Rosalie Grace and the Internet Assassins

a brief preface

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:03:00 -0500

This is the story of a young woman named Rosalie and her sudden acquisition of certain abilities, and her attempt to save her friends, herself, and ultimately an entire city, from a horrible fate. I hope you enjoy.

If you’d like to obtain a better-formatted copy of the story, simply contact me (not anonymously, please - I won’t answer anonymous questions here) and provide an email address for me to send it to.

Your humble author,
~Talvieno

Chapter 1 - Thursday Morning

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:51:04 -0500

Rosalie Grace stood on top of the wedding cake. At twenty feet high, it was by far the largest cake she’d ever created. She felt like singing – nothing in the world could possibly be as wonderful as what she was doing now.

So she sang, one of her favorite songs. She did so love music. If only she could bring a guitar or piano with her while she worked…

“Shadows all around you as you surface from the dark…” Her sweet voice – a pleasant contralto – drifted out over the little city of Talvis. People turned to listen, and they smiled – Rosalie was at work again. They came to watch, and for a moment, Rosalie wished she was invisible. She felt a little shy, as she didn’t think her voice was as beautiful as they did.

How had she managed to fit such a large cake inside her brother’s apartment? And how had she designed it to be strong enough to stand on? Rosalie wasn’t quite sure, but it didn’t bother her in the least. Nor did it bother Joshua, her brother. Where was he, anyway? She considered looking for him, but decided it didn’t really matter – she had other things to worry about.

Finishing the cursive lettering on the top – solid gold – she leapt lightly onto the next tier down and began embellishing the tall sides with giant blue roses of the highest quality frosting. She had to reach a bit, even despite her five-foot eight height, but it would look beautiful when it was done. With this in mind, she almost laughed with joy as she sang.

She wished Caroline was there, but somehow she knew that her best friend was at her house, her nose buried in a book, soaking up knowledge like she loved doing. That thought made Rosalie grin.

Charles stood beside her, helping. Rosalie looked at him in surprise. “Charles?” she asked. He only smiled in return. She hadn’t known her boyfriend to ever seem interested in her cakes, and the man certainly didn’t seem like the type to be any good at it, being a football jock. But there he was, smiling and helping.

Rosalie was happy.

Suddenly she stopped, and her voice quieted. Everyone wondered why the singing had ceased. The young baker paid them no mind. For some reason, there was a large cluster of misplaced roses on one side of the cake.

Rosalie had a spoon in her hand, and she carefully removed one of them, tossing it off the cake, and out of sight and mind.

There was another behind it.

She removed yet another, only to come up with the same result. One after another fell, but for as many as she removed, there were always more. Who could’ve done such a thing?

Birds were fluttering about the discarded roses on the ground, chirping, and Rosalie didn’t care to shoo them. These roses had to go.

“Charles?” she called. He would fix it.

Charles came around to her side. He was so handsome… Taking the spoon in his hand, he began removing roses. For every rose he removed, a bright white light shone out from behind it. Rosalie watched in awe.

Finally all the misplaced roses were gone, and the cake was aglow with light. It was the most gorgeous cake she’d ever created. She leapt down and stood on the grass, admiring at it. She knew exactly how many roses there were, without having to bother to count: eight hundred and twenty-seven.

Wait… 827?

Hmm…

Her eyes widened as realization overcame her – 8:27!

Rosalie’s eyes snapped into focus, looking at her alarm clock: 8:27 AM. So it had all been a dream… A nice dream, but still – it was only a dream.

She was kind of wishing she could just go back to bed – she’d done it before, with no ill consequences. Running your own business had some oft-overlooked advantages.

But the sun… It shouldn’t be coming in the window at that angle… She briefly looked out the window at the chirping sparrows in the bird feeder, and then back at the alarm clock (why did it never wake her up?). She sighed – she knew it was a little too late to go back to sleep.

Rosalie got out of bed and closed the blinds. It was a little habit of hers – she couldn’t stand anyone seeing her right after she woke up. Who knows where it came from – all the countless billions of humankind have to (at one point or another) wake up next to another person. And just about every one of them would have given anything to look as good as Rosalie did when she woke up.

Still, she was tired. Why is it that you feel more tired the later you sleep in? It ought to work the other way around. The longer you sleep, the more energy you have. But for some unknown reason, life enjoys teasing us in little ways like that.

She stopped long enough in the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror. “Yep. I look awful,” she said, not the least bit surprised. But did she try to fix herself up? No. Breakfast first. Getting dressed was only second priority.

She sleepily stumbled down the hallway towards the kitchen, and Tank got up off his bed to say hi. “Hey, Tank,” she said. “Did you sleep well, boy?” Tank responded with a wag of the tail.

In the kitchen at last, she began to survey the surrounding area for something to munch. No cereal was good enough for her – not in the least! She’d cook an omelet, or perhaps blueberry pancakes. Simple eggs and bacon were a bit too easy, and she had grown tired of them.

She finally decided on the omelet (she was a little too tired to be imaginative) and began getting out the ingredients.

Breakfast was delicious! She savored every bite of the meal she had prepared, noting how well the mushrooms complimented the flavor of the olives, and how she had added just the right amount of pepper to add a little zing to it.

With breakfast over, she washed the dishes and put them up. While she often missed having a big family around, there were benefits to everything, and this was one of them: she only had to clean one set of dishes.

Now it was time to get dressed.

She stopped for a minute in the bedroom, looking longingly at the bed once more. Then her eyes caught the red glow of the numbers on her clock. She sighed – she needed to be at work by ten. Rosalie abandoned her friend, the bed, and continued into the bathroom to get dressed.

Thirty minutes later, she was ready.

That was pretty good as far as women go – they can take an hour or more to brush their hair, wash their faces, apply makeup, all of that. Guys usually just run a comb through their hair and keep moving. But people don’t generally expect guys to look as good as they do women, and as a result, women have it tougher, in that respect.

It may not have been by choice that she took such a short time, however – Rosalie was late today, so she had to hurry. No spending forever on makeup today. She prayed she looked halfway decent, and then got her purse and things together. She was wearing tight blue jeans and a close-fitting purple sweater, which was more or less her usual style, and went well with her trim figure.

As she walked towards the garage, she stopped.

She’d forgotten Tank.

Tank was sitting at the door, waiting patiently with a wagging tail to be brought outside. He’d been inside all night, and he was doing his best to let his mistress know that he needed to go out.

“Oh, no,” she groaned in disbelief. How had she forgotten? I must be more tired than I thought, she decided. Shocked at where that line of thinking was taking her (back to bed), Rosalie hastily brushed all thoughts of that sort out of her mind.

She opened the door briefly to check the temperature, and found the February air far too cold to go out without a heavy coat. Fortunately, she had one hanging up in the hall closet, and she quickly retrieved it.

Rosalie hated cold weather. No, that’s a bit of an understatement – sheloathed it. Snow was okay in small doses. If it didn’t have the snow, cold weather was yet another unnecessary evil in the world.

She took Tank out as quickly as she could, and with him safely back inside, she went to her car.

She loved her car. She kept it clean and sparkling all the time. It almost looked like new. It had taken her entire childhood to save up for it, and she had proudly paid for it in cash when she bought it, when she was 16. She had wished she could’ve used the money from her old TV show, but part of the contract was that her parents would keep that money in reserve until she had graduated high school.

She put her purse in the passenger seat, and got in carefully to keep from messing up her hair.

And now, the checklist. Did she turn the lights off in the house? Did she feed Tank? Did she remember to lock the doors? Hmm… Everything seemed fine. Maybe today wasn’t so bad after all.

She put the keys in the ignition and turned.

The car made that awful noise, the noise every human on this earth fears almost to the point of death – the sputtering of a dead battery, as the engine turns over unsuccessfully.

Well, you have to admit – there are drawbacks to buying cheap cars.

Rosalie was about ready to cry. Today was going terribly wrong. She forgot all about the perfect omelet she had made. Now the only things in her mind were how the car wouldn’t start, how terrible she looked, and how late she was.

Wait… How late was she?

Rosalie glanced over at her watch. Only 9:37. She’d have time to walk there, if she hurried. It was only a mile away.

She got out of her car and went back into the house. Tank was overjoyed to see her – if not a little puzzled – and demanded attention. But Rosalie didn’t have the time.

She went out the front door with her purse over her shoulder, and locked the door behind her.

Rosalie finally got to her destination at three minutes until ten, and fumbled with the keys until she got the door unlocked. She opened the door and walked into her bakery. If she was proud of her car, it was nothing compared to how she felt about her bakery.

For the most part, Rosalie was a very cheerful person. It didn’t take much to get her down, admittedly, but she would never stay that way. She was light-hearted and happy – life had treated her well, for the most part. Of course, she’d had trouble with men, and her family hadn’t been that wealthy growing up, but what everyone always took away from meeting her was that she always seemed to have a certain spring to her step. No one ever saw her angry.

She loved being random (although she didn’t like the word “random” itself). Sometimes she would go out of her way to do something unusual, just to get reactions from it. She loved that – it always made her laugh. Her best friend Caroline often joined her as her partner-in-crime, and together they would act like little kids again, causing harmless mayhem for the pure joy of it. She was “weird”, as she often liked to say.

What she valued most was simply being true to herself.

***

Eighty miles away and three hours earlier, someone else awoke – not to the sound of birds, but to the sound of country music on the radio.

“…when the stars go blue…”

Kyle rolled over and pushed the button on the alarm clock to turn off the radio. With eyes still heavy from sleep, he looked at the clock – 6:32, it said. Wow, last night must’ve been rougher than I thought. As he usually got up at six, six-thirty meant he had slept through thirty minutes of somewhat annoying country music. He was slowly falling back into his bad habit of staying up late, despite all he could do about it.

Maybe I’ll go back to bed. But no, habit was habit. He rolled out of bed and began to get dressed. He had another long day ahead of him, and he wasn’t about to mess up his routine.

Less than fifteen minutes later, he was dressed, shaven, clean – by aman’s standards, anyway. Teeth brushed, hair combed, all of that. He’d grabbed a bagel and was munching it (it didn’t go well with the taste of toothpaste). His jeans had a grease stain on the front, but he hardly noticed, and if he had, he might not have cared. But, it was time to take the dog out. Anything else could wait for later.

Fred began bouncing up and down in his crate, producing the most awful racket you’ve ever heard. But it didn’t matter to the little guy. He loved going outside, and he didn’t want Kyle to forget him. Then again, how could Kyle forget, with all the noise Fred was making?

Kyle walked past him to get the leash. The sound of Kyle’s old, black sneakers on the linoleum made Fred even more excited, and he began pawing at the crate door. It wouldn’t open, of course, but when has being incapable of accomplishing a goal ever stopped a dog from doing something?

Kyle let him out and hooked the leash to his collar. Together, they went outside to explore the cold, cruel world.

It was snowing.

Kyle loved the dark world of six in the morning: cool, crisp, calm. The birds were waking up, and people were scurrying to get ready for work, or school. But he was alone amidst them all, in a world of peacefulness. So dark, so quiet.

Five minutes later, they were back inside his little house.

Now, at this point it would be worthwhile to note that Kyle had an unusual tolerance for cold weather. He had been fine taking the dog outside in only a pair of jeans and a t-shirt – with it only twenty degrees outside. He’d always been that way. Cold simply never bothered him. Well, unless he was sick, but that didn’t happen often, fortunately.

He unhooked the leash from his dog’s collar and put it on the counter, and then went to fill Fred’s food bowl.

With all of that done, he could settle down and begin working. Yes, he was among the privileged few able to work at home. But then, his job was that which could be done anywhere, because Kyle was a programmer. A game programmer, to be more precise.

His current project was the biggest he had ever been a part of by far. The game would allow the player to program the AI of a number of three-dimensional robots to battle swarms of enemies. Kyle was currently working on the weapon systems. Art wasn’t his area of expertise, and he knew it, too. He was content to leave that to somebody else. No, programming vast amounts of code – now that was his forte.

For the next few hours, that was all he did – write large amounts of code into the program.

He knew he was different than everybody else. After all, only a small percentage of the earth’s population could actually understand programming code at all. To everyone who couldn’t, it was like a different language.

That was a joke he had used to like to make. He’d ask the question “how many languages do you know?” of a group of people (adding “just trying to get to know everybody better” as an excuse for it). After everybody had said “one”, “two”, or even “three” on the rare occasion, he’d answer “nine” and have everybody’s attention. But one time somebody had beat him – the guy had stood in back and been quiet until after Kyle had made his little joke, and then quietly (glasses, blue sweater-vest, shy; classic nerd of a guy) said “fourteen”. He was instantly the focus of twenty-plus sets of eyes. And he named the languages off, one by one, speaking a little of each as proof. Kyle’s conscience (stupid conscience – always causing problems) had gotten the best of him, and Kyle had quietly admitted all but one of the ones he knew were computer languages. He would have told anyway, but the guy had kind of stole his thunder, and made him feel rather guilty about trying to show off. He didn’t make that joke again – all the fun had been taken out of it.

But, back to the matter at hand. While he programmed, hours could pass, and he would be scarcely aware of it. While gamers have what they refer to reverently as “being in the zone”, programmers have a zone of their own. When in it, their fingers dance lightly over the keyboard, giving the impression that they’re possibly flying – if it wasn’t for the machine-gun noise of the keys, you might think they were – the backspace key is never pressed, and all senses are dulled, until all that’s left in the programmer’s mind are his hands, the screen, and the code.

Kyle was in the zone.

No one who happened to see him would have seen a human being – they would have seen something similar to a living statue with fingers of lightning: never blinking, never stirring – except for the fingers, which would have taken a high-speed camera to tape. For the moment, Kyle was dead to the world. A bomb could go off in the next room, and he’d never notice. Somebody could hang an elaborate “kick me” sign on his back – taking the time to decorate it with glitter and multiple colors of paint – and he wouldn’t even realize it.

Who says programmers aren’t cool?

Chapter 2 - Computer Virus

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:31:05 -0500

Furiously he pounded the keys, as if it was the only way to stay alive, and every breath depended on the rat-a-tat of the keyboard.

Suddenly something obscured his vision.

Instantly jolted out of the “zone”, Kyle leaned back as if to see better, and his eyes adjusted from code-mode as he focused on the window that was blocking his view.

“Click here for free smileys,” it said in large, happy, yellow fonts on a light blue background.

Now he was a little angry and confused. How had a pop-up managed to evade his firewall?

The initial anger quickly gave way to curiosity. How had it managed to slip past his firewall? He had some of the best software out there. Until now, he had never had even the slightest problem with garbage like this. How had the firewall failed?

Kyle quickly isolated the pop-up and began looking over the machine code for it. It looked like a normal pop-up. His firewall should have stopped it. As he continued looking over the code, he began to spot actual flaws in it, places where he could improve it. His programmer’s instincts kicked in, and he began to edit the pop-up to perfect it.

Then he remembered – that’s not what he was trying to do. He gave a nervous little laugh. Whoops. Perhaps he was a bit too easily distracted.

He closed the pop-up code and opened the code for the firewall he had written.

“Shoot!!” he said out loud. What happened to it?? he wondered, shaking his head in confusion. The code had been mutilated – there were strings floating at random points, loops without breaks, and a number of mishandled integers. Who had done this? And how?

More confusing was the fact that scattered throughout the code were repeated instances of “IOA”. What were they, initials? The way they were placed, they didn’t seem to have any real purpose.

Kyle put his laptop to the side and leaned back into the cushion of the sofa to think about what it all meant.

This couldn’t be a virus. The programmers who wrote it had definitely aimed it directly at him. Someone would have had to hack into his computer and intentionally rewrite his software. But why? Who would go to such great lengths to cause him problems? He thought about all the enemies he had ever made. Most of them weren’t exactly computer-savvy, and the remaining few didn’t know where he lived. In fact, most of them were from grade school.

So how had it been done?

Kyle ran a search for all files accessed in the past few days. He ended up with an understandably long list. It included any file that either he or the system had opened, created, or modified recently. He began to look through the files, one by one. He had a hunch he knew what had happened. It was extremely unlikely, but it was possible.

Not finding what he was searching for in the list, he switched gears and began to pick apart everything the machine had in its memory.

Finally he found what he was looking for: a trojan, cleverly designed to float around in the computer’s memory undetected. As he looked at the code, he couldn’t help but feel a little impressed with the craftsmanship – in a strictly professional sense of course. Whoever had done this was at least as good as he was.

The virus was disguised as a completely normal file, although when executed through another recently-downloaded file that acted completely normal, it would reprogram (very messily – that particular bit wasn’t impressive) his firewall and antivirus protection.

Kyle isolated the file and downloaded it to a flash drive for further study, and wiped all other traces of it from his hard drive. Thankfully he had a copy of his firewall, so he replaced the damaged files. Then he began to modify them so this wouldn’t happen again.

Within a couple of hours, he was done. Problem solved. An interesting learning experience, to be sure, but unimportant, and irrelevant to his current task – the weapon systems for the game he was making. It was time to get back to work. But maybe first – a little break. Time to answer some questions about computer software.

Over to Yahoo Answers he went. It would be a good opportunity to test out the modifications he had made to the firewall, he decided, inventing an excuse for himself.

He’d never quite understood why he loved answering questions in Yahoo Answers. He knew quite a good deal more than the man on the street, and helping people pleased him somehow, even when someone incorrectly accused him of stupid answers. The people didn’t always take his advice, but he offered it all the same.

Perhaps it was out of a need for social interaction. Anyone who knew him at all knew he didn’t have many close friends. He’d only had a few, total, over his entire life. He hadn’t gone to college yet, but he was planning on it at some point, to get himself what he called a “real” job – one behind a desk.

Perhaps it was because it helped his confidence. It felt nice to be the smartest one around, though occasionally someone smarter would answer. Nobody could ever accuse him of having a big ego, though – he was convinced he was ugly and undesirable. He was also convinced he would eventually end up with a girl who was a social outcast, one of the few people society rejects for one reason or another. But he would love her all the same, he was sure of that.

Perhaps it was out of loneliness. One of his deepest, best-kept secrets was the fact that his greatest desire was to find someone to cherish, to love, and to please, someone who would do the same for him in return. Being a programmer, he never really got out much, and when he did, he generally wasn’t popular with the ladies. Part of it was that he was shy of putting himself directly into social situations with people he didn’t know. Part of it was that he never really tended to say the right things. But no matter what the reason, he didn’t have anyone. But he longed for it – he wanted love.

Whatever the reason, he was taking a break, and taking it answering questions on Yahoo Answers. His co-workers would laugh, he knew, but he didn’t mind overmuch. A lifetime of being laughed at made it that much easier to take.

Little did he realize how important what he had discovered really was.

Kyle wasn’t the only one to contract the virus. Approximately 50% of everyone with access to the Internet had been infected with it. A commonly used web browser was at fault, manipulated by a group of twisted, scheming minds, known only as the IOA.

But the annihilation of all mankind’s firewalls wasn’t their goal – no, indeed. It was simply a side effect of hacking into the United States security system.

***

Rosalie was hard at work at her bakery. But was it really work? She had one of the best jobs in the world.

She baked just about everything – bread, bagels, pretzels, muffins, cookies – but the cakes – oh! The cakes were her favorites!!

Day after day, cakes of all shapes and sizes came out of her ovens – from the plain round ones to the flat rectangular ones, and the incredible (how did she manage to cook the center, people always wondered) cube shaped cakes. Not to mention the spherical ones. How did they hold themselves up as they cooked?

After the plain cakes had been cooked, she’d arrange them into edible masterpieces of art. Need a cake for a beach party? How about this one: a desert island with a hut and a palm tree, along with edible islanders. She’d made grand pianos, forests, mansions, skyscrapers, Aztec temples, space ships – just about anything you could think of – all finely frosted and decorated. And completely edible.

Rosalie had grown up as a middle child in a larger family, and one month while she was seven, everyone got so sick that they could hardly even get out of bed. She and her father had been the only ones who had seemed immune to whatever virus everyone else had picked up. For that month, she and her dad did all the cooking, and while he was at work, she did it by herself.

Her cooking wasn’t good to begin with, but she took it upon herself to learn, and spent hours reading and soaking up everything she could find about how to cook and how to cook well, and she rapidly improved. By the time everyone was healthy again, she was cooking well enough that they simply left it to her and her mother, for the most part. When she grew older, they would end up leaving it to her alone.

Her big break in the culinary business had come one year at the city’s bake sale while she was 14. Her parents were taking a vacation over the weekend – just a few hours away, but far enough for their tastes. While they were gone, she did nothing but bake – she enjoyed that better than anything else. That Monday, her mom brought her creations to the bake sale. Her cooking was an instant hit, and it attracted enough people so that for the first time in the city’s history, everything sold. The media came and interviewed her, and as fortune would have it, a producer for a cooking network saw the broadcast, and was astounded at what she was capable of.

“Rosaliegrace’s Bakery” aired for the first time less than six months later. It was an enormous success, though it only ran two seasons. She afterwards compiled a cookbook of her favorite recipes, and people grabbed it up like free samples.

Interestingly enough, Rosalie had never watched a single episode – her family didn’t own a TV. As a result, the fame never went to her head, and Rosalie’s ego was small, if it was anything. But the show had earned her enough money that as soon as she was out of high school, she moved to Talvis and opened a bakery of her own (under the same name), and here she’d been for the past two years.

But today, not everything was going well. Sure, she had made it to work on time. Yes, there were a number of customers making purchases. Thank goodness her sister was manning the cash register – Rosalie might not have managed otherwise!

This week she had a special order, from people from out of town. They were making a movie, according to what they said, and they wanted her to help cater refreshments. She’d gladly taken the job, but the work was rapidly piling up.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, she also needed a recipe for a new kind of cake she was making, that had to use a particular type of flour. And her laptop wasn’t working right – the searches came up empty, even when she searched for something she knew she should be able to find.

That could wait for now, she decided. She had four batches of oatmeal raisin cookies that needed to come out of the ovens, along with six cakes.

Molly was helping Rosalie at the counter with the cash register. It was a snow day, and school was out, so she had some free time to earn some extra cash.

Now, normally, she’d prefer to yell at her sister. Or throw toys, or buckets, or launch some other projectiles at Rosalie’s head. She was jealous of her sister’s good looks, people said, which didn’t quite make sense – she didn’t care so much about her own. Their mother had speculated that it might be Rosalie’s fame that spurred her jealousy, but Molly would never admit to being jealous at all, so no one ever knew for sure.

Now, as it would happen, Rosalie had offered to pay Molly to help her, and of course she accepted. Molly excelled at math and spelling, two things crucial to handling the checkout counter. She made an excellent cashier.

She had hoped to land a job elsewhere, but not being in high school yet had a number of drawbacks, and this, unfortunately, was one of them. For the time being, however, she was content to help out at her sister’s bakery.

And what a job it was! She had to handle the register and answer questions from potential customers at the same time. Sometimes people actually asked for Rosalie’s autograph, and she’d learned how to politely turn them down. It had been difficult to get used to – keeping a set of numbers in her head while answering questions, handing out the correct amount of change, that sort of thing. Also, it could get to be rather annoying when people would rather stare at her sister rather than look at her while she told them how much they owed. But, it paid more than most jobs for a thirteen-year-old would have.

Rosalie set the cookies into their separate baskets under the glass counter and hurried back to the kitchen after asking Molly how everything was going. Molly had responded with a neutral comment: “How do you think?”

Just then, a familiar voice rang out. “Rosalie! Hey!”

Rosalie looked over and saw him – Andy, her best friend Caroline’s unofficial boyfriend. “Hey, Andy!” she answered him, smiling.

Andy was tall – several inches over six feet – and his trademark short, uncombed hair and brown leather jacket never changed from day to day. In the summer, he’d wear close-fitting tees (which looked good on his muscled, farm-grown arms). But Andy was Andy – to know him was to love him.

He sidled up to the counter with a wide, friendly smile. “How’s it going, Rosie?”

He was the only person who called her that, but Rosalie didn’t mind. She smiled in return. “Everything’s going good,” she answered. “What can I get ya?”

Andy grinned. “I…” and here he paused dramatically, “am looking for a cookie. About, say…” He held his index fingers close together for a moment, staring at them, then abruptly pulled them about six inches apart, and continued, “Yea wide… And… filled with as many chocolate chips as you can stuff into the thing.”

Rosalie smirked. “Not your usual fare, Andy,” she said, getting a clear plastic bag to put it in. Chocolate chip cookies were Caroline’s favorite, and they both knew it.

“Well, no it’s not,” he admitted, cocking his head to one side. “Then again, I usually don’t come in here at all!” He grinned mischievously.

She couldn’t help but laugh. “You liar, you’re in here at least once a week, always after my little cream-filled cakes.”

