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LiFS Chapter 13 - Meeting Heroes
🕑 Added 2023-11-20 00:05:39 +0000 UTCI made it to the Pelhams a little after ten. Crystal met me at the door, a finger on her lips as she told me that her parents were already asleep. She led me up the stairs to a sparsely-furnished bedroom at the end of the hall, showing me the bathroom, her room, her parent’s room, and the room where Eric was still awake doing his homework along the way.
She let me get settled in, which mostly consisted of putting the sheets she’d brought me on the bed and taking off my hoodie. I was very thankful that my powers made cleaning myself and my clothing rather easy––sweat was basically just salt water and I could dry things on command––because otherwise I imagined I would have looked and smelled considerably worse after several days with no changes of clothes.
About ten minutes later, Crystal came back wearing sweatpants and a long white t-shirt and carrying two mugs of hot tea. I wasn’t really much of a tea person––unless of course it was of the twisted variety––but it was a nice gesture. I thanked her and she handed me a brown mug decorated with a stylized bear wearing jeans and a bright yellow hat.
I was expecting her to leave after that, but instead she curled up in the papasan chair in the corner of the room, watching me silently as I sipped at my tea. It was slightly sweet and a little grassy, with notes of some sort of fruit or berry. I couldn’t say whether it was good tea, but it was hot and didn’t taste bad so it was kind of nice after walking through the chilly March evening.
“Could you tell me a bit more about your world?” Crystal asked suddenly. “Only if you want to, I mean. I know it's getting late and you’re going to talk to the PRT tomorrow, but I’ve never met someone from another earth and it sounds so fascinating! They say Aleph only diverged from us a few decades ago but it's already so different, and it seems like your world is also pretty different from Bet.”
“Uh, yeah, sure. I don’t mind. I don’t think I could fall asleep right now anyway.” I was tired, but the anxiety about my meeting tomorrow was still getting to me. I’d gotten pretty used to meeting gods, but somehow mortal bureaucrats sounded even scarier. Getting my learner’s permit with my stepdad had been an experience, and I’d had the Mist on my side at the time. Dealing with a super-powered DMV sounded like a literal nightmare. “What do you want to know?”
We ended up staying up a teensy bit longer than I think Crystal fully intended. I spent about an hour telling her slightly altered stories about some of the monsters I’d fought and quests I’d gone on. Then the topic had shifted to more personal anecdotes. I told her about my mom’s affinity for blue food. She told me about some of her and her brother’s hijinks after they’d first gotten their powers.
Around two a.m I suddenly remembered Carol’s instructions to get some sleep. Whoops. Crystal was really fun to talk with. She was smart, had a good sense of humor, and seemed like a genuinely good person with a passion for helping others. For a moment I’d almost managed to forget that I was impossibly far from home and possibly permanently cut off from everyone I’d ever known.
I hoped my mom was doing okay. I was really glad she had Paul now to support her. I had a feeling she wasn’t going to take my disappearance well.
“Are you alright, Percy?” Crystal asked quietly. I opened my eyes and realized that she was still standing in the doorway, loosely holding our two empty mugs at her side.
“I…I think so,” I answered quietly, but the lump in my throat probably made my words sound unconvincing. “I hope everyone’s doing alright. My mom…”
Crystal set the mugs down on the bedside table, then sat down beside me on the edge of my borrowed bed and wrapped me in a tight hug. She didn’t say anything, but it was probably better that way. Any reassurances she could have tried to give me would have been completely empty and we both knew it.
After a moment, I hugged her back, savoring the warmth of another person pressed up against me. Her hair was very soft and smelled of lavender. “Thanks,” I whispered into her shoulder, my voice muffled.
“Any time,” she whispered back. “You should get some sleep. Aunt Carol told me your meeting is at nine, so you need to be up pretty early.”
“Late and sleep deprived probably wouldn’t make a good first impression,” I joked weakly.
“Probably not.” She stood up, smiled, and left the room, turning off the lights on her way out.
It still took me more than an hour to fall asleep, my eyes staring blankly up at the dark ceiling as I listened to the inaudible crash of distant waves, but the hug helped. Oh Annabeth. How I missed her. How I wished that she was here with me. She’d know exactly what we needed to do. There was no way she couldn’t figure out a way to get back home.
Not for the first time I cursed that traitorous scum Ethan Nakamura. A quick death had been far too good for him. I hoped Hades had found a suitably horrible fate for him. May his soul suffer for eternity in the fields of punishment.
A single tear leaked down my cheek and vanished into nothingness. Oh Annabeth…
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“So what do you make of him?” Armsmaster muttered, his words audible only to the sensitive microphones inside his armor.
“I’m not seeing anything,” Dragon answered promptly. “Facial recognition found nothing and there is no record of a Perseus or Sally Jackson living in New York pre Behemoth. I also can’t find any cape that matches his powers or shares his tinkertech. There aren’t very many high end bruits who also have hydrokinetic powers.”
Well, not outside the obvious example, Armsmaster thought grimly.
“Per PRT protocol, I’ve taken the initiative to forward his information to Watchdog. Hopefully they’ll be able to tell us for certain in the next few hours.”
