The Ship had two boats attached to it, the second one was much smaller, on the right side facing the front… the Starboard, I guess?

I wasn’t sure why they called the front and back anything other than the front and back, but I guess the starboard and port made sense. No matter which way you are facing, the starboard side of the ship is on the right side of the boat, and the port is on the left, whereas for whoever is looking around, the right and left are relative to them.

I guess that would make ordering crews around easier.

The starboard boat frame was vastly smaller and had two boats attached to it called Zodiacs, which were inflatable and went into the water very quickly, and within twenty minutes I was back on board the ship surrounded by gawkers.

“Dude, no offense, but I really need to know what your power set is. If you are going to wreck the boat, I need to know in advance.” Tino said.

I shook my head, “I don’t know if I can offer to help repair it, but whatever it was I had no idea what was going on.” I sighed, “Maybe it’s like… kinetic redirection or something. Really good sex and foosh! I have a bunch of motion to get rid of.” I grinned at Rattler, “It’s a good thing I didn’t get hit with a bullet or something, I have no idea what kind of backlash that would have had.”

Tino smiled, “For a second there I thought you were like a flying meta, I mean, boom, straight up. And then you started falling, and I could hear you yelling… I thought maybe you had a bad awaken or something, and we were going to have to clean up after it.” he looked meaningfully at Naomi.

She shook her head, “I will take care of it. I mean, the expense at least. I didn’t give him one. It was just a bad power interaction.”

“Give him one?” I asked, but Naomi shook her head.

Caelo was watching, mystified, and then signed to me, “Is that what happens when you absorb energy?”

Damn. I signed back. “No, usually it wrecks me, and I absorb a tiny bit of what is coming in. Whatever Naomi did was a surprise.”

She nodded, “When I see him, I will ask Louis to help you figure out how to control it. He is good at that.”

Double damn. If this guy could help figure out what’s going on, I’d owe him.

How was I supposed to spy on someone that I owed big? I’d been lying to the scary woman, I still cared about what happened to my relatives, even if I had never met them. How long would it be until she started sending me pictures of their dead bodies?

I guess my face must have gone cold, because Caelo started trying to sign something else and I turned away, stalking back toward Naomi’s now slight-damaged bedroom. I needed some sleep.

“I think I know what happened,” Naomi said once we were both back in her bedroom, with the door wedged closed. It probably wasn’t fire-safe, which I heard was a thing on ships, but she had braced one of her chairs against the door.

“Oh?” I asked eloquently, flopping onto her silk-covered loveseat.

“Yes. I don’t think you are a regenerator or immortal at all.”

That was news to me. “So what do you think?”

“I think that you are entropy resistant. You seemed to absorb all the energy I used to break down your structure completely, but since you don’t burn it off by destroying your own body and then regenerating it, you were left with a ton of extra energy to dispose of.”

“And that explains me being immune to death how?”

She sat down next to me on the love seat, and then smiled a little, “Well, does your brain ever get hurt when you do?”

I nodded, leaning back against the loveseat and crossing one leg across the other. Naomi was my boss. I was not going to get horny just because she was leaning forward and not wearing very much. I was glad I had another pair of baggy shorts to wear.

Some cowls were big fans of keeping it in the family when they needed to burn off a little steam, but it was bad policy, appearances notwithstanding.

Yes, most female cowls were also gorgeous with great bodies, although a few of them had a feature they thought was horrifying which was why they were cowls.

Now, if I could just convince my body that the girl who had just practically sent me through the roof... that Naomi was off-limits, I should be fine. It didn’t help that right now I could easily tell that there was a lovely little bit of sweat collected in the hollow between her well-shaped breasts from the warm night that would have been fun to lick off just before she made me explode or something.

“Yeah, I have cooked it, burnt it, smashed it into peanut butter, I mean, it’s just a brain. It’s not immune to damage like my bones are. Neither is any other internal organ. That’s why the wizard thought I was a liche because even regenerators are vulnerable to getting their brain pulped.”

She nodded, “But when it comes back, you can still remember everything? You don’t have to relearn how to change your own diapers?”

I shook my head, “No.”

“I think your body uses the energy from taking damage to reset yourself to your original entropic state. Obviously, it’s not complete, or else food would have no effect on you and you wouldn’t be able to do anything like building muscle or… much of anything really.” She put her hand on my knee. “You would be frozen, unmoving, forever.”

