Just Super

“There’s a language of the gods?” Emily asks the important questions.

“Apparently. I think it’s weird, though, that they know more about this than us, when we’ve got thousands of people walking around with these on our bodies.”

“Well, Tiara, at least, would have to know. How could she not?”

I hadn’t really thought about that yet. Everybody knows the marks are magic, of course; there’s no science to explain them. I’ve never heard of the distinction between magic and “divinity” that Jane mentioned, and that the document talks about.

Tiara stopped the Archmage from becoming a god, with the help of the six, but she’s never shared the details, and the Six weren’t around long enough afterwards to tell their tales. It wasn’t until after they vanished, the marks started appearing. If Tiara knows how they got their powers, and she’s never denied that she does, then she’s the only one.

“You’re right,” I say. “I don’t see how she couldn’t know. So is it not true, or is she hiding it?”

“Why would she hide it?”

I have a guess. “How would people react if everyone knew? We’re barely tolerated as it is. Can you imagine giving the religious nutjobs even more ammunition?”

“Unfortunately, yeah. And think about the egos on some of the people at this school. If they had an excuse to claim some kind of demi-godhood…” She shudders.

“Somewhere between milli- and micro-godhood, but, yeah. No.”

We both let that sink in.

I look at Emily. “We’re not telling anyone, right?”

“No. I don’t think so.” She sighs. “But wait. You brought this up because of what you can and can’t summon by flickering. Why?”

“Oh, right. I don’t have anything solid, but the idea of divine energy makes me think of belief. So maybe beliefs influence what I can do?”

“Whose beliefs? Yours? Wouldn’t your experiments all work, as long as you expected them to, then?”

Damn. She’s right.

“I don’t know. But I still feel like there’s something there. Or maybe if we understood what my mark means in that language, it would all make sense.”

“Maybe you can ask them Saturday. Anyway, time for phase two of today’s tests.”

“There are more?”

“Of course. I’m hoping that you don’t end up fighting any more invading soldiers, but if you do, you need to be ready.”

“How do I get ready?”

“Hit me.”

“I don’t want to hit you.”

I really don’t. I know that I can’t hurt her, but I don’t want to even try to hurt her. I’m not new to sparring. I did it a lot, obviously, back when I was competitive. I sparred with people I liked and people I didn’t. But I never sparred with someone I…

“Come on, Frank, you can do this.”

She’s right. I can. She’s not going to get pissed at me. There’s no chance of me hitting too hard and hurting her. It’s just playing pretend. I can do this. It’s a good thing I wore loose jeans.

I take a fighting stance. “Ready?”

She nods.

I start with a simple punch. She moves the absolute minimum amount for me to miss, and gives me a bright grin. 

“Atta girl.”

I flicker behind her and throw a punch, but she manages to spin in place enough to catch my fist in her hand. I flicker back to her other side and try a leg sweep. She rises out of the way.

“Cheater.” I’m sure my smile lets her know I’m not serious. This is sort of fun.

“Careful. Don’t go for any headshots unless you want to break your hand.”

I keep trying to land a punch, or a kick, anything. She catches or dodges every attempt. I start flickering faster. I punch from one side, then flicker to a different spot and throw another, going for an angle where she can’t possibly dodge both. She does.

“I was flying toward you and Alex when you shoved her out of the way,” she says casually. She’s not even breathing hard. “You were standing when you disappeared, but were in a full flying tackle when you appeared.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re throwing punches when you don’t need to.”

She’s right. I keep up a random pattern of flickers around her for a few seconds while I think. What would it feel like to have a punch about to connect? Something like this.

I flicker from two feet behind her with my fists up in a defensive position, to right in front of her with my arm almost fully extended, an inch away from her chest.

It almost works. She moves away from my fist faster than my arm can move. She gives me a big smile.

“That’s more like it! But a whole inch? You can do better.”

