Marlene stops, frozen still for a moment, mouth agape.

From somewhere, maybe the apartment below, a cricket is chirping.  Odd that one would still be active this late in the year.

She shakes her head, blinks, and starts to open her mouth to say something.

There's a knock on the door.

Outside are three people:  Hard Time, a woman, and a man.  The woman has sandy blonde hair tied into a neat ponytail.  Though dressed casually, there's a preciseness about her clothing and manner that makes you think of the military.

The other man is the shortest of the three.  He has thin red hair and sunglasses on.  Hands in  pocket.  Slouched.  You notice his socks don't match.  Definitely not military.

Marlene answers the door and just sort of stares at them.

"Good Evening.  We were looking for Jack Sharpe?"<Red> The blonde reaches out her hand.  Marlene shakes it, still moving like she just got woken up from post-op surgery.

The blonde gestures.  <Red>"May we come in?"

Marlene sighs and steps aside, motioning for them to do so.

The blonde smiles at you.  "Hello Jack. My codename is Gut Shot.  I'm the leader of Guard Star.  You've already met Hard Time."  She gestures at the red head.  "This is another associate of ours.  You can call him Mr. Alcome."

The red head sighs and nods in your direction.

Gut Shot nods and smiles again.  "We have a lot to talk about.  I assume you've already discussed things with your Aunt." She glances in Marlene's direction.  Marlene just nods absently.  "We can talk here.  But given the circumstances...would you mind if we move to the school for our discussion?"

Standing in the background, Jack doesn’t say a word. He hadn’t expected them to show up the moment he’d said it to her. He’d have liked to give her the opportunity to change out of her work clothes and into casual wear, but apparently that wasn’t the situation they were dealing with, and he rolls with it. He makes idle note of Gut Shot.

The man beside her earns a similar glance and the youth surmises that he’s quite possibly Omen. The Alchemist, from all reports, would probably be wearing some sort of anachronistic outfit, with a cravat or similar embellishments. Sloppy lack of attention doesn’t fit with someone who builds super-suits. He also doesn’t have any of the visible tech that he’d associate with Hemi. Maybe JackPot.

JackPot fits too. Though why she wouldn’t have mentioned his Cape name, when she mentioned her own is curious.

He moves back half a step when they enter, now standing toward the end of the couch. His stance relaxed, his eyes going between them. Some might look intimidated, he doesn’t. For several reasons, mainly because he has no reason to be and they’re expected, but also because of his confidence in his own abilities.

“Hello,” he greets them, not introducing himself, since GutShot had already said his name. “I’m fine with talking wherever,” he confirms.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 649):

Marlene raises her hand.  "Wait.  Hold it.  I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with talking somewhere else.  What's going on?"

Gut Shot turns to her, smiling like a salesman. "Sorry.  I got ahead of myself.  You're right.  Let's sit down and go over what's going on."

She walks over to Marlene, holding out her hand.

As she does so, Mr. Alcome walks over to you, thumps you on the chest, and mutters, "Come on.  Let's go."

Hard Time looks at you and nods his head at the door.  The two of them move out to the landing.  Inside you can see Marlene sitting at the kitchen table with Gut Shot.

Hard Time glances inside once you step out.  "We can head out.  Gut Shot will go over everything with your Mom."<Green>

"Aunt.  That's his Aunt."  Alcome only glances at Hard Time as he corrects him, and then looks back at you.  "They'll be fine.  Linda will go over the program and benefits package with your Aunt.  And they'll hear us talking on the landing."

Suddenly the three of you are standing in a large room.  It looks like a gymnasium, except there are no bleachers or basketball court.

There's also no exits.  Or at least obvious ones.  You see two 'hidden' doors in the wall.  And it looks like there's a lift that heads up into the ceiling.  You can't see above the ceiling though.  It's like when you were looking at the football field that one time.

And this room is about that size.

"If your Aunt calls out to you or comes to get you, we'll pop back.  But for now, let's chat.  First off, I'm the guy who'll be doing your evaluation."

He studies you.  "Okay.  I have a general idea of what you can do.  B.  C.  F.  L. R.  Z.  And you're a Black."

Hard Time had been grinning.  Now he blinks rapidly several times and says, <Green>"Wait.  What?"

Alcome keeps studying you.  "He's a level Black."  He laughs and puts his hands in his pockets.  "That's gonna put a crimp in the mirth. Don't worry.  You may have to smack them around a few times, but they'll eventually give up on trying to dissect you."

"Whoa whoa whoa whoa!  That's not funny.  Don't say shit like that."  Hard Time puts a hand on Alcome's shoulder, then looks at you.  "He's just makin' a bad joke.  No one's gonna try to cut on ya."

