Mod Superhero: Initialize: A Scifi Progression Fantasy Series, page 30
“You look relieved,” Emmett said, trying to match her smile.
She laughed. “Yeah, well, you gave us a good scare.”
“Like last time?”
Clara shook her head. “Not like last time. You must’ve been having some crazy dreams.”
Emmett sunk down into the bed. His heart was still racing, and he could still vividly remember the feeling of being choked by his own twisted hands.
Finally, he said, “You have no idea.”
Chapter 46
Makeup and Answers
Emmett had no desire to be confined to a hospital bed again. Despite the dull pain all across the front of his body, he sat up on the edge of the bed.
Meanwhile, Clara and Venture stared at him with tired, apprehensive eyes.
Emmett smirked through his bandages. “You know, being a super isn’t as glamorous as people say.” When neither of them laughed, he asked, “Was it worth it, at least?”
“Yes,” Venture replied. “But first, tell us about what you saw while you were unconscious.”
Emmett nodded, then recounted in as much detail as he could the dreams he had after the fight.
When he finished, Venture stuffed his hands in his pocket, like a professor about to deliver a lecture.
“With the sedatives administered, you shouldn’t have been able to dream. Those were hallucinations brought on by a foreign substance—a poison. Poison contained in the shrapnel of Porcelain’s duplicates.
“Now, there is very little chance of Porcelain developing a power like this, which leads me to think that she was poisoned by someone else. All this time Porcelain has been acting strange; First she was present at the Champion street attack, and Clara said Porcelain was incoherent when you found her.
“At some point, either directly preceding the Champion street attack or sometime during it, Porcelain was poisoned by an unknown super. The poison caused her to hallucinate and act irrationally, even violently.
“Most poisons break down over time or are broken down by the body, but due to Porcelain’s unique powers and biology, the poison hasn’t broken down. She’s still suffering from the poison weeks later.”
Clara stifled a yawn and shook her head. “Emmett, it’s the middle of the night. You were only out for a little under an hour.”
Emmett sighed. “Those dreams—hallucinations… They were so intense. I can’t imagine being stuck like that for that long. Where is she now?”
“She’s gone,” Clara replied. “She got away.”
“Is there anything we can do? Can we help her?”
Venture nodded. “We’ll have to wait for her to pop on our scanners again, but yes. I’m already analyzing the traces of poison from the shrapnel. Unless it’s something otherworldly, we’ll be able to make an antidote. Getting her to take it, that’s another story…”
Clara crossed her arms. “Then we can question her about what happened at Champion street.”
“The League will want to question her,” Venture corrected. “That’s their prerogative.”
Emmett listened, but couldn’t stop his mind from wandering. Porcelain lost control of herself, just like Amarque…
“Are they related? Porcelain and Amarque?”
Dr. Venture and Clara shared a knowing glance.
Venture replied, “I’m still waiting on communication from the Summit of Heroes. Amarque still hasn’t woken up yet but… Clara and I had the same thought.”
Emmett sighed. It felt like the weight of several realizations all settling on him at once. “So a rogue super testing their powers, seeing just how powerful their poison is… Powerful enough to affect veteran members of the Summit… Didn’t one of the mutagens result in something similar?”
Venture nodded solemnly, while Clara turned in surprise—apparently they hadn’t gotten to talking about that possibility yet.
“When I tested the mutagen variants you brought in, one of them created cells that produced poisons. Some outright lethal, while others had a hallucinogenic effect similar to what Porcelain and you suffered,” Venture said. “I just don’t know for certain. The final effects of taking the mutagens aren’t always the same, so there’s not going to be a one hundred percent match… But if I had to bet, I’d go with your theory. Newly minted super testing the limits of their powers.
“Now the big question. Are they working alone?”
Emmett frowned and immediately regretted it—his face felt tender beneath his bandages. “Probably not. Athena said the knock-off mutagens were coming in ten plus shipments at a time—that’s coordinated. And even if they’re not tied directly to the shipments, there’s no way some random newbie was able to get close enough to both Porcelain and Amarque to poison them.”