Andy’s smile turned playful and his eyes widened. He looked about the room quickly, as if looking for anyone who might be watching and ducked his head. “Keep your voice down!” he said in a loud whisper. “That’s top-secret information!”

“My ears only, right.” Andy was fun – that was all there was to it. She got a nice six-incher from under the counter and put it into a bag, handing it over to him. As he paid for it, she asked him with a grin, “Andy, why don’t you just ask her out?”

This stopped him for a second, as she had expected it would. The grin never left his face, though it took on a hint of embarrassment. “Um… Well…” he said slowly, avoiding eye contact, “I’m getting there.” He took the cookie and left with a wave over his shoulder.

Rosalie didn’t have time to think about his answer, however – she had to get something into those ovens. “An idle oven is a waste of time and space,” she often liked to say.

Soon enough, she had all the ovens filled, and time enough to try to figure out what was wrong with her laptop. Well… ten minutes, anyway.

She opened her web browser and went straightaway to Yahoo Answers. It seemed simple enough – post her problem as a question, and wait for it to get answers. It could take a while… Computer questions usually did.

She asked the question, “Why can’t I search for anything anymore?” and added the details. After submitting it, she knew it would only take time, so she went to work on a cake.

Fifteen minutes later, she was back.

And horrified.

Over 100 different people had answered her question, most of them variations of “I’m having the same problem,” and the timeless (and worthless) “Could somebody please answer her question?” One person had actually answered, “Holy cow! 121 answers! Make that 122.” Rosalie was surprised at how many people had responded. This usually didn’t happen… Especially outside of Polls & Surveys. It would take forever to sift through them all.

She finally decided that something must be wrong with her browser – everybody who used it seemed to have a problem with it.

Then, close to the bottom of the list, she found a single answer with an explanation, written by a certain ProgramX82. It had over three hundred thumbs-ups already, and it had only been written five minutes ago. It stated:

“It would appear that a major internet browser website has been infected with a piece of software that has the ability to download itself past your firewall, and disable it. Without the most up-to-date anti-viral software, it also destroys your capabilities to use any web browsers. Fortunately, I know of a software download guaranteed to fix your problem. You can download it from http://mediafire/aprog/d82ks02stli2019fii/.

– ProgramX82”

Rosalie was pleased to have gotten an answer so quickly. She linked to the site, but was disappointed. It was MediaFire. Her computer couldn’t download anything from there.

Still, she had to have that fix. She clicked on ProgramX82’s picture and went to his profile. She sent him an email:

“Dear ProgramX82,

MediaFire doesn’t work with my computer. Is there any other way I can download the software?

– Rosaliegrace”

And then back off to the kitchen she hurried. She had some sourdough starter that needed her attention.

She didn’t realize she had accidentally signed her real name instead of her screen name. But it was fortunate for her that she did – what followed was a direct result of that tiny mistake.

Chapter 3 - Rosaliegrace's Bakery

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:56:05 -0500

Kyle sat idly at his laptop, looking through all the different questions people wanted answered. Why did he like helping people so much? He never could find out.

Hmm… This was interesting… An unusual number of people were asking questions about computers – the section he usually chose to work with. He scrolled through the questions, and let out a little yelp of disbelief when he saw that one of the questions had over 50 answers, and had been asked just five minutes ago.

What were the chances he’d end up with the coveted Best Answer? Just about none. People didn’t always appreciate his replies. But it was strange – the norm for answers about computers (after five minutes, anyway) was about two. His curiosity got the best of him – he had to know what all the fuss was about.

“Why can’t I search for anything anymore?” was the question. Below, it stated, “Usually I don’t have any problems, but suddenly my searches all come up empty, even when I know they shouldn’t. Your going to have to explain it simply – I’m not much good with computers! :P”

Kyle looked over the answers people had given and laughed. The list was long, but undistinguished. There wasn’t a single answer there that was useful. Well, he decided, without the proper anti-virus software, the trojan I discovered would probably shut down their search engines. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who had gotten it.

Idly, he refreshed the page. Impressive – another ten answers in such a short space of time.

He thought for a moment, weighing in his mind how valuable his firewall would be to all these people. How much could he charge for it?

And then he shook his head violently. No, making a profit on these people’s ill luck was not something he would be proud of doing. Not even donating all the money he made to charities would ease his sense of guilt. These people really needed help.

So he did what he felt was right – he uploaded a one-run version of the software he had written to MediaFire. Now everyone could access and run it on their machines. He made a brief reply to the question explaining what was going on with the Trojan, and added the link to his MediaFire download.

Now that that was done (wow – 50 new answers), he could move on to a different question.

“What are the specs of my machine?” Kyle read, and sighed inwardly. If only they taught computer basics in school.

Five minutes later, he noticed that the tab for Gmail said he had one new message. He couldn’t just ignore it – he’d have to see what it was. Mr. “How do I shut down my computer” could wait.

Hmm… Somebody couldn’t use MediaFire. Well, some people couldn’t… He should have provided an alternate link. Wait – “You’re going to love me”… Wasn’t that… He switched tabs and checked. Yep – that was the person who had asked that popular question. He’d thought it sounded familiar.

Kyle read the signature and did a double-take. Wait… Rosaliegrace??? As in the Rosalie Grace, owner of Rosaliegrace’s Bakery? As in the Rosalie Grace, who had once had a TV show? No, it couldn’t be. What were the chances of that? He tabbed back to Yahoo Answers, and opened her profile. He read:

“I wrote a big long thing about me… don’t know what happened to it… I love baking, music, walking, playing games, reading, eating :P, and all that good stuff!”

Wow, he thought. It didn’t actually say it was her, but it certainly did look like it. While he didn’t know her personally, he had had a crush on her a few years back, while her show was still running. While it had been cancelled (the producers had been arrested – they were crooks), the feelings had stuck with him, and he still looked around for her stuff from time to time.

Kyle was preparing to answer her question when he got an idea… It was sneaky… Not exactly an honest thing to do… But what was there to lose?

He considered this for a bit. Then, “Oh, why not,” he said, and typed a response.

“Are you THE Rosalie Grace of Rosaliegrace’s Bakery?

– ProgramX82”

Now all he could do was wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. The reply came quickly. It was brief, but it said so much in one word:

“Yes…”

Never before in the entire history of the world had the word “yes” held so much meaning. It was as if the word had been transformed into a mighty vessel of knowledge, and he was the one to claim it. Volumes of encyclopedias couldn’t record all that was said in that brief email. But what to do with this newfound wealth of information? Hmm… Only one thing to do.

“Neat. Hey, I live only a short distance away from your bakery – I could come transfer it over myself for you, if you aren’t too busy. I’d have your computer working again in no time.”

He sent this nice little “I don’t really care who you are, but I’ll help” reply to her as fast as he could. To be honest, he was rather pleased with himself. Not everybody could pull something like this off. Okay, “rather pleased” is a bit of an understatement. He felt like he must be the smoothest dude in the world. Suave, silky Kyle. Awesome.

It wasn’t often that he felt confident like this. Most of the time, he was exactly the opposite, but he always seemed to switch between the extremes – either the biggest ego in history, or no ego at all.

Maybe he could have his own TV show! He shot this idea down himself, and quickly. Nah, then I couldn’t program. But other than that, he didn’t see any problems with it. Maybe – …

His thoughts were interrupted – he had gotten a reply.

“Sure, come right over! Your so sweet!”

Kyle melted (metaphorically speaking) in happiness. This is going so well! I can hardly believe it’s real, he thought excitedly. Now, as long as he could keep her from figuring out that he didn’t actually have to come over there… But that wasn’t top priority. Top priority was getting there. She was expecting him any minute.

Kyle put his laptop in his car and got ready for the 80-mile drive there.

Okay, maybe he wasn’t as close as he had said…

He made the trip in just over an hour.

***

Rosalie waited impatiently for ProgramX82 to show up. Suddenly, she remembered – her cupcakes! She rushed to the oven. As always, she had remembered right on time. Nothing ever burned at her bakery.

The cupcakes needed to be put in a cupcake-holder made of cake, and of course she got to work on that right away.

After a while, she completely forgot that he was coming over.

Kyle walked in the door of Rosaliegrace’s Bakery, and the only people he could see were customers and Molly.

See? Being the sister of the famous Rosalie Grace wasn’t all bad – some of the fame trickled down. Everybody knew who she was – she’d helped out on the show for a few scattered episodes. “Oh, you must be Molly, Rosalie’s little sister!” they’d say – and you couldn’t take that as an insult – people would look at you questioningly. No, you had to pretend to be honored to be associated with her. Molly had figured that out a long time ago. The thing she wanted most was to make a name for herself; to step out from under the shadow her sister cast upon her – to shine with her own light.

Like that would ever happen.

But who was this coming in the door? Jeans, t-shirt, a laptop case, and a look of uncertainty on his face – this wasn’t the usual customer, Molly figured out pretty quickly. His eyes were darting around quickly, looking for something. Only briefly did they rest on her, and then they continued their search. Great, she thought. Once again, somebody knows who I am, but doesn’t care.

Someone bumped into the stranger from behind, and he stumbled forwards – the doorway really wasn’t a smart place to stand. But it snapped him out of it, and he now proceeded directly to the checkout counter where Molly stood waiting.

Hmm… she thought. Is he actually going to talk to me? She looked him up and down – he looked a tad too old to be interested in her… But still…

He arrived at the counter. “Um…” he began hesitantly, and Molly felt a glimmer of hope surge through her – somebody was nervous around her! Then he continued. “I’m here to talk to Rosalie – do you know where she is, and could you direct me to her?”

That did it. Molly almost let out a yell right there. Wow – she must really need a break. Plus, watching Poltergeist until five in the morning didn’t help much, either. But she only said, “Yes, of course I know where she is, and no, you can’t talk to her! Nobody can, especially not some nobody who just comes in off the street.” This wasn’t the first time this had happened, and Molly was getting tired of it. She expected him to turn away and leave – surely she must have hurt his feelings.

“Yes, I understand that, but I’m here to fix her computer – she said it’s not working?” he said with a little uncertainty. This wasn’t going as well as he had expected it to.

Molly couldn’t believe this guy. Walk away, already! You’re not going to get to see her. Then she noticed something – he was making eye contact with her. Nobody ever did that – they usually just looked past her, hoping to catch a glance of her sister. Suddenly, Molly felt a bit of sympathy for the guy. He was such a loser, anyway. She ought to at least humor him.

“I’ll go check with her. Be right back,” she said, and headed for the kitchen.

Rosalie was icing a traditional wedding cake when her sister walked in. She continued with her work, not desiring to make any accidental mistakes.

Molly stood there for a moment, a bit uncomfortable. Why had she even come back here? It was pointless. So what if he was a bit cute, in a geeky sort of way? That was his only redeeming quality, and even with that he wasn’t that great looking. Still, there was no point in coming back here without saying something. “There’s a guy out there who says you want to talk to him,” Molly said with a sigh, already beginning to wish she hadn’t promised to ask.

“Well, I don’t want to talk to him,” said Rosalie absentmindedly. The rose petals had to be perfect – she couldn’t be distracted by more gentleman callers.

Molly began to walk away, having received the answer she expected. The man at the register would be most displeased, and serve him right.

Suddenly, Rosalie did a double take – she remembered. “Wait – Molly!” she said, putting her equipment to the side and coming over. “Did you get his name?”

Molly spun around. This was a bit of a surprise. This had never happened before – it caught her off guard. “Uhh… No… He, um… didn’t give it.”

“But you didn’t ask?”

“Well, no, but I didn’t think he was telling the truth, anyway, so –”

Rosalie was already at the door. “It’s okay; I’ve been waiting for him to show up. Thanks, Molly.”

She walked into the main portion of the bakery, and looked the man over. Hmm… He didn’t look like a nerd, but he certainly acted like one. The expression on his face was one of surprise. Rosalie’s thoughts went to her hair. She knew she should have fixed it up better that morning!

She quickly recovered, and asked, “Who are you?”

For a second or two, the guy just stood there awkwardly, just staring at her. He slowly regained control, and stuttered, “I – I – umm… Kyle.” Then seeing the look of disappointment on her face, he added, “ProgramX82.”

“Come on,” she said, opening the counter door so he could walk through, which he did. “What took you so long?”

“Well, see… Um… Traffic was terrible. There were four traffic accidents out there.” For the most part, this was true. He forgot to add it was partially because he lived half the state away (although, to be completely honest, it wasn’t actually “forgetting”).

Rosalie turned and began walking to the back part of the bakery.

“So, Kyle…” she said slowly, as if tasting the name, “you can fix my problem, right?”

“Yeah, no problems there,” he said, the first thing he had said so far with confidence.

“Okay, then,” she said, opening the door and walking through, “Follow me.”

Kyle found the kitchen to be rather warm – uncomfortably so, in fact. It was probably only around 79 degrees or so, but that made little difference. He wasn’t any good with warm temperatures, and all the ovens in the room weren’t helping any. He began to itch violently all over.

He still could hardly believe what was happening. Rosalie was at least twenty times more beautiful than he thought she’d be. And why couldn’t he talk right? He did great online. Shoot… he’d ceased to be the smooth person he could act like online. Was he lying about his personality, in that way? That was an interesting thought. Maybe if he was to –

“Right through here,” Rosalie said, interrupting his thoughts and leading the way into a little break room.

Rosalie’s laptop sat on a little blue table in the center of the room. Kyle began to wonder why she liked blue and white so much.

But time enough for that later.

“Look away!” Rosalie said, and Kyle did, as she entered the password. “There you go!” she said after a moment.

Kyle got his laptop out of its case and set it up. “Nice system,” he said, checking out the specs of her laptop. Thanks for having me over,” he said with a smile. “I’ll have it fixed up in ten minutes.” Odd – he’d suddenly regained his confidence. Why was that? “

Rosalie was pleased, but deep down she was a little uncomfortable with him poking around on her laptop. There was no way she’d let him know that, though. It would have been better possibly if he was a good-looking guy, but as it was, he was slightly below average. At least he seemed smart. But even so, it would be nice to get him out of there in a timely manner.

“Okay,” she said. “Be back soon – my pies have to come out!” And she left.

Kyle immediately began to copy over the files. She didn’t have a password on her wireless router – access was easy. Good thing, too. He didn’t think she would have remembered to tell him.

Ten minutes later, he’d finished his job. Rosalie came back in with a little bag full of something that smelled delicious.

“Hey, there!” Kyle said, “Back just in time! Guess what? It’ll work now!” To prove it, he did a Google search for Rosaliegrace’s Bakery – over 50 thousand hits.

“Thank you so much!!” Rosalie said happily, slipping her checkbook out of her pocket. “How much do I owe you?”

This took Kyle by surprise. It was completely unexpected. He answered, “What? Nothing! I was just doing you a favor.” He tried to act all cool about it, but he still hadn’t fully recovered. Why hadn’t he expected her to ask? He could’ve come up with an appropriate response.

Rosalie misunderstood his surprise, and thought he was prompting. “No, I can’t just not pay you anything! Really – how much do I owe?”

Kyle was shutting down his laptop, but he’d made a full recovery by now. He turned and looked her in the eyes. “Rosalie, your smile is more than payment enough,” he said in a serious way.

“Oh, you’re so sweet! Thank you so much!” Beaming, Rosalie handed him the bag she’d been holding. “Here – these are for you – as a sort of ‘thank you’.” He’d turned out to be a nice guy – maybe she should’ve packed a little more into it.

With his laptop back in its case, he stood and slowly reached out for it. His confidence had suddenly vanished – what had taken it away? He smiled a sort of embarrassed smile, and managed an “Okay, thanks.” Great – his ears were turning red. Why did they always have to do that? They were conspicuous enough as it was, without drawing attention to themselves and shouting out that he was embarrassed.

As the bag switched people, briefly Kyle’s and Rosalie’s hands met. Instantly, a bright flash of blue-white light filled the room. It was as if a star had suddenly come into their midst – they were nearly blinded by it. What was it? Where was it? The light appeared to come from their fingers, as rays of white and blue shone about the room.

And then it faded, so abruptly that both were left wondering if they had seen it.

Rosalie was the first to say something. “What was that?” She could tell her voice sounded worried – what was she worried about? She only felt surprised, confused, and curious.

“I – I don’t know… I saw it too.” He had a tendency to state the obvious in situations he didn’t understand. “I don’t know where it came from.”

The young chef didn’t know either. She motioned to the window. “Maybe a light blew outside,” she said, forcing herself to sound more certain than she felt.

“Oh… Okay.” Kyle answered, doing the same. The last thing he wanted was for his visit to be ruined right after he’d accomplished so much. She might need him again – it was best to stay cool. “Here, let me give you my cell phone number, in case you need anything else,” he said, putting down his laptop, getting a pen and paper out of the case and scribbling down his number.

Rosalie took the paper and tore it in half across the middle, reaching for the pen. “I’ll give you mine, too, just so you’ll know it’s me, if I call.” She scribbled another number and handed it and the pen back to him.

“Well, thank you! And have a nice day!” he said, putting everything up and heading for the front of the bakery.

“You too!” Rosalie replied, forcing her attention back to her cakes and away from that odd flash.

Back in his car, Kyle opened up the little bag Rosalie had given him. It was full of mini blueberry muffins, and he closed his eyes, breathing in their delicious scent with a smile.

Chapter 4 - Mysterious Voices

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:21:05 -0500

Kyle stared blankly at his laptop, back in his tiny living room. He didn’t really feel like programming anymore. He just wasn’t in the mood – too much had happened today. He needed some time to think it over. So, he did what many guys do when they feel like this – he played a game. He decided on Halo, as it wasn’t a very thought-consuming game, and started it up.

While his hands and eyes were kept busy fragging aliens, his mind was left free to think about all that had gone on.

So… Apparently the virus he had discovered was affecting almost everybody. And he had a cure for it already figured out. But… So many people!! It was hard to grasp – so many people had need of something he had made.

He threw two frag grenades at a Hunter and watched in satisfaction at the mess it made. But just how much of the world’s population? And what parts in particular? Was it just common people like him, or… Oh, no! The government was undoubtedly being affected by it too… Hey… that was probably the goal of whoever released it. Wait… no, the government was too powerful – they’d have anti-virus protection strong enough for sure, with the best minds in the country working for them. Kyle knew he wasn’t the best, and wasn’t ashamed to admit it, not even to himself.

He jumped into a Phantom and began to take down Grunts on the valley floor below in an off-hand sort of way. But Rosalie – wow. That was the biggest thing that had happened that day, beyond a doubt. Why didn’t he ask her out or something? And what had been wrong with him? Why was he so shy all of a sudden? It was as if all his confidence had been drained from him in an instant. Stuttering! He never stuttered! Why had he been stuttering?

Kyle switched to a plasma rifle and began pulverizing Elites in near-frustration. Why had he been so stupid? The opportunity of a lifetime lost – all because he was a little nervous? Hmm – no, not nervous… Wait… No, it was nervousness. But why had he been so nervous?

He knew why he was nervous. It was always this way. He just wasn’t too good around other people. Most programmers weren’t – it was simply a hazard of the trade. But Rosalie, now… she was so much different than everybody else. He couldn’t help but be a little shy around her. Rosalie, you truly are beautiful.

“What?” a nearby voice yelled at him suddenly.

Kyle was startled so badly that he fell off the sofa. The Master Chief fell off a cliff.

Kyle sat up and yelled back, “Who is that?”

No answer.

He picked himself up off the floor, trying to piece together what had just happened. Had he actually heard someone? He could have sworn he had heard a voice (it sounded surprised) right next to him. He quit playing Halo and began looking around the room for where someone could be hiding. Hmm… There weren’t really that many places. The sofa he had been sitting on was in a corner – no places to hide there. Cautiously he looked behind the curtains, under the desk, and around the TV. Still nobody. Feeling more than a little foolish, he tried under the sofa, but still no luck.

He picked up his coke and took a sip of it, savoring how cold it was. Maybe he hadn’t heard anyone. It’s probably just your imagination, he told himself.

“Kyle?!?”

Great. Now he was wearing coke. It didn’t match what he was wearing, either: It was wet. He was dry. Or had been, anyway. Where was that crazy voice coming from? Was this some sort of joke?

He began to think a little higher-tech and checked the vents above the couch for some sort of hidden speaker.

No luck, but he was beginning to expect it. Suddenly, he got an idea.

He went outside.

It was kind of warm, the sun shining amidst a scattered array of wispy, far-off clouds… But it was better than being in there – out here, whoever it was couldn’t get to him without coming outside. Somebody was screwing with him, and he couldn’t figure out whom.

He gradually became aware of how weird it must look for a skinny guy with a shirt covered in coke to storm outside and stop abruptly in the middle of a suburban yard.

Suddenly he realized what it was. His laptop!!! Of course! It had a speaker right next to where he had been.

Kyle spun around and marched back to the house, turned the doorknob, and nearly gave himself a face full of door.

It was locked.

Yahhh!!! Why did he always lock the door behind him, even when he knew he was going right back inside? He fumbled in his pocket for the keys, finally got the door open, and went in.

He closed (and locked) the door behind him, and walked quickly over to his laptop. He pushed alt-f4 to close Halo, and then muted the sound. He was hoping (sincerely hoping) that it would foil whoever was playing this cruel joke on him. But – he didn’t want to miss whatever the person was saying, either…

He quickly set up the computer to record two sets of sounds – one to record sounds in the room, and the other to record sound signals intended for the laptop’s speakers. Ha. Take that, he thought with a touch of pride.

“Okay, where are you? This isn’t funny!”

What?!? This wasn’t fair! He’d muted the volume! Now he had to keep looking! Who was it? The voice sounded familiar…

“Who are you?” He yelled, praying that someone would answer. But to no avail – the room was silent. Who are you? he thought hopelessly. Whatever prank was being played on him was being played by a master prankster. He couldn’t be going crazy… His mind was his most important asset – he refused to even as much as consider the possibility of insanity. Wait… That voice… Rosalie? Could it really be? She wasn’t exactly computer-savvy – it couldn’t be her. She would’ve had to follow him home. And he knew he didn’t make that good of an impression.

“Yes, it’s me!! Who else would it be? I’m regretting I ever even talked to you! Now where are you??” said the voice of Rosalie. She sounded really ticked off, and a little scared.

Kyle was beginning to get a weird idea of what was going on… It didn’t make sense, it defied logic, and it went against everything he believed to be true. To be honest, it sounded like one of the conspiracy theories that he might’ve come up with when he was a kid…

***

Rosalie was actually pretty pleased, despite all the mishaps of the day. Her computer had never run so fast before. Kyle was good – what had he done to it? He’d certainly done more than just fix the search engine. Her laptop was running faster than it had when she first bought it. Maybe the day wasn’t so bad after all.

She had quickly found the recipe she needed and made the cake, which was now baking.

Her cakes… Muffins! It was time to take them out.

And out they came, all 144 of them, out of several different ovens. Rosalie gave Molly the job of putting them in the baskets they went in out front, where the customers could see them. Rosalie would have put them out herself, but she was really busy. She had a cake house that needed built and frosted.

Why had Kyle taken so long to get there? And four traffic accidents? Come on, if he was really as close as he had said, he wouldn’t have taken so long. It was almost as if he had walked the whole way. But at least he had shown up, right?

She could smell the jungle cake cooking in the oven – the exotic flour she had used had a cinnamon smell to it, and it made her thoughtful. Perhaps he had taken his time; maybe he hadn’t left right away. That would explain it.

She got out several blocks of lemon cake to build the house with. One block by itself did well enough for the main part of the house. Then, she sliced a smaller piece in half from corner to corner and arranged them on top to form a roof.

What was it Kyle had said? That she wasn’t the only one that was having her problem? What was it, some sort of mass virus or something? How did those things work, anyways? But it didn’t matter – it was fixed now, wasn’t it? He was a pretty nice guy, actually – going out of his way to come help her.

She glanced over at the order. It said it had to have a family and their car out in the driveway. Those would go on last, but it would be best to get them out now so she wouldn’t forget them later. She’d learned that a long time ago.

So, out came a family and their car – all edible candy figurines. Now for the chimney and dormers.

And that thing he had said before he left – “Your smile is more than payment enough” – what did that mean, exactly? She had thought it was a compliment, but it sounded kind of cheesy. But no – it was intended to be sweet. Which it was.

The dormers were a little more difficult, so she got them out of the way first – two on the front, fitting snugly into the little places she’d made for them. The chimney was easy. It was just a little piece that would go into a slot she’d cut for it.

She carefully positioned the chimney and started putting it in.

“Rosalie, you truly are beautiful.”

“What?” she yelled in surprise. Rosalie wasn’t a very difficult person to startle. The chimney rolled down the roof, and completely slaughtered the poor little family underneath itself when it fell. Legs went everywhere. The car slid off the table, shattering itself on the tile floor.

