1.3
I think in the back of my mind I must have shoehorned Lisa into the "spoiled rich girl" category of my social filing system: the kind of person you saw on T.V. that lived in gaudy penthouse suites and had a tendency to take in stray animals. That's why I was almost embarrassingly surprised when instead of arriving at a ritzy apartment complex in the heart of Downtown, our night time adventure ended in front of a modest brick apartment building on the border between Downtown and The Docks. It looked like the sort of building that originally had been used as an office complex or some other small business, but had been repurposed into living spaces.
Some of my surprise must have shown on my face as Lisa gave me an impish little smirk and a mischievous wink before tapping in a code at the front entrance and unlocking the door. I felt my face heat up as I turned away in shame, reflexively crossing my arms and hunching in on myself. Here, Lisa had reached out to me and was generously taking me into her home and I was thinking all sorts of unflattering things about her. I mean, sure she may have admitted to being a villain and had probably done all sorts of morally questionable things, but she'd been nothing but nice to me so far. It wasn't fair of me to label her with all manner of rude and condescending stereotypes just because I was a little out of my element.
"Hey!" I was startled out of my self-deprecating cycle when Lisa suddenly clapped her hands together in front of my face, drawing my attention to where she was holding the glass and metal door open with her waist, leaning forward to better fix me with her stern expression. "None of that now. I can guarantee with certainty that you're your own harshest critic, so enough with the needlessly complex and unforgiving self-reflection. Now, let's get inside, we're letting all of the heat out."
With several mumbled apologies, I hurried into the front lobby of the building behind her. It was a pretty plain area with generically speckled white floor tiles and concrete walls and ceilings that tried and failed at being a warm cream color. On the left wall there was a solid wooden door labeled with a simple black sign that read maintenance and opposite it was a wooden bulletin board with a mismatched sea of colored paper pinned to it. One of those long black commercial entry mats was laid out onto the floor, thoroughly waterlogged and dirty, leading to an elevator and another wooden door with a small glass window labeled 'stairwell.'
"Probably best to take the stairs for now." Lisa mused aloud as she made her way across the foyer, her shoes making audible squishing sounds as she walked over the poor defeated mat. As I slowly trudged along after her, I couldn't help but draw a parallel between me and it: walked over all day long, people continuing to wipe their shoes off on it even when it was obviously at its waterlogged limits. If it kept raining, who even knew how long it would be before it was finally allowed to dry out again.
A hand clamped down around my nose.
"Nuh uh-uh, what'd I say?" Lisa exclaimed into the silent foyer. "If you have time to be feeling sorry for the floor mat you should be worrying about what the evil lair I'm taking you to is like instead."
Evil lair? Really? In this boring little apartment building?
Lisa raised her eyebrows at me and I suddenly felt embarrassed over my internal comments. She had a way of making you feel like she knew exactly what you were thinking. If she said it was an evil lair then who was I to doubt her. I mean, I guess a plain little apartment building could be the perfect place for an evil lair. Certainly no one would think it was one at first, second, or even third glance. It could be the perfect cover.
Lisa let out a little amused sigh and let go of my nose, turning to hold the door open for me and began leading me up the stairs.
We climbed three stories, judging on the number of doors we passed, before leaving the stairwell into a short hallway. The door opened into a boring little area with an uncomfortable looking bench, an ancient looking vending machine, and a grimy little garbage can before continuing on to a series of four doors, two to each side of the hallway almost directly across from each other. Pulling out a key, Lisa stopped at the first door on the left, unlocking it with a heavy mechanical clack before pushing it open and ushering me in.
Lisa's "evil lair" was... actually pretty nice, in a clean, minimalist, modern chic sort of way. The front door opened into a short entry hall with a mat set aside for shoes. It widened a bit after that into an area that disappeared into a perpendicular hallway on the left and a long dark granite countertop that separated the entry way from the small kitchen area, complete with polished metal appliances, on the right. Finally, the entryway opened up into what was likely the largest portion of the apartment, the combined living room & dining area.