Venture nodded, confirming his thoughts. “We’re likely dealing with a coordinated team. Even if our suspect is a new super, the rest of the team is probably experienced.”
Clara scoffed. “How experienced can they be? All they did was poison a member of the Summit of Heroes and possibly steal from one of the biggest corporations on the planet.”
Venture smirked. “You both wanted to play hero. Welcome to the game.”
Emmett sighed. “What time is it? I need to get back home.”
Clara replied, “It’s almost two in the morning.”
Suddenly, the exhaustion that hung heavy over his allies found Emmett as well, and he covered up a yawn. “I need to get back.”
Clara chuckled. “You need to do something about your face. You can’t go back like that. Your roommate will freak.”
Emmett gingerly touched the bandages on his face. He’d caught a chin and forehead full of shrapnel. Thankfully, he’d managed to shield his eyes from getting shredded. That would’ve sucked.
“The swelling is already going down,” Venture said. “I’d lie low for the rest of the weekend. Stay in your room and fake sick. By the time Monday comes, you should be able to put makeup on to cover up the worst of it.”
“Makeup?”
Venture rolled his eyes like Emmett was missing the obvious. “How do you think all those supers hide their scars and injuries so they can maintain a double life? They wear makeup. All of them.”
Emmett waited, but Venture’s expression didn’t change.
Clara’s eyes were locked on him. “You’re not too manly for makeup, are you?”
Emmett scoffed. “No, it’s not that… At least I don’t think it is.” He trailed off, not wanting to put his foot in his mouth.
“Good,” Venture replied. “You better get used to it. Clara, why don’t you get some of your extra makeup and show Emmett how to apply it.”
Venture turned and left the med-bay, leaving the two of them alone. Emmett chuckled awkwardly while a devious smile spread across Clara’s face.
All they had to do was wait.
Wait for Dr. Venture to make an antidote to the hallucinogen. Wait for Porcelain to show herself. Wait for news about Amarque…
Emmett hated waiting almost as much as he hated running away from a fight. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about makeup.
Clara and Emmett were sitting on the edge of the bed in the med-bay. She’d pulled out a small bag of makeup and set it on a clean tray beside the hospital bed.
Alright, he felt apprehensive about it. But why? Why did he feel so clammy sitting next to Clara and staring down her supplies?
Emmett had turned it over enough in his head while waiting for Clara to return that he concluded it wasn’t a manliness thing. Maybe in his parents' generation it would’ve been more common for women to wear makeup, but plenty of Emmett’s peers—boys, girls, nonbinary alike—wore makeup.
Maybe it was because makeup was about hiding. He wasn’t going to use it the way most people did. Emmett was going to use it to hide wounds… But was that so different from hiding an imperfection? Wasn’t that what people used makeup for?
Emmett sighed.
“Oh, come on,” Clara said as she looked through the tubes of makeup. “It’s not that bad.”
“It just feels weird. And I’m more weirded out that I’m not sure why it feels that way.”
Clara chuckled. “Sometimes there’s nothing to figure out. Feelings can be like that. Try to think of it like anything else—like a tool. That’s all.”
Emmett nodded and tried to tell himself that the rows of small squares and tubes were just mods—no different from mutagen vials or the smoke pellets that he put in his arm. Makeup was just another tool, just another way to hide—just another type of mask.
First, Clara helped him peel off the bandage on his cheek and another on his forehead, and applied a thin layer of liquid bandage to keep the cuts clean.
Next, Clara matched a foundation to his skin tone. She explained that it would make his skin appear more evenly colored and serve as a go-to solution if he wanted to cover up surface scratches or light bruises. It would also serve, literally, as a foundation for additional steps if he had particularly nasty bruises.
Though there were different ways to apply foundation, Clara primarily used gel-types that could be applied with her fingers—supers weren’t going to carry brushes and sponges around. Emmett felt a little awkward as he tried it on his face, but it was easy enough to apply.