She heard murmurings from the customers out front – her yell hadn’t gone unnoticed. She would have to make a point of being quieter.

Rosalie scanned the room, searching for a place someone could hide. The ovens were definitely not likely candidates for hiding spots. Hmm… Nobody under the tables. The cabinets wouldn’t fit anybody, either.

She got a broom and dustpan and started to sweep car off the floor (how weird does that sound, she thought to herself). After she’d finished that, she took out a batch of cookies that she needed to transfer immediately to cooling racks. The voice was still bothering her. She couldn’t figure out what she had heard. But it was so quiet – it was hard to believe that she had actually heard someone.

“Did I actually hear anyone?” she asked herself quietly, voicing her thoughts.

“It’s probably just your imagination.”

Okay – that was weird. This was very, very weird. Kind of creepy, actually. But who was talking? It sounded like… “Kyle?!?” she said incredulously. It couldn’t be!

She didn’t know why – she half expected him to answer. She had noticed that there was something about him that just didn’t seem right…

And the room responded to her query with silence.

She must be lonely. Being alone in the kitchen for the whole day must have some sort of negative psychological effect on you. Maybe she should see somebody for it.

Molly stuck her head in the door, looking at her curiously, and asked with a raised eyebrow, “Did you need something?”

“No, no, everything’s fine, but thank you,” Rosalie replied dismissively. The golden-haired head withdrew itself with a smirk, and the door closed. The smirk had the appropriate effect, though the owner didn’t see it.

After a few uncomfortable moments of reflection, she went back to her cake house and put the chimney back on. Now she just had to put the frosting on. And replace the family. Wouldn’t it be nice if all family problems could be solved that easily – you just get another family when something went wrong?

She set the new family out on the table next to the house-cake. Then, having second thoughts, she moved them to the other side of the table to keep them safe, in case the chimney collapsed again.

Next, she got out the frosting she had made for the cake, and began to ice it.

There was a special method for properly frosting cakes. You started in one place, and worked your way over the whole cake, frosting as you went. It worked best if the frosting was kind of warm – then it would spread easier.

She started with a spatula, to cover ground more quickly. Well, not ground, more like wall. And then roof. But the roof had to be a different color.

She switched to a different spatula and started on the roof. Soon, she had managed all she could, and she switched to using a knife. It wasn’t as fast, but it was better for details like chimneys and dormers. Which she began to work on. First, the base of the chimney.

“Yahhh!!!” someone yelled.

It scared Rosalie so badly that her hand jerked at least four inches, which was enough to slice the chimney off the cake and fling it across the table. It was headed for – oh no – and there was nothing she could do to stop it, either.

The poor Lemonhouse family died a second time.

And she had lopped off a corner of the roof, too. And dropped the knife in the frosting. Now she felt about ready to cry. She was going to have to start over.

“Ha. Take that,” said the voice, and Rosalie could almost imagine someone grinning mischievously, even triumphantly at her.

Now she was really ticked off. She didn’t actually think it was Kyle – she had seen him drive off. But somebody was playing pranks, and it was going to stop now.

“Okay, where are you? This isn’t funny!” she said, with all the fierceness she could muster. As soon as she said it, she realized she needed more practice. Not even being angry made her sound mean.

“Who are you?” said the voice.

This was far from being funny. That definitely sounded like Kyle, all right. Not only was he playing a practical joke, but he was so bad at it that it was almost a joke by itself. The voice had seemed to come from behind her… She spun around and visually searched that half of the room.

“Rosalie?” said the voice, from behind her again.

Enough was enough. She rolled her eyes and spun to face the other side of the room. “Yes, of course it’s me!” she said defiantly, “Who else would it be? I’m regretting I ever even talked to you! Now where are you??”

There was a pause, and then: “I’m at home.”

“Oh, this is not home!!!” Rosalie growled, her eyes narrowing. (Yes, it was an actual growl – she was in a really bad mood.)

Kyle sat there for a moment. His suspicions were correct, though he still couldn’t figure out how it all made sense – his laptop wasn’t recording any sounds at all. He hadn’t said a thing – he had just thought what he wanted to say. He wasn’t actually hearing Rosalie – well, he was hearing her, obviously, but it was in his head.

But how was he going to convince her of that?

Rosalie stood there for a moment, waiting for a response of some kind. She didn’t get one. “I know you’re here, and I know you’re trying to scare me. If you don’t leave, I’m calling the police.” She prayed she sounded braver than she felt. This was the first time she’d ever had to deal with stalkers like this. “I never should have let you mess with my computer!”

That was it!! Kyle knew how to convince her, and he might never have figured it out if she hadn’t said something. Thank you, Rosalie! he thought, realizing too late that she had probably heard him.

“Thank you for what?” Now she was angry, scared, annoyed, creeped out, frustrated, upset, and confused.

Don’t worry about it. He was starting Skype on his computer as quickly as he could. Rosalie, do you have Skype?

This was getting weirder and weirder… “Yes…” she said cautiously, twirling around abruptly to see if she could catch him running behind her.

“Okay, then, what’s your Skype name?” she heard him ask.

He was crazy. “I’m not telling you that!” she said. “Now, get out of here!”

This was going so badly. Rosalie, I can prove to you that I’m not there. But I need your help to do it. Will you help me?

Skype was open and loaded. He just needed a name.

No answer.

Rosalie, my Skype name is MrProgramex. Start Skype and send an IM.

Rosalie was very unsure about this. But he sounded so sincere… But he couldn’t be telling the truth – it was impossible that it could be so – he had to be here. Nobody had ever made her as uncomfortable as Kyle was making her. What sort of tricks was he playing? She would refuse to bite.

“No. You’re going to show yourself now or I’ll call the police and they’ll find you for me.”

Kyle had no doubts they would try. Who would refuse her something as simple as that? But he had to convince her enough for her to simply look at Skype. What was she fearing…? Honestly… I could’ve hacked into your files and gotten your Skype name myself, Rosalie. I could do it right now if I was there. Shoot, I could do it even if I wasn’t there! But I’m asking you. He listened to his voice. He sounded calm, sincere. This was the best he could do. Please, Rosalie, you just have to believe me.

Cocking her head slightly to one side, she considered the tone of his voice, the inflections on the words. He didn’t sound like he was playing a joke… She hesitated for a moment longer, and then haltingly walked into the side room and typed in the password for her laptop.

“Rosalie?”

She ignored him for the moment. Let him ask. She didn’t have to answer. She wasn’t happy with him anyway. She started Skype, and waited for it to load.

“Rosalie?”

Her eyebrows furrowed. Just wait, okay?!? she felt like yelling at him, but she didn’t.

Rosalie!

This wasn’t going well. She was ignoring him. All hope was lost. He would either have to drive back or hope he never thought about her again for the rest of his life.

“Rosalie…”

She let out a low growl and added MrProgramex as a contact, and sent him an IM.

Kyle breathed a sigh of relief. He had begun to fear she couldn’t hear him anymore. Roseskiss was her Skype name, apparently. He added her as a contact. You know, I really don’t like it when you ignore me, he thought jokingly, and sent her a video call. Oh, please let her have a webcam.

Rosalie wondered what he meant by the webcam statement, but soon figured it out – a box popped up on the screen asking her if she would accept a video call from MrProgramex. She hesitated for a moment, but then her curiosity got the best of her, and she clicked “Accept”.

There, on the screen, was Kyle’s face. He had positioned his laptop so that he could sit on the floor with his back to the TV – and the news for a different city was on, not that of Talvis, where she lived. He was certainly not anywhere nearby, just like he had said.

“Now do you believe me?” she heard him ask.

She was about to reply, when suddenly she realized something.

His mouth hadn’t moved.

Chapter 5 - Video Call

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:46:05 -0500

Rosalie was stunned. She was beginning to understand what was going on. Somehow, they were communicating with each other – without talking. Telepathy? She’d heard of it, but never thought it was possible. It just sounded like sci-fi. But for it to actually happen to her?

Wait – if he was sending her his thoughts, might he be able to hear hers?

Kyle shifted a little bit. “Rosalie…?” he said, sounding a little concerned. His mouth was moving as he spoke.

“Mmm-hmm?” she said, unintentionally making her voice a little higher pitched than normal.

She decided to test it, to find out if he could hear her thoughts. She needed to come up with something to think about that he’d have to react to, so she’d know how much of her thoughts he could read.

“Are you alright?” he asked. Now he looked concerned, too.

“I’m fine,” she answered.

Aha! She had it. Something he’d be sure to react to. Watching his face carefully, she began to imagine him without any clothes…

“So… Do you believe me now? That I’m not there?”

His face hadn’t changed. Okay, so maybe he couldn’t hear her thoughts. But his question needed answered now. “Yes… But what’s going on? What are you doing?” she asked him.

Kyle heard Rosalie speak in his head, and then his laptop began sending the exact same thing over the speakers. It sounded rather like when a group of people try to sing “row, row, row your boat”

in rounds, but they don’t start at the correct times. It was hard to understand, and that’s an understatement. The Rosalie voice in his head almost exactly matched the one that was being sent over by Skype.

But he understood. “Um…” he gave a little nervous laugh. “I don’t really know. We’re communicating telepathically, maybe? Shoot – that sounds crazy,” he admitted. “But it’s all I can come up with.”

Rosalie nodded. So, he had come to the same conclusion she had. But now she realized it could be either of them. To read minds, one might also be able to send thoughts, as well. There was no way of knowing who was doing it, that she could see.

“Which one of us is doing it?” she asked, not expecting a meaningful answer.

“I don’t know – I hadn’t thought about that. I’d assumed it was me – I can hear your voice and send you thoughts, but apparently you can’t send me thoughts.” He wasn’t moving his mouth again.

“Showoff,” Rosalie thought.

Kyle sat back in his seat. Wow. He’d heard that one loud and clear. “Umm… I’m not trying to show off… And maybe I’m not the one with it after all…” he said thoughtfully, with a little grin.

“You heard that??” Rosalie said – she was genuinely surprised. She thought she’d tested this out already. “Can you hear this?”

“Yeah, I heard that. But could you hear me when I talk, if Skype was muted?”

Rosalie stood up. “Cookies,” she said, and rushed out of Kyle’s line of sight.

“Wait, what?” came the unheard response over her laptop speakers.

Rosalie had suddenly remembered the chocolate chip cookies that were in her ovens. She needed to get them out, and quickly. Sure, telepathy was important, but she wasn’t about to let her cookies burn!

“Where’d you go?” she heard him ask.

Nosy. I have to get my cookies out before they burn.

“Okay. I’ll wait.”

That was nice of him – saying he’d wait when he could hear her thoughts. She felt a little sarcastic about it, but still – it was kind of funny.

She put on her oven mitts and started taking the cookie pans out and setting them down. Then, with a pancake flipper, she carefully put the cookies on cooling racks. The cookies would keep cooking if they stayed on the pan, and they’d end up crunchy instead of chewy.

But her job didn’t end there. It was time for the jungle cakes to come out, too. And several cakes that would be used to build a cake that would look like a cruise ship. At least that one would be easy.

Molly stuck her head in the door. “Rosalie, we’re almost out of oatmeal raisin cookies,” she said. Rosalie turned back to the counter and started putting the cookies she’d gotten out earlier into a basket. Okay, Molly, I have them here. Whoops. Did she just try to…? She turned to Molly to say it out loud.

“Okay, just checking,” Molly said, and pulled her head back. The door closed, and Rosalie was left alone in the room. Had she just…

Kyle? she thought.

“Yes…?” came the response.

I just talked to Molly…

“Yes… and this is odd because…?”

She sighed. Men could be so stupid.

“Oh!!!” Apparently, he’d just figured out what she meant. “So it’s you, and not me.”

Yes… I think the same thing. Which means I’m reading your mind. Maybe that made him a little uncomfortable – it would serve him right, too. All of this was his fault. She knew he didn’t have to come over to fix her computer. He could have attached the setup file for the firewall to an email. And she didn’t live anywhere near where he lived, if what he’d put on Skype could be believed.

Kyle considered this for a bit. Yeah, it made sense. But why could he hear when she talked?

Hmm… Her being able to read his mind made him a little uncomfortable. Do you hear everything I think?

She was quick to answer. “I think so, and you don’t think much.”

That’s rather vague. And insulting, he thought to himself, but he didn’t say it.

“Yes, it is.”

Are you busy?

“No, why?”

You’re not saying much.

“Well, I’m not.”

I’ll wait ‘til you get back. So he waited.

Rosalie finished up with the oatmeal raisins and took them out front to Molly. “Here, you can put these out now,” she told her, and then went back to the kitchen. And no, I wasn’t talking to you, she said to Kyle.

“What?” He sounded confused.

I was talking to Molly, not you.

“When?”

Just now!

A pause. Then, “I didn’t hear you say anything.” Another pause. “Maybe I can only hear you talking when you’re actually talking to me…” Rosalie had arrived at the same conclusion at the same time.

She took a container of cookie dough she had made and started to put it out onto pans. Then she decided to try something.

“Molly, come here!” she said.

She waited. Molly never showed up. I think you’re the only one who can hear me talking, Kyle.

“Why do you say that?”

I just tried it on Molly. It didn’t work. Suddenly it hit her how unusual all of this was – this was crazy! Nobody would ever believe them!

She put the cookies into the oven and walked back to her laptop. She could still see Kyle in his living room, tossing a tennis ball up in the air and catching it. He wasn’t looking at her – he didn’t know she was back yet. A mischievous grin slowly spread across her face.

“Kyle!” she said suddenly, attempting to startle him.

“Yeah, what?” he said, looking at the screen. He stopped tossing the tennis ball. But he wasn’t startled. Rosalie was a little disappointed.

“Do you realize how crazy all of this is?” she asked him.

She saw Kyle lean forwards press a couple buttons on his laptop. “Sorry – just muting the sound,” he explained. “Yes, I do realize how crazy it is. It’s wild! If we told anybody, they would think we’d lost our minds.”

“And none of this shocks you?”

Kyle looked at her questioningly.

“Doesn’t it at least make you worry?”

He thought about it. “No, not really.”

He looked honest, but he had to be lying. “What do you mean, ‘not really’?!?” she said, sitting down in her chair.

Kyle paused. “Well… I’m not sure how to say it…” He began tossing the tennis ball again.

“Say it.”

“I’m trying.” Toss, catch, toss, catch.

This was getting to be so annoying!! “Try harder.”

“Okay…” He paused to try to figure out how to put it into words. “It really doesn’t bother me. I don’t know why – it ought to. But it doesn’t. If that makes any sense.” Toss, catch. Toss, catch. Toss, catch.

“Yes, it makes sense. But why?” she asked, a bit more impatiently than she had intended.

He glanced at the screen. “I don’t know!” he said unconcernedly, raising his eyebrows, and then looked over to the left. She saw him abruptly reach way off the right side of the screen for something.

Kyle yelled in surprise.

He sat back up, with a look of surprise and shock on his face. He was staring off in the direction he had leaned – sitting motionless and staring.

Rosalie was starting to get concerned. Wait – how was she concerned? She’d just met this guy. But still… “Kyle?”

Still that blank stare.

“Um… what just happened?” she asked, curious to know what was going on.

Kyle’s head turned only slightly, and moved an inch closer his webcam. His eyes stayed glued some invisible point off the side of the screen. It was as if he was trying to look at her, but couldn’t turn his attention away from whatever he was looking at.

They were silent for a while – both verbally and telepathically. Then Kyle shook himself a little bit – the same way he might have if something had startled him. With a deep breath, he picked up his laptop and turned it so that the webcam would face the direction he’d been looking.

Rosalie had to stare at it a little bit to figure out what she was looking at. Then she figured it out.

It was the tennis ball.

And it was completely encased in ice.

Kyle was dumbfounded. He couldn’t figure out what had just happened. He was tossing the tennis ball up and down, and had thrown it a little too far to the left. He reached for it, and it had shot across the room, hit the wall, and thudded to a stop on the floor.

What had he done? What it looked like was that he’d just frozen a tennis ball. Great, put that on my resume, why don’t you. “Good at freezing tennis balls.” He stopped – had Rosalie heard him?

No, apparently not. He hadn’t been talking to her.

“Rosalie?” he said, not taking his eyes off the frozen object he was staring at.

“Yes?”

“Do you know what that is?”

“The tennis ball?” she asked, although it was more of a statement than a question.

“Yes…”

“And it’s frozen.”

“That’s right.”

“What did you do?”

Kyle sat the laptop back down on the low table and looked at her. “I don’t know!” he said, freaking out a little bit. “I was throwing it, and I threw it too far, so I reached to catch it, and this happened!!” He was freaking out because it had occurred to him – if he could freeze things, but didn’t know how to control it, he could end up freezing something valuable, or worse – he could accidentally freeze and kill someone.

Now it was Rosalie’s turn to be unusually calm. “Kyle, calm down. It’ll be fine.” She was fighting a smile.

“But how is all this happening??” Now he was going nuts. It had sure taken him long enough.

Rosalie thought about it. What was going on? Wait… Maybe…

“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you remember that flash of light we saw earlier?”

Kyle stopped his semi-panicking for a moment, unaware that Rosalie was using a technique on him often used on upset toddlers – you introduce them to a new idea, and they calm down to think it over. He was also unaware of the trouble she was having in her battle with the smile. “Yes… you don’t think that all this is because of that, do you?”

“I think it’s at least possible.” She thought it made sense. Nothing unusual like this had ever happened until that flash of light. It must have done something to them. Or maybe it was simply a by-product of whatever happened to them at that moment.

“It doesn’t really matter if it’s because of that or not,” Kyle said. “Now the question is, ‘What are we going to do about it?’” He looked meaningfully at her.

Rosalie’s smile faded. She hadn’t thought ahead that far yet. “I don’t know…” she said, shaking her head slowly and staring at the keyboard.

“What if more stuff like this happens?”

This was a little too much for her to process all at once. How fast was he thinking? “I don’t know!”

Kyle looked thoughtful. “So… what do we do? Your call.”

“And why is it my call?”

“Well, you’re the lady. Ladies first.”

“No offense, but it’s your fault all this happened.”

“None taken, and no, it’s not.”

“And how is it not your fault? I know you didn’t actually have to come over to fix my laptop – you could have sent the files over and I could have installed them myself.”

“That wasn’t all I did. Your system’s registry was totally whacked up. I… fixed a few things.” he said with a hint of pride.

So that was what he did… “Would it have run if you hadn’t?” she asked pointedly.

A moment of silence. “Yes…”

“So it’s your fault.” She wasn’t actually angry with him – she was really just playing around. She wanted to see what he’d say.

Kyle was getting a little frustrated. Today wasn’t going well at all. “Okay, look. Say a bunch of people are in a building some terrorists blow up. Is it their fault they die, just because they decided to go to work that day?”

Rosalie thought about it for a bit. His analogy made sense, really.

“And why’d you let me come over if you knew I didn’t have to?” he added, just in case.

She didn’t have an answer to that one, and there was a moment of silence between them before she finally said, “Okay, how about we’re both at fault?”

“Okay, that works. But it’s really more my fault than yours,” he admitted.

Finally he admits it. “Yes. Now, you decide. What do we do?”

Curious, she decided to test and see if she could read his mind.

Kyle leaned back and considered everything. What could they do? How would they keep from messing anything up? And they were the only ones who could know about it, too.

He had an idea that would solve their problems, or at least keep them from becoming too severe when they found some more. But it was way too much to suggest. It would never work.

“What wouldn’t work?” Rosalie asked.

“What?” He hadn’t realized he had meant for her to hear that. This might be a tad more complex than he thought. “I was just thinking.”

“About what?”
“No, never mind. There’s no way.”

“No, what? Tell me.” Rosalie was interested in what he had to say, and curious at why he didn’t want her to know. She felt a little nosy, actually.

“Well…” he began uncomfortably, “I… Never mind.”

“No, tell me!” For some reason, she found his sudden shyness funny, and almost laughed.

“I can’t! It’s not a correct thing to say.”

Rosalie tilted her head a little bit left and forwards and said, “Come on, you can tell me,” in the manner of a mother trying to get her kid to tell her something.

Why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut? It was too late, now. She’d either keep asking or get her feelings hurt. And hurting her feelings was the last thing he wanted to do. “Okay…” he began. “But don’t get upset.”

“I won’t.”

Kyle hesitated. Then he said, “The only thing I can come up with is for me to come over there for a while so we can be close by if anything else happened.” No! That had come out wrong. I forgot to mention I’d stay in a hotel! Argh!

Rosalie laughed. “Is that all?”

Kyle looked up, confused. “Is that all?” he parroted, trying to figure out what she meant.

“Puh-lease! That’s nothing! If you want to stay in a hotel up here, then of course! Go right ahead.”

He felt a wave of relief sweep over him. Thank you, telepathy. You saved the day. “Okay, I’ll do that, then. I’ve just got to drop off my dog at a friend’s house, and then I’ll be right over.”

“Okay!” she said, wondering why she wasn’t still freaked out. It would probably come back – she was sure of that. But for now, she was fine. “I’ve got to go get my brownies out! Talk to you when you get here!”

Kyle laughed. “Or sooner, if you say anything before then!”

Rosalie laughed again. “Yup! Bye!”

“Bye!”

And the video call ended.

Chapter 6 - An Accident

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:11:05 -0500

For a moment, Kyle sat there, staring at the screen like he had while he’d talked to Rosalie. He felt a deep sense of disappointment for some reason. After thinking about it, he knew why, too – he was wishing the call didn’t have to end. For some reason, he liked talking to her. She wasn’t an easy person to talk to – not for him, anyway. But he liked it.

His eyes began to wander, and came to a rest on the text box at the bottom of the screen. Well, he could send her an instant message. The thought immediately began to make him feel a little better. But no – that wouldn’t be the right thing to do – she was busy, after all. And they had just ended a video call. No, the conversation had come to an end. She wasn’t likely to be at her laptop, anyway.

He could think to her – that would work.

No! he told himself. Not an option. No more talking. But the harder he tried, the harder it became to keep from doing it. It was just a thought, after all, and he was curious to know what would happen. But what would he say? He began to think over his conversation with her. He needed a way to distract himself from it. No… Perhaps he only needed a good excuse for it. And it couldn’t sound like an excuse, either. It needed to sound sincere.

It would be sincere, he protested against himself. I just need a reason. He thought about all the things they had said. Was there anything she’d left out or hadn’t explained; any questions he’d asked she hadn’t answered? He thought about it for a little bit.

Cookies! He’d asked a question and she’d answered with “Cookies”. It wasn’t really answering, so that might be a good question to ask. But what was it? He always saved chats so he wouldn’t forget anything later. He’d just check.

That’s right… It was a video chat. You can’t save those. And part of it had been silent telepathic communication. So how was he going to remember what she had said? Okay… Well, they were talking about who it was that actually had the ability – it had been right before she’d accidentally tried to talk to Molly. But he knew the answer to that question. But was that the one he had asked?

The screen saver on his laptop started, making intricate swirls of colors dance across the screen. He’d made it himself, but it pulled him from his thoughts. What had he been trying to do? Then he remembered – he was going to pack for a hotel trip.

He tapped the touchpad to stop the screen saver, and shut down his laptop. He put it in its case, and went to his room to start packing.

Kyle liked to travel, and he always traveled light. He would be able to carry everything he needed wherever he needed to go in a single bag, plus his laptop. It made it easier to move around, and he could choose any mode of transportation he wished – except motorcycles, of course, but they didn’t have room for much, anyway.

Idly he considered whether he should take his work with him. Would he need it, perhaps? He didn’t know for sure how long he was going to be gone – what if he needed something to do? He decided to play it safe, and packed his CD case into his bag. Then he started on pulling together and packing some of his clothes.

Within fifteen minutes, he was completely ready to go.

“Fred! Come on, boy – car ride!” Little Fred began to jump up and down excitedly and wag his tail like he was trying to use it to propel himself forwards. He was so excited – he loved car rides. Kyle put the dog’s seat belt harness on him and buckled him into the car. Then he put his briefcase and bag in the back.

Twenty minutes later, poor Freddy-boy was disappointed to discover that he was being left at the house of Kyle’s friend, Jeb Nirlak. But look! More dogs to play with. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all, Fred decided. Anyway, Kyle would come back for him.

For the second time that day, Kyle started the trip to Rosaliegrace’s Bakery. This time, however, he stayed under the speed limit. It was going to take him a little under two hours. As it was already 4:06, he estimated his time of arrival to be around 6:00. Did she tell me when her bakery closes? he tried to remember.

Unbidden, the answer to his question came to his mind. “No, and it closes at six.”

Telepathy was certainly a useful thing to have.

“Why – is something wrong?” Rosalie asked him.

“Well, that’s about when I’m going to get there, and I wanted to know where I needed to go,” Kyle sent back.

