Ancient Legos
Chapter 15
Aftermath
Captain's Log, Earth Date: February 9th, 2011
The chime for the end of class sounded. I stood up, yawned, and began to pack up my stuff.
Dennis coughed on his way by my desk, gesturing down at my papers. He ignored the odd look I gave him and then went over to Chris to do the same.
Including ignoring a look that was probably very similar.
I blinked.
Wait, are those designs on Chris' test? I thought. Tinker
designs?! And… hold on, why is he designing technological Legos with some pretty important pieces flat out missing? I mean, circuits just don't
connect like that!
Dennis reached him and patted him on the shoulder. The Tinker looked up at him with a slightly vacant expression, but all Dennis did was gesture down at the test and glare pointedly.
Chris looked back down, realized what he had done, and his eyes widened.
Regardless of Chris' broken tech, I found myself mirroring him when I stopped paying attention to them and looked down at my
own desk.
While I hadn't written anything except what belonged on my test…
on my test, my personal design notebook next to it wasn't so lucky.
"How the hell…?" I muttered. After a moment's thinking brought up nothing to explain the phenomenon, I merely shrugged at the fact my decidedly non Tinker notebook (well, beyond the moderate psychic field necessary to keep it effectively invisible from the teacher's attention) now had some
very detailed doodles of the inside of a fusion reactor and packed it up too.
Given what I'd written in it, I'd very likely have to start hiding it from everyone else as well.
I did send a query to my little Shardling, but it replied with a vague feeling of shrugging. It wasn't responsible but it had some ideas. When I asked it to elaborate, it communicated something about bright white lights and broken chains. Whatever that meant. Even with the helpful visuals and sensor logs it provided me, I couldn't make heads or tails of whatever the hell it was trying to tell me.
I'd look into it later. It couldn't be that important.
Dennis looked back my way and noticed me putting my book away. He grinned, tossing me a thumbs up, which I returned.
And then the three of us walked out of math class to the Arcadia cafeteria.
Yep. Yesterday I made a battleship, defeated an Endbringer, met the President with Alexandria by my side, met the director of the PRT, learned they were all alternate universe versions of each other which I was
definitely not allowed to mention to anybody, met my biocrystal dog's neighbor who was apparently some super spy, met someone from
NASA who thankfully was not yet another Costa Brown (the more important one to me) and even got invited to spend some time with
the Triumvirate too. At the end of that jam packed day even my Alteran biology was flagging and I just wanted to crawl into my comfy Captain's cabin to take a long nap, but no, I had to go receive what was far too many medals for my lax, exhausted, and nearly asleep shoulder muscles.
Oh yeah, and I was
also genetically transformed into a completely different species with so many abilities I might as well add Trump to my power classifications, but frankly that was a footnote in a day like that.
Then there was the Coil problem.
That one was an issue for Later Weldon to solve.
Even with all of the insanity that yesterday had been? Today I was back in school like nothing ever happened.
Well, almost nothing.
When I landed at the school, the sheer
volume of my peers' thoughts nearly decked me.
It was bad in DC, but at least pretty much everyone near me had their thoughts in some sort of order and were focused, not broadcasting them with wanton abandon across the latent telepathic potential of the human brain. Even the reporters and politicians were measured in their heads despite what quite a few of them displayed outwardly.
My school was filled with teenagers.
It was like standing outside six hundred metal concerts at once, with backup vocals in every other music genre. Only the music was an endless tide of
thought.
I was almost an hour late to classes because of the time needed to restrain my gift as far as I could, enough to hear
my own thoughts louder than the rest. My brain should've been unable to process the information… but it was yet another reminder that I wasn't exactly human any longer.
Walking in that late into the middle of a test wasn't really that bad given it was one of the very, very few times I had an issue like that. Miss Matthews didn't care much, she just handed me my test and told me to sit down.
I'd always completed tests faster than my classmates. I was used to it.
