All of them had gone off the deep end. That’s to say that Leticia, WhiteWash, and Midnight weren’t even trying to fight what had happened. Their colors were a wild blur mixing in a giant kaleidoscope orb. In case you’re misunderstanding, I’ll rephrase. All five girls trapped somehow in this giant marble that seemed to squish all of them while still encasing half a universe. Which makes perfect sense.

My teeth ground together. An eye twitched and my neck ached. The mess of paints in front of me kept on swirling. Something about Brittney’s horse kept casting off light that sat on par with Leticia’s mess. And if her brightness stood out like a beacon, then Cindy and her damn drunken unicorn were like the fuzzy edge on one of those blacklight posters. Something about it framed the rest of the colors, heightening everything.

I hated it. Call it a result of hunger, annoyance, or frustration.

“Flux?”

It went “beep, beep, motherfucker”. And if you haven’t guessed by the two-dimensional swear, we were in “Adam actually has a heart and it’s beating pure dissatisfaction” territory.

“Make sure the people splicing the video together note this as a resonance effect.”

Flux beeped then tilted.

“Pretty sure.”

Here’s the thing, Clinton had babbled a bit about it earlier and my brain sort of glazed over, but I’d seen these situations before. Go around a few hundred blocks like me and you’ll see everything at least once. His overeager ramble had been too clinical but he’d been right. Powers with the same source drew each other together. They’d amplify. Then they’d overload. I couldn’t figure out why the hell my sister sat in the middle of all this. The unicorn and Cindy made vague sense, if only because I’d run into the unicorn in a tan landscape with red roses.

It was the colors. That’s the only thing they had in common.

Flux beeped. I shook my head then started to explain my comment out loud. For the ratings and my own sanity.

“I’ve only seen them a few times. Two or three powers in the same place, linked or tied together, makes them all worse. Though generally I see it in family members that got their powers from some goop or a stone.” Or whatever. “Somehow that one is tied to the Hotel California, so either that place is also related to where the girls were going, and this planet’s core, or he’s just all angry.” I pointed to Cindy and her unicorn. The overgrown pony reared and hooves sparked literally stars off of the edge of their entrapping bubble. “Those three are from the same source, and Clinton had said they were being called down here. Or they’d said it.”

I couldn’t keep it straight anymore. That’s the problem with too many adventures. I could be sure that all the pieces were somewhere in my past but none of it linked together right. It’d take a detective with too many hours and a good memory to sort everything out.

Back to the action.

My sister’s pink robotic horse stood there. Shiny and bright enough to make my eyeballs cry. Rockets appeared, blasting outward. I stared at it and wondered about Flux. A creeping suspicion make my neck crawl. I brushed it off. It’d be easier to simply talk out loud for the camera.

What came out was a boring, “I don’t understand.”

Flux spun a circle around me. It’s head or face tilted on one side.

“Why Brittney’s part of it,” I clarified.

Flux beeped.

“And I can’t see a way into that. If I even should go in.” The bubble had a rather solid edge but radiated something strong enough to give darkness wavy heat lines. “Maybe it’s easy to walk into but if we’ve learned anything from my video stream, it’s how bad walking into disasters will go. Me, that? I doubt it’ll pop like some overgrown bubblegum. That’s an important lesson lass,” or whatever they were now “don’t leap in headfirst. I’d live, but what it something bigger and meaner comes along? What’s the next level against three people combining their powers to alter reality?”

Maybe a giant cup of coffee would materialize then wake them up. If one did pop in, it’d be scalding hot. The point being that escaping higher powers didn’t always require an even greater ability to come along. Frequently something just snapped everyone out of the mess.

“Maybe I should go in,” I suggested.

My head shook.

I almost wondered if their combined powers would be enough to remove this stupid ability of mine. My head shook. People had obviously tried that over the years. Trying to remove my power might tear my vision into a million pieces, and reassemble me in Australia a week later. Nothing stopped the ability, which I why I was classified as a “No-go”.

