The paranoid part of my brain must have been trying to get back at me for ignoring it to join this whole competition against its rather insistent advice. It had spent the whole time I was helping Dani get checked into that hotel room and settled in plotting, and now that I was on my way back to the arena to get those pictures taken, it sprang the trap: what if that Fell you pissed off, or some of her troops, decide to get even by hitting you during the competition? There’s so much chaos in there, everyone yelling from all sides, you’d never see it coming. Even if people tried to shout warnings to you, there’s no way you’d be able to tell. You’re a sitting duck in there, stupid. Way to go, now you’re gonna die or be horribly maimed. Hope showing off was worth it to you.
Sometimes, my paranoid self could be a real dick. But that didn't mean it was completely wrong. Not in the least. I really was going to have to be careful out there. Sure, they had security, a lot of security. I wasn’t exactly the first Touched to have potential enemies ready to show up the very second they could be certain of exactly where I was, so the organizers of this had to have plenty of protection set up. I wasn’t even sure what all their precautions were, and that was kind of the point. No one outside the secure and trusted parts of the organizing committee knew just what defenses they had around and in this place, so it was that much harder to actually plan out how to get around those defenses. What I did know was that several people had been caught trying over the years, no matter how secretive and clever they were trying to be. It never really worked. There were rumors that the committee used very powerful Mind-Touched to be aware of any potential weaknesses in their security, and even left some that deliberately looked open to trick those people into trying to take advantage of them.
But did any of those very valid and completely true points stop that paranoia from creeping its way through my brain the second I had that troubling thought? Pffft, of course not. That part of my mind had a foothold now, and it wasn’t going to give it up for something dumb and useless like logic. I was just going to have to deal with being even more worried about something bad actually managing to get through those defenses and keep my eyes open. Even more open than they already were. But no, Paranoid Me, I absolutely was not going to drop out of the competition.
Making that point very firmly inside my head after changing into my costume a short distance from the shed in the park, I made my way there. I’d already sent my family a check-in text letting them know that I was going to be hanging out with Dani a bit longer so they wouldn’t start getting curious about that, so I was good for the moment. Hopefully this whole thing wouldn’t take long.
Of course, then the paranoid part of me had to get even more fuel for itself (it really was gorging itself lately, I was concerned about its health) as I approached the shed and found a guy standing in front of the little keypad. He was about five foot ten, pretty well-built under a skin-tight dark red bodysuit, and had a black hardshell helmet covering his head with a white cross shape across it. The sight of the guy made my heart reflexively jump, before I reminded myself that I wasn’t exactly the only person who was supposed to use the tunnel to get into the arena. There were dozens of Touched competing in these events, naturally I was going to cross paths with one of them heading inside occasionally. Especially if we were supposed to get pictures taken. No, finding someone here made sense.
No sooner had I thought that and come all the way through what amounted to a second and a half of freaking out and calming down, than I had an all new reason to freak out. Namely the eyes that were suddenly looking at me. Eyes that were on top of the helmet. Not electronic camera fake eyes, real biological ones. Gooey biological eyes. They both slid around from the front, snapping into place on the back of the helmet to stare at me. And they weren’t the only body parts to appear. At the same time, one of his arms sort of… split. Actually, it was more like a second arm spontaneously pulled itself out of the original. It looked like a goopy mess very briefly, but solidified into an exact duplicate of the first arm almost immediately. It also slid around on top of the costume, until the arm was centered on his back. Which was when a sword appeared in it. A sword that appeared to be made of actual bone that had been sharpened. Yeah, one second I was staring at this guy’s ordinary back, and the next he had actual biological eyes on the outside of the back of his helmet, and a third arm that had grown out of one of the extant ones before visibly moving over his back so it could point a goddamn sword at me. A sword that was actually made out of bone.
“Oh!” The guy’s voice (sounding like it was projected through a microphone) abruptly blurted, even as I was reeling from that whole thing, “you’re that Paintball guy, right?” Even as he said it, the bone sword disappeared, as did the extra arm and the eyes. Both of which dissolved into goop before turning to dust and blowing away. By that point, he was already turning around, revealing another set of extra (at least I hoped they were extra) biological eyes attached to the front of his otherwise featureless helmet. Yeah, it was literally just a blank metal helmet with a pair of human eyes stuck to it. They took me in as the guy spoke again, his voice once more slightly computerized as it came through a microphone inside the helmet. “Sorry if I freaked you out. Or, you know, am still freaking you out. I’m told it takes a little bit to get used to my schtick.”
