Superhero ... ish VI + VII

VI

Jimmy had been rash, she had been careless, she had lost one of her weapons, was no closer to knowing The Shade's miracle power and had most likely made an enemy in her now. Well. The most regrettable part was that she now had one less dart to work with. The one that The Shade had stolen out of her belt had been stopped by her ribcage and so the resulting wound was only shallow and would stop bleeding soon enough. She could easily have picked a more vulnerable spot, like her stomach or the liver on the back, instead she had chosen to only sting her solar plexus a little.

It made sense, Jimmy reflected that morning while cutting a strip of band-aid. It was close to where the dart had sat in the belt and obviously The Shade had only wanted to distract her to get free.

She pulled the paper strips off, flicked them into the bathroom bin and lifted the band-aid up to her chest. And stopped. She squinted at the small hole below her heart. Or rather, the roughly star-shaped scar.

Well, fuck me. That was fast. She prodded the tiny patch of tender pink skin and rubbed over it to confirm what she saw. When the hell did that happen? She wondered, and then was distracted by debating whether to save or throw away the now useless band-aid.

It rained. Jimmy loved that. For various reasons, it meant fewer potential witnesses – The view was bad, sounds were obscured, and in general people would stay indoors and not come across Jimmy in the first place. It also obscured most traces she might leave behind and posed a slightly greater challenge to her. Wetness turned everything more slippery and dangerous, and the rain itself influenced the handling of her blades.

With nothing pressing on her agenda tonight, Jimmy could entertain herself and practice to her heart's content. For this purpose she had loaded up her mp3 player. With all the noises of the rain and wind she could afford to hear a little less and risk being less silent than usual. She wouldn't be heard anyway.

On the vast construction site by the university, well away from the portable bungalows of the workers, Jimmy climbed the building shells from the outside and jumped from wall to naked wall, exercised balancing on the scaffolding and throwing darts. It all worked as well as it ought to, so she moved on to her next exercise before she could get bored. She hopped from concrete to steel, back to concrete and down to the muddy ground as soon as she had reached the biggest pile of debris that they kept here. She dashed up the hill of broken concrete blocks, metal, granite and wood and straightened up on the topmost wooden beam sticking out. She had to balance a little, because it started shifting and wobbling slightly when her full weight pushed down on its outermost end, but managed to keep it still.

The rain had not only soaked the ground and turned it so soft that everything sank down and stuck to it like to a giant gum, but had also seeped into the raw edged concrete and splintery construction wood and weighed them down slightly. Delighted at this opportunity, Jimmy picked a cracked block of armoured concrete sitting at the foot of this debris hill. It was more than ten times her size and had bent points of steel beams sticking out of it in several places. She examined its dimensions from the distance while securing her footing on the beam at the top of the pile. Stretching out both her arms with open hands towards her target, she started lifting it slowly. It was genuinely hard at first, and Jimmy began to think that she had accidentally directed her intent at something else, when the concrete block suddenly jerked upwards a few centimetres with a wet sucking sound as it came out of the mud. Jimmy almost dropped it again in surprise, but it felt surprisingly light to her now. The weight she was lifting was comparable to that of a full linen bag of groceries, or maybe two sixpacks of beer in glass bottles. Jimmy laughed triumphantly and started singing along to the music in her earphones.

"'Will you dance with me now, heaven's child?' sang the clown, we've nothing to lose but your wings and my frown!" She lifted the block over four metres above the ground to about her own height and pulled it closer. She tried varying the speed to see how steady she could keep it and at what point she might lose control over it. "- To the sound of our love singin' true! So tell me why no one's listenin', is there nothing at all left to say!" When it was close enough for her to touch if she were to lean forward a bit, she lifted it again, and over her head this time, grinning wildly. The adrenalin rush and the awareness of this power surging through her, holding up this massive chunk weighing several tons, was exhilarating, to say the least. She had to laugh, even as a small trickle of rainwater made it through a crack in the concrete and splashed down on her face, followed by a few small crumbs of loose concrete. "So may the living be dead in our wake!" she shouted to the song in her ears and hurled the concrete block down the other side of the rubble hill. It landed with a wet thud and set off a chain reaction of cracking and shifting, as the lower parts in the pile were crushed and knocked aside by it. The debris shuddered and began to shift and slide in an avalanche of rubbish, and Jimmy had to hop down from her beam before the movement reached her. She jumped onto a barrel and then the concrete block, just before the entire pile collapsed. She spread her arms, laughing, and hopped around in a circle on her block.

It took The Shade over two weeks to make another appearance. Jimmy would have sought her out herself, if only she had had an idea where to start looking. However, she had been sure that The Shade would approach her again, albeit more cautiously than before, and she did.

After a reprieve of roughly a week, the rain had started again a few days ago. It was annoyingly soft and slow, and sometimes turned into a misty dribble, then into just wet air for a few hours, until it started raining again. Jimmy did not mind and simply continued her private exercises, interrupting them only once or twice to relieve a fat cat of a small part of their comfortable wealth. After all, she needed to eat, too. She kept practicing her lifting with objects of varying weights and sizes, and each time she had successfully moved a particularly heavy piece exactly the way she wanted, her power rush made her so giddy she couldn't help but snicker and do a little victory dance.

This time she was standing on a stack of haybales that were covered with a thick canvas. These fields were not too far out to take a leisurely walk in them, so Jimmy had taken to use them because they were more devoid of people than the city, and it might become a little reckless to keep throwing large, heavy things around every night. Nevertheless she wanted to exploit the cover this continuous rain offered to practice, so these dark, quiet, people-less outskirts were almost perfectly suited to her purposes.