Flux beeped then floated closer to the bubble.

“No.”

It bobbed up and down then darted back to the bubble.

My head shook at Flux’s suggestion. “Going in there will make things worse.”

Flux gave a series of long happy beeps. As if the idea of things going from bad to a nightmare entertained its programming.

“Normally I’d be okay letting everything explode, but again. Brittney.” I pointed at the pink pony rider.

Mom would kill me. Or try. Again. Brittney didn’t notice me but continued to shout at Cindy. Their silent film existence scared me. It meant that barrier swallowed sound. We were almost looking at the top part of a snow globe. The world inside sat removed from reality as a whole.

If it were just trio from Wilhelm’s school, that’d be fine. Cindy alone would have been enough for me to turn right around and wander into the sea of corpses instead. Or leap in headfirst because to hell with her wellbeing.

Brittney had suffered enough from my presence. Dad had been turned into a glorified calculator with legs and barely spoke to me. My sister and I had a little bit better relationship.

Or we had.

Life never lets me sit and ponder problems when it really matters. The few moments of time I did get to myself I spent watching television and sleeping. Maybe that simple behavior is the only thing I shared with normal unpowered people. Time marched forward and inaction solved as much as it caused.

Here’s where doing nothing and over-thinking boned me.

The earth, fucking, shook. I turned to face the sea of corpses behind me. They had bunched up closer to us. Even an idiot like me could figure out what that meant. The world we were in had started shrinking and being pulled to this place. Why, no idea. I’d be it was the reality altering bubble that the girls were projecting.

With my sister in it.

Beads of sweat ran down her forehead. She glanced at me briefly then ran for Leticia and pushed her back. Cindy sat near her high horse and flipped me off. A second shake hit us and the pile of corpses behind me grew even closer.

A third one hit two breathes later and I still hadn’t figure out what to do for my sister. According to fuzzy math I’d be neck deep in corpses in a few minutes. It’d be an easy bet that none of the five girls would like to join me out here in a carnage aftermath.

“Flux?”

It beeped.

I could see the Purple Prose in the distance and that gave me an idea. If I couldn’t stop them, maybe it’d be possible to wake them up. Solve a major power with a minor one. Such as Flux’s copy ability dropping a ship onto the bubble to see if it’d pop.

“Another ship?”

Flux looked up, down, then shook its head back and forth.

“What, was that your last one or something?”

Guess what noise he made. Go ahead.

The ground shuddered and rippled. I managed to stay stable as we were all pulled another few feet inward.

I climbed my way back through the piles of corpses, sans shirt mask. Sans is a Ted word meaning “go look it up yourself”. Being neck deep in corpses meant that when Ted thoughts popped up I couldn’t indulge them.

The goal became escape. That bubble worried me. The mole people world showed signs of collapsing toward that center. That had zero to do with the core we’d been coming to blow up. It didn’t make sense on a planet full of dirt and tunnels. Fleeing would give me time, and I needed a lot of that to figure out what the hell was going on.

We weren’t kids anymore. This time I knew what my powers would eventually do to her.

“Brittney!” I shouted.

She showed no signs of hearing me. Cindy and her horse switched from stopping WhiteWash and her sister. They ran for the edge of the bubble and banged on it. The drunken unicorn staggered, spun, and somehow ended up on the ceiling of their spherical cage. He banged down, or up, whatever, with it’s hooves. Sparks turned into stars then burned out.

“Britt!”

I shouted repeatedly.

The ground under me sucked in toward the bubble. Their color strewn circle expanded out in my direction. My breath hitched suddenly.

“It’s pulling us in!”

Flux beeped then spun in a circle. Whatever that meant. As always, I pretended the eye said something understandable.

“Of course it’s obvious!” I yelled back at it. “But maybe the special effects show of all those bodies surging toward the center isn’t obvious from your angle!”

Flux spun in a circle and bobbed up and down.

