Chapter 1.1.27 — It's... Going

Emmett took his time walking down the hallway to the training hub. His right arm still ached from the first time he tried punching Clara’s fiery robot. Now the rest of his body ached too: It felt like he’d spent the last hours of the evening running for his life and getting burned alive…

Which Emmett supposed he had.

He walked into the training room, muscles tender and skin feeling raw beneath his suit.

Clara was unhooking the last of pieces of her VR gear and slotting them back into the wall. She turned, half wincing, half smiling.

“I got you good that last time. Your face looks sunburned.”

Emmett said sarcastically, “It’s not so bad, you should try it sometime.”

Clara shook her head. “I’ve had more than enough close calls with fire. Next time we’ll practice with a different power set. That is one advantage you will have over other heroes, you know—you can simulate their powers here. You just have to make sure you get good intel.”

“So which super was I fighting against just now?”

Clara turned around, examining the VR gear again. She looked at the visor, maybe looking at a log of some kind.

She answered while looking at the visor. “We don’t usually pull info from just one super, even if you wanted to train against a specific one. Even the best data is incomplete. Any super worth their ranking is always trying to improve their techniques and stretch their abilities in new ways. So we don’t just take data from one pyrokinetic: Today you were fighting against techniques from Blond Bombshell, Liquid Red, and Instaflame.”

Emmett’s mouth dropped open. “Isn’t Instaflame a Class three super?”

“Yep,” Clara replied, hanging the visor back on the wall. “We can adjust the strength of each ability, though. If you were fighting Instaflame at full strength, you wouldn’t have made it off the roof.”

Emmett believed it. He’d seen plenty of records of Instaflame’s battles—always the aftermath. Bystanders didn’t tend to stick around his battles to film.

But something else Clara said piqued Emmett’s curiosity.

“...Can supers get more powerful?”

“Sure. It’s easier for some power types: Artificers like us, for instance, but others can too. When a super first gets their power, they’re not going to be very good at using it, right? But as they practice, they’ll get better. Someone with super strength will become more coordinated. Someone with psychic powers might increase their range or be able to concentrate longer.”

“But there are limits, right?” Emmett asked.

Clara thought for a moment before nodding. “Yes. Super strength will only grow so much, and someone with pyrokinesis won’t spontaneously develop negation powers, but you would be surprised how much training and creativity counts. That’s part of why the Code says do not fuck with a veteran super—they won’t just have three or four moves. They’ll have dozens of techniques and surprises, and they’ll be quick with every single one of them.”

Emmett nodded. It made sense even before Clara laid it out like that, but he had a hard time believing anyone would be stupid enough to pick a fight with a veteran super—some new pyrokinetic going up against someone like Instaflame.

Just training with Clara had made Emmett realize how much he had to learn, and she wasn’t a veteran super—she wasn’t even a pyrokinetic. Worst of all, she was probably taking it easy on him!

Still, every super had their limits. Even someone as powerful as Instaflame.

But artificers weren’t limited like that.

Emmett glanced between his mechanical arm and Clara.

He’d been given Mutagen-A, and Emmett would bet that there were other Mutagen formulas out there. That was tempting, but he was more intrigued by mechanical possibilities.

Maybe Emmett could talk Dr. Venture into helping him make his own set of armor? And in the meantime he could keep upgrading his arm… It was a shame he didn’t have two metal arms—then he could carry even more mods. But Emmett wasn’t about to cut off his other arm, though.

Clara raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got a crazy look in your eye.”

Emmett chuckled. Despite feeling like he’d been worked over, he actually felt great.

He felt like running across the rooftops all the way home.

“Hey…” Emmett said, rubbing the sunburn on the back of his neck. “Do you want to go out tonight?”

Clara’s eyes widened. So did Emmett’s.

“What I mean is, do you want to go run around the town together? I mean, the rooftops.”

Clara’s face turned as red as Emmett's face felt. Meanwhile, he would almost rather be cooked alive.

“I… can’t,” she said, glancing awkwardly around the room.

Emmett tried to keep his face straight, but inwardly, he was cursing himself. Of course Clara couldn’t just go run around the town with him—why had he said it that way, anyway? She probably had her own training to do; Her dad was probably listening in to their conversation; And she was a super! He was barely a newbie…

Or Clara thought Emmett just asked her on a date. That wasn’t what he’d meant… not really.

Clara was his friend, and he didn’t want to mess that up.

