Report Assessment 13

  We are thrilled that you have managed to find a way to layer sources of power on top of the Fox Instinct. Not even the greatest of our standard bearers have managed to secure this much potential for growth.

  Caution, though, is surely the order of the day. There is no way to know exactly how the Fox Instinct, Dark Energy source, and the Emotional Gemfield will interact. Not only could the interactions be unpredictable, but they could also prove to be dangerous beyond what you are equipped to handle.

  Lean on your relationship with Gem Blade. But be careful that she doesn’t exert too much influence over you. You are the leader of the Bay Area Superhero Alliance because of your stability and discernment. I know you look up to Sniffer Sleuth, but he hardly has the experience in combat that you do.

  I am also beginning to suspect that Gem Blade may be starting to become enamored with you outside what is appropriate for working peers. Be sure to enforce your professional boundaries. The last thing we need is for BASA to be compromised by romantic drama.

  Ever in your corner,

  “Kitten”

  Response to Report Assessment 13

  I can be sure Gem Blade isn’t interested in me in that way. And I don’t believe in the gossip claiming that she indulged in a romantic relationship with any of her heroic colleagues. Other than that time she admitted to kissing Captain Iron.

  That was likely just adolescent excitement and physical chemistry. The kind of thing that can happen when meeting any celebrity. She’s been nothing but professional with me so far.

  —Fox

  Response to the Response to RA13

  Oh honey… you aren’t serious are you? If even half of what you’ve said is true (did she seriously twirl her hair?) then she’s been sending you signals like crazy. I love the drama, but I love our mission more.

  Wise up,

  “Kitten”

  RE, RE, Response to RA13

  Point taken. I’ll be careful.

  —Fox

  Red Fox Action Log 51:

  We got to talking at the gas station.

  Gunnar and I ran in for snacks first, but the others trickled in, much to Sniffer Sleuth’s chagrin. I knew that my prosthetic made it a little easier to drop the snacks than others, but I wanted to prove — maybe just to myself — that I was getting better at using it. I managed to grab some pudding cups for Cynthia, and tea for Twitch. Apparently, with how powerfully smell is attached to memory, even those stuck between here and the veil beyond have something like smell.

  Also, she’d asked us to drop her previous name, and stick with Twitch. Said something about ‘her parents choosing it to conform with British colonial values’ or something. I thought it was kind of cool. I just went by Fox now too.

  So anyway, she liked making tea just to have something to smell. Her hands also had some feeling to them, just enough that she didn’t crush things she touched, and liked to feel the warm cup too.

  “I wonder what flying is like,” Gunnar said, referring to Bronze Boy tearing across the sky on our way here. He paid for the snacks.

  One of the few benefits to being a ghost in armor was that she could use as much magical propulsion as she wanted without it hurting her body. This seemed to violate the laws of conservation of energy, but I knew almost nothing about magic so I assumed it was fine.

  “I haven’t gotten tired of it yet,” Twitch said. “It’s almost better than sex.”

  “Almost?” Gunnar asked incredulously.

  “If you do it right,” she answered, taking my bottle of tea and pouring it into her coffee cup. She then put it in the microwave and pushed the ‘add 30’ button til she got a minute and a half.

  “Sex or flying?” Gunnar asked. “Twitch. Were you talking about sex or flying?”

  “Inuendo…” Bronze Boy said mysteriously.

  “I said we’d just time for one to run in but now we have basically the entire car here,” Sleuth admonished.

  “I need to stretch my legs too,” Cynthia said. “So let's just consider this a little break. We can be back on the road in ten minutes.”

  “You’ll have five,” Sleuth said, grabbing a bag of gummy worms.

  “Eight?” Cynthia offered.

  “Starting now,” Sleuth said firmly, glancing at his watch.

  Cynthia grabbed the pudding cup from me and we sat at a booth on the cafe side of the gas station.