I can. I appear to her left side, my fist is already touching her arm. She pulls away, but I do make contact. Again on her right side. Miss. Behind her with my foot already in contact with her calf, moving at full speed. That’s a hit, but at the cost of me losing my balance. It was like kicking a steel pole. I fall to the mat.

“Why’d you fall?”

“I lost my balance?”

“Sure, but why did you fall instead of flickering?” She has a point.

We keep it up for five minutes, and I’m getting more and more contact, but I’m also getting tired. Break time, but one more thing. I flicker directly in front of her, my pointer finger just touching her nose, and push lightly.

“Boop.” Turnabout is fair play.

Emily grabs my hand and kisses the tip of my finger.

We spend almost an hour, with breaks, practicing. When we’re done, I look down at myself. My jeans and shirt are drenched in sweat. Emily, of course, is as fresh as a daisy.

“I am so gross.”

“Still cute, though.”

I start to flicker to a me that didn’t just get super sweaty, but stop myself. I made a lot of progress just now. Would I lose any muscle memory I might have gained if I did that? We could have started fifteen minutes earlier, though, and I could already be showered. I flicker.

“Why is your hair suddenly wet?” Emily asks.

I explain my thoughts of a moment ago,

“Do you really think that would happen?”

“I have no idea. But I haven’t gotten a workout like that in forever, and I’m sort of looking forward to the soreness I’m going to have later.”

She nods. “I miss that sometimes.”

Friday B days are the worst. Sure, Friday A days mean two A school days in a row, but there’s a weekend between them. Two B days in a row is unfair. I got to hang out with Emily for a few minutes before school, but now I won’t see her, except for a few times in the hallway, until school’s out.

I survey the lunch room and courtyard. There’s no space next to Bella and friends, so I don’t head their way. My first instinct is to find a seat by myself. I only sat with the gang two or three days a week, back in the day, after all, and the rest of the time I sat by myself.

But I want to sit with people. I want to know what’s going on in people’s lives, and not so I can figure out how to use it against them. People are interesting, and it turns out that I enjoy being around some of them.

There’s one particular person that I don’t want to talk to, but I need to. I probably should have a while ago, but this is the first time I’ve seen her by herself. Alex Green is sitting on a rock in the courtyard reading a book. Her arm hasn’t been a cast for a week now; I guess she heals fast, too. I walk over.

“Hey, Alex.”

“What is it, Doyle?” She looks up.

“I should have said this sooner, but I’m sorry.”

“For almost getting us all killed?”

“I was talking about breaking your arm, but that, too.”

She shrugs. “Thanks for the apology. Is that all?”

“Yeah.” I turn to walk away.

“Hey, and thanks for saving my life, I guess.” She’s not full of enthusiasm, but it’s a nice thought anyway.

“No problem.”

That’s enough social interaction for the moment. I’ll survive eating by myself this one time. 

“That’s sixty-three, in one second.” Emily is pointing at the screen of her laptop, which shows the video of our sparring session from yesterday. She paused at the point right before I started getting hits in, when I was flickering randomly around her.

“And?”

“The fastest possible reaction time is, I don’t know, maybe fifty milliseconds. You’re flickering away again less than sixteen milliseconds after you appear.”

“Wait a second.” I lean past her, brushing against her totally by accident, and scrub the video back a little bit, then letting it play in super slow motion. The app we’re using shows times in milliseconds. “There, see? You start moving about five milliseconds after I appear.” I let the video play.

“Yeah, I don’t count, though. I don’t have to wait for all the nerve signals to get where they’re going.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

“So anyway,” she continues, “you must not be reacting to arriving.”

“I could have told you that. I decided to flicker randomly. I wasn’t really making decisions.”

“How could you even tell what was going on like that? Your point of view was changing sixty-three times a second.”

That’s a good question. I try to think about what that felt like, then remember I can just do it again right now. “Stand here, please.” I point at a spot on her bedroom floor where there will be room on all sides of her. 

I start flickering around her at random.

“Well?”

