Ever had to rely on a ceiling fan for entertainment purposes?
Not the most fun way to pass the time, I'd say.
But it's half past midnight on some weekday in November, I forget which one, and I find myself doing so, mostly out of a lack of desire to knock myself out.
It might sound irresponsible, not sleeping at a late hour like that, but in my defense, I had a long power nap not too long before. High school tends to make one lose control of their REM schedules.
Anyway, I'm steadily watching the fan, while also thinking stupid thoughts about the infinite possibilities this hour has in store-- that is, for those who aren't imprisoned in their rooms by traditional social norms. Meanwhile, the "sane ones" like myself are trapped, doomed to live out their nights with one of two options: A) sleep, or B) ennui, and since I wasn't tired I was forced to deal with the latter.
The stupid fan's mocking me, all the while. There it stands, the centerpiece of my room's flat upper surface, as content with itself as any non-sentient object could be, and the more I watch the blasted thing make its conceited rotations, the more I feel the need to get away from it.
And that's when I hear a sound not unlike that of glass being tapped.
I think I'm hallucinating for a second, but it happens again, so I go over to my window to see the hubbub. Pulling back my curtains reveals a tall, tan young lady with a shoulder-length measure of straight hair waiting for me at the fire escape. Her chartreuse eyes match the glow of the neon lights below.
I open the window. "Nora? What are you doing here?" I'm starstruck-- somewhat literally, considering the single white star adorning her purple turtleneck-- but I could say without a doubt that the last person I expected then was my girlfriend.
"Since when are you a curfew enforcer?" she replies, kissing me on the cheek.
I blush a bit (three years of dating, and even then she still made me melt), but I try to hide it as I continue. "No, wait, I mean, literally, what are you doing here? We're on the forty-eighth floor, there's no way you could've climbed all the way up!"
She gives me a classic Nora Irving smirk. "That's actually what I came to show you." I raise an eyebrow, and she stands up, keeping as straight an expression as possible.
"Okay, now, what I'm about to do may generally be considered mad or daffy, even by my standards. But you'll just have to go with it for me, alright?"
I think about protesting whatever this is, but I figure she knows what she's doing, so I just say, "Don't do anything rash."
She goes toward the banister and grabs it, throwing a leg up. "I won't, I promise!" Straddling the railing, she turns back to me and gives a thumbs up, and I gasp. I start to yell her name out, but before it leaves my face, she drops out of sight.
I practically throw myself out of my window and over the railing, but stop at the end of the balcony, fighting back an urge to tear up. One moment she was there, and the next, gone, and I thought I'd lost her forever.
But it's then that I notice a purple billow over Alderney Street below. It stays static for a moment, then inches a little bit higher, a little closer to me. And somehow, despite my better judgment, seeing it almost seems to be a relief.
The cloud starts accelerating, getting quicker and faster by the second, and it zooms past me and I'm mesmerized, even as I shiver from the gust of cold air that emanates out of its path. At the peak of the Griffin Building it makes a loop in the air, and I finally notice a blurred pair of black boots.
My jaw drops to the ground floor. Nora's face becomes clearer as she descends, and with the grace of an Olympian, she passes the balcony once more, then makes a U-turn back upward, meeting me at eye level. I light up, and she beams right back.
"I'd ask to kiss you, except I feel like that'd be weird since you're... floating," I say. The comment makes her laugh.
"Well, what'd you think?" Nora asks.
"Do you even need to ask? It was awesome!" I say, making a half-turn away from her. "Makes me wish I could do that..."
"What's up?" she asks.
I go back to her with a grin. "Oh, nothing!" I put my arms on the banister and smirk. "It's nothing."
She frowns in thought, but then says, "Hey, maybe we could go out for a bit together."
"Like, flying?"
She nods, and I give her a shrug. "I mean, I'm here silently griping about ceiling fans, so why not?"
The clouds around her hands dissipate, and she drops back onto the fire escape with a pat. "You might want to change, though, unless you feel like going out in that."
I look down and realize I'm in my blue plaid pajamas, right down to the attached footie slippers. With a sheepish smile, I duck back into my room, but before I get the chance to conceal myself from the city at large my curtains are already drawn and my window's as shut down as a crashed computer.
Ah, Nor knew me so well. Even before she was super, she had a knack for reading minds.
Five minutes later, I step back out of the window. The light winds start to tap the strings on my gray hoodie upward, so I tuck them in between the jacket and my turquoise shirt.
"Well, don't you look spiffy, Mr. Listman," she says. "I like the bird. S'a nice touch."
I poke the monogrammed belly of the stylized goldcrest adorning the tee, then sweep the top of my 'do like a greaser. "Ready to go?" she asks
"As much as I ever will be, I guess," I reply, and she lowers herself slightly, keeping her shoulders at level with the banister. Trying not to push myself too quickly onto her, I clamber over the balcony edge. I'm nervous about the ground below at first, but Nora takes hold of my legs, and suddenly all my tension's gone.