“Just come over to the bakery.”

That sounded like a good idea, he decided.

***

It was six o’ clock, and Rosalie was closing the bakery. Molly had already left. Molly didn’t usually want to stay the whole day, anyway.

There was a lot to do – the doors had to be locked, the cash from the cash drawer needed to be put away, and all the different baskets of bread, pretzels, cookies, and muffins needed to be covered and stored.

Tomorrow was Friday, her favorite day of the week. She wasn’t exactly sure why, but it was. And Friday was the last day in the work week for Rosalie; she didn’t work on weekends. Not at the Bakery, anyway. Every other weekend she would give piano lessons at her house. Her next scheduled lessons were for two Saturdays from now – she had this weekend free.

It was almost dark outside, and a beautiful red sunset with golden clouds had almost changed to a dark blue with silver. And someone was approaching. She looked closer – it was Kyle.

She walked back to the front door and opened it for him.

“Hi,” he said uncertainly. Why was he nervous again? He’d been fine at home. Maybe Rosalie makes me nervous, he considered.

Kyle walked into the bakery, and Rosalie closed the door behind him. “Hello!” she said cheerfully. She looked tired – today had been a long day for both of them. “I have to finish closing up before we can go,” she told him.

“That’s all right,” he replied. Then he added, “I’ll help. What can I do?” One small victory – triumph over his nervousness.

Rosalie walked back towards the kitchen. “No, don’t worry about it – I’m almost done, anyway.”

Kyle felt his gentlemanly side start to kick in. Surely she didn’t mean that. She must still have a lot to do. He was going to help her, even if it killed him. “Hey, it’s no problem. What can I do to help? Wash dishes? Clean the ovens?”

Rosalie walked towards the front window. “I wash the dishes right after I use them so they don’t pile up,” she said, flipping the “OPEN” sign on the window to “CLOSED”. “And ovens only need cleaned if you make a mess.” She started back towards the kitchen. “And I don’t make messes,” she said with a grin as she walked past.

Kyle felt useless. This would never do! Man up! Get in there and do something to help! he chided himself. “Well, then, what can I do?” he asked, following her to the kitchen.

She reached inside and flipped the light off. Darkness filled the room. “It’s done,” she said, putting her purse over her shoulder and walking to the door.

Kyle’s small victory became a crushing defeat. He’d just wanted to help. Did she not want his help? Maybe she hated him. She had said it was his fault this had happened… She definitely didn’t like him much, he was sure of that.

While becoming carried away with his reasoning, he lost track of where he was.

Rosalie turned. “I still have to lock the front door…” she said. “And I’m not locking it with you in here. Come on.”

Kyle looked. He was standing in the center of the bakery. Grinning sheepishly, he walked past her and went outside. Rosalie closed the door and locked it behind her.

“So… Now what?” Kyle asked. He’d lost the feeling of being top dog, and was waiting for her to decide what to do. It was sad, really, how quickly that had happened. But being around Rosalie seemed to do that to him. It was why he was doing so poorly, he decided. He’d never had a chance to practice.

Rosalie looked him over. He looked rather awkward, really. It was hard to see his face in the dim twilight, but she was sure he looked kind of uncomfortable. Was that her fault? She hadn’t meant to make him feel that way. “Well,” she said, “I’m going home.”

Kyle felt that terrible sinking feeling. He’d gotten there too late – he was going to have to wait for tomorrow to talk to her.

Rosalie didn’t tell him, but she could hear his thoughts. Not all of them, just the ones on the surface; the strongest ones. The other layers were invisible to her. She had to actively “listen” to hear the surface thoughts, unless he meant for her to hear him. When he did that, it had the same attention-grabbing effect that someone calling your name has. Your mind picks it out of all the different sounds you’re hearing and brings it to your attention.

He seemed so disappointed, but she didn’t mean him to be. She had figured he was going to come over to her house after she’d closed up. After all, she needed a ride home.

“Come on,” she said, “You can walk me to your car.” She started walking in that direction. Her bakery was part of a shopping plaza that had a moderately-sized parking lot, and Kyle’s car was sitting by itself out in the middle. Almost everyone had closed up and gone home.

“My car? What about your car?”

“My car wouldn’t start this morning,” she explained. “I had to walk.”

“Oh.”

She couldn’t help it – she had to know what he was thinking. Sure, it was a little intrusive, but he knew she could, right? He would keep his thoughts controlled. She decided to listen in a little bit. It wouldn’t do any harm, right? Still, she felt a little guilty about it. But she had already started – too late to stop now.

“Okay, so, to the car, then. But what afterwards? Kinda hoping to get a chance to discuss what’s gone on today, but if she’s leaving, I won’t get a chance. Not until tomorrow, anyway. I should say something – I don’t want this! Maybe I could go over to her house and talk. No! Bad idea – that’s a little too much to do with somebody you just met. Even if I feel I’ve known her forever. No, I’ll just keep my mouth shut and let what happens happen. Rosalie’s smart – she’s already got plans made, for sure. REALLY smart… And SO beautiful! Why am I always so stupid around her – I just wanted to help! – I don’t – no, wait… It can’t be – I just met her! But truly – she is perfection, perfected. The way she walks, the way she talks, the way she moves, so full of grace. Hmm… Rosalie Grace… Maybe the word was named after her… I think –”

Rosalie withdrew her attention from his mind, and was thankful that it was a little too dark for him to see her face – she was blushing deeply. But she had learned what he wanted, though his thoughts rushed by so quickly… Now she just had to get him to ask it.

But they were almost at his car. She’d have to work quickly. How could she get him to ask? Maybe… If she could read minds, perhaps she could tweak them, too. Create thoughts instead of just reading. It was manipulative to the highest degree, and probably immoral, but it could prove useful. She allowed herself back into his thoughts.

“– like a class created component. The functions should always outnumber the methods. I guess if you were to put a structure at the top of the code, it would have the same effect as defining variables on the world level. If I could simply rearrange the private subs and use an if-then argument to redirect the focus…”

Rosalie didn’t understand any of the programming speak, and it was having a negative effect on her. She didn’t like listening to anything she didn’t understand. Yes, she decided quickly, his thoughts needed changing. She reached out to him, with the intention of tweaking his mind a tiny bit – just as an experiment. She could imagine the tendrils of her mind beginning to stretch across the gap between them.

And she felt his mind.

So complex – more than anything she’d ever seen – anything she’d ever heard of. It was like trying to switch from reading picture books to reading Shakespeare – there was no common frame of reference between this and what she was used to. The human brain was a complex so utterly complex that it defeated the purpose of the word, and needed a word of its own. She was awed. Despite all its complexity, it spoke out one thing loudly – this was Kyle. It was as if it had his name stamped firmly across it in bright red letters.

But where to begin? Maybe if she sent him a thought; if she suggested an idea to him…

Kyle was growing aware of something in his mind. It danced lightly at the edges, the way you can see a dim light in the dark, but only if you don’t look directly at it. Something wasn’t right… Something was probing him – exploring – feeling… Rosalie?

Reflexively, blindly, he felt himself trying to make the sensation go away.

Rosalie sent the thought, carefully chosen: “Suggest talking to Rosalie at her house tonight.”

She could almost sense the thought traveling across the wispy tendrils of her mind to his. Then…

Pain! Oh! It hurt! Like lightning in her skull! The feeling of a thousand sharp talons ripping up the inside of her head!

The tendrils snapped, and she was left alone with her pain; so terribly alone.

Everything was going dark so quickly… She couldn’t stand. She caught a brief glimpse of Kyle’s face through the shadowy mists. Kyle, she tried to say, I’m so sorry.

She crumpled and fell forwards. The ground would be so hard…

But the ground never came. Before all went black, she was dimly aware of the sensation of being carried…

Then all was gone.

Chapter 7 - An Experiment

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:36:05 -0500

Slowly, so slowly, Rosalie came to from the darkness that enveloped her. Oh!!! What a headache she had! It was awful – like nothing she had ever dreamed was possible!

But where was she? She didn’t dare open her eyes.

She could feel a blanket over her… Her head was on a pillow… Oh, it was all so soft; a tiny ray of sunshine amidst a blackened world of pain.

But it wasn’t her bed… Her blanket didn’t feel this way… Where was she?!?

Rosalie’s eyes snapped open, but shut them back immediately. The light was too bright – it hurt her head so badly. She just wanted it to stop! She gave an involuntary moan.

She was aware of the sound of a flipping light switch – a lamp on the bedside table next to her. It echoed in her brain. It sounded so loud!

She risked opening her eyes again, just a little. The room was dark. Where was she?

As her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, she became aware of a person sitting on a bed opposite her. Then she remembered everything.

She must be in a hotel room. And that person next to her must be… “Kyle?” she whispered.

She heard someone stirring; standing up, coming over. They were trying to be quiet, but it sounded so loud in her head.

“I’m here,” he yelled.

She winced with pain. “Don’t yell!” she said pleadingly.

He was quieter now. It sounded like he was talking normally. “Rosalie… I was whispering.”

Rosalie was about to give a hasty response, but she stopped to think about it. It had indeed sounded the way people do when they whisper – but it was so loud!!! And she felt so sleepy…

“Here.” She could just barely see Kyle’s outline in the dark – he was holding a glass of water and a couple pills. “Tylenol,” he said quietly. Rosalie was too grateful for words. She raised herself up on one elbow and took the medicine he handed her.

“Now lie back down and get some rest,” he told her.

Rosalie did so; thankfully, but gingerly. Any sudden movement made her head throb. She heard the rustle of his clothing as he walked away and sat back down on the bed beside her.

There was a knock at the door. Oh, what pain it caused her! She just wanted to yell at it to stop! She wanted to surrender – she’d fought the battle; she’d lost. Just leave me alone! But the sound was fading… All sounds were fading.

For the second time that night, the darkness enveloped Rosalie. But this time, she welcomed it.

***

Rosalie awoke. Her eyes were closed. She felt an urge to open them, but remembering the pain it had brought the time before, she restrained herself. Then, a sudden realization: her head didn’t hurt anymore.

She became aware of the sounds in the room. Someone was sitting on the other bed typing on a laptop keyboard, breathing softly.

Then other sounds – someone was walking past the door in the hallway. The couple in the next room were arguing about who should sleep where. Someone in the parking lot outside the window was upset; they’d locked themselves out of their car.

Then still other sounds – a family across the parking lot was deciding who would bring what in. Someone sneezed in the room across the hall. The people in the room above them were walking across the floor.

Too much noise, all at once – Rosalie wanted to block it all out.

And was surprised to find that she could.

Super hearing? But how did that happen? Did it have something to do with trying to affect Kyle’s mind?

She moved a little and opened her eyes. Kyle was sitting on the other bed, facing towards her, his face illuminated by his laptop’s screen. He looked over at her when he heard her stir.

“Rosalie?” he asked cautiously. “Are you all right?”

Rosalie marveled at how clearly she could hear him. It was so much clearer than before, but she would have thought it normal, then. It was similar to the feeling a person gets when they first get glasses when they’ve needed them their entire lives.

“I’m fine,” she said softly.

“What happened?” he closed his laptop and put it on the bed beside him.

Rosalie considered her answer before she spoke. “I’m not sure. I was in so much pain all of a sudden, and it made me faint.”

Kyle turned the bedside lamp on. He got the feeling he was asking the wrong question. He decided to be more decisive. “What were you doing when it started?”

She couldn’t dodge that one without lying. She didn’t want to admit what she had been trying to do, but she didn’t see another option. “I was… trying to see if I could change your mind.”

Kyle gave a little laugh. He was smiling – a sad smile, but a sympathetic one. He had guessed that might’ve been the answer.

Rosalie sat up carefully. “Don’t laugh at me! It really hurt,” she said.

“That’s not why I was laughing.” Then, reading her expression, he added, “Rosalie, you could have just asked.”

Rosalie was confused. “What?”

Kyle was still smiling that odd smile. “I would have told you: you can’t make me change my mind.”

It was a joke, she decided. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I know.”

“You aren’t upset? I tried to put a thought into your head. I tried to literally ‘change your mind’.”

“I know that’s what you meant. And no, I’m not upset.”

“You’re not offended, or anything?”

“Rosalie,” he began with a look of solemnity, “I’m not an easy person to offend. To date, only one person outside my immediate family has ever managed.”

There were several minutes of silence following this as the two people watched each other quietly.

“So…” she began, mostly to break the silence. “What happened?”

“You just told me what happened.”

Rosalie grinned. “No, I mean what did you see happen? And how did I get here? And what’s new?”

Kyle nodded. He understood now. “Well, I was walking beside you, and we were almost to your car. I felt as if something was trying to ‘feel’ my mind… If that makes any sense…” his voice trailed off.

Rosalie gave an embarrassed smile. “Sorry. That was me.”

“Ah. Okay, well… I thought it was, so I looked over towards you, trying to make that feeling stop. You looked surprised – shocked – like you were in pain.”

“I was. You have no idea,” she said, shaking her head.

“And then you looked at me. And for an instant, I could almost feel how you felt. Just for a second. It was like you were trying to tell me a hundred things, all at once.”

He stopped, and stared off into the distance. He was lost in the depths of time, reliving that moment. His face changed – pain crept into his eyes; sorrow; an utter despair no words could describe.

Rosalie peered into his mind. She quickly withdrew – he was making himself feel the thoughts she had sent him. But they were more emotions than thoughts – so many they seemed to mix and overlap into a twisted heap of agony. She wanted desperately for him to stop.

“Kyle,” she said, trying to snap him out of it.

His eyes refocused, and he looked at her. “Sorry. Where was I?” Before she could reply, he continued, “Oh, yeah. Okay… Well, after you sent that ‘thought wave’ – or whatever it’s called – you fell forwards.”

“And you caught me,” she continued for him.

“Yes…”

“That’s the last thing I remember,” she said truthfully.

“Well, I laid you in the back seat of my car, and drove here – the Voyageur hotel. And here you are,” he finished with a flourish of his hands.

“And here I am.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Wait, how did you carry me?” Rosalie looked at his skinny arms suspiciously.

“You mean how… How did I lift you?”

She nodded.

“Ah…” Kyle was beginning to understand. “Okay…” He stopped short and pulled up the sleeve of his t-shirt, turning himself so she could see his arm. It was the best way he could think of to explain.

Rosalie was surprised. “You’re muscular! But your arms are so skinny!” She laughed. “They get so thin at the bottoms.”

Kyle smiled in embarrassment and pulled his shirt sleeve back to his elbow, where it had been before. “And that’s why I never pull my sleeves up…” he said quietly, trying to make a point.

She laughed. “Sorry, Kyle, it was just a surprise.”

“It’s no problem. It’s happened before.” He’d used to work on a farm, carrying stuff around, part-time. He never really liked anyone knowing, though – it just made him feel self-conscious.

Suddenly Rosalie couldn’t hold it in any longer. She had to tell him. “I’ve got a new ability.”

A look of confusion crossed his face. “Hmm? What are you talking about?” He thought she was making a joke.

“I can hear… everything!!!” she exclaimed excitedly.

“Okay…” Kyle was still convinced it was a joke and wanted her to continue. He was expecting a punch line. “I don’t get it.”

Rosalie looked at him in mock disapproval. “I’m serious!”

Now he was beginning to gather that it wasn’t a joke. Realization shone in his eyes, which got wider rapidly. “Are you serious?!?” he asked.

“I just said I was!” She wasn’t laughing, but she almost could’ve been. After all, how often does a girl wake up to find she has a new super power?

“How much is everything?” Kyle queried.

“Down the street is the furthest so far.”

Kyle sighed. Earlier that day he’d had the luxury of believing he was imagining it. Now he wasn’t even slightly surprised.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked, her excitement fading.

“No, I believe you,” he said unconvincingly. To tell you the truth, he was a little jealous.

“But it’s true! Watch.” She tilted her head to one side and listened. “Our neighbors in there,” here she pointed at the wall next to the head of the bed, “are arguing about whether they should leave the TV on to help them sleep.”

“Well, that can’t be proven, unless you want me to barge in there and ask them if that’s what they’re talking about!” Kyle said, chuckling.

“Hmm…” she listened a little more. “Five people are coming down the hallway outside the door. Two men, a woman, and two children,” she said matter-of-factly. “Go look,” she added.

On his way to the door, Kyle laughed and said, “And how can you tell the difference between a man and a woman by the way they sound?”

Rosalie rolled her eyes and grinned. “Guys clomp their feet. Girls step more carefully. Plus, this girl is wearing high heels and the two men are whispering about her.”

Kyle couldn’t argue the validity of that claim, even if he had wanted to. He reached the door and opened it, just in time to see two kids, a woman, and two men walk past him, headed for the elevator. He closed the door back. “Nah, that’s just luck,” he joked.

If he wanted to argue, fine, she decided. She’d win. “Okay, then, how about this –”

“No, don’t bother!” Kyle said with a smile on his face. “I believe you! I told you I did!”

Rosalie was pleased. “Isn’t it awesome?”

“Yeah, it is.” Was she rubbing it in, or was she actually this excited? Kyle brushed the thought aside quickly – of course she was excited. She wasn’t the type of person to try to rub it in – it simply wasn’t her personality. She was too nice – too considerate for that. “Okay, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “I’m going to leave, and I’ll walk down the street outside, saying something every now and then, and we’ll see how far you can hear.”

It was definitely worth a try. “Okay!” she said.

“Great!” He walked to the door and left.

“Hurry back,” she thought to him.

Down in the lobby, Kyle paused briefly. It wasn’t a large hotel, by any means, but they had spruced it up the best they could. Padded red-backed benches, large-leafed Easter lilies, a couple decorative silk trees (is that what you call them, he wondered), and large paintings of rolling landscapes by unknown artists. “Are you ready?”

“Go right ahead,” came the response.

Kyle took a deep breath. He hated making himself look weird in front of people. But, it had to be done. “Can you hear me now?”

An old guy walking past him gave him a weird look.

“Yes, I can,” he heard, “Easily.”

“Good.”

Kyle walked out the front door and into the parking lot. It wasn’t full; there were a lot of spaces without cars. He walked to the center of it, out in the open.

“Are you ready?” he asked her.

“Ready.”

This wasn’t so bad. Nobody was here. “Can you hear me now?”

“Yes!” she answered, “Better than before, actually!”

“What? But how? I’m further away!”

“Turn around,” she told him.

Kyle turned, and scanned the second-floor windows. There was Rosalie, waving at him. He laughed and waved back. “I’ll make it tougher for you, then!”

“Go right ahead!” he heard her say laughingly. Or he heard her think, rather.

There was a loud honking behind him. He turned, and found himself face-to-face with a Hummer that was trying to park where he was standing. He got out of the way quickly.

He walked over to the stop light and crossed at the first opportunity. It didn’t take too long; there wasn’t much traffic, despite it being a four-lane road. Upon reaching the other side, he turned around to face the hotel. “Ready?”

“I’m ready!”

“Okay, here goes, then.” He took a breath and said, “Can you hear me now?”

“Yes!!” came the happy reply.

He laughed telepathically.(That sounds new, doesn’t it?) Okay, I’ll make it even harder now!

She was laughing now, too.

He walked down the sidewalk away from the hotel, passing a small shopping center and a McDonald’s. He liked this; it was neat. He almost felt like singing. Walking at night in cold weather always made him feel like this. He didn’t know why. It just made him happy – like he couldn’t decide whether he should yell, laugh, or sing. But he loved it. But it wasn’t the only thing he was doing.

“Here comes another one. Are you ready?”

“Yep!”

“Can you hear me now?”

“Yeah! I can still hear you!”

Kyle was thoroughly impressed. He hadn’t expected her to be able to hear this far. She was getting close to matching Superman. Crazy. “Wow. Okay, I’ll keep going.”

He walked onwards for a while, enjoying the night air. There weren’t many people out, but it wasn’t like the city was sleeping. Cars still drove along the roads, gas stations were still getting customers, and people were stopping at restaurants for a late supper.

Hmm… Supper. He’d forgotten – he hadn’t eaten anything in quite a while. But he wasn’t hungry. No, when he got hungry, his stomach started bothering him, and he wouldn’t be able to think about anything until he ate something.

He finally stopped in front of a small church. “Okay, you ready?”

“Yes, I am!” he heard in his mind.

“Can you hear me now?” he asked her.

There was a pause. “No… I don’t think so…”

“Maybe if I yelled.”

“No, don’t yell,” she began quickly, trying to keep him from being stupid.

“CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW???” he yelled in his best Jim Carrey voice. Wow – his medicine was really starting to wear off.

“Yes, I hear you! Be quiet!” she laughed.

He laughed along with her. “Okay!” he told her.

Somebody came out of the church and started towards him. As quickly as he could, he did an about-face and headed back to the hotel.

***

“So,” Rosalie asked after he got back, “How far?”

“About half a mile,” he answered with a grin.

“Really?!? That far?”

“Yep. You’ve got good ears, you know?”

She laughed. She didn’t know, but Kyle loved to hear her laugh. “I know!”

“What time is it, I wonder?” He looked at the time on his laptop. “Wow – 10:30.”

She was almost shocked at how late it was. “Whoa! I’d better get going. I’ve got to get home!”

“But your car is still in the bakery’s parking lot…” Kyle said. “I could drive you there.”

“Did you forget?” Rosalie laughed. “I told you – it wouldn’t start this morning.”

“Well, I could drive you to your house,” he suggested.

“Sure!” she answered, grabbing her purse.

The ride to her house was uneventful. Kyle dropped Rosalie off at her driveway, told her goodnight, and then they parted ways.

Kyle suddenly found he was exhausted, now that the immediate concerns of the day were past. But he was hungry. He had to eat – now. Maybe at that McDonald’s he had passed earlier…

Chapter 8 - Strawberry Popsicle

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:25:05 -0500

Rosalie awoke early the next morning to the sound of birds. She rolled over and looked at her alarm clock – it was only five. Hmm… Maybe super hearing wasn’t always a good thing to have… She covered her head with her blanket and went back to sleep.

And awoke thirty minutes later – one of her neighbors was singing in the shower. She was going to have to learn to turn her hearing off as she slept – or move to the middle of nowhere.

Rosalie finally got a bit more sleep, waking up at 7:00. Today, she had plenty of time to get ready, unlike the day before.

She got out of bed and walked into the kitchen. There was Tank, happy as always, saying good morning to the world in general. His big tail wagged back and forth. It was a good thing her boyfriend had come over yesterday to take him out – she wouldn’t have managed otherwise.

“And why weren’t you in bed, Tank?” she asked him. Tank did a little dance with his front feet, looking up at her.

Rosalie checked his food bowl. It was empty, so she refilled it. Tank scurried over and began chowing down. Now it was time for her breakfast.

She quickly cooked some blueberry pancakes and scrambled eggs – just enough for herself. She was good at eggs, yes, but not nearly as good as she was at baking. Even so, it was a first-rate breakfast.

As she ate, her thoughts wandered to Kyle. And she wondered what he was doing at this time in the morning. She allowed herself to feel his thoughts.

Hmm… He was trying to work out some sort of problem. What could it be? She let herself in a little deeper.

Ugh. Programming. She quickly withdrew before she could lose her appetite.

With breakfast eaten and cleaned up after, she could focus her attention on getting ready to go, and Rosalie proceeded to her room to get dressed.

She began to wonder about what exactly had happened last night. Why had she passed out? Did she do it to herself, or was Kyle’s subconscious mind protecting itself? Or… Was Kyle consciously doing it?

She shook her head rapidly, as if trying to shake off those thoughts. That simply wasn’t possible. Why would he do that to her? But he hadn’t acted surprised… But no! It wasn’t like him! He wouldn’t do that to her! But then again, she had only known him for less than a day… But why…

She brushed the suspicions out of her mind and continued getting ready.

***

Kyle woke up. He rolled over to look at his alarm clock, only to find he’d forgotten it. He always forgot something. A missing alarm clock wasn’t so bad. He started up his laptop and looked at the time – 6:03.

How did he do that?? He always woke up when he wanted to (if he slept well), whether he had an alarm clock or not.

It was still dark outside, and as a result, it was still dark in the room. He turned his laptop so the screen would act as a flashlight, and looked around. By aiming the screen, he could see everything.

A TV was up on top of a wooden dresser. The bed next to him had been slept in, but was vacant at the moment. He sighed. Great. Now I’ve made myself start feeling lonely.

Hmm… Still an hour before the hotel started breakfast. He needed something to do…

He flipped on the lamp that was sitting on the bedside table.

After thinking for a moment, Kyle got out of bed and walked to the bathroom. He cleaned out one of the glasses the hotel had provided (he never trusted the hotels to get them actually clean), filled it with water, and took his morning medicine. He had ADHD – if he didn’t take his medicine, he’d act exactly like Jim Carrey, whether he wanted to or not. But with the medicine, he would be completely normal – no one had ever guessed he had ADHD. The medicine acted like glasses for his brain.

