Tunnel after cramped tunnel, we carried Jerry's unconscious form under the suburbs. Many of the passages were made of concrete or brickwork and part of the city's sewers or storm drains but quite a few, while still obviously artificial, were cut straight into hardened clay or bedrock. While narrower than the rest, there were enough of them it seemed impossible they could have all been dug in the few days since the invasion... for however much the word "impossible" was worth in the face of superpowers.
Despite being underground and connected to actual sewers, the air was cleaner than that of the city above. The longer we traveled the less the sweet-sour stench of rotting meat, the tang of drying blood and the acrid smell of burnt wood polluted the air. The humidity was lower and there was none of the vision-obscuring mist down here beneath the earth. Everything was quiet, the darkness less oppressive than the world above despite the urgency of our current goal. If it hadn't been for the occasional root getting caught in my hair or mud dropping from the ceiling at our passing it would have been a nice place to rest, even.
Mandy would stop frequently, more to adjust Jerry's position in her arms and to confirm he hadn't gotten any worse than any need of her own to rest. Other times she'd pause at an intersection for several seconds and mumble indistinctly to herself. The redhead's mutters were not in any language I knew and every time she'd pick a direction immediately after the same few words were said.
Instead of calling her on her use of actual spells and being infected by Jerry's nerdiness, I thought about my own powers while keeping a finger on the unconscious boy and holding his blood inside and on its proper course. The fights with the Black Hand and that Hackett guy had revealed several issues I needed to address. While hurting the shadow had been the most immediate problem, I had liked how the balding idiot could hide from me even less. Ambushes in general had been the worst encounters so far, closely followed by trickery.
Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y3m9d
Powers [2/33 pts]
Force Adjustment III, Force Awareness II, Forced Acceleration II, Immutable Force II, Progressive Regeneration III, Proximakinesis III, Super Suit I
Attributes [0/33 pts]
Might 18, Agility 10, Reason 3, Vigilance 7, Ego 10, Luck 2
Two more points into Vigilance sent my every sense into overdrive. It was like washing off the last vestiges of sleep in the morning, drinking a full cup of hot chocolate, cleaning away the earwax after neglecting it for too long and getting a corrective eye surgery combined. I felt more awake, alert to everything around me as my eyes caught small cracks and bumps on the tunnel's walls despite the near-total darkness, my hearing sharpened to the point I could hear Mandy and Jerry's heartbeats from feet away, my nose shifting through and cataloguing smells with ease. Even how the air running through my hair as we ran became something to track.
The impact on Force Awareness was even greater. Proprioception, the sense of perceiving the location, movement, and action of parts of the body, is something every human has; it's what lets us walk without watching out feet. It encompasses a complex of sensations, including perception of joint position and movement, muscle force, and effort, all things good athletes train to both handle instinctively and be aware of consciously. Now that sense seemed to expand, giving me similar information not just on my body but everything around. The awareness was less detailed than that of my own limbs, perceived through a filter and lacking familiarity like trying to do delicate work while wearing thick gloves.
Even limited awareness of my surroundings was incredibly useful, though. Gliding through the tunnel was now as easy as aiming a spoon at my mouth; no more roots catching in my hair or mud falling into my face. Mandy's every step, where she'd turn, when she'd stop, how she'd adjust her grip on Jerry was no longer something I had to pay conscious attention to in order to maintain contact with the unconscious boy without jostling him. When I actually paid attention? Mandy's every move down to body language was like an open book without having to look at her.
This... was probably going to cause some privacy issues if I raised the rank of Force Awareness any further. Comic-book x-ray vision had nothing on being aware of others' bodies almost as well as your own. Especially since nobody would be able to tell I was actually looking. But that was future-Maya's problem.
All my fights so far had involved hitting the enemy up close and personal. Being an intensely physical person, it was what I knew, what I instinctively went for and with my increasingly complex abilities it provided countless options. But it was also limited by its lack of range, the need to get up close and personal with the enemy. It meant both having to catch up with them and getting in reach of their own melee attacks. Early searches for powers that would make up for it had returned... lackluster results. Simple blasts and beams had been a staple of science fiction, comic books and games because they were simple. Given how varied the monsters had been, I needed something with broader application, something that meshed with and complemented my existing powers.
Combined Forces I: merge two force effects you can exert into a single whole qualitatively greater than the sum of its parts. Quantity is reduced to the same extent. Create Force I: ex-nihilo make 1 kJ worth of particles on touch. Within the energy limit, you may invent particles with whatever properties you want.
Forcefield Creation I: apply force effects you can personally exert to a volume up to one cubic yard at a time, at reduced effect. One simple geometric shape at a time. Lasting Force I: make force effects you can personally exert permanent, at reduced effect. Costs time and stamina scaling with effect, inverse scaling with each other. Spatial Distortion I: you may treat one distance at a time from half to twice as long, selectively, in relation to yourself. This does not directly affect other people. Spatial Leap I: change the location and orientation of one target of up to a quarter ton that you can perceive by up to 20 ft and 90 degrees in the same local space. Chronal Leap I: move a target of up to a quarter ton that you can perceive where they were up to 1 second before, or where they would be in up to 1 second.
Now that was more like it... even if it would take time to choose which to take.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
xxxx xxxx
It took us nearly half an hour to reach our destination and that was with Mandy moving faster than any normal girl could have in those tunnels, let alone carrying an unconscious guy wearing a metal exoskeleton all the way. After experiencing the freedom and sheer speed of flight the slowness would have worn on my nerves had I not had other things on my mind.