Alcome ignores the hand but, still watching you, nods in Hard Time's direction.  "He's a Yellow.  So he doesn't get it.  But it's not like you need to worry. I doubt they have a scalpel that'd work on you."  He looks over at Hard Time. "I'd call him an 8C.  I for now.  E in the future.  He'll be very E.  Maybe."

Alcome wrinkles his nose and then shrugs.  He walks towards a far wall.  "Okay.  You've listened to me talk about you like you're not in the room.  Thanks Jack.  What questions do you have for me before we get started?"

“You okay if I leave you here with her, Marlene?” Jack asks of her before he lets himself be lead anywhere, he won’t leave if she doesn’t seem okay with it. Inevitably, it seems that she is okay with it however, when it clicks that Gut Shot, aka Linda apparently, is a famous Cape it goes a bit smoother no doubt.

Following Alcome and Hard Time, he glances around. Looking toward the doors and the lift, but he doesn’t say anything for the moment. Probably under the football field then, not Omen or Lucky-guy. Maybe the fact that Alcome sounds like alchem is not a coincidence. Or maybe he’s just someone else entirely, he idly speculates to himself, it’s a fun game.

He actually finds himself pulling up his mental images for the available details out there about known metas.

“Sol, the neighbor, would keep quiet. He’s a rabbi, good guy,” he mentions conversationally, in response to the comment about people hearing them if they were on the landing. His hands folding in front of him as he considers where they are. He simply nods at the assessment, not looking surprised. He  also just nods a little when he’s told he may need to ‘smack them around a little’ to keep them from trying to dissect him.

Thinking about the mention of yellows and blacks, he realizes that Alcome is either likely a black or at least knows a few of them so that he can be casual about it. He did pull of that nifty space-shifting trick.

When Alcome says he doesn’t need to be worried, Jack smiles a little genuinely. It was nice to have someone know what he could do and not have them respond like Hard Time seems inclined to.

There are several questions he could ask: who is Mr. Alcome? It would probably sate his curiosity, but figuring it out on his own is more enjoyable.  Should he hold back? No, Hard Time would be reporting the Black status and the laundry list of initials regardless, so it wouldn’t do him any good, the cat is out of the bag. He’d liked to have heard what ‘Linda’ had to say to his aunt, if only so that he could be fully informed, but he expected she’d retain all the most pertinent information and could boil it down later.

“No, no questions. I expect that I should try not to demolish the facility and the football field, and most of the testing will be straightforward in nature,” he surmises.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 651):

Alcome glances over his shoulder, smirking at you.  "You're assuming that I'd let you do that, aren't you?"

He reaches out and touches the wall.  The space starts to shimmer.  Things bend and then the three of you are standing on what can only be described as an asteroid floating in space.  The sky is orangish and the stars are all black. The ground is uneven.  Stone pillars bearing odd inscriptions ring the area instead of walls.

At each corner of the space are four...blobs?  They are reddish pillars that seem to be gelatinous in nature.

Alcome is standing where he was.  He turns and looks back at you.  "Okay.  You can go nuts here.  Here's your first test."

He points at Hard Time, who is standing nearby.  Hard Time glances at him, then you, then shrugs.

"Protect him.  He gets even a drop on him, you lose.  Start."

The four columns of gel suddenly spring into 'life'.  That is, they start to bounce across the space, headed for Hard Time.

I felt like there was a lot of speculation and then speculation on whether his ‘solution’ would work. Hope this was okay. Thanks!

Jack doesn’t retort, he has no reason to get in a pissing contest with Alcome. The idea that anyone could make an object invulnerable against him is frankly ludicrous, they’d be able to ward off atomic bombs with that level of power. The only way it would even appear that way would be through an illusion, but if it’s an illusion his power would blast through it. That’s his immediate assumption anyway. Though with this second movement he isn’t entirely sure that this wasn’t just another movement in space.

Watching as the world is realigned, he finds that at least at first glance he doesn’t see the elevator doors anymore. But things are moving now and he doesn’t want to sit there trying to puzzle out Alcome’s power, he has a test to perform. Not that the outcome matters. They know what he can do because Alcome has already ‘read him’.

He nods at the explanation that he can go nuts and decides not to doubt it. It must be altered space to direct the energy away from the Program’s Room. Redirected energy, not stopping his energy. That makes sense.


He also decides as he examines his options, not to ‘protect Hard Time’ by eliminating the source of the problems. Which he might have done if this were a situation were this not clearly not being set up as a test wherein they are playing roles. Alcome as tester and testmaker, Hard Time in this case as damsel in distress, and Jack, as Cape.


