Chapter 1.1.47 — 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.

His mind spun with the possibilities.

~

Emmett woke suddenly, his notebook splayed across his chest. It was the middle of Sunday night. His burner phone was going off. Emmett rolled over and grabbed it from the floor. When he saw the message, he nearly fell out of bed.

1:46 AM: We found her. Drone inbound. Get to your roof for pickup.

The message didn’t have a tag, but Emmett knew it was from Clara or Venture.

Emmett got up, pulled on his bodysuit and clothes overtop of it. Then he pocketed his mask and burner phone.

Emmett left his room—

And ran straight into his roommate.

Lock stood in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water. He was still wearing his hoodie and shoes, like he’d just gotten in from a late night—

Well, semi-early night for Lock.

“Hey,” Emmett said, trying to think of an excuse for leaving in the middle of the night… At least he still had makeup on.

Lock finished drinking the entire glass before he set it down on the counter and turned to Emmett.

“Hey man. You feeling better yet?”

Emmett nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, I guess so. I’m, uh, actually going up to the roof to clear my head.”

“Want some company?”

Lock asked so flatly that it caught Emmett off guard. It sounded like Lock had a long night and just wanted to turn in.

“Thanks… but I just want to be alone.” Emmett didn’t know what else to say. Hopefully, being direct would be enough.

Lock nodded once, his eyes never leaving Emmett’s. Silence dragged on until it was awkward and then intense.

Finally, Lock turned and went into his room. “I’m going to sleep. Catch you later, engineer.”

Emmett waited until his roommate’s door shut to go out onto the fire escape. He tried to push aside what had just happened, but Lock’s eyes felt like they’d bored into him.

He could definitely see why Lock kept getting work as a bouncer. Emmett couldn’t imagine anyone messing with his roommate.

Emmett just hoped Lock wouldn’t worry and come up to the roof looking for him. Emmett had just pretended to be sick all weekend and now he was going to hang out on the roof in the cold night air, probably for several hours.

Hopefully Lock would just go to sleep.

~ ~ ~