Sensation: A Superhero Novel (7 page)

            “Name,” he said, impatiently. 

            I was so lost in my reverie it took me a second to realize that this was the second time he’d actually said it.  And I was flummoxed.  In all our preparations - coming up with a persona, working on fingerprints, brainwaves, etc. - we had never settled on what name I would use.  I stood there in silence for a few seconds, trying to come up with something.  Suddenly, a deep baritone sounded behind me.

            “He’s asking for a name, kid.”  I didn’t have to turn to look; I knew who it was.  But I turned anyway, and there he was.  Alpha Prime.

            It’s not every day that you get addressed directly by the world’s greatest superhero.  He stood a few inches taller than Paramount - more evidence that his son still had a little ways to go before he equaled him.  For a big man, he moved rather quietly, the only sound being the slight billow of his cape.  Then I remembered that you rarely ever saw him walk; either he zipped around at super speed, flew, or - when not in a rush - he just floated from one spot to another, his superiority and supremacy ever-evident.

            “Your name, kid,” he repeated, with just a hint of impatience.  I felt a sudden fury building, which wasn’t typical for me, at the thought of being rushed.  I would come to understand later that much of what I said and did over the next few days - particularly at the end - was because I wasn’t myself in a certain sense.  My altered brainwaves had indeed resulted in some alterations to my personality. 

            Alpha Prime frowned in concentration.  “Do I know you?”

            “No,” I said with finality.  Fist balled in fury, I turned to the guy at the table and - latching on to the moniker I’d just inadvertently been given - angrily stated, “Kid.”

             “What…?”  The guy was clearly taken back by my vehemence.

            “Kid,” I said again, recognizing my own anger and trying to speak with more civility.  “My name is Kid.”

            The registrar harrumphed and shot me an odd glance before going back to typing.  I turned back to the source of my anger, Alpha Prime, but he was gone, floating off through the crowd, shaking hands and wishing everyone good luck.

            “Powers?” the registrar said a few seconds later.

            “Flight,” I replied.

            He waited, looking at me expectantly.  Finally he asked, “That’s it? Flight?”

            “Isn’t that enough?”

            He shrugged.  “Suit yourself.  Now before I print your name tag, are you sure that this is what you want - ‘Kid’?”

            “Yeah.”

            “No ‘Kid Flight’ or ‘Kid Sky’ or-”

            “Just ‘Kid,’” I said.  I took the name tag after it was printed and went into the League’s headquarters.

****************************

            Inside Alpha League HQ, a large waiting room had been filled with folding chairs for those of us trying out.  I took a seat and waited for my name to be called along with thousands of other hopefuls. Basically, when called, we simply had to go into a nearby side room and demonstrate our powers.

            I looked at my name tag, which said “Kid-1.”  I didn’t understand the purpose of the numeric designation until later, when a fight broke out between two kids who had both chosen the name “Templar.”  Apparently, the assistant calling in the next candidate had forgotten to state the number designation, so each Templar thought the other was trying to steal his place in line.  Fortunately, the situation was resolved rather quickly, but not before one Templar pulled a glowing sword out of the ether and took a few swings at his adversary who, from what I could see, may not have had any powers at all.

Truth be told, about ninety-five percent of applicants get weeded out at this stage of the trials.  Basically, they don’t have any powers to speak of, but just want an opportunity to meet a couple of their superhero idols.  Another three percent will have negligible powers - abilities that really don’t amount to much.  (As BT had put it, the ability to float half an inch off the floor and such.)  The remaining two percent of participants will constitute the sweet spot among the applicants. 

The time passed quickly and quietly for the most part.  The one notable event occurred when Paramount came walking through on the way to his test, followed by a gaggle of reporters, all vying to get his attention for a second.  As they went past me, one of the reporters on the outskirts of this small mob suddenly stumbled, having snapped a heel on her two-inch stilettos.  I reacted quickly, standing up and catching her before she could fall.

