Chum

“What Safeguard said wasn’t exactly wrong,” Puppeteer lectures me from atop the false fire escape, clinging horizontally to the wall in stark defiance of gravity while her strings shimmer in the light of the gymnasium. “Learning to use your powers effectively and creatively will make the difference in a life or death situation.”

“It’s hard to think of creative uses when your power is ‘bite things’ and ‘smell blood’,” I bite back, as she walks her way down the brick facade, making footfall on the padded floor. “There’s not really a non-lethal way to bite a chunk out of someone.”

There’s a very soft, almost imperceptible whoosh as her strings retract into her fingertips. “I don’t agree – but – in that case, we’ll focus for now on alternative skills, and figure out how to work your powers into it later. Hit me.”

“Huh?”

She gets into what I recognize as a jiu-jitsu stance from when my parents tried to make me get into martial arts – slightly hunched over but with a straight back, elbows bent, knees bent, hands open. “There are three essential elements to superheroing – rapid response, disaster aid, and criminal apprehension. If you could get Safeguard into an unbreakable grapple, you could leverage your athleticism advantage over them and easily get them hogtied,” she explains, taking a short, quick step closer. “I’m not a martial arts sensei yet, so I can’t tutor you through this. We all develop our own styles in response to circumstance and our powers. We’ll just have to feel out what works, so… hit me.”

I’ve watched movies and television. I know sort of the essence of boxing, arms up, guarding my face, thumb on the outside of my fist, keeping everything square and even. Puppeteer slowly steps clockwise around me, and I step clockwise around her, taking a step or two closer. There’s a rush of motion, and I aim my fist for her shoulder, trying not to hit her in the face.

It takes less than a half of a second for her to intercept my fist, get in underneath me, and flip me over onto my back, all the way over her. I land on the padded floor with a sharp “Oof,” as the air is forced out of my lungs, splayed out like a flayed starfish.

“First lesson in criminal apprehension – we need to teach you how to take a hit.”

“Bubbelah! It’s good to see you again,” Pop-Pop Moe squeezes me hard and tight, taking his hat off and setting his umbrella in the little umbrella rack that my parents have set out. It’s raining outside, interrupted by an occasional crack of thunder that lights the entire sky up white and purple. “You know, your parents and I missed you last shabbat, it was lonely without your youthful je-ne-sais-quoi!”

I squeeze him back and he tousles my hair before letting me go, allowing me to escort him into the “dining room” of our rowhouse. Our shabbat set-up isn’t as elaborate as his own, but we have the candles set aside in a drawer for such an occasion where the weather is too inclement (that means really bad) to travel to Ventnor. He sits down, his bones audibly creaking and cracking, and stretches out.

My parents are out right now, getting dinner from the nearby supermarket instead of cooking something special. That’s okay, though, I don’t blame them. Cooking is hard! “Sorry, Pop-Pop. I was, um, a little busy,” I reply, looking away from him.

“Oh, I know all about why you were busy, darling. How goes the superheroics, Missus Bloodhound? I hear you’ve already apprehended your first bad guy, mazel tov, mazel tov,” Pop-Pop Moe reaches over to shake my shoulder and get me looking at him again, his smile warm and genuine. “Have you saved any lives?”

I nod. “I’ve, uh, I stopped the bad guy from hurting hostages. And a couple of times on patrol I’ve been able to smell people’s internal injuries and warn them, most of the time they don’t know or think it’s less bad than it is. And this one time, with Raauu… One of my teammates, I actually called 911 for someone who was incapacitated in their home and bleeding out. They hung around on the sidewalk a couple of days later so that they could give me a gift next time they saw me,” I tell him, grabbing the kind of gaudy shark tooth necklace strung around my neck and showing it off proudly. Unlike my little chompers, this one’s a real, genuine shark tooth, about the size of my thumb, shaped like a guitar pick.

Pop-Pop Moe reaches out to squeeze my shoulder softly. “That’s a very good thing you did, Samantha, darling. As it says in the scriptures, ‘to save a single life is the same as saving the whole world’. And that’s a very pretty necklace, I think it suits you well.”

I’m about to say something in response, blushing with shame, or pride, when the front door slams open and two sopping wet adults scramble inside. My mom’s voice is loud, probably loud enough for the neighbors to hear. “Who likes supermarket rotisserie chicken!?”