  “That van has a rattle,” Cynthia said, digging her plastic spoon into the pudding cup, and eating her first bite. She closed her eyes, and sighed. A little bit of chocolate smeared across her lips.

  “It’s brand new,” I said, maybe too defensively. “It doesn’t have a rattle.”

  She took another bite and made an ‘I don’t know’ sound.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” I offered.

  “Sure!”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “What’s with the pudding cups?”

  Twitch sat in the booth a bit of a ways down. Gunnar, and Sleuth sat with her.

  “Oh. I just have a sweet tooth,” she said. “Always have.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well. Not just that. Look. When I was a kid, my mom was this huge health nut. We had a, well, he wasn’t a personal chef. He was just a guy we hired to cook for us. Because my mom worked a lot.”

  “How is that not a personal chef?”

  “Well, a personal chef is for rich people? Giuseppe was sort of just like a babysitter who cooked.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Anyway. He cooked great food but it was always low in sodium, and she didn’t believe in dessert. So when I was a kid, I’d get the driver —”

  “The driver?”

  “Maybe I was a little rich.”

  “I have no comment.”

  “Anyway, I’d sneak out with the driver on the way home from school to a convenience store, and I’d get chips, chocolate, whatever I was craving. Eventually, pudding cups. Then when I got famous, I made a deal with a japanese company for these bad boys, and now I get them for free. When I’m somewhere long enough to wait for the mail.”

  “Don’t you get tired of them?” I asked.

  “Why?” she asked, a horrified look crossing her face. “It’s chocolate.”

  She finished the cup, tossed it into a trash can from fifteen yards away, and gave me a satisfied grin.

  “Can’t argue with that,” I said.

  “What about you?” she asked. “You know all this stuff about me, and I know basically nothing about you.”

  “What do you want to know? I’m not a secrets guy. Shoot.”

  She laughed, and ran her fingers through her part. She wore a less conspicuous outfit today, a black-with-white-polkadot sundress and white stockings. She looked radiant.

  “Come on!” she prodded. “You’re like Mr. Cheery Mystery Man. Nothing bothers you. You offer nothing.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “How about this,” she said, a conspiratorial glint in her eye. “I take you flying — right now — and you tell me something that you haven’t told anyone else in the group.”

  She stood and took my hand. Her palms were slightly sweaty, but I felt a thrill anyway. Look, I told you before — I am just sort of touchstarved. It didn’t really mean anything.

  “You have five minutes!” Sleuth called as she led me out the front door.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She laughed, and we were tumbling off into the sky, falling up into infinity.

  The wind whipped around us, and my stomach shot into my throat. I wasn’t afraid of heights, but it wasn’t long before the ‘high’ became ‘very high.’ First the convenience store was doll sized, then half that, then matchbox sized, then we were up into the low lying clouds.

  It wasn’t cold. It took me a moment to realize why.

  The gem in my palm glowed. She’d activated it somehow. I had the field around me but it was brighter now.

  “This is too high!” I yelled.

  You don’t have to yell, she said as a calming voice in my mind. Also, I have you. The gemfield has you. You are perfectly safe.

  I laughed in a giddy, rollercoaster way, and looked from the world below to her. Her eyes shone with warmth. Not just in the emotion, but in the gemfield too. Her hand in mine showed her blue field of energy envelope mine. They’d merged, swirled into each other.

  Then she took off. We flew higher and higher, up into the clouds that beaded water droplets on the outside of our fields — surprisingly hydrophobic. Then, suddenly, we were above them.

  The clouds stretched out below us like a fluffier, hillier earth — massive mountains and peaks of white cotton candy. It was very bright, and heartaching beautiful. I’ve seen something like this out the window of a plane. But that view had been like a painting on the wall. Now, I was in the painting. It was everywhere, overwhelming.

  There was so much sky, and it went on forever. We were also very notably alone.

  I wanted to talk to her the way she’d talked to me. When she had, I’d felt something like my mind but just to the side of it. I know that sounds like nonsense, but that’s the only way I could explain it. It’s like someone had opened up extra space right next to my head, my mind. It tried shifting my focus there, and then thought

  Do you do this with all the boys?

