Who would my first superhero teammate be?

I sat in the mess hall late the next morning and wondered.

Who would be the leader and who would be the sidekick?

Would we both be leaders? Would we both be sidekicks?

Maybe it would be someone super-smart, as smart as I was strong. Maybe it would be a big macho bruiser of a guy and I’d be able to wow him by being even stronger than him. Maybe it would be a really hot superhero babe and we’d fight crime as partners and then fall in love, though my heart gave a little twinge for Ali at the thought of that.

One of the doors to the mess hall opened and a boy stepped into the room. He was tall and skinny and pink acne dotted his face. He was dressed all in black: Black boots, black combat trousers, black jacket that zipped up at the middle with a black zip.

This outfit contrasted completely with his complexion, a very pale white—pasty, even. His face looked almost sickly. He was like a sort of stretched-out spotty ghost. Except for his hair. His hair was a tangled mess of bright flame, orange, that added inches to his height, topping him off like some kind of adolescent candle. He looked quite awkward in his black outfit, slightly hunched over like he was uncomfortable in his own body.

He just stood there without saying anything.

Oh Lord, is he the other superhero? I thought. He’s too dorky; too much like me. Please let it not be him. Please let this just be the butler or the bell-boy or the intern or something…

The boy’s face immediately dropped from the awkward smile pulled back over his front teeth to a sad pout. He looked like a hurt Labrador.

Did he read my mind? Was it so obvious what I thought or did I accidentally think it out loud?

{No, you didn’t think it out loud,} a voice said in my mind. {You were right the first time. I read your mind. And I am the other superhero, just so you know.}

“Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh!” I jumped a foot in the air. The boy’s lips hadn’t moved but I had heard a voice speaking clearly inside my head. What was even weirder was that it was slightly deeper than my own voice and had a British accent.

{Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you,} came the voice in my head again. There was a tinge of melancholy to it. {This is one of my powers. I can listen in on people’s minds and speak to them: Telepathy.}

I clutched the top of my head and covered my eyes with my palms, wincing. It didn’t hurt, but it felt like my mind was being invaded.

{Sorry,} said the voice again, now in an unmistakably saddened tone, {I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t usually read people’s minds without their permission... But in this case I couldn’t help myself… Also, you thought that very loudly… Wow, we’re off to a great start, aren’t we?}

My hands still over my eyes, I dug deep down inside myself to try to find the courage I needed. God, this is so weird… Wait, don’t think that! Crap! I tried to stop thinking so that he wouldn’t hear my thoughts, but then I was just thinking about what I didn’t what to think, so it didn’t work. Come on Gonzalo, you can do this. Don’t be such a weakling. Don’t mess things up with your first superhero teammate...Oh no, did he just hear me think that too? Damn it!

“Ok, I can do this,” I said out loud, trying a different approach. If I actually did think out loud then he would be able to hear my thoughts anyway, so maybe it wouldn’t be so weird. I took my hands away from my eyes. “I can cope with this. This is totally normal for a superhero.”

The red-headed boy‘s mouth had disappeared into a singularity. It made the acne on his upper lip stand out like little pulsing red stars.

{Are you sure you’re OK?} said the boy’s voice in my mind. {I can always come back another time if you don’t want to meet me now…?}

“No, it’s alright,” I said. “I’m just not used to this is all. It just takes a bit of...adjusting to.”

{I understand. Um...it’s nice to meet you anyway.} The boy held out his hand for me to shake. He only sort of half held it out, like he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to or not. {I’m Mute.}

“Well, you’re clearly not…” I said, confused. “Not really, anyway…”

{No, um, I don’t mean I’m a mute. I mean my superhero codename is ‘Mute’. Wow, people are really going to find that confusing, aren’t they?}

“Oh, riiiight…”

As I took his hand and shook it, I imagined smacking him unconscious over the head and then making a dash for it, running away from this crazy weird place back to my apartment, back to my Mom. I didn’t feel like I chose to think it; it just popped into my head, perhaps because I was intimidated by the boy’s telepathy. A grimace contorted my face. Again, I tried not to think about beating him up and running away, but that only made me think about those things even more.

Man, this is hard!

Mute smiled at me, still holding onto my hand. {Don’t worry,} he said. I guess I can call it ‘said’, though I only heard the words inside my mind. {That’s a normal thing for people to imagine when they first experience me speaking into their minds. That was relatively tame, actually. Being a telepath, you get used to these things quickly. You’d be amazed at the kind of rubbish that goes through people’s minds, all the time... But trying not to think about something—that’s the best way to not stop being able to think about it. Believe me, I know.}

I let go of his hand and wiped mine instinctively on my trousers, realised what I was doing, then stopped. Did he notice that? Argh, not again! Think about something else!