“Definitely new to the scene – I think it’s entirely possible that you were their very first appearance at all,” Marcus’s voice comes over a little tinny through speakerphone while their face graces the corner of my computer screen. “No local nor national nor international articles, no mentions by name. Can I say for a second how cool it is that you’re letting me be your guy in the chair?”

“You can,” I say, chuckling, not making direct eye contact with my webcam. Marcus’s room is much darker than mine, with glowing LED lights providing most of the illumination, casting his face with a deep blue that’s lit up white and cyan from his two monitors. In the edge of the video stream, I can see his computer, a heavy, lumbering rectangle with heavy black edges and translucent sidings, whirring and humming with life. The occasional flash of lightning illuminates the rest of the bedroom for only a sparse moment or two at a time. “What about unnamed sightings? White helmet, big cape, gothy boots.”

My hip aches quietly. Not from any lingering damage – I got it checked out with a doctor, since it turns out having a LUMA and a secret identity does, in fact, entitle you to certain healthcare rights – but just from the memory of getting stepped on. It makes me burn up inside, that I couldn’t catch them in the act. “In Fishtown slash Northern Liberties? Let’s see…”

I idly sweep through the latest soccer news while Marcus does his magic work. The Philadelphia Union won their latest game, which is exciting. I think in all the hubbub, I kind of forgot to take some time for personal stuff. Maybe for the first time in forever our local soccer team might actually be worth a damn.

“Got it. Just one result, not sure if it’s legit or not. Someone said they saw a supe with a white helmet and big platform boots in an Ace Hardware, getting zip ties, wrenches, just a bunch of equipment. He was waiting in line behind the person when they turned around to ask him if he had read the latest chapter of One Piece. Witness says they were creeped out and didn’t respond, and then the supe paid in cash and left,” Marcus reads out, word by word, adjusting his glasses part-way through. “Weird.”

“What’s One Piece?” I ask.

Marcus doesn’t need to look this one up – I can tell by how he glances at the camera. “Oh, it’s, uh, it’s an old manga about pirates.”

I stare back at him. “What’s a manga?”

He blinks a couple of times. “It’s, uh, a Japanese comic. Here, let me… Hold on. Let me just go with this whim real quick.”

“You’re the smart guy, I trust you.” I reply, continuing to scroll down soccer news. Occasionally, someone in the chatroom tries to shill for their local hyperball league stream, and it’s starting to get annoying, so I block them and report them to the mods for spamming. I’m here for soccer, damnit.

His fingers clack at his mechanical keyboard as he types. “Safeguard… manga…” he mumbles to himself, presumably doing a NetSphere search. Then, he starts laughing as his scroll wheel clicks. “You’re gonna love this.”

“What is it?”

He starts reciting a Wikipedia page to me – I can see the reflection of the logo in his glasses. “Blame, stylized as, all caps, BLAME!, with an exclamation point at the end, is a Japanese science fiction manga series written and illustrated by Tsutomu Nihei, published from 1997 to 2003… Yadda yadda… Okay, first thing – Safeguard named themselves after the antagonist of a really obscure manga, probably. Secondly, whoever named NetSphere, the company, is a huge nerd.”

“Huh?”

“Here, let me just send you the link…”

I’m not a fan of going shopping for school supplies. Yet here I am, in the middle of a Target, while my mother oohs and aahs over every little frugal deal. “You know, not spending any money at all is cheaper than buying things that are on sale,” I say, to no avail, my pleas falling on deaf ears. My urges feel overwhelming, one of my teeth fell out this morning, and even with a phone and a game on hand, I can’t stop myself from getting distressingly bored.

“I told you, Sam, we need to get you a new bookbag and binders for all of your classes, and we’re not going to leave here until you’ve found ones that you like,” she says, hands on her hips as she turns away from something that’s demonstrably not school supplies (demonstrably means, like, “it can be demonstrated”, if that makes sense?) and tut tuts in my general direction. “Plus, I’d like to get you a first aid kit. You know, just in case.”

“In case I get hurt? Please. My friends have been helping me train,” I reply, balling my fists up and getting into a boxing stance.

“Huh? No, silly, in case someone gets hurt at school and you’re the one to help them,” she replies, turning her body back towards the shelves full of deals but keeping her head halfway between that and me. “That’s what you do, right?”

