The usual sounds of lead rocketing out a barrel echo through the neighbourhood as I pose for Paige to examine my new look. We managed to find a really dinky hotel or rather, a motel to stay at.

In another set of fortuitous events, we stumbled upon a store that had just been robbed. In the confusion Paige and I took some extra stuff for our sakes, and perhaps theirs if they have insurance.

Said bundle of stolen goods included a bunch of oversized clothes and a lot of sugary snacks, most of which it looked like Paige was going to gulp down in a few hours.

Out of the pile of clothes, only few fit me enough to pass off as my actual size. Which is why I’m posing like a supermodel for Paige right now.

She giggles and tosses a potato chip at me, “You’re not doing it right, those poses are for female models not the males.”

“Oh really? Then what am I meant to pose like then?” Hungrily I pick the fallen potato chip off the pile of clothes that litter the cheap carpeting on the floor. “You should come up here, show me how it’s done.”

“I think I’ll take you up on that offer!” She bounces off the bed, even leaving her bag of chips behind and runs over to where I’m standing.

“You’ve got to keep your arms all stiff, but not too stiff you know what I mean?”

No, I don’t.

She continues in all seriousness, “And then, your eyes have to be like, above the persons head, like you’re looking into their future…or past.” She shrugs, narrowing her eyes. “And finally, you don’t smile, frown if possible.”

I watch her intently as she tries to get her lips to stay still, only for them to descend into a quivering mess that ruins everything she’s been setting up.

“Hahahha! You can’t force it!” I toss myself onto the bed as she rolls her eyes at me, a grin firmly in place where her supermodel stoic demeanour is supposed to be.

She pouts but joins me. It’s the best bed we’ve had, sturdy, doesn’t sink with your weight and it smells alright too.

The one room motel had everything our old shank didn’t; a television, a working bathroom with clean water pumping out of it and a good view of the city.

The find came as a surprise to us both, I mean, this is a pretty terrible part of the city to be sleeping in, we had even lower expectations than our shank for the motel and hotels unfortunate to be situated here.

But it’s the entire opposite. Sure, customers are scarce but the service is prime, cheap and brilliant. It’s probably because they don’t have many customers that they’ve retained this much of their value…so to speak.

Still whatever the reason, it’s a fortunate paradox to stumble on.

Munching on a chip Paige asks, “So all that’s left is to wait for you to heal up right?”

“Mhm.” I hum. It’s been only a few days since the incident with Steve and his booster drug, there’s a lot I’ve got to do – testing my powers for one – but I’ve got to wait a bit before jumping straight into anything too fun, at least until my bruises aren’t as sore and tender as they are now.

I still have no recollection of where said bruises came from, all I did was lie on the floor, puke and cough up blood. If anything, I should be most worried about my internal organs but I haven’t peed out blood or fainted out of the blue or anything so…I guess that’s fine.

“Once I can use relatively safely use my powers again, I’ll check if the effects of that booster drug still remain. I hope they do.”

“If they do you’ll be a lot more…powerful?” she smirks, flexing a muscle.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I chuckle, “Well, maybe not, I guess I’ll be faster…technically. But I realized something about my powers too.”

“What?”

“It’s localized.”

She raises an eyebrow at this, stuffing her face hole with more chips.

“That means I can only use it at certain ranges…outside that, nothing else will be paused in time.”

“Oh.” She chews faster, “So that means…you can only affect people close to you with your powers?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad. If your time you can pause it for has increased then maybe the range can increase as well.”

I shrug, really not having a clue if that could be a thing. Not having the strength, the withstand the backlash of using my powers for long enough to actually study and observe them has left me ignorant about its capabilities.

There’s a lot of work to do on that front, specifically I want to find out if I can choose what I want to keep paused in time and what I want to keep working.

“Hey…” Paige whispers, “Don’t you think that sound is getting louder…and closer?”

“What sound?”

“The gunshots?”

I wave her off, “It’s nothing.”

Paige levels me with a questioning look and I rephrase, “Okay, it’s probably not anything worse than the usual, some fools probably got their hands on a-”

The glass windows and red curtains are blown inwards long before I can finish what I was saying.

“Ahhhh!” Paige screams and I jump off of the bed and grab the closest thing to a weapon.

A lamp.

Fuck!

The new presence in our motel room, wrapped in the curtains and covered in broken glass and a bit of concrete is a man.

The man groans in pain and lifts a hand weakly, a hand with a gun in it and a finger on the trigger.

“He’s got a gun, Vern!”

Breathing in and out I manage to get my heart back in my chest and not in lodge with fear in my throat.

Curled up in the curtains I notice he’s bleeding profusely all over the carpet and curtains as well as the gun he’s weakly holding in his hand.

“Don’t worry. He’s just about dead already, Paige.”

She looks at me, her eyes and lip trembling with shock, “Are you sure?”

I nod, satisfied to leave the man to die all by himself as I walk over to where he crashed through, “He’s no meta and this is the third floor of the motel…something threw him up here.”

Looking down the window, sure enough, there was something rather interesting and dangerous down there.

“I think we should get ou-” Paige mutters.

“No,” I cut her short, “Lynx is down there.”

“Lynx! But this is-”

“Invincibill’s territory. That would make that poor fella Invincibill’s man too.”

This doesn’t bode well. Why the hell is Lynx here himself?

I bit on my finger, watching the growling, giant beast-man covered in fur trash the place and mow through the men shooting at him.

“If we go down there, I don’t think Lynx will ask too many questions before killing us, he’s in beast form now, even civilians look like threats.”

She slips onto the floor, curling up into a human ball, terrified.

“So, what do we do?” She asks, eyes dead staring at the man who’s bled out on the floor of our room and annoyingly ruined all the good clothes.

Not answering, I leave the now widely open window and curse myself for being such a cheapskate.

There was obviously no way a motel like this existed in this neighbourhood with no setbacks.

I step to the man and sigh. This isn’t my first time seeing a dead body, or a freshly dead one either.

Prying the pistol out of his still warm hand, I count how many rounds it has left.

Six. Good enough for thugs, useless against a meta.

Nodding satisfactorily, I set the safety on and pocket it. Looking at the man, I find he’s fairly large. I’ll need some help with moving his body.

“Pai-” her name dies in my throat as I glance back at her. She’s curled up into a ball, trembling in fear and completely out of it.

Shit.

Crawling up to her, I take her sweat palms in mine and call out her name again, “Paige…I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

All this time I just zoned out, didn’t even consider how this could affect her, especially with her trauma.

She doesn’t seem to take any notice of me. But that’s fine. This has happened before; I don’t know anyway to help her except…get her out of the situation.

The sounds and sometimes even the sights of guns, droids and violence sets her into this state, I shouldn’t have brought her into this part of the city. Damn cheapskate!

Back to work.

I stamp out the urge to just hug her right there as she trembles and move back to the dead body issue. Gangs have their own clean up crews, especially with members whose bodies can be used as evidence to lock them up.

I’m not sure if they’ll be coming for his body, but I can’t take my chances on anything, not right now.

I need to get his body out of here before Lynx or Invincibill send their crews, or hell the police arrive. The fighting had long ended, all that remains is the mess made down there and up here.

It’s not easy moving a healthy human body that’s now turned dead weight. I pick up the ends of the curtain and make sure not to look at his face as I wrap him up and pull him towards the window.

It takes a moment but I get there and toss his rolled-up body over the concrete of what’s left of the window.

Could Lynx have thrown him any further? Fuck.

Exhaling, I turn back to Paige and find she’s unconscious.

“Now for the hard part.”