“Er, what kind of a name is ‘Mute’ anyway?” I said.

Mute forced a smile and his pimples rearranged. {It’s not my real name. Oh yeah, but you knew that.. It’s meant to be sort of ironic, like, because I can’t speak with my mouth—but as you can hear I can speak perfectly well with my mind. Commander Abram says he thinks it’s safer if we only go by our codenames, even with each other. Um. What’s yours?}

“Go—” I started, then realised he was asking for my superhero name. “Oh, er, I don’t have a codename yet actually.” I tried my best not to think my real name, though he probably heard it anyway. What should I call myself that could preserve my secret identity? How about Gordon? No… “I guess for now, you can just call me ‘G’.” I said it like ‘Gee’.

{‘G’?} A smile pulled at the corner of Mute’s closed mouth. {Got it. ‘G’ for ‘Gangsta’.} The voice in my mind impersonated a colloquial London accent, but not very convincingly. It was weird.

“No, I’m not a gangster,” I said. I didn’t want him to think that ‘G’ was going to be my permanent superhero name. Or ‘Gangster’. That didn’t fit me. “It’s just the initial of my first name. My real name, that is.”

Mute looked at the floor. {Ah, why did I say that? That was a silly joke to make. I must have offended him. I’m really messing this up.}

“No, you’re not, you’re not.” It was my turn to reassure him. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t offended.”

Mute’s mouth popped open, though he still didn’t move it to produce the sounds that I heard in my mind. {Oh no, did you overhear me think that? Sorry, I didn’t mean to project it… Sometimes I project my thoughts by accident… I’m still learning how to control my powers...}

“Hey, don’t worry about it...” I rubbed my arm. I wasn’t used to being the less socially awkward one in a conversation. I didn’t have any practice at it. What was I meant to say? “So am I. It’s all good. To be honest, I was kinda nervous about meeting you too. I actually wondered if you might be a girl, since Commander Abram didn’t tell me.” I chuckled uncomfortably.

Mute chuckled back no less uncomfortably inside my mind. So weird. He held out his hands. {Well, sorry, this is what you got. A spotty ginger kid with telepathy who only recently finished his GCSEs.}

“‘GCSEs’?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation into easier territory. “What are GCSEs? Where are you from, anyway? How did you end up getting recruited by Abram?”

{Um, why don’t I tell you while I give you the tour?} said Mute. {That’s what the Commander asked me to do with you, by the way.}

I agreed and we quit the mess hall by the door he had come in. It led to a bright, white-walled, cream-carpeted corridor with paintings in wooden frames on the walls. Some of them I knew were famous. I recognised Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, Monet’s ‘The Water Lily Pond’. Were they just copies, or were they originals? They couldn’t be the originals.

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The first room Mute showed me was the ‘canteen’. Just like the mess hall, its name did not do it justice. Yes, there may have been a big metal sliding hatch built into one wall, but the room also housed a long, beautifully carved mahogany dining table, several smaller but equally beautiful round satellite tables, and a collection of golden candelabra. There were more famous-looking oil paintings on the walls, and the carpet was intricately patterned with subtly shaded flowers and vines. Above all this, from the ceiling hung a magnificent glass chandelier, splitting the light from the candles into rainbows.

{Yeah,} said Mute in my mind, {it got a bit strange eating my Wheetabix in here by myself every morning. But then I just asked my chef to switch me to fry-ups, so now I eat one of those every morning instead.}

“We have our own chef?” I was surprised because I hadn’t seen anyone else here yet except Abram, his driver George, and now this other kid Mute.

{Oh, no, we don’t have our own chef,} said Mute. {We each get our own individual chef.}

Our own individual chef? What sort of a place was this?

The ‘briefing room’ was just as impressive, though in a different way: it had a wide conference table with a holographic world map projected onto it, set up in front of the largest flat-screen monitor I had ever seen in my life. I could just imagine the important missions we would be sent on from this room already.

The swimming pool—yes, this place had a swimming pool—was incredible too, about four times the size of my local pool in Brooklyn. It had lanes for serious swimming but also a diving board, two hot tubs and no less than three flumes. The flumes seemed like a bit of an unnecessary touch, but I supposed that superheroes needed to have fun too.

This place was unreal. I still couldn’t quite believe that I had been recruited to an organisation that got to call it their ‘Base’.