"You're okay, right? Not scared, are ya?"
"No, no, of course not, I'm fine," I stammer, before having the thought dawn on me that I was essentially sitting on her arm. "I'm not too heavy, am I?"
"You're actually really light, man. I've had more trouble lifting silverware."
"Is that the superhuman strength talking?"
She fakes a moment of thought. "Nope, all Nora." I roll my eyes. "Of course, if you feel like it would be too much of a hassle for me to keep you up there, I don't have to..."
In a beat, there's nothing under me anymore, and the billboards surrounding us start moving upward as I start to approach the ground. Before I get the chance to yelp, a familiar lavender glow stops me, and Nor appears in front of me, hanging upside down with a mischievous grin.
"If it's not too big an issue, would you mind never doing that again?!" I yell.
"Man, I thought you'd like it," she says, with a disappointed sigh and a frown.
“Just… just try not to take me by surprise like that. It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with danger. You ought to know that better than anyone.”
“Noted. You’re sure you want to go through with this?”
I gaze at her. The smirk’s back on her face, but it’s not sarcastic, it’s warm, and even though it’s past midnight in the middle of fall, the look in her eyes is as early and springy as it gets. With a face like that, I can’t help but nod. “Fantastic!” she says, and we're off!
We rush down Alderney Street at a brisk pace. As Nora mimics the flight of the birds my shirt portrays, I tumble and wheeze below her, with about as much grace as a duck with clipped wings. A cold sweat breaks out on my head, and outwardly I crack a toothy smile when she looks down at me, but on the inside I have no idea how to handle things. If it weren’t for her, I’d be falling, then and there, and within seconds I’d have been a jumble of nothing five blocks down from my apartment.
But still we fly, and as the tendrils of Nora’s hair billow through the stream of electronic billboards at the intersection of Alderney and 117th, I stop remembering my own mortality. The skyscraping buildings of Downtown Greyson start to give way to lavish McMansions below, and soon we were drifting through the skies of Marling.
“Any particular reason why we’re over here?” I shout to her.
“There’s somewhere down at Cooper Bay that the snobs haven’t ruined yet!” Suddenly everything makes sense. When we were younger, Marling didn’t exist, and Cooper Bay was the best beach on the whole Phillips Sound side of Greyson City. Nora and I would go down in the daytime sometimes and chase down the little seagulls while running from the freakishly huge ones, back when she was normal and couldn’t freeze their dung in mid-air.
But things in Greyson City have a way of changing. The city introduced a new district to offset the cost of living Downtown, the gargantuan gulls disappeared, Cooper Bay became the “private beach house” part of the city, and Nora jumped into a crack in reality with everyone in our ragtag bunch of friends—everyone, that is, but me, as I was on a cruise with the rest of the Listman clan at the time.
At the very edge of Marling’s grid of haughty homes, the bay opens itself into view, and Nora lands with the stance of a professional gymnast. Meanwhile, I drop from the sky and into the sand with a loud ‘thud’, kicking up a bunch of sand all around us.
“Pretty, right?” she asks. I lift myself up ever so slightly and sit with my knees up.
"Yeah, I guess so."
I pick up one of the stones from the sand and chuck it at the Sound. It bounces off of the glowing blue waters once, twice, then plummets into them with a 'plink'. I sigh, and Nor turns to me.
"What's wrong, Tre? You seem pretty dumped out," she says. I want to avoid the question, but her face has that look on it that she only got when she was in "concerned" mode-- slight pout, widened eyes, and dropped brows. It was easy to feel down, but hiding my feelings to Nora was the hardest of the hard.
"I just..." I trail off, gazing at the moon. "I feel like we aren't the same anymore. There's you and the Crew, and then I'm there too."
She joins me with a squat in the sand, brushing it off of her pants in the process. "Is this because of the powers?"
I bury my mouth into my folded arms. "You could say that."
She wraps her sweatered arms around my knees. "Well, I'm gonna let you say it. I may be able to fly, but I can't read minds."
I think over my words. "Do you think I'm bringing you and the rest of the team down?"
"Well, why would you be?" she says, as one of the stones in front of us gains a purple haze and ascends. I pinch it with a pair of fingers and throw it without thinking, and it immediately sinks.
"I'm not like you guys anymore. I can't fly, I can't lift a car over my head, I can't hack into NASA and the NSA, but you, Max, and the Keystrokers can without breaking a sweat.” I took Sal out of the hole in my jacket. “Best thing I'm good with is a sword, and even then, she's made of plastic."
"You still managed to kill an interdimensional nightmare with her," she says.