            “Crap!” she shouted, angrily taking off the shoe and its mate. “As if there wasn’t enough going wrong!”

            “Sorry,” I said.  “Next time I’ll let you fall.”

            “What?”  She seemed to notice me for the first time.  She put a hand up and pulled back her hair.  She was in her early twenties, and actually kind of cute.  “I’m sorry, not you.  Thanks.”

            “No problem.”

            “It’s just…I really needed a good story here today.  This is my last shot.”  She suddenly looked kind of tearful.  “I thought if I could just get a question or two with someone like Paramount, it could get my career back on the right track.”

            I chuckled.  “Unless you’ve got an audience that numbers in the millions, you can give up on getting anything out of him, or Vestibule, or any of the other household names.”

            “Great.  Just great.”

            “Hey, if it’ll help, you can interview me.” 

            She looked skeptical.  “And you are…?”

            “Kid,” I said.  “Just Kid,” I added, when she looked like she was expecting more.

            “And what makes you so special that we should get you on tape?”

            “Because,” I said,  “in a week, you won’t be able to get this interview.”

            She thought about what that meant.  Normally, after the Super Trials, any teens selected were forbidden to give interviews, and media access to them was restricted in the extreme.  Interviewing a teen who later made it onto a superhero team was a coup for reporters at these events.  Telling her that I wouldn’t be available for interviews in the future was dropping a hint that I was someone special. 

            “Alright,” she muttered after deliberating for a few seconds, “but you better be worth it,
kid
.” She emphasized the last word, implicating it both as my moniker and as a generic designation.  “Sid, let’s get set up over here…”

            She motioned to someone behind me - a cameraman that I hadn’t noticed before.  She then had me step over to a nearby wall, which would serve as the background.  She ran her fingers through her hair again and then spent a few seconds straightening out her clothes.

            Sid held up his hand, palm open.  “Ready to go in five, four, three…”   He folded his fingers into his fist as he counted down, going silent on the last two digits.

            The newswoman gave a beaming smile. “Hi, I’m Sylvia Gossett, reporting to you live from this year’s Super Trials.  I have with me one of the hopefuls…”

            We had about a five-minute interview.  As with so many other things that happened then, I don’t know what made me go on-camera with her, as I had intended to keep a low profile.  (Again, I attribute it to the altered brainwaves.)  To this day, however, it remains the only known interview with - and one of only two pieces of film footage containing - the infamous Kid Sensation.

            Following the interview, I didn’t have to wait long for my name to be called.  I was ushered down a short hallway by a pretty redhead who was assisting with registration, and into what was basically a large conference room approximately twenty by thirty feet in size.  At one end was an elongated table at which sat three superheroes - two men and one woman:  Mouse, Rune, and Esper, each with a laptop in front of them.

            Mouse was a fairly new member of the League at that juncture, and as such no one knew much about him - a fact that didn’t change much over the next few years.

            Rune was an enigma and a true human spectacle.  His entire body was covered from head to foot in strange designs: ancient symbols, weird hieroglyphs, obscure characters.  He was generally considered to be some type of magician.  Because of his appearance, he was one of the less-popular superheroes; speaking bluntly, the runes that covered him gave most people the creeps.  Even more disturbing, some of them appeared to be moving.

            Esper, the telepath, had a two-fold job here.  In addition to observing participants demonstrate their powers, she also took a cursory glance into their brains to make sure that people were who they said they were (i.e., nobody was a supervillain or a mole for one).

            “Next contestant,” said Rune with a grin, “come on down.”

            As I approached, I could feel a slight probing into my mind - Esper - and I knew what she’d see.  Again, I had been trained by Nightmare, a psychic who - in his prime - had known no equal.  As such, I had learned the trick of having a steady stream of male-teenager thoughts running along the surface of my brain: “Cute girl…”, “Video games…”, “Football…” and the like were on a continuous loop in my head, but outside my mental castle.  Satisfied, Esper withdrew from my mind as gently as she had entered, and it’s a testament to my grandfather’s training that she never knew that I had been aware of her presence.

