Chương 114: Candle

I was back in that goddamn testing center again. Same one I usually spent time beating the daylights out of Casney or having nutritionists explain why I'm eating the meals I'm going through or checking on development of fat and muscle in me. Usually it's a lot more clinical and it always looked the same. In this case, it seems they've done some renovations in the time we all spent recovering from the ADU's terror attack.

There had been no sign of them since, prompting multiple conversations about the actual motivations of the attack. Every single one met the same exact conclusion:"We're going to look into it." There was no way for us to really pry any further into it given they were being actively secretive from every single standpoint. We were using every method that was available to us per the laws of the land and the laws of physics.

We can't see what isn't there and we can't shove soldiers and cameras into every building's deepest corners. The overall lack of locality and demagoguery served as a benefit there, really, as it meant any signs of ADU were always reported. People were avoiding wearing green due to lower-ranking ADU members wearing green hoodies. I had to break up a drunken brawl because someone lifted their arms and revealed they had a green undershirt. Though I was seeing it as much easier to handle these things.

People were listening to me, quite well even. I had some relatively positive rapport with civilians after stopping Technofiend, but there were still hang-ups about the raid. But by this point now people were actually happy to see me. I was still getting used to that, but I could benefit from it in the mean-time.

"Hey, Leo," Tancred's voice broke my reminiscing.

"The egghead introduced himself and asked you the same question four times."

"Oh I, uh, sorry. Haven't done that in a while," I admitted, rubbing my face.

"Could you repeat the question?" The "egghead" was a researcher from the Super Commission, this scrawny little old man with eyes so big you could mistake him as a mascot on a box of sweets. Easily in his eighties. He spoke in a thick Northeastern accent.

"Alright, so to clarify again, I'm Doctor Tudor. I'm the xenobiologist who is going to be evaluating the results of the various tests you will be going through for today's research on determining the origin of your powers." Xeno. Xeno. Where was that from? His English course used that word once. Oh yeah, it was "foreign." Foreign biology? Like aliens?

"Wait, xenobiologist? Do you guys think I'm not a human?" The researcher waved that off.

"No, not at all. The field of xenobiology predates the contemporary notion of aliens by about twenty years. The meaning behind it just refers to how most superhumans have some sort of different biology as a product of their powers, not all but most. Typically we handle stuff like determining what qualifies for tessellation." I nodded.

"Uh huh. So… what's the question you were asking?"

"Right, right, so you haven't eaten today, correct?"

"Yeah, no, my lunch isn't for a couple of hours." He nodded.

"Good. That's part of some biomarkers I'll be collecting during testing," he explained. As he spoke, he opened a plastic briefcase on a desk, procuring a mask with some kind of bulbous end on it, alongside a collar and holding it out to me.

"I need you to put these on." My body tensed up and I instinctively stepped away.

"Not happening." The researcher clicked his tongue, shooting a glance at Tancred.

"Could you go check on Agent Casney while I talk to him?" The agent took a deep breath before nodding, strolling away towards the crowd of people also in the facility. I could see Sam's hair standing out among the group. She seemed more sociable than she'd been in the past few weeks. Maybe she was just in her element.

"Look," Dr. Tudor explained.

"I know about your previous experience with calibration devices. These are not part of the same designs or programs. The mask is for measuring the contents of your breath when you exhale, the collar is just for reading your heart rate without having to put anything directly over your chest, to improve mobility. There will be zero looking at your brain. I don't need to look at neurological activity." My face scrunched, refusing to step closer.

"…Kid, I don't believe in experiments that hurt people." He grabbed the sleeve of his jacket, yanking it up and revealing a tattoo on his arm with a set of numbers. Besides that, a large candle.

"The last doctor I knew who did took my brother from me. I wasn't even supposed to be on-site, I was going to handle my reports from home since I'm semiretired. When the first documents came in about how they first tested you, I booked a flight here. I wasn't going to let that dog do anything else to a boy." Rolling his sleeve back down, he held the items out again.

