When Milly awoke, the first thing she did was check her phone.
6:18 AM
She’d slept for forty minutes? Real-time? Was she back to normal?!
Milly jolted up straight in bed and snapped her fingers. To her dismay, the snap’s sound came a moment after.
Why had so much time passed when sleeping hadn’t turned off her super speed? Perhaps the power only worked while she was conscious? But if that was true, why hadn’t Niki’s alarm woken her up at six, like normal?
Meanwhile, Niki was sitting at her desk now. She had the notebook Milly had left for her. Even though she looked frozen, time had passed normally for her.
So, sleeping had kind of worked? That was a slight comfort. Time only moved noticeably forward while Milly was asleep, but at least she was no longer trapped in the same minute. If Milly needed to, she could reach out to people for help, and she’d just have to go to bed to pass the time. Not the best solution, but it was a step closer than she had been.
Yeah, she just had to stay positive.
Milly noticed Niki was holding a pencil. Curious, she came over and peeked over Niki’s shoulder to have a look.
Niki had just finished a paragraph that seemed to be addressed to Milly.
Milly picked up the notebook and flicked through it. Apparently, Niki had read the message Milly had left for her and written back.
“Hey! I thought you were joking, but I just saw you ‘turn’ in your sleep! I could not even see it!
One second you are in one position and the next you are in another with nothing in between!
That is incredible!”
“Heh, she seems excited.” Milly smiled. Niki’s enthusiasm was infectious, just like back at the pizzeria. The only difference was that this time, she really had a power. The good kind, if she could work this out. Niki’s comment also settled her earlier question. “Welp, ‘reckon sleep didn’t slow me down any then.”
“I understand why you tried sleeping, but it did not work.” Niki’s next line read. “Since you are still experiencing hyper-acceleration in your resting state, I suspect it is your new default.”
Milly didn’t like the sound of that. When Niki last got analytical like that, she made a good read on Stella’s power after seeing it for a minute. What if she was right again?
“That would mean you cannot slow down by relaxing, but you might by concentrating!
Think about your hand. If you relax your hand, it opens halfway. It does not clench
or spread fully in a relaxed state, both require effort. I hope this helps.”
“Easier said than done, but thanks for trying to help,” Milly said while she held the book in one hand and stared at the other. She flexed her fingers and felt the bit of strain that came with it. “What is the speed equivalent of flexing?”
At least it was a potential starting point. She’d have plenty of time to figure it out.
To her surprise, Milly found Niki hadn’t just written on new pages but also made quick edits and comments in the margins where Milly had written about her observations.
The section on her newfound super strength just read, “momentum? Relativistic mass? Try slow lift.”
Milly raised a brow at that. She had a vague idea what those words meant, but physics hadn’t exactly held her interest before. “Couldn’t hurt to try.”
The nearest heavy object was the bunk bed. Milly grabbed one leg and tried to slowly lift it up, careful not to accidentally break the whole thing.
The bedpost didn’t budge.
“Huh? Okay, hang on.”
Milly left the room and headed back to the medical office.
She intended to find the same mug she had chipped before to run a quick experiment. There was no sense in breaking another one.
Once Milly got there, ACE was already on the case, as they’d put it.
Milly immediately spotted the cracked mug. It was being held aloft and inspected by Stella while Terra hunched down by the crater in the wall. Over by the desk, Ruth was holding a notepad while she spoke with the nurse and a custodian with his arm in a sling.
“What’s all thi—riiight, I made a mess, didn’t I?” Milly was glad no one could see her sheepish blush. The consequences hadn’t seemed all that important in the moment, but it must have been very concerning from their perspective.
All three members of ACE looked less than pleased to be on the job so early in the morning. Milly wasn’t even sure if they’d gotten any sleep. Terra generally looked annoyed, but Ruth and Stella typically at least tried to put on a smile. Their clothes were wrinkled and covered in little green hitchhiker seeds. Though Milly didn’t recognize these particular ones, she knew they were always a pain to remove once they’d latched on.
Was this the aftermath of nighttime heroics? It sucked to think someone had pulled them out of bed to look into her mess.
Should she leave them a note? Well, first things first.
Milly plucked the mug from Stella’s grasp. The gap in the rim looked as though an ambitious mouse had taken a big bite. When Milly experimented with snapping off a few pieces, she found it took more effort when she did it slower.
“Mhm, maybe Niki’s on to something,” Milly mused while she placed pieces in the mug, then returned it back in Stella’s hand. Consulted the notebook again, Milly scribbled down the result of the experiment. “Oh yeah, I best return this before Niki writes on the table.”
Another section asked Milly to measure time. Now that was something she could easily do on her way back.
Milly started the stopwatch. “One Mississippi. Two Mississippi,” she counted out while monitoring the display.