I scooted back a little, putting my leg down so that she wasn’t touching my knee. “I don’t know much about physics and stuff. When I was growing up, most of a kid’s education involved figuring out how to grow enough food for a whole year in one of the shortest growing seasons on Earth.” I shrugged. “Pro tip. Before GMO you mostly can’t.”

Yeah, a lot of people have problems with genetically modified organisms, mainly scientifically-designed foods, but when you go from a 6 to 1 yield which meant starvation to a 40 to 1 yield which means you live and might even have enough to sell, you don’t grump too much about whether it was created via selective breeding or in a test tube.

Southern Siberia was now, with new modified strains, one of the bread baskets of Russia, rather than the place you threw criminals and political dissidents to starve and freeze to death. Novosibirsk, for example, was one of the premier grain and vegetable oil exporters in Russia, helping to keep both it and China fed and up to their elbows in edible lubricant.

Speaking of edible lubricant, Naomi was still leaning toward me. Dammit, woman! It had been a while. If putting me to pasture with a very visible power accident was out of the picture, I needed to keep things professional.

She nodded. “Well, when you absorbed the energy, your body was protected from the entropic effect. Usually, you seem to absorb just a little bit of the energy, and the rest goes to resetting whatever happens to you. But since you took the full force of my power… and by the way, sorta stripped my power reserves in the process, so I am pretty much harmless until they regenerate, it kind of overloaded you. You are used to immediately feeding all that energy into your entropic reset from whatever damage spilled over past your absorption.”

“Which means?” I asked her, trying to keep her focus on nerdsplaining to me.

“That means that your energy absorption is your defense. You should be able to absorb almost any sort of energy, from kinetic to heat to meta powers. But right now your...battery, I guess, is really tiny, because you are used to only absorbing a tiny bit and then having to use the rest to fuel your entropic reset.”

She beamed evilly, “And the way to build your capacity, and incidentally protect yourself from more damage, is the same way you would build muscle. Right now, every time you lift that weight, you are spending all your energy trying to balance it instead of getting a good workout.” She laughed. “Since my power is directly opposed to yours, instead of you having to bleed it off by resetting yourself, I can help you increase the size of your energy storage.”

I sighed a little. “Does this mean we are going to be partners, or you are going to be my personal trainer? No offense, but I am not exactly in a position to cut my income. I still eat like a horse, and after what I just did a few minutes ago, I am starving again.”

She shook her head. “Not entirely. I still need someone that can keep my energy expenditures stable and, like you just did, bleed off the extra so I can avoid just getting excited and disintegrating everything around me.” she looked me up and down speculatively, “Plus, it can help me train my own energy use to help avoid accidents. A cute guy that won’t get melted if he gets me too worked up is a huge bonus.”

Ahh. I knew it would come down to this. I am no one’s fantasy come to life, unless they had a muscle fetish, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to trade in my henchman cred for manwhore. “Yeah, that might be a little bit of a problem. I mean, I am sure that… err… Look, you are the boss.”

She smiled slightly. “Yes, but did you see what we did? I am proposing a change of contract. There are a ton of situations where being able to unleash incredible strength, or jump a mile and survive, could come in enormously useful. So I am suggesting that instead of being my henchman, you are my partner. Even splits minus expenses. There are certain extremely appealing targets that are just too hard for me to crack, even with my abilities, but with you, I could hit them.”

She straightened herself a little, and folded her flimsy top a little better over herself, much to my relief. “Other stuff. I mean, if it happens it happens. Unless you aren’t into girls? Or black girls?”

I chuckled a little, “No, I mean, yes, I am into girls, and I think you are gorgeous. It’s just that I kind of make a point to avoid entanglements that can lead to more complicated entanglements. I outlive the shit out of everyone, and I have been married three times. Twice I outlived my wives, and that… hurts. It hurts worse than getting caught in a car fire for hours, and I know.”

I shook my head, “I don’t want to fall for someone and then watch them die again. I don’t want to watch my grandchildren die. Again.”

She looked at me very seriously, and then slowly nodded, “I totally understand that. But… just so you know, I am a little selfish. I awakened when I was 14, and I never could be with anyone because I might kill them. I think you are really good-looking despite acting like your face is weird, maybe better-looking than Alchemyst or Red Shift.”