"But what if that's all I'm ever gonna be good for?" I ask. "That was three years ago, Nora, and since then all of my friends have become the freakin' Justice League!"
She's mum again, and I blindly throw another stone, this time without her help. I don't see where it goes, but at that rate, I don't care. I start to regret leaving my bed, because I knew this conversation was going to happen. I just didn't want it to.
"You know, not everyone in the Justice League has superpowers," she says. I want to glare for a second because I feel like it's almost meant to be one of her Grade-A Snarky Comments, but she continues before I get the chance. "It's not a 'superhumans only' club. Never has been. I mean, Batman's a founding member, and he doesn't have any powers, right?"
The comment makes me perk up. "Right, but he's also filthy rich."
"But is that what makes him a hero, T?" I consider answering affirmatively, but in my heart I know it's not true, so I deny it, and she replies, "It isn't. If it weren't for his crimefighter spirit, he'd just be a playboy."
I smile at Nora, and she reciprocates with a dorky grin that makes me sputter. "You've been brushing up on your comic book knowledge," I say, once I regain my composure.
She levitates herself over the beach, still sitting but on air, and she replies, "Hey, when a girl can do this, she's got to brush up on her predecessors, right?"
A couple of skipped stones later, we start making our way back toward Greyson, taking the straight path through Marling to the other side of Downtown. As we come up toward Greyson's tallest office building, I say, "Perfect night for flying, eh?"
But Nora doesn't reply. I look over to find her floating in silence. There's a different look on her face than before-- she's tensed up, like something's bothering her.
"Is everything alright, Nor?"
We stop at the corner of Clom and Petersburg. “Something’s fishy. I can smell it.”
I sniffed. “It doesn't have that seafood stink...”
Nora shushes me. “Not like that, genius! I mean, I'm not really sure if we're alone.”
As Nora pulls me away from Coleman Tower, I spy an obsidian shine against the blue night sky, and that’s when I notice it: a stout-nosed, squat aircraft with a dark coat of paint. I couldn’t make out who or what was inside because of how dark the windows were, but there was a familiar glyph on the nose of the helicopter: the logo of a company who sort of accidentally funded a zombie outbreak two years before, and who we’d gained the ire of by stopping said outbreak.
“You were right!” I shout, noticing the generously-sized weaponry at its right side. Nora turned around and bit her lip, and I gulped. There’s a click, and the copter opens fire. I cower, but before the shots make contact Nora lifts me up to her level, and I grasp her hand as hard as I can as she speeds up. The copter stays hot on our trail, letting up on its fire ever so slightly before resuming without a significant pause. One shot grazes my right hand, and in a fit of panic I start to slip away from Nora. I scramble back toward her and grab her leg as she shifts direction, back toward the city.
Behind me, I start to hear the sound of glass windows breaking as the shots start to go wayward. Hey, what kind of sicko would have to do so much property damage just to get to us two?
I turned back around to find that the cockpit was absolutely empty under the light of the nearby Harmister Co. billboard. There wasn’t a pilot in sight.
I tug Nora’s leg. “Nor, you’ve gotta throw me at it! I think I might be able to get it off of us!”
“The adrenaline’s making you lose your mind again! I won’t!”
“Just trust me!”
She looks down at me with pure dread on her face, but I smile at her, and even though I’m just as unsure if I want to do this as she is, it’s legit. She shuts her eyes, and then I found myself going backward. I turn around and, with a pair of purple clouds around my hands, weave through the shots from the copter—up, down, up, down. My jacket flaps out behind me with gusto, and I reach my left arm out, smirking to myself as I hook onto the right landing skid of the copter. The metal comes close to freezing my hand off, but I grip it as hard as I can as I pull Sal out of her makeshift sheath with my open arm.
I'm not sure if the strategy I'm going for is going to work, but I figure there's no reason not to try it, so with a sweep of the right hand, I shove the plastic sword into the glass of the windshield above me. It gives way with a loud crack, and I start my climb into the copter with a near-jump up to the window.
The sound of the propeller's almost deafening, and it tries to drill its way into my head without remorse, but I won't let it. I can't. Not now, not earlier, not ever.
I keep my head low as I scamper into the cockpit. To my slight surprise, I actually was right-- inside, it's just me and a smorgasbord of instruments. Beyond one touchscreen with a variety of different options, the gallery of gauges and gadgetry is Greek to me, so I thumb through its options until I find something relevant-- aerial camera, no, autogyro mode, no... autostrike?
I press on the option, and the machine gun fire ceases. With a swipe of sweat off of my brow, I breathe a sigh of relief...
Hey, why is this thing going down?
