Chương 133: Issachar, Part 1

"This absolutely sucks!" Jairo yelled out, stretching out as he lay flopped over the beanbag chair. I shrugged at him as I leaned over the kitchen island.

"I've been without all the luxuries for longer than I've had them, so it doesn't really matter to me." Technofiend taking over our systems for just a short while, so thoroughly, meant we had to go completely analog for an unforeseen amount of time. Sam herself said on the short end yesterday that it'd be days. As of today, August 12th, there wasn't even an inch of progress.

"You at least had a TV or something, didn't you?" Jairo asked.

"Well, yeah, but I didn't watch it, I think." Still didn't exactly have those memories on hand. He threw his hands up.

"That doesn't change my point. You still had access to it! Our TV's burned out because of the demon thing and now we can't even use our phones and stuff because of Technofiend! Again! And for even longer!"

"Aren't you supposed to be studying anyway?"

"Half of my lectures are videos I have to watch, and I can't watch them." My brows furrowed.

"You're in the same kinds of classes as me, man. We don't do video lectures for any of those."

"I have a bio class that does them, you don't do bio." He flopped over to face me, still laying on the beanbag.

"Do you think they're gonna put you in some kind of physics class for your gravity stuff?" I shook my head.

"That'd require more math and I'm still not doing great in that class." He shrugged as the door to the common area opened, and Tancred trudged through, behind him were multiple staffers with notepads. They were taking notes on different items in the room, disregarding me and Jairo using some of them.

"What's up with those guys?" I asked, glancing at Tancred. The agent looked back towards me.

"We still need you all in operational capacity, and since the security hygiene here isn't great, we'll be moving operations to the testing facility. You've been there plenty." I nodded.

"I… have. But there didn't seem like much space for the whole team, plus Sam and her kids. How's that going to work out?"

"It's an entire warehouse, Leo, there are areas we don't even normally use. We've had contractors setting up a communal rest area since about 2 AM as a temporary point of staying until you all get some individual rooms." Completely moving our rooms, too. Not actually being able to see that window into all the water now felt a little disappointing, given how much time I had spent staring at it whenever I tried to go to sleep.

"How long are we going to be staying there?"

"No exact numbers, but probably a couple of weeks at the minimum. Gives us time to update all of our physical systems and technical ones on top of that, re-do security, and investigate how the Hell Clowncar got in."

"Did you guys even catch him?" Jairo asked, rolling out of his beanbag seat and clambering up to his feet.

"Leo and I never heard about anything related to that.

"Nope! Bastard used just his clones to do everything, so any time we thought we had him apprehended, he went up in confetti and glitter. Shit's still everywhere too. Found some in my coffee this morning." I clicked my tongue. There was a mole in our team. It wasn't Clowncar, but whatever holes were in our security to allow him in also let the mole in. I knew it wasn't Chris, and Jairo proved himself clean with that last mission. I considered what Foras said when trying to humiliate us when he introduced himself.

If anyone in that group were a traitor, he'd have made some sort of allegation. He did nothing of the sort for May or Tancred. Though Tancred, I just knew wasn't a mole. I didn't trust him, but I did find him predictable enough. Sam had betrayed me once, but realistically speaking she was clearly under duress from the whole ordeal.

That didn't make me trust her, but if she struggled with just hurting me for the sake of protecting her children then I can't imagine she'd be able to hide exploiting whatever vulnerabilities we had from all of us. Someone would have picked out some kind of gap. The stress she'd been under already from how I reacted to her was wearing her down too much. Plus she wasn't very outgoing. How would she be approached? She can stay in the unlikely category with Tancred. What about the other major names who worked with us?

Definitely not Casney. He had this freak obsession with honesty. He'd outright tell me if he was assisting the terrorists to make sure I was fighting up against an actually difficult threat or something. Agent Lafeuillade wouldn't either. After that hug, I think she would have come clean. She also didn't spend enough time around us to really get that kind of privy information to distribute. And the attack with the guys reporting to Hidalgo, that happened after she had left. She wouldn't have known our movements.

So that's another write-off. Who else did I know? Eliza and Perry… I never mentioned to either of them where Chris and I were going. So they wouldn't be able to divulge that information. Eliza and I don't agree on many things, but she's sincere. Perry is a businessman and his business is making superheroes look good. He's worked with superheroes in the past. He would not give that up for an ecoterror cult or to mess with the HenchNet. That writes those two off. The comms team, what about them?

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. Betsy has been helpful, if very distant. But it seemed she just preferred to stay a strict professional. Not suspicious. I knew nothing of Jairo's comms handler, Peggy. Never even met her. Glenn, Chris' handler, was very charismatic and smooth. But he was someone who apparently had worked with Billy back in the military, from what I was told. He didn't seem to show any inclinations for betrayal.

So he stayed in the same bubble as Tancred and Sam. Unlikely, but no way of knowing for sure. May talked about her handler, Daniel, being a very awkward man who clearly wasn't great at handling comms. He was also new. Betsy and Glenn had Super Commission backgrounds. I wasn't sure about Peggy. But Daniel was a new guy. But he had to be thoroughly vetted if Tancred let him in. He wouldn't be tactically blind enough to just let anyone in. So there were low odds of it being him. In the unlikely pile he went.

Now who else did that leave… probably just Agent Rich- SNAP"Leo, come on, you've been doing great with not zoning out!" Tancred called out.

