King of Superheroes, page 11
The paperwork in question ended up being some fluff contracts about how we weren’t liable for anything other than free education from him, and I rolled my eyes as I scribbled my name at the bottom.
He had to make his bag somehow, and really, I kind of respected the hustle.
But before we got started, Kin wanted to see what powers each Tempest held, and I had to admit I was also curious.
The space we were standing in was large, open, and mostly free of heavy equipment, but the wind was certainly stronger since we were at least twenty stories up. There were heavy white tarps that covered mostly empty rooms and fluttered like bat wings in the breeze, and there were several pallets of wood, steel, and other miscellaneous construction equipment off toward the sides. The skeleton of the building stretched up and around us on either side, so the wind whistled through the steelwork, and it made quite an exciting stage for the Tempests to prove their powers.
I watched as one of the fledglings with a blink teleportation ability darted around the construction site at rapid speed. He hopped from one bar to another and back around until eventually he ended up in the middle of the floor, where he bowed theatrically as Kin gave him a round of very eager applause.
Another girl could manipulate the air around her, so as she spread her arms out, the wind suddenly froze, and every single tarp covering fell silent and still.
Then it was time for the green-eyed brunette to show her power, and I caught her eyes and nodded encouragingly as she stood in the center of the building site.
“And what’s your name, dear?” Kin asked as he leaned toward her excitedly.
“Uhh… Rhiannon.” Her voice was soft and shy.
“What is your power, Rhiannon?” the property magnate asked.
“I can fly,” she said in the same half-whisper.
“Oh, well, I look forward to seeing this!” Kin exclaimed. “Please, carry on!”
Rhiannon bit at her bottom lip and nodded at his words, and she waited a moment as though she were deciding what to do. Her green eyes darted around, and she suddenly walked toward the edge of the building with purpose.
Then she turned back to us, smiled nervously, spread her arms, and then leaned backward until she toppled off the edge.
Nobody spoke, and we all held our breath for a moment as the wind continued to whistle around us.
Suddenly, Rhiannon came hurtling through the sky above, and we all whooped and cheered as she soared through the steel bars, did an impressive loop around a moving crane, and then eventually came back down to earth.
When her feet hit the ground, every single Tempest burst into applause.
She looked breathless, with her long hair swept off her face and her eyes sparkling with adrenaline, and Kin’s claps were maybe the loudest of them all.
“Very impressive!” he boomed. “Oh, very impressive indeed!”
“Thank you,” Rhiannon said with an almost reluctant smile pulling at her features.
“Now, as impressive as that was…” Kin suddenly said. “I hear through the grapevine that there’s somebody here who isn’t actually a Tempest.”
He let his words hang in the air, and there was a sudden silence among the group.
With a slight grimace, I raised my hand.
“That’s probably me,” I said and waved. “My name’s Mark Maddock.”
“A pleasure, Mr. Maddock,” Kin said, and his eyes glinted with intrigue as he studied me. “You were originally a Conduit, I hear?”
“Yes, sir.” I nodded. “But when I nearly set the stage on fire during the Pillar Placing Ceremony, I used telekinesis to yank the curtain down to smother the flames.”
“Telekinesis, huh?” Kin whistled and put his hands on his hips as he nodded thoughtfully. “I assume you’re here to learn on the job, then?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m still working my powers out.”
“Well, then, I won’t make you get up here in front of everyone.” Kin waved his hand. “Besides, the day is getting on, and we have work to do! If you could split into pairs, Eloise here will explain everything.”
With that, the telekinetic property developer took his leave and left his secretary to pair us up and put us to work.
I shot Rhiannon a quick look, and she nodded eagerly, so without a word we decided to pair up together. She seemed incredibly shy, despite the fact that she just launched herself off the side of a building in a highly performative way, and she seemed grateful at my offer.
“Hi,” she said in the same quiet voice as I approached her.
“Hi,” I repeated the word back and grinned down at her.
She was slender, with a narrow waist but full breasts, and she constantly tucked her brown hair behind her ears. Her green eyes were framed with thick lashes, and she had a small nose, tanned skin, and her lips were a dark shade of dusky pink.
Yeah. She was gorgeous.
“Rhiannon, right?” I clarified with a friendly smile.
“Yes,” she said and blushed faintly. “And I know you’re Mark.”
“The one and only,” I joked, but then I frowned. “Well, I guess that’s really true considering I’m technically a Conduit standing here with a bunch of Tempests.”
“Can you really use telekinesis?” Rhiannon asked, and her voice was suddenly excited with intrigue.
“Well, I definitely didn’t pull that curtain down with my hands,” I laughed. “But I’m not sure. Physical powers seem to be a hell of a lot easier to grasp. The powers I have to use my mind for… it’s just harder to tap into.”
“I could try and teach you?” Rhiannon offered and then bit her lips as she averted her gaze. “I-I mean, only if you want to…”
“That definitely beats whatever Kin was trying to get us to do for free,” I said with a smirk, and then I motioned for her to follow me. “Come here.”
