17) Team Building

"Well, that was a disaster," I said to myself as I started up my truck parked in the underground parking complex underneath the stretch of greenway between the larger building in the Rome quarter of the city. It was about a twenty minute ride home even with the underground express streets that got me halfway home without stopping.

Shimmer was on my front porch waiting for me, with her foster sister Scorn already walking away to her trailer before I turned down the driveway.

The teenage superhero gave me a grim smile as she sat on the glider with her legs folded up, projecting an apologetic feeling at me as I slumped down in the rocking chair and gave my dogs some attention after Scorn sent them back from following her.

Shimmer coughed into her fist. “I don’t think the reporter meant any trouble, I’m guessing she may have just been excited at the idea of a way for her to Trigger a power. Or she may have been trying to give you a chance to deny it before the rumors went too far.”

I shot her a glare. "So what do I do the next time some idiot kills themselves near me hoping to get a power? Reviving people doesn't always work, I lost the first two people I tried it on before you.” I leaned back in the rocking chair after throwing the scorched and now slimy knotted up rope Fafnir had brought me. Muffin jumped up on the slider with Shimmer.

“And I knew those people.” I shook my head.

Muffin whimpered and shoved her head into Shimmer's side until the teenager began petting her, Fafnir darted out of a gaggle of murder geese with the burning rope in his teeth and several irritated fowl chasing after him.

I felt myself relax as I sat on my porch and began to rock my chair. Shimmer had been out here enough that her presence had become familiar, comforting rather than jarring.

At least until she started talking.

“You’re going to have to do another interview.”

I closed my eyes and sighed as she projected a feeling of patience with a shot of resolve behind it.

“We need you to do it in another body, get people used to the idea you might look like anyone, it might help keep them away from this place and your real, vulnerable body.”

I raised an eyebrow before looking over at her. “I think your judgment of what counts as vulnerable might be a bit biased, Miss Brute 3 going on 4.”

Shimmer blushed while rolling her eyes.

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I checked the time. “You got dinner plans?”

She gave me a questing look. “Ah? Nothing solid, I was just going to grab a bite at the cafeteria and go study until it was time to patrol.”

"Good, I'm going to saddle up Chester so you can take him out for a ride. You can catch your sister and tell her I’m roasting some quail with veggies and potatoes and invite her over. She might even come if you’re joining me.”

Her eyes went wide for a moment, “You know we should do more team building exercises, can I invite the rest of the team over?”

I thought that over, and nodded. "I got leftover roast venison, I think." I reached out with my powers to detect any leftovers in the fridge, at least if it was leftover meat, and found that Scorn hadn't decided it had been sitting around too long and fed it to the dogs. "Yep, I got plenty. I can boil up some corn as well."

Shimmer stared at me. “Did you just use your powers on cooked meat?”

I blinked and shrugged. "I can be versatile, it won't work on processed meat. Or the vat grown stuff, it has to be something that had a nervous system. Same rules as for things to Trigger, which raises some questions I don't want to go down the rabbit hole trying to figure out."

Chester was more than happy to take the simultaneously nervous and overjoyed teen out for a ride. He had been my grandmother's horse and while he liked me well enough, he hated having guys climb on top of him.

He was more than happy to let me groom him, and clean his stall, or even to go for a run with me, but he was a girl's horse.

I set the stove to preheat and settled the two plucked and gutted birds in the roasting pan along with carrots, potatoes, and some shallots I had tried growing that year, along with two spoon fulls of my savory chicken mix sprinkled on top.

Which consisted of a full set of herbs and spices, twelve of them. This ain’t Kentucky.

Then I pulled the dough I had mixed up the night before and split it up into two bread pans to go in later.

And I checked my mail.

The Algernon mice hive mind was now registered as my sidekick, and they had already chosen the name Smintheus as their official hero name.

A message from them explained that it was a name of Apollo as the Lord of Mice which had become associated with him since mice live both above and below the ground and it symbolized Apollo's status as a Psychopomp being of both the living world above and the world of the dead below.

They also admitted they got it from their first hit on a search for mice and Greek myths that led them to a Wikipedia article, but they still liked it.

My next message was a rejection letter from the city government for my sidekick doing monitor duty due to them not being Registered Supers.

I took a deep breath and attached a copy to the email I had already written to the law firm of Angler and Alder asking for their assistance in suing one of the most powerful people in the world, and for all intents, the owner of the city I lived in.

It had to be taken as a given that I wasn't getting invited to the Palace for lunch again any time soon.

Scorn actually followed her sister back to the house as Shimmer led Charley in by the reins. My farm hand waved at me as she took the reins to put Charley into the barn and waved for her sister to follow her in. It looked like Shimmer was going to learn how to brush down a horse.

Manifest brought Fable in with him, and she stalked me down in the kitchen to ambush me with a hug. "Thanks for the fruit basket, Shim told me what the "Thanks for letting me know I'm alive." meant."

Then she punched me lightly in the shoulder. “You had to know how much I was going to freak out over that without any context.”

I grinned and rubbed at my arm. “I’ve slept a bit better knowing for sure I'm really alive, so I wanted to thank you since I can see your illusions in my body, but not in a corpse's. Thanks."

She squirmed a bit and then volunteered to set the table, nearly dancing at the news Scorn would be joining us. All the Royals seemed pleased to see her again since it had been years for some of them, and the Empath seemed almost comfortable around them.

So dinner was nice, but I didn’t make it to monitor duty that night.

Several buildings had collapsed during an earthquake in Syria.

Core was going into the field, and he had tapped the Royals as his escort.