Blinking a few times at that, I mentally kicked myself after a second. “Oh! I--uh, no. I mean yes, I’m Paintball. And that--uh, that’s really something.” Boy was I just a fantastic conversationalist or what? Truly, this poor guy wasn’t going to feel awkward or just regret trying to talk to me at all.
Fortunately, from the sound of his soft chuckle, the guy was accustomed to that sort of reaction. “Yeah, something’s one word for it. There’s other, less polite ones some people use, especially when they first see it.” He shrugged easily. “Sorry again, we haven’t met at all yet, and if you don’t really pay attention to the Atlanta Touched scene, you’ve probably never even heard of me. The name’s Bodyshop.” Belatedly, he amended, “Well, it’s not actually my real name, but you know.”
Despite my surprise at the whole situation, I found myself painting a smiley face on the front of my helmet. “Yeah, I haven’t really gotten around to updating my official ID or anything yet either.”
“Hey, you make a face on your helmet too?” Bodyshop followed up that question by, yeah, making a pair of lips appear on the outside of his helmet, right where they should be under those eyes. Well, where they should be if they’d been on his actual face rather than the metal helmet. That time, when he spoke, it looked even more weird because the voice still came from inside while the lips that were on the helmet remained motionless in that simple smile. “This always freaks out the people who… uhh, right, that was probably a bad idea if I was trying to make you feel better about the whole thing and calm down, huh? Sorry, sometimes I really don’t think at all.”
“Uh, no, no, it’s okay.” My head shook. “I get it, sometimes my powers freak people out too. See?” With that, I shifted into my pink liquid self and dissolved into a puddle. As his eyes (however many of them he actually had) took that in, I moved around in the dirt for a moment before reforming back to my normal self. “So yeah, I definitely understand freaky powers, believe me. I take it you duplicate your body parts and uh, move them around on yourself or whatever?”
“Dude, melting into a puddle? That’s sweet. I saw your display earlier, where you exploded and reformed, but I didn’t know you could do it on command and move around!” Bodyshop made that extra mouth on his helmet smile once more before it dissolved. “And yeah, I can absorb uhh… biological material, find out all sorts of stuff about it, like a human DNA scanner, make copies of my own parts and move them around and control them as long as they’re within a few inches of my body, that sort of thing. Even make them appear on the outside of my clothes, as you’ve seen. Oh, and I adjust my own copied parts too. Changing the eye color, sharpening that piece of my duplicated leg bone into the sword you saw, and strengthening it so it doesn’t snap in half as soon as I hit something with it.”
“Super useful,” I murmured, absorbing that whole thing. Powers really could get freaky, that was for sure. “So you see out of eyes on the front of your helmet and any others you put on yourself?”
“Yeah, it takes a bit to get used to, but I manage,” he confirmed, sounding slightly self-conscious. Now that I was listening to him a bit more, I was pretty sure he was still a teenager. Late teens, older than me, but still a teenager. “People who are a lot smarter than me say that it seems like whenever I make new eyes, I also make the, ahh, other stuff necessary to use them, inside my brain. It’s like… you’ve got parts of your brain that process visual data and tell the rest of your brain what it means. When I make new eyes, it builds a temporary counterpart in my brain that does the same sort of processing as the original. Then the rest of my brain sort of puts it all together so I can keep track of what I’m seeing, even in different directions. The doctors have some much bigger and more impressive words for it, but that’s about as much as I understand.”
“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t understand it if you made it any more complicated than that,” I assured him. “Still, that’s pretty cool. But you take in other, uhh, body pieces you said? Something about scanning DNA.” If this guy could do something like that, I really didn’t want to let him get any of my saliva, blood, or anything like that. My mind was spinning out a bit about the bad possibilities. But I tried to keep all of that out of my voice and just sound intrigued rather than nervous about it.
“It’s okay, I don’t use my powers for working out secret identities or anything like that,” Bodyshop immediately put in, proving either he was more perceptive, or I was much worse at hiding my feelings. “But yeah, my skin will absorb any bit of… let’s just call it genetic material and I sort of get a pop-up in my mind telling me all sorts of stuff about it. A lot of the time it depends on the amount of material, and just how, ahh, intact or degraded it is. But generally speaking, I can tell you how tall the person--or animal--is, whether they’re human or animal, natural hair and eye color, any genetic variations or other things that would stand out, current illnesses, yada yada yada. Plus, not only do I have my own regeneration, but if you take a damaged piece of biological material like uhh, someone’s heart and put it against my body, I can fix it. I mean, slowly, and it’s kind of gross. My skin sort of sucks up the organ and takes it into its own separate chamber in my chest, heals it up over the course of a few days or a week, and then I can push it out again, good as new.”