I glance back at the screen to find both "autostrike" and "autopilot" cloaked under a red stripe amongst the green of the other options. I launch myself to the screen to turn the autopilot back on, but try as I might, it stays red.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up with a jolt, and I grit my teeth as the windshield shifts its view to Rubin Road below. The traffic starts going haphazard, with a once straight line of cars becoming a messy jumble.
I brace myself for the impact, with my arms to my chest and my eyes wide shut. But just as I'm expecting the copter to drive a divide into the street, there's nothing. It was almost as if the fall had stopped completely...
I open my eyes to find a cascade of purple wind between the copter and the asphalt, and I gasp with glee as the copter regains altitude.
The glint of the windows around the scene got brighter as my girlfriend enters into the view of the windshield, and she steers herself into the broken window with exquisite finesse. I throw my arms around her and squeeze tight.
"Thank you," I whisper into the shoulder of her sweater. She pats me on the back as I let go.
"Let's get this thing landed," Nora says, and the glow around the aircraft localizes itself around the skids. With a pushing motion, the helicopter advances toward the sky, and the golden glow of the streets fills the view of my side window.
The copter comes to a stop atop the Pert Building nearby, and Nor floats out Olympic swimmer-style while I drop down the old fashioned way. She gives me a high five as I join her outside, and we both start to let out a sigh of relief but a shrill beeping noise from the copter interrupts us.
We turned around to find a red light accompanying the beeps, which accelerate with every passing second. I gasp, but Nora groans.
"I don't have time for this crap," she says, throwing her hands upward. The chopper zooms upward instantly, and with a smacking motion, it's rapidly growing smaller and smaller, moving straight to the horizon. It makes contact with the ground of Phillips Sound, where a tiny orange fireball billows in the air momentarily before dissipating with a pop.
"Did you really just do that?" I exclaim as I glance back and forth between her and the smoke cloud over the Sound.
"Just your friendly neighborhood Irving at work," she replies as her hands lose their aura.
"Hey, Nora," I say, and with a light brush of her hair, she turns to me. "Were you, y'know, moving me through the gunfire back there, or just keeping me afloat? Because it felt kind of weird, it wasn't like how I was tumbling before. Was more natural, y'know?"
"The best in the business never reveal their secrets," she dryly replies, and I nudge her a little with my shoulder. She gives a laugh, and we both dangled our feet over the edge of the Pert Building's roof as we looked up at the prismatic November moon above us.
"Well, after that, I don't think I'm getting to sleep. I think I could eat, actually," I state, with a humble growl of my stomach accentuating the end of the sentence. "After all that action, I think I could really use a burrito."
"Dude, where are you gonna find good Tex-Mex at this hour?"
"24-Hour Tacos! Located for your convenience at the corner of Logan & Wilson," I reply in a deep TV commercial announcer voice. "Call 555-8226!"
She gives me a blank stare. "Only you would have that memorized."
"Well, I can pay for your burrito," I say, pulling myself up to the edge. As she follows suit, I finish, "But only if you can provide the transportation."
"Make it a chimichanga and we've got a deal." She reaches her left hand out with a sly grin.
I roll my eyes and close my right hand around hers. "Fiiiiine," I say, faking a whine.
"You ready to go?" she asks.
"Only if you are."
She gives me a classic smirk, and with that we jump, without a worry in the world and tortillas on the brain.
I feel like there's been points where I've gone longer than that, it wouldn't be surprising. In no way is this anything to be proud of, it's just a statement of fact.
Hm. I've had this space on Tumblr for well over a year now, yet the number of posts stays significantly low for someone who calls himself a "writer". Weird, right? I mean, you'd figure that there'd be a lengthy archive of content from 2012 and 13, but apparently not.
I bring this up because right now is a personal period of change, even though it's the middle of winter and there are no coins in my immediate line of sight. The second semester of my junior year has just started, and with that of course comes the complete (well, near complete) change in topic as far as my classes are concerned. In addition to that, it's January. New years are as big a change as we get until a decade or a century or a milleniuhwhatever passes, so why not change here?
I didn't make any formal New Year's resolutions this year because one of my best friends and I already made ours back in November, and I generally find them useless anyway, but today, in the ending throes of January's delightfully dreary days, I'm deciding to humor that old itch for self-improvement's sake.
I'm going to update this blog once a week for as long as I can. And why not? A writer is a person who brings stories to life, be it reality or fiction, truth or lies, and one of my favorite video games taught me that a story is nothing if it isn't shared with the world.
American Style Buffoonery, as of today, this Friday, January 24, 2014, is no longer just a blog, or the Web equivalent to a ghost town. It's a digital tapestry, with text as its thread and images as its subjects. No longer will I look to Tumblr as a vessel for self-expression through others-- hell no! This website was designed for people to follow the world's creators, but what good is that if those creators bind themselves to the thoughts of others? That isn't to say I'll stop doing that-- Trespeak has been active for four years for a reason-- but dammit, I'm not going to relegate myself to tiny gray text anymore.