She reached forward and brushed my stubble with her soft hand. “Plus you aren’t in a relationship. So I will probably try to get things going. It doesn’t have to be romance, it could be just sex, but I am not going to just let it lie.”

She smiled a little, “That and you are going to have to be VERY good at playing my boyfriend.”

I was slightly confused. “I haven’t been so far?”

She blinked her eyes at me innocently. “Well, what do new couples do when they are sleeping alone in the same room together?”

I shook my head, “I am not…”

She laughed, “No, you aren’t, but it needs to look like we are. That means no sleeping on the floor. No giving me my space when it comes to other guys. If I find someone else that attracts me, and can handle what I can do, we can work out some sort of privacy arrangement, but for right now, It needs to look like we are going at each other constantly, or I can’t sell it.”

Yes, she was beautiful, but under that, she was also coldly calculating. That was… probably… a good thing. “I don’t know how to be a partner,” I added.

She smirked a little, “Well, that means we boost your power pool. Regular training, and you don’t get to play employee. We will stay away from cape territory for now, but that means no surrendering if the going gets tough. The people we will be hitting wouldn’t let you surrender anyway, they are huge fans of torture and making examples of people, but unless a cape or a cop shows up, you need to act more like a badass supervillain than a scary minion.”

“Mook,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“Mook. Mooks are hired, and minions are loyal. Mooks won’t sell you out, but they won’t go past the end of their contract either unless they get rehired. Minions are loyal troops. Maybe they won’t die for you, but they are there for more than just a paycheck, and they demand certain behaviors from their cowl in exchange.”

“Like what certain behaviors?”

“Well, like the Blades, that work for Edgemistress, well, they literally have an ax to grind. If Edgie suddenly started hiring male mooks or decided she wanted the D, they’d desert her. They hate men, and so if Edgemistress wants to keep their loyalty she has to hate men too. The Red Menace is the same way… he has troops of fanatical followers, but if he stops ranting about evil capitalist pigs or decides that he wants to profit from his… exploits in a more personal way, they’d desert, or maybe even kill him for being anti-revolutionary.”

She laughed, “Okay, I saw the word mook but I didn’t really realize that the different types of henchmen had different categorization schemes.”

I nodded, “Yep. Thugs are generally less reliable than mooks, but they make less money and are mostly in it for the excitement of kicking ass. They will also kill for you if you pay them enough, but they are always short-timers. You hire a bunch of thugs to break up an enemy base, but they are unreliable… If their target offers enough, they might switch sides.”

“Goons, on the other hand, are a lot like mooks. They are loyal like minions, and they need to be taken care of, and they will do stuff like breaking kneecaps, but they won’t fight a cape or kill people unless someone’s trying to kill them. They get paid but are also into whatever you are doing, and they are not particularly professionals. If you are a union boss or something, and a bunch of your boys goes to work for you to get paid while they strike and kick the crap out of scabs, they would be considered goons.”

I thought about it. “There are some other categories like flunky is a guy that you hire specifically to sell you out, and stooge is someone you hire to get hired by another organization as your spy. Lackeys are guys that work for you without getting paid, although you do need to take care of them since they are not devoted like minions.”

She laughed again, “Seriously? Is this important?”

I shrugged, “Is becoming a cowl without getting murdered by the people who work for you important?”

She nodded, and I smiled. “Yeah, Cowls know this stuff. Honestly, what you do, hitting the cartels, is real mask work, but most cowls are there to play the game. Get rich, get caught, do time, retire rich, and never get backstabbed. I am betting your father knows all about it.”

“Unless you want to go it totally solo, you need to understand how it’s put together. And solo cowls tend to wind up in stronghold eventually, or dead.”

She nodded slowly, and then said, “You are getting even aren’t you?”

I laughed, “Yep. You nerdsplained me, so I had to mansplain you.”

I shrugged, “The problem is, even partners have a bunch of different roles, and it’s something I don’t really know anything about.”

“Well, I have plans to deal with something soon, but it’s going to take at least a week to get everything into position. I have someone else I am working with, but she works with my father and is a close friend, and we have different roles. So my suggestion is, we try to work out how to expand your battery, you get paid, and we see how far we can take it. After that, I try to buy your loyalty with my body, my wealth, a little shared excitement, and your sense of obligation.”

I grinned a little. “How refreshingly honest.”