“So… My father isn’t here right now…” Naomi mentioned, loud enough for others to hear.

I looked at her in surprise for a second and then remembered. Right. “Do you think he would kill me for dating his daughter?” I asked.

She shrugged, “Possibly, but I don’t think so. He’s pretty down-to-earth with the whole wanting us married and happy thing.” She smiled, “Although I think we make him despair sometimes.”

I took her hand, “Well, we might have some time, and I am pretty hungry right now.”

She raised her eyebrow, curling her hand around mine. “Really?” she asked.

I nodded, “Yeah, the train trip was very long. So how about we find out where I will be sleeping, and then look for something to eat?”

Caelo was looking at both of us, sort of confused, and I lowered my hand again so no one could see it. I pressed my thumb against my pant seam and rotated my index finger down, sort of a shortcut for ‘later’ that I hoped she understood.

After a moment she smiled and then turned, heading further towards the front of the ship, under a sort of plastic awning with transparent panels, within which I could see a table.

Naomi smiled again, although it was more worried looking than I had expected, and pulled me over towards one of the side structures on the deck with a door in it. She opened the door, and then we went down a ladder into the ship.

The passage was narrow but well-finished and painted white with wooden paneling and a nice firm carpet. She took me a little way forward along the ship’s side again, opened a door, and then pulled us in before closing it behind her. “Okay, the rooms are soundproofed.”

I looked at the door, “Why, do you think we are going to make a lot of noise?”

She looked at me oddly, tilting her head, “You know that…”

I chuckled, “Yes, I know, but I was trying to make it look real. Besides, you are attractive. If it weren’t for you know… your disintegration and your father being a powerful and murderous ghost-summoning supervillain, and all the guys with guns, and your sister knowing full well what’s going on…”

She looked at me in shock, “She knows? How do you know?”

I walked over and flopped on a bed within the small room, a crew quarters I think, and then tugged my legs up to sit cross-legged on the mattress. “You don’t know ASL?” I asked her curiously.

She shook her head, “No, I didn’t grow up with my sister. We had different mothers. Mine was in Jamaica, hers was…”

I nodded. “She tried to scan me. I don’t scan very well, but I don’t blame her for trying. I told her I’d talk to her later on about what’s going on, but I throw stuff like that off quickly, not immediately. If she caught anything, she would have a pretty good clue about what’s going on, or at least enough to know we aren’t bumping uglies.”

“You can talk to her?” She asked, “She never… signs around me or my father. I thought she couldn’t.”

I shrugged, “It’s likely that she doesn’t want to try talking to you when you don’t understand. She is also kind of shy about it, I think. Maybe not shy, but very careful about avoiding giving offense.”

Naomi sighed. “Neither of us spent much time with our father until recently. I grew up with my mother, and Caelo… spent a lot of time in institutions. There’s nothing wrong with her voice and she’s not deaf, and she can clearly understand anyone that speaks to her, but she just nods or shakes her head, usually.”

I tapped my knees, “Well, I need to know something. You know how my power works. If we are going to pull this off, knowing how yours works, at least some basics, is going to be necessary.”

“My power works, as far as I can tell, by increasing an object to its most stable form.”

“It’s most stable form?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound very much like disintegrate.”

She shrugged, “Think of it like entropic increase. As far as I can tell, it just increases the entropic load until the object falls apart in its maximum entropy state. Maximum mixing and disordered state possibility.”

I thought about that for a second. I knew what entropy was, sort of, but I didn’t understand the math. “So basically, it’s sort of like aging, right? Ice will instantly melt, wood disintegrates into dry rot, metals tarnish or oxidize until they become a powder, that kind of thing?”

She smiled, “That’s mostly it, but not exactly. The thing is, even decay is a biological process. So wood will fall apart from aging, but not from dry rot, just like a person won’t rot. I don’t increase the energy in the system, that’s decreasing the entropy, not increasing it.”