He glances at Hard Time at the explanation and vanishes from where he is, and appears next to the big blond man. Orienting himself directly above the man for the moment, he spins in a circle, cutting the sections of asteroid out from under the blobs in a four neat arcs, his heat vision cranked to the maximum power and the lowest width to make the neatest least destructive cuts. He then descends, grabs the slabs of asteroid and sends them spiraling out into space, away from Hard Time with a flipping motion of his arm.

“Let’s see if they can travel through space and those chunks,” he says aloud.

Not sure if I can actually send them away, if the space warps to actually allow things to move away. If they can fly, if the asteroid can be cut into pieces. So many options! :D

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 653):

Hard Time blinks with wide open eyes as you take the asteroid apart.  "Fuck..." he mutters.

Alcome laughs, giving you a clap.  "Nice!  Mindless destruction is always fun!  Okay.  Let's change it up a bit."

The space shimmers again.  The three of you are suddenly standing in the middle of a busy city.  You recognize it from photos.  Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing. It's called the world's busiest cross walk.  The time is noon.  The street is thronged with people moving from one side to the other.  You and Hard Time are smack dab in the middle of one of the crosswalks.  A huge river of people is moving around you.

"Don't let any civies get hurt either."

A woman coming up next to the two of you suddenly morphs into one of the gooey columns.  A man next to her starts and falls on his ass.  The gooey column begins to descend onto him.

You see at least five other people in this stream starting to morph as well.

Jack starts to figure out how things work. It seems like things actually behave the way he expects, which is useful. They very well could have ignored the forces of gravity and the power of him having thrown them away bodily. It makes things easier if they act in a way that matches with physics. Metas don’t have to do that, so these things really don’t either. His immediate action is to move others of the path of danger. But first, he zips into the air, claps with the thunder of a gunshot, and yells out, “Get away, move safely!”

Darting between people and starting to clear the area around the blob-things. He moves at super-speeds. As he goes, he continuously hits the blobs with focused blasts of freezing breath, careful to avoid hitting nearby civilians. His lips puckered for a tight stream of freezing air, he zips around each of them, moving people away.

He suspects that using physical strikes will be useless against the blobs. Slime monsters are classically resilient or downright immune to physical force, but freezing them generally works.

Hard Time is left to get himself out of the way, choosing to save him last, since he’ll weather the problem better than the Japanese civilians.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 655):

Everyone is reacting, both from your clap and the sudden transformation of people into blobs.

The blobs seem to freeze decently.  That's one good thing.  But more people are spontaneously transforming.  As the crowds rush further and further out, you have a larger area to keep track of.  Getting to the points of outbreak isn't a problem.  You're you.  Picking them up in a timely manner becomes the issue, even for you.

It finally happens that you see two incidents about to go down.  One has a already existing blob about to ralph all over a pregnant woman who can't run as fast as others in the crowd.  The other is a man who's suddenly exploding into goo at the same time he's holding the hand of a small child.  His son maybe?

The two incidents aren't near each other.  Freezing these things seems to take around one second.  You have less than that time to reach each incident.

Flying over everyone’s heads, Jack heads towards the small child. He’ll try to save the kid first. Even as he flies however, he flips through the air and attempts to use his heat vision on the one about to ralph. Making his choice mainly based on proximity. He tries to intercept any projectiles with heat vision and then hits the blob vaporizing it with vertical motions of his eyes, in order to give the woman time to move out of the way.

Hopefully.

Spinning even as he crosses the mental boundary he’d given himself to try to time it, he slams feet first into the one holding the hand of the kid: never having slowed down, he presses through whatever pressure the blob can exert and pulls their hands apart. As soon as he has them separated, he spins in a tight spiral and blasts the blob with a concentrated blast of freezing breath.

Making a blob-sicle in roughly a second before he takes up the kid and moves to hand him off to someone else, only pausing for a tenth of a second before he’s moving again.

Zipping back above everyone’s heads, he heads toward where the woman and the cooked blob had been. To see what else he needs to do. Freezing anything remaining as he closes the distance again.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 657):

As a plan it is rock solid.  The execution gets snagged up by one problem.

Turns out the blobs are combustible.  Spectacularly so.

As your heat vision hits your first intended target, it almost comes apart as a rain of small drops of napalm.  The child screams as drops begin to touch her.

Everything freezes.  Only you and Hard Time seem capable of movement.  Everyone else has halted like God hit a pause button.

Alcome saunters up to the spot where the child is being doused.  He studies it for a moment and then  gestures towards her.