00:00:00
By the time Milly was in the middle of Mississippi number three, the number changed.
00:00:01
Milly made a note, then reset the timer to try a few more times on her walk back. This time letting it run ten times as long. The number fluctuated a bit since it was hard to keep a good count. It averaged out somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-five.
Well, that about lined up with the two and a half. It wasn’t exactly on the money, but it would do for now.
Milly jotted it down as she entered the dorm, then slipped the notebook back into place on Niki’s desk. Eventually, Niki would notice the sudden appearance of new words.
How long would that take? Milly assumed it would take Niki a second to notice normally which would mean…
“Erm, well if a hundredth of a second took like two and a half seconds for me, all I gotta do is move the decimal twice, I think?” Milly counted on her fingers. “Two-hundred-fifty of my seconds? Geez! That’s over four minutes! I’ll be here for forty just waiting for her to write something back!”
Yeah. No. Milly wasn’t waiting around for that. There was lots of stuff she could do to kill time for that long.
In fact, she knew just where to start.
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Back at the medical office, five seconds later.
“There! That’s the last of them!” Milly grinned as she plucked the final hitchhiker seed from Terra. She dropped it into Stella’s mug.
It wasn’t much, but Milly just wanted to make their lousy morning a little easier. It had been kind of her fault, after all.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
In the process, Milly had discovered something interesting. The people in the room were reacting to her presence. They weren’t keeping track of her in the slightest, but some areas where she’d stood still for a while to casually pick out the seeds had drawn the attention of whoever had a line of sight on her at the time.
By now, everyone was on edge. They couldn’t have caught much more than a glimpse now and then, but it was something. They were talking to each other, and Stella was tilting the mug to show Ruth the seeds inside.
Milly had to wonder if she’d really made things better.
Maybe she should write that note now.
Milly took Ruth’s notepad and flicked through it, looking for an empty space. The next page would do. Milly tapped her pencil on the paper, pondering what to write. She didn’t want to get in trouble for breaking the wall, so an anonymous note would be best.
Hey! Don’t worry! The wall was an accident!
I’m really sorry. It won’t happen again.
Okay, you can relax now! Thanks!
-Mi
“Don’t sign it, genius!” Milly admonished herself while she erased her signature. Now she’d obviously written something there! It wasn’t too hard to make out the first two letters of her name like this.
Stupid!
“Erm, okay. It’s fine. Just overwrite it with something like, uhm…” Milly looked around for inspiration and riffled through her pockets. It barely even mattered what, as long as it wasn’t her own name. Keys, a pad of sticky notes, her phone, the stopwatch… “Oh, got it!”
-00:00:01
P.S. I fixed your clothes.
P.P.S. I didn’t peek!
Milly smiled, more than pleased with herself. It covered up her mistake, and she’d added a little something extra just to draw the attention away. As a bonus, now somebody else would have to be just as confused as she was when she first saw that number today!
All Milly had to do now was give the notepad back. Although, now that she had it anyway, there wasn’t any harm in taking a peek, was there? It was probably good to know what effect her actions had inadvertently caused. Yeah.
The first page had some bullet points on the unexplained explosion in the medical office.
A statement from the nurse on what she’d seen, which was nearly nothing worth mentioning; it did contain a neat detail, a flicker of pinkish color during the explosion.
The custodian also had a statement. He had seen nothing, but he recalled a sudden impact to his shoulder, after which he discovered his keys had gone missing. He had arrived well after the explosion.
Ruth didn’t seem to think the two cases were related.
“Woah, Ruth wasn’t kidding. They are bad at this part.” Milly could barely believe it while she leafed further back into the notepad. She almost immediately hit a dead end. Apparently, the notes only went back as far as Sunday.
Come to think of it. Since when did Ruth have a notepad? Milly never saw it before, not even either of the two times Ruth had talked to her directly about Meatcr—Vanna.
The Sunday notes had to do with a string of nightly pickpocket incidents. Everyone that was interviewed reported the incident took place on streets with foliage, trees, bushes, that sort of thing. Curiously, there wasn’t anything on why a random pickpocket merited a superhero investigation.
Then it just had the words ‘STAKEOUT’ in big block letters pressed deeply into the page. Someone had been frustrated.
Things must have escalated because the next bit described the combat powers of a plant villain, which included the rapid overgrowth of weeds to cover their escape.
“Reckon that one got away, huh?” Milly asked Ruth while she returned the notepad to Ruth’s hand. “I’ve got a minute. I’ll just go have a quick look.”
Bad idea? Maybe.
Milly could argue this was just one more thing she could try to do to make up for the spot of trouble she caused, but honestly? She had superpowers and a supervillain just dropped right into her lap! What else was she gonna do?
Fortunately, the street names had been labeled.