Then he got an idea. He started looking through the drawers, and before long, he’d found what he’d wanted: a stack of individually wrapped soap bars.

Hmm… They smelled like strawberries. It surprised him a little – the hotels he’d been to always used vanilla or green apple. Still… It did smell nice.

Picking up and unwrapping a bar of soap, he started tossing it in the air, walking back to the bed and sitting down. As he walked, he started thinking about how unfair it was: They’d both been present when that flash had happened. If it was the cause of Rosalie’s powers, why didn’t he have many? And why couldn’t he figure out how to use his?

He decided to recreate the tennis-ball event. He tossed the bar of soap a little too far, and tried to catch it.

It fell to the floor.

He reached over and picked it up. Then he tried again.

Just like any good little bar of soap would, it fell to the floor. It was so obedient to the laws of physics. So annoyingly obedient that Kyle almost might have tried to strangle it – if it had only had a neck.

Kyle was about to try again, when he stopped. This isn’t going to work, he decided disappointedly. Let’s try something else.

He decided to try to make it fly away from him instead of trying to catch it, and gave it a little toss. Up went the soap, and back down it came. Kyle made a pushing motion with his hand.

The soap made a satisfying crack as the flat little bar shattered against the wall.

A smile spread over his face. “Awesome.” It was the only word that would fit. “Take that,” he said to the soap, getting up to go pick up the frozen pieces.

But… They weren’t frozen. They weren’t even cold. Just… room temperature. Which meant…

“Telekinesis?” he asked out loud, to nobody in particular. But how could that be? He’d frozen the tennis ball… What had he done wrong? What good was a power if he couldn’t use it whenever he wanted to? This was no fun at all. Sure, he had telekinesis – the ability to move objects with his mind. He’d just trumped Superman. But the only thing he could think about was his failure. He’d wanted to freeze the soap, not fling it. But… could he fling it again?

He picked up the pieces and moved on to the next bar. He set it on the bed, and made a Jedi-like motion with his hand – holding his hand almost horizontal and waving it towards the soap.

No motion.

He rolled his eyes. Great. Yet another stubborn bar. Why couldn’t he master his powers? Rosalie’s worked so well, and whenever she wanted them to.

“Okay… Let’s dance,” he told the soap, imitating kung-fu moves.

He held his hand flat, palm outwards, in the traditional “stop” gesture, and pushed his hand slowly towards the soap.

The bed sank downwards in the middle, as if an invisible person had sat down. A smile of satisfaction spread over his face. Kyle pushed harder. He could actually feel the pressure he was putting on it! The mattress sank lower. The floor started creaking slightly. He almost started laughing – this was so cool!!

So… how much could he do? He pushed as hard as he could.

The mattress nearly flattened, and the floor groaned like an elephant was trampling it. But Kyle went flying, ending up in the bathroom floor. Just a few inches higher, and he would have cracked his skull on the door frame.

He stood up carefully, surprised and a little confused. As his head cleared, he began to realize – of course. There was no way he could have moved something heavier than he was, especially with his telekinetic powers. No – the Jedi of Star Wars cheated. The physics in the movies were all screwed up.

So… could he fly?? If he tried to press down at the ground, might he fly upwards? And how far could he fling things to the side? And could he use both hands at once? And could he pull things as well? So many questions were rushing through his mind all at once. And he could hardly wait to find out the answers to all of them.

Wow – he knewhe was a morning person, but his brain had never been this active this early in the morning before.

Something caught his eye. “Oh, no,” he groaned. He’d frozen the bed.

The bed sparkled with the glint of ice sprinkled with tiny pieces of strawberry soap (it was encased in a quarter inch of the mixture), starting in the center of the top, and ending near the edges of the blanket in a network of spiraling frost patterns. Little icicles clung to the edges and hung down towards the floor.

Kyle grew thoughtful – so, he could not only freeze things, but create moisture as well? This was nice… Perhaps there might be some way to use just the moisture…

There was a knock at the door. Perfect timing. “Sir?” spoke a feminine voice from the other side.

He walked over to the door and opened it a crack, doing his best to look sleepy. A member of the hotel staff was standing outside, peering in at him. She was young and pretty – around 22 or so, Kyle guessed, with short blonde hair. With the hotel uniform (white button-down shirt and dark navy khakis), she looked very official, and her appearance gave the air of “Don’t mess with me.”

“Did something break, sir?” she asked him. She looked genuinely concerned. And she probably was – if he’d broken something, she’d have to deal with it herself.

Whoops, Kyle thought. He should’ve been quieter.

Squinting from the dimmed hall lights, he covered a yawn. It was all totally faked, but he was a good actor when he tried. “Hmm? No… Nothing’s broken,” he said sleepily, as if he’d been woken up. What would she do if she found out he’d turned one of their beds into a strawberry-flavored popsicle?

“But that sound, sir? Several of our guests were woken up by a loud crash a few moments ago, and called the front desk. It came from your room?” she prompted him.

He knew what she was saying. Translated into hotel speak, she’d just said, “I’m giving you one more chance to tell me what that noise was before I have you kicked out, and we check your room ourselves.”

Quick – think quickly, he thought. He could be a good liar. Hmm… That was interesting… A good liar… Were there good ones? Weren’t they all bad? Whoops – sidetracked again. He’d have to try harder to keep his mind focused, at least until his medicine started working.

“Oh, that. You heard that?” he asked, rubbing non-existent sleep from his eyes. “I was walking to the bathroom, and I tripped over my bag. Sorry.”

“Hmm…” she said thoughtfully. She wasn’t sure whether she could believe his story, but she decided to let him off the hook. She looked him up and down. “You’re cute,” she said. “Cute, but dumb. I’ll let you off the hook this time, but don’t let it happen again!” Then she added the customary, “Enjoy your stay at the Voyageur,” and walked away.

Kyle could feel his ears. They were warm – very warm. He didn’t blush. Instead, his ears turned red. Great big misshapen radar dishes of ears that stuck out a little, and they liked to be noticed.

He closed the door, locked it, and turned around to look at what the staff member might have seen – the great ice bed – like a water bed, only colder, and with the moisture on the wrong side.

The ice… it was… gone! But what had caused it? And where had it gone??

Little pieces of strawberry soap lay scattered all over the bed. The scent of ripe strawberries filled the room. It smelled pretty good, actually – almost romantic.

But where had the ice gone?

After standing there, surveying the carnage, Kyle walked over to the bed and began to pick up the scattered pieces of soap. There were a lot of them – he’d completely crushed the soap when he’d been thrown.

After he’d cleaned up, he checked the time on his laptop. Still only six thirty. Why did time seem to go slower the more you wanted it to go quickly?

Well… since he had a little more time left…

In under a minute, three fresh bars of strawberry soap were sitting out on the bed.

“Ladies and gentlemen…” Kyle began in a wrestling announcer voice (quiet, of course, so as not to wake the other guests), “this match is scheduled for one fall. In one corner, weighing in at point oh-five pounds, put your hands together for Misterrrrrrrrrrr Strawberryyyyyyyyyyyy!!!” He made cricket noises to symbolize the crowd’s unwillingness to applaud. “And in the other corner, weighing in at a hundred forty five pounds, the master of disaster – the king of fling – the foe hammer of a programmer; Coooooooollllllllddd Kyyyyyyyyyyyllllllllllllle!!!!” And the crowd went wild.

Cold Kyle – nice name. He hadn’t planned on it, but it sounded pretty good.

But his medicine was kicking in. The match had to be canceled. Yes, he knew. It was sad. Thousands walked disappointedly to their imaginary cars.

Okay… For my first experiment. Can I move objects sideways?

He focused his attention on the bar of soap on the left, and held his hand towards it, palm outwards. He pushed at it a little, watching in satisfaction as it slid across the bed. It was so nice to push things you weren’t touching. Still focused on the bar of soap, he turned his arm to the left slightly, continuing the push. He was unhappy to find the blanket depressing wherever he aimed his arm, with the soap sitting still.

“Okay, then… I can’t move things parallel to myself.” He was deeply disappointed. It would have been so cool. Or maybe he could… He’d just have to wait until later, when he’d had more practice.

Time for experiment number two. Could he pull objects to him?

He flexed his fingers and rubbed his hands together rapidly. “Okay, soap,” he said in a deep voice, “Let’s do this.”

Holding his arm out towards the soap, he made the universally recognized “stop” gesture, palm flat outwards, and pulled his hand closer to him, closing his fingers slightly as he went.

The soap launched itself from the bed and smacked itself hard against his hand. He caught it effortlessly.

“Steeeerike one!” he said, a little louder than he had meant to. He felt so awesome! He couldn’t think of anything cooler than what he was doing.

He practiced with the soap for a while. Before long, he could use it almost like a paddle ball – throwing it outwards, and pulling it back in. It was actually easier – he never could get the hang of those things.

But his stomach was rumbling a little bit.

Kyle looked at the clock. “Almost 7,” he said. “Time for breakfast.” He got dressed quickly, and left.

He got back around 7:30, having had a good (if not excellent) breakfast, and not quite in the mood for playing around with soap that smelled of strawberries. He’d had enough of the things on his pancakes. And the smell was beginning to get on his nerves. So many strawberries, so little time.

He wished so badly that he could read Rosalie’s mind. It’d be awesome to know what she was thinking about right now. Plus… he was kinda lonely.

He took out his laptop and started programming. He had over 40 different maps to design, and he didn’t want to end up behind schedule.

Chapter 9 - Before Hours

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:50:06 -0500

It was 8:30 in the morning, and Rosalie was dressed and ready to go. She’d taken care of Tank, and all the doors were locked.

It took her a few tries to get her car to start, but it was running. What a relief. It was a nice change after how badly yesterday morning had gone. She pulled out of the garage and down the driveway, headed for Rosaliegrace’s Bakery.

She pulled up in front of the bakery with an hour and thirty minutes to spare before it opened. As usual, with the entire parking lot at her disposal, she left the front row open and parked in the middle – she was always mindful of her customers, and she liked walking, anyway. She got out of her car, locked the doors, and walked inside.

It was another “snow day,” and school was out again. Rosalie knew Molly would show up to earn a little money, but she wasn’t there yet, which wasn’t unusual. Molly didn’t usually get there until ten o’ clock, when the bakery opened. Rosalie didn’t need her sister’s help until then, anyway.

Right now, she had lots of work to do. She had to mix batter for the cakes she’d be making, for one thing. There was frosting that needed to be made, dough to be kneaded, recipes to find – all sorts of things that needed to be done before the bakery opened.

Too bad none of her powers could help.

Rosalie worked on this preparatory work for quite a while, before she finally decided that she ought to check on Kyle. He ought to be up by now, right? Kyle? she called to him.

The response came immediately. “Good morning, Rosalie!” He sounded wide awake and happy. “I hope you have a good day!”

“I hope I do too!” she thought back cheerfully, and heard him laughing in her head. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing – I just didn’t expect you to say that!”

“Okay, then!” she thought. “Are you busy?”

“Not TOO busy…” he thought in reply.

“Good!”

“Good, indeed.”

There was a minute or two of silence following that remark. She was waiting for him to ask if he could come over. He ought to be asking any second now… But he wasn’t… Why wasn’t he?

Rosalie felt a little upset about it. He ought to have said something for sure by now. Did he not want to talk to her? Wait… Why was she upset about it? There was no reason for it. If he didn’t want to come, then fine, let him stay. He was only there to… How had he put it? “To be close by in case anything else happened.” Well, he was doing that, all right.

But she wanted to talk to him, and not telepathically, either. Face to face. But why wouldn’t he ask? He must feel the same way, right? She was the only one he could talk to about It, and he was the only one she could talk to about It. “It” being what had happened to them the day before, that was still making itself known in various ways.

Another reason for him to come over – the stronger of the two (although Rosalie refused to admit it to herself) – was simply that she liked talking to him. He was easy to talk to – he didn’t judge, and he listened.

Rosalie decided she’d take a peek at whatever he was thinking about.

“Push and pull and push and pull and catch. Okay, let’s try two at the same time. One, two, three, go. Oh, come on. You can’t go unless you start. Okay, I’ll just jump right in. And… Wham! There we go. It’s almost like juggling. Hey, I wonder how far I can reach. Aw, great, one of them broke. Okay, we’ll put one on the dresser, and… Voila! I can reach that far. Okay, I’ll put it next to the window. And now I’ll walk over here, and… Pull! Shoot. Do I have no limit? Hey – I wonder if I can make it hover… Nope, I guess not.”

Rosalie wanted to know what it was all about, but he wasn’t actively thinking about whatever it was he was doing. She put it out of her mind and went back to work on her sourdough.

Five minutes later she was a little upset. Why wasn’t he talking to her? Did he not care enough to ask her if he could come over? She considered trying to prompt him and see if she could get him to suggest it on his own accord, but she’d had enough. “Kyle?”

“Yeah, what is it?” He sounded slightly distracted.

“Could you come over here?” she asked him. Then she added, “Please?”

“Sure, be right over. Expect me in about… Five minutes.”

“Thanks.”

As Rosalie waited and worked, she grew thoughtful. Why didn’t she want to talk to him telepathically? It was her new power, after all. Then she realized – sure, she was good at it, but it just didn’t feel the same. It didn’t feel natural.

***

Now, the truth of the matter had been that Kyle was simply too absorbed in his experimenting with his powers to even think about Rosalie, as cruel as that sounds. But hey – how often does a guy wake up with a new superpower, right?

Still, it was no excuse not to go visit her, and Kyle knew it. As if that wasn’t enough to convince him, he knew he actually wanted to go spend some time with her. In a strictly platonic way, of course, he told himself. And that last he wasn’t able to convince himself of.

Kyle pulled into the parking lot in front of the shopping center where Rosaliegrace’s bakery was located. It was 9:35. The front row was beginning to fill with cars – overflow from the other shops in the plaza – but there were some empty spaces in the middle, where Kyle decided to park. Pulling straight through two spaces would make it easier to leave, later, which was what he preferred.

He got out of his car, locked the doors, and started walking towards the bakery. Walking was so slow! He couldn’t help it – walking always made him impatient, and he jogged towards the door instead. He found it unlocked, and he let himself in. A little bell above the door made a ringing sound, announcing his arrival.

Kyle walked inside and the door closed back. The key was in the lock, and he took that to mean he was supposed to lock the door after he came in. With that done, he smelled the air. It smelled so good!! He could smell so many indescribably delicious things, all at once. For the first time, he allowed himself a good look at Rosaliegrace’s Bakery.

Kyle didn’t like snooping or staring or eavesdropping. Those were habits he’d worked out of himself, and he was a little proud he’d managed it. Now that nobody was around, he allowed himself to look around the room.

It was almost like standing in a dream. There were four round tables with white tablecloths in the center of the room, each with a decorative cake in a glass dish as a centerpiece and baskets of muffins, cupcakes, pretzels, and other varieties of smaller edibles around them. On the left and right walls were four sets of shelves behind glass doors, each shelf neatly covered with loaves of bread (of innumerable types), cakes, and other larger items. Behind him in the windows, there were beautiful wedding cakes. They looked so good that Kyle almost wished he was having a wedding himself, so that he could try one of them.

Further away from the door, past the tables, was a single long glass countertop, which had doors on the far side that swung to the side for access to the different showpieces underneath. Only the best of the best seemed to be inside the counter – large blueberry muffins; giant chocolate chip cookies; monkey bread. It was almost too much to take in all at once.

Behind the countertop were two sets of French doors. Behind them was the kitchen. But in between them were a number of flat shelves that held the cakes – in glass cake stands, of course.

And coming in from the kitchen was Rosalie, the master chef herself, looking pleased to see him. Her apron was untarnished by spot or stain, and her medium-length golden-brown hair was put up behind her in a short ponytail to keep it out of the way, though the wavy curls persisted in showing themselves anyway.

He stood there for a few dumb seconds before realizing that he was not simply a spectator, but actually there in person. Rosalie brought him back to the present. “So, are you admiring my bakery?” she asked. “Or me?”

Kyle laughed nervously. “Hi,” was the only thing he could find to say.

Rosalie laughed prettily at his reaction. “Shy all of a sudden?” she asked teasingly. Kyle was about to respond when she turned on her heel and left, saying, “Come on!” with a big grin on her face. Kyle followed her through the French doors.

“So… what are we doing? Why did you ask me over?” he queried, more to try to recover from his shyness than anything else.

“You can put your laptop in there,” she said, pointing towards the break room.

Kyle looked down. He was carrying his laptop, in its case. He’d completely forgotten he was holding it, he was so overwhelmed. So overwhelmed that he didn’t notice she’d changed the subject again without him noticing, which was exactly what she’d been hoping would happen – she didn’t have an answer to that particular question yet.

He walked into the break room and sat his briefcase down by the blue table. Walking back through the door to the kitchen, he was hit once more by the wonderful smells. Why hadn’t he noticed them yesterday? After a bit of thought, he decided that it was because he knew he wasn’t there for sightseeing, so he didn’t try. But now… Mmm! It made him want to breathe faster, as if it would help him smell even more at once.

Rosalie was busy by one of her mixers. Kyle sidled over and looked: she was putting the ingredients for something into the bowl. Oil, water, eggs – he’d never managed to crack and open them one handed, how was it done?

Kyle didn’t want to feel useless. He hated relaxing while other people did the work. “How can I help?” he asked. It was almost a catchphrase of his.

Rosalie spoke without turning: “I need two sticks of butter. They’re in the fridge.”

Kyle started over to the fridge. Rosalie only used it to store ingredients temporarily for quick access. She had a refrigerated room off to the side where she could keep the rest, though Kyle didn’t know it.

Suddenly he got an idea. He checked to see if she was looking. She wasn’t – too bad. It wasn’t enough to discourage him, and he decided to do it anyway.

He extended his hands and pulled backwards with one, and the door opened with a little effort. There were the sticks, right in plain sight.

Now for the tricky part: he could easily get the sticks, but he’d noticed earlier that he had trouble picking single items out of groups. Then again, he’d practiced quite a bit… It was an iffy situation. Let’s give it a shot, he thought to himself.

Kyle pulled backwards with his other hand, keeping his mind focused on the butter, and they came to him, flying through the air. He used both hands to catch them. Hmm… How to close the door… The refrigerator was wide open, and the inside of the door was facing him. He reached out and with a quick tug, the door swung shut.

He turned and handed the butter to Rosalie. “Here.”

“Thanks,” she said, “You can put them on the counter next to me. And could you unwrap them, please?” She was measuring out flour.

Oh, well. His performance had gone completely unnoticed. But so what? She’d know eventually. He unwrapped the sticks of butter – manually, for this job. He didn’t want to accidentally squash them.

After he was done, he set them down on their opened wrappers, and watched Rosalie for a bit. She was fast and efficient – she knew exactly what she was doing, and she knew the recipe by heart.

“What are you making?” he asked.

“Right now? Sugar cookies!” she said happily. She loved baking!

Kyle watched for a little longer. Suddenly it hit him – she’d never answered why she wanted him to come over. Hmm… He’d have to watch for that – she was clever. Very clever. How had she made him completely forget his question?

He decided to try again. “Why’d you want me to come over?” he asked.

She had an answer ready this time. “To get to know you better,” she said, starting the mixer.

Kyle considered. Yeah, it made sense. They had only met yesterday. “Okay, so what do you want to know? Ask and I’ll answer,” he said. He had to jump out of her way, though – she was moving quickly around the kitchen.

“Okay,” she began. “Where were you born?”

“Well, I was born in Memphis, but now – you know where I live now!” he said, laughing. “Saw it on the TV.”

“Yes, I did!” She was smiling. “I was born in Tulsa, but I’ve lived here in Talvis for quite a while.” she said, washing a mixing bowl.

“Here, let me get that,” Kyle said, walking over. He’d had his share of washing dishes; he knew a trick or two. He’d let her be busy with something else. Dirty dishes he could handle. She gladly relinquished the task. “Tulsa, Oklahoma?” he asked. Then he broke out singing. “Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains!”

His voice wavered a little at the start, but got stronger after “Oklahoma.” He was a bass. That came as a surprise to Rosalie.

“Is it really as windy as the song says?” he asked.

“It depends on the weather. In certain seasons it is.”

“Same in Memphis,” he said, drying the bowl. “It’s especially windy in March. But it’s a dead calm in the summer, when you need it the most to cool off.”

Rosalie laughed. “Yeah, really!” she said in agreement. Kyle proudly handed her the mixing bowl he had cleaned. She handed him a stack of four more dirty ones.

“I’m not good with heat,” Kyle said, trying to keep the conversation going.

“Really? I get antsy when I don’t get out.”

Kyle wasn’t sure when the last time he’d heard the word “antsy” had been. “I don’t mind cold weather, though.”

“I get cold so easily,” Rosalie said, almost laughing.

“You get cold easily?”

“Yes I do,” she said. Her answer was a little short, but in her defense, she was counting out teaspoonfuls of cinnamon. Kyle was getting the idea that she didn’t say much when she was busy, and for the most part, it was true – how much she talked depended on how busy she was. If she was bored, she could talk all day. If she was busy, you could hardly get a word out of her.

“I get hot easily,” Kyle said, starting on the second bowl. “It doesn’t take much above 85 degrees for me to start feeling dizzy.”

“Wow…” Rosalie said thoughtfully. “My mom is like that.”

Kyle didn’t know how to take being compared with Rosalie’s mother. He couldn’t dwell on it though. He was on a roll. With his hands busy, he felt confident. He had to keep the conversation going. “I’m great with cold weather. I once went a whole winter wearing only short-sleeved shirts, without a jacket or coat. The official reason was because I knew we were tight on cash, and I wanted to help my family save money.” He was perhaps a little too proud of that story – it was one of his top five most-told.

“Aww!” Rosalie said. “That is so sweet of you! I used to do stuff like that too.”

Now came the good part. “The main reason is because I wanted to see if I could do it.”

She grinned. “Guys are so weird!” she laughed.

Now he was grinning. “Weird? What? Come on! You just said that you used to do stuff like that!”

“I know! I’m just playing!” she said, still laughing

Kyle was laughing too, now. “I know! I was kidding!” He’d finished the third bowl, and set it on the countertop. “Seriously, though – thanks for the compliment. The sweet part, not the weird part, I mean.”

“Aren’t you done with them yet?” she laughed, and came over. She washed her hands and then cleaned the last one while Kyle watched. Rosalie had it done in half the time.

All Kyle could do was stare. She was good!!! Then he remembered something. “Hey, what time does Molly show up?” he asked.

“Oh! Molly shows up around five ‘til ten… That’s right about now!” Rosalie said, looking at the clock on the wall. She hastily dried her hands and went to the front of the bakery. Kyle followed along behind her.

Molly was walking up to the door when Rosalie unlocked it and let her in. Molly walked in, and Rosalie closed the door behind her.

Molly looked at Kyle. “He’s still here?” she asked.

Kyle wasn’t sure how to react. Should he hide? Should he wave? Yeah – that sounded right. He waved – a little awkwardly. He had to keep on his toes around the Grace sisters. They surprised him constantly.

“Yes, he came by this morning to help me out,” Rosalie said. “I’ve been having… A little problem…”

“Yeah, alright,” Molly said, giving Kyle an odd look. Kyle walked back into the kitchen to avoid her questioning gaze. He didn’t want to end up blurting something he shouldn’t.

“Oh, don’t worry about her,” Rosalie’s voice came to him. By now he’d learned to distinguish voice from thought. Rosalie, on the other hand, had learned far earlier. “She’s just curious. She won’t cause trouble.”

“Yeah, okay,” he thought back. “She still makes me a little uncomfortable, though.”

Rosalie was spared from having to answer. It was ten o’ clock – time to let the customers in. Rosalie hurried to the front door and flipped the OPEN/CLOSED sign around, and the first customers of the day walked in. Rosaliegrace’s Bakery was open for business.

Chapter 10 - Baking 101

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:15:06 -0500

Rosaliegrace’s bakery was beginning to fill with customers, just like it did every day. Molly had her hands more than full. She deserved every cent of what Rosalie paid her. She had to handle the cash registers, put out whatever Rosalie finished, and make sure nobody tried to run off with something without paying – because occasionally, someone would try. But usually she didn’t have any problems with that – bakeries don’t generally attract thuggish customers.

Rosalie was in the back working on several cakes. Kyle was watching her in amazement. It was almost like watching a stop-motion film – her hands moved her frosting tools around, and wherever they went, little roses, hearts, ribbons, and puffs of frosting would spring up – almost like magic. And indeed; it did seem magical. It was almost like something out of a Disney fairytale.

She worked quickly, but carefully. Not a thing was out of place. The roses, while she hovered over them for hardly a second, were exquisitely crafted, and perfectly placed. Kyle might almost have thought that this was a new superpower of hers, had he not seen her working yesterday.