“Thank you.”
Armsmaster shifted his gaze back to the large display covering one wall of the conference room. The potential Case-22 was sitting beside his lawyer, Brandish, slowly working through a tall stack of forms and tests with her help. He’d mentioned dyslexia during the initial interview and his behavior matched with what Armsmaster knew of the learning disorder.
Perseus Jackson. The display in his helmet zoomed in on the young man’s face. Once again, the facial recognition program connected to his armor found no precise matches, not that he had expected it to do so.
He was tall and well built, with what Armsmaster’s software told him were very handsome features. His immediate disregard for masks contributed to his story––cape culture had become deeply embedded in the public consciousness over the past few decades. His accent matched what he would have expected from someone growing up in New York, but anyone like that should have had an instinctive understanding of maintaining a secret identity.
The door to the conference room opened and Director Piggot strode into the room, followed closely by Miss Militia and the Deputy Director. “Armsmaster, good. What do you have for me?” she asked briskly, taking a seat at the head of the long table facing the display.
Armsmaster waited for everyone to sit down, then began. “I was contacted last night by Carol Dallon of New Wave just after nine p.m. The potential Case-22 contacted her for legal representation and presented sufficient preliminary evidence for her to believe his story. He also consented to examination by Panacea, who found that the subject did not appear to be carrying any dangerous diseases from his home dimension, though his power apparently makes him impossible for her to affect directly.”
“At least that’s something,” the Director muttered loudly.
Armsmaster continued. “Wanting to get this issue settled as soon as possible, I set up a meeting for nine this morning, to which Mrs. Dallon agreed. The subject, whom I will henceforth address as Riptide, the cape name that he has chosen for himself, and Mrs. Dallon arrived promptly at the specified time. Since then he has fully cooperated with questioning and testing, though no final conclusion has been determined as of yet. He does not exist on any database that I or Dragon have access to, and the issue has been forwarded to WEDGDG.”
“You were present for the initial evaluation. What is your impression so far?”
“According to my software, Riptide does truly believe that he is a Case-22, though it is possible that his memory may have been tampered with by a master or stranger cape. Based on his account, he arrived in Earth Bet on Wednesday of this week and spent several days gathering information before approaching us and Mrs. Dallon via her daughter. Glory Girl was the first cape who he encountered and she left him her contact information after mistaking him for a regular new hero.
“According to him, he stumbled across some form of dimensional passage while exploring the ocean in his home reality. The passage was incredibly hazardous and he claims that only his Brute power allowed him to survive the experience and he was badly injured regardless. He does not know the precise location where he emerged, but is willing to assist us in locating the point.
“After some initial questioning, Riptide consented to basic power testing. He is a highly-durable Brute and a hydrokinetic Shaker. None of the equipment present in the PRT headquarters was able to injure him and he had no difficulty standing beneath the hydraulic press, though he mentioned that he is not necessarily able to lift the same sort of weight that he can endure. I was unable to independently verify this fact.
“His hydrokinesis is similarly impressive. He has fine control of water in a large area around him, though he was unable to pin down a specific range limit. We were also unable to find a mass limit for water he could control as of yet, but he has agreed to further testing near the shoreline at a later date.”
“Levithan. You’re describing Levithan. You’re telling me we have a mini-levithan Case-22 on our hands?” Piggot asked, her voice hard.
“Essentially, yes.”
“Wonderful. What else have you got?”
Notes appeared on the display within his helmet. “The Earth that Riptide comes from, tentatively labeled Earth Gimel, appears to have diverged from our world at some point in the recent past, though the exact date is currently impossible to pin down. The world appears to have a smaller cape population than we do and have established a very different cape culture. The existence of capes is mostly kept secret from the general population and the majority of their efforts are focused on combating some form of monster-capes or potentially bio-tinker creations.
“Furthermore, the world has a much higher concentration of second-generation capes such as Riptide himself. According to Riptide, his father is a much stronger hydrokinetic than he himself is, but does not have the same level of Brute abilities as Riptide. Most second-generation capes in his world tend to be weaker than their parents. This is generally consistent with trends observed in Earth Bet, though proper studies are difficult to conduct due to secret identities.”
“And what about Riptide himself?” Miss Militia asked. “I assume we will be attempting to recruit him into the Protectorate?”
“Riptide considers himself a hero, though the term seems to mean something slightly different in his own world. I have not seen enough to make a firm determination one way or the other, but I do not believe he would have approached us if he intended to become a villain.”
The director clicked her tongue loudly. “We’ll try for a soft sell. From the sound of it, he’s certainly not someone we want as a villain. If he does turn out to be a Case-22, we’ll need to help him figure out a new identity. Hopefully that will help ingratiate him to the PRT. If he isn’t, well. We’ll take that on a case-by-case basis.”
“Understood, Director.”
“Good. Keep me informed. I’ll be in my office. I may as well get something productive done if I’m coming in to work on my day off.”
Comments
ThatGit
Not *too* long, but it is at the end of the day Percy Jackson
BRUNO ASTUR
How long until he realizes that she is interested?
Bishop7053
Also crystal best girl
