Dinner had been quite good, but unusual. Apparently, the dinner staff, two girls and an older gentleman, had been warned that a really big eater was going to be showing up.

I thought that big eater meant me until I met Tino. The guy was big, like Pacific Islander big, and quite polite. For the first time, I felt a little intimidated by the amount of food someone else could put away.

The food was served under the tented area, sort of banquet-style, And I was introduced to a lot of foods I had never even tried before. I had moved across Europe and China in the distant past, and even through a lot of places in the United States where odd foods like gator and snake were the norm, but I’d never really been to the pacific islands.

Fried plantains, some kind of herb-crusted fish called stamp and go, and a light bread that tasted like a slightly sweeter King’s Hawaiian bread were first on the menu. This was followed by mountains of these kinds of salty donut holes and something called Pikliz that reminded me of Mexican pickled vegetables or maybe Appalachian Chow-Chow.

There was a very good really hot rice and beans recipe, which was called rice and peas for some strange reason, but I got very odd looks when I covered it with the pikliz… but the combination was delicious, and soon several other people, including Naomi and Caelo, had tried it that way.

There were even piles of steamed and dressed veggies like cauliflower and Broccoli, a weird kind of Macaroni Au Gratin that was filled with chicken chunks and didn’t really taste like cheese, and lots of other stuff, followed by lingonberry hand pies.

For the first time in a while, I was really filled up after we ate, and looked around at the other guests. Two guys looked like they had my job, big muscular guys packing shoulder holsters. Tino, of course, who was a walking advertisement for the pacific islands world’s strongest man contest, Rattler, Caelo, Naomi, and a big guy with dreadlocks and sideburns named Sandman that pretty much screamed “I am a supervillain”.

Something about Sandman really bugged me. I wasn’t sure if it was the way he looked at me or the way he looked at Caelo and Naomi, but I would never, ever want to work as a mook for him. He had that look in his eye, the look I had seen on some guys in prison, that said he was dead inside.

When he looked at me, he was almost completely expressionless, like he was simply unsure if I was an obstacle or a threat. But when he looked at the girls, something else reared its ugly head. I know he worked for Kjootoo, but if I could help it, I wouldn’t ever leave one of them alone with him.

In fact, it was actually kind of hard not to want to just grab his dreadlocks and pound his head into the deck until he stopped moving. Without even a word being said. I had only had that reaction once before, and it worried me.

The dining area was arranged with little tables, and Caelo and Naomi were sitting at mine with a small Asian, quite attractive, that called herself Akiko.

I was talking to Caelo in ASL while repeating out loud so as not to be rude to the others. Her ASL was… hesitant... like she had recently learned it and had to fumble occasionally to find the right word.

When I switched to FSL or French sign language, she seemed a lot more comfortable. The two versions share a common root, but the specifics can be very different, although there were a lot of ASL words for specific things that just weren’t used in FSL much. There were a lot of crossovers, but the biggest difference was the way in which statements were structured.

After a bit, I stopped repeating when the subject moved to more private matters that shouldn’t be discussed in front of everyone else.

“How many languages do you know?” Caelo signed.

I shrugged a little and had to fingerspell some of them. “ASL and FSL,” I answered, “Plus French, German, Cantonese, Kejia, Hunan, Mandarin, Persian, Hindi, Dutch, Afrikaans, English, Spanish, and I can make myself understood or order a beer in a bunch more. At last count, I could get beat up in over two hundred languages."

“Are you a language master? I know you have power, but I don’t know what it is except for energy cloaking.”

“No, I just have lived in a lot of places. Spent time in jails in a lot of places too, so I had plenty of time to learn the languages that would get you stabbed for not knowing. What’s energy cloaking?”

“That thing you do where you cut off my ability to catch your emotional state.”

I shook my head. “That’s not what I do. It’s a reflex, I just… absorb some energy. Kind of like a stealth bomber that absorbs radar. I can absorb radar too, and radio waves. Makes using a cell phone tough, sometimes.” I signed.

She smiled a little, “I learned FSL at school in Belgium. When Father brought me here, no one understood it, and I had a hard time communicating in ASL because it was so different. I can understand French, English, Japanese and Haitian Creole, and a little bit of Spanish if they don’t speak too quickly.”

“I know you and my sister don’t love each other, or are even intimate. Why are you here?”

The question caught me out of the blue a little, and I tried to figure out a good answer. “She needs someone to help her, and to keep men away from her until she learns to control her power.”

“Can you help her?”

“I can try. I am very hard to hurt, and even if she does, I will probably be fine afterward. I have worked for a lot of people with dangerous abilities, and I am used to the risks.”