Perhaps man’s greatest invention, the yield of wood has been a vital part of human life for what feels to us modern folks like a mega-anuum. But despite how much we’ve grown reliant on it, we don’t think of it as something that can have emotions— it’s inanimate, unfeeling, lifeless, the end result of man sapping the life out of the very thing keeping the human race alive.
But what if it wasn’t? What if, by some chance of luck, that thin material we’ve grown to rely on was capable of having an identifiable soul?
Media Molecule’s video game Tearaway explores this concept to its limits, wrapping you up in a world where paper isn’t a symbol of death, but a vessel for life— and so, so much more.
Making comics for print in Photoshop is weird, but I’m doing it!
By the end of the month (hopefully) I should have the comic that goes with this cover done. It’s called Clarence vs. the City (of course) and is about a coffeehot chocolate cup’s escapades throughout a bustling metropolis after losing his owner in a library. Fun stuff.
Comments
Ever had to rely on a ceiling fan for entertainment purposes?
Not the most fun way to pass the time, I'd say.
But it's half past midnight on some weekday in November, I forget which one, and I find myself doing so, mostly out of a lack of desire to knock myself out.
It might sound irresponsible, not sleeping at a late hour like that, but in my defense, I had a long power nap not too long before. High school tends to make one lose control of their REM schedules.
Anyway, I'm steadily watching the fan, while also thinking stupid thoughts about the infinite possibilities this hour has in store-- that is, for those who aren't imprisoned in their rooms by traditional social norms. Meanwhile, the "sane ones" like myself are trapped, doomed to live out their nights with one of two options: A) sleep, or B) ennui, and since I wasn't tired I was forced to deal with the latter.
The stupid fan's mocking me, all the while. There it stands, the centerpiece of my room's flat upper surface, as content with itself as any non-sentient object could be, and the more I watch the blasted thing make its conceited rotations, the more I feel the need to get away from it.
And that's when I hear a sound not unlike that of glass being tapped.
I think I'm hallucinating for a second, but it happens again, so I go over to my window to see the hubbub. Pulling back my curtains reveals a tall, tan young lady with a shoulder-length measure of straight hair waiting for me at the fire escape. Her chartreuse eyes match the glow of the neon lights below.
I open the window. "Nora? What are you doing here?" I'm starstruck-- somewhat literally, considering the single white star adorning her purple turtleneck-- but I could say without a doubt that the last person I expected then was my girlfriend.
"Since when are you a curfew enforcer?" she replies, kissing me on the cheek.
I blush a bit (three years of dating, and even then she still made me melt), but I try to hide it as I continue. "No, wait, I mean, literally, what are you doing here? We're on the forty-eighth floor, there's no way you could've climbed all the way up!"
She gives me a classic Nora Irving smirk. "That's actually what I came to show you." I raise an eyebrow, and she stands up, keeping as straight an expression as possible.
"Okay, now, what I'm about to do may generally be considered mad or daffy, even by my standards. But you'll just have to go with it for me, alright?"
I think about protesting whatever this is, but I figure she knows what she's doing, so I just say, "Don't do anything rash."
She goes toward the banister and grabs it, throwing a leg up. "I won't, I promise!" Straddling the railing, she turns back to me and gives a thumbs up, and I gasp. I start to yell her name out, but before it leaves my face, she drops out of sight.
I practically throw myself out of my window and over the railing, but stop at the end of the balcony, fighting back an urge to tear up. One moment she was there, and the next, gone, and I thought I'd lost her forever.
But it's then that I notice a purple billow over Alderney Street below. It stays static for a moment, then inches a little bit higher, a little closer to me. And somehow, despite my better judgment, seeing it almost seems to be a relief.
The cloud starts accelerating, getting quicker and faster by the second, and it zooms past me and I'm mesmerized, even as I shiver from the gust of cold air that emanates out of its path. At the peak of the Griffin Building it makes a loop in the air, and I finally notice a blurred pair of black boots.
My jaw drops to the ground floor. Nora's face becomes clearer as she descends, and with the grace of an Olympian, she passes the balcony once more, then makes a U-turn back upward, meeting me at eye level. I light up, and she beams right back.
"I'd ask to kiss you, except I feel like that'd be weird since you're... floating," I say. The comment makes her laugh.
"Well, what'd you think?" Nora asks.
"Do you even need to ask? It was awesome!" I say, making a half-turn away from her. "Makes me wish I could do that..."
"What's up?" she asks.
I go back to her with a grin. "Oh, nothing!" I put my arms on the banister and smirk. "It's nothing."
She frowns in thought, but then says, "Hey, maybe we could go out for a bit together."
"Like, flying?"