“It’s weird. I can’t really describe what it looks like, but it’s not confusing or anything. I guess it’s sort of like I’m imagining your room in my head, but not from a specific point of view. Things might be a little blurry?”

“You sound really weird when you talk while you’re doing that.”

I flicker to right in front of her and lean in for a kiss. If she’s dodging, it’s taking way more than five milliseconds.

“Want to go out to dinner? Or do something else fun?” I ask, when we come up for air.

“I’d love to, but I’m waiting to see if my girlfriend is ever going to ask me out on a date.”

I flicker to my bedroom and swipe to call Emily. I start talking the instant she answers.

“Hi, Emily. Would you like to go on a date tonight?”

“I don’t know, it’s awfully short notice. How about tomorrow night?”

“Ooh, I’m going to be in another universe tomorrow evening.”

“Well, I’ve already been asked out for tonight.”

I hang up as I flicker back to her room. “Now you’re just being difficult.”

She’s looking at her phone. “Ooh! Giant Brain Spiders are playing downtown!”

“Is that something you’re going to need to deal with?”

“They’re a local band. They’re pretty good. Wanna go?”

“Will we be able to get in?”

“It’s all ages, so we’re good.”

“Let me check with my aunt and uncle. Be right back.”

I flicker home.

I drag myself out of bed at a little after ten Saturday morning. Last night was a lot of fun, but exhausting. I got home just before midnight, as requested by my aunt and uncle, but then once again messaged with Emily for an hour after that. It took me another hour to get to sleep.

After I eat breakfast and message with Emily again for a bit, it’s time to do some chores around the house. I don’t have any official tasks that are specifically mine; I do whatever needs doing. I seem to like things a little neater than Aunt Kate and Uncle Keith, so there’s usually stuff for me to do whenever it’s chore time.

While I’m cleaning the fridge, Aunt Kate comes into the kitchen. 

“Thank you, Frank. I’ve been meaning to get to that.”

“No problem. I live here, too, after all.”

“Did you and Emily have a good time last night?”

I smile. Dancing was so much fun. I had no idea what I was doing, but Emily didn’t either, and we weren’t the only ones. The band was pretty good, and I got to dress up in a new version of my goth-punk-princess look that I’d put together. Emily was in black pants and a black silk top and was so beautiful I could hardly take my eyes off of her.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” my aunt says. She’s smiling at me.

Oops. I’ve been standing here with a goofy smile on my face. “Yeah. We really did. Dancing is fun.”

“Did you have to fight off any invading armies?” Her tone is a little artificially light.

“Nope, not even a soldier or stray robot.”

“That’s good to hear.” Her relief sounds real. “I’m about to make some cookies for the church bake sale tomorrow. Would you like to help? You don’t have to.”

“That sounds fun. Let me just finish this real quick.” I’m going to meet up with Emily around five, before I go visit Jane again, but I’m free until then. I finish wiping down the last shelf in the refrigerator, reload it, and we get to work baking.

“You don’t have to go back there, you know.”

Emily and I are sitting on her roof. I’m supposed to visit Jane again in a couple of minutes, and Emily is worried about me again. It’s cute.

“Are you telling me I shouldn’t? Are you getting a bad feeling?” It feels like a safe bet that if something terrible were going to happen to me over there, she’d know it.

“No. This is just a normal girlfriend worry thing.”

We each put in our earbuds for our otherPhones and she calls me.

“Here goes.” Remembering her drop off the building before she started maiming the walking tanks, I cross my arms over my chest, fall backwards, and flicker to wherever Jane is.

I arrive standing up. Looking silly in front of Emily is one thing, but I don’t want Jane and Daniel to think of me as a silly teenager.

“Ha ha,” Emily fake laughs over my earbud. “You’re hilarious.”

“Hi, Frank. You’re right on time.” Jane is standing a few feet away next to a man I don’t recognize. “This is Daniel.”

He looks at his phone. “Not a peep on any detectors.” He turns to me. “Hi, Frank. Nice to see you again.”