“I wish I could speak with her, but she doesn’t know any sign. I didn’t used to be able to do it easily either, except for a few words, but only Lauren could understand me. There have been other people that know sign, but until I met Louis, I never wanted to speak with anyone.”

“Louis?” I asked.

Her eyes got a dreamy look in them. “The very perfect. I plan on marrying him and my father approves, but he is very busy, especially now. He is too far away to dream walk, but he could hear me even when I couldn’t speak. That’s his ability.”

Hmm. Dreamwalk. Yep, definitely one of those mental powers that don’t exist. The name, Louis sounded familiar though.

“Louis. Is he A.L.C.H.E.M.Y.S.T.?” I had to fingerspell.

“Yes, but he doesn’t like that name very much. He always tells people to call him Louis instead, but most people forget. Me too, but I remind myself every time I see him.”

“What does he look like, this man of your dreams?”

“Kind of like you, but much bigger. Super Sexy, but with more freckles and less hair on his face.”

Made sense. Most Metahumans either tended towards the wiry or the buff. We used a lot of energy, and most of us had really minuscule fat percentages. Metahumans with extra strength or vitality tended to have a multiplicative effect on their natural body, and since that was a very common power, most super-strong Meta tended to get as buff and powerful as possible. The ones who relied on agility tended to be built like sprinters because, again, of multiplicative effects.

In my case, I only got super strong when I was already beat to shit, so most of my muscles were for vanity and doing the usual jobs a mook had to do… intimidating people and hauling around gear was just a lot easier when you bulked up a bit. Plus, you know, innate healing. I could walk out of a Gym after two hours on the weights, eat a hearty breakfast, and be fresh as a fiddle and ready for a day of kicking ass and taking names.

“You are going to marry him?” I asked.

“Yes. Right now he’s with my friend Lauren, but sooner or later I will.”

“You are going to take him away from your friend?”

“Of course not. She’s my friend. I am going to marry him but she is welcome to join too.”

Wow. Just wow. The guy sounded like a real winner. Polygamy? Or just… girls on the side agreement? Players. I hoped I wouldn’t have to kick his ass for messing with my employer’s family.

I had more than enough trouble just taking care of one girl at a time. Then again, I had time. I had never understood the whole idea behind playing the field after you got married. I may not have been that old, but you can put up with a few sacrifices when sex was no longer on the table. Hell, my ex-wife had told me to go find a pay mate while she was in the hospital, but I couldn’t. I just didn’t work that way.

When I was single, that was one thing. I might be a bad guy, but I had my own code of honor, be it flexible as hell sometimes. You don’t abandon kids, you don’t cheat on your woman, You don’t steal from the working class, and you don’t kill anyone unless it’s the only way to stop them from doing something just as bad or worse to others, helpless people.

Would I kill a serial killer? Hah. The body would never be found. I wouldn’t torture them unless I had to though, because when you kill ‘em, they don’t learn nothin’. That reminded me of the emptiness in Sandman's eyes... was that why I sort of instantly hated him?

I looked closely at Naomi for a moment. Did she even know about her sister? I didn’t need to stick my head into family problems unless they caused real problems, so I’d keep my mouth shut, but it might cause an issue later.

Especially with a girl that may be capable of pushing emotions into other people. Empaths were bloody dangerous. If her heart got broken, she might share her sorrow or even suicidal thoughts with lots of others. I’d seen it happen before, in China. One depressed girl killed millions.

I still had nightmares about what I’d had to do to stop her. If I hadn’t, millions more would probably have died, but there was a reason I never tried to escape from the jail in Hunan. I deserved it.

That was the one and only time I’d ever tried to be a ‘real’ hero. I had a bunch of medals, but risking your life to save people when you know you cannot die is meaningless. No more heroic than going into a grocery store to buy beer.

But that… that took a piece of your soul, and I couldn’t do it anymore. Let the guys without a conscience play the superhero. They could handle it better and accept the adulation for risking almost nothing with a clear head.

And if they failed to stop some kind of walking nightmare with a doomsday weapon? Well, I’d survive it. I had before. Not that Berlin had. There was a reason why Hamburg was the capital of Germany, instead of the scoured rubble that was Berlin.

I shook my head, dispelling the memory. I was sitting at a table eating my heart out while surrounded by three lovely girls. What the hell was my problem?

I realized, when I saw Naomi’s room, that she had definitely claimed it as an adult. Tastefully decorated, even the fabric covering the antique imperial loveseat was finely appliqued silk.

Of course, the room was decorated with silk. Wouldn’t want any accidents.