“Hopefully, foundation is all you’ll need.” Clara held up his bottle of deep tan foundation for emphasis, then she grabbed a different bottle. “If you need something more, you’ll need concealer. Basically, you use the color opposite from the color of the bruise you’re trying to hide. Peachy yellow cancels the blue from most bruises.”
She put a bit on her finger, then dabbed a tender spot below his eye. “Don’t rub. Just dab it in. If you’re in a pinch, you can just use the concealer, but if you need it to last for a few hours, take a minute and put on foundation too.”
Emmett grunted in affirmation instead of nodding. It seemed easy enough.
Clara smiled and held up a small mirror. “Your turn. You definitely need to put something over that other eye.”
Emmett eyed his reflection. His face still felt tender, and so he’d been expecting the worst, but considering his recent beating at Porcelain’s hands, he didn’t look too bad. He looked… normal—
Except for the bruise under his right eye. Even with a layer of foundation, it was still a deep purple.
Emmett sighed and set to work while Clara held the mirror steady for him. In the end, he needed less concealer than he thought.
“A little bit goes a long way,” Clara said, lowering the mirror. “You did good.”
“Thanks,” trying his best to return her smile. “Did your mom teach you?”
The question had slipped out, and for a moment, Emmett worried how Clara would react. She never spoke about her mother, and then Clara might see it as another comment about masculinity.
Clara burst into laughter, leaving Emmett to sit in worried silence.
When she finally stopped, Clara wiped a tear from her eye. “Dad taught me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Dad’s a super. He’s had to cover up plenty of bruises and injuries. Mom… uh… didn’t need makeup.”
“That doesn’t sound cryptic or anything,” Emmett replied, attempting a joke.
Clara snorted a laugh. “I guess it does, doesn’t it? Sorry. I just still don’t know how to talk about her… God, that probably doesn’t make sense either.” Clara finally met his eyes and kept a straight face. “Tell you what, when Dad comes clean about his super identity, I’ll tell you what I can about my mom, if you still want to know.”
Emmett definitely didn’t want to pry, but he had so many questions about Clara, Dr. Venture, and now about Clara’s mom too. Even so, he understood the reason for discretion. If Venture wasn’t ready to disclose his super identity, then talking about Clara’s mom might inadvertently give it away.
In the end, Emmett would just have to trust them and be patient.
Emmett returned her smile. “Deal.”
Chapter 47
Late Night Rendezvous
By the time they finished the makeup tutorial, it was 3 A.M. Saturday morning. Clara suggested he stay the night in the med-bay, but Emmett wanted nothing more than to get home and sleep in his own bed.
So Clara sent Emmett home with a small bottle of foundation and concealer, as well as makeup remover and cotton balls. Clara instructed him that if he ran out, he could just take the bottles to the nearest drugstore and get replacements. The last thing she gave him was a replacement folding knife and a small bluetooth earpiece.
“Keep that on you,” Clara said. “If Porcelain comes up again this weekend, either dad or I will call you. The earpiece will tie into your burner phone, but it will also work without it—that way you have a direct line to us.”
Emmett pocketed the earpiece and was about to say thanks when Clara interrupted him. “Don’t forget. You’re supposed to stay in and recover. So… maybe wait to test out the earpiece until after the weekend.”
“Alright Mom.”
Clara punched him in the arm. He’d expected it to be playful, but Emmett actually winced in surprise.
“Alright, fine. I’ll take it easy this weekend.”
“That’s more like it,” Clara said, sounding pleased. Then she walked off down the main hall of the lab, waving before she entered the door to section 001.
Emmett rubbed his still tender shoulder. What was her power, anyway?
Since the buses weren’t running anymore, Emmett jogged back to his apartment. The run was easy enough, but it was almost four in the morning by the time Emmett got back, and he felt exhausted in every other way.