  Cynthia laughed. She’d heard me! Her hair almost had a violet tint in the blue light, and it flowed behind her slowly, as if through water.

  Not all the boys. I heard her say. And not anyone in a long time.

  Thank you then. I know it’s not a big deal for you, but I’ve dreamt of something like this.

  You’re welcome.

  She pulled me around to face her, and put a steadying hand on my hip, rather than have to deal with my hook. I didn’t quite mind that part.

  Where’s my secret? I felt her say.

  Uh, I had posters of you on my bedroom wall?

  That’s not a secret.

  Then what about the fact that guns terrify me. Even with my new power, I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.

  Oh, now, that is interesting.

  We gazed into each other’s faces, and I felt an invitation.

  This is a lot for me right now, I told her through our connection. Can we go down now?

  Sure, she answered. But why? What’s so overwhelming?

  I want to understand how my new powers work, and I want to know more about you, and I want this team to work out. It has to work out. Adding one more thing may be too much.

  What ‘one more thing’ are you talking about?

  I tried to keep my mind comfortably blank. I gave her a smile I hoped wasn’t too uncomfortable.

  Right, I heard.

  She spun me back out, and we flew back into the clouds. The journey down was a little longer than the journey up. I didn’t mind, of course.

  Then, before I even realized it, we were hovering just an inch off the parking lot. She let go of my hand, and my feet landed back on the solid asphalt.

  The next five hours of driving wasn’t too bad. Gunnar had burned a couple mix CDs for the trip, and he drove the exact amount above the speed limit to not acquire too much notice from the traffic cops. We had good conversation. Cynthia rode in the front this time. With her superior eyesight, she was always the first to spot deer or some other animal.

  I fell asleep at some point, unaware of how tired I was until it happened.

  When I awoke, I noticed that I’d fallen asleep on Sleuth. He gave me an uncomfortable smile that told me that he wouldn’t have chosen for that to happen, but didn’t want to wake me regardless. I gave him an appreciative nod.

  Georgia had thick forests and small towns. It reminded me of East Texas, where I’d grown up. Nostalgia hung around me like a nosy neighbor.

  Some more adventure later, we pulled up to the man’s house. I noticed some shotgun casings on the ground. We were out in the sticks, so that wasn’t so out of the ordinary.

  My Fox Instinct was quiet, so I knew it was just my baggage acting up.

  A person in a camo bullet resistant vest with pockets, and patches all over it approached carrying two cups of coffee. I also spied the pink semi-automatic pistol on his hip. Rick excited the vehicle and greeted them with a smile.

  “Marshal! You brought me coffee!”

  “And a black tea with milk for the boy,” he said, handing me the disposable cup. “Is that Gem Blade?”

  Cynthia introduced herself.

  I updated my understanding of this person’s identity now that I was able to spot more about him. The multicolored flag was supposed to indicate a minority gender or sexual identity. The big fluffy gray beard probably meant sexual minority, but HRT was supposed to be damn good now, so who knows.

  I’ll have to have the Foundation send me a packet on what some of this stuff meant. I didn’t really know the pride flags outside the main one, and understanding vulnerable minority groups was just part of the job.

  Additionally, ‘gun people’ made me nervous. I grew up in the South, so I’ve been around guns my whole life. Maybe that was the problem.

  But, now that I met this man, I’d have to update my understanding of ‘gun enthusiast’ a bit. I took a sip of the tea. It was my favorite brand. Delicious. Likely Rick’s work.

  “It’s a great cup of tea, sir.”

  “Call me Marshal,” he said with a smile. “You look uncomfortable.”

  “I’m fine. Just keen to get inside and away from prying eyes.”

  “You’re out in the middle of nowhere son, but come on.”

  We hiked up the hill to the cabin. Marshal led us in. Sitting at a table, reading a book, was Nora.