The restroom where I was currently sitting on the edge of an old-fashioned bathtub was literally garnished with silver and occasionally gold.

I was still wearing my shorts, but I had removed my classic Hawaiian shirt, and Naomi was kneeling on the bathmat, looking at me nervously. I held my hand out over the bathtub, in case things got messy, and she was wearing little but an oversized teeshirt with a giant coffee cup on it.

I joked a little, “This is your first time. Are you really sure you are ready for it?”

She shook her head, “I don’t know if I am… I mean, I have done it plenty of times with tools, and things I wouldn’t miss, but I have never… you know… done it, with a real person before.”

I nodded understandingly. “It takes time to get used to the idea. I mean, it’s one thing to know the science behind it, and yet another to know that it’s really going to hurt.”

She wiggled a little, and I definitely noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra under the shirt. “If it makes you feel better,” I said, “Just know that I have done this plenty of times. It only hurts for a little while, and then it’s done and out of the way.”

She nodded and held her finger out towards the palm of my hand, where I held it over the bathtub. If this worked like she was expecting, it was likely to get bloody.

The tip of her finger began to glow softly, blue, and it looked like even her skin beneath it became a soft shade of blue, the light seeming to wash out as if her finger were some kind of neon bulb rather than a digit.

Okay, I was probably going to yell. Hurt was hurt, even if you could tolerate it, but I was about to have my hand disintegrated. She had pulled back as much as she could but warned me that with flesh, even a quick flick of her finger would probably take most of the flesh off of my bones, if not the bones themselves.

And then her finger touched my hand.

“Shipfarckles!” I yelled. Leaping up. I didn’t see any spraying blood, but that energy that races through me when I get hit? It felt like I was getting electrocuted, More than ever before. “Crabknuckles! Holy Flaming monkey lovers!”

I raced out of the bathroom. I was not sure what to do, but I was clutching my hand against my chest and grabbed the doorknob to head out into the hall, which came off in my hand as the door opened. Not even really a doorknob, anymore, just a set of silver knuckles with my fingerprints on it.

“George?” I heard a worried shout before as I rushed onto the deck.

“Holy Mothercracker!” I yelled, running out onto the deck, past the small tables. One of them caught my thigh, and in a moment smashed through the windscreen and far out away from the ship, a mangled tangle of wood and metal.

“Toxic Monkeylumps!” I yelled again, “Kris fracking Kringle on a breadstick!”

I had to get rid of the energy, and I kept running, diving over the swimming pool in a single stride, and then jumping as hard as I could when I hit the helo landing pad, hopefully, the most durable part of the ship.

With a screeching crack, one corner of the pad fell away underneath me as I soared.

I wasn’t flying. I was falling. At first, I was falling upward at incredible speeds.

Flying requires either wings or some way to bend Newton’s first law over a jailhouse toilet to play a game of hiding the soap. I kept falling upwards for a while, but eventually, Gravity finally decided it was his turn to play.

Far beneath me, I could see lights coming on all over the ship… quite a bit behind me as well. Well, at least hopefully it wouldn’t hurt TOO much when I landed.

I have never liked falling great distances. Sure it wouldn’t kill me, but without a parachute, your balls play hockey with your tonsils, and everything inside you is screaming “I am going to die!” So I won’t bother to pretend I wasn’t hollering like a loon before I finally hit the water. Sure I knew it wouldn't kill me, intellectually, but instincts just ain't amenable to reason sometimes.

Weird, usually, after a fall of a couple of thousand feet, water’s surface tension wasn’t too different from landing on solid concrete. I hit hard, feet first, but it didn’t hit me as hard as it usually does. My shorts were shredded, of course, they were weak linen and not designed to survive hitting the water after falling almost a mile.

But my brain wasn’t mangled very much from trying to squeeze unsuccessfully through the bottom of my skull. I usually would be out like a light after hitting anything at that speed, but this time I remembered slowing down when the water caught me, the pressure and impact, and I was finally floating in the cold ocean.

The power feeling had faded a bit, but my nerves were still jangled. The weirdest part was, it hadn’t actually hurt. It had stung a little, but it was more like one of those electrical kits you played with as a kid, where the current would run through your body a dozen times a second from the capacitor, like licking a 9-volt battery, only with your whole body.

The really creepy part, though, was that my hand was completely intact. I was sparkling a little, almost as if my body were coated with a luminescence that only showed occasionally, or maybe I was one of those really stupid vampires from a Young adult movie showing why they didn’t hang out in the sun… just before they exploded in a burst of fire.

I heard “Man overboard!” from… way too far behind me and just started treading water.