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Unfortunately, Milly still wasn’t the least bit familiar with the actual city. It took her nearly 17 seconds of normal-time to find the correct street. That didn’t sound like much on the clock, but that meant over an hour of ‘Milly-time’.
Milly felt a little silly naming it after herself, but until she ran into someone with the same powers in an evil costume, she was going to assume she was the only one stuck in her own little time-zone.
Anyway, Milly was confident that she found the place. A residential street with two unbroken streets of apartment buildings three and four floors high. Most notable were the trees that were planted between every three parking spaces. They were huge, with expansive branches, some of which had been hastily torn down to make the street passable again.
“This has to be where the fight happened.” Milly nodded to herself while she took a stroll along the street.
The sandblasted remains of plants jutted up out from between the sidewalk tiles near the end of the road. They had the same hitchhiker seeds. Nearby, a thick patch of ivy went all the way to the roof. The only issue was that the base of it had been removed, or maybe it hadn’t been there in the first place.
Milly paused at the two-meter section of bare wall and stared up nature’s leafy ladder.
If she could reach up there, it was definitely climbable. No different from how she used to get up to the roof of the stables back home. Well, except that if she messed up, there would only be the stone street to catch her rather than a hay bale… and it was about twice as high.
“I should just go get a ladder. Even if I borrow one from the fire department, it should only take me a couple of seconds.” Milly reasoned that was definitely the smart thing to do. She walked away, then cast a glance back at the building.
The ivy vines were just two meters up.
“Or~” Milly retorted in a sing-song voice while she spun around and took a run at the wall.
She’d seen parkour videos like this. All she had to do was jump and run a few steps up the wall while her body was still flung forward. Or something like that.
Just a hop, skip, and a jump!
The ball of her foot collided with the wall, and she pushed off easily.
One step up. Two. Three!
Milly reached the vines with no problem. In fact, she felt like she could keep going and get a better grip higher up!
Four. Six. Twelve!
Twelve?
Milly had already vertically sprinted past most of the vine and was coming up on the edge of the roof! Shocked, Milly didn’t even slow down as she rushed over the ‘cliff’ and shot up straight into the air.
“No!” Milly hurtled upward with nothing for her to grab onto or push off against. Higher and higher. The building had been four floors tall, and she was already twice as high as though she’d never stopped running. Twisting in the air, she grasped in vain for the shrinking rooftop. “Stop!”
For a terrifying moment, she felt completely weightless, then she plummeted down onto the roof.
The impact left Milly flat on her back and wheezing for breath.
“What *cough* was that?”
Falling into the open sky was horrible already, but then she got spiked like a football out of nowhere? Like a big invisible hand swatted her down.
Milly didn’t understand how that could happen. Everything hurt.
After a good few Milly-minutes, she could draw a breath without coughing up a lung again. She pushed herself back onto her feet and had a look around the roof. No sign of anything that might create an invisible bug zapper over the building.
However, Milly spotted something shiny in the rain gutter: a metal key with a black handle. A small wagon wheel symbol was indented into the plastic. Arkwright’s symbol.
“A dorm key? I wonder whose.” Milly pocketed the key and took one more look around.
Nothing stood out to her as an obvious escape route, and she didn’t feel like putting in any more effort right now. She was sore, shaken up, and hungry.
It was time to fold ‘em for this round.
At least getting down was easy enough. She just slid down along the waterspout and was back to street level in no time.
Milly limped along the middle of the road. It was much easier than the sidewalk where she would have to bob-and-weave through a sea of pedestrian statues.
The city had come alive. Everywhere Milly looked there were people and open stalls with food on offer. Her stomach rumbled. What cruel torture. So many options were available and yet there was nothing she could buy with her card.
“Ugh, I should’ve brought actual cash.” Milly groaned.
If she just had a few dollars, she could just take a snack and leave the money. Although nobody could stop her from just walking into the nearest restaurant and taking a plateful, she wasn’t a thief.
Checking her pockets one last time for any hint of loose change, her fingers brushed over some cold, circular metal.
Milly pulled them out, only to be greeted by the custodian’s ring of keys. She totally forgot she took those.
“So much for not being a thief…”
She’d deal with that later.
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Back on school campus, in the cafeteria.
Milly had just wolfed down a tray of sandwiches, but she still didn’t feel any better.
Worse, actually.
Milly had been nauseous with what she thought was hunger before, but now she was also dizzy on top of that. It was hard to keep her thoughts straight. Her ears were ringing a hum that started low but kept raising in pitch chaotically.
Stumbling, Milly just managed to get to a seat and let her forehead slam on the table. She crossed her arms over her head and covered her ears, trying to keep the noise down as it reached a feverish pitch.
Then…
Milly recognized the cacophony for what it was: the sound of dozens of teens chatting over breakfast.
She lifted her head.
The world was moving again!