I recognize his voice from the suit of power armor back in Death Valley. 

“Hi, guys.” 

I look around the space I’ve found myself in. It’s a medium-size living room, with an open set of curtains in front of a sliding glass door. We’re fairly high up, going by the view. I can see what looks like the Texas capitol building, which I only recognize because I saw it last night when Emily and I were flying to the show.

“Are we in Austin?”

“Yeah,” Daniel answers. “It’s very odd that you don’t have to know where you’re going to get there.”

“See, I could have stayed here, and at some point Jane could have invited me up here, probably to talk to y’all about my world or something, so I could have been here right now.”

Daniel seems almost offended. “So when you asked if there was a possibility you’d gotten the portal set to the right definition…”

“Yeah. Afterwards I wasn’t completely sure that my logic worked, but it got me home, so—” I shrug.

Daniel has many more questions about my power. We talk about that for a bit, then he asks to see my phones.

“Both of them?”

“Yes. I’ll need them both to see if I can make something that will let them link up.”

“You’re sure you won’t break this one?” I hold up my otherPhone.

“I’m sure. Everything I do will be non-invasive.”

“I’m on the phone with my girlfriend Emily.” I’m calling her that at every opportunity. “Will this drop our connection?”

“No. That’s actually helpful.”

I hand him both phones and he disappears into another room of the apartment.

I turn to Jane. “So that document you gave me…”

It turns out that the original is not plain text, but that the automated conversion that her phone did to send it to mine couldn’t find any compatible format beside the plain text.

“Good thing ASCII was invented before 1983, or I couldn’t have gotten them to you at all,” Jane says. “Let me poke Daniel and have him check on that while he’s playing.”

She fiddles with her phone for a moment.

I ask her some questions about the info in the file, but she doesn’t have any answers for me; she’s only skimmed the document herself. She’s pretty confident that her company’s research department is right, though. 

“What is your company?”

“We work for the Lone Star Protectorate. It’s part of the Incursion Defense Network.”

“Wait. It’s a private company?”

“I’m not thrilled about it. For a few years after the Void opened—that’s the event that introduced powers, and later magic, into our world—there was one non-profit that coordinated this stuff. For-profits like the LSP managed to get some crazy licensing requirements in place, and now almost all response work is done by similar companies.”

“That sucks. Our Rapid Teams are run by the government. On the other hand, y’all showed up in Death Valley like three minutes after I did the first time I got here, and it took ours almost twice that to get to a major incursion in Chicago.”

“It’s the chance of extratech salvage that does it. If we find the right thing that our R&D team can replicate and patent, that can mean millions, or even billions.”

We compare notes about our worlds for a while, with Emily occasionally chiming in from home.

“Check with me before you come home,” Emily says. “I have to deal with something.”

“I could come back right now.”

“I promise that if I need anyone to jump between universes, I’ll let you know.”

“What is it?” Jane asks.

“Emily has to go fight something—”

“Not necessarily. Maybe a kitten is stuck in a tree.”

I can hear wind rushing by through the earbud, so I know she’s already on her way.

“Has something like that ever set you off?”

“No, but I could get lucky.”

“Yeah, you could.” I can’t believe I just said that. I look up at Jane.

“Sorry. Um, there’s an incursion or a fire, or some other emergency and Emily is going to deal with it. I’d teleport to her, but that’s probably a bad idea when she’s flying at hundreds of miles an hour.”

“Yes. A very bad idea. I’ve been doing this way longer than I’ve even known you. I’ll be fine.”

“Fine.”

About that time Daniel returns to the room. He hands me my phones. I stick my regular phone in my pocket and look at the other phone. He’s attached a little add-on where the charging cord usually plugs in. It’s as wide and thick as the phone, and adds about a half inch to its length.

“This is a wifi access point. It handles your world’s wifi, your other phone’s wifi, and ours. I put an app on each of your phones that will let them connect across it. It has to be plugged into your other phone to work, because all of that phone’s radio signals are going directly to its home universe.”