Rosalie was working as quickly as she could. She didn’t have time to go slowly – she had a lot to do, even without her new powers to worry about. She was working on an anniversary cake at the moment. Someone had requested a traditional round white-frosted cake with ribbons and roses, with “Happy 50^th Anniversary” on the top in gold lettered loop cursive.

She worked speedily, but as always, she was noticing the mistakes she was making. One of the roses she had just made had an extra petal, and the one beside it was just a teeny bit too much to the right. It wasn’t perfection, by any means. But for some reason, nobody else seemed to care – or even notice at all. But she noticed.

She finished on the roses and took out another head for her frosting gun and put it on. This one was for ribbons. She had to move her hands at the correct speed around the sides of the cake to keep a constant thickness to the ribbons, which were supposed to be robin’s egg blue.

She began on the side closest to her and began moving her hands around the cake, looping the frosting in an elaborate design. There were places where the frosting was slightly thicker than it ought to be, and places where it was slightly thinner. And that last loop was a tad too close to the bottom of the cake. She never guessed that it was only her expertly trained eye that enabled her to catch these minute mistakes.

Kyle watched with awe as she looped her way around the cake. He had no clue what to call any of the designs she was making, but it looked beautiful! How was she getting the blue frosting to hold on to the sides of the white-frosted cake? It seemed to defy gravity.

And she went so fast, too! She was averaging two loops a second. Up to the top, loop backwards, down to the bottom, loop forwards, and then back up to the top. And it was the same thickness the whole time, too! Not once did it bunch up anywhere.

He’d tried frosting a cake once. It didn’t end so well… He had tried to make his own frosting, but it had been kind of sticky and fluffy – like whipped cream. Not what he had wanted… But there was a lot more than they said there’d be, so he didn’t run out, at least! He had spread it on the sides of the cake, pleased with how easy it was, and when he was finished, he stepped back to look. It didn’t look quite the way he’d wanted it to – kind of lumpy in places – but it was frosted. He had left it on the counter for an hour. When he came back, the frosting had deflated! In some places, all that was left was a little bit of translucent goo. And it was drippy, too. He’d been the only one who had dared to taste it.

But Rosalie – she was almost like a goddess, the way she spun those ribbons out. Hmm… Maybe she’s actually a goddess, he thought half-seriously with a smile. Rosalie: the goddess of love, beauty, and cakes. She would dethrone Aphrodite to take her rightful place in Olympus. But… that wouldn’t do… then she couldn’t make cakes anymore… He decided that maybe she’d be best as plain Rosalie Grace – goddess in disguise. Suddenly, he almost laughed – wow, his mind was wandering!

But she’d finished with the ribbons. Now she was working on gold letters on the top, “Happy Anniversary” in gold letters. Once more Kyle was awed. She was frosting faster than he could write in loop cursive. Which, he had to admit, wasn’t very fast – he was better at typing than writing, anyway. But it was still impressive, all the same.

Rosalie was almost biting her lip with nervousness. She was using edible gold leaf frosting for the words on top of the cake. It was expensive, and she couldn’t afford to lose or waste any of it.

She carefully worked her way through the loops. Just like the ribbons, she had to stay at a constant speed, or the letters would be marred. And she couldn’t stop, either – as it was cursive she was writing in, she had to keep going.

She finished the first part. Now for the second: A – n – n – i – v – e – r – s – a – r – y. She was very careful not to misspell – if she did, she’d have to do the cake over. It had happened before, and patching it up simply didn’t look the same.

It looked satisfactory to her, when she finished. Well… there was a little extra frosting on the v, but that was all right. It was going to be eaten, anyway. She moved to the space she had left by “Happy” and wrote in “50^th”. And she was done. While not perfect, the cake was beautiful, and ready to be picked up.

She took the cake into the bakery, and put in on the wooden shelf behind where Molly was standing. After closing the glass doors, she walked back to the kitchen.

“You’ve been pretty quiet,” she said to Kyle, wondering what his explanation would be.

“Well,” he said cautiously, “I like watching you.”

Rosalie gave a little nervous laugh, as she was unsure how to answer that. “Thanks…”

After a minute or two, Rosalie decided to break the awkward silence. “Well, you’re here so we can get to know each other better, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, then, let’s start back. How many siblings do you have?” she asked.

“Four,” Kyle answered. He gave their names and ages.

“Wow!” Rosalie said, unimpressed. “I have seven!”

Kyle was impressed. “Whoa! Are you serious?”

Rosalie grinned, and started kneading dough. “Yep!” She gave their names and ages, too. Kyle was positive he would’ve forgotten half of them within five minutes. He didn’t have a very good memory.

“What high school did you go to?” Kyle asked. It was a rather safe question – like asking about the weather. You couldn’t offend anyone with it.

“I was homeschooled,” she said.

Kyle got a big smile on his face. This was a pretty rare coincidence! “No way!” he said in mock disbelief. “I was homeschooled, too! Ever since grade four!” He went over to the sink to start washing dishes – there were only a couple there, but he hated being idle when someone else was working.

Rosalie put the dough into a pan and went over to take several cakes out of the oven. “Really?” she asked. She thought it was pretty cool, too. “Freaky! I had this weird feeling and was gonna ask if you were… but I didn’t.”

“I had the exact same feeling…”

Rosalie and Kyle continued talking for a while, and as they did, they kept finding things they had in common. Neither of them could dance. They were both interested in adoption. They both liked large families. Their favorite colors were both blue. A weird one: they both loved cold pizza. Kyle was almost shocked at that one. He’d thought he was the only one. Rosalie, on the other hand, already knew she wasn’t the only one – her friend Caroline liked cold pizza too, she explained.

They liked the same books, movies, actors, candy, and food. There were a hundred other things they had in common, too. They were actually beginning to creep each other out a little with how much they had in common – it was so close that they could almost have believed they were from the same family.

Kyle was about to make a joke about the possibility of having been separated at birth, when they heard loud laughter coming from out front. Rosalie hurried over to stick her head out the door and see what was going on.

There were four tall, muscular guys in the bakery (not the type of person Rosaliegrace’s Bakery generally attracted), laughing about some joke one of them had made. They were joking with Molly about something as they paid for a basket of cookies. Molly was practically basking in the attention from the group of men. They didn’t look like the troublemaking type – or, at least, if they were, they weren’t trying to cause trouble. Rosalie thought they actually looked pretty… hot.

“Rosalie!!!” Kyle hissed, pulling her back in the door.

She was annoyed, to say the least. “What?!” she asked angrily, whirling around to face him. She didn’t like being touched, unless she gave permission first, and tried to jerk her arm away. He held firm.

She struggled uselessly for a moment, and slowly the fear and surprise in Kyle’s eyes registered in her mind. “What… What’s wrong?”

“You’re…” he began.

“Are those guys after you or something?” she asked, venturing a guess to try to get some idea of what was going on.

Kyle shook his head a little, but the look of shock on his face remained. He opened his mouth to say something, but he couldn’t seem to find words for it. “Rosalie,” he said again.

“What?”

He was still holding her arm, and he lifted it up in front of her. “Look,” he said.

Rosalie looked.

Her hand was… gone.

Rosalie started to let out a little scream of terror, but she stopped herself in time. Kyle pulled her into the break room and locked the door.

“Rosalie, you’re invisible.” He was stating the obvious again.

She looked around at herself. Her arms were gone. Her legs were gone. She couldn’t see her nose. Rosalie didn’t have to look anywhere else to know – she was invisible.

But her clothes were still there. She could still see them. And apparently, so could Kyle.

“Oh, this is awkward…” Kyle said, staying quiet to avoid unwanted attention from the people out front. “Not to mention dangerous. How long have you known about this?” he asked.

Rosalie felt like he was accusing her of something. “I didn’t!” she hissed back at him. “I just found out!”

“Okay, no need to get upset. I was only asking.”
She felt a little better about it. Then she realized how horrible it was. “Oh, why couldn’t this have happened tomorrow?” she asked, almost despairingly. “This is the worst time!”

“Why is it such a bad time?” Kyle inquired.

“It’s because I’m supposed to be baking right now! I’ve got a whole movie crew to cater for, for one thing!!!” Rosalie said impatiently. She sat down in one of the white chairs that were sitting around the table.

“We’ll just keep Molly out of the kitchen,” he suggested, trying to solve the problem.

“That won’t work!!!” she said, rapidly shooting down his idea. “Molly pops her head into the kitchen all the time, and if she doesn’t see me, what would she think?”

“She’d think you were invisible.”

Rosalie gave him the evil eye, and then realized he couldn’t see it. It almost made her laugh. Her feelings were so mixed up right now. She wanted to laugh, she wanted to cry. She wanted to be angry, she wanted to stay calm. But she was too panicked to be calm. “Not funny,” she said.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” he answered ironically. “She’d see your clothes floating around in midair, and she’d say, ‘Oh, that must be Rosalie. She’s invisible, and her clothes are floating around in midair.’”

Rosalie groaned.

“Well, that was meant to cheer you up…” he said with disappointment. “It was a joke.”

“I can’t let Molly see me like this,” Rosalie said, ignoring him and shaking her head uselessly.

“Don’t worry, Rosalie,” Kyle said with a mischievous smile, “Molly wouldn’t actually see you!”

“Not funny, Kyle,” she said.

“Okay, sorry.” He’d just wanted to cheer her up. The problem was, he didn’t quite know how to do it.

There were a few minutes of silence as both of them thought over the problem. “Well,” Kyle began, “If you could get your clothes to be invisible, too…”

“But I don’t even know how I became invisible!!!” Rosalie said hopelessly. “I don’t have any control over it at all!!!” She felt like she might cry, and she tried to fight it.

“You must have some control over it…” Kyle said thoughtfully.

“Why do you say that?” She felt a glimmer of hope rising in her.

“Well… I don’t know… You must have some control over it, right? It wouldn’t be fair if you didn’t.”

The glimmer of hope was extinguished as suddenly as it had formed. “Whoever said life was fair?” she said, a tear rolling down her invisible cheek. Why was she so upset about it? She had a new power. She was invisible. Tons of people would have given anything to have what she had.

Kyle saw the tear, and felt his empathy kick in. He almost felt like crying himself now, as he began to feel what she was feeling. But… that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. He needed to be strong. He steeled himself against his empathy, trying to shut it out. It didn’t work. He gave Rosalie a hug instead.

Rosalie gratefully accepted the hug. It felt so good to have someone who would actually listen and care. It was exactly what she needed.

After a few moments, she was better. Not completely better, but better enough to gently push Kyle away.

Kyle sensed his hugging abilities were no longer needed, and pulled up a chair next to her. They sat side by side for a little while, trying to come up with a good plan of action.

“My cookies have to come out soon…” Rosalie said, troubled.

Kyle looked at her. Or rather, he looked at where he thought she was. “Well, can’t you go get them out?” he asked. Molly could be kept from coming in the kitchen. He wondered what she would think it was about…

“No, I can’t get them out! Do you realize what someone would think if they saw my clothes just floating around?”

Kyle felt rather mischievous again. He couldn’t help it – this situation practically begged for it. “Well…” he began, “You could take them off.”

She glared at him. It didn’t do any good. She glared at him mentally. From the hurt look on his face, she could tell it had done its job.

“It was just a suggestion,” he apologized. “Just a little joke…”

Rosalie was saved once again from having to answer. There was a knock on the door.

“Rosalie?” said a voice from behind the door.

It was Molly.

Chapter 11 - Awkward Situations

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:42:05 -0500

Rosalie sighed. She had known she wasn’t going to be able to keep it a secret forever. “Let her in,” she told Kyle resignedly.

“What?! Won’t she go crazy?”

“Yeah, probably, but it’d be better to tell her now than later.”

“Rosalie!!” Molly said again, her voice muffled by the door. She rattled the knob a little. Kyle was glad he’d locked it.

“And why?” he asked Rosalie.

“Right now we have proof.” Her shirt sleeves gestured towards herself.

Kyle really didn’t like this idea. It made him feel so uncomfortable. What if Molly told somebody? This ought to be kept a secret. The media would go crazy over something like this. He’d always wanted to be on TV, but only for something he did, not for something he was.

Reluctantly, he walked over to the door and opened it a little. There was Molly, right where he knew she’d be.

She didn’t seem surprised to see him. “I need to talk to Rosalie,” she said.

Kyle sighed. Well, now or never. It had to be done. “Come on in,” he said, pulling her inside.

Molly came into the room, and immediately saw the shirt and jeans sitting in the chair. She freaked out – panicking. This was crazy!!! Her sister – or what should be her sister – was gone, and there were floating clothes… They were floating!!!

She began to start hyperventilating. Her eyes were really big.

Kyle had always been proud of how wide he could open his eyes when he was a kid. In fact, he had earned a nickname from it: Chief Crazy Eyes. But even he had to admit that Molly had him beat. “Okay…” she said, the wits scared right out of her, “what’s going on?!?”

And then the clothes moved. They “stood up”, if you could call it that. And they started walking towards Molly. With every step they advanced – shoes attached to jeans, jeans attached to shirt – Molly retreated two. And her eyes got even wider. She screamed, and turned to run.

Kyle grabbed Molly before she could escape and shut the door, locking it. Molly fought like a tiger. “Rosalie!!!” he pleaded, “Say something!” Molly was gaining the upper hand – she didn’t care if she hurt him, and he was trying not to hurt her.

“Molly!” Rosalie spoke, getting her attention.

For a moment, Molly stopped struggling, and turned, wide-eyed, to look at the apparition moving towards her. The right sleeve held itself out, offering an invisible hand. A voice came from above the open neck of the shirt. “Molly. It’s me. Rosalie.”

Kyle let go of Molly, who cautiously took a step forwards. She reached out – gingerly, cautiously – and put her hand in Rosalie’s. For a moment, the two sisters stood there, holding hands, gazing at each other – one visible, one not – and it seemed to have a calming effect on them.

Suddenly Molly threw herself forwards and hugged Rosalie. The empty sleeves hugged her back. After a few moments, Molly stood back and looked her sister (or her sister’s clothes, rather) over. “What happened?” Molly asked.

Kyle looked at where he thought Rosalie’s eyes would be. If she had been visible, he would have seen her looking back at him. Rosalie was the first to speak. “Well, we’re not exactly sure…” she began.

Molly turned to Kyle, and gave him the same piercing gaze she had inflicted upon him that morning. “What,” she asked slowly and accusingly, “did you do?”

Kyle held his hands up in the traditional “see, no weapons” gesture and said, “Hey – all I did was accept a free bag of mini muffins.”

“Wait…” A light bulb seemed to go off in Molly’s head, and a look of realization came over her face. She spun around to face Rosalie. “You’re actually invisible!!!”

Rosalie nodded – a useless gesture. Nobody saw.

Molly was still reasoning out in her mind what everything meant. “But… your clothes… If you wanted to be…” a grin spread over her face as she continued the thought, “you’d have to…”

Suddenly she fell on the floor, laughing hysterically. It was all too funny! Rosalie was invisible – how, she didn’t know – but her clothes weren’t!!! The only way for her invisibility to be of any use would be to take the clothes off! It was just so good!!! Absolutely hilarious!

Kyle couldn’t help but laugh a little bit too. He stopped quickly, though. Apparently, while her sister laughing at her was one thing, it was a completely different matter for him to be laughing at her: he felt Rosalie glaring at him telepathically. It was a really uncomfortable feeling.

After a couple of minutes, Molly made a partial recovery – enough to sit up and groan from her sides hurting whenever she wasn’t doubled over from sporadic bursts of laughter. “Okay… So, let me get this straight. You,” here she pointed at Kyle, “and Rosalie have known about this for how long?”

Kyle shrugged, and thought about it. “Less than a day.” That sounded so odd – he felt like he’d known Rosalie forever.

Rosalie spoke up. “Well, actually, this didn’t start until just a few minutes ago.”

Molly nodded, and started laughing again. She stopped laughing after a moment, and asked Rosalie (in between giggles), “And you can’t control it?” Then the rest sank in. “Wait – this? What else can you do?”

“Well,” Rosalie began carefully, “I can also read minds… to some extent, anyway. And I have super hearing.”

Molly was wowed. There was no other way to put it. “This is all so cool!” she exclaimed. Then she turned to Kyle. “Can you do anything?”

Rosalie answered for him. “No, he doesn’t really have any powers he can control yet.”

Kyle lifted one corner of his mouth in a mischievous grin, and made a grabbing motion with his hand. He caught and took a bite out of the muffin that flew at him from the basket on the center of the table.

Rosalie was amazed, but hurt at the same time. “I didn’t know you could do that!” she said.

“Neither did I, until this morning. I never got a chance to tell you.”

Molly looked at them and asked, “So, what’re you going to do? Are you going to fight criminals, or something?” She was genuinely interested. Sure, maybe a little jealous, but that could wait until later. Right now it was just cool. Super cool!

Rosalie sounded thoughtful, even if she didn’t look it. “Actually, we hadn’t thought about that yet…”

“We only met yesterday, and we still have no clue how all this is happening to us.” Kyle said truthfully.

They all stood there for a moment, pondering the situation. It was a lot to take in.

Suddenly, Rosalie remembered. “My cookies!” she exclaimed, opening the door and running into the kitchen. Kyle and Molly followed.

Rosalie’s clothes looked so weird as they floated around. The cookies were in the top oven in a stack of two, and as she reached up to open the door and take them out, Kyle could briefly see right through her over the tops of her jeans. It was weirding him out.

Rosalie took the cookies out of the oven and set the pan on the counter. They were just right. Rosalie never forgot her baking; nothing ever burned in her kitchen. Kyle and Molly got over to her.

Molly spoke, voicing Kyle’s thoughts. “Um… Rosalie? It looks really weird to see your clothes floating around like that…”

Kyle tried to suppress a laugh, but failed.

Rosalie turned to him. “What’s funny?” Molly looked at him. She wanted to know, too.

Kyle tried to stop, but erupted into a full-fledged burst of laughter.

Rosalie was almost laughing too, now. Laughter was contagious. “What? What’s so funny?”

Kyle smothered his laughter the best he could. “Rosalie… I” was as far as he got before he started laughing again.

Rosalie was a little annoyed, but she thought whatever it was he was trying to say must be hilarious. She had to know what it was. “What? Tell me!”

Kyle forced himself to stop laughing and took a deep breath. “Rosalie,” he said, starting to chuckle again, “I can see down your shirt!” He lost control and started laughing again.

Molly loved it, and was rolling on the floor again in the blink of an eye. It was true – Kyle could see right down Rosalie’s shirt – and the double meaning made it so funny! She was laughing right along with him – maybe this guy wasn’t so bad after all.

Rosalie tried to be upset, or at least annoyed, but found she couldn’t manage anything less than a grin. She let them laugh. And she laughed a little bit too. It was kind of funny.

After Kyle and Molly had stopped laughing, Molly said, “Really, Rosalie – it looks weird. Clothes don’t usually float around, you know?”

“You know what?” Rosalie said suddenly, “I’m going to take them off!” Her crazy, mischievous side was kicking in.

Kyle’s eyes got big. Whoa! This was a little too far for comfort. Sure, he’d like it. But he wouldn’t quite know how to handle it. It’d be so awkward. This was one of the disadvantages to being a programmer: they usually didn’t wind up in the same room as naked women… even if they were invisible. And… if she was to become visible again with him in the room… he stopped himself. “Umm… are you sure that’s such a good idea?” He felt uncomfortable already.

“Sure!” Rosalie said, already headed to the bathroom to change. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Why was he trying to stop her? Just about every guy in the world would be booing him if they knew what he was doing. It was like telling Helen of Troy to keep her clothes on; it simply wasn’t socially acceptable. And Rosalie practically was Helen of Troy. She might even be a direct descendant of her. And yet he continued. “Well, what if you became visible again?”

Rosalie laughed at him. “What, shy all of a sudden?” She liked it – here a guy who was mindful of a girl’s feelings. There weren’t many out there like that. “Well, simple! You just look away!” She left, and Kyle was left alone with Molly.

“Don’t forget the ponytail holder!” Molly called after her, and then turned to Kyle and looked at him critically as she considered what he’d been saying. “You’re weird,” she finally decided.

“Yeah, I know,” he said resignedly. After a moment, “What was it you were trying to tell Rosalie?”

“Oh!!!” she exclaimed. “There were some guys out front who were throwing a party for their girlfriends – as a sort of a really big apology for not being around all the time – and they want cakes and cupcakes and stuff for the party: they want Rosalie to cater.”

Kyle knew Rosalie already had a big catering job, but didn’t see the point in mentioning it. “Did they leave?” Kyle asked.

“Yeah… But they gave me their number,” Molly said, digging it out of her pocket and handing it over. Then suddenly her eyes got big as she remembered – “Oh no! I’m supposed to be out front!” Molly rushed over to the door and looked out. “Oh, what a long line!” she groaned. She turned to Kyle and told him, “Make sure you tell Rosalie when she comes back out, okay?”

“Okay.”

Molly hurried off.

Kyle turned around. Well, I guess I ought to get a head start on the dishes, he thought unhappily, as he walked over to the sink and started washing. It wasn’t a head start, really – Rosalie had already put a lot in there. If anything, he was behind. But she was getting a lot more done with him helping, he knew. Or hoped, rather.

Behind him, he heard the door open. “I’m back!” said Rosalie’s voice cheerfully. Instinctively, he turned around, before remembering – she wasn’t wearing anything. Fortunately, he couldn’t see her.

Rosalie saw him spin around and look at her, and she covered herself with her hands, before remembering – he can’t see me. “Let’s get back to work,” she said, walking over to the counter to start working on bread. She was making white bread, banana bread, potato bread, pumpernickel, and sourdough next, and she had everything ready. She felt really uncomfortable, being naked in the same room as Kyle, but at least he couldn’t see her. She busied herself to try to force it out of her mind.

Kyle couldn’t focus. This was so awkward! And he tried to keep from thinking about Rosalie – she could read his thoughts – she’d know what he was thinking about her. But he couldn’t help it. Pictures of her kept forming in his mind… Walking around the room… …No clothes… Ack! He had to stop! Think about something else! Anything! What Molly said – tell her what Molly said.

“Umm…” Kyle began haltingly, “Rosalie – I mean, uh… Molly… Wanted… I mean, Molly said…” This would never do. If Rosalie hadn’t been looking, he might almost have slapped himself to try to pull his thoughts together.

He felt someone slap his mind mentally. It felt odd… But it was very definitely a slap. “Thanks… I think…” he said.

“No problem,” she replied.

Kyle cleared his mind of all thoughts of Rosalie and began again. “Molly said there were a bunch of guys out front who wanted you to…” he had absentmindedly turned to face Rosalie as he spoke. She was holding a large mixing bowl against her… Hip? Stomach? And she was mixing the contents with a spoon. He couldn’t help it. He was so turned on right now. But he refused to give in. “There were a bunch of… Guys… Who wanted to… Um… Who wanted you to… Oy.”

No! As awkward as it was, he would not let this affect him this way. It was awkward enough already, without him making it more so. He decided to take a deep breath, and just rush into it. “They wanted you to cater for a party for their girlfriends, and they wanted you to call them,” he finished valiantly, pleased with himself for his heroic efforts.

His “heroic efforts” didn’t go unnoticed. “Yes, and you’re crumbling up the paper in the pocket out of nervousness,” Rosalie laughed.

Somewhat embarrassed (why should he be embarrassed?), he took the paper out of his pocket, and hesitantly approached Rosalie. He was terribly afraid he’d offend her somehow. Rosalie walked over and met him halfway, taking the paper from him. It floated away for a few feet, and uncrumpled itself so it could be read.

This was new. He’d done his share of reading over other people’s shoulders, but he’d never read through someone’s shoulders before. This just kept getting weirder. He returned to his post as head dishwasher, and continued his task.

His hands were shaking. Stupid hands, why were they shaking? He was wishing she’d stayed clothed. Sure, he hadn’t seen her, but this was a dangerous situation, he knew. It didn’t take much to offend a nude woman. One wrong move and they’d be screaming at you, he thought. And he really didn’t want to hurt Rosalie.

They continued working for a while, the silence hanging heavily over them like a shadow in a graveyard – both were uncomfortable, and scared to a certain extent of what they imagined might happen. Rosalie, at least, was amused by the reactions she was getting from her new friend. Occasionally she would say something to break the silence:

“Do you have that bowl ready?”

“How long til you’re done?”

“Here, wash this – it’s dirty, now.”

Kyle turned around to face her. She was holding out (was it holding out? Hugging something looked the same as holding something at arm’s length) a dirty baking pan.

He really didn’t want to have to approach her again… He made a grabbing motion and pulled. It wasn’t coming…

“Hey! Take it!” Rosalie said.