Lock wasn’t home, so Emmett penned a quick note and left it on the counter for him:
Sick and feel like shit. Sleeping.
Emmett slept well into Saturday afternoon and proceeded to do what Clara and Dr. Venture suggested: Spending the rest of the weekend inside.
It actually wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be.
Lock came and left several times during Saturday and Sunday, and Emmett waited until he stepped out to make himself soup and to use the bathroom.
Twice, Emmett stepped out to use the bathroom while Lock was home, and a single nod was all that passed between them.
Aside from avoiding his roommate and questions about his injuries, it was just a matter of keeping busy. Between Emmett’s classwork, his engineering project, superhero research, and media he wanted to catch up on, keeping busy wound up being the easiest part.
The hardest part was keeping his mind from wandering.
Emmett felt like he should be doing more—even when his eyes ached from staring at his phone trying to find more information about Porcelain, the mutagens, or recent superhero news.
Worse, when Emmett drifted off to sleep, his mind drifted back to the hallucinations he’d had under the poison. Dreams about washing up on blood and oil stained shore, of fighting a copy of himself. Twice he woke up in a cold sweat.
And Porcelain had been suffering from that poison for weeks.
They needed to help her.
Emmett laid back in his bed and groaned. First, they needed to find her.
He hated waiting.
If he was going to keep doing this superhero thing, then he had to find a better way of tracking targets. There was the radio locator, a project that, up until yesterday, Emmett had been proud of. Now it just seemed woefully inadequate.
Radio would help him keep up with certain communications, like police and emergency services, but it wouldn’t help him find or track supers. Maybe cellphones would be a better way of doing that—it was common practice for supers to carry a burner phone, but that wasn’t a reliable way of tracking someone. Burner phones were supposed to be kept off for that very reason.
But then, Dr. Venture was supposedly tracking Porcelain through her power signature. It wasn’t foolproof—she needed to use her powers for Venture to track her—but it seemed infinitely more useful to Emmett.
Emmett turned over possibilities in his mind, realizing that Venture was already several steps ahead of him. Which made sense, given that he was an artificer.
Maybe Emmett didn’t need to engineer it all himself. Maybe once Venture trusted him enough, Venture would share that tech with Emmett…
Emmett chuckled defeatedly and tried not to let himself think that all his work on the radio locator was for nothing. It was still a valuable experience, and he still needed to finish it to graduate. There was no getting around that last part.
Then there was Emmett’s own development to worry about. Despite all the progress Emmett had made, it still wasn’t enough. If not for Clara being with him last night, Porcelain might’ve killed him.
There wasn’t anything he could do right now, but Emmett wasn’t going to stay a Class 1 super forever. One day, he’d be able to take care of himself.
That meant getting stronger.
So Emmett started brainstorming. It was all hypothetical and in super broad strokes, but it kept him occupied in between work for classes and episodes of Full Throttle Heart.
If he had a single option for a mutagen, what would he want to enhance? Maybe something to enhance his muscles that could make him stronger or faster in quick bursts. Maybe something to enhance his lungs to give him better endurance or one to give himself telekinesis. Emmett was sorely lacking a ranged option for dealing with enemies and still wasn’t keen on using guns—nonlethal or otherwise.
Were there mutagens that could duplicate other powers? That would be something! There’d be nothing to stop him from taking the best powers of several supers for himself…
Maybe Gnosis had already done that. That wasn’t a pleasant thought. But if that was the case, they wouldn’t be able to hide a development like that—not from the public and not from the Summit of Heroes.
Emmett’s mind kept wandering. What if he could make some other part of him mechanical? Would he want to replace another limb, or would it be possible to replace his skeleton with titanium? Or maybe he could make a neural interface so that he could seamlessly communicate with the lab or control a separate weapons platform. After all, in the last few years there’d been progress made with neural interfaces, and Emmett knew that as amazing as modern science and technology was, the stuff developed by the military, artificers, and the Summit of Heroes had to be even more futuristic.