The two of us quietly hurried off to a less crowded corner of the construction site where Eloise couldn’t freely see us, and we hopefully wouldn’t have to partake in the manual labor that Kin had signed us up for.
“So…” I said as I leaned against a pallet of wooden planks. “What should I try?”
Rhiannon thought for a moment, and I watched with a grin as she tucked her warm brown hair behind her ears yet again. Then she pointed to a box of hard hats in the corner.
“Tip that over,” she said decidedly.
“The whole thing?” I asked as I squinted my eyes at it. “Okay, here goes, I guess.”
I glared at the box and tried to block out everything else around me. I tried to forget about the whistle of the wind, and how it made my hair whip around my face, and I tried to forget about the clanging sounds of the rest of the Tempest fledglings as they moved and dragged things around. I also tried to ignore the sound of Eloise’s high-pitched voice, and the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears.
Suddenly, the box rattled for a second before it went still, and I let out a breath as I released my concentration.
“I can’t,” I said with frustration in my voice. “I can… Sort of feel it. I don’t know.”
“Focus,” Rhiannon insisted. “You know you can do it, because you’ve done it before. You just have to will it to happen.”
I honed my eyes onto the box of hard hats and squinted even harder, and I felt my hands ball into fists at my sides as I focused.
The box rattled again, but I didn’t let it go.
If the box rattled, that was because of me, which only solidified the fact I could make it move with my mind. That physical evidence only helped to concentrate my power, and suddenly, the box toppled onto its side, and the hard hats spewed across the floor.
I let out a gasp and finally relaxed, and I turned to Rhiannon as she clapped her hands with a giggle.
“See!” She smiled at me. “I knew you could do it!”
“Oh, my god, that was hard!” I laughed. “You’ll have to keep teaching me.”
“If you want me to.” Rhiannon’s voice became shy again, and she blinked up at me as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“I’d love for you to,” I said eagerly. “If I can practice telekinesis, then eventually I should be able to move things as easily as you fly.”
“You’ll get it eventually,” Rhiannon said with a soft smile. “It’s super easy once it clicks in your head.”
“Yeah, I don’t know how I’d feel about flinging myself off the top of a skyscraper, though.” I grinned at her. “That was really something.”
“Thank you,” the brunette Tempest said with another shy blush. “It was a lot of fun, actually.”
Rhiannon was endearingly nervous, like a small fluffy animal, and I found myself drawn to her sweetness.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” The bulb suddenly went off in my head, and I shot her my warmest smile. “Would you… Do you want to be on my team? For the real world missions coming up?”
“On your team?” Rhiannon repeated, and she bit her thumbnail as the flush on her cheeks darkened to a deep red. For a moment, I thought she might refuse, but then she smiled faintly and nodded. “Yes. I’d love to.
Chapter Eight
I made sure to introduce Rhiannon to the rest of the gang as soon as we arrived back at the Academy. She remained shy and pretty quiet, but Frank soon started to crack jokes to make her laugh, Hannah decided they were going to be the best of friends, and Danny just told her she’d get used to our craziness eventually.
The brunette Tempest almost immediately slotted right into our new dynamic, and as we sat at our usual table for dinner, the one by the side of the kitchen area and overlooking the bay, I found myself with a broad smile on my face as I stared at my group of friends.
Not just friends, my team.
The five of us spent the first half of the weekend just hanging out in the common area, which was a nice change of pace from the first week’s madness. There was a huge thunderstorm on our first day off so we were pretty much stuck at the Academy, but we spent our time researching superheroes.
I knew about the current ones employed by the Federation, the ones like Thunderbolt who always seemed to take any bit of publicity they could get, but it was interesting to delve a little deeper and go back a little further.
I was keen to read up on the Antis, and how they’d come into power, so my friends and I headed to the fifth floor where there was an extensive library on all things Super.
“I’ve been dying to check this place out,” Frank said as he bounced on the balls of his feet and waited for the elevator doors to slide open.
The library took up the entire fifth floor, and I felt my mouth drop open as we stepped out of the elevators and into a cavernous room filled with wooden shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling.
The entire left side of the library had the same floor-to-ceiling windows as the fledgling common room, so we could see the thunderstorm raging above the gray waters of the bay outside and the occasional bolt of lightning illuminated the place for a couple of seconds before it dissipated into the air again.
“Wow, this is some research facility…” Danny muttered in an instinctively hushed voice.
There was a bank of computers on the east side of the hall, but Frank immediately made a beeline for the maze of bookshelves.
“There’s all the obvious stuff on the big Antis war a couple years back,” my Conduit buddy said as we hurried after him. “When our current group of big Supers managed to take them out. But I wanted to check out all the really old books they’ve got here. The one my grandma gave me was interesting, but I’m sure there’s a million more that we could dig into.”
As arduous as it was yanking dusty old tomes off the shelves, Frank’s method of research actually proved pretty fruitful.
“So, the Antis date back to World War Two?” Rhiannon asked in a whisper.
“Looks like it,” I said and pointed to the page I was on. “Guess who they were in league with?”