She nods, and I give her a shrug. "I mean, I'm here silently griping about ceiling fans, so why not?"
The clouds around her hands dissipate, and she drops back onto the fire escape with a pat. "You might want to change, though, unless you feel like going out in that."
I look down and realize I'm in my blue plaid pajamas, right down to the attached footie slippers. With a sheepish smile, I duck back into my room, but before I get the chance to conceal myself from the city at large my curtains are already drawn and my window's as shut down as a crashed computer.
Ah, Nor knew me so well. Even before she was super, she had a knack for reading minds.
Five minutes later, I step back out of the window. The light winds start to tap the strings on my gray hoodie upward, so I tuck them in between the jacket and my turquoise shirt.
"Well, don't you look spiffy, Mr. Listman," she says. "I like the bird. S'a nice touch."
I poke the monogrammed belly of the stylized goldcrest adorning the tee, then sweep the top of my 'do like a greaser. "Ready to go?" she asks
"As much as I ever will be, I guess," I reply, and she lowers herself slightly, keeping her shoulders at level with the banister. Trying not to push myself too quickly onto her, I clamber over the balcony edge. I'm nervous about the ground below at first, but Nora takes hold of my legs, and suddenly all my tension's gone.
"You're okay, right? Not scared, are ya?"
"No, no, of course not, I'm fine," I stammer, before having the thought dawn on me that I was essentially sitting on her arm. "I'm not too heavy, am I?"
"You're actually really light, man. I've had more trouble lifting silverware."
"Is that the superhuman strength talking?"
She fakes a moment of thought. "Nope, all Nora." I roll my eyes. "Of course, if you feel like it would be too much of a hassle for me to keep you up there, I don't have to..."
In a beat, there's nothing under me anymore, and the billboards surrounding us start moving upward as I start to approach the ground. Before I get the chance to yelp, a familiar lavender glow stops me, and Nor appears in front of me, hanging upside down with a mischievous grin.
"If it's not too big an issue, would you mind never doing that again?!" I yell.
"Man, I thought you'd like it," she says, with a disappointed sigh and a frown.
“Just… just try not to take me by surprise like that. It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with danger. You ought to know that better than anyone.”
“Noted. You’re sure you want to go through with this?”
I gaze at her. The smirk’s back on her face, but it’s not sarcastic, it’s warm, and even though it’s past midnight in the middle of fall, the look in her eyes is as early and springy as it gets. With a face like that, I can’t help but nod. “Fantastic!” she says, and we're off!
We rush down Alderney Street at a brisk pace. As Nora mimics the flight of the birds my shirt portrays, I tumble and wheeze below her, with about as much grace as a duck with clipped wings. A cold sweat breaks out on my head, and outwardly I crack a toothy smile when she looks down at me, but on the inside I have no idea how to handle things. If it weren’t for her, I’d be falling, then and there, and within seconds I’d have been a jumble of nothing five blocks down from my apartment.
But still we fly, and as the tendrils of Nora’s hair billow through the stream of electronic billboards at the intersection of Alderney and 117th, I stop remembering my own mortality. The skyscraping buildings of Downtown Greyson start to give way to lavish McMansions below, and soon we were drifting through the skies of Marling.
“Any particular reason why we’re over here?” I shout to her.
“There’s somewhere down at Cooper Bay that the snobs haven’t ruined yet!” Suddenly everything makes sense. When we were younger, Marling didn’t exist, and Cooper Bay was the best beach on the whole Phillips Sound side of Greyson City. Nora and I would go down in the daytime sometimes and chase down the little seagulls while running from the freakishly huge ones, back when she was normal and couldn’t freeze their dung in mid-air.
But things in Greyson City have a way of changing. The city introduced a new district to offset the cost of living Downtown, the gargantuan gulls disappeared, Cooper Bay became the “private beach house” part of the city, and Nora jumped into a crack in reality with everyone in our ragtag bunch of friends—everyone, that is, but me, as I was on a cruise with the rest of the Listman clan at the time.
At the very edge of Marling’s grid of haughty homes, the bay opens itself into view, and Nora lands with the stance of a professional gymnast. Meanwhile, I drop from the sky and into the sand with a loud ‘thud’, kicking up a bunch of sand all around us.
“Pretty, right?” she asks. I lift myself up ever so slightly and sit with my knees up.
"Yeah, I guess so."
I pick up one of the stones from the sand and chuck it at the Sound. It bounces off of the glowing blue waters once, twice, then plummets into them with a 'plink'. I sigh, and Nor turns to me.
"What's wrong, Tre? You seem pretty dumped out," she says. I want to avoid the question, but her face has that look on it that she only got when she was in "concerned" mode-- slight pout, widened eyes, and dropped brows. It was easy to feel down, but hiding my feelings to Nora was the hardest of the hard.