He shows me how the app works. I try to give him my full attention, but I keep listening for signs of what’s going on with Emily. I think I get the gist, anyway.

“Did you write these just now?” I ask. 

“Oh.” Daniel laughs. “No. I have a basic app written and a salvaged extratech device that translates it to other world’s tech platforms.”

Of course. I should have guessed. “Okay. I don’t really know much about coding.”

“Can I ask you a few questions about your power?”

“Sure.”

He asks more than a few questions, and seems frustrated by a lot of my answers. When he takes a break to think, I tell him about my theory that it has something to do with belief. Then I realize I haven’t heard anything at all over my earbud for a while. Emily must have muted. I hope.

“Everything okay, Emily?”

There’s an agonizing five seconds of silence.

“Yeah—get away! What are you doing!—but some people are being idiots and not getting far, far away from the big snake.”

“Big snake?”

“In Zilker Park.” I have no idea where that is. “It’s coming through a rip. I’m trying to convince it to back up and go home, without hurting it.”

“The rapid team hasn’t shown up yet?”

“Nope. Hold on. Bad snake. Go home!”

“You tell them!”

“Damn it.” Emily cursing, again. It sounds more like she’s frustrated than anything else. “You really want to come help?”

I can’t believe she’s actually asking me that. Of course I want to help her. She gives me a quick summary of the situation. There’s a hundred-foot-plus long snake about ninety percent through a rip. If it gets all the way out, the rip will probably close, and somebody will have to figure out what to do with a giant snake.

Emily has a plan, though. She’ll hover in the rip herself, which should hold it open for a little bit, once the snake comes through, then I’ll try to get the snake to chase me through the rip. Once the snake is clear, I’ll come back through the rip and we’ll let it close. If something goes wrong and it closes while I’m there, I can flicker home.

“So I’m bait.”

“You don’t have to do this. I could fly through now and drag it back through the rip. There’s a decent chance I could get back through before the rip closes.”

“Hell no. I’m not risking you getting stuck in another universe.”

I give Jane and Daniel a quick rundown of what’s going on, and apologize for ignoring them. “Is it okay if I stay for a minute or two longer while we plan?”

It is. 

Emily and I refine her plan a bit. A minute later, she’s ready.

“There’s room for you to show up between two and ten feet to my right, and a couple feet in front. Can you target that?”

“Can do.” I look back at Daniel and Jane. “Thanks. Again in two weeks? I can answer more questions.”

“Sure,” — “Yeah,” they answer.

“Incoming,” I tell Emily. 

I don’t stick exactly to the plan. Right before I flicker, I realize that I’d like a better idea of what’s going on, so I flicker to a spot a few hundred feet above and in front of Emily. She could have been holding me there, after all.

Despite the fact that I immediately begin falling, I get a decent look at the ground below.

There’s a mass of rock sticking up out of the ground like an island, not too far in front of me. The side nearest me has a twenty or thirty foot cliff, and in front of that is a rip in space. The edges are the purple-white of portals, but other than that, it’s not much like the portals I’ve seen.

I can see through it to the other side, which appears to be some sort of forest with enormous trees. There’s also a giant snake that’s just emerged from it. Emily is wrapped around its tail, holding five feet or so of it in the rip. 

Hearing “hundred-foot-long snake” turns out not to have been enough to prepare me for the reality of a hundred-foot-long snake. I fall almost a hundred feet before I remember to flicker down to Emily.

The instant I appear next to her, I can feel the rip next to me through my mark. When I sensed the other portals, it was a smooth vibration—almost a hum. This is like jagged static. It’s very uncomfortable.

“Remember, you don’t have to do this.” Emily looks worried.

I collect myself. “I’m good. Ready?”

“Ready.”

I flicker about fifty feet in front of the snake and wave my arms at it. I am both satisfied and terrified that this part of our plan works. The snake sees me and lunges forward. I flicker further away, staying well within its line of sight. It adjusts course to keep chasing me.