Kyle misunderstood what she meant. He gave a hard tug, intending to grab it when it flew at him. But something was wrong… He was flying. Too late, he realized – he’d had hold of Rosalie.

They collided in the middle and fell in the floor, with Kyle on top. Rosalie gave a little yell of surprise. Alarm bells were sounding in Kyle’s head. Wide-eyed and in a panic, he scrambled to get off her. They stood up. Kyle was apologizing profusely.

Rosalie was rather upset, but seeing how sorry Kyle was softened her attitude towards him a little bit. “Just take it,” she said, holding out the bowl.

Kyle did so, his head spinning – this was a little too much to take in.

There was a long silence after that. Rosalie peered into his mind, and found he was angry at himself for not simply walking over there and taking it. “Hey, it’s all right,” she told him.

She could tell Kyle didn’t believe her.

And yet another long, uncomfortable silence began.

Finally, she tried to find something with which to break the silence. Something he’d be comfortable with. “So, what kind of programs do you make?” she asked.

“Um… I write games and simulations.” Kyle said, scrubbing on a cookie sheet.

“Tell me,” Rosalie said. She didn’t really want to know, but she hated the silence.

“Well…” Kyle began awkwardly, “You’ve played games before, right?”

“Yes…” Where was he going with this?

“Three dimensional ones?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you took out all the programming in those games, all you would be left with was a bunch of completely flat pictures, data tables, and some sound files. The programming is the magic that holds it all together,” he said. He was feeling more comfortable now; more confident.

“Really?” Rosalie asked, not sharing the same respect as he had, but still… It was better than silence.

Kyle went on for a while about programming. He loved talking about his work. A little too much, possibly.

“…and then I decided that the best thing to do would be to assign each index in the array a separate identifying string, so that the variables could be changed more easily. And it worked great, too! I could easily change a box to a tree, or a wolf into a rabbit, all by changing one variable!”

Rosalie was kneading dough. It was more interesting than what he was saying. “Really?”

“Yeah! In fact, I did that with the whole program! With a few key taps, I could turn a big boss into one of its own minions! I mean, it would have been easy for a hacker to hack into it, but it increased the frame rate by 15%, and cut the total programming time in half!”

Suddenly Rosalie noticed. In the dough she was kneading… She could see her hands…

Rosalie screamed.

Kyle was startled out of his story and instinctively turned towards her. He saw… Skin. He turned away as fast as he could and closed his eyes. “Oh, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening,” he repeated over and over, as if it would change the fact that it was happening.

Rosalie grabbed an apron and covered her front half with it as best she could. She was upset. “You looked!! Why did you look?!?” she yelled.

The door to the bakery started opening. “Don’t open that door, Molly!” Rosalie sent to her. The door closed back.

“I didn’t mean to!” Kyle said. He wasn’t yelling, but he almost was. “You yelled! I was looking to see what was wrong!”

“And what would be wrong?!” She carefully made her way to the bathroom, keeping the aproned side to him, just in case he happened to turn around again. “There’s only one thing that could’ve been wrong!”

“Well, I didn’t know that!” Kyle protested. Oh, he’d done it this time. This was the end of it all for sure. He might as well go get his laptop and leave. Why was he so stupid? He always ruined everything!

“You’re not going anywhere!” Rosalie said in response to his thoughts, as she opened the bathroom door. “Stay there ‘til I get back.”

Kyle sat down on the floor and groaned, his head in his hands. Oh, he had done exactly what he had feared he’d do. He’d ruined everything. This was sure to be the end of their friendship. But he’d just been worried about her. That’s why he looked. He’d thought she must’ve cut herself or something, from being too distracted with his story.

Rosalie heard what he was thinking. She laughed at how he thought she was so interested in his programming. She must be a pretty good actress.

She left the bathroom and came back to the kitchen, wearing the same plaid blouse and snug-fitting black pants as before. Her hair was still down, but despite that fact it looked just as good as it did when it was up.

Kyle hurried to his feet and began to apologize.

“Don’t bother,” Rosalie said, “It’s fine. But if you ever want to get me to shut up, just talk about that.”

Kyle felt wounded. “Sorry,” he said, and turned back to the dishes.

Chapter 12 - Learning Curve

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:05:06 -0500

Rosalie and Kyle stopped for a quick lunch break, as it was already one o’ clock. They munched on sandwiches and muffins, talking occasionally about topics that were completely neutral in nature, and thus safe – such as allergies.

“I’m allergic to pecans,” Rosalie said, munching a sweet corn muffin.

“I’m not allergic to anything that I know of,” Kyle admitted, “Though one of my younger brothers used to have a severe milk allergy.”

“Imagine that…” Rosalie said thoughtfully, almost in pity. “Not being able to eat anything with milk in it… That must’ve been so hard on him.” So much of what she made included milk as one of the ingredients, and she could hardly imagine what it would be like.

“He never knew any different.”

After a quick meal, it was back to work. Rosalie’s bakery never slept. Except at night… And on weekends…

Kyle stopped to think for a moment. He’d come over to say hi. Now she had him washing dishes for her?? Wow. He couldn’t help but feel a little impressed. She was good. How had she done it?

Then he remembered – it had been his idea to wash dishes. And he had a lot to do. He started scrubbing a couple of oddly shaped pans, wondering what they were for.

“I’m going to make that call,” Rosalie said, grabbing her cell phone off the counter and going into the break room. She always kept her cell phone on the counter as she worked, just in case somebody called.

This gave Kyle a little time to think about what had been going on earlier with the invisibility. How had it started? Why had it ended? And what was the use of a power that you couldn’t use?

Like his freezing power. He knew it was his. But how did it work? It always just started on its own – he couldn’t control it. And it was the same way with Rosalie’s invisibility.

But what had made it start? Kyle thought back to when he had first noticed it. As best as he could remember, she hadn’t been doing anything out of the ordinary. She was just looking into the bakery. He had turned from the sink and seen her, and pulled her back as fast as he could.

But was it fast enough? He wondered if maybe someone had seen her. That would’ve been bad.

Well, what had made it stop? He had been talking about programming; that he knew for sure. But how would that have had anything to do with it?

Kyle finally decided that it must’ve been chance; a random occurrence. Which meant it could happen again at any time…

Rosalie was done with her phone conversation and hurried back into the kitchen. She had six pans of brownies that needed to come out and cool.

For the rest of the day, everything went normally. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, and neither Rosalie nor Kyle lost control of their powers. Kyle somehow managed to find a clever new way to accidentally embarrass himself at least three times every hour, cleaning all the while. Rosalie was grateful for his help, as it meant she could cook more. Molly came into the back more often than usual, hoping to see something interesting happen, but Kyle had made a point of not using his powers until later. Finally, around six, Rosalie was ready to close up.

“I’m going home! Bye, Rosalie,” Molly called out as she left the bakery. Then, as an afterthought, “Bye, Kyle!” she added.

“Bye, Molly,” Rosalie called back. She was putting away everything in the kitchen.

Kyle was furiously scrubbing dishes. “See you later, Molly,” he called to her, drying a mixing bowl. Over the course of the day, he’d gotten further and further behind. But he was getting faster. Rosalie had taught him a few tricks. But they weren’t enough – Rosalie could cook faster than he could clean.

Rosalie laughed as she walked over. “Aren’t you done yet?” she teased. Kyle didn’t answer. “Here, let me help,” she said, rolling up her sleeves.

Kyle was curious. “What do you do with everything that’s left in the bakery? Won’t it go bad over the weekend?”

She nodded. “Yes, if it was left out. I always cover everything that will keep – Molly’s probably already done that for me, since she’s here.

“My friend Ross always comes over on Fridays, after I lock up (he has a spare key – I trust him), and gathers up all the stuff I leave out. He and Queen (that’s his wife’s nickname) – I think her real name is Quinine, but I don’t know… Anyway, he and Queen run a little charity for me in their spare time – The Rose Bud. That’s where all the rest of everything goes.” Dishwashing didn’t take up much of her thought, and it left her free to talk – which Kyle liked.

Together, they finished up the dishes.

Rosalie walked through the bakery and turned off all the lights. “Don’t forget your laptop,” she reminded Kyle as she turned off the light in the break room.

His laptop! How had he forgotten? He’d taken it there that morning with the intention of using it, but had completely forgotten about it. There was simply too much dishwashing to do. He laughed. “Great,” he thought, “I’ve been demoted from ultra programmer to dishwasher boy.” He headed for the break room to retrieve his laptop.

“I like my dishwasher boy!” Rosalie joked.

Kyle got his briefcase and headed back through the French doors towards the front. Rosalie was already waiting there. “Come on!” she said. Kyle walked out, and she locked the door behind them.

“Am I driving you again?” Kyle asked as they stepped off the curb onto the asphalt.

Rosalie laughed. “No, I won’t need it this time!” she said, “My car started this morning!”

“Okay!” Kyle said more cheerfully than he felt. Sure, the day had been really awkward and uncomfortable, but he didn’t want to have to stop talking to her. He had so many questions to ask. They’d been so busy working that he hadn’t really had the time.

Rosalie heard his thoughts, and hoped he would say something this time. But he wasn’t confident enough… He was still uncomfortable about all that had happened earlier. She had to boost his confidence somehow. “So, what are you going to do when you get back to the hotel?” she asked, hoping it was the right question.

“Program,” he answered simply. He avoided going into details, now that he knew she didn’t like it.

“Programming what?” she asked. Oh, yes – she was digging a grave for herself, and she knew it, too. She couldn’t stand listening to him talk about programming. She hardly understood computers, and most talk about them was meaningless to her. But it needed to be done.

“A game,” he replied.

“What kind of a game?”

“A fun one.”

This wasn’t getting her anywhere. He was purposefully avoiding answering anything about programming. “Would I like it?” she asked.

“Don’t think so.”

Rosalie was surprised. She even felt a little insulted. “And why don’t you think I would like it? I like computer games as much as everybody else!”

“I never said you didn’t. You have to understand basic programming to play this particular one,” he answered.

This confused her. “But… Why would you need to program to play a game?” she asked. She wasn’t faking this time – she really was confused.

“Because you have to be able to program robots in order for them to fight,” he said.

Now she felt like she was getting somewhere. “And how do they fight? Up close or with weapons?”

Kyle was loosening up some. “Either one works,” he said. “And they can lay mines, too.”

“So… More weapons so they have more options to choose from?” she asked.

“No, it’s to add more depth to the game. If there were only missiles, then the game would be nothing but training your robots to aim the fastest.”

She was sensing he was a little more confident now. It was a good thing, too. They were almost to their cars. Unfortunately, she had overlooked one tiny detail – once he’d started, he wouldn’t shut up.

“So far I’ve put in over sixty missions. There’s so many because the levels go by so quickly. You don’t actually have any control over your robots when you’re fighting, so the game goes faster. AI is a lot more efficient than humans are, even if less resourceful and creative.”

Praise God! They were at their cars. He’d stop now.

“Actually, several of the people I’m working with suggested we take one robot and devote it to player use, but I turned that idea down – it doesn’t make sense. The game wouldn’t flow as well anymore – it’s about AI, not player skill.” Why wasn’t he stopping?!?

Rosalie loudly opened her car door. Suddenly it hit Kyle that they were parting – not something he wanted, despite how awkward part of the day had been. “Hey,” he asked, “Do you think it would be okay if I drive over to your house with you so we can…” think of an excuse, think of an excuse… “…figure out your invisibility problem?” Hey, that was actually pretty good, he congratulated himself. And it’s more important than my programming, too. Even if only slightly.

Rosalie was relieved. Her plan had worked! “Sure!” she said, getting into her car.

“Great!” Kyle said, unlocking his and getting in. “See you there!” he called to her right before he closed his door.

Rosalie started her car and backed out of her parking space, and then drove through the parking lot up to the road. Kyle followed in his car. “You know…” she heard him thinking to her, “There are currently six terrain types for the game, and each one of them has a different structure within the program. Actually, I could add some interesting new ones whenever I wanted – it’s as simple as adding an integer variable to a class.”

“Kyle?” she thought to him.

“Yeah? What?”

“That’s enough.”

“Sorry.”

Kyle followed Rosalie to her house. They were silent for most of the drive, with Kyle occasionally asking for directions telepathically when they became separated.

Before long, they arrived safely. Rosalie parked in her garage, and Kyle parked out in the street. He got out of his car, locked it, and walked up to the front door. He rang the doorbell and waited.

“Are you coming?” she asked him.

“Are you coming?” he asked her.

Rosalie sighed. “Where are you?” she queried, telepathically.

Kyle groaned. This was going badly already. “I’m at the front door. Where are you?”

So that was why he wasn’t coming. “I’m in the garage,” she told him.

Argh. He left the front door and headed around the house. “Be there in a second.” In less than a minute, he was in the garage.

“Hey!” Rosalie said in greeting.

“Hi,” Kyle said in reply, as Rosalie unlocked the door.

“I was beginning to think I’d lost you.” Rosalie removed her keys and swung the door open in front of her. “Come on in,” she said, and walked inside.

Kyle followed her up the steps and into the house. At first glance, it appeared well kept, but he restrained himself from taking a good look around until left alone, like he always did.

Rosalie led him inside. Her house wasn’t huge, but it was big. It only had one floor, which was all she needed. Besides, she’d never lived in a house with stairs.

“Make yourself at home,” she told him. She was a gracious hostess.

This phrase always annoyed him. There was no way to feel “at home” in somebody else’s home. It was their house. You shouldn’t feel at home. But, it didn’t really matter, and he let it drop.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Rosalie said over her shoulder, heading for her room.

After she had left, Kyle began looking over the house from where he was standing. It was laid out rather simply: There was a single long hallway through the center of the house, with different rooms off to the sides. At one end of the house were the bedrooms, and at the other end was the kitchen/dining area. He’d come in through a door on the side of the hallway that led to the garage.

He walked a little ways down the hallway towards her room. There were two doorways here – one on the left, and one on the right. The one on the right led to a nicely decorated living room, with a piano, sofa, chairs, and other things like that. It reminded him of old-time parlors. She really did make a lot of money with her baking, or so it seemed.

Kyle looked into the other room. This was more like a living room, with a TV, sofa, chairs, loveseat, and a desk inside. It was a little messy, but nothing that couldn’t be cleaned up in a hurry.

He returned to where he had been standing before and waited patiently for Rosalie to return.

Rosalie was in the bathroom while all this was going on, but she was keeping track of Kyle’s thoughts. Yes, the whole business made her feel rather nosy, but it was better that than have him steal something, right?

She had to be honest with herself. She didn’t really think he would take anything. Still, she found it interesting to keep a watch on what he was thinking. She was pleased of what he thought of the parlor, but she felt her cheeks growing hot when he went into the living room. It had been a while since she’d been in there. That was where her boyfriend liked to hang out.

She flushed the toilet to give him an early warning, left the bathroom, and then her bedroom. There was Kyle, standing in the hallway where she’d left him. She decided she wouldn’t let him know she knew he’d been looking around, as there wasn’t really any reason to.

“Hello again,” he said to her with a smile and a little wave. “So, are you busy right now, or can we talk?” Then he added, as an afterthought, “And don’t say you’re not unless you actually aren’t.” He was beginning to learn a little more about her.

Rosalie had actually been about to say she wasn’t, but this caught her off guard. She was a little surprised, and had to think about it for a second before replying. “No – I’m actually not busy,” she said. And she wasn’t – she didn’t have anything planned for that night.

Usually Friday night was Friend Night, and she’d go somewhere with her friends. Bowling or skating (she felt she was terrible at both) or they’d go to the movies (she was marginally good at that, in her opinion).

Her friends would never have admitted it or have let it shown, but they were a little jealous of Rosalie, especially when they had first met. Even her best friend Caroline was jealous, who had known Rosalie since they were toddlers, and was a bit of a know-it-all. Caroline pushed so hard to learn everything she could about everything, aiming for an academic fame to compare with Rosalie’s.

After a while, the feelings of jealousy had subsided, for the most part: Rosalie never acted like she was more important than they were, and if she felt it was needed, she would willingly put everything on hold to comfort them. That was her personality – she was always considerate of others. But tonight, they had other things that they needed to do, and actually couldn’t come. They’d bailed on her, and Rosalie had the night free.

“Okay, then,” Kyle said. “Let’s try to figure out how your invisibility works, since you’re not busy.”

Rosalie considered for a moment. That made a lot of sense, even coming from a geek like Kyle. “Sure!” she said. “How do we start?”

Kyle gave it some thought. “Well, I guess we should first try to get you relaxed. That’s how this stuff usually works. Well… In the movies, anyway.”

Rosalie thought it was a good idea, too. “Let’s try that, then.”

Kyle was still thinking; ideas were flowing through his head so quickly. He grabbed hold of some of them. “You should probably start by lying down,” he suggested.

“What? But I wasn’t lying down when it happened the first time,” Rosalie pointed out.

“Well, of course not! But it’s the first step to getting you relaxed.” Kyle hesitated, and asked, “Do you have a sofa anywhere that you wouldn’t mind lying down on?”

Rosalie’s first assumption was that he was acting like he hadn’t walked around and looked everything over. Was he lying to her? No… He had asked if there was a sofa she wouldn’t mind lying down on. He hadn’t implied that he didn’t know that she had one. “Well, actually, they’re kinda lumpy… And some of them are a bit too soft to be comfortable like that. And I don’t like the leathery feel of the other one, either,” she admitted. “How about I try my bed instead?”

Kyle thought it over. “That’d work,” he said, “Probably even better, too.” He followed Rosalie into her bedroom. Rosalie lay down on her back on top of the blankets, her upper half propped up with pillows. Kyle softly closed the door behind him as he entered.

“So, what are we gonna be doing?” Rosalie asked, reaching beside her into a bag of pretzels she had on her bedside table. She moved them towards her mouth, but one slipped and fell into her shirt. This was a problem… If she could somehow remove it without him noticing…

“I’ve got a ton of ideas of how to get this to work!” he said, almost excitedly. Then his eyes wandered to the guitar on its stand by her bed. “Cool, you play the guitar too?”

Rosalie laughed, and utilized his attention on it to draw the pretzel out from where it had fallen. “Yup,” she answered, popping it into her mouth. “But let’s get going with this.”

“Right,” Kyle said, his attention back on the task at hand. “Now… breathe deeply.” He dimmed the lights.

Rosalie suppressed a laugh. This was so silly! It would never work. But, she’d let him try his way first. Then she’d try something else. Facing the ceiling, she began to breathe slowly and deeply.

“Now, close your eyes,” he said.

“What?” she turned to look at him. He wanted her to close her eyes? Was he planning something? Some sort of surprise to startle her?

“Just close your eyes,” he said.

Rosalie sighed with amusement and turned her head back to the ceiling, closing her eyes. She could hear him moving. She could almost tell exactly where he was. He was walking carefully and quietly to the foot of her bed. “Focus… Focus…” he was saying slowly, in a soft voice. “Imagine your invisibility is a muscle. How would you use it? If it relies on reflexes for use, just like your legs do for walking, how will you get it to start?” He paused, and continued smoothly, “Try making it start.”

Rosalie opened her eyes and looked at him critically, with a bit of a smirk. “Kyle, if I turned visible while I wasn’t wearing anything, I don’t think it has anything to do with reflexes.”

Kyle sighed. “Fine, let’s try something else.” Then an idea popped into his head. “Hey – what was it you saw when you poked your head through the door to look into the bakery?”

“Nothing, really,” Rosalie said, somewhat embarrassed.

Kyle wasn’t convinced. Not in the slightest. Spending a day around somebody really tells you a lot about them, and Kyle thought he knew Rosalie better than that. “Come on. What did you see?”

Rosalie gave a sort of embarrassed smile and said, “There was a group of really tall, muscular guys in there,” she said. “Everything else was normal. Why do you ask?”

Kyle thought it over. Light bulb! He bet he knew what it was, and said as much. “Rosalie, I think I know what it is.”

Rosalie wasn’t surprised. She had thought he’d come to this conclusion sooner or later. “And what do you think it is?” she asked, already sure of what the answer would be.

“I think…” Kyle said slowly with emphasis, “I think that you turn invisible… when something turns you on.”

Rosalie sighed. That was exactly what she’d thought he would say. “That’s crazy… It’s not possible,” she said, grabbing another handful of pretzels. She’d thought this over already. If that was the case, then why couldn’t she make herself invisible by thinking of those guys? It didn’t make sense.

Kyle was deep in thought, too. “Hey! I bet I could get you to turn invisible!”

Rosalie groaned. “How?” she asked.

“I’ll take my shirt off!” Kyle clearly had no idea of what turns women on. He was just trying to help, but he was going about it the wrong way entirely.

“Kyle, don’t,” Rosalie said. Suddenly, she stopped… What was that sound… Footsteps? Someone tip-toeing very quietly…

It was too late. Kyle had his shirt off. “Okay, shirtless!”

Rosalie looked at him. “Oh, you didn’t…” she said, rolling her eyes. “What did I just say?” She lifted an arm and waved it around. “Didn’t work, see?” She let it fall back to the bed.

The door opened.

Rosalie and Kyle turned to face it at the same instant.

Rosalie gasped. It was her boyfriend, Charles.

Charles had arrived at his girlfriend’s house intending to surprise her, only to find a shiny blue car parked outside her house in the street. He had used the key she had given him to get inside, and he heard voices in the bedroom. Tiptoeing quietly down the hallway, he had heard an unknown male voice say, “Okay, shirtless!” He hadn’t waited to hear more.

Charles swung open the door and was shocked and angered to find the lights dimmed, Rosalie lying on the bed, and a shirtless guy standing in front of her.

There was no doubt in his mind as to what was going on.

Chapter 13 - Impromptu Battle

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:31:05 -0500

Kyle was stunned.

Rosalie sat up in her bed.

Charles was mad.

Kyle processed everything as quickly as he could, rapidly glancing back and forth between the other two people in the room. “Wait a minute… Are you married?!” he asked Rosalie incredulously, jumping to conclusions. Then it started to sink in – he’d been in many close scrapes, but this one was bound to end up a little too close for comfort.

Charles looked like he was ready to kill. He turned to Rosalie. “Did he break in? Did he hurt you?”

Rosalie was slightly relieved. He wasn’t mad at her; he trusted her. And why shouldn’t he? They never fought, and she never lied to him. They only argued on rare occasions, and it was only about silly things like whether or not a person could land on a swimming pool of Jell-O and bounce, like they could in the movies.

Charles didn’t give her a chance to reply. He turned to Kyle with a savage look and said, “Come on – let’s settle this outside, man to man, away from the lady.”

Kyle steeled himself against any cowardice he might have, and was surprised to find there wasn’t any. “Agreed,” he said, putting on his shirt and heading for the door. He would not allow Charles to know Rosalie’s secret without her telling it to him first. It was something he must keep from happening, at all costs. It became almost his mission. Yes – he would play the role of the disgruntled lover.

Charles followed him out.

Rosalie sprang from the bed and ran after Charles. She couldn’t let this happen, especially not to her new friend. “Charlie, wait!” she called after him. “Charlie, no! You don’t understand!”

Unfortunately, Charles, striding down the hallway, was too far away to hear her cries.

Kyle chose the driveway; a place not visible to the road, because it was sheltered by a thick hedge. He was in front of Charles, so he decided he was going to choose where they went.

“Hey! You! Out front, I said!” Charles called after him. But Kyle pretended not to hear him, walking out into the garage. The garage door was still open – his plan was working so far. Charles followed him down the hallway, yelling at him. He was getting even angrier than before. He was determined to teach this little punk a lesson he’d never forget. What a weakling! He was too much of a coward to be humiliated in front of the neighbors.

“Charlie! Charlie!” Rosalie was pleading. “Listen to me!”

“Can’t,” Charles said, pulling away from her and storming into the garage. “I’ve got something I have to do.”

Kyle stood in the driveway, calmly awaiting his pursuer. His eyes narrowed as he watched his foe approach. He would not back down. A rush went through him – a thrill of the fight; a burst of pure adrenaline. He felt like he could do anything. “Let’s go,” he said, stretching his arms and flexing his fingers. This was going to hurt, but he was going to enjoy every second of it that he could. He had a feeling that it would be a while before he enjoyed anything again.

His rival’s indifference infuriated Charles. He continued to ignore Rosalie’s complaints, and in the manner of a bull, he lowered his head and marched towards Kyle. You could almost feel the anger emanating from him. He wanted to get his point across – you don’t mess around with him.

Kyle’s head was clear. He felt neither anger, nor regret, nor disappointment, nor fear. He didn’t even remember the reason all this was happening. At the moment, the simple fact that it was happening was more than enough. All that existed was Charles, Rosalie, and himself, and he bounced lightly on his feet, his arms up in imitation (poor imitation) of a boxer’s stance.