The floors were wood paneling painted a light grey-blue, broken up from the slightly darker grey walls by a white trim. A small rectangular black dining table helped provide some division between the living area and kitchen area and was surrounded by four black chairs with white upholstery. A large light and fluffy rug with a glass coffee table helped to give the living area a more inviting feeling. The rug was framed by a large, cushy looking black leather couch that occupied most of the far wall, and a matching black leather recliner to the left. Opposite the recliner on the right wall hung a flat screen television, framed on each side by two tall speakers, and by a cabinet underneath with another speaker and a number of other electronic system boxes on top.
"Come on in and make yourself at home." Lisa invited as she slipped her shoes off on the front mat. "Just... no crazy energy balls inside, at least until we do some power testing to figure out exactly what they are." I felt a resurgence of shame and turned my attention to the floor. Of course Lisa would be uncomfortable having me in her home. I had clearly demonstrated before that I was dangerous and unstable. Anyone would be nervous with someone like that-
A pair of hands clapped together on my cheeks. I looked up to find Lisa giving me a look of unreasonable patience.
"That wasn't a personal dig Taylor. Powers in general can be a bit weird and temperamental. Until you practice a bit to figure out their limits and functionality, it's best to err on the side of caution, right?" I turned to look away from her again and I felt the pressure on my cheeks increase as Lisa leant forwards to keep her face in my line of sight. I imagined that if I hadn't become a weird invulnerable brute thing my face would have been comically squished together. "Right?" She pressed me again, giving me an encouraging little smile that in my head shouted You're being entirely unreasonable so hurry up and stop worrying.
I eventually nodded.
"Good." She declared, straightening up and clapping her hands together as if to say 'That's that.' "First things first, I think after tonight's adventure you should take a shower." Her lips pursed up to one side as she looked me up and down. "Even if your skin has some weird selective non-stick properties now that keep you more or less clean, I think it's important to maintain these sorts of little routines." I blinked a few times as my mind flashed back to my inexplicable dryness after I'd climbed out from the bottom of the bay. "After that, if you feel like eating I can heat something up in the microwave. I'm not a great cook, but frozen dinners I can certainly manage."
Lisa backed away a few steps and then cocked her head to the side expectantly. I stood around uselessly for a few moments before hurrying to crouch down and untie my sneakers... only to realize that I had never put any on when I'd run out of Kurt and Lacey's house earlier. Somehow feeling even more awkward than I already did, I stood back up and slowly trudged further into Lisa's apartment. She beamed up at me before turning to lead me down the hallway to the left.
"The bathroom's the first door on the left here and if you'll wait just a second I'll grab some clean towels and get the water going." Lisa opened a thin whicker door on the right side of the hall revealing a small linen closet, and quickly fished out a fluffy white towel and a washcloth. Shutting the door, she then hurried across the hall to the opposite door and flicked on the light switch, revealing a modestly sized and very clean bathroom.
It was all white tiles with black accents, and just screamed "average bathroom." The porcelain toilet sat on the left opposite a wooden cabinet with a sink set into the top. The wall opposite the door was taken up by a walk-in-shower with a sliding door. It had a handrail along the side and a little bench built into the wall opposite the showerhead.
Lisa bustled into the room, placing the towel and washcloth down on the countertop before ducking into the cabinets underneath and pulling out a bottle of what was probably shampoo and a bar of soap. They had obviously never been used, as they were still wrapped in the plastic they came in. Ripping off the plastic and throwing it in a small garbage can next to the toilet, she hurried into the shower and set the hygiene supplies down on a little plastic shelf. Finally, she stepped back out but leaned in to dial on the knob controlling the water. After quickly hiking up her sleeve and reaching in to feel the water temperature and making a quick final adjustment, Lisa nodded to herself and stepped back around me.
"So, go ahead and take your time scrubbing up and I'll dig out some pajamas for you to wear when you're done. You can just leave your clothes on the ground. I'll take care of them after you're done." With one final bright smile, she backed out of the bathroom and pulled the door shut behind her.
For a few minutes, I simply stood there listening to the sound of the water hit the tile of the shower floor. I was in a daze: just completely unable to make sense of the overwhelmingly dizzying series of events that had been this day. I looked down at the baggy grey sweatshirt I was wearing and for another two minutes, I tried to work up the energy to take it off. Giving up, I just slowly shuffled my way into the running shower and carefully sat down on the little built in bench. Leaning forwards, I rested my elbows on my knees and sank my face into my hands.