What I
wasn't used to and indeed even had an ethical crisis over was the fact that as I looked at the test, I realized I knew all the answers verbatim
because I was reading them from my teacher's mind. Along with one of the reasons she hadn't given me any grief about being late; she knew I was a Ward, had been told by the principal in fact!
Those were just the two most notable things I picked up. It seemed that by tuning down and focusing my new telepathy, I'd accidentally set it up so I was funneling all of my frankly excessive power into whoever I was focusing on.
And I couldn't turn it off either! The best answer I managed to come up with was, well, I
also figured out the answers in about a second flat due to my new mind and…
ancient memories, so I wasn't cheating.
Totally.
Getting the supercharged telepathic focus to at least have a volume control took the rest of the test.
Anyways, almost immediately upon entering the cafeteria, I heard my new hero name.
"Shipyard!"
I barely kept myself from startling. Dennis and Chris noticed this, snickering and then flat out chuckling when I sent them a glare.
One of the usual gaggle of girls that hung around Vicky, or as was more important to me now than it ever was before,
Glory Girl, was the cause of my momentary panic.
"-Oh my
God he's so awwwesome~!"
"Ya think he's single?" another one asked, interrupting her.
My face blushed of its own accord and I facepalmed with both hands.
I could
hear Dennis' mocking grin. "Hey, she's cute, you should ask her out," he teased.
My mortification only increased, a muffled groan of pain escaping my mouth.
"It happened to us too, you'll get used to it," Chris offered, trying to be helpful.
I lowered my hands and sent them both another glare. They held no sympathies for me in their eyes.
I rolled my own and sighed. Guess this was my life now. Gods, it was gonna be hard enough to ignore being talked about out loud, much less what I saw in their heads due to my not exactly well controlled and actively burgeoning telepathy. It was good the entire night, but when I woke up… with the massive power and range boost that it apparently had undergone while I was asleep, it was nearly impossible to shut everything out. Then the parking lot, and the test…
I was in
high school. With girls.
That made the entire mess even more conflicting.
Hey, I was a teenage guy. The fact that a not insignificant number of girls were having daydreams about me was music to my… I'd say ears, but telepathy, so brain instead? I also got the distinct impression that part of myself, my Alteran memories, was laughing at the rest of me. Just great.
What
wasn't great was how they were imagining me in those daydreams. I didn't have eight (or more for a couple of them) abs, I wasn't strong enough to carry them in one hand, and most importantly, the lewds were too damn high!
I shook my head to clear my thoughts, trying extra hard to tone down my telepathy. It sort of worked, but it took a lot of my attention, and the thoughts only shifted to the back of my mind versus disappearing. This was at least an upgrade from this morning where I'd had to put nearly all my focus into stopping myself from outright thinking I was every single person whose thoughts I experienced, and an even larger upgrade from yesterday even though I wasn't remotely as powerful then.
Yep, the disparity made
no sense. Tell it to Alteran physiology.
I felt the urge to slam my head into a wall.
And Glory Girl? Despite being a victim of one of my creations… and her own recklessness, well, that didn't seem to deter her at all.
Nor did Dean's status as her boyfriend.
Sitting right next to her.
Her brain was automatically assuming we'd both join in and be totally happy with it, if she offered.
From what I could tell of Dean's disposition, she was very wrong. Very very wrong. I was a little split on the topic due to my Alteran memories, monogamy wasn't mainstream to us… them, and even less so in the arena of having
fun or destressing with your friends with benefits, but Dean
definitely didn't share any of those ideas at all.
...Wait.
"Glory Girl," I breathed, just now remembering.
"Huh?" Chris asked, snapping out of another of his little doodling sessions.
"I second the walking lack of secret identity here," Dennis mirrored, unable to resist putting a slight tease into his words. "What about Vicky?"
"Is she okay?" I worriedly asked, turning to stare at her.