“We’re recording all this for historical accuracy! Journalistic integrity demands it.” Ted’s crew could be considered lucky since ratings went up as the body count increased. “I mean look at it. Miles and miles of dead monster piles, being pulled in.”

I continued to crawl away while narrating for the viewers at home. Flux bobbled across the landscape then gave a series of noises that might have been a whistle. Or its eyeball resetting some operating system. Who could say for sure?

The inward pull died off. Ground steadied beneath my feet and I found a slightly larger body to stand on. Their Romanesque w armor was sturdy enough for my weight. The landscape hadn’t changed aside from the bubble getting bigger and the bodies growing increasingly clumped. I had to figure out what to do next, because any intervention from a higher power would leave the students abandoned and my sister once again suffering because of my powers. Cindy, I didn’t care about.

There were dozens of weapons around me. If they couldn’t break out, maybe it’d be possible to crack their cage from the outside. I grabbed a gun and pointed it.

It went well. The goo gun fired out an arc of green acidic mess toward their swirl of colors but utterly missed. I went flying backward as one of Newton’s Laws caught up with me.

I pulled myself out of the latest pile of corpses. Gunk or innards dripped down my face. I brushed it away using a dirty loincloth then shouted out at the bubble.

“Brittney! Get out of there,” I shouted.

Her head whipped around. She glanced at the edges of whatever reality distortion they were trapped in searching for me. Or so I hoped. Her hand came up and she pointed at nothing useful. Cindy nodded and both girls got on their horses and flew off.

Okay. They didn’t fly off. They were in the air. Their horses were galloping. They went four feet if you counted the air under their steeds. Whatever they thought was going on, wasn’t.

I picked up a short sword and hurled it all of ten feet. The ground beneath me shuddered and everything pulled toward the bubble. Ahead of me a mishappen man’s foot got swallowed to the knee. My tactics changed. If all this mass being pulled toward the bubble somehow made it bigger, then maybe I could simply remove some.

If you find yourself in dire need to move a body, let me warn you. Corpses are heavy. Mole people corpses, even heavier. I moved one body five feet before the ground shivered again.

My feet touched the edge of the expanding bubble. I kicked. One foot sunk in half an inch while the other got caught on a gun holster that belonged in some western novel. They refused to come loose. My toes numbed. Tingles crawled up to my thigh.

I unlaced the shoe and yanked myself free of the bubble. The shocked feeling faded while I resolved not to get any closer to that nonsensical cage.

My sister pointed and waved. I fumbled away from the bubble. Lights flashed but not a sound came from inside the sphere.

“Copy this stuff!” I yelled at Flux.

Flux duplicated an utterly random assortment. The pile of dead bodies didn’t get any higher but extra versions of their belongings scattered everywhere. Dozens of the obsidian carved guns fell from the sky. Copies of gas tanks were piled to the side. I kept scooting away trying to find a valuable weapon or a mole man grenade. Maybe a mole person dirt nuke to throw at the bubble.

“Dammit,” I stomped. Something under my foot squished and I refused to look down. It couldn’t be good. Winning lottery tickets don’t squish. Gold bars don’t squish. Boobs don’t od that either, unless you’re dating a weird person with some sort of slime girl powers.

Flux beeped. My brain came out of the distracting thoughts.

I turned around and stared at an unorganized mountain of stuff. Flux continued popping out random objects and I continued to stare blankly. He’d never printed this many materials in one go. They were long lasting too. That had to mean something but, in that moment, it made zero sense.

“You can do all this but can’t reprint the Purple Prose?”

Flux beeped then popped out a dozen pages from the user’s manual. They fluttered down.

I walked to the side of the mountain that lay between me and that ever-growing bubble.

The border’s edge and ground beneath my feet stayed still.

My eyebrow lifted from utter confusion.

“Did they run out of juice?” I asked.