The spray of water from the shower impacted with the back of my head and my shoulders in a steady, unrelenting rain. I had a vague sense that the water was probably warm, but differences in temperature were indistinct after the changes that had overtaken my body. I thought back to showers I'd taken in the past.
They'd always been a therapeutic experience for me. I could climb in after a rough day at school and just close my eyes, luxuriating in the feel of the steady cascade of hot water washing over me and just forget all of my troubles for awhile. With the realization that showers would probably never feel the same again, the tears broke free of their invisible damn to pour out for what felt like the hundredth time today.
I don't know how long I sat there, drowning in my own misery.
I was dimly aware of the bathroom door opening again, but couldn't muster the energy to care. Lisa knelt down at my side, ignoring the way the water soaked into the knees of her jeans and the entirety of one side of her blouse. She reached out, taking hold of the bottom of my sweatshirt and began to pull it up off my torso.
"Arms up." She ordered, her voice a calm neutral tone. Listlessly, I complied. In one motion she pulled my sweatshirt and undershirt up over my head and discarded them behind her. Another quick motion and my bra soon followed. "Stand up." I did, letting my head hang forwards as my hair dangled in a curtain around my face, streamers of water pouring off every cluster of curls. Lisa reached out and dexterously unfastened my jeans before pulling them and my underwear down to my ankles. "Right foot up." I raised my foot. "Now the left." So I did. "Okay, go ahead and sit back down." I returned to my seat.
The next ten minutes passed by in an almost hypnotic blur. Lisa stepped fully into the shower, cutting off the stream of water with her body so she could properly massage a handful of shampoo into my scalp and work it through my hair. Eventually she stepped aside, allowing the water to reach me as she gently coaxed me to move my head in different directions. I numbly acknowledged the lack of stinging as the sudsy water flowed harmlessly over and into my eyes. The washcloth came next: Lisa carefully washing me from head to toe. I reflected on the irony of it: I was pretty much invulnerable and yet Lisa treated me with all the care of a collector cleaning a porcelain doll.
Eventually the shower was over. Lisa quickly toweled me off before dressing me in a pair of fluffy blue pajamas.
"I don't have any underwear in your size here, but I'll go out to pick some up tomorrow. Maybe I could go and grab some of your things from the Dawkins's house, if that's alright with you." I shrugged. It wasn't like I had any particular attachment to my own clothes. "Well, we'll see then." Lisa declared as she produced a brush from somewhere and began working through my hair. With how curly it was, I'd grown accustomed to the task of carefully working out the unavoidable knots following showers and rough nights of sleep. In spite of how long it took, I'd never really considered it a chore. I had always loved my hair: considered it my one defining feminine trait, the one thing I could be proud of.
As Lisa brushed, the plastic bristles glided through my curls without resistance: smoothly pulling through them like a hand gliding over silk.
When she was finally satisfied with the brushing, Lisa pulled my hair behind my ears and over my shoulders, and stepped around in front of me. She gathered up both of my hands between hers and then looked up to peer into my face directly. For a short time she stood there, her eyes ghosting back and forth, her mouth a neutral little line. Eventually, her lips turned up into a mirthless little smile and she coaxed me out of the bathroom behind her.
She led me further down the hall, into the next door on the left. It was a bedroom, sparsely furnished with a queen sized bed, an end table with a little lamp and an electric radio-clock next to it, and a medium sized dresser opposite. One of the walls sported a pair of folding closet doors and the opposite one had a single window. Lisa led me up to the bed before letting go of my hands to lean over and peel back the blankets.
"This'll be your room." She said as she straightened out the pillows. "For now, why don't you try to get some sleep and forget about everything for awhile." Wordlessly, I slowly climbed into the bed, and Lisa pulled the blankets up around my shoulders. "I know- uh... It's not going to be easy, but just- we'll take things one day at a time: keep putting one foot in front of the other, you know? Little steps. Maintaining little routines." I heard her quietly pad away from the bed, towards the door. "If you need anything, anything at all, I'll be out in the living room. Please, please, don't hesitate to come out and ask. I'll be waiting there, just for you." Finally, with a quiet little 'goodnight,' Lisa clicked off the overhead light, and pulled the door almost all the way shut behind her.