I mean, she
looked okay. And she
did have Amy Dallon, Panacea, to heal her…
But I remembered the heat her sister had tossed my way on PHO while the stuff with the Hyperion went down. Color me a bleeding heart, I was concerned.
"Oh, you mean the shield thing?" Dennis asked.
I nodded, not trusting my own speech.
Dennis grimaced, but sighed. "She's okay," he assured me.
The tension visibly and physically left me.
"I wouldn't recommend apologizing to Amy right now, though," Chris chimed in, answering another of my concerns. This, entirely coincidentally, made my tension come roaring back. He pointed out a robed figure sitting with their hood down next to Vicky using his pencil eraser. "She doesn't look very happy."
I glanced Amy's way and found that Chris was right.
Amy wasn't just upset. Her face was an almost literal storm. And so was her mind. The traumas, the concerns, the doubt and the whirlwind of negativity in her head...
I couldn't help myself. "Oof," I lamented. "Yeah, I'm gonna take a rain check on talking to her."
That didn't keep me from making a note via Hyperion's mental link to have a very important talk with Amy Dallon.
The attraction to her sister was understandable, Vicky was
ridiculously hot and my brain totally didn't immediately leap to the concept of indulging Victoria's fantasies only with the biokinetic that was Amy as second fiddle, but the rest of her battered soul needed deeper hugs and therapy than anyone but I could provide which put paid to
that.
Well, anyone but me unless there was a telepath somewhere else more powerful than me who wasn't the Endbringer I'd defeated… unlikely to say the least. The PRT Manual did mention they had world class therapists effectively on call, and I was sure I could get one for Amy just by asking with how willing Director Piggott was to bend over backwards for me after I'd saved her, but none of those were
telepaths so they couldn't dig into Amy's head like she'd no doubt require, given how stubborn her thoughts were just on a light glance through them.
More than the therapy and the hugs, though, she needed someone who wouldn't judge her.
Judging, not usually my thing. Passing judgements and labelling, yes, heatedly and cruelly judging, not a chance in hell. Well, unless you were the kind of person who deserved all that, and more… but there weren't very many of those in the world.
Amy was messed up. She
could be an asshole if she was stressed, the way she'd fired shots at me on PHO prior to my fight with Ziz proved that if nothing else, but she was also not a bad person.
Just… a lonely girl with the hots for her adoptive sister and a Shardling derived power that would've been terrifying in its scope and power to the old me.
New, fully Alteran me? I could build something that did what she did, only better, in a
day or so with nothing but mundane science, two microwaves, a toaster, five flashlights, a few double A batteries and a banana, to say nothing of if I leveraged the matter printing abilities of my Shardling. I wasn't that impressed.
"Good call," Dennis approved, knocking me out of my contemplation.
Welp, not dealing with it today. On to tastier, less complicated things! "So!" I announced, changing the subject. My finger found its way unerringly to the buffet line that Arcadia had in lieu of what other schools would call a food line/torture squad. "Lunch?"
Chris nodded eagerly. "Duh, Tinkering always makes me hungry."
"Seriously, how are you still masked?" Dennis asked.
I rolled my eyes and grinned to myself. Chris really wasn't masked. We cape geeks just thrilled in the hunt, not the capture.
Plus, you know, all that nasty stuff the PRT would do to you if you unmasked a Ward. That helped deter us too.
And that's just what they released publicly. The Ward manual got into much, much more in depth explanations and descriptions, so much so that it justified my groups' decisions to not spill the beans quite well.
Too bad I couldn't tell them. I was finally on the inside… and now there would forever be a divide between my group and I.
I shook my head again and headed to the buffet line. Less thinking, more eating, and hold the depresso!
After we all finished fishing what we wanted out of the buffet, I began heading to my normal table.
Well, I say we. It was mostly me stacking up food on two trays due to my new body's significantly increased energy demands while Dennis watched, slack jawed, and Chris tried to build a cannon out of pizza slices.
