Just Super

The portal is gone. So is Emily. The little chunk of desert looks like we hadn’t been here at all, so I’m guessing that we haven’t—that this is yet another parallel universe. Damn it.

“Emily!” I shout at the top of my lungs. 

There’s no answer. I knew there wouldn’t be, but I had to try.

Why did I have to be so stupid. I want to blame it on the little bit of wooziness I’m still feeling from whatever was in the dart, but really it was just me not thinking things through. Again.

I can fix this. First things first: I can feel my mark just fine, so at least I didn’t sprain it this time. It’s currently on my lower belly.

I’m not going to try to flicker to my room this time. I don’t want to risk appearing in mid air if the building is gone, or surprising someone else. Instead, I try to flicker to the park near my apartment.

I’m still in the desert. I try Griffith Park. Still here.

Last time, it seemed like all my distances reset. I guess that happened here, too. I try flickering thirty feet away, and find myself standing in the spot I’d tried for. 

The feeling of a weird pressure in my head makes me look up, and I see a shimmering in the air. There’s not much in the way of cover here, but there’s an outcropping of rock that I could probably have reached if I’d taken off at a dead run the moment I got here. I flicker to a crouch on the other side of it.

There’s a dull ‘boom’ and a pressure wave passes over me. I peek around the outcropping and see a small vaguely SUV-looking craft descending to the ground. Once it lands, both front doors open, then the back hatch pops up.

The driver and passenger are a tallish woman with purple hair, wearing a coverall, and a tall man in shimmering white spandex that appears to be a superhero costume. At first I think he’s close to seven feet tall, then I see that he appears to be walking on an invisible surface about six inches off the ground.

From the rear hatch, what’s either a person in power armor or an oversized robot emerges. Something about the way it moves makes me think power armor. That impression is reinforced when it’s the first to speak.

“No sign of a portal. The event was highly localized.” A man’s voice comes out of a speaker I can’t see, somewhere on the armor. It—no, he—walks toward the spot where I arrived.

“There are a few footprints here, but they don’t go anywhere,” he continues.

The woman, who’s been doing something on her phone, looks up. “I’ve got a gate incoming from the KC branch. ETA is three hours, fifty minutes.”

That sounds promising. Maybe they can get me home.

“Why so slow?” the man in white asks. He sounds personally offended.

“If you want to go fly it out here yourself, be my guest, Darius,” the woman answers.

He doesn’t respond.

“Getting anything, Daniel?” she asks.

“No signatures other than the incursion event, and it’s fading fast. The whole area scans as void negative and mundane.”

I have no idea what those things mean, but If I had to guess I’d say he’s scanning for me and not finding anything. If I’m hoping for their help, I’m going to have to talk to them. It might as well be on my terms.

“Hello!” I call out, “I’m going to step out where you can see me. I’m not dangerous.”

All three of them spin to face me as I step out with my hands in plain sight.

“Stop where you are!” Darius shouts and raises a hand toward me. 

There’s a weird feeling of pressure and my hand brushes against an invisible barrier. I guess he can make force fields. I suppress the reflex to flicker away. I’m probably safer in the bubble for the moment, anyway.

“Who are you!?” he practically shouts the question.

The woman says something quietly to him. He answers quietly, but forcefully. She talks again and I make out the words “just a kid.”When Darius doesn’t respond, she walks over to me. She stops about ten feet away.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m Jane. You are?”

“Frank.”

Her eyes open a little wider at that. She adjusts her coverall, making a little pin she’s wearing more obvious.

I don’t see any point in being subtle.

“Oh, are you trans, too?” I ask.

I can see some signs, now that I look. Her shoulders are a bit broader than average, her jaw a little wide.

“I am,” she replies. “Sorry about the force field, but we have to be careful. If you happen to be carrying any germs that your world has built up immunity to, but ours hasn’t it could be bad. And vice-versa, of course.”

I hadn’t thought about that. I hope Emily and I didn’t spread anything or pick up anything from that other Earth.

“I heard you say something about a gate. Is there any chance you can send me home?”

“We can try. There are no guarantees, though. You don’t seem surprised by any of this. I take it this isn’t your first cross-world excursion?”

“That depends. I went from my world to another one, to this one, without returning home first. So does this count as my first, or my second?”

“I’d have to check the manual on that one. You also don’t seem surprised by Darius. Does your world have superpowers?”

“Yeah.”

She asks for some details and I don’t have a good reason not to share, so I give her the tl;dr on the Invasion and how it ended.

I’m about halfway through when the power armor guy, Daniel, walks over to join us.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he says. “I’ve got the tear from your crossover event isolated, but it’s pretty weak, and may collapse completely before the gate gets here. Do you have anything on you that I can use to help stabilize it?”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Any small objects can work, but the more complex or unique to your world, the better.”

“She didn’t come over from her own world,” Jane says, before I can respond. “This is her second stop.”

“Oh,” Daniel says, then pauses, ”then anything from the universe you just left.”

“I’ve got a pair of phones from that universe.”

“Nice. That should be just about ideal. May I borrow them?”

I hand him the little bag that has the phone in it.

“Wait.” I’ve just realized something. “Does that mean you can’t get me home?”

Daniel’s head turns to face Jane. 

“From what you’ve said, there’s not going to be a tear to take advantage of, so no,” she answers.

Daniel spends a few minutes explaining. Travel between universes leaves something like a wound in the fabric of the multiverse. Most wounds heal relatively quickly, but until they do, travel between the universes involved is easier. The fact that there was a portal in almost the same spot in the other universe doesn’t help, apparently.

I almost ask if we could take the gate through to the other side of itself and use it again there, before realizing what I’d be asking.

“I’m sorry,” Jane says. “Will you be in danger where you just came from?”

I explain that I won’t be, if you don’t count the danger of dying of embarrassment from having to ask Tiara for help again.

Daniel takes the phones over to the spot where I came through and begins fiddling with them and a device he’s already set up there. Jane walks over to the vehicle and returns with a couple of small camp seats. She sets one down right up against the forcefield, then walks twenty feet or so away.

“Hey, Darius,” she calls out, “drop the forcefield for a second, will you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Quarantine protocol is that intruders must remain isolated until destroyed or deported.”

I really don't like the sound of “destroyed.” I’m glad they seem to have chosen the deported option for me.

“The protocols don’t say anything about forcefields. Twenty feet is plenty of distance for a few seconds.”

“No.”

“Darius—”

“It’s fine,” I say. I do not want to do anything that would jeopardize my return. I sit down on the ground to show how fine it is.

Jane approaches again, shaking her head. “You were telling me about your invasion.”

 I finish up my abridged history of the invasion. It takes around ten minutes.

“Oh, that might explain it.”

“Explain what?”

“You’ve got one of these marks, right?”

I can feel it on my belly, so I lift the edge of my t-shirt to show her.

“Okay, so if these marks were created by bleeding off the energy that your archmage—”

“Not our archmage, he came from somewhere else.”

She waves that off and continues. “—was using to ascend to godhood, they may be little fragments of divinity.”

“And?”

“We don’t have anything that can detect divinity. It’s not usually an issue here. So that’s why you showed up as mundane.”

That’s a lot to digest. It feels like something I would have heard about.

“Does that make marked people like me demigods, or milligods or something?”

Jane shrugs. “No idea. Do you mind if I get a picture?” She points to my belly.

I lift the edge of my shirt again so she can snap a photo with her phone. This time I notice that she’s careful to place herself between me and Darius when I lift my shirt. I like her.

“What’s your power?” she asks once I’ve lowered my shirt again.

“I can teleport.” That’s close enough, anyway. I can’t tell her all my secrets.

“Cool. I’ll see if I can get Darius to drop his forcefield before you go, so you can show me—if you want to, that is.”

“Oh, he doesn’t need to drop it.”

It’s been long enough that I could be at least a mile or two away from here, if I’d been walking the whole time, but I don’t need to go that far. I flicker to a spot about fifty feet away, still directly in her line of sight. Then I flicker back to where I was.

Jane’s eyes are extremely wide. She looks almost scared.

“Get out of the way, Smith!” Darius yells.

“Darius, wait!” Jane spins to face him, keeping herself between him and me.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but it doesn’t sound good. I’m not going to wait around to find out what the problem is. I flicker behind another outcropping that’s a couple of hundred feet away. I peek around and see Jane steadying herself, a few feet to the side from where she was standing before.

The first outcropping I hid behind looks weird. It takes a second for me to notice that about the top third of it is sliding off the rest. A diagonal gash has been cut through it. As I watch, Jane charges toward Darius and gets right in his face, yelling. I can’t quite make out her words.

Darius lifts his hand and looks like he’s ready to slash downward, but Jane stands her ground. I really want to know what they’re saying. I’d need to be closer, though.

I flicker into their vehicle. No one is in position to see into the open hatch, so they shouldn’t know I’m there.

“Chill the fuck out, Darius. She wasn't hurting anyone.”

“You know better than that Smith. Breaching containment is a hostile act and can be met with whatever force I deem necessary.”

“The ‘containment’ was unnecessary to begin with!”

“That doesn’t matter. She breached it!”

“And then immediately reëntered it! You are not killing a teenager who’s no threat to anyone.”

“The fact that she can teleport through my forcefields makes her a threat.”

“To what? Your ego?”

“Darius!” Daniel joined the conversation.

“I’ve got this, Daniel,” Jane says. “Listen, Darius, sure, maybe you could convince the right people that you were justified if you do this. I’m betting you couldn’t. But even if you could get away with it, it would still be fucking murder. Now go wait in the car before you do something we’ll all regret.”

“Fuck you.” Darius spits out the words.

I get the distinct impression that he’s coming my way, so I flicker back to my outcropping of rock, and watch him climb into the passenger side of the vehicle. Jane is standing outside the vehicle, scanning the area. When she looks my way, I wave. She begins walking my way.

“I’m really sorry,” I say, when she’s close enough to hear. “It was stupid of me to teleport out.”

“Not your fault. I should have told you not to, but I didn’t think you could.”

She pauses, then continues.

“We should probably stay over here until it’s time to go. Darius is—difficult.”

“I noticed. What the hell is wrong with him? How was me ‘breaching containment’ enough to make him want to kill me?”

She gives me a look. Oh, right, I was eavesdropping.

“I was hiding in your vehicle for a minute. I wanted to know what was going on.”

She looks like she’s going to say something, then shakes her head. “Keeping him and others like him in line is a big part of my job. They’re broken, but sometimes they’re needed, and he does follow the rules. He just thought he’d found a loophole there.”

“Your job sucks.”

“If it helps at all, he hasn’t killed anyone yet who wasn’t an active danger. If he ever does, I’m pretty sure the company won’t protect him.”

I shrug.

She looks around like she’s looking for the least uncomfortable place to sit on the ground. After a quick check to see that I’ll be out of Darius’s line of sight, I flicker to where she left the chairs, grab them, then flicker back. I set one down, then flicker another twenty feet away and take a seat. 

“Thanks,” she says, and sits in her own chair.

“So how do y’all deal with folks like him in your world?”

I don’t know the answer to that. I haven’t really heard about anyone that bad back home. The closest I can think of is— 

“Are you okay?” Jane looks concerned.

“Yeah. I think so. It’s just, there was this guy back at my school who Darius reminds me a little bit of. Luckily, he’s gone now.”

I hope that’s as true as I think it is. I will not be that asshole.

We chat for the next couple of hours. She tells me some about this world; I tell her more about mine. I tell her about my recent excursion, leaving out Tiara’s name. If there’s a version of her here, I don’t want to give anything away about her. I can’t help noticing that I spend a lot of that time talking about Emily.

“The gate is incoming,” Jane says, looking up from her phone. “I think Darius has had enough time to cool off. Come on.”

We fold up our chairs and I follow her at a distance of about twenty feet.

Daniel is still fiddling with his gadgets as we approach. The two phones I loaned him are about ten feet apart, each suspended in its own little contraption. A jagged line of some barely visible energy crackles between each of them and a spot in the air, directly between them. Another trace of energy arcs ten feet above the spot, connecting the two phones directly.

“Hey,” he greets us. “I think the phones did the trick. I’d say we’ve got a solid ninety-five percent chance of getting you back where you came from.”

Those are odds I can live with.

There’s a whooshing sound and we all look up to see a jet rapidly slowing as it approaches our location. Within a few seconds it’s hovering over us.

“How is it hovering there?” I ask.

“Force impellers,” Daniel answers, as if that explains anything.

A pair of doors swing down, and an eight foot diameter metal ring, covered with cables and tubing appears, being lowered on a cable. Daniel grabs it once it’s in reach and guides it into place. He yanks it downwards as its lower edge passes through the point where the beams from the phones meet.

“We don’t want to disrupt the tear,” he comments.

I give the ring a closer look. There are four legs to stabilize it, which Daniel carefully adjusts, and a console of some sort. It takes him about five minutes to seem satisfied that everything is in place.

“Okay, I think we’re ready to power this puppy up,” Daniel says. He’s reaching for the console when the two traces of energy from the phones suddenly cut off.

“What the fuck?” he exclaims. He turns to the vehicle. “Darius, what did you do?”

I can see the smug asshole smirking through the window. Oh no.

“What?” I ask.

“He surrounded the tear with a forcefield. His fields isolate things dimensionally as well as spatially. That’s why he freaked when you teleported out of one.”

“What does that mean?”

“We don’t have a connection to where you came from anymore.”

Damn it.

“What happens if we activate the gate anyway? Will it just not work?”

“It'll open, but it could go anywhere.”

“Is there a way to tune it?” I feel surprisingly calm as I ask my question.

He gestures at the console. It’s practically covered with knobs and dials and sliders. There’s a small screen in the middle of the mess.

“All of that is for fine tuning, but it’s incredibly sensitive to the conditions around it. Even where you’re standing when you turn it on can affect the destination.”

“It’s okay, Frank. We’ll find another way,” Jane says.

“What about ‘destroy or deport’?” I ask.

“We have some discretion.”

“Not that much,” Darius responds from the vehicle. “She has to go. Now.”

Jane starts to turn. “Listen, ass—”

“It’s okay,” I interrupt. “I’ve got this.”

“Really?” She doesn’t look like she believes me.

I’m not sure I believe me, but I think I’m right. I walk up to the console, next to Daniel.

“May I do it?” I ask him.

“Have you worked with a device like this before?”

“Nope. Doesn’t matter though. Just show me the on switch, please.” I do my best to sound confident enough for him to go along with it. I guess I succeed. I press the button he points at. The screen lights up and the ring hums.

“Those sliders—” he starts.

Before he can continue I randomly twiddle all the knobs and tweak the sliders. I throw a couple of switches for good measure. I don’t need to ask what to do next. A button has lit up, glowing red. I point at it and look at Daniel. He nods. I press.

The ring fills with the familiar swirling violet-white of a portal.

“Why are they always that color?” I ask.

“I’ve read a lot of theories, but most of them are garbage, and the rest contradict each other,” Daniel replies.

“Can I have my phones back?”

“They’re not doing any good now, so sure.” Daniel retrieves them from their perches and hands them to me. I slide them back into their bag.

I step up to the portal.

“Are you sure about this?” Jane asks.

“There’s a chance I got it right, right?” I ask Daniel, instead of answering Jane.

“In theory? Sure. The chance isn’t precisely zero. Just approximately zero with at least thirty digits of precision.”

“Good enough.”

I could have gotten it right. This gate could take me back to my own world. Does it? No. But I could have done things differently. It could have been a portal home. I can’t change it. If any of them walked through this portal, they could end up anywhere in the multiverse. But I can change me.

I focus on my mark. I could have gotten the settings right.

I focus on my mark. I could have opened a portal home.

The world gets blurry around me.

“Why is she blurry?” I hear a voice ask. It’s too distorted for me to recognize.

I focus on my mark as I step into the portal and go home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Huge stone walls rise around me. That's a good start. I flicker to my room.

There’s all my stuff. Nice. I should tell Mom I’m back, but there’s something I need to do first, because she’s not going to let me go once she knows.

Alarms sound as I appear in the hallway at The School. It’s almost seven in the evening, on a Sunday, so that’s to be expected.  I flicker in next to Emily’s locker, which I open easily (padlocks are basically just a way of saying “I’d rather you not open this,” not real security) and stick her phone inside, along with the charger and the earbuds that came with it.

I take a deep breath, then I flicker to the guest chair in the principal’s office.

I jump a little, because I’m looking right at Principal Ruehl, who is seated behind her desk.

“Hello, Mr. Doyle,” she says, “I’m glad to see you made it home safely.”