I tried to sleep. Really, I did. I followed all of the steps: putting my head to the pillow, closing my eyes, staying as still as possible, but sleep never came. My mind started to wander. The scene from inside dad's car began to play over and over again in my thoughts. I started to obsess over all of the decisions I had made before the accident: the decisions that led to getting into the car, to go to the mall, to buy a stupid, meaningless present...
I sat up. Trying to force myself to think of something else, my thoughts drifted to the changes to my body. I realized I wasn't tired, not in the slightest. After a day like today, I should have been exhausted, shouldn't I? Even if I couldn't sleep, surely I should have felt something.
Anything!
I stood up.
Slowly, as quietly as I could, I made my way out of the bedroom and down the hall. The living room was quiet with only faint clicks breaking up the silence. I found Lisa laying back in the recliner in the dark, her feet up and a blanket wrapped around her legs. She'd produced a laptop from somewhere and had it resting on her thighs as she scrolled and clicked her way through some website I didn't recognize. When I stopped at the border to the living room, she looked up and met my eyes. She closed her laptop and bit down on the edge of her lip, worrying at it as she gave me a quick look up and down.
"Can't sleep?" She asked. I shook my head weakly. She leaned forwards, the footrest of the recliner retracting so she could place the laptop down on the coffee table and stand up. Patting the cushion of the leather couch, she beckoned me over with a smile. "Come here and sit down, I'll be right back."
I slowly made my way over towards the couch as Lisa bustled past me, out of the living room and down the hall. Sinking into the thick cushions of the couch, I sat in silence, listening to the faint clack of thin wooden doors elsewhere in the apartment as she rustled through something. After a short wait, she hurried back into the room carrying a thick blanket and a few small pillows.
"Have you ever tried meditation?" Lisa asked as she threw her gathered good onto the couch next to me. I shook my head again as Lisa worked to slide one of the pillows in behind the small of my back. "Well," she continued as she placed another pillow down in my lap and threw the thick blanket over top, tucking it in around me. "I think it might be worth a shot." With the blanket tucked in, she stood up again and hurried over to the T.V. kneeling down to shift through the cabinets underneath it.
"With meditation, it's best to pick something to focus on: maybe a word, maybe a phrase, maybe an idea, and just repeat it over and over. Think about that one thing to the exclusion of everything else." Eventually, Lisa found what she was looking for: a coiled black wire, which she promptly plugged into one of the boxes on top of the cabinet and began unraveling. "For you, hmm... does your power have a mental component?" As she reached her laptop, she dropped the remainder of the coil of wire, and plugged the other free end into a port on the side. "Like, maybe a weird sense or feeling in the back of your mind that wasn't there before?"
I turned away to give her question some thought. Thinking back to my fight with Lung earlier, there were certainly a few things that fit what she was asking about. I had been able to sense the exact location and state of my orbs of black stuff in the area around me, including the trickling drain as they slowly disappeared. Now that I thought about it, there was something else there too, prickling at the back of my mind even now. It felt like... pinpricks, maybe. Like the pins and needles you feel after having a limb fall asleep. They popped up in a continuous stream, exploding at the edge of my senses like tiny fireworks before fading into obscurity to be replaced by the subsequent waves. It was a constant static that I hadn't noticed until just now. I blinked a few times and looked up at Lisa. She gave me two thumbs up and an encouraging smile.
"Yes that!" She exclaimed animatedly. "That's it exactly! For your meditation, you're going to focus on that feeling, that extra sense, and nothing else." She sat down on the edge of the recliner and opened up her laptop again, quickly clicking away at it. "Try to think about it in new ways and from different angles. Mentally pick it apart. See if there's anything new you can glean from it that you didn't notice before. See if it moves, grows, or shrinks. Er, try not to conjure up any of those spheres if you can, but don't really stress about it either. Just try to... zone out, I guess."