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Well that left me staring at him for a moment, painting a surprised open-mouthed smiley face on my visor before coughing. “So you fix other people’s body parts as long as they--err--don’t mind losing them for a little bit? I guess that probably helps fix them up for transplant into someone else.”
His head bobbed immediately. “Sure does. In fact, that’s the other thing. Say I take one person’s heart and absorb it, right? If I also take part of someone else, like their blood, I can sort of… tune the organ to the DNA in the blood. That way, when it gets implanted, the new body won’t reject it. It takes a couple weeks for me to do something like that, so it’s not like I’m exactly completely revolutionizing the entire transplant process, but it does let me help a couple people each month who wouldn’t have gotten a working organ otherwise. So, you know, that part is pretty cool.”
Whistling low, I managed a weak, “Yeah, I guess it really would be. And pretty useful to have around. Especially if--wait, you said you’re from Atlanta? As in Atlanta, Georgia? Isn’t that place--uh, you know…” I couldn’t think of the most polite way to phrase what I wanted to say.
“Completely overrun by violent, extremist warlords who control most of the city and surrounding areas?” Bodyshop supplied casually. “With Star-Touched like the Conservators overrun and overworked, barely holding onto certain key areas while the gangs rule everywhere else? Yeah, that’s the one. And yes, it can get real nasty over there. But it’s still my home, and I like helping the people who are just trying to live their lives, you know? We try to do as much as we can.”
There were a few cities around the country that had something like that, with Fells running large parts or even the majority of their territory. But none of them were as large or as thoroughly compromised as Atlanta. The actual city government didn’t really exist anymore, and the state capital had basically been moved to Augusta, a hundred and fifty miles away. Meanwhile, Atlanta itself was, as far as I knew, basically carved up between five different competing factions.
There were a lot of Fell-Touched involved in that, but the leaders of the five factions who were constantly at war with each other were some of the most famous Fells in the country, just because of how much control they had over a very large city in what was supposed to still be part of the United States. There were the Risen, led by a guy known as Growtesque, with the w. He could grow to massive skyscraper sizes and anywhere in between, but the larger he got, the more monstrous and--well, ugly his appearance. Rumor was he was actually quite handsome in his human form.
The second gang were called Melting Pot. Their leader was Wickwright, this woman who was able to create apparently unlimited numbers of wax soldiers. They weren’t that much stronger than normal people, but simply being able to create thousands of mindless cannon fodder troops made her incredibly dangerous.
Then there was Menagerie, an organization whose leadership was composed almost entirely of TONIs. The one in charge was a white tiger known as Baekho, who was one of the most powerful aerokinetics in the country, if not the world.
Downsize was the leader of the fourth gang, who were called Enterprise. He was able to surround things, or even living beings, with bubbles that he could shrink down and telekinetically move around. The things or people were practically invulnerable as long as they were shrunk down, and he could put them back to normal size whenever he wanted. He literally threw around entire buildings like that.
Finally, the last of the Atlanta gangs was a group known as Penumbra. They were the most secretive group, thieves and assassins basically. Their leader was Skulk. Her power, terrifying as it might have sounded, allowed her to hide behind anything or anyone. As long as she was within about a foot of something that she designated as her hiding place, no one could see her. Not even the person she was using to hide behind. She could follow someone down a busy, crowded street in broad daylight and no one would know.
In any case, those were the leaders of the five gangs over there. They each controlled a constantly-changing piece of the city. The whole place was all much more dangerous and powerful than what we had up in Detroit. Or at least, more openly dangerous. Instead of having the Ministry secretly controlling and manipulating things, they had open warfare between all the gangs, with temporary, tentative truces and betrayals starting and ending every other week. From everything I’d heard, Atlanta was basically a warzone. But they didn’t call in a group like Armistice to end the problem because the gangs were too entrenched, with what amounted to an entire city of hostages. Well, first it was because the Georgia governor refused help, insisting they could handle things. He didn’t want foreign Touched parading around enforcing the laws. And by the time they realized they really couldn’t handle it, the local civilian populace was basically controlled by the gangs too. Not all of them, obviously. But each gang had thousands of civilians ready to act as human shields or suicide bombs the moment outside forces pushed too hard. If Armistice, or any other big group of outsiders or the military went in, it would be a massacre on several levels. It was a complete clusterfuck, in no uncertain terms. Last I’d heard, they were still working on ways to fix it. But it had been a problem for… at least ten years, and showed no signs of actually improving at all.