All the while Mute was showing these rooms to me he never once said a word about where he came from or how he had ended up being recruited by Abram. So after we left the ‘rec room’—a room twice the size of my entire apartment, complete with table tennis, a pool table, and multiple flatscreen TVs and videogame consoles—and were back in one of the corridors, I asked him.

{Oh, right,} he said, {I never answered your question the first time, did I? Silly me. Um, well, if you hadn’t guessed already, I’m from England. Does my voice sound English to you inside your head?}

“Yeah, it does.”

{That’s good. I’m always worried people are going to hear me speaking in their own internal voice. That would really freak them out.}

“It’s cool,” I said. “I always wanted a British friend.”

There was a pause. I hadn’t planned to say it—it had just slipped out. I guess I was still thinking my thoughts aloud. For a moment my eyes searched in the cream of the carpet, looking for some sort of hidden trap door to escape through.

But Mute only said {Cool,} and nodded, and I relaxed. My eyes returned from the floor but I had to move the conversation on or the implicit acknowledgement that we were in fact friends would become too obvious, too awkward. It’s not like we were girls or anything.

“So how did you get over here then?” I asked. “Did Abram fly over and pick you up when your powers manifested?” I had never called it that before but it was obvious what the right term was. I had a language for this kind of thing from comic books and movies, sci-fi novels and videogames. Only now it was like I was in one of those.

{Actually,} said Mute as he started walking down the corridor to another room, {my powers first manifested a while before the Commander found me.} When walking behind Mute it was easier to imagine what he was saying was coming from his mouth, but my ears still didn’t hear any sounds. {I first realised I had the telepathy when I was thirteen, when I started overhearing other people’s thoughts. It scared the crap out of me, I can tell you that, but eventually I got used to it and started using it to my advantage. Reading the teacher’s mind for tests, keeping one step ahead of my Dad, using it to find out which girls fancied me...none of them, it turned out.} He glanced back at me for a moment and gave me a pitiful smile. Was that meant to be a joke? He sounded so pathetic, I couldn’t tell. {That sort of thing. I kept it a secret.}

“How did anyone ever find out then?”

{Um, well…} It was odd to hear someone projecting their own hesitation into your mind. {...eventually I realised that I didn’t just have telepathy, but telekinesis too.}

“Oh, wow,” I said, “that’s awesome.” I knew from comics that ‘telekinesis’ meant ‘being able to move things with your mind’. “How strong is it?”

{I suppose I could show you...} said Mute.

We had stopped outside yet another door, this one with the words ‘WORKOUT ROOM’ printed on it in capitals. The words conjured images of a couple of benches and a few dented free-weights, maybe a single piece of dishevelled gym equipment. That’s what the workout room was at school, although I had only ever been beaten up in it, never used it for myself. But I knew better than to expect that by now.

Still, I wasn’t fully prepared for what I saw when Mute pushed the door open.

Beyond was an expansive state of the art gym. It had a fleet of electronic exercise bikes. It had treadmills and the things with hand-grips I thought of as ‘walkers’. It had whole racks of weights—free and dumbbells—no less than eight punching bags, and a sea of blue mats for floor exercises. It had pieces of gym equipment that I had never seen before, mounted TV screens playing music videos and four different vending machines. It had a wall made out entirely of mirrors so you could watch yourself while you exercised.

Like all of the other rooms and people in this ‘Base’, the workout room seemed to be named slightly ironically.

This time I said it out loud. “This place is unreal.”

Mute took me over to what looked like a metal tennis ball on a mat on the floor. But instead of picking it up, he pointed, directing my attention to a pair of rings I hadn’t noticed before that hung from a couple of ropes attached to the ceiling. I had seen these kinds of rings before on gymnastics programmes on TV, but these ones were so high up it would be impossible for anyone to reach them—they were pointless.

{Let’s see if I can do this...} said Mute. He positioned himself directly underneath the rings, looking up at them, then crouched down. He paused for a moment, apparently contemplating something.

Mute jumped and his whole body shot up into the air. The first instant of the jump was like any regular jump, except that then he kept going.

He moved through the air, all the way up to the rings, caught them with each hand, let his feet keep going past his head, then backflipped around gracefully before letting go and dropping back down to the ground.

He landed a little way from me. He seemed to hover in place just for an instant as he made contact with the ground, then bent his knees to take the strain from the landing.

“Ok, that was awesome,” I said.

His cheeks went red and he shrugged. {Yeah, it is pretty cool I suppose...}

That must be what they call British understatement. “You can basically fly! It’s amazing! What else can you do with it?”