"Why are you going over there?" Dennis asked. "That's the Cape nerd table."
I stopped on a dime and turned all the way around, staring at him like he was an idiot. After I noticed that yes, he
was serious and, upon checking with my telepathy, no, he wasn't currently being a dumbass, I decided to mess with him.
"Dennis," I pleasantly answered, "I know you didn't recognize me when I joined our little group, but you must have seen me around our school. Now, just
where have you seen me? Think hard for a couple of seconds, I'm
sure it'll come to you."
Dennis narrowed his eyes and dropped his eyebrows, displaying his clear lack of amusement. "Ha ha," he deadpanned.
I merely raised an eyebrow and motioned for him to get on with it, ensuring my food trays didn't get unbalanced. This was important given that it was holding two versus the normal one, piled with food. If I cheated a tiny bit with my telekinesis, nobody needed to know that.
A scowl joined the unamused expression on my new roommate's face. "Fine. Uhm… Back when we weren't friends, didn't you hang out at the-" he began.
Then his eyes widened, and he dropped his jaw. "Oh."
I smirked. "Right. At the cape geeks table. I'm
one of them, Dennis," I informed him.
He groaned, wiping his face with a hand. "How the hell are you gonna hide your
thing?" Dennis hissed, composing himself. "You guys almost got
me!"
I grimaced and crossed my free arm over my food trays. "I
know, and there's no '
almost'. To give you an idea of the reality of the situation, right before I joined our
after school club, we had it narrowed down to you, Carlos, Dean, or Chris here," I stated, pointing my thumb at the once more doodling Tinker. "
Funny how that worked out, isn't it?"
Dennis' eyes widened. "So, wait, when you didn't seem fazed when we revealed our faces-"
I nodded sagely and closed my eyes. "The wisdoms of the ages had already divined your identities."
My clock themed, irreverent teammate snorted. "Do you really call yourselves that?"
"Nope, that's PHO's nickname for us. Blame them."
"Ah yes, blaming PHO. The good old standby," he chuckled. Then he crossed his arms and frowned, taking this a bit more seriously again. "Are we all really that bad?" he asked.
"Remind me again what Chris was drawing in Math?" I asked rhetorically. "And also,
now?"
Dennis looked to the once more doodling Tinker and sighed. "Right... but you were doing it too," he reasoned.
"Yeah, now how the
hell do you think I'm gonna be able to keep it from them?" I nodded my head over to the table on the other side of the cafeteria at which my fellow cape geeks were once more debating. Probably my
own identity, this time. "I'm not a good actor!"
Dennis looked at me like I was crazy. "You were on TV!" he pointed out, lowering his voice. "
With the President!"
I lowered my own voice to answer him. "In a uniform, with an obfuscation field over my face and a gun on my hip." I raised my voice back to normal. "That's nothing like this! Not only are they really good friends who know me
very well, we're
cape geeks!"
Dennis sighed, closing his eyes.
"I give it five seconds. Tops."
My teammate who ritually shied away from procedure groaned. "I'll call in about some NDAs," he agreed, folding like a house of cards. "Probably should've done that a while ago anyways."
"You really should have," I agreed. "And thanks, Dennis."
The only response I got was grumbling about having to be responsible as he pulled out his PRT phone.
I was wrong.
It was three seconds.
"So how's it fly?" Jane asked out of the blue.
Or it
would have been out of the blue if their heads weren't basically screaming their intentions at me, much less the badly hidden fidgeting they were all doing.
I groaned and pitched my head forward into my hands. "I
told you, Dennis!"
Said Ward teammate of mine looked at all the grinning, knowing faces at the table, then to Chris who had zoned out and was doodling again, and finally back to the rapid nodding he got when he raised an eyebrow questioningly.
"Don't worry, we're ready to sign those NDAs," Chuck informed him. He planted a meaty hand on my shoulder and lightly swayed me side to side. "One of us is one of you now, and that makes
you, our friend."
