but it would be non-interrupting. We might cause a minor brown out in the immediate vicinity."

"Would doing that be more or less dangerous than my trying to learn how to power the suit myself?"

"Less dangerous," Bud said. "Much, much less."

"Okay then, lets try and figure out where we can do something like that, because I'm already tired of the whole tanning booth fiasco, and I want to get used to the exoskeleton. We're getting close."

"I might disagree, but so far we have been moving faster than our original projections suggested."

"Okay then," I decided that Bud was agreeing with my idea. Time to get him acting on it. "Where and when do we grab that line?"

"I will have to look into that," he told me. "In the meantime, since you don't want to use the exoskeleton, what do you suggest we do?"

"Well, I've been wondering. Can I still use my telekinetic gift while Harley has the suit locked and lifted?" I felt Harley's agreement. We'd both wondered about that since we'd settled on his doing the locking.

"Ahh. Mmm. Well..." Bud hesitated. He didn't know! We'd stumped him!

"Well if you don't know, we're in the right place to test it. Shall we try?"

"Very well," Bud said, but with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. "But proceed cautiously, please!"

Harley had been holding us five feet in the air during this entire discussion, so without further ado, I reached out and tried to lock on the slab of Bakelite sitting in its usual place.

Tried and failed.

Yet the failure wasn't absolute. I could feel Harley's lock, and I could feel my own, and mine didn't so much fail utterly, as slip and slide around his without finding its way to where it needed to go.

I tried again, with the same results. And again. And again we failed. But even in our failure I felt encouraged. "We can do this," I told Harley.

"I believe you're right," he answered in my thoughts. "We'll just have to keep trying it until we get it."

I shared my mental agreement as I tried again, and failed again,

"We need to think on this power problem too," he added. "I don't care what Bud says."

Not having Bud in our thoughts actually came in handy for a change.

We zoomed around in the cave for a little while, just to give Harley and I a chance to get used to passing directional information without actually 'thinking out loud'. After a while we had it working very well, and Harley was able to read my intent and act on it faster than he would have been able to respond to my verbalized thoughts.

After playing with that for a while we went back upstairs and I spent some time catching up on the news online, on TV and in the paper. I was getting a pretty good idea of where the 'problem' neighborhoods in Santa Rosa were, and who some of the key figures in the gang and drug related activities were in the area.

The worry I had, over my success or failure as a super hero, was over intelligence. I had no way to gather it other than by going there myself and observing. I could wish I had some fancy alien spy gadgets, or that I could read minds, or simply see events from afar. Unfortunately, I didn't have those things. Bud had implied that 'they' wanted me to be a super hero. 'They' had to know there was more to it than a little power and a costume. The time would come to confront Bud, and perhaps the mysterious 'they', with these questions. For now, every day was about living, learning and indulging. For two guys who used to be dead or dying, a little indulgence was nice.