The trio of girls were hard to see from this far away. Their swirling colors still spun around almost lazily. Like they were too tired to get out of bed and could only flop an arm a few inches at a time to kickstart themselves.

I dared take a few steps closer. Again, it wasn’t my own safety I feared. It was my sister’s. I had to get a good idea of what was happening to her. Especially since this was all being filmed and my parents would see it eventually. We were mostly estranged but letting Brittney die would put the final nail in that relationship’s coffin.

Maybe I didn’t care. Maybe it was more about doing something this time, and not letting life go wrong.

Flux continued to print out piles of crap. I ignored the robot’s mess making mission.

I slowly stepped closer and noticed the border between that bubble and the pile of corpses had grown. A flat nearly polished surface revealed itself one inch at a time.

At some point, the bubble shrunk.

“What,” I said.

Yes, I said it like a word. Zero questioning tone. Only deadpan confusion. I turned to my eyeball companion. Flux abruptly started printing another copy of the Purple Prose.

“What?” I got the tone right this time.

The third ship crashed into the second one he’d printed earlier. I tried to understand the distances involved. Or how Flux suddenly had the ability to paste out one of those ships where it hadn’t before. The field of dead monsters had an end in sight now but seemingly stopped being pulled toward the bubble.

I couldn’t figure it out.

Flux did its thing. I studied the bubble’s edge. A solid twenty feet sat between the border of it and the nearest corpse. I got closer and studied the inside. It reminded me of a snow globe. All sorts of stuff inside but none of it touched the real world out here. Or the mole people world.

With people inside.

If I’d gone to school like the others, maybe I’d have a plan. Even if I had a plan, it probably wouldn’t work for me. Here’s an example of nonsense I’d heard people spout over the years. “With enough thermodynamic pizza shaped charges in a semi-circle around the bubble, we could shatter it’s exothermic layer and reveal the core.” If anyone spouts that kind of stuff, don’t listen. Run away.

The problem is that people who could spout that kind of stuff were half baked technowizards and could wade into the piles of dead bodies. They’d pull out shoestrings and guns, put them together with some tape, and nuke the planet to dust.

“Seriously?”

Flux continued printing a mess. Or copying. Whatever.

I got closer and closer until my nose almost touched the doom sphere. It shrunk a few feet. Almost fleeing from my body. That seemed like a challenge. An eyebrow shot up and I pointed to the distorted bit of reality. The students were a few hundred feet further in. My sister and Cindy still galloped through the air, going nowhere.

I stepped closer. The edge of the bubble rippled and rolled before retreating a second time.

“Is this a trap?” I asked. “This seems like a trap. It’s luring me in. Is it?”

It didn’t seem to care about me one bit. Flux didn’t care either. Being a substitute teacher for defense against stupidity didn’t make me a smart man. You can also assume that the word teacher never implied brilliance or competency. It only meant that someone had agreed to try and help other people learn.

My eyes closed for a solid minute. Too many possibilities ran through my mind and part of me hoped the bubble would suddenly expand and take all the decision making away from me. It didn’t. Life gave me time to seriously consider the situation instead of simply reacting to the latest development.

After too long, my eyes opened and I found Flux staring at me. It’s red iris blared powerfully enough to drown out everything else.

“Okay. I’m going in. I know I said it was stupid,” my narration for the viewers at home paused. “I guess, for me, there’s no better option. I can’t construct something useful of out that mess. I don’t have super strength. And the people in there need to get out safely. So, my advice for those of you trying to do the right thing, if you need to help people, stick to your strengths.”

I walked slowly toward the bubble’s center. Flux continued to copy out objects and might have even heard my little speech. A shoulder shot up. It had a crazy microphone somewhere on its body.

“Mine just happens to be walking into insane situations and letting the chips fall where they may. Right?” I muttered.

The bubble continued to retreat, slowly, in time with my footsteps. A sour taste hit the back of my tongue. The sudden shock made my lips puckered and cheeks tighten. White and black swirled across the globe’s surface, chased by all the colors of Leticia’s mood ring powers. Pink lanced by. That dayglow border that somehow belonged to Cindy lined everything. Their powers were going insane and I didn’t understand any of it.