Zelte agreed with her fanciful, overdramatic nod of affirmation. Namely, she bobbed her head faster than a rock concert's mosh pit. "Friends don't betray friends." To illustrate this, she held up her hand… and ignited a small fire right above it. A… green flame which sorta also looked like some kind of water?
The rest of the table crowded in to block off sight from everyone else almost automatically. I found myself doing the same before my brain registered what I was seeing.
Wait, what?
"Hold on, since when can you do that?" I asked, shocked.
Dennis seemed even more amazed, and he was alternating between shooting accusing glares at me and wondered ones at Zelte.
"Since the fire across the sky thing," Zelte giggled. With a flurry of her hand, the 'flame' flickered out. "Don't blame him, Dennis, he didn't know."
Dennis looked at her with clear incredulity, then at me when I shrugged.
"Even if I did know, you heard our motto," I lamented.
"Friends don't betray friends," we all repeated, in mostly joined unison.
The smirks on our faces didn't really help Dennis, but he just sighed. "Weldon, I don't know where you found these guys-"
"The Web," I interrupted him, bumping fists with Mack.
Dennis looked mildly annoyed at the interruption. It was entirely fake annoyance, if my telepathy was trustworthy. Which, you know, it seemed to be; not even Alexandria had been able to keep me out. "Right, I don't care," he sighed. "You're good people and I wish there were more of you." He finally sat down fully, closing into the circle, and plopped his tray in a hastily evacuated space. "Give me the lowdown on what you all know. And Weldon, do your… surveillance stopping thing."
I nodded, focusing on the area around us, as Dennis became enraptured by the Brockton Cape Geek Alliance. Or, at least the Arcadia part.
I only remembered to reach up and yank Chris down into the impromptu huddle circle after I was done weaving what was effectively an illusion around the table.
In that meeting, Dennis and Chris had their eyes opened… and promises for NDAs were extracted from all.
Even Evangeline. Though she was rather… touchy about the subject.
Lewis got the best reaction. He told Dennis he wanted to bring up several loopholes with the PRT… but only
after he was done exploiting them as an example.
If Carlos, Dean, or Missy had been at that table, they would've probably been able to talk him down, and then overcome the complaints of the rest of us when we called them party poopers.
Carlos, Dean, and Missy were
not at that table.
Carlos was somewhere, Dean was with Vicky at the Cheer Table, and Missy didn't even attend our school.
No, to stop the onslaught of what in retrospect were bad, but
incredibly fun ideas, we had Dennis, Chris, and I.
Chris folded when Dennis and I teamed up.
Dennis wasn't slowing this down for anything; if he had any part in it, which he totally did, it was to speed the train up by strapping rocket boosters to it and shovelling his own ideas for how to mess with the PRT into the train as a form of jet fuel.
Also, I learned that it was my fault that Zelte triggered. Turns out she had a fear of fire I didn't know about. After her run for her local Shelter had been abruptly interrupted by me and Ziz
setting the sky on fire, she had the worst day of her life.
I apologized endlessly, was forgiven, and then mercilessly teased for my role in blowing my own secret to my group and giving one of them superpowers indirectly anyways. Somewhere in the middle every single one of them thanked me for getting rid of the winged Endbringer, too, but then it was right back to messing with me.
My friends in a nutshell.
Also, I had my Shardling tell Zelte's to behave itself and gained another biocrystalline puppy in my own little but still growing network instead, which was honestly becoming distressingly familiar at that point.
History, my second to last class of the day. Ironically it was this class that got barely any benefit from my new genetic disposition, Alteran memories, or my powers. Not like Science, my next class, in which I was probably going to totally and utterly destroy the concepts of difficulty.
Too bad I couldn't show my classmates how the universe really worked. I was sure Zelte would love to get her hands on some naquadah.