The narrow, dark tunnel opened so suddenly into a cavernous, too-bright chamber it was jarring, like missing a stair and barely avoiding a tumble. Mandy carried Jerry to a solid wooden table set right next to the tiny entrance while I tried not to gawk. The entire, basketball-court-sized area was lit by dozens of floating, yellow-white orbs that collectively shone down more brightly than broad daylight. It was also taken up by dozens, no, hundreds of flowerpots, barrels full of soil, even whole seedbeds where all kinds of greenery flourished. Someone had transported either a very large garden or a small farm into this giant basement beneath the hellish ruined cityscape above.
"Aunt Sarah! We have wounded!" Mandy cried. No sooner had she broken her silence than a sun-worn but broadly smiling grandmother appeared around an apple tree - complete with actual apples - and came in our direction. While of a height with Mandy, she was stout and as solid as an oak tree, with thick, calloused hands and arms that might have once been as thick as mine. She also wasn't any relative of my best friend's. I'd only ever seen her once, at a distance, when she'd escorted a terminally embarrassed Jerry to school the first day of Freshman year.
"Oh, you reckless, stupid boy," she muttered, smile slipping just a little as she set the basket full of fruit she'd been carrying down and took a closer look at the huge wound on the brunet's side, the one I was still keeping all sealed up. "I told him he shouldn't have gone out without his armor but does he ever listen?"
The world flickered and warped like bad editing in a movie and something absolutely revolting disagreed with my guts on a fundamental level. A nauseating pressure fell on my everything within and without then the unseen force tore apart and I found the old woman staring at me oddly while holding a breadbox that hadn't been there a moment before.
"Please take a few steps back, dear," she asked politely but firmly. "Your negative energy almost ruined my cookies and these are a fresh batch. It would be sad if they go to waste."
"I can't," I told her, still reeling from... whatever it had been that gave me the full-body, gut-wrenching crash. "I'm literally holding his side from opening, preventing him from bleeding to death." It must have been part of the old lady's powers, though how it related to cookies of all things I hadn't the foggiest.
"No need for that now that the boy is here," she told me as she took two red cookies out of the box, the mouth-watering aroma of baked sugar and real butter filling the air. She cracked the first cookie against Jerry's forehead and the same pulse of energy as the first time Mandy had done it went through him. I reluctantly took several steps back and watched as Jerry's wound healed up like a movie on fast-forward. The healing was faster than my own regeneration but less complete, leaving thick, ugly scarring and tender, sore tissue in its wake but it was better than the alternative.
"Amanda, dear, could you watch over him? I do need to harvest the strawberries before they're overripe and I don't want my idiot nephew to choke," she said as she forced Jerry's mouth open and stuck the two halves of the cookie within. More of that energy started flowing through his body and the nasty scarring started healing away very very slowly. "It would stop me from giving him a piece of my mind when he wakes up, see."
"I think he'd take the choking instead," the redhead joked hoarsely, crying in relief. "What... what about the standard procedures?"
"You youngsters and your procedures," the old woman huffed. "I'd known you three were clear when you were still a mile away. Your friend is a bit too negative and stubborn," she threw me an exasperated look like all older people use on their kids all the time, "but she's your friend." And with a swirl of her shawl and robes that might have been in vogue back in the Pleistocene she ventured into her subterranean garden and vanished.
A split-second later, I got hug-ambushed by a weeping Mandy that tried to crush me in her embrace - my ribs protested even through two layers of superpowered defense.
"I thought you'd died... we'd had so many infiltration attempts... people vanishing then showing up twisted... idiots like Hackett willingly joining the monsters... I didn't know what to think," she muttered into my shoulder between sobs. "I'd hoped... wanted you to be you... feared you weren't. I..." she burst into more sobs while I awkwardly patted her in the back."We couldn't say much until we were sure. I am... so, so sorryy!!!"
I'd never been particularly good at the whole emotions thing, except for the bad parts. Baggage from the past, I guess. On the upside, it had helped with not running away in terror whenever this Hell the city had become regurgitated another horror in my general direction. On the downside... sometimes you did have to comfort crying friends.
"There's nothing to be sorry for," I fudged a bit, swallowing my previous confusion at her and Jerry's banter not quite including me, the sense that they'd... moved on, changed while I hadn't been there with them aggravated by the whole Tomio debacle. "I would have done the same in your place," if I'd thought about it. Being less trusting would have saved me from quite a few problems the days before, because Tomio hadn't been the only problem.
"You... you really are..." Mandy stopped talking, wiped her tears with the back of her hand, blotchy, gloriously crimson face as only natural redheads could get trying to form the right words. "Thanks, May. I... do you want to catch up after Jerry gets healed?" she asked hopefully, voice shaking with a hint of her old timidity.
I was about to come up with a clever, comforting, proper-best-friend reply when two more people entered the underground garden. The first was a vaguely familiar man in his late sixties with unkempt grey hair and even more unkempt beard framing yellow-gleaming eyes and a worn-looking face that was as ugly as it was cheerful. He was lugging around an enormous shotgun or maybe a cannon - it certainly looked large enough to be one - and wore a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and a green-brown leather trench coat that didn't quite close around his jolly bulk. In short, he looked like Santa Claus cosplaying a big game hunter.
The other was a tiny, black-haired, black-robed girl that was maybe seven years old. The moment I saw her my every muscle clenched so hard my bones hurt. What the hell was that mind-bender doing here? This was supposed to be a safe place to catch up with my friends not to...
"We're back!" the Midget said in lieu of a greeting. "Did you miss us?" For a second there she looked straight at me and all my worries about this being another Tomio situation where a mind-controller was controlling people I knew and liked far better than Julia and her group exploded.
With a yell full of rage I flew at her, punch aimed straight at her smirking face.