"A few questions.  And they may sound stupid.  But this is what I am evaluating.

"First, what went through your head when you saw you had two targets about to get attacked at the same time?  How did you decide to react the way you did?

Second, what do you feel now?  Seeing this?" He gestures at the child, staring at you intently.

(It’d be the pregnant woman being doused. I moved to physically dislodge the kid, I blasted the one near the woman.)

Jack is annoyed. He could have tested the combustibility against the first set of slimes. He shakes his head at his failure, but it was deliberately meant to be difficult or impossible to pull off. That seems like the sort of thing they’d test.

Looking toward Alcome at the questions, he relaxes his focus on perception so that he can talk with the man in something approximating real-time.

“A lot of things. I have ample time to consider things. I thought about: wind speed, guesstimations on when contact would occur, likelihood of survival if I hit them with a glancing blow, the angles I'd need to do things safely, the area behind the target slimes in case there was over-penetration, my available methods of attacking without risking massive collateral or property damage but the first thing I thought about was which of the two would be able to run away if I gave them even a moment. The kid isn’t liable to run away even if I could have stopped this one,” he hooks his thumb over his shoulder at the frozen slime he has detached from the kid. “From afar.”

And then he indicates the woman.

“If the heat vision had stopped that one’s attacker, which, apparently it won’t. She would have run away on her own. So to answer your first question, I reacted based on which attack would reach in time and chose who to save based on the likelihood of both surviving.”

He then looks toward the pregnant woman, currently frozen in horror as she is hit with a rain of explosive slime-fire.

“I’m glad that I don’t have to watch a figment of your imagination burn alive, if that’s what you mean or smell her flesh cooking or whatever else your power can make manifest. For a moment there I felt a little regret that I hadn’t tested how they would react to various stimuli when I was protecting Hard Time, but then it occurred to me that you could have just changed them between tests and I’d never know, so it’s pointless to beat myself up about that. Finally,” he glances at the pregnant woman, “I feel discomfort seeing a person like that. But at the same time, I can tell you that I don’t feel bad. Mainly because I have had ample time to come to terms with how I believe your power works, and lastly, because I did the best I could.”
This message was last edited by the player at 19:20, Thu 14 Jan 2021.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 659):

It's funny because I had it right the first time, then for some reason I thought I had it wrong and changed it.  Sorry about that.

Alcome listens with his head slightly cocked.  "You are the second person who's ever given me a dissertation for an answer. Most people say 'I just did the best I could'."

He waves a hand and the scene fades.  The three of you are now standing in a completely white space.

"You make it sound like my power is illusions.  Or at least that what you went through was illusory.  I will admit it is not a bad assumption.  But I'm telling you now.  You're wrong.  What just happened both times occurred in reality.  At least as I know it."

He starts to walk in a circle around the white space.  "Another something you should know.  All that stuff I was spouting before about you being a black and what codes you were?  That didn't come from me."  He is walking in a circle around you and Hard Time, hands in his pockets, smiling.  "That was from someone else.  He's the one who evaluated you.  Omen.  He's watching us even now."

He stops and wraggles his eyebrows.  Suddenly he starts singing.  "He sees you when you're sleeping...he knows when you're awake...  Alcome chuckles and starts walking again.  "Actually, he's a pain in the ass.  But I owe the guy some favors.  And being here with you now is how I check one of the boxes on my IOU to him.

"See I don't really give a shit about your powers.  I don't care how big and bad you are.  If I wanted to end you, I could."

He starts walking again.  "As long as we're on my favorite topic...Me...lemme give you my real introduction. I'm not one of these little capes like that guy." He nods in Hard Time's direction.  "I suppose I'm what you'd call support staff now a days. Though I used to be on the other side of the fence.  If you know anything about your 20th century meta-history, you might recall a guy called The Isolationist.  That'd be me."

The Isolationist.  The name rings a bell, though not in a major way.  The Isolationist was a hood that popped up about three times that you've read of.  Once in the 1950s when he appeared in Portland, Oregon.  The second time was in Idaho around 1985.  The last time was in the 90s.  Something to do with a NASA mission.

Though the history books you read back at the shack didn't have a lot of detail about his powers or the events, they did discuss the damage he did.  In Portland, he obliterated three square blocks and killed over 400 people.  In Idaho, he caused two mountains to disappear.  They've never been found.  The whole NASA thing was one sentence in the book and didn't really say anything at all other then there was an orbital battle between him and some capes at the time.

Alcome stops.  "You heard of me?"

"Quit it."  Hard Time steps forward, walking towards Alcome. "I see what you're tryin' to do.  But it's bullshit to push the kid like this."