My sister’s face had become drenched with sweat. Cindy’s clammy skin looked increasingly lackluster. If the bubble of colors and girls every stopped spinning, and I reached the center, maybe it’d all be made clear.

“Come on,” I mumbled. Something new had to happen soon because this play date with a glorified bubble had frayed my nerves enough. “Come on. Do something.”

On I went. I couldn’t believe how much the bubble had swallowed earlier. All the dead bodies that had been in my way were now gone. The ground beneath the piles had been left completely bare. There were no scratches or stains left. Not a spec of dirt. In its wake a flat polished surface. It didn’t slant up or down.

The air thinned. My chest worked harder to get a breath. Everything near the edges of my vision turned hazy. I swallowed down the bitter taste.

“How is it so smooth?” I asked.

There were no signs of roughage on the ground to make it easier to walk on. Despite that, my feet didn’t slip. They simply slid from one spot to the next as I did my best to walk heroically forward.

My heartbeat louder. I shuddered. Something about this whole mess felt wrong. Not the normal levels of wrong where aliens and ex-girlfriends were out to kill me or splice my dick onto a monkey. The kind of wrong where soul sucking monsters from a dark abyss, exactly like the one in space around this planet, lurked just out of eyesight.

I snorted at the absurdity of everything.

The longer I slowly walked and took note of the too-smooth ground and absent dead bodies, the more it dawned on me. This might not even be the stupid mole people planet anymore. Maybe it never had been.

Confession time, I’d seen this kind of nonsense before.

Over our time together, I’ve shared a lot of stories. More perhaps then anyone cares to hear. Maybe by this point you’re rolling your eyes and fighting back a sigh. Maybe you’re hoping that psychic link we’re sharing where you can hear my voice stops abruptly. But you deserve to know what was happening. You get to benefit from hindsight.

The first time, it’d been a dream of sorts. I’d woken in darkness, staggering toward something unseen. Around me the ground went from discordant jags to a flat plane.

The second time, I’d been running from some tangle haired nightmare demon with limbs that went on forward and eyes big enough to have teeth. Something bigger had eaten it. I’d run screaming while the comping gashes filled my head. All around me, the ground sort of treadmilled. When I ran, I went nowhere.

We don’t talk about the third and fourth since they were basically wet dreams that made no sense. The dream faded. The ground around me kind of turned to an endless landscape with no definition and a blackened sky.

My fifth adventure, I started to chalk these events up to dreams. The kind where the first rays of light peer through that small slit between eyelids to create a fake horizon. It went on like that. Monsters, aliens, critters from some weird reality, then everything there would fade as the dream fell apart. Or world, as the case may have been.

I’d met a man who claimed it was etheric realities collapsing. Creations spun out of the same source that powered every superhero’s abilities. Eventually, they all returned, or so the story went. I’d never been in the center of one as it fell to pieces.

This world was collapsing and I, in decision based on undeniable brilliance, walked toward the center of it, where a gaggle of girls were trapped. A few feet away from the retreating bubble, I paused.

I turned to find my companion. The only familiar link to sanity outside, here with me. The eyeball still sat a long ways away, where the edge had been. Flux continued to pop out anything it could think of. We’d grown far apart. Five hundred feet or more.

“Flux!” I shouted.

Flux’s beep echoed out next to me. I blinked. There the robot hovered. A foot away in half an instant. Behind him, objects continued to fall. The silent camera started its lazy circle arc around me. It flew right into the bubble a few feet, then froze.

Colors spun across the surface of the material. Green lights shot up and down. Flux didn’t move.

“What’s happening?” my voice’s pitch increased into horror land. “Why are you adding to this?”

The resonance effect now showed signs of Flux’s copying beams. Their green lazers zoomed up and down despite Flux’s currently immobile form. My heart stilled along with Flux.