He paused and pursed his lips, though this time I didn’t overhear his thoughts. Then he said {Well, that’s the thing. Look.}

He crouched down on the mat next to the little metal sphere and held out a hand, palm open, in front of it. He shut his eyes and scrunched up his face.

{Rrrrrrr,} I heard in my mind. It was a bit unnerving.

The metal ball lifted about a centimetre from the ground, hovered there for a heartbeat, and then fell back to the mat with an anti-climactic little plop.

Mute opened his eyes and breathed out noisily, like he’d just exerted himself a great deal. {Thing is,} he said, {I have telekinetic control over my own body, so I can fly and do acrobatics and stuff, but my telekinesis is much weaker if I try to use it on anything that isn’t my body.}

“Huh. So you can move yourself with your mind, but not other things?”

{That’s right.} He was blushing again. {But the Commander thinks that with training I’ll be able to move things outside my body too. As you can see, I can already do it a bit. It’s one of the things I practice in my workout sessions in here. I’m sure I’ll get there one day…}

He fidgeted with his foot on the floor. I didn’t need to be a mind-reader to work out that he was embarrassed. But I didn’t know what he had to feel embarrassed about. How could there be someone in the world who was more awkward than I was? I was practically a smooth operator by comparison.

{Um, would you like to see your own custom equipment?}

“My equipment?” I said. “Sure!”

He took me to another part of the gym. Next to the huge weights rack there was another smaller rack with only one set of dumbbell weights mounted on it. This set was painted fluorescent yellow.

{So I hear you have super strength and invulnerability, right? Now that is cool. You should try some of the regular weights.}

“Sure thing.” I went to the big rack and lifted some different weights off of it with one hand—20kg, 30kg, 40kg—replacing them each time. “Easy,” I said.

{Wow. They weren’t lying about how strong you are. Can you lift that yellow one?}

I sauntered up to the side-rack with its fluorescent yellow dumbbells. They did look pretty dumb, if I was honest. Thinking that these would be as easy to lift as any of the others, I took hold of their crossbar with one hand and tugged gently.

Nothing.

They must be caught on something.

I put my other hand on the crossbar as well, and pulled. The weights came off the rack and my muscles tensed as they took the weight of them for an instant, but they were so heavy that I dropped them, and they fell to the matted floor where they landed with a crunch, almost hitting my feet. I let out a yelp like a scared puppy.

The weights had landed still on the mat, without rolling away. When I examined them more closely, I realised that they had dented the concrete floor underneath even through the mat, and were now resting in their own pair of shallow grooves.

{The Commander told me they’re made of Osmium,} said Mute. {Apparently it’s the heaviest metal in the Universe. Until recently it’s been very hard to work with, but a team of German scientists just had a breakthrough and managed to bulk-manufacture it, so the Commander had a set of weights made specially for you. It’s for your strength training. You should try and lift it properly.} He seemed less awkward when he was showing off something he knew or bossing you around. I hoped he hadn’t heard me think that.

I gritted my teeth, crouched down, and wrapped both my hands around the crossbar of the weights again. I took a deep breath and then flexed my legs, pulling against the weights.

Nothing. They were fricking heavy.

This was madness. I wasn’t used to anything being heavy. I had almost forgotten what it felt like. Before my powers, almost everything had been heavy. I wasn’t sure that I liked remembering.

Mute was still watching.

Slowly, I took a deep breath and bit down with my jaw, tensing my biceps as much as I could. This didn’t really show on my arms, as despite now having hyper-muscle density I still had the body of a regular weedy dork.

I gave the weights everything I had. “Raawrr!” My own embarrassing sound of exertion came out.

Miraculously, the dumbbell moved upwards off the floor. I held it about a foot from the ground for just a second, and then something twanged in my back and I dropped it again.

Bam!

“Damn it!”

Another pair of dents appeared in the mat. I stood up again, massaging my back with one hand, and exhaled through my nose.

“Those things sure are heavy.”

{Don’t be down on yourself. I’m sure with training you’ll be able to lift them. Commander Abram says everyone who comes here will have areas where they need to develop with their powers. I suppose we’ll have the head start on the others because we’re the ones who’ve come here first.}

“I guess so.” I ground my teeth, eying the weights in irritation.

{So…that’s pretty much the tour,} said Mute, clearly unsure of what to say next. {What do you think of your new workplace, um...G?}

“I like it,” I said. A thought came to me. “And hey, you know what? I’ve decided what my codename is going to be. It’s obvious, really, if I think about it.”

{Oh yeah?} said Mute. {What are you going to call yourself?}

“Weakling.”