Alcome shrugs.  "You won't know the answer if you don't ask the question."

Hard Time waves a hand at Alcome dismissively and turns back to you. "He's full of shit.  The stuff about The Isolationist...I mean.  Yeah.  That's him. But the stuff from the news reports isn't really what happened."

He glances back at Alcome.  "This guy's power is creating pocket dimensions.  He can set up little worlds and fill 'em up with whatever he wants.  But all the things inside those worlds.  They're just..." Hard Time waves a hand, trying to hunt for the term.

"Soulless constructs?"

Hard Time snaps his fingers.  "Yeah.  Constructs.  That's it.  It's like fightin' androids. All those people he supposedly killed?  They weren't real.  They disappeared cos he stopped thinkin' 'em into existence."

Alcome doesn't say anything.  He just shrugs again.

Hard Time shakes his head.  "Sorry Jack.  I knew they wanted to test you a bit.  An' Omen wanted Alcome to do it.  I figured cos you were high spec, Omen wanted someone else high spec to do the evaluation.  I didn't think they'd do..."  He waves his hand at the emptiness.

“A dissertation requires a thesis,” Jack replies with equal sass to the amount he was given. If Alcome wants to get into a shit-talking bout, he can throw down, he has lots of advantages when it comes to coming up with retorts. He has never felt the slow-burn of being the guy who didn’t have a response to an insult.

Listening the man’s explanation, he actually has serious doubts about that statement. The implication is that they were dimension hopping, but he’s fairly certain he can feel it when he moves through dimensional membranes. He hasn’t had enough experience with them to be certain he’d felt what he’d felt when he’d moved between his house and the cube.

But he was starting to think he could pin it down. Maybe learn to resist it. He hadn’t been trying to not go. Out of curiosity, he starts to flex his ability to influence things by exerting himself simultaneously in multiple ways, without really moving, onto the fabric of the current. Bending the fabric of space around him ever so slightly by flying while simultaneously flexing. Countering his own actions. Trying to resist the dimensional interplay around him.

“Does Omen not like you?” he questions, really thinking through his options now as he starts to consider whether Alcome is telling the truth about having killed those people in a version of Tokyo in some universe. His bragging that he could end Jack doesn’t even phase the teenager. He doubts it. He also doubts the man is stupid enough to say it to his face. The moment he’s ouside of one of these dimensional spaces, he’s likely about as vulnerable as anyone else in relative comparison to Jack.

Which is to say that Jack could ascend up into space, find Alcome outside of a dimension, and then descend on him going so fast that there would be zero chance of reaction. He could simply pile drive the guy into paste. He honestly expects that if he goes all-out total-annihilation on nearly anyone who isn’t at least as tough as Hard Time, there’s essentially zero chance of survival.

The only chance Alcome has is if his bodies are always just dimensional extrusions. Like playdough squeezed through a small hole. A little Alcome-shaped thing that walks around talking shit.

Hearing the man’s Cowl name, he now seriously starts to consider whether to simply dash across the room and snatch the guy’s head off his shoulders. Perhaps it’d be better to wait, act slightly cowed, wait for him to be outside of a dimension. Talk to Omen first. Since Omen can apparently track him and can confirm his mortality outside of his dimensions.

Jack is mid-planning the best way to kill ‘The Isolationist’ for the good of mankind when Hard Time speaks up and he glances over.

He just smiles.

“I appreciate the concern H.T., but I wasn’t going to act without having a chat with someone first,” he says to the man.
This message was last edited by the player at 22:21, Fri 15 Jan 2021.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 662):

You notice when you ask about Omen, Alcome is looking at you quizically.  You 'hear' him mumble, "And just what are you up to now?".  He shakes his head when you stop 'gyrating'.

"Omen?  Who cares?  He's an asshole."

"He's an asshole you owe big time." Hard Time gives Alcome a meaningful look, which is just met with a shrug.  Hard Time scowls and shakes his head.

He turns to you.  "You did pretty good.  Scenarios like that happen though.  Sometimes you can't save everyone.

"One thing about the Life.  It can really wear ya down.  I won't give ya a big long lecture.  But if you're gonna put on the tights so ta speak, don't go solo.  It can really get at ya.  Or drive you crazy." He jerks a thumb over his shoulder in Alcome's direction.

"Heavens to Betsy.  What an accusation."

Hard Time ignores him.  "It's important to have people who at least have an idea of what you're goin' through around."

"I would agree with that.  But things are different if you're a Black."