            Mouse looked up from his laptop.  “The Kid,” he said with a bit of a snort.  “It says here you can fly. Let’s see it.”

            I floated up about a foot off the floor, waiting silently as they eyed me.

            “Technically, that’s not flying,” said Rune after an eternity, although it was really about fifteen seconds.  “It’s floating.” 

            As if to illustrate his point, a pen on the table suddenly floated up into the air.  “Or, if you’re some kind of fakir, it might even be simple levitation.  Flight, on the other hand, implies speed and direction.” With that, the pen suddenly began circling around him at a dizzying velocity.

            For a second there, I thought he’d said “faker,” as if I were a fraud.  Even after I realized that he’d said
fakir
, the anger continued building in me.  Still airborne, I dashed forward and snatched the circling pen, then flew back to my original position.  I held out the pen and then let it drop.  I flew to the back of the room and then zoomed back, catching the pen before it touched the floor.

            Mouse looked at me stonefaced, while Esper raised an eyebrow in appreciation.  Rune clapped his hands and threw his head back in laughter.  “I like this kid!” he exclaimed.

            I turned and left the room.  I didn’t really know where I was headed - back to the waiting room, I supposed. 

            “Hey!” a voice shouted in my direction.

            I turned to look and saw the assistant who had shown me into the room.  She touched a hand to the side of her head and cocked her head slightly while walking towards me, obviously listening to an earpiece.

            “You’re in,” she said when she got close.  “Follow me.”

            She led me back down the hallway and through another two corridors before stopping at a nondescript door. She took a magnetic key card out of her pocket and slid it through a card reader set in the wall.  The door audibly unlocked.  I waited, looking at her.

“Go in,” she said, raising her hands palm up in exasperated fashion.  I opened the door and stepped inside as she walked away, shaking her head and muttering.  

I was in another holding area.  However, there were decidedly fewer people in here than the previous waiting room.  This was the short list, teens with powers or abilities worth looking into a little more.  There were chairs arranged in two sections, with an aisle down the middle of them.  I took the first seat I came to and sat quietly.

Paramount, of course, was there, the center of attention as usual.  I was one of the few who wasn’t hanging on his every word.  Another was a girl who sat across the aisle from me.  She had straight black hair, a smooth complexion, and a simple appearance unadorned by makeup or jewelry.  It took me a second, but I quickly recognized her as Electra.

Electra had an unusual backstory. She was allegedly an orphan who the League had found as a baby.  Because she exhibited super powers even as an infant, the entire Alpha League had gotten itself appointed as her guardians.  She actually lived here at League HQ on one of the residential floors of the building.  The only other person who had lived their entire life at League HQ was Paramount, and - like him - she was also expected to be a sure thing as far as being selected by a superhero team.

  Over the next thirty minutes a few more people trickled in.  Following that, no one came in for the next hour.  During all this time, Paramount talked incessantly and inanely about anything that came to mind.  Finally though, even he seemed to run out of mindless chatter and sighed grumpily.

“When are we going to get this show on the road?” he asked. 

Of course it was a rhetorical question, so we were all shocked when a voice answered.

“Oh, I was just waiting on you to finish.  I didn’t want to disturb you in the middle of one of your anecdotes.”

We all looked to where the voice had come from.  In a chair a few rows in front of Electra sat Rune.  I didn’t recall him being there before, and no one had come into the room.  Had he been there the entire time?  Briefly I wondered if he were a teleporter, but quickly decided it didn’t matter.

“If you’re done, then,” he stated, pointedly looking at a now-silent Paramount, “we’ll get underway.”

Rune stood and cast his gaze about the room.

“You’re about to be taken to the next part of the trials.  This will be a testing ground where we subject you and your abilities to examination to determine if any of you have the rudimentary requirements to be a superhero.”