Clara cleared her throat. “What I mean is, I’m looking for leads on Champion street. And you can’t come with me.”

“Oh…”

Somehow, Emmett felt both relieved and devastated.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Just let me know what you find.”

Clara nodded reluctantly, but Emmett already knew: It depended on what she found, and if Dr. Venture would allow her to share it.

The air felt thick and awkward, and Emmett wasn’t about to overstay his welcome.

“I’ll see you Monday,” Clara said. She gave him a small smile.

Emmett did his best to return it. “Yeah.”

~

Emmett waved goodbye to Clara and left the lab. He didn’t see Dr. Venture on the way out.

Once he got outside, he pulled his hoodie up and walked the streets of Eastside, enjoying the cool Friday night air—

At least until he got a few blocks away. Then he turned and took a detour a few blocks North. Emmett would take a long way home tonight, going between the high rises in the middle of the city and the high-class homes of the Heights—taking Dr. Venture’s advice about varying his routes.

He was even wearing a new blank, gray hoodie—he’d gotten it and several other nondescript clothes from a nearby thrift store the other day.

When Emmett felt like he was far enough away from the lab, he turned into an alley and pulled on his mask. He’d washed the blood out of it since his unfortunate run in with the two masked supers in the slums.

It felt surreal putting the mask back on—Emmett swore he could still smell the copper of his own blood even though there was nothing on it.

Surreal—and right.

Emmett smiled, then leapt up to the nearest fire escape and climbed to the roof.

Then he started running.

~

Emmett didn’t stop until he’d ran almost ten blocks—

Until he ran across Athena.

He’d almost run right by her.

Athena was sitting against the ledge of a roof, one that was covered with gravel. Her white, braided hair lay over the shoulders of her leather jacket, and she skipped stones across the roof—No. They skipped across the roof but never touched the ground. She was bouncing them off her transparent force fields.

“Hey,” Emmett said.

Athena looked up and smiled. “Nice mask. I was beginning to worry that maybe you’d missed a jump… Did you get some sun today?” She pointed to his cheeks.

Emmett chuckled. “Something like that. What are you doing up here? Killing time?”

“Waiting for you.”

Emmett glanced around at the neighboring roofs. Athena still hadn’t sat up, and she hadn’t been facing East. She wouldn’t have seen him coming. So unless she had super hearing or some other power…

“Did you know I was coming?”

“Yep,” Athena replied, skipping another stone through mid-air.

“How?”

“Premonition, future-sight, visions… Call it what you want.”

Emmett’s eyebrows raised. “That is pretty cool,” he replied—the understatement of the year.

Athena shrugged. “It has its uses, but it’s not perfect. Hence the confusion the last time we met.”

So, she’d seen Emmett at the edge of the roof, but hadn’t known he was a super. Why else would a normal person go up to the roof and look down…

It was a dark joke, but now it all made sense.

Emmett chuckled.

Athena finally stood up and fixed her jacket. “Yeah, can’t say I’ve had that mix-up before. So, how’s your training going?”

Emmett took a step back and cleared his throat. It hadn’t been that long since he’d seen her, but he’d forgotten how tall Athena was—Emmett was barely up to her chin, which meant she must’ve been six feet three or four inches tall.

“It’s… going,” Emmett finally said, realizing that he couldn’t just tell Athena about the lab.

She smiled anyway and snapped her fingers. “Good instinct. You don’t have to say anything more than that if you don’t want.”

Emmett considered his options, and didn’t see any harm in telling her what he’d been practicing.

“...A lot of running away from things.”

Athena’s face wrinkled in consideration. “I guess that’s as good a place to start as any. But you don’t sound very happy about that.”

Emmett gave her a half-hearted smile. “It’s a good place to start.”

“Uh huh,” Athena replied, totally not convinced. “Look, in another thirty minutes or so, a delivery van is going to pull into the loading bay of the building we’re standing on. Except they’re not dropping off groceries—they’re carrying knock-off mutagen compounds.”

“Like the kind Gnosis makes?”

Athena crossed her arms and looked at him incredulously. “Yes, but how do you know that?”

Emmett tried to keep a straight face. “I read… a lot.”

“Uh huh. Well, like I said, it's a knock-off brand, and I could use some help destroying their supply.”

Now Emmett’s eyes widened in excitement—far too quickly to pretend otherwise. “Yes.”

~ ~ ~