Alcome isn't smirking or rolling his eyes now.  "Everyone has their moment a' doubt an' pain, sure.  But with us...with us Blacks...it's a whole other story.  The temptation to just say fuck it.  Or how things would be better if they just did what would be good for them in the end.  Well.  You'll see when you get there.  Even Jesus wept, right?"

The three of you are standing back in the training room.  Alcome yawns.  "Enough of that shit.  I did my bit.  Have fun with this bronco."  He heads towards one of the walls.  You would guess there's a door there.

Hard Time clicks his tongue and then looks at you.  "So. You're still up for this.  Right?"

Jack doesn’t seem to have found any way to alter anything. Bummer. He’d have to keep playing around with a way to mess with someone like Alcome. It’s a little out of his wheelhouse, in a way that he doesn’t like. He can handle some of the other powers that are out there, but at least they can’t mess with his freedom or make an attempt at killing him.

He doesn’t answer the question about Omen. Though the answer is: because it seems like he was willing to let me kill you, as a test.

“Thanks,” he says to Hard Time and nods his head at the summation of the scenario. “I’m not sure being non-solo is going to help me be certain I can save everyone, any more than having ten team mates would. But I can appreciate having people to talk to about the job afterward.”

Turning his attention back to Alcome, he considers that the man may be an asshole, but apparently isn’t some sort of psychopath. Just a very old jerk. “How old are you anyway?” he asks of Alcome, spontaneously, when it occurs to him the timeline of events. The 50s was the point of an event, and that’s just a recorded one. He’s probably been around longer.

Looking to Hard Time, he nods his head, “I am. Do you have more testing you’d like to do?” he inquires.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 664):

Alcome doesn't turn around.  Ahead, a panel in the wall slides open.  You called it about the hidden door.

"I was born in 1702.  At least in this reality." He turns his head and gives you a smirk.  "My timeline gets...confusing."

He then is through the door.

Hard Time sighs.  "Just so ya know.  He's not on either team.  Paladins or Guard Star.  He just...like he said.  He's support staff.  It's complicated."

He claps his hands together.  "Alrightie then!  Since he took off without giving us a ride back, lemme give you a lift to your apartment.  Yeah I know you can fly.  But we need to be circumspect.

"Speakin' of your living arrangements.  Is there anything we need to address?  You an' your aunt need a bigger place or somethin' closer to school?  We can make that happen.

"Also."  He scratches his cheek.  "Can you tell me about your folks?  How'd you end up living in Minneapolis anyway?"

You can answer that last question with just a summary sentence or two.  I am more interested in what you do not tell him than what you do.

Thanks

“For a guy older than the United States, he’s a bit of a dickhead, you’d think he’d have old-timey manners and a Cockney accent or something,” Jack remarks to Hard Time, once the Isolationist has departed, presumably, for Isolation or whatever it is that he does. Hearing about being circumspect, he doesn’t buy that explanation. He’d had himself and Darja fly back in the middle of the afternoon, let alone in the evening.

But if Hard Time wants a moment outside the base to chat, who is he to argue. So he nods and follows along, slipping his hands into his hoody as he walks.

“That’s something you can offer aunt Marlene. I don’t sleep really, even less faking now that Marlene knows that I’m a meta, so where my bed is is largely irrelevant. An hour a night usually, for my sanity.”

He takes an artificial breath to give the larger man a chance to respond, glancing around as they are walking through the facility. Trying to spot the hidden things.

“So, I mostly just putter around reading articles and learning languages with my spare time—especially since I met Darja. She inspired me to learn Estonian, and then I’m taking Cantonese, so I finished that out, and I’m also working on a good handful of the most popular ones around the world. That all being said, and since you guys are perhaps willing to make my arrangements better: I could use a bunch of MIT and Harvard-graduate student level textbook materials. Like a full database of every subject, as up to date as possible, and access to all the best journal sites, with a computer that can keep up with me, would be, you know, sweet as,” he goes on as he thinks about what they can offer as a group that is either well funded by some outside source, or by their own member’s genius patents. The computer is possibly the most expensive ask, but they were offered a house and he’s using it to improve himself.

“And if you expect me to remain circumspect, a car, I guess, eventually?” Having said that, he doesn’t make too many outlandish requests, the truth is, he can get most of that information for free on the internet. He just needs to don his eyepatch and parrot and go sailing the seven seas.

The follow-up earns a nod, and he begins to tell it all. The rule was not to reveal himself, and he has gone past that point.