"I just..." I trail off, gazing at the moon. "I feel like we aren't the same anymore. There's you and the Crew, and then I'm there too."
She joins me with a squat in the sand, brushing it off of her pants in the process. "Is this because of the powers?"
I bury my mouth into my folded arms. "You could say that."
She wraps her sweatered arms around my knees. "Well, I'm gonna let you say it. I may be able to fly, but I can't read minds."
I think over my words. "Do you think I'm bringing you and the rest of the team down?"
"Well, why would you be?" she says, as one of the stones in front of us gains a purple haze and ascends. I pinch it with a pair of fingers and throw it without thinking, and it immediately sinks.
"I'm not like you guys anymore. I can't fly, I can't lift a car over my head, I can't hack into NASA and the NSA, but you, Max, and the Keystrokers can without breaking a sweat.” I took Sal out of the hole in my jacket. “Best thing I'm good with is a sword, and even then, she's made of plastic."
"You still managed to kill an interdimensional nightmare with her," she says.
"But what if that's all I'm ever gonna be good for?" I ask. "That was three years ago, Nora, and since then all of my friends have become the freakin' Justice League!"
She's mum again, and I blindly throw another stone, this time without her help. I don't see where it goes, but at that rate, I don't care. I start to regret leaving my bed, because I knew this conversation was going to happen. I just didn't want it to.
"You know, not everyone in the Justice League has superpowers," she says. I want to glare for a second because I feel like it's almost meant to be one of her Grade-A Snarky Comments, but she continues before I get the chance. "It's not a 'superhumans only' club. Never has been. I mean, Batman's a founding member, and he doesn't have any powers, right?"
The comment makes me perk up. "Right, but he's also filthy rich."
"But is that what makes him a hero, T?" I consider answering affirmatively, but in my heart I know it's not true, so I deny it, and she replies, "It isn't. If it weren't for his crimefighter spirit, he'd just be a playboy."
I smile at Nora, and she reciprocates with a dorky grin that makes me sputter. "You've been brushing up on your comic book knowledge," I say, once I regain my composure.
She levitates herself over the beach, still sitting but on air, and she replies, "Hey, when a girl can do this, she's got to brush up on her predecessors, right?"
But Nora doesn't reply. I look over to find her floating in silence. There's a different look on her face than before-- she's tensed up, like something's bothering her.
"Is everything alright, Nor?"
We stop at the corner of Clom and Petersburg. “Something’s fishy. I can smell it.”
I sniffed. “It doesn't have that seafood stink...”
Nora shushes me. “Not like that, genius! I mean, I'm not really sure if we're alone.”
As Nora pulls me away from Coleman Tower, I spy an obsidian shine against the blue night sky, and that’s when I notice it: a stout-nosed, squat aircraft with a dark coat of paint. I couldn’t make out who or what was inside because of how dark the windows were, but there was a familiar glyph on the nose of the helicopter: the logo of a company who sort of accidentally funded a zombie outbreak two years before, and who we’d gained the ire of by stopping said outbreak.
“You were right!” I shout, noticing the generously-sized weaponry at its right side. Nora turned around and bit her lip, and I gulped. There’s a click, and the copter opens fire. I cower, but before the shots make contact Nora lifts me up to her level, and I grasp her hand as hard as I can as she speeds up. The copter stays hot on our trail, letting up on its fire ever so slightly before resuming without a significant pause. One shot grazes my right hand, and in a fit of panic I start to slip away from Nora. I scramble back toward her and grab her leg as she shifts direction, back toward the city.
Behind me, I start to hear the sound of glass windows breaking as the shots start to go wayward. Hey, what kind of sicko would have to do so much property damage just to get to us two?
I turned back around to find that the cockpit was absolutely empty under the light of the nearby Harmister Co. billboard. There wasn’t a pilot in sight.
I tug Nora’s leg. “Nor, you’ve gotta throw me at it! I think I might be able to get it off of us!”
“The adrenaline’s making you lose your mind again! I won’t!”
“Just trust me!”
She looks down at me with pure dread on her face, but I smile at her, and even though I’m just as unsure if I want to do this as she is, it’s legit. She shuts her eyes, and then I found myself going backward. I turn around and, with a pair of purple clouds around my hands, weave through the shots from the copter—up, down, up, down. My jacket flaps out behind me with gusto, and I reach my left arm out, smirking to myself as I hook onto the right landing skid of the copter. The metal comes close to freezing my hand off, but I grip it as hard as I can as I pull Sal out of her makeshift sheath with my open arm.
I'm not sure if the strategy I'm going for is going to work, but I figure there's no reason not to try it, so with a sweep of the right hand, I shove the plastic sword into the glass of the windshield above me.
It gives way with a loud crack, and I start my climb into the copter with a near-jump up to the window.