With another click on her laptop, Lisa sat back in her recliner and gave me a warm smile as the sound of a steady rainstorm began to play out from the speakers on either side of the T.V. I glanced over at them before giving her another look, feeling slightly self-conscious about the whole thing. She just gave me another little encouraging thumbs up and pulled her laptop back into her lap before reclining again.
With a little sigh, I closed my eyes and tried to sink back into the couch, getting comfortable. Internally, I focused on those little bursts of static. For awhile, I just "watched" them. Nothing really changed. As far as I could tell, they came in a continuous, undecipherable stream: numerous enough that I couldn't pick out any individual patterns to their appearance, and quickly enough to blend together into the background noise of my mind.
I shifted my attention to the metaphorical edge of the burst area. Maybe there I'd be able to make out some details about the little pricking pinpoints. To my slight surprise, I could. I had thought the bursts were like fireworks, appearing suddenly and then fading out, but that wasn't true. They certainly appeared in something that could only be called a burst but they didn't just disappear after that; the burst was just the most noticeable. The little firework sparks seemed to pool together, running like rain water around unseen dips and turns into distinct streams and flows. I followed them, doing my best to mentally trace out their paths, forwards and back from start to end, and end to start. Gradually, a discernible pictures started to form in my mind.
The little flows of sparks swirled about and together, around a discernible shape before coming to rest into collective pools. The shape had a distinct central core that the majority of the sparks seemed to settle in. Externally, it was vaguely cylindrical, but internally they danced together to from impossible shapes. Infinitely extending, fractalized polyhedrals grew in ever expanding crystals, coming closer and closer together and yet never truly intersecting. From the main core, these fantastic and unrecognizable shapes branched out into four distinct protrusions, all fed with flows from the core, which in turn was fed by the collection of tiny pinprick explosions, so numerous that in spite of their infinitesimally small size they managed to fill an ever growing collective.
I realized with sudden and absolute clarity, that I was looking at myself. This was my body now, this collection of impossible shapes, growing together in impossible ways, and fed by a seemingly limitless stream of sparks, each smaller than I could even conceptualize.
I turned my attention back to the source: the cluster of constant fuzz, unending explosions, and unyielding flow. Tentatively, I poked at it with mental fingers: prodding at it in different ways attempting to invoke a reaction. Nothing happened, but I could feel a vague sense of... malleability. I closed my imaginary hands around it, and gently squeezed like you would a rubber stress. Again there was no change and the continuous stream of sparks was unimpeded by my ministrations. Finally, I pulled at the cluster, attempting to stretch it apart, to urge it larger.
My mindscape exploded.
The once tightly contained cluster of bursts blossomed out, stretching away from me in all directions. The steady flow of sparks spreading through my body slowed to a standstill and the sphere of sparks grew and grew, each individual spark stretching farther and farther apart. Soon the expansion slowed, and when the space between each spark became too great, it stopped entirely. A chill of pure awe ran through me as I gazed out in wonder at what the tight cluster of explosions had become.
It was like looking at the night sky, only instead of stretching out above you, the infinite points of twinkling light wrapped around in every direction. I felt as though I was suspended within a sea of trillions of tiny sparkling stars, and even as my mind froze in wonder, the sparks continued their dance. What was once a fast torrential flow, with each spark in the stream moving too quick to follow, was now a slow and elegant dance across the heavens around me. The tiny pinpoints of light began a slow leisurely spiral through the dark expanse, orbiting around me like stars around the center of a galaxy and gradually growing closer. Except...
They weren't getting closer. Each of the trillions of sparks that I had cast out around me had remained stationary, hanging precisely where they had been when they had stopped. The gradual inward spiral was being performed by an entirely new set of sparks, as though the ones I had cast out had all divided, leaving one behind as the second began a slow, lazy dance inward.
And even as this new set of trillions of dancing sparks made their way across the void, another set appeared. Once again they originated at the sparks I had cast out around me and traced the same gradual spiral as the first duplicated ones in lazy paths around and towards me.