“My parents are both metas. My mother is currently up near Saint Cloud in a mental facility after she hit someone with her car while blitzed. Omen can rank her if you want. My dad is also a meta-level genius, but he’s smarter than my mom, or at least more cunning in a, ‘I’ll rig everything twenty moves ahead’ sort of way, perhaps she’s better at the actual science? I can remember all of their conversations but they never did meta-level science in front of me. Mom did make a few things out of our microwave when she got blitzed, but her drinking slowed her down. She’s troubled, but she's getting better. She's good where she is now, but if you guys do anything to help her, just get her somewhere safe, nearby, structured. No alcohol, things to keep her occupied.”

He pauses.

What Jack doesn’t talk about is how his dad is almost certainly a hood, and how he suspects that the old guy may have been responsible for the two car wrecks, may have prodded the BEs to their current location, how Marlene’s house is close to a possibly-meta-related scene of multiple murders, and that high science is involved with people exploding. Or that he coincidentally showed up the very year that Darja did with the Program being restarted.

Too many strange coincidences and only one mad genius he knows who could do it.

Not to say there aren’t others, but others don’t know about him. Didn’t, anyway.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 666):

I was wondering if you were peeking ahead in the script.

The facility seems much larger than you had first scoped.  Deeper too.  It looks like there are two layers below the 'training room'.  And under the school itself are at least four floors.  They seem shielded from above or you would have already picked them up.  But it seems like they aren't being shielded from being viewed from the side.  That is the floors in general.  There are some rooms which seem to be completely closed off.

There are also a lot more people than you thought too.  You count at least twenty, excluding you and HT.

Hard Time leads you up a stairwell.  It opens into a utility closet located under the football field bleachers.

"I'll be honest.  We knew about your Mom.  At least her being in the...hospital.  But thanks for the heads up.  I'll relay to Omen.  We can make arrangements yeah.  There's a place that deals with...uhm...'troubled metas'.  I'll get ya some information on the place and you can decide.  What about your Dad?  We came up with bupkis on him.

"Yeah.  We can getcha learning stuff.  So you know: you have to take an IQ test and a couple a' different psch evaluations."

The two of you stop before the SUV he had driven out to the site of the tag game from earlier.

"Hold on.  Lemme text boss lady and let her know we're driving back."  He takes out his cell and starts tapping away on it.  Without looking up, he asks, "You met Kevin I take it? What's your opinion on him?"

Jack almost asks who the other people are, but until he’s certain that they know he can look through things, he just sort of looks interested at the architecture. He’d rather keep that particular trick up his sleeve a secret for as long as possible. A few people may have figured it out, but then again, he has so many other powers they could have easily jumped to the wrong conclusion. Only his buddy Colby probably knows for sure, he’d been rather clear about what he was doing.

He scans the area to make sure nobody is watching as he walks out of the closet, as he really doesn’t need to get a reputation for going into storage closets with middle-aged men at the school. Seeing nobody, he follows.

“She’s fine where she is, but I’d be glad to consider any alternatives. I don’t know if I’d call her troubled, she’s just a drunk who had a rough go of it. When I went to see her, she was clear headed. I think she’ll be okay if she’s safe where she is,” he tells Hard Time.

The confirmation about getting the hook-up on information and textbooks in whatever format gets an actual genuine fist-pump.

“More than what I already told you? He ran off. Current location unknown. He did send aunt Marlene some money for my college fund, and I expect he has been poked at things around here a few times. But with that sort of brain power you could do that from anywhere with a laptop and motivation,” he keeps it vague. He’d already indicated that his dad was twenty moves ahead. A poke from someone twenty moves ahead is essentially Jack saying, ‘my dad has  probably manipulated things around here.’ But he isn’t going to spell it out.

It’s not like he doesn’t want his dad to get caught. But as far as Jack knows, his dad didn’t rig the car wrecks, and is in fact working in counter against whoever did, and he’s the piece in the middle. Far, far too many unknown variables. He hadn’t even mentioned the super-tech behind the mirror, or the alien making suits in the Auto Zone.

“More tests, huh? Well, I suppose that’s predictable. As long as you don’t cramp my style. I have a date tomorrow, other than that I’m cool with meeting with people,” he mentions. He isn’t about to let them even begin to derail things with Lydia, so he just comes right out and tells them.

He glances over as the text is sent to boss lady, picking up her cell phone number next to the contact info. Tucking that away for later.

“Kevin’s a good guy, barely even cursed after Roger tried to blow him up in that gas station a few weeks ago,” he points out. “Just hoofed it out of there.”

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 668):

HT chuckles, not looking up from his phone when you mention your date.  "Don't worry.  We consider....whaddyacallem...'interpersonal relationships'...important.  Just be a gentleman."