In other words, this guy was probably really busy if his goal was to help people. Offering him a smiley face on my visor and a thumbs up across my chest, I replied, “Well, it’s good to know there’s still people over there who actually want to make things better. Or at least stop them from spiraling quite as much. But what are you doing here?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I winced before amending, “What I mean is, are you competing in something, or just helping?”
“Helping.” After saying that, the guy turned a bit to gesture toward the shed and the tunnel beyond. “One of my teammates is competing. Her name’s Tumbleweed. Makes herself superlight and bouncy, propels herself in any direction, and can make the impact she hits things with super-hard without doing any damage to herself. The more things she bounces off of before hitting the thing she wants to hurt, the higher she can boost the damage. It’s kinda fun to watch.”
He was right, that sounded fun. No wonder they wanted her to compete. Although… “Sorta sounds like she should’ve gone with Pinball,” I murmured, before coughing. “Not to backseat drive your friend’s name choices. Or suggest she use a name close to mine, come to think of it.”
Bodyshop chuckled, waving that off casually. “Don’t worry, you’re not the first one to suggest that. She grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. So she just likes the name Tumbleweed. Apparently they used to blow around her family’s property all the time. It’s a personal thing.”
Both of us realized we were taking way too long standing out there when we were supposed to be in the arena. I had those pictures to do, and he was supposed to be bringing Tumbleweed her anxiety medication. So we headed in, talking a bit more on the way. I would technically be competing against his friend in a few of the upcoming events, but I didn’t really care about that. I mean, I cared about the competition, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. This whole thing was for fun.
After making it into the arena, we split off. I waved as the guy went to find his teammate, before following Devon’s directions to the room where I was supposed to get my picture taken. For some reason, now that I was alone, walking through these quiet halls (all the fans had long-since left for the evening so there wasn’t even the sound of crowds off in the distance), I felt nervous. This was real. I was getting my picture taken to officially be a part of this whole competition. Why did this, walking alone in a quiet hallway, make me realize that even more definitively than actually performing in front of everyone a few hours earlier had? What was wrong with me?
Well, whatever it was, dealing with it would have to wait. I found the room, which turned out to be a large banquet-type area full of tables of buffet-style food and a stage at the far end. There were dozens of people, about half of whom were in costume, milling around and chatting. When I came through the door, several of them waved and called out greetings.
I was still trying to figure out what to do now that I was here, when Devon showed up. He came through the crowd, beaming at me. “Great, great, you’re here. Hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the room, I meant to have someone out there to help. But uh, security says you had a little discussion with our friend from Atlanta?”
So they had been watching. That wasn’t exactly surprising. Giving a quick nod, I assured the man that I’d found the room just fine. “So now what?”
“Well, we’re still waiting for the photographer, to be honest,” he informed me. “So mill around a bit, meet some of the others if you want. Get something to eat, there’s plenty of food, and if you don’t want to uncover your mouth, you can take it over behind any of the privacy screens we have scattered through the room. Other than that, as soon as our guy gets here we’ll get all the pictures taken. There’ll be a few of you by yourself and a few group shots with whoever the photographer thinks would be good.”
No sooner had I agreed with that and turned to meander my way through the crowd, than another voice spoke up. “There’s the boy!” It was my dad, as Silversmith. He came right up, clad in that sleek silver armor while extending a hand to me. “Hey there, Paintball, thanks for coming on such short notice. And I must say, that was a truly impressive display out there for your introduction.”
I accepted the handshake. What else was I supposed to do? “Uh, thanks, sir. It was fun. I mean, kinda crazy, but fun.”
With a soft chuckle, Dadsmith agreed, “Crazy but fun sums it up. You deserve something like this, after everything you’ve done back in the city. Come on, I’ll introduce you to a few people you might like to know.”
Just like that, I was being guided along toward one of the mingling groups by my own unknowing father. I was going to have to spend the rest of this whole thing right next to him, talking to him, and trying not to let him realize who I really was. So maybe I should really thank him.
Because if I managed to get through all this without anything going terribly wrong, I wouldn’t have anything left in me to be nervous about the actual competition.