All at once, I felt a rippling prickle in the vast expanse around me, like a trillion tiny needles forming a sphere and poking inwards at once. New sparks began to appear, haphazardly in the expanse between one and the next, and as though a switch had been thrown, the speed of the dance increased. More and more new sparks appeared in the void where previously there had been nothing. They popped into my perception at random and gradually began to move faster and faster. Like before, they came together in flows, drawn to one another just as they were drawn to me, but again I noticed something different. For every nine sparks that were drawn towards me, one seemed to spiral away. All at once I felt another wave of pricks and realization dawned on me.
My seemingly endless sphere was still growing outward slowly, and for every inch it gained, a hundred new sparks appeared in every wave of pricks, and for every spark that appeared hanging in the expanse around me, ten more appeared in the void between them, and for every one hundred that appeared the speed of the attraction increased.
It wasn't long before a new torrent was forming, sparks drawing together into new flows as quickly as they could appear. What had started as a lazy spiral quickly transformed into a torrential crashing cascade, and what I had felt in observant awe before twisted into overwhelmed panic.
Too many. There were far too many sparks. It was like stepping from a pitch black room into a blinding spotlight, like sleeping in silence to being woken by a hundred million alarm clocks. My focus floundered, and like a taught rubber band suddenly released at one end, the sphere of endless sparks snapped back into me like an explosion in reverse.
The sudden titanic implosion overwhelmed me. I was left reeling somewhere on the border between my mind and my body. The rate of growth of the fractalized polyhedral crystals increased so drastically that where before their expansion was a slow crawl, now they too seemed to flow like a torrent of water. I was overcome with a sudden surge of dizziness and nausea and euphoria and suddenly red was right and left was blue and...
With a yelp, my eyes snapped open an instant before I toppled off Lisa's couch to land face first on the floor. For what felt like hours it was all I could manage just to lay there and suck in shallow, panicked gasps of air I didn't need, to stop a dizziness I didn't feel, but eventually it did pass. The endless spinning stopped and my senses returned to me.
Holding my breath I craned my neck to look over my shoulder to see if Lisa had witnessed my episode. She wasn't moving and I felt another surge of panic that maybe something I had just done had hurt her.
I jumped to my feet... or at least I tried too. Still wrapped up in the blanket as I was, my limbs caught on the fabric and it began to come apart with an audible tearing sound. Not wanting to completely destroy Lisa's property with my new found super-strength, I immediately aborted my struggles and flopped ineffectually back to the floor. Finally, I resumed my attempts to escape in a much more controlled fashion and managed to finally wriggle my way free.
I leapt to my feet, whirling around to check if Lisa was okay, only to be brought up short by the sound of happily chirping birds. Blinking, I focused on her chest and found that it was steadily rising and falling with the slow breaths she was taking, and the way her head lolled to the side on the headrest, mouth cracked open and with an expression that wasn't unimaginable agony, I realized that she was just sleeping and that I had been out of it for far longer than I had thought.
For awhile, I just stood around motionlessly, not really sure what to do. Eventually, I decided that it probably wasn't the best idea to fall asleep with a laptop turned on and balanced on your legs, and carefully moved to relocate it. I managed to do it without waking her up and placed it down on the coffee table. I reached out to shut it and glanced at the screen. Before she had fallen asleep, Lisa had been browsing through what I considered an obscene number of different tabs on her web browser. Idle curiosity got the better of me and I clicked through some of them.
More than a few were opened to various Wikipedia pages about one complicated physics topic or another. Others were just streams of annotated text that I couldn't even begin to make sense of and a couple were open to a webpage with the NASA logo in the top left corner.
"Lisa must really like science." I thought to myself right before I started to feel bad about snooping and carefully closed the laptop.
I glanced at Lisa again and after a moment of hesitation I carefully pulled the blanket she had draped over her legs up to her shoulders before settling back down onto the couch. Scooping up my wayward pillow and blanket, I tried to get comfortable again so that I could try my hand at another round of meditation.
Without the soothing sounds coming from the speakers, the silence of the apartment was suffocating. As I sat there alone with my thoughts, the demons that had begun to haunt me began to claw their way back into my mind. After a dozen repetitions of chasing train of thought in a self defeating mental circle, I tried to clear my mind by focusing on the sound of Lisa's breathing and matching my own to hers. It didn't work as well as I would have hoped and I found myself anxiously counting the minutes until she woke up.