But noooooo, Armsy had to give me a
responsibility lecture. No overhauling the scientific fields Weldon, no rewriting the history books Weldon, don't use your telekinesis to write anything on the whiteboard,
Weldon.
I sighed and shook my head. The guy was thorough.
As much as I complained in my head, though, I knew he had a point. I might've had no chance of a secret identity with the group in the school who were my best friends and also had an obsession with figuring things like that out... but that didn't mean I needed to announce my identity to everyone
else.
After all, as funny as it would be to see the look on my teacher's face when I filled in about fifty million years of Ancient history, my secret identity would be blown so hard it'd make what I did to Ziz look like a stroll in the park. Also, this was recent history class, so I wouldn't even get any credit.
I still felt guilty about that, by the way. The Ziz thing. A feeling which was only compounded by the fact that between the snafu at the PRT with Dragon and Alexandria, my healing of Director Piggot, meeting the President, the
massive clusterfuck that was the reality of who Alexandria and the President were, signing treaties as a sovereign nuclear armed power (for bonus 'it wasn't us!' points for the US), then the press conference, and finally NASA's turn to go nearly catatonic at the mentions of what my tech could do…
Well, I'd left her core on the Hyperion. All night. And then I had to come to school, which meant I couldn't even check up on her.
Even Hyperion's beam system wouldn't help me there, as while it
could transport me out of school and back, I didn't yet want the PRT to know about Ziz surviving. Not until I got a look at her.
The problem was, I'd had two tails/bodyguards all day.
And as much as Dennis and Chris were good friends and my teammates, I had no doubts they'd call Piggot on my ass so fast it'd look like they achieved personal FTL.
Even Dennis.
"Class, I'd like to introduce you to someone," our teacher announced.
I sat up. Finally something interesting, something that wasn't just memorization. History is easy if you have eidetic memory, and I had that
before my powers. Before my genes got rewritten.
Needless to say, I barely paid attention anymore. It was all I needed. The teachers had tried tripping me up all day today, but I guess after I repeated Mr. Edinborough's entire lecture on English folk literature back to him, word spread through the teacher's lounge.
The door opened, and in walked a girl. Nice figure, blonde hair, white skin. She seemed to be fond of white, given how much of it she was wearing, and when she arrived at the front of the class and waved, I found that her irises were also a pearly kind of white.
She had a theme figured out and stuck to it, I guessed.
...
Wait. Something about those features was kinda familiar.
"This is Sam. She's a new transfer from Immaculata and will be joining this class rotation beginning with the entire day tomorrow," our teacher introduced her. He glared at Dennis, who was about to open his big mouth. "Play nice."
Dennis closed his mouth and held his hands up, the very picture of innocence.
Sam then spoke up. "Thanks for not flipping out," she thanked us, for some reason. "My eyes tend to freak people out." Oh.
Another of my classmates in the class shrugged. "Hey, we go to school with Glory Girl and Panacea," she reasoned. "After Vicky, you'd have to be pretty strange, or a
cape, to faze us."
Several 'Hear Hear!'s rang out from the class. I would've joined them, but I was busy trying to figure out what was bugging me about… Sam.
She smirked, locking her eyes directly onto mine. "Oh, I dunno," she sweetly replied, her voice sounding just a little more musical. "I might just surprise you."
For some reason I got the feeling that she was talking to me.
I raised an eyebrow in her direction. She just grinned, so I allowed my rein on my new senses out a little.
My senses examined her body head to toe… Oye, no, not
that way! I found out that she was very much
not human. Maybe a Case 53? Her eyes were weird, but still… I mean, it was almost like her body was made up of trillions of tiny little crystal machines, with a much denser core-
And then I got it.
I couldn't help myself, gulping
hard. Those eyes, her love for white…
feather white. And her smirk.
I'd seen them before.
Yesterday.
Fifty miles above Brockton Bay.
"I can't
wait to be your friend," she said, once more speaking
directly to me.
Oh
, shit.