“I’d rather not.” Hannah sniffed and turned back to her own book. “That makes a lot of sense, though. I guess Supers weren’t quite as… Prevalent back then.”
“They were pretty ostracized,” Frank said as he pored over the massive book he had splayed out in front of him. “But understandably. There isn’t much Super history, and no one really knows for sure what makes people super. It’s definitely genetic, but still random.”
“But they still helped to win the war,” I said as I leaned across the table where we’d set up our station and nodded to Frank’s book. “That’s when they started the Federation, right?”
“Right.” My redheaded friend nodded eagerly. “The Federation for Supers was created after the second World War. Once we’d proven ourselves to the masses, they started to trust us.”
“And I’m guessing that’s when the Antis sort of came about, too?” Danny asked with a grimace.
“Right.” Frank nodded. “It was a direct response. The yin and yang, the good and bad.”
“And the ugly, by the sounds of it,” Hannah said.
“So… Almost a hundred years of the Federation,” I said as the cogs started to turn inside of my head. “Which basically checks out at the same time frame as the last Omega?”
The mention of the Omega made my little group fall silent, and I noticed none of them were brave enough to meet my eye.
I didn’t blame them, because it was low-key freaking me out, too.
“Yes,” Frank eventually said. “There’s… Well, it’s a kinda half-baked theory, but there were always stories that the Omega kept to himself back in the day, but once the war started and the Supers were sort’ve drafted in, that’s when he went full crazy.”
“Do you think…” I cleared my throat before I carried on. “D’you think he went crazy with power because his probably once loyal slaves ended up serving a slightly higher purpose?”
“Sold out to the government and a paycheck, you mean?” Hannah asked with a pointed look.
“Right.” I nodded. “So… He got pissed. Started the Antis. Believed in Super supremacy, and all that.”
“It’s not too far-fetched a theory.” Frank’s voice was low, and he shot me a look. “But that’s not going to happen to you, Mark.”
“Of course not,” I said as I shook my head, and then I shot my friend a wicked grin. “How could it, when you guys are keeping me in check?”
“Exactly,” Rhiannon piped up with a sudden smile.
“Honestly, what would you do without us?” Danny asked with a smirk.
I smiled gratefully at my friends, and we spent the rest of the afternoon hunkered down in the library with our backs bent over old books, lost in our research.
It turned out the Antis were born from several Supers who’d believed they were intrinsically better than their human counterparts. Because they possessed literal power, they deemed themselves worthy of ruling over humans as though the powerless were inferior. After the war, they’d gone underground and worked in the shadows to spread their vitriol, but they were nowhere near as powerful as when they’d had an Omega riding with them.
When the Antis tried to rise up again a few years ago, it was easy to see why the current roster of Superheroes had decided to take them out, and it ended up with a huge battle between the Antis and the Supers right here in Miami.
Miami was famous for training fledglings, and it was from Academies like ours that the Antis had cherry-picked Supers to try and turn to the dark side.
“These guys actually sound psychopathic…” I said as I flipped the page.
“I know,” Hannah said darkly. “We’d all heard about them, but geez… I can see why they’d kept most of this information out of the news. The humans would’ve tried to lock us all up.”
“I never thought of it that way,” Danny admitted. “The Antis are the bad apples, and if it got out to the humans, we’d all be tarnished with the same brush.”
Frank also explained why Mori had been such an incredible Dreamer and showed us the book his grandmother gave him, and it turned out Hannah had known about the famed astral projector, too.
“You trained with Mori?” she asked me in surprise, when Frank accidentally let slip that I’d been taken to his quarters after the Pillar Placing Ceremony.
“Yeah, he tested me,” I said. “To see if I really did have an aptitude for all four pillars.”
“He tested you?” the blonde Dreamer demanded as her blue eyes lit up. “You mean he had you astral projecting?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “It was trippy as hell.”
“I’ll bet,” Hannah said with a reverent shake of the head. “I bet it was awesome, though.”
“It kinda was.” I smiled. “Still super weird seeing my unconscious body slumped on a couch, though. I don’t think I’ll ever use the term ‘out of body experience’ lightly again.”
“Wait, he actually pushed your soul out of your body?” Danny asked with a grimace. “That sounds awful.”
“I’d have nightmares for weeks,” Rhiannon said and shared Danny’s pained expression.
“It was fine.” I chuckled. “I’m sure he’ll have more in store for me.”
“If Mori’s training you, I see no reason why you couldn’t become a fully-fledged Omega on the good side,” Hannah said, and she excitedly pulled Frank’s borrowed book closer toward her so she could peer at the text on the page with interest.
The storm continued to rage outside and the winds ravaged the ocean surface so it was a steely gray mess of water. I was half-surprised the fancy white yacht in the harbor hadn’t already floated away. But Miami storms were something I needed to get used to, according to Danny.
“You grew up here?” I asked him as we went to grab some waters for the gang.
Hannah and Frank were still researching Mori, and Rhiannon seemed to have a super grim interest in the concept of astral projection, sort of like a huge car accident you can’t help but stare at as you pass. It weirded her out but seemed to intrigue her just as much.