"You have my word, God as my witness." I took a deep breath, knowing I'd regret it. I barely tolerate my own mask. This one looked even worse. But I did it, I collected the items and began putting them on.

"So what do you think my powers are?"

"I avoid thinking of any specific conclusion until all testing is completed. At best, I can go over some comparable cases. You show signs similar to cases with a phenomenon known as 'tactile telekinesis.' A form of telekinesis that only works through bodily contact."

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, the main way is that I can tell you what I do dismiss: Muscles. Hyper-dense musculature is more apparent even on thinner frames," he explained as he began turning a tablet on. He held it up and pointed at a few sections.

"Just numbers and lines. No zap buttons, see?" He explained with a chuckle.

"Anyways, no muscles. Plus, at the sizes you've handled, it would be a thermodynamic anomaly. You'd have burnt your costume off from just how much heat your muscles would generate."

"Telekinesis…" I repeated, more as a mutter to myself. It wasn't my first consideration.

"So what's the first experiment?" I asked. There was silence as he fiddled through more drawers, before finally grabbing an item off the desk. A jar of peanuts, which he held out to me.

"Don't open this." He stated, turning away from me after I picked them up. He then whistled over to the crowd as a few individuals approached. One had a camera with a tripod. Among the group included Tancred and Casney, who were standing on opposite sides of the group. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"Right, this way," Tudor noted as he waddled over to an end of the facility where a metal bracket stairway led up to a platform.

"So, slip your mask on proper and all that, get your mouth covered, take a few deep breaths, then head up the stairs," he instructed. Following the instructions, I cocked my head at him once they were all set. The mask smelled like a pair of fresh shoes. Very weird aroma. Getting to the top of the platform, I was maybe twenty feet up. The rafters just grazed my head. He began speaking as the individual with the camera set it up to face the platform, speaking up to be heard.

"You are going to hold the jar of peanuts out in front of you firmly in both hands, and when I say 'Go,' you're going to walk off from the platform and try to land on your feet. If you land sitting or on your back, that is fine, but do not land on your front. We need to be able to clearly see the peanuts for the photographs." I nodded and held the peanuts out, as though I were presenting an infant lion to its future kingdom.

"Go!" Hopping down, I landed without any trouble, the sound of the camera clicking rapidly filling my ears the whole time. He made me repeat it about nine more times. The first three times were the same, the rest had me holding the jar in different ways, on its side, upside down, a few others. I could tell he wanted the orientation to be different, but the exact reasoning why I couldn't tell. Calling out to a staffer, a woman with a bag of flour approached and stood just off to the side of where I landed each time.

"We're gonna do this all again now, but the nice lady is going to whip up a bunch of flour. You can shut your eyes if you don't want to blink in any dust." I nodded, and we went through the same experiment again. However, this time the woman swung around the bag of flour and filled up the entire area with dust and debris that began to make people nearby begin to clear their throats. After that, Dr. Tudor spoke again.

"Alright, Tancred, do you still smoke?"

"Only whatever's in Lafeuillade's pipe."

"Drat. Casney, do you have your cigars with you?"

"An appropriately-uniformed soldier includes all permitted luxuries."

"Right. You're going to light one up and take a few puffs to build up some smoke for Leo to fall through. Do not come near me with the cigar at any point. Once it's done you put it out. Your taste in them is terrible." The auditor nodded as he procured a cigar from his suit's jacket and strolled over to take the woman's place. Using just his index finger, he ripped the end off and lit it with a match from his pocket, taking a deep and heavy draw of it. Just one from him brought the cigar halfway down.

It smelled like a smokestack even through my mask. People were already coughing.

"Why do your cigars always taste so goddamn old?" Tancred asked.

"Was that wrapped in a piece of the Constitution when you were there to fuckin' sign it?"

"I was not a signatory, as I was deemed a nonperson in my pursuit of protectin' the American ideal, and thus it would be seen as comparable to Washington's dog Vulcan signin' it." One of the staffers spoke up.

"I read about that dog in elementary school! Didn't he steal a ham?" Casney took another draw of his cigar.

"…Well he was the one blamed for it." Tudor scoffed and called out to me.

"Go!" I followed the request, dropping through the thick cloud of cigar smoke ten more times. Staying at only ten each for these runs was pretty pivotal, as by that point half of the research facility was hacking up a lung over the smell of Casney's choice of poison.

"Alright, we're all set, put it out," Tudor requested. Casney obliged, putting it out on his tongue before slipping it back into his jacket, as though anyone wanted the lingering aroma from that afterwards.

"Right," he stated, his gaze focusing on a wall for a moment.

"Was that all I was needed for with these trials, Doctor Tudor?" His voice was oddly static there. No bounce from his alien accent. Tudor nodded, looking at the viewfinder of the camera as it was held out to him by the photographer.

"Yes, yes. Do you have a meeting? You seemed interested in observing the study in full." The auditor shook his head, immediately making an intent-rich stroll away and through the crowd of staffers and researchers.

"Somethin' has come up that I must attend to. Do keep me updated on the boy's abilities, however. I put quite the parlay on my guess." In the awkward silence that ensued, I raised an eyebrow.

"What's his guess?" I asked. Tudor toddled over to me before speaking, plucking up the jar from my hands and opening it to inspect the contents.

"Nothing particularly relevant at the moment. As I said, I try to avoid conclusions until all testing is done."

"Was that not all testing?"

"Not at all," he explained before cracking open one shell of a peanut to eat its contents. He smacked his lips together, visibly rolling it around in his mouth, before chewing and swallowing.

"Hm. Good peanut. Anyways no, we have covered the first leg of testing, which was an environmental observation test related to your durability. At your height and weight, a six meter drop is enough to almost always cause significant injury in a regular human. It's well established this does not apply to you, so I felt it was the safest way to test your durability without putting you under any duress or risk of harm. You show no signs of any pain or discomfort, and you are as ambulatory as when you arrived."

"Could you uh, explain that a bit more simply?" He nodded.

"You're walking and moving around with no signs of injuries. I felt if you had any form of congenital insensitivity to pain, there would be distinguishers from that fall such as a change in gait due to natural shifts in bone structure from the impact. There are none."

"Well, I had the whole shock collar thing, wouldn't that already prove that?" Closing the peanut jar, he began toddling off, beckoning for me to follow.

"No, not at all. The device you wore was similar to a TENS machine, which directly stimulates nerve endings and muscle groups. CIP just blocks pain signals like walling off someone's house, so while you can't hurt them by physical harm, you can still yell through their windows and hurt their feelings. That's what you experienced. Exterior injuries are far more easy for most pain insensitivity syndromes to just disregard."

So the collar wasn't actually causing me any physical injury, it just kept making my body think of pain to the point I couldn't move. That didn't make it much better, now that I thought it over. Moving over to another area, this an enclosed room with two windows. Inside was some very basic furnishings. Two chairs and three tables. One of the tables was a regular one, flanked by the chairs in the middle. The other two were closer to little platforms.

Through one window, I could spot May on the other side, reading through a book. The inside of the room was populated by two individuals. One was Sam, who was laying a little silvery cube on one of the platform tables next to the central table. Next to her was another man. Thick-necked, broad-jawed, slicked-back blonde hair. He almost looked like a movie star. The man approached, putting a hand out.

"Howdy there, son. Heard you're Hercules." His voice was thicker than his neck. A cowboy drawl. I stared at his hand for a moment, remembering what happened with Casney. But I was then reminded of Dr. Tudor's promise, and I reached out to return the handshake.

"Yeah, that's me."

"Pleasure to meet you. And don't worry about your identity, secret's safe with me. I'm a superhero for hire by the name of Diamond Bob. The Commission's payin' me to help you with an experiment on your powers, if that's okay with you, son." He then let go of my hand, resting his hands on his hips.

"I… okay. So how are you going to help me with the experiment?" He grinned, his exposed teeth glinting in the halogen lights.

"Well, son. We're gonna arm-wrestle."