This might actually be possible. Most Metahumans could pretty much pull energy out of thin air, decreasing their energy. I guess technically that meant that whatever Magic they used instantly invalidate both the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

That sort of proves that it was magic, the same way that they seemed to violate Newton’s laws of motion, and pretty much any scientific law they got their hands on.

“Is it an all-or-nothing thing? I mean, do you have like… a size of zone you effect, or can you slow down the burn or speed it up?”

Naomi nodded, “I can choose to only do it in certain areas, and it only affects things that I touch directly, but it seems to have a mass limit. Anything over that and it doesn’t work as well. I can scale it down, some, but the less dense stuff tends to have a much greater effect quickly.”

“A wooden chair goes to powder almost instantly if I use it, but a steel chair, if I scale it down enough, just gets seriously weakened, or if I try to restrict it, I might just make the back turn to powder instead of the whole thing.”

“The biggest problem is,” She stated simply, “That when I get stressed, or excited, I sort of lose control. It activates over my whole body, instantly, at full power. This is really useful if like, a bullet hits me or something, but it’s hard on my clothes, furniture, and pretty much anything I carry around with me.”

I chuckled a little, “That’s the other reason you need a fake boyfriend, right? So someone is around that can carry that kind of stuff just in case a mistake happens, and you don’t want to be left in the lurch with no money, phone, or backup clothes, and you need a plausible reason other than a bodyguard to have them around constantly.”

She nodded, “That and loot bags. My power has a secondary aspect too. I can choose not to interact with normal matter at all. I can’t do it here, because we are underway and moving and I don’t want to wind up swimming, but I can slip through things without disrupting them as well.”

“I can take lightweight stuff with me, but nothing heavy like people. But I can’t breathe or interact with the real world at all except for a slight pressure from dense objects.”

I nodded, “So you can get into someplace with normal structure, and then disintegrate through like, a lock, and then clean out the safe and get out?”

She agreed a little excitedly. “Exactly. And my targets are things that generally won’t attract too much attention from capes. If a drug dealer or known mob type gets robbed, who’s he going to complain to? The cops? The capes?”

I grinned, “You have kind of worked out the perfect scam. I am curious about your motivation, though. I mean, you already seem to be stupidly rich. Why play the crook game?”

She shook her head, “I am not rich, my father is. Yes, he would probably give me whatever I wanted, but I want to succeed on my own. Also, my power tends to get all trigger-happy when I don’t use it for a while, and I don’t want to take someone’s hand off because they brushed me on an escalator or something.”

She looked a little evil for a moment, “Plus I get to rip off Kjootoo’s competition. Caelo and I are not that close, but one of us might have to inherit his operation someday. I don’t really think either of us wants it or would do a good job, but he keeps things under control.”

“If someone else took over, they might start using it for the really nasty stuff. I am not going to pretend to be some kind of hero, but someone is going to control the trade around here. Better someone that cares about the locals and tries to keep things under control. People are always going to buy weed, and the islands are always going to produce it, which means, if Kjootoo’s people don’t, someone else will. Before he came along it was run by some really nasty cartel types working with the CIA, and before that dutch traders, and both of them were very breaking bad types. Murder, mayhem, and most of it concentrated on the islands.”

I grinned, “Rationalizing. I love it.”

“Huh?”

“You have figured out a way to rationalize being a bad guy, by being a good guy that’s also a bad guy. I mean, the officials, when they bust big-ticket crooks, basically rip off their stuff, a lot of which has been legitimately purchased. They freeze and drain their accounts, and then auction off their property for their own operating expenses.”

“You do the same thing, specifically hitting bad guys because that’s where the money is. But in the end, if you don’t go around randomly hurting people, you are every bit as much of a good guy as the ones that are paid to do it. No one really wants to be the bad guy, and with your powerset, no cape team would have you, so you just play a good guy under the table. Like a vigilante, but without giving away all the money to politicians who’d just hide it for their retirement or spend it to fund other bad guys as ‘resources’.”

I chuckled, “So you get to look at yourself in the mirror as a good guy, and rightfully so, while still profiting from crime. I have always loved that outlook because it makes you consistent, and reliable. The cowls that actually think of themselves as evil are horrible shits to work for because they will do stuff just to prove how bad they are. Like kicking puppies, blowing up kindergartens, or concocting doomsday plans. I won’t work for those guys.”