“Does it get harder for you to fly the higher up you go?” I ask Gale, our feet dangling a little precariously off the edge of one of the taller buildings along South Street, watching people below us. We’ve figured out over the weeks that my power’s radius is roughly spherical, which generally means being on the ground is best for detecting problems en masse, but being high up gives us a better vantage point on the whole street at once, which is more important. The Rita’s beneath us has a long line stretching out along the sidewalk, even as the sun starts going down far enough to paint the sky bright orange and pink and it’s not so hot anymore. “Like, doesn’t the air get thinner?”

A drone buzzes around our head, likely streaming us to someone’s phone, but I ignore it.

“Yeah, it does, but I usually don’t go that high anyway. Maybe it’s just me, but having your activation event happen during what your brain assumes is a plane crash has made me a little afraid of heights, heh,” Gale answers, her voice only slightly muffled by her scarf. I’ve come to realize over the patrols that she uses her wind powers probably completely subconsciously to project her voice, which is really cool. Maybe one day I can have my powers be just like that – something I don’t even think about, just act on and use like they’re breathing and walking. “It’s like… my control is over a volume of air, I think, is the physics word. So the higher I go and the thinner the air gets, the weaker I get, because the air is less dense but I can still only control the same volume.”

“And does it like… weigh? Like, do you strain your muscles by lifting things?” I ask in return.

Gale laughs a little bit and flexes one of her arms. I look away immediately, pretending to have noticed something on the ground, and she laughs harder. “It does, yeah. I think most people that have powers you could call “telekinetic” have it get exerted on their muscles. That’s why I can only lift, like, two people at a time. Myself and you. Or, like, myself and another person.”

“Neat,” I say, gently pulling myself away from the edge of the rooftop, mostly so I can adjust my mask and itch my nose. Whenever I’m around Gale and we’re talking too long, my nose itches. I don’t like it, but I don’t have any control over it either.

“Why do you ask?” she asks, still watching the street below us instead of looking at me repeatedly fumbling balls.

“Just kind of curious. I think it’s important to get a grip on all my teammates powers, you know? Think about how we could use them together effectively,” I say, trying to make up a compelling excuse that’s not ‘because I want to know more about you’. At this point, I think I’ve successfully identified the emotions that Gale makes me feel, but I’m really, really not interested in putting a name to them, because I’m not a lesbian.

Wow, that sentence feels weird in my internal monologue. No. No, no, no.

“If only my range was bigger than yours, because now I’m wondering if I could use my wind control to carry the smell of blood to you,” Gale muses, making me blush hysterically. I feel my entire body going bright red, especially my ears. “Now I’m wondering if it really is a smell thing. Like, do you think it would still work with a sinus infection? That might be a problem during the winter when everyone’s stuffed up.”

“No, I actually tried that with Puppeteer. We shoved tissues up my nose and then she poked her finger open with a lancet. Totally fine. Honestly, maybe even a little easier to detect. Wasn’t distracted by gym smells,” I answer.

Gale nods along, humming quietly to herself. “So you have ESP, then.”

I finish itching my face and sit back down next to her. “Huh? Are you saying I’m psychic?”

“I guess? It just means extra-sensory perception. Like, you have a new sense that’s not related to any of the other ones. I wonder if there’s maybe a sensory organ for detecting blood in the air somewhere in your body, that would be cool,” she replies, tilting her head in my general direction and smiling at me through her scarf. “Or maybe you really just are straight up psychic like I am. It turns out a lot of superpowers can be boiled down to either ‘psychic’ or ‘weird biology’.”

“Do you have weird biology?”

Gale laughs. “I have tiny holes in my fingertips where the wind comes out.”

“Seriously?”

She gently elbows me in the ribs. “No, goofball. If I could make my own wind it would make my life a lot easier.”

I rub my chin in thought. “I think you can, actually?”

Gale turns her entire head towards me now, eyebrow raised. “Oh, really? How?”

It takes a significant amount of effort to say what I have in mind with a straight face. “Just eat a lot of beans before you go on patrol. Problem solved.”

She starts blushing like mad, cheeks puffed up, while my mask’s jaws snap together with my laughter, sending a soft claka-claka-claka through the air. Eventually, she gives up being a little offended by a childish fart joke, and starts laughing along with me. It feels nice.