He stops chuckling when you answer his question about Kevin.  He's already sent his message, which was just what he said it would be.  That you guys got dumped by Alcome and were heading back.

You can see his mouth twitch this way and that, then he points his phone away.  "You know about Roger then.  So I'm guessin' you know what happened first go around of this program too, huh?  Does Darja?"

He waves a hand.  "Never mind.  I'll ask her directly.  Sorry about that.  Someone's lookin' for Roger.  As for Kevin...well.  He's gotten on the wrong side of some folks.  It'd be best not to bring him up.  I sure would like to tell him to keep his head down and to mind his manners for the next little while. That Jack-O's not happy. But I guess I don't have a way of gettin' in touch with him, now do I?"

He gives you a wry smile and then jabs a thumb at the passenger side.  "Get in.  You're probably late for a long talk with your aunt."

He's chatty on the way back, but only about banal topics.  Gut Shot and Marlene are waiting when you get back.  Gut Shot gives HT a measuring look and then nods.  "Sorry if things  went a little wonky there.  But that is the life.  We'll talk more in the next couple of days Jack."  She turns back to Marlene, who is giving her a tight smile.

Marlene sighs, shutting the door after them.  "So I wanna ask what happened.  And where you disappeared to.  But I think the less I know, the better.  One thing though.  You know your Mom isn't going to be happy.  You want me to be the one to tell her?"

The comment about being a gentleman earns Hard Time a look. “Someone with that haircut should not be giving dating advice to anyone,” he points out, clearly teasing because he follows it up with a stupid little smile so that the man knows he was just messing around. Even though his haircut is rather 90s action hero.

Hearing the question about Darja, he is about to answer in the negative. Saying that he doesn’t think she knows, but it’s her decision to make. She can either go forward with telling what had happened, or keep it a secret to herself.

A moment later, he clarifies: “I did my homework before I joined you guys,” that much is honest, pushing his hand through his hair. He doesn’t comment that he’ll pass the message to Kevin. But he will, later. “Who is Jack-O?” he asks as he is getting into the vehicle.


Getting back to the apartment, he spares a glance around as he walks up into the building. Checking to see if anything has happened to the building or surroundings while they were certain they had him out of the area.

Gut-Shot’s words earn her a brief nod. “It’s fine.”

Sitting down on the couch when Marlene begins to speak her mind, he calmly listens and finds himself shrugging slightly. “I can do it. Did they offer you a new house or anything? Did you accept?” he asks.

In reply to Jack Sharpe (msg # 670):

HT shrugs.  "Jack-O.  Jackson O'Malley.  He's a government guy."

---

Marlene waves a hand.  "She mentioned we could ask for 'anything necessary'.  I kinda didn't follow up because frankly it sounded like they were offering me a bribe.  I'll stick with my own apartment.  Not sure how much I wanna owe these people."

She sighs and sits down.  "So I'm not gonna pretend I am overly happy about this.  But like I said before.  It's your life.  I will support your decisions.  I just want to ask one thing.  Finish school.  Not...this weirdo Mutant X school.  But high school.  It will make me feel better if I know you have at least some normal memories."

“I don’t think you’d owe them anything, Marlene. In fact, just insist that you don’t want them to feel like you owe them anything, and be clear about that, then insist that you are given full ownership of the property they get you. Then if they ask you to do something you don’t like, you can tell them to jog on,” Jack suggests and shrugs a little. He isn’t going to tell Marlene she has to take what is offered, but he thinks she should. It’s an opportunity to leverage things in her favor.

He thinks about it and goes on, walking into the kitchen and coming back with something that isn’t a G-D Fresca, picking out one of his Dr. Pepper’s.

“Whether they’re trying to manipulate you or not; let this be my gift to you. I like the idea that you’re getting something out of all of this, and I won’t let them put you over a barrel over any of it,” he tells her.

The thing she insists on just makes him smile. He can only tell people so many times that nothing about his perceptions of reality are normal, his perception of things is so different. Not just in the way he can think about things so much more, but in the way that he perceives things. More colors, more wavelengths, more types of energy. Schooling itself is largely irrelevant too.

No, his biggest attraction to normal schooling is friendships. He might manage a similar series of relationships in college, but that'd be another four years of needless commitments. Instead of university, he'd probably get a part time job somewhere so that he could feel grounded? That makes sense. People to socialize with.

“Speaking of regular stuff. I have plans to go on a date with Lydia on Sunday, and we’ve agreed to go to homecoming together, so you and I will need to go and get me a tux or uh, suit, I guess? Right? Prom is tux, homecoming is a suit?” he asks, he’s actually not sure on that, and not just making it up to seem normal.