“Why not?” she asked curiously.

“Because I am in it for the money. I don’t kick puppies or blow up kindergartens because that’s just rotten. But I rationalize the hell out of what I do, I admit it. One thing, though, is most people have a lot less time on Earth than I do… shortening that time without a damned good reason is just flat-out mean. I won’t say I have never killed anyone, but I have never done it for selfish reasons.”

“What about self-defense?” Naomi asked.

“Self-defense against what?” I asked. “I will do it to protect other people, but I have yet to find anyone that can kill me. So if I kill someone just because they are trying to do the impossible, what would that make me?”

“Speaking of doing the impossible, I really want to see if your power can do permanent damage. I have never heard of a power like that before, but lots of powers are just… kind of out there. This is probably going to hurt, a lot, but I need to know if your power is capable of wrecking my bones.”

I held up my left hand and wiggled it a little. “Even if it is, I should be able to regenerate it. When my power first appeared, my bones were pretty screwed up from a combination of malnutrition, heavy metal exposure, and radiation damage. I am pretty sure I might have had leukemia too, but once my powers manifested my bones straightened up in mere months.” I grinned at her, “Teeth too.”

“I think that we should, but someplace other than this. Also, it might… really, really hurt. Are you sure you are ready for that?”

I smiled, “last week I let a guy shred my internal organs and knock me three floors off a building, and landed on my head. I think I can handle it, I have handled much worse.”

I shrugged a little, “Stuff still hurts, a lot, but after a while, you just get used to it. It helps to know that it will go away, The worst part is not the damage… after a while, your nerves get destroyed and everything just feels wrong, but when you are healing it back, and your nerves start to regenerate, now that REALLY hurts.”

She sighed and flopped on the bed next to me, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Hold on a second. I have an idea about something, but we might have to test it.”

I nodded, “Sure thing. Hey, how about I grab a shower real quick? That way people think we had a nice assignation in here.”

She nodded and I headed into the shower. Fortunately, a ship like this had decent water, there were no regulators or anything, and although the shower did say ‘nonpotable’ it wasn’t salty or anything.

After I got out, I took the time to change into something more summery.

Technically, it was heading into winter, but this far south the days were still pretty balmy, and I think the ship was headed even farther south, so I changed into a pair of long shorts, a Hawaiian shirt I hadn’t worn in maybe two decades, and a pair of tremendously beat-up sneakers.

She was careful not to watch me as I changed, but it wasn’t a big deal. After a while, the damage to clothes was just something you got used to, and after getting shredded I had more than once had to run around naked for a while.

This wasn’t the comic books, where somehow strategic clothing remained after you got wrecked. I was pretty average in my opinion, but that didn’t mean I had to intentionally swing it around.

“Are we good?” I asked. “Oh, and do you have some kind of weird henchman uniform you want me to wear? I refuse to do the spike thing, but I am pretty open-minded when it comes to the conventions.”

She smiled and opened the door. “How do skin-tight armored neoprene, night vision gear, and urban camouflage sound to you?”

I laughed, “It sounds like heaven. Usually, I either go in thug rough, you know, jumpsuit and ski mask, or I get to wear some seriously weird crap like a bronze breastplate and helmet. It’s like… whatever stupid empire failed to take over the world is favored by a lot of cowls for their henchmen. If it were me, I’d go for something more upbeat, all those old empires LOST, I would want more positive morale for my guys.”

She giggled as we walked through the passageway. “I can see it now. Invulnerable guy and his army of hot-pink bunnies, out to take over the world, one Hooters at a time.”

I nodded rapidly, “Right? I mean, who’s going to shoot a playboy bunny? It’s not really that intimidating in general, but I know a bikini team with rabbit ears would probably scare the crap out of some data entry center or programmer nerd lab.”

Naomi laughed, a lot more of a promising sound than the evil chortle or cackles I was used to.