I doubt I could outrun this thing, but luckily I don't have to. I keep flickering farther from it, gradually curving our course back toward the rip. I almost lose its attention a couple of times, when I try to get it to turn too sharply, but I quickly correct that.

Sooner than I expected, I’m almost to the rip. Emily is now hovering above it, just her arm stuck through it. I would have thought it would collapse down to barely big enough for that arm, but this is why I’m not considered an expert in extradimensional physics, I guess.

I don’t want to flicker to the other side of the portal. I haven’t been to that world, and I remember what happened when I flickered across Tiara’s return portal. Sure, I could get back from some random other universe, but the snake wouldn’t see me, and might not go through.

Instead I flicker directly in front of it. The jagged static is almost painful. I hesitate for a moment. It’s hard to make myself step into the source of that feeling. I don’t have time for this; I take a step backward.

My head almost explodes. My skin feels like it’s distorting to the shape of the static. I’m halfway through the rip, and my muscles won’t respond. I can barely see the snake through the jagged rainbow aura dancing in front of my eyes. It’s a few feet away, mouth gaping open.

I flicker, trying for twenty feet behind me.

I’m almost surprised that it works. It hurts like hell, but it works. The rip is twenty feet in front of me, with the snake’s enormous head coming through. I feel off, somehow, but the pain is gone, and so are the other weird sensations. Whatever walking through the rip did to me, it doesn’t seem like there’s any long term damage.

I flicker thirty feet back and to the side and take a second to glance around. The trees here are huge. The trunks must be over fifty feet in diameter. I stop gawking and find the path to lead the snake along..

Three more flickers and the snake’s tail comes through. I can see Emily’s arm still poking through at the top.

Here’s the tricky part—okay, the most currently relevant tricky part. We don’t know for sure the rip will close when she pulls her arm out. If we did, the plan would be for me to flicker back to the rip, step through, then let it close.

Since we don’t know, though, I need to lead the snake further away. I do so. 

“That’s gotta be far enough,” Emily says over the earbud.

“Just a little more.” I keep flickering further away from the rip.

“Come on. The rip is being weird. It might close.”

“It’s fine if it does.”

“Let’s not take an unnecessary risk, please.”

“Fine.”

I flicker back to this side of the rip. The static immediately assaults my senses. I’m not sure if it’s worse or if I’m more sensitive to it; maybe it’s both. I see what Emily meant about the rip acting weird, though. Before it was like a clear window, but now the image is rippling.

I don’t want to risk getting stuck halfway again, so I steel myself and dive through.

It’s even worse this time. Every one of my senses overloads for the split second I’m half in and half out. I crash to the ground in a heap. Fuck.

“Frank!”

The sensory assault from behind me goes away, but my senses haven’t returned to normal. I feel Emily’s arms wrap around me. There’s a reassuring steadiness to them.

“Are you okay?” Her voice is slightly distorted. “Why are you still flickering?”

I am? The rip did something, but I can’t tell what.

I’m standing in Jane’s apartment again.

“Frank?”

I’m in Death Valley. I have no idea which world, but it’s not mine; there’s no castle. It’s hard to think; there’s too much going on.

I’m huddled in Emily’s arms.

I’m lying on my bed, back in Mom’s apartment.

“Frank?”

I’m in the same room, but in other Tiara’s world.

I’m in mid-shower, soapy and wet. The water isn’t running.

“Frank! Can you hear me?”

I’m sitting in a darkened movie theater watching a movie that I’ve never heard of.

This goes on for centuries -- place after place after place.

The only constants I have are myself and Emily’s voice. She’s calling me back.

“Frank! Whatever you’re doing, you’ve got to stop!”

Another fifty years flicker by, seconds at a time.

“Frank! Please!” She’s crying. “Please.”

I focus on her voice and on my mark.

I’m huddled in Emily’s arms.

I’m huddled in Emily’s arms.

I’m huddled in Emily’s arms.