Abnormals/Apprentices

When Carbon opened his eyes, the other two were staring down at him.

“You glow in your sleep.” Hybrid said.

“Sorry.”

Vessel watched him intently enough to make him feel like he was shrinking.

“Dark,” she said.

Carbon looked down, realizing the small amount of light in the room came from him.

“It hasn’t been long, has it?”

Hybrid was looking around for something.

Vessel held her hands together, they buzzed, along with the sound of footfalls. She looked above them.

“There are people on the roof?” Carbon asked.

Hybrid grabbed them both, starting to run when the side door slammed open. The kids screamed.

The lights turned on.

“Kids?” The woman with brown hair and a face-covering mask looked behind at her friend in a white dress and a red braid.

“What do you want?” Carbon asked, wrestling out of Hybrid’s hold to stand in front.

The brown-haired lady was staring at him.

“You can’t be older than—”

Carbon shot lightning before she could come any closer. The lightning circled around her, but didn’t actually make contact.

She was still staring at him, mouth slightly open.

“Just like a Faraday cage.” Her hand moved toward him. He didn’t have a better way to protect them, but he wasn’t sure he had to.

“Hold on to me,” Hybrid whispered.

Carbon obliged.

“Wai—”

They were gone before the woman in white could finish.

Kaguya poured tea exactly as her mother had taught her many times before, without spilling a drop.

“What is the meaning of this?” A man suddenly opened the door to their room, grabbing Kaguya by the arm, “My daughter will not become a courtesan!”

“She is my daughter,” mother said, “And she has already chosen.”

The man kept yelling.

“Visiting hours are over,” Kaguya muttered, feeling something tense her whole body, as if for the first time in her life she were ready to pounce.

“I am not a visitor I am—”

The tea rushed toward her free hand, obeying her movement to splash the man’s face. He fell to the ground.

“Come at another time!” Kaguya insisted.

Mother watched in awe.

“This must come from your father,” she said, “You must find him.”

Kaguya looked at the intruder on the floor.

“Of course he isn’t your father. Your father is—”

Wildcard woke up, ran to Circe’s bed, and snuggled up to her. She’d kept having dreams of things she’d never heard of. She was still struggling to read too, so it wasn’t like she could have heard about it from a book. She was sure she hadn’t seen pictures like that before, but she knew that if she had the chance, she could make that tea again.

Circe startled awake a few moments later.

“Bad dream?” she asked.

Wildcard shook her head.

“Dream.”

Circe sighed.

“Someone died,” she revealed of her own dream, “And I was mad because I knew someone would be at the funeral, so I couldn’t prepare.”

She looked at Wildcard.

“I was in a fancy teahouse, learning from my mother, until someone got mad, and I threw tea in his face.” Wildcard imitated the motion from the dream.

“I dreamed of eyes.” Berserker revealed from underneath the bed, startling the girls. Wildcard adjusted to watch below the bed.

“That’s not comfortable,” she informed him.

“Yes it is.”

“Is not.”

“Is too.”

“Is not.”

“Why are you beneath my bed, Berserker?” Circe asked.

“I like it down here.”

Wildcard crawled down on the floor, joining Berserker under the bed. She was right, it wasn’t comfortable, but Berserker was down here.

“I’ll stay down here too,” she said, snuggling into Berserker. Her worries suddenly got a little easier, and she found herself drifting to sleep again.

“This isn’t good,” she heard Circe say.

“I’m fine,” Berserker insisted.

“She isn’t. Why would this keep happening if she was fine?”

“It’s not like you’re sleeping through the night either.”

“I don’t wake up until…”

Alyssa ran out of her bed to her collection of binders hidden in a box labeled “Dance”.

“Dream?” Berserker asked from the bed. He must have come in during the night.

“Why aren’t you on the couch?” Alyssa asked.

“Bad night,” he answered.

She found the binder labeled “School”. If she thought of the Abnormals as old friends, then it had to come from there.

“What happened?” Berserker asked.

“Kids—Oh my god, kids!”

She ran to her balcony to look at the pool. The single mom two floors down was there with her daughter, but there were no signs of the previous struggle.

Berserker pulled her back by her shirt.

“What’s—”

Alyssa ran back to the binder, dragging Berserker behind. She wrote on one of the empty pages.

• Kids
• Electric, Sound, ???
• Someone’s after them.
• “Mom”!!!!????
• Someone’s after them.

“Why would I dream this now?” she asked.

Berserker looked over her shoulder.

“Mom?”

“One of them called me mom.” She pointed at the “???”.

The phone on her nightstand rang. The ID said “TC”.

“You know,” she said, “She’d buy you a phone if you asked.”

“I can only memorize one number.”

“Bullshit.”

Alyssa answered the phone.

“Is Berserker available?” Tesla Coil asked.

“He’s here,” Alyssa answered.

“We need to meet, usual location. I think he really should be here for this one.”

“You know that’s the best way to guarantee he isn’t coming right.”

“It involves kids.”

Alyssa dropped the phone. Berserker swiped it before it hit the ground.

“What do you want?”

It couldn’t be.

“Give me a second.”

Berserker kissed Alyssa on the cheek, creating tiny sparks between his fingers where she could see.

“I need a ride.”

He handed the phone back to Alyssa.

“Do your dreams usually have something to do with—”

“Sometimes,” Alyssa admitted, “I saw a lot of you when you were dead.”

“I’ll keep your kid safe, I promise.”

“Not just my kid,” Alyssa said, “Pretty sure she’s not at least.”

Berserker made no response, running out of the bedroom.

“Clear the pool!” he yelled. The people down there screamed, but Alyssa didn’t hear a splash.

“Sorry, Foursie,” she offered.

If this vision was actually important, and the kids weren’t completely unrelated, Alyssa needed help, significantly more stable help.

She needed to talk to Circe.

“Nightingale and I interacted with three kids last night,” Tesla Coil revealed, careful not to slip in a civilian name while Berserker was present, “And one of them…” she took a deep breath, still struggling to find the right words, “One of them was Electron.”

“What?” Xer asked, “Didn’t you just say they were kids?”

“Most of you recall my history with Electron, so you won’t be surprised to know our powers react uniquely to each other. His powers,” she gestured to a screen, which now showed that little blond boy as she’d seen him, “Reacted like they were Electron’s.”

“Looks like him,” Berserker admitted.

Xer’s eyes widened.

“How do you know what Electron looks like?”

“I met him.”

“Without the suit?”

“Yeah. He was a doctor or something.”

“He had a doctorate, yes,” Tesla Coil admitted.

Now Berserker’s eyes widened.

“Right, you’re the redhead.”

Tesla Coil checked her wig. Her hair shouldn’t be visible.

“That explains why you’ll work on Coven jobs with me. You’ve been working on it since then.”

“What secret history is going on here?” Blaster asked.

“That makes it so much easier to tell you, because you already know: Those are clones.” Berserker pointed at the screen, “The Coven made them.”

“You never explained what the Coven was,” Xer said, “You mentioned it back after Berserker died. We know it’s shady, but not much else.”

“The Coven is a secret society of superhumans that was originally intended to keep superhumans safe and supported, whether or not they were part of the organization,” Tesla Coil explained.

“Now they do things like make clones because they want to take over the world or something,” Berserker revealed, “I got out before they could explain the mission to me.”

“When you say got out…” Tetra aimed her question at Berserker, but her gaze settled on Tesla Coil.

Berserker gave her a nod.

“You already figured it out, didn’t you?”

If she had his permission, she had no reason to hide it.

“Berserker, Alyssa, and their friend Circe share ability and appearance with supersoldiers from the World Wars: Boaz Kurtzberg, who project Kurtzberg was named after, codename Berserker, Kaori “Claire” Nomura, codename Wildcard, and Euphemia Morgan, codename Circe, respectively. Given what Berserker’s already said, you can guess why that is.”

“But powers aren’t inherited,” Xer said, “Why would they have the same abilities?”

“They don’t seem to be identical,” Tesla Coil explained, “Kurtzberg could imitate non-superhuman abilities as well, Nomura had a suite she could choose from rather than a random variety, and Morgan was telepathic rather than clairvoyant.”

“Most of the others didn’t survive,” Berserker admitted.

“Copies of papers are often flawed, why would we expect a copied person to be an exact match,” Tesla Coil explained, “And given that they’re post-mutation clones, they probably weren’t born traditionally.”

“Mordred,” Tetra muttered.

“Mordred?” Nightingale asked.

“It’s not particularly relevant. It’s a word Mages use to mean bastard, comes from a fey word meaning not-born. Reminded me of it is all.”

“Crazy revelations aside,” Xer said, “What happened to the kids?”

“One of them,” Tesla Coil pointed to the one with white hair, “Teleported away.”

“I started a conversation with Vessel,” Nightingale said, pointing to the black girl, “But she got pulled away before I could get much information.”

“Do you have the other names?” Blaster asked.

“No,” Nightingale said, “Just hers, and I know they just escaped a Coven facility, not that they knew it was called that.”

“How do you know it was the Coven then,” Blaster asked, “This could be an independent cloning project.”

“Eugenics,” Berserker said.

“What?” Everyone waited for an explanation.

“I don’t know the whole mission, but the Coven wants to make the ultimate superhuman.” He pointed to the Asian girl again, “Alyssa,” he pointed at the boy, “Electron,” he pointed at the black girl, “Straight hair.”

“Straight hair?”

“Her hair shouldn’t be stick-straight if she’s black.”

“It can happen,” Blaster said.

“Multiple organizations are racist, Berserker,” Tesla Coil said, “And neither Alyssa nor Electron are hidden from the public.”

“Does the public know her powers?”

Not that well, it didn’t.

“Next time, just believe me,” Berserker recommended.