We all tagged along for Byron’s last Points Siphons, unable to bear the suspense. If his specialty was something useless…

The twelve-minute wait for his claim to be registered felt hours long. Davi snapped at me three times to stop fidgeting, which, admittedly, I was doing at superhuman speeds.

After an eternity, a swirl of colored lights spiraled up from the ground near Byron’s feet, wreathing his entire form.

My first thought was that he’d been attacked by a new enemy, some kind of swarm of technicolor fireflies. I reached over to pull him out, but my hand was burned and pushed away.

“John! Can you blow-”

A member of our military escort stepped in between us and Byron. His calm facial expression seemed so inappropriate that it made me pause. “This is standard. Getting a specialty doesn’t ever look exactly the same, but it always looks like a rainbow upchucked.”

I looked behind us to the faces of everyone else in our escort. No one seemed alarmed, and most were nodding sympathetically.

I rubbed my smarting fingers. “Thanks for the advance warning…”

Laughter met my words, and a woman behind me called out, “Maybe not the nicest prank, I’ll admit. But it’s harmless. You can’t hurt them while they’re like that, and it only hurts you enough to keep you back.”

Really? Assholes. This is stressful enough. I did my best to put my irritation aside. The damage was easily mended, not worth worrying about.

A few seconds later, the swirl died down and Byron became visible again, opening his eyes.

“What did you get?” I asked.

Instead of answering, Byron walked out the door of the shelter that had been erected around the base of the Points Siphon. We all followed him, emerging outside just in time to see him burst into flame.

Some weeds nearby, poking through a crack in the pavement, were immediately incinerated, but as they crumbled to ash I noticed that the lone dandelion in their midst was untouched, its bright-yellow petals not so much as wilted.

The flames receded from around Byron’s face for a moment. “Hey! Vince! Pick up that stick by your feet.”

I looked down, seeing a thin branch about the width of a straw. I grabbed it. “This one?”

“Don’t drop it!”

The stick caught fire in my hands. I actually did drop it, on instinct, but my reactions were quick enough to catch it again. Flames licked off the branch and around my fingers, the heat intense enough to turn the stick to ash in moments.

I wasn’t harmed at all.

“Nice!” Byron yelled. “Control is perfect. Power test time!”

A circle of road around Byron immediately melted and began fucking boiling, the surface bursting into flames. Only a small foothold in the middle remained solid and unburned. I stepped back, avoiding the pungent fumes of burning tar, and John made a face and started up a small breeze, blowing the plume of smoke away from us.

Byron immediately stabilized the area, the asphalt turning solid mid-boil, its previously-smooth surface now locked into some kind of bizarre sculpture of liquid. “Okay. I might not have thought that through all the way. So, only five seconds of testing at high power, but I’m not even a tiny bit tired! I think we’ve got this.”

“What’s your ability do, exactly?” a member of our escort asked, pen and paper in hand.

“Once a day, I can control the temperature in an area around my body perfectly for sixty seconds and spontaneously manifest flames in the area. I’m immune to all temperature related harm for the duration. Oh, but the control doesn’t extend to freezing things. I can go from a little above freezing to… around 6,000 Fahrenheit?”

“Once a day?” I asked.

“Yeah. Most of the Specialties can only be used once a day, man. You know that.”

“So, since you just used it, we’re not leaving tomorrow morning.”

Byron froze. “Uh… Well… we needed to test it?”

Davi laughed. “Don’t lie. This wasn’t strategic. You just got excited.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Name of the Specialty?” our escort asked.

Byron looked away. “Uh… Avatar of Flame.”

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t thrilled about another day of delay, but I needed to focus on the positive: we had a working solution. I clapped Byron on the back. “Two more mornings, then, and we’re headed east. A quick stop at your grandparents’ farm in Texas, then home!”

A new monster finally spawned that evening, almost - but not quite - three days later than expected. It was a nasty one, too, a horrible leechlike fanged creature that could squeeze through the tiniest of openings. It only attacked people who were sleeping, injecting them with some kind of sedative and slowly killing them over the course of hours. If it couldn’t find a vulnerable target, it simply hid. The monster was easy to kill, as long as someone besides the victim noticed it. Repeated Annoucements the following day encouraged people to consider communal sleeping arrangements, accompanied by a steadily rising death toll.

“We’ll have to take more time to rest at night, so two of us can stay awake and watch,” I said.