Charles stopped short in front of Kyle. He was a good foot taller than his opponent was. Why wasn’t the fool running? Or even scared? He put it out of his mind. It was of no importance. “You asked for it, jerk!” he growled. “Nobody messes with my girl!”

Kyle wasn’t about to debate this statement.

Charles reached back, and brought with his fist enough force to knock down a door. Kyle dodged the blow nimbly. Being skinny and quick had some oft-overlooked advantages. It caught Charles by surprise. Fine, he thought, let the fool dance. I can’t be tricked twice.

Rosalie had left the garage, and was trying to approach them. This was all happening so quickly! Her mind was swimming – she could hardly manage to keep all the details in her head at once. She saw Charles reach back for a punch. She hadn’t seen the first one, but this one looked terrible. “Kyle!” she screamed reflexively.

Kyle was momentarily distracted. Rosalie? Wait – Oh, no…

Pain exploded in his jaw.

He quickly got back to his feet. If he was to keep this going for more than a minute, he was going to have to act like he was unharmed by any of it. His lip felt odd…

Rosalie rushed over and grabbed Charles by the arm as he pulled back for another punch. She almost had to jump to reach it; his arm was up so high. “Charles, no! Stop! You’re making the wrong choice!”

Charles briefly turned to her, and Rosalie almost staggered backwards, tasting the fury in his mind. “Am I now?” he asked, his face unchanged. “It’s either him or me!” He turned back to the task at hand: pulverizing this nerd into fine particles of dust. He shook Rosalie off and followed through with the blow.

Kyle jumped to the right, but the powerful hook slammed into his face. He could almost feel his brain flopping around inside his head. He felt dizzy… Another blow slammed into his jaw from the left, and then a straight punch to the nose. He hit the ground and slid backwards, his jeans making a hissing noise on the concrete. His nose felt like a bomb had gone off in it. He saw his shirt – it was spattered with blood.

He could play the part of a coward and stop now. Charles had made his point, and after he’d fixed his nose up a little bit, everything would be fine. But his nose… Ow.

Unfortunately, this was not fated to happen. A brief glance at Rosalie renewed his efforts: Rosalie was invisible! Once again, it was at the worst possible time. He had to protect her secret. A new rush of determination surged through him. He would not surrender, not if he ended scarred for life. He had to distract this bully. He would prevail – if not by strength, then by will alone. He pulled himself to his feet, and let out a bone-chilling war cry. It was completely spontaneous in nature – he couldn’t have reproduced it even if he had wanted to. And another punch came.

Kyle began to dodge to the left, but threw himself backwards instead. Facing towards the sky, he saw the right hook whiz in front of his face, narrowly missing. He put his arms behind him to stop himself from falling, and pulled his feet inwards, allowing inertia to flip him into a diagonal position.

He kicked at Charles’s unprotected stomach.

Kyle was a runner. If he hadn’t loved computers so much, he might almost have been able to make a career of it. He hated walking. He’d jog instead – if he didn’t run. And his legs packed a vicious kick, though he’d never known it before.

Charles staggered backwards, clutching at his chest. In front of him, Kyle collapsed onto the ground – his arms couldn’t hold the added weight of a kick. But Charles could hardly breathe. This was completely unexpected… The little freak!

Rosalie was shocked, and a little indignant at Kyle. She hadn’t liked it when Charles had been beating him up, but this was a little too much. Charles had done nothing wrong! He was her boyfriend, after all. He had a right to do this.

Charles, recovering from the blow, let out a savage roar, and charged his opponent. Let him duck. Let him dodge. Charles knew all the tricks now. And he was madder than a hornet in autumn.

Kyle decided he had him angry enough. It was time to suck it up and be beaten to a bloody pulp. He set his jaw and waited. It was coming. He knew it was. With his fate decided, he found he had only the slightest trace of fear in his mind. He was ready. He was waiting.

Charles charged. Not even the ferocity of a dragon could compare to how terrifying he was in his full rage. He had both fists ready for action. The heavily muscled arms swung back – one, two – and their devastating blows made impact. He’d only intended to scare the guy, but now, it was personal. Nobody messed with him, and he couldn’t stand for anyone to try.

An uppercut impacted on Kyle’s jaw, and it actually slightly lifted him off the ground. The second blow hit – a steamroller crushing his chest – and he flew into the hedge, all but knocked unconscious.

Charles fought the urge to follow him over and squash the creep like a bug under his foot. But what… What? The idiot was getting to his feet again…

Kyle’s head was swimming, his vision was blurred, and all he could taste was blood. He had to give up. This guy was just too tough, and he didn’t seem like the type to have mercy, either. Then his wandering vision staggered past Charles, and he could just barely make out the outlines of Rosalie’s clothes, floating near the garage. No! He would not give up!

Kyle pulled himself out of the dirt and tangled branches, struggling to his feet. Every motion was an act of will against his screaming muscles. He looked at Rosalie and gave a meaningful nod. He was not about to give up, not when she needed him. She was one of the few friends he had, and every one of them was precious to him. As he raised himself from the ground, leaning heavily on the hedge for support, he called out in a weak, broken voice, “So! That’s the best you’ve got?”

Rosalie groaned. Stupid men and their testosterone! She covered her eyes, unwilling to watch. Wait… My hands… Where…?

Sudden realization overtook her, and she almost stumbled. She finally realized why Kyle was doing this. He was going through so much pain on her behalf… It was almost too much… She had to tell Charles… But then… All Kyle’s work would be undone! She had to think quickly. But… there was nothing to think about – she had to get out of sight.

Kyle’s head was spinning. Suddenly, he seemed to leave his body; his point of view seeming to be at a spot above the driveway. He was hallucinating. This had never happened before…

He looked down, and saw a giant of a man picking on a bloodied little weak guy. He watched for a few moments. No matter how much the giant dished out, the little scrawny dude just wouldn’t give up.

Kyle almost screamed. Nothingmade him angrier than when people pick on others significantly smaller and weaker than them, and when they little guy stood his ground, he was filled with a righteous anger that outmatched that of the god of war himself.

He snapped.

The programmer shook his head, and his vision returned to normal. He prepared to fight, bending his knees and placing himself in a karate/boxing stance.

Charles couldn’t believe this guy. “Quit already!” he yelled.

Kyle yelled back; an unintelligible scream of pure fury. Under other circumstances, the scream would’ve been hilarious, the way he was babbling, but this was different – he was hell-bent on the destruction of his opponent. Not only that, he was unaware of the pain he was in – his blind rage blocked it out. For the moment, Kyle was incapable of conscious thought.

Charles pulled back for the knockout punch. He didn’t know what was up with this guy, but he wasn’t about to let him win.

Kyle didn’t note Charles’s motions, so involved was he with the infliction of pain.

Charles fired his hardest shot at Kyle. The punch was milliseconds from becoming a reality…

And Kyle cheated.

He pushed down telekinetically on the ground with his hands, adding the force to the jump he was making with his legs. He lightly sprung a majestic twenty feet into the air. All his thoughts were on where and how he should land – no – he had no thoughts – it was all instinct. His conscious mind was not engaging in thought.

Rosalie sensed something was wrong. She’d decided to monitor the fight from inside the house, as she couldn’t allow Charles to see her – or any of the neighbors, for that matter. But now… Kyle’s mind was lost to her – was he dead? She could hear what was going on, but she didn’t hear anyone! Panic filled her, and she rushed outside. She arrived right after Kyle made his mighty leap, and she looked skywards in astonishment.

Charles’s punch missed – where had the guy gone? He looked up, stunned to see his foe in the sky. No matter. It would hurt the little fool that much worse when he fell upon his fist. Charles swung back, ready for the knockout blow.

Kyle was ready. But he needed speed. He made the familiar grabbing motion with his hands, and pulled himself towards the ground. Like a dart he flew – his target picked out perfectly – he would hit the bull’s-eye.

“Stop!!!” Rosalie screamed at them, but it was no use. Both gladiators had tunnel vision – they were unable to pay attention to anything other than what they were doing.

As his target rushed towards him, Charles steadied his feet on the ground. This blow had to do as much damage as possible.

Kyle was ready. He was waiting. As he plummeted towards the earth like a falling star from the heavens, he pulled his legs towards him.

It was time.

Charles swung his most powerful punch at the sky. He would catch his foe right on the jaw. It would be weeks before the guy would talk again, and the little punk deserved it, too.

Kyle kicked his fiercest kick possible out at Charles, both feet at once, but the punch took him by surprise. A fist… Is it going to…? All went black.

At the same time, Charles felt the destructive force of Kyle’s kick land squarely on his face. He flew seven feet backwards, colliding with Rosalie and knocking her off her feet. Rosalie only narrowly avoided cracking her skull open on the ground.

Kyle fell like a stone onto the pebbled concrete of the driveway, completely knocked out. If he had known it, he would have been pleased (or his subconscious self would have been, anyway) – he had accomplished his goal.

Rosalie couldn’t sense the thoughts of either one of them. She sat up and cradled Charles’s head in her arms, tears streaming down her face. “Charlie,” she cried repeatedly, but to no avail. He was unconscious, just as his enemy was.

Her secret was still safe.

Charles’s face was covered in blood from where Kyle’s last kick had landed. Rosalie laid his head gently on the ground, and went inside to fetch a wet washcloth.

When she came back out, she half expected one of them to be gone, but no – they were right where they had been when she’d left. She lovingly cleaned the blood from Charles’s face – crying when she saw his busted lip – and went to get ice to put on it.

When she came back, she noticed Kyle, sprawled face-downwards on the driveway in an irregular heap. After balancing the ice on Charles’s face, she went over to examine Kyle’s wounds. She had to roll him onto his back to look at his face.

Kyle looked awful. No – not just awful, he had been that before – but now he was horrifying to see. A gruesome mix of blood and mud smeared his entire face. He had a busted lip in five places, and he had a number of deep gashes on his cheeks where Charles had unknowingly hit him with a class ring. Not one, but both of his eyes had bruises around them. It would be a long, long time until Kyle’s face returned to normal.

She started crying again. It had all been to protect her. Kyle would’ve probably just left, otherwise.

A car pulled into the driveway, its lights shining brightly in Rosalie’s face. Rosalie held up her hand instinctively to shield her face from the light, and was grateful to see she was visible again. The headlights dimmed, the door opened, and a familiar figure got out. “Carly!” Rosalie cried, wiping her eyes uselessly and stumbling to her feet. Too much had happened for one day.

Carly (a.k.a. Caroline) had cancelled her other activities so she could watch a movie with her best friend. She’d called, but Rosalie hadn’t answered her phone, which was odd – she knew Rosalie was home, and Rosalie always answered. So Caroline had come to see what was wrong. As she drove up, she could see two battered bodies lying on the driveway, with her friend in their midst.

Rosalie explained to her as much as she could, and together they got the two injured men fixed up and into the house.

One could only guess what would happen when they awoke.

Chapter 14 - Explanations

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:55:06 -0500

Rosalie and Caroline managed (with quite a bit of effort) to move Charles onto the sofa in the living room. After they had positioned his cold packs carefully on the face of the hulking quarterback, they brought Kyle over to the loveseat. It was considerably easier than it had been to carry Charles – the young programmer wasn’t nearly as heavy. Instead of a few cold packs, they placed an entire bag of ice over his mutilated, swollen face. He needed it, too – he wasn’t even recognizable anymore. Then they left and walked into the hallway.

“Okay,” said Caroline quietly, turning to Rosalie, “What’s going on here?”

Rosalie wasn’t sure what to say. “Well, Charles walked in on Kyle and me while we were in the bedroom,” she began.

Her friend interrupted her. “Wait – hold on… Who’s Kyle?”

Rosalie pointed to the unconscious man on the loveseat.

Caroline nodded slowly, looking at Kyle. Then she turned back. “And he was in your room… why?”

Rosalie hesitated. “Well… It’s kinda complicated…” she said uncomfortably.

“Wait…” Caroline said suddenly. “You weren’t…?” she asked with a doubtful, but meaningful look.

“Wait… You mean…?”

Caroline nodded slightly, with the quizzical, uncomfortable expression still showing.

“No! No! I’d never do that! You know I wouldn’t do something like that!” Rosalie was surprised Caroline would even ask such a thing.

“I didn’t think you did! I was just asking,” Caroline said to clear things up. “But what do you mean by ‘complicated’?”

“Umm…” Rosalie had no idea of what to say. Did Kyle’s act of self-sacrifice cover Caroline, too? Should she try to keep her powers a secret, even from her best friend?

But Caroline didn’t give her a chance to reply. “And when I pulled into the driveway… Why were you… invisible?” The doubtful expression was gone – she was expecting a meaningful answer this time.

Rosalie had been afraid Caroline might have seen her like that. She had noticed that she’d turned visible again at some point, but she wasn’t sure if Caroline had seen. She decided that her friend had to know.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, Rosalie told Caroline everything that had happened to her over the course of the past couple of days. She started with Kyle’s visit to the bakery, and the mysterious flash that had brought them back together.

Caroline listened closely to every detail, nodding and asking questions on occasion. In a way, Rosalie was glad to be talking about it – it felt so good to be able to tell somebody everything that had happened.

She continued her story with the discovery of her telepathic power, her super hearing, and finally her unpredictable invisibility power. She explained how Kyle was trying to help her figure out how her invisibility worked when Charles had walked in.

She left out some, too. She didn’t want to tell Caroline about Kyle’s powers. Not yet, anyway. She’d let him decide for himself if she was to be told.

But, Caroline had a feeling that Rosalie wasn’t telling her everything. “Rose,” she said, “You’re not telling me everything, are you? What made Kyle special enough that you would tell him and not me?”

Rosalie was stuck. She couldn’t lie to her best friend, and she didn’t see any way around it. Hopefully Kyle would forgive her. “Well… Kyle has powers too… He got them at the same time…”

“At the flash?”

“Yup.”

Caroline was quiet for a bit. Finally she asked, “What am I thinking?”

Rosalie peeked at her mind, and laughed. “You’re trying not to think about anything! I can only sense surface thoughts – nothing lower down! I only hear the loudest ones. But with Kyle, I can send them.”

Suddenly she felt something – Charles was waking up, the clock chiming nine in the living room awakening him. Kyle was just beginning to form his first fuzzy thoughts since when he snapped earlier.

“Carly,” Rosalie said, “They’re waking up.”

“Then let’s go in there,” Caroline said, taking charge of the situation. “We’re going to need to make sure they don’t try to start fighting again.”

Charles woke up. Oh! His face hurt like crazy! What was wrong with it? And where was he? He moved the cold packs off his nose and mouth and rolled over.

Hmm… He appeared to be Rosalie’s house. It was his favorite spot, too: right across from the TV.

Suddenly everything started coming back… The car out front… Coming inside and finding the guy in the bedroom… The fight…

Why did the guy never even punch once? His skinny arms wouldn’t have hurt nearly this bad.

He rolled over to try to ease the pain on his ribs, and saw Kyle over on the loveseat. What? The guy’s still here?!? What’s going on??? Wait… For Rosalie to have taken that dude inside, Rosalie must’ve been serious – she must actually know this guy. But… No. Rosalie wouldn’t cheat on me. So what’s going on? Wait… Maybe Rosalie is afraid of the guy. That’s why she’s still being nice to him. What’d the guy do to scare her so badly? Is it blackmail? Ooh, he’s gonna get it… Charles started to his feet.

Caroline stepped in front of him – legs apart, arms crossed. “Nope, sorry. You’re not going anywhere. You leave him alone.”

Charles sat back. “Caroline,” he said slowly, a grim smile creeping over his face. “I should’ve guessed you were here. Rosalie wouldn’t have been able to carry me in by herself.” He pointed at Kyle. “Why is he still here?”

“I told you to listen,” Rosalie said reproachfully, walking over. “He’s a friend.”

“A friend with his shirt off in your bedroom.”

Rosalie sighed. This was going to be so hard to explain.

Once again, she was saved from answering. Kyle woke up.

***

Kyle awoke slowly. Face… Cold… Nice… For an instant, his newly awake mind was aware of Rosalie’s mind peeking at his, and he smiled mentally. It felt nice to be able to feel like someone cared. Then the freshness of his mind faded, and he couldn’t sense Rosalie’s presence anymore. She might still be there, but he wouldn’t be able to tell. It made him feel lonely.

Wait… Why was his face cold? He opened his eyes. Several large ice cubes stared him down.

Suddenly he remembered everything. He played the fight back in his mind, bit by bit, hating himself for some of the decisions he had made. That was something he liked to do: he liked putting himself down. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t even completely sure that there was an actual reason.

Then he got to the part where he had snapped. Oh, no… Stupid, stupid, STUPID! He remembered his flying leap. Oh, he should’ve been more careful. But what had happened to Charles? Was he okay? Kyle hoped he had missed.

He heard movement over on his left. Then a voice. “Nope, sorry. You’re not going anywhere. You leave him alone.”

Huh? Who is that? Kyle didn’t recognize the voice. Then he heard another, and he did recognize it. It was his onetime archenemy. “Caroline… I should’ve guessed you were here. Rosalie wouldn’t have been able to carry me in by herself.” Caroline… That must be the name of the owner of the new voice. “Why is he still here?” Aw, great…

Then a voice he knew well. “I told you to listen. He’s a friend.”

“A friend with his shirt off in your bedroom.”

Oh, that does it. Kyle would have rolled his eyes and shaken his head if anyone could’ve seen. Taking the bag of ice off his face, he turned his head towards the voices and opened his eyes. At his ten o’ clock was a new person – probably Caroline – standing between him and Charles. Rosalie stood at her side.

The ice bag rattled as he put it down. Everyone turned to look at him, and they all froze in astonishment.

“How…” Caroline began, unable to complete her sentence. She had an inkling of what was going on.

“Kyle…” Rosalie said, and Kyle began to wonder what was wrong. Rosalie slowly lifted her hand to point at him. “Kyle… Your face…”

Charles, the only one out of the loop, began to look somewhat creeped out. “Whoa…” he said, “You’re not hurt?!?”

Kyle suddenly noticed. His face… It didn’t hurt anymore. It felt… Normal. His face had undergone a miraculous recovery. Just two hours before, he had been almost unrecognizable. Now, nobody who saw him could even tell he had ever even been in a fight.

Caroline gasped. “You’re… Your face… It’s… healed…” she said in awe.

Rosalie couldn’t believe it either. How had Kyle’s face healed so quickly? Was healing one of his powers?

Kyle felt his face. It certainly seemed normal… How had it healed so quickly?

He sat up, and gasped in pain. Oh! His chest still hurt. So, just his face healed, and nothing else? Why was that?

Taking advantage of the opportunity, he looked the two new people over. Caroline was dressed in a smart/casual outfit – a dark-gray, long-sleeved shirt with little designs woven into it, and a pair of neatly pressed black pants. Her hair – a deep, dark brown – was put tightly behind her head with a barrette. Charles… Charles was wearing a pair of dirty-looking jeans and a navy-blue jacket. His blond hair was close-cropped, though not buzzed, and appeared too short to require regular brushing.

Meanwhile, the gears continued turning in Charles’s mind. He remembered Kyle’s jump. He had brushed it away as unimportant at the time so he could stay focused, but now it stood out as an unusual event. “Wait… You were flying earlier!”

Rosalie turned back to Kyle. She sounded both surprised and somewhat indignant. “You were flying?!?” Could he fly? Why hadn’t he ever told her something so important?

Kyle spoke for the first time since he had woken up. He felt like Rosalie was accusing him of something, the way she had said it. “No! I wasn’t flying!”

“What do you call what I saw you do, then?” Charles asked pointedly.

Kyle didn’t have an immediate answer for that one. “I… I jumped…” Well, it was the truth… Or it was most of the truth, anyway.

Charles didn’t buy it. “You jumped twenty feet? Right…”

Caroline raised her eyebrows and suppressed a smile. This was getting more interesting all the time…

Kyle couldn’t think of an answer to that one at all. But Charles didn’t give him much time to think, stating, “You still haven’t explained why you were in my girlfriend’s bedroom with your shirt off.” His eyes narrowed accusingly.

Rosalie sent a thought to Kyle. She was asking for permission. She didn’t want to tell Charles unless Kyle decided it was okay, especially after all Kyle had gone through for her. Fortunately for her, he agreed that it would be the wisest thing to do. But how to go about it – now, that was a different question altogether.

Kyle decided on the best way to break it to him – by showing off, more or less. He reached down next to the loveseat where he had set the bag of half-melted ice cubes, and pulled from it one of the largest pieces. Placing it flat on the palm of his hand, he slowly pushed it upwards into the air, until it appeared to be hovering above his hand.

Charles stared open-mouthed. “Whoa…” he finally managed, “How are you doing that?”

Caroline was impressed as well. Still watching Kyle, she said aside to Rosalie, “You never told me he could do that…”

Rosalie hadn’t known he could make objects hover, either. Now that she thought about it, she realized she had forgotten it for most of the day. They hadn’t really ever discussed it.

Kyle wasn’t finished yet. He tossed it into the air, and flung it towards Charles when it came back down. Charles ducked, and then when he realized it had never hit anything, he sat back up. The cube was hovering half a foot away. Well, not “hovering”, more like “vibrating”. Kyle was oscillating his hand back and forth rapidly to keep the cube in place.

Charles looked at the cube, and looked at the motions Kyle was doing with his hand. Slowly and cautiously, he reached for the dripping piece of ice. For the moment, he had forgotten all about Rosalie and the bedroom, which was exactly what Kyle had intended.

Just before he grabbed the ice, it shot back towards Kyle, who slowed it and caused it to hover above his hand again.

To finish his act, Kyle popped it up into the air. When it came back down, he used both his hands in a sort of half-clapping motion, and the ice cube splintered into fine particles of ice dust, which faded away into mist, and then was gone.

“Wow…” Charles said. He felt like he must have been dreaming. He would’ve rubbed his eyes, but his face was still rather sore.

Caroline clapped a little. She was impressed, and very much awed by what she’d seen. She almost asked for an encore.

Rosalie only rolled her eyes. “Showoff,” she said, fighting a grin.

Charles had a question. “Where did you learn to do that?”

Kyle smiled. “You’d never believe me,” he chuckled, shaking his head slowly.

“Try me.”

“Rosaliegrace’s Bakery,” Kyle answered promptly.

Charles turned to Rosalie. “What?” He had no idea what the guy was talking about. And he didn’t even know what the guy’s name was.

Rosalie sighed. “Yesterday, Kyle came over to fix my computer. There was this weird flash of light when our hands touched – I gave him a free bag of mini muffins as a thank-you, and then he left. I thought that would be the last I saw of him, but ever since then, we’ve had kinda weird things happen to us – like our ‘powers’, for example.”

“Wait… What?” Charles was trying to process all the information. Apparently, this guy, “Kyle,” had met Rosalie only yesterday. That explained how Kyle hadn’t seemed to know that Rosalie had a boyfriend… But… Wait… ‘Our’ powers?!? “You have powers, too?” To be honest, he didn’t like the thought of Rosalie having powers at all.

Rosalie nodded. “Telepathy, super hearing, and invisibility!” she said, counting them off on her fingers.

“Rosalie can’t control the invisibility one,” Caroline added.

Charles nodded to say he understood, and thought it through. Ah! Now it made sense. Kyle was blackmailing Rosalie with this knowledge. She had to do whatever he said, or he’d tell the media. Hence, the bedroom scene. What a twisted, manipulative little freak. Oh, his face may have healed, but just wait. Let’s see if it heals after the pounding I’m going to give him next.

Rosalie continued explaining. “No, I can’t control the invisibility one. That’s what Kyle was trying to do when you came in – help me figure out why it happens. It feels like it just flips on and off whenever it wants. Kyle thought it might have something to do with me being turned on, so he took his shirt off to try to prove it. If you remember, I was visible when you walked in, so it didn’t work.”

Charles was about to make an accusation when he heard this. After thinking it over, he said, “So, he wasn’t blackmailing you? Or trying to force you into doing anything?”

Rosalie shook her head emphatically. “No! No, he’s just a good friend, and that’s all. He’s one of my best friends now, actually.”

Charles looked over at Kyle. He didn’t like apologizing, really… It just wasn’t something he was used to doing.

Kyle guessed what he was thinking about. “Hey, it’s okay, man. No harm done, see?” he said jokingly, pointing at his face. “I understood where you were coming from, even then. But I couldn’t let you know about Rosalie’s powers unless she told me she wanted you to know. That’s why I even accepted your challenge in the first place.”

“It wasn’t a challenge.”

“Well, whatever.”

Everything was starting to make sense to him now. But, one thing remained unexplained. “Why did you keep fighting then? Why didn’t you just give up after you had done your act to protect her? No offense, but you’re not really much of a fighter, you know.”

Kyle smