Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (4 page)

“Impossible,” Concorde says.

“I don’t care to label anything as impossible,” Dr. Quentin says. “What do we have for readings?”

Concorde consults the main display. “No radiation signatures matching any known profiles,” he reports. “Very minor changes in air pressure, I assume from the item appearing in the testing area, but that’s it. Nothing else of consequence.”

“Nothing? You’re certain?” Dr. Quentin shoulders past Concorde, angrily taps the control panel, scowls.

“I specifically scanned for Hawking radiation, because I knew you’d theorized he was creating a Lorentzian traversable wormhole, but there’s nothing, no trace of any kind of electromagnetic radiation whatsoever.”

Dr. Quentin releases a slow, growling breath. “In lieu of any evidence to the contrary, I must assert my original hypothesis: your gloves are magic,” she informs Matt, uttering the word
magic
with pronounced disgust. “You’re done. Clear the lab.”

“Can I get a please, maybe?” Matt says.

“Please, get your magic gloves the hell out of my lab.”

“I’d like to know a little more about how they work,” Concorde says.

“Then go consult that sorceress with whom you associate. That is why you keep her around, yes?”

“Dr. Quentin, it’s not his fault his gloves are magical,” I say, feeling a little silly in doing so. I mean, come on, I’m defending magic Mickey Mouse gloves.

“I despise magic. It defies all the laws of the natural universe, and I’ll have no truck with it.”

“What if my powers turn out to be magical?”

“Then I’ll consider this one of the most crushingly disappointing days of my life. Get down there. Make me happy.”

The first few minutes of my test involve standing in the middle of the lab, doing nothing while a mechanical arm sweeps me head-to-toe with a scanner. Dr. Quentin tells me to hold out my hands. The scanner hovers over them, emitting a pulsing red light, like a bar code reader at the supermarket.

“Look at that,” Dr. Quentin says, awestruck. “Look at that!”

I look to the control room. Dr. Quentin is wearing a giddy smile. Looks like I made her happy. Go me.

Concorde appears over her shoulder. “That’s impossible.”

“There’s that word again. This is...oh, my...”

“What? What is it?” I say.

“You have stars in your hands.”

I have what?

“I’m sorry, that was rather hyperbolic, but for want of a better description, it was accurate enough,” Dr. Quentin says. “The objects in your hands are super-condensed plasma, almost identical to the plasma of which stars are composed.”

“They sure didn’t look like stars. They looked like, I don’t know, yellowish marbles.”

“Excuse me?” I tell Dr. Quentin about my run-in with Manticore, my stomach churning from the too-fresh memory of him carving the source of my power out of my palms. Breathe, Carrie, oxygen is your friend...

Concorde turns to Dr. Quentin. The control room microphone barely picks him up, which makes eavesdropping a challenge. “Assuming these are artificial constructs,” he says, “it’s possible they automatically revert to an inert state when removed from their host to avoid an uncontrolled fission reaction.”

“Very likely,” Dr. Quentin says, “but that means the plasma is rendered coherent by something other than a gravitational field.”

“It’s also possible the plasma itself is naturally inert. They don’t generate the energy independently, but act as a conduit to a larger primary power source.”

“Trans-galactic energy transmission?”

“If those things are receptors rather than self-contained generators, it would explain a lot.”

“Hmmm. Intriguing hypothesis.”

Mental note: pay more attention in science class so I can understand what the heck they’re saying.

Dr. Quentin keeps the scanner running as I power up and put on a little show. I glow, I float, I fly, I zap some targets. Dr. Quentin
mm-hmm
s and grunts and
I see
s.

“Concorde tells me when you flew here this morning, you achieved a speed of mach three at approximately thirty thousand feet above sea level,” she says.

“That’s right.”

“Hmm. Let’s try something: I want you to take a deep breath, let it out completely, then refrain from inhaling again until I tell you to do so. And please stay powered up.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Proceed.” I proceed. “While we’re waiting, I’m going to ask you some questions. Please respond non-verbally as best as you can. Understood?”

I nod.

“You’re in high school now, correct? A sophomore?”

I nod.

“How are your grades?”

Two thumbs up.

“In every subject?”

I shake my head and make a plus sign with my fingers.

“Bad at math?”

Nod.

“
Tsk
. Pathetic.”

The questions fly at me with no clear rhyme or reason. Dr. Quentin asks about my parents’ divorce and my relationship with my mother, if I own any pets, what my favorite color is, what sort of movies I like, how many books I read, what I think of the president...

“Are you romantically involved with any of your teammates?”

Whoa, that’s a curveball. I shake my head.

“Are you romantically
interested
in any of them?”

Nope. Not even a little.

“Someone on the Protectorate, then?”

What?! No no no no no...

“Gwendolyn,” Concorde says.

“I need to keep her distracted. You have your methods, I have mine.” I raise my hand. “Yes?”

“Can I start breathing again?”

“Why? Do you need to?”

“Well, yeah,” I say, “I think I do.”

“Do you?” Dr. Quentin says, smiling impishly. “You haven’t breathed for nearly four minutes.”

FOUR

Here are a few of the many interesting things I learned today:

One: Stuart can dead-lift a little over seven tons (Joe Quentin, by comparison, can dead-lift about eighteen tons), and he’s tough enough to take a direct hit from an air-to-ground missile without harm. Something stronger, like one of those bunker buster jobs, would bang him up, and it would hurt like hell, but it probably wouldn’t kill him. Probably. This Dr. Quentin determined by shooting Stuart with a special bullet (which she designed, naturally) that measured how Stuart’s skin responded to the impact.

Two: Missy, while not Stuart strong, is still freakishly strong. An athletic fifteen-year-old Missy’s size should be able to bench-press in the neighborhood of ninety pounds. Missy topped out at 185. Also, her reaction time (“The time between the presentation of external sensory stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response,” according to Dr. Quentin) is about three times that of a normal human.

Three: Sara needs to practice, practice, practice. The nature of her powers was a known quantity, but Mindforce wanted to see how well she handled her telekinesis, and the answer was like a caveman with a club. She could throw up a shield and hit things with a telekinetic battering ram like nobody’s business, but catching things thrown at her? Delicate manipulation? Fail. She tried to work a Rubik’s Cube using her telekinesis, and wound up blowing it to pieces.

Four: Matt has magic gloves. Dr. Quentin hates magic. Moving on.

Five: wow, where do I begin?

For starters, I’ll begin by saying I apparently should not have been able to make the flight to the Quantum Compound. Between the severe decrease in air pressure, the thin oxygen content, and the below-zero temperatures, I should have been half-dead from hypothermia and hypoxic hypoxia (in simpleton’s terms, a serious lack of oxygen) long before I broke the sound barrier.

And hey, speaking of that! Instantly accelerating from a dead stop to mach one could have killed me, or at the very least caused me to black out. Stay with me, because this gets a little complex. A human traveling at supersonic speed pulls about nine
g
s (one
g
being equivalent to the normal force of gravity on a stationary subject). A human flying at mach one in what pilots call an “eyeballs out” position (flat on their belly, head leading the way) can tolerate about twelve
g
s for several minutes before bad things start to happen — losing consciousness, for example, caused by g-forces pushing all the blood in the body away from the brain. That’s why pilots wear special suits when flying supersonic aircraft for prolonged periods.

I don’t have one of those. So, you might ask, how am I able to fly at stupid crazy speeds without dying? According to Dr. Quentin, when I’m powered up, my entire body completely transforms into the same coherent super-condensed plasma my power sources are made of. I literally become a living star.

Mind
blown
.

“That is
nuts
,” Sara says. “I thought you just got all glowy.”

“So did I, but no, it’s a full-body transformation. Dr. Quentin said any physical sensations I experience when I’m powered up are psychosomatic responses: I believe I should be breathing because I have no reason to believe I
shouldn’t
.”

“Did Dr. Quentin really say she wanted to write a paper on you?”

“I think she’d dissect me if she could,” I say to the mocha latté I’ve been holding in my hand for the past ten minutes. Every time I go to take a sip, I wonder: do I really desire the delicious combination of chocolate, coffee, and steamed milk (expertly prepared by Jill, queen of the Coffee Experience baristas), or is it raw instinct tricking me into behaving like a human?

As unnerving as the concept of becoming a not-human humanoid star kind of thing is, I’m actually more freaked out by how much potential I have. Dr. Quentin hit me with a quickie course on the nature of stars, and sure, ninety percent of it went
way
over my head, but I grasped the basic concept: I can manipulate light, heat, various forms of radiation, electromagnetism, and gravity. In theory, I’m capable of bending light to become invisible, projecting energy as harmless as a flashlight beam or as destructive as a nuclear bomb, increasing or negating gravity in other objects, emitting an electromagnetic pulse that’ll kill any electronics within range — Dr. Quentin thinks I’ve barely scratched the surface of my abilities.

Overwhelmed? Yeah, just a little.

“Guess I got off lucky, then,” Matt mopes. I feel bad for the guy. He has no luck when it comes to meeting his super-hero icons; he grew up idolizing Concorde only to learn he’s a complete tool, then the greatest scientific mind of our age harshes on him, just because he had the dumb luck to find his grandfather’s magic gloves.

“She doesn’t hate
you
, you know,” I say. “I bet if you got a chance to talk science with her, she’d be all over it.”

“Yeah, like I’m ever going to get another chance.”

“I promise, when I figure out how to do something new with my powers, I’ll offer to show off for her so you can come with me, and then you can dazzle her with your keen grasp of all things sciencey.”

This does not mollify him; Matt shrugs apathetically. Okay, let’s try something else.

“Dr. Quentin mentioned someone on the Protectorate who could look at your gloves, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, she was referring to Dr. Enigma,” Matt says. “She’s the team’s go-to expert on magical stuff.”

“There you go. Next time I talk to Concorde, I’ll see if he can set something up.”

“Oh, thanks ever so.”

“What’s with the sarcasm? I’m trying to help you.”

“Sure, maybe you could ask him to make me a cool suit like yours too.”

“I kid you not, there we were,” Sara says, “in the freakin’ Congo.”

“Seriously?”

“Well, don’t dump on Carrie because the Protectorate gave her a costume and not you. It’s not her fault your outfit looks like ass.”

“You cannot make your own candle burn brighter by extinguishing someone else’s,” Missy says.

“That’s deep, Muppet,” Stuart says. “Is that something from Grandpa Mifune?”

“No, it was my fortune yesterday, remember?”

“Oh yeah. The fortune cookie, it is wise.”

“And yummy.”

“Are you done now?” Sara asks Matt. “Can we get back to enjoying our Saturday or are you going to be in a snit all afternoon?”

“Okay, fine, I’m done. See? Snitless.” Matt flashes a plastic grin at us. “Happy guy, right here. Ready for fun.”

So yes, he
is
going to be in a snit all afternoon,
I think at Sara,
but I bet if we can distract him enough, he’ll forget all about this morning.

He does have the attention span of a five-year-old, doesn’t he?
Sara says.

“We were going to game, right?” I say. “So let’s do it. Let’s go kill orcs, or Cthulhus, or whatever.”

“I like this plan and am proud to be a part of it,” Stuart says.

We pick up our drinks and head out. The cloud cover has broken up to reveal a bright midwinter sun, but the afternoon air remains biting and chilly. Or does it? Am I just imagining that it’s cold out because I expect it to be cold out?