“This is your fault,” Kurt told Byron. “Asking for damn vampires.”

“They don’t suck blood. They devour their victims after administering a fast-acting sedative, there's no suction-” Byron cut off when he saw the looks on our faces. “At least it’s not going to hamper our flight?”

Several members of the Medieval Militia graciously offered to handle sentry duty while we slept the following night, so we could start our journey as well-rested as possible. We accepted gratefully, planning to test Byron’s ability to inflate the airship envelope at the break of dawn the next morning. If he succeeded, we’d depart immediately.

The horror of the new monsters couldn’t dampen my excitement. I practically burst out of bed and out the door. “Alright! Let’s get to work on the pulleys and hit the sky!”

“Uh… could we wait just one minute?” asked John. “Gonna need Kurt’s help with a thing.”

“What’s up, John?” Kurt asked.

John set down his backpack and pulled out something we all recognized immediately. “It’ll add a lil’ bit of weight, but… I thought we could put this on for luck?”

“Absolutely,” Kurt said. “I didn’t even notice you grab that!”

“Couldn’t leave Frank behind. Not all of him,” John said. His voice was suspiciously thick.

Not even I minded the brief delay as Kurt affixed the semi truck’s rearview mirror to our flying vehicle. “We shall name her… the good ship Frankenair!”

Then it was time for the moment of truth. My friends and I piled inside the basket, except for Byron. Davi hit him with a Gravity Null and she and Kurt used Telekinesis to hold him in the middle of the sagging envelope. They couldn’t affect Byron directly, but it was easy to pull the tall man around by mentally “grabbing” his clothing if he didn't have the pull of gravity dragging him down.

“Here goes nothing,” Byron said. A moment later, he burst into flames.

“Keep giving him more air!” I called to John. The basket was surrounded by plastic sheeting, but we’d left a narrow gap between the basket and the balloon to allow for airflow. With their powers combined, the envelope began inflating rapidly. We’d been worried that the fabric would melt, but Byron’s specialty really did seem to allow for perfect control of temperature, just as advertised, and John’s ability swiftly circulated the heated air to the farthest reaches of the envelope.

Several members of the military and our entire support team from the Medieval Militia were on-hand to watch. Everyone burst into cheers as winds buffeted the inside of the nylon. When we started lifting a few inches above the ground, those cheers redoubled.

Kurt shook Davi’s shoulder and pointed to the far side. She nodded, and moments later the first pair of anchor lines began untying themselves. The airship wobbled as they worked. My friends had practiced trying to do this in synch, but their practice was no substitute for the real thing. It would have been trivial to put the Medieval Militia in charge of untying us, but we’d have to take off again later without help. If Kurt and Davi couldn’t do this alone, better to know before we left.

There were some hiccups, and I’d thought we had failed at one point, when a blast of unexpected wind sent the airship skidding sideways nearly twenty feet… but somehow, we stabilized, and the ship began lifting off into the air.

The moment Byron’s flames faded, Davi pulled him back to the floor of the basket and took flight, darting through the gap and disappearing around the bulk of the balloon. We couldn’t see what she was doing, but the skies above Albuquerque were largely clear of monsters anyhow. I trusted Davi to deal with anything new that appeared.

“How are you feeling?” Kurt asked Byron. “You look much less tired than last time.”

Byron grinned and shot off a blast of flame above us, accelerating our rise. “Fresh as a daisy.”

We had risen a hundred feet, well above most of the buildings in the city, and I started pedaling. I didn’t start off at top speed, instead starting at something close to normal human speed and slowly accelerating, keeping a careful watch for any issues. To either side, our purloined propellers began spinning, my musclepower turning them in a slow whump-whump-whump that gradually evened out into a steady thrum as I moved faster and faster.

Here we were. In the sky. Moving up, moving forward.

I was still anxious, tense, waiting for something to go wrong.

Our Analysts have you at 4,000 feet and just under thirty miles an hour. You’ve done it! Congratulations. We’re counting on you.

Seconds after the Announcement, Davi shot through the gap and into the basket. “Skies above are clear.”

“Vince, can you keep this speed up?” Kurt asked.

I grinned. “For hours! I won’t call this easy, but I’m not pushing it, either.”

“Byron?”

“Same!”

“We’re doing it,” Kurt said. His voice was barely audible over the thrum of the propellers. He looked shaken, like he couldn’t believe it.

I grinned at him. “We’re going home!”