She fooled around, striking a pose like a mage shooting something out of his fingers, as she carefully placed the tractor back into the exact same indentations by the roadside that she had taken it from. She smiled smugly and released it, pulling her hands back, snapped her fingers and twirled around. "Got to be green, got to be mean, got to be everything more, why don't you like me, why don't you like me, why don't you walk out the door?" She looked up at the night sky, facing the falling water, threw out her arms and started bowing in every direction. "Thank you, thank you!"

"Who are you bowing to?"

Jimmy jerked away from that voice and nearly slipped on the wet covering. The Shade was sitting on the other end of the haystack, shockingly close, and what's more, she could not have just arrived, because she was lounging comfortably stretched out, leaning back on one arm and resting the other on a drawn up knee. She even had a fucking straw in her mouth, for crying out loud.

"You've got to stop doing that," said Jimmy, and hoped she hadn't yelled it.

"You've got to start paying attention," retorted The Shade.

VII

Jimmy turned her mp3 player off and took the earphones off. They slid safely down into her tunic. She used this time to chastise herself for letting her guard down and to force herself into instantly recovering from this little surprise. She started stretching to make a point about how utterly unalarmed and relaxed she was. If The Shade could strike cheesy poses to look cool, she could do it, too.

"Did you bring the dart you borrowed?" Jimmy said boredly, not even looking at The Shade while pulling one of her arms across her chest. Something hard knocked against her leg. She eyed the dart by her foot, kept messing around with her arms while nudging it onto the tip of her foot and lifting it up like this. Without bending down she picked the dart up from her foot and examined it for damages, dirt or any nasty surprises before sliding it back into the belt across her chest where it belonged. She then continued her pointless stretching, moving on to the legs.

"I'm really interested to know how you do that," said The Shade. Jimmy looked at her. She was watching. The rain made it hard to make out a particular facial expression, especially because only her mouth and one eye were visible. And her mouth was busy with that fucking straw. Jimmy looked away again, affecting a bored expression.

"I exercise," she said simply.

"I mean the telekinesis, stupid," said The Shade.

"So do I," said Jimmy.

"At least tell me if it's ... something you can learn. Please," tried The Shade.

Jimmy shrugged. Sod it.

"I don't know," she said honestly. "I don't know how I got that ability." She dropped the workout act and just sort of stood around. She hooked her thumbs into her belt and looked at The Shade. She, apparently, also gave up trying to look cool and sat up.

"Sorry for being so rude," Jimmy muttered. To her surprise, The Shade seemed to have no problem understanding the words at once, despite her damp scarf and the rain falling around them and drumming down on the canvas.

"I don't know if 'rude' is what it was ..." The Shade frowned and seemed to think about it.

"Uuh... insolence? Threatening behaviour? Harassment?" offered Jimmy.

"Yes! Harassment!" The Shade pointed at Jimmy.

"And coercion," added Jimmy, unfazed, while The Shade nodded vigorously. Jimmy shrugged. "Well, sorry for that," she said casually.

They looked out over the nightly, rainy, extremely muddy field together for a little while. Jimmy pulled her mask down.

"At least tell me if yours is something that you can learn," said Jimmy smugly. The Shade smirked.

"It's not. Sorry."

Jimmy thought about it.

"Is it contagious?"

The Shade shifted and looked up at her.

"Say what?"

Jimmy looked at her and decided to just fuck secrecy and go commando, figuratively. She pointed at her chest, where there was still a tiny indentation in the cloth from where The Shade had stabbed her.

"This wound healed up in less than an hour. It was small, but that shouldn't have happened. If you have something that can regenerate your body, maybe it rubbed off on me for a short while."

The Shade cocked her one visible eyebrow.

"That's impossible. You didn't touch -" She stopped herself.

"Well, I kissed you. So yeah, I did touch you," Jimmy stated and shrugged again. The Shade frowned up at her and got up. Again, the very picture of supple litheness and flexibility. Jimmy took note of that for the gazillionth time.

"That's never happened before," said The Shade, in a tone that said 'Impossible'.

"Maybe the people you've snogged haven't been injured. So no one ever noticed," said Jimmy stoically. She smirked at the gradually more and more flustered Shade, who was eyeing her suspiciously now. It looked as though she were resisting the urge to cross her arms. She also looked as if she wanted to say something. Jimmy kept smiling amusedly and just waited.

"That wasn't snogging." Shade managed to sound indignant in an elegantly dignified manner. Jimmy smirked. She debated whether or not to say it.

"Shall we try again? Just to see if it has the effect."

"Try again? We've never tried in the first place! You forced yourself on me!" Jimmy could almost see The Shade's hair rise up and crackle in outrage. It was wet but that didn't seem to keep it from moving up and sticking out as if charged with electrostatic. Jimmy cocked a brow, but was, in truth, impressed with the spectacle.

"I didn't plan that, you know?"

"Good, because that would have been a pretty stupid plan!" How she huffed.

"I was a little impulsive."

"I'd say!" Now she did cross her arms, glaring fiercely at Jimmy, who was still only sort of standing around.

"And I apologised," said Jimmy and shrugged. The Shade unbristled slightly. "Well, can we please try it? I would like to know why I healed so suddenly. You don't need to tell me how, just let us try this. As research, to try to reaffirm the results of last time. Alright?" She took a cautious step towards The Shade, who looked at her apprehensively but did not draw back. She nodded grimly and pulled her noseband down.

To the next part.