The sound of the propeller's almost deafening, and it tries to drill its way into my head without remorse, but I won't let it. I can't. Not now, not earlier, not ever.
I keep my head low as I scamper into the cockpit. To my slight surprise, I actually was right-- inside, it's just me and a smorgasbord of instruments. Beyond one touchscreen with a variety of different options, the gallery of gauges and gadgetry is Greek to me, so I thumb through its options until I find something relevant-- aerial camera, no, autogyro mode, no... autostrike?
I press on the option, and the machine gun fire ceases. With a swipe of sweat off of my brow, I breathe a sigh of relief...
Hey, why is this thing going down?
I glance back at the screen to find both "autostrike" and "autopilot" cloaked under a red stripe amongst the green of the other options. I launch myself to the screen to turn the autopilot back on, but try as I might, it stays red.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up with a jolt, and I grit my teeth as the windshield shifts its view to Rubin Road below. The traffic starts going haphazard, with a once straight line of cars becoming a messy jumble.
I brace myself for the impact, with my arms to my chest and my eyes wide shut. But just as I'm expecting the copter to drive a divide into the street, there's nothing. It was almost as if the fall had stopped completely...
I open my eyes to find a cascade of purple wind between the copter and the asphalt, and I gasp with glee as the copter regains altitude.
The glint of the windows around the scene got brighter as my girlfriend enters into the view of the windshield, and she steers herself into the broken window with exquisite finesse. I throw my arms around her and squeeze tight.
"Thank you," I whisper into the shoulder of her sweater. She pats me on the back as I let go.
"Let's get this thing landed," Nora says, and the glow around the aircraft localizes itself around the skids. With a pushing motion, the helicopter advances toward the sky, and the golden glow of the streets fills the view of my side window.
The copter comes to a stop atop the Pert Building nearby, and Nor floats out Olympic swimmer-style while I drop down the old fashioned way. She gives me a high five as I join her outside, and we both start to let out a sigh of relief but a shrill beeping noise from the copter interrupts us.
We turned around to find a red light accompanying the beeps, which accelerate with every passing second. I gasp, but Nora groans.
"I don't have time for this crap," she says, throwing her hands upward. The chopper zooms upward instantly, and with a smacking motion, it's rapidly growing smaller and smaller, moving straight to the horizon. It makes contact with the ground of Phillips Sound, where a tiny orange fireball billows in the air momentarily before dissipating with a pop.
"Did you really just do that?" I exclaim as I glance back and forth between her and the smoke cloud over the Sound.
"Just your friendly neighborhood Irving at work," she replies as her hands lose their aura.
"Hey, Nora," I say, and with a light brush of her hair, she turns to me. "Were you, y'know, moving me through the gunfire back there, or just keeping me afloat? Because it felt kind of weird, it wasn't like how I was tumbling before. Was more natural, y'know?"
"The best in the business never reveal their secrets," she dryly replies, and I nudge her a little with my shoulder. She gives a laugh, and we both dangled our feet over the edge of the Pert Building's roof as we looked up at the prismatic November moon above us.
"Well, after that, I don't think I'm getting to sleep. I think I could eat, actually," I state, with a humble growl of my stomach accentuating the end of the sentence. "After all that action, I think I could really use a burrito."
"Dude, where are you gonna find good Tex-Mex at this hour?"
"24-Hour Tacos! Located for your convenience at the corner of Logan & Wilson," I reply in a deep TV commercial announcer voice. "Call 555-8226!"
She gives me a blank stare. "Only you would have that memorized."
"Well, I can pay for your burrito," I say, pulling myself up to the edge. As she follows suit, I finish, "But only if you can provide the transportation."
"Make it a chimichanga and we've got a deal." She reaches her left hand out with a sly grin.
I roll my eyes and close my right hand around hers. "Fiiiiine," I say, faking a whine.
"You ready to go?" she asks.
"Only if you are."
She gives me a classic smirk, and with that we jump, without a worry in the world and tortillas on the brain.
(this post is literally just here to make it so I don't have to scroll through part 3 again)
IOTA & I: A RETROSPECTIVE ON TEARAWAY
Ah, paper. Where would we be without it?
Perhaps man’s greatest invention, the yield of wood has been a vital part of human life for what feels to us modern folks like a mega-anuum. But despite how much we’ve grown reliant on it, we don’t think of it as something that can have emotions— it’s inanimate, unfeeling, lifeless, the end result of man sapping the life out of the very thing keeping the human race alive.
But what if it wasn’t? What if, by some chance of luck, that thin material we’ve grown to rely on was capable of having an identifiable soul?
Media Molecule’s video game Tearaway explores this concept to its limits, wrapping you up in a world where paper isn’t a symbol of death, but a vessel for life— and so, so much more.
(cont'd)