"I've been talking to you for like thirty seconds now." My head shot straight up, seeming to have been tilted the whole time, and I passed a glance at Tancred.

"Huh? Sorry. Was completely stuck on a thought there."

"What was it about?"

"Lost my train of thought, I can't even remember now."

"Very useful," he griped as he crossed his arms.

"As I was saying, you're going to be helping the staff with moving our heavier equipment. Jairo will as well, so don't act like you're being singled out."

"You don't have anyone else in the Super Commission with super strength to do the job?"

"Most Auditors with superpowers don't have those kinds of powers, kid. Casney's an exception because he's older than the Super Commission and they needed somewhere to put him that fit his resume."

"Why does that even fit his resume?" Jairo asked.

"You and Lafeuillade are like… you look and act like government agents. Spies and stuff. Every time I saw Casney he looked like a pro-wrestler in a suit." The agent shook his head.

"Morgan and I were never spies. I was CIA, but I wasn't a spy. While I did plenty of covert ops, I was a regular case officer. I was never an agent, to be clear." Well, now I wasn't sure how to describe him.

"Why not agent?" I asked.

"The CIA uses agent for recruited foreign assets. I'm so American, my last name's listed among the Saints on the Mayflower. Casney probably knew one of my ancestors."

"Do you think you two might be related?" Jairo asked. The auditor shuddered, shaking his head.

"I hope to God not, and if you ever put that idea in my head again, I'll pistol-whip you, I don't care if you're underage." Jairo burst out laughing. I raised an eyebrow.

"I see the softness is still really hard for you to keep up," I pointed out. The fact something that simple brought so much out of him actually brought a chuckle out of me. That was a rarity. Less rare, as of late, but still rare.

"You haven't walked in on him when he's in his moods, thanks to me by the way," he explained with a raised finger.

"So be a bit more grateful, you little snot. Meanwhile, I now have the worst possible images in my head. I need to go find a way to clear my thoughts, you idiots start helping the staffers load the vans." With that, we took to the task at hand. Anything heavier than a chair was handled by Jairo and I. Jairo stuck to rapidly moving the slightly-less-heavy things while I hauled the stuff that was too heavy for anyone else at a more normal pace.

The goal was mostly moving all of Sam's heavier tech that couldn't be safely left behind. One of them was the hydraulic press that didn't work on me before. I thought back to that first test, how nothing came from it. It lent well to Dr. Tudor's notion that I was using gravity. If I just made it less heavy, then of course I wouldn't feel anything.

But why, then, did it not take anything out from me when it was putting out hundreds of tons when moving stuff that was ostensibly lighter took a lot more strain out of me? Was there something I was just missing? It made sense that I was getting stronger when I was getting angrier, my brain was probably pouring everything into focusing that strength… forcing that gravity power, really, into a function. But I was completely calm, then. Was it in two separate directions?

Either get as pissed off as possible or try to turn off my brain as much as possible? Would need to find a way to experiment with that. Or at least keep that in my pocket in the meantime. Once everything was loaded in, Jairo and I decided to climb into the back of one of the moving trucks. They were gonna need us to haul everything anyway, and none of the staffers were ones that I was particularly familiar with. In the rumbling silence of the moving van, Jairo spoke up.

"Have you thought about anything for your birthday, yet?" Oh, God.

"Completely forgot. Wait, why do you know?"

"It's public information in the base, dude. Did Chris not tell you we're gonna be doing a party and all that? Thought he might've brought that up since you guys had been hanging out for the past few days." I shook my head.

"No. Honestly kind of hoped it would slip by. I don't remember having any real big birthday things. I like to not think about it at all. Means I don't have to be reminded about how… how different I've become, I guess."

"Why not?"

"It's…" I clicked my tongue.

"It's all kind of happening so fast. A few months ago I was being hauled off the street for fighting drug dealers. A couple months prior to that, I was sleeping inside a garage. I went from a random guy in the alleys terrorizing bad guys to a superhero people like, but I also learned I don't have all the memories I thought I had, my powers don't work the way I thought they did, and I've done things I never thought I would do because of how careful I tried to be."

Jairo watched me, light cracking through the door frame on the truck. The rumbling of the glorified metal box we were in probably worked as an added accent to his thoughts as he parsed them. After a few seconds, he spoke.

"I get it, I guess. A couple years ago I was getting ready to become a pro fighter. Then in just a few months my whole life turned completely different. It's not really the exact same as what you're going through. Sorry I can't relate all the way. But I do kind of get it, Leo. I don't think hiding from it is the right move, either." My gaze moved back up towards him.

"I don't know if I'm really hiding from it. More I just… if I acknowledge it, I acknowledge that I'm a different person. I don't want to be a different person, I want to be me." He let out a scoffing sound. Of a sort. With how his voice worked, it was more like someone stepped on a frog.

"You're Leo regardless, dude. When you just zoned out earlier thinking about whatever, that's the same thing you were doing when you just walked in. If you were really so different, do you think you'd still be doing that?" I stared at him for a few seconds, before nodding.

"No, I guess not. Thanks, Jairo." We rode the rest of the way in silence, until finally coming to a stop. The back of the doors swung open after a few minutes, by a little man with absolutely huge eyes like some kind of cartoon character. The same one who got me all uncertain about my powers. He spoke, cheer in his voice.

"Leo, my favorite! Come on, let's catch up a little bit!"