Flux beeped. It was the first sound I heard from inside the bubble. Not even my sister’s seemingly urgent shouts had reached the outside.

But Flux could. Not with a normal beep. This one stretched on for an age. Then Flux moved, only a little, enough to cause its robot lens to go wide and freeze again. Locked in robotic horror. Green beams lanced across the distorted surface.

Papers started appearing all around Flux. They fluttered inside the distorted space. Dozens of pages pelted the trio of girls who were stuck in a triangle formation, facing inward toward each other. Their bodies were rapidly lost under the increasing number of pages.

More fluttered by sister and Cindy. Their horses swung to the side, seemingly dodging an incredibly onslaught of objects. I couldn’t see what they did. To me, it looked like billions of pages of the user’s manual hung in the air.

Then the papers started turning into objects. No, they weren’t real objects. They were closer to captured images projecting onto a movie theater screen. Or shadows cast by a flashlight. Miniature, flat, but otherwise perfectly copied. Panties. Workbenches. Half a nuke. A blue gauntlet and the bowtie that belonged to Show Stopper. That and more projected along the sphere’s surface.

Throughout it all the beep kept on, turning into a broken hum that droned in the background as more images appeared. They overlaid each other until it became impossible to pick out where one item began and another started.

My stomach curled into a tight ball and tried to eject anything remaining. Dry heaves wrecked my chest. Both eyes water. My nose filled with stinging liquid.

Flux’s body separated into pieces. The framework shards that made up its chassis floated away from each other. Droning continued as the pieces slammed back together. They slowly parted again and this time I saw the bright white ball at the center of Flux’s body.

It snapped together again.

The bubble popped.

Alice appeared. Thick black strands intertwined with blonde locks. A blink later and her hair accents switched place. One band glowed a pasty white. The color crawled down her arm until Alice’s fingernails shone. Red lanced across her body.

Behind her, hovered the giant floating face from my dreams. It’s white crack of a mouth mocked me. One eye on the left glowed brightly like a star or a black hole that swallowed everything bright. Where the other eye should have been, existed nothing.

Let me tell you, if my life hadn’t trained me for this level of horror show confusion, and my stomach so empty, I would have shit myself.

***

What the World Sees, What the Person Lives, our Apology

Hero Watch has over a decade in the business of reporting on super powered events. In the grand scheme of the powered world, this is a drop in the proverbial bucket. Despite the abundance of experience to draw upon, we’ve failed to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors at the outset of our creation, or at all, until recently.

In the powered world there’s a lot of stories. Facts are tallied. Videos review. Testimonies from those involved and Friend-of-a-friend all get logged in the court of public opinion. When the story finally settles a “public account” gets recorded into the history annuals. Yet these finalized truths are rarely detailed. They gloss over key events for the sake of remaining uncontroversial and thusly undisputed. Whenever we (Hero Watch) delve into these events and dig up facts, the official account is revealed as a stick figure outline of the real story.

History, as they say, is written by the winners. This is true in both war and politics, so naturally it extends to the powered world. Human nature is to live the version of a story that doesn’t clash with the world view.

It takes an army to live minor events. Their endless stream of tiny occurrences builds to a major result that impacts everyone. Those masses create an accepted public account. Often, one person becomes a spectacle, and we at Hero Watch have been guilty of joining this movement.

It’s only recently that we’ve started to see the story of every little person along the way. Our correspondent, Adam Millard, has taken to sharing the unseen passing of the unknown. These testimonies have brought their existences to light. Their roles, and how little the public account does to recognize the individual.

To them, and to you, we apologize for not making their accounts more apparently. It’s impossible to garner the attention required to survive in our field without aggrandizing the public account, but we are joining Adam in his movement. This site would not survive without you as individuals. Thank you for your patronage.

To that end, please visit the new section of the site and share your own untold details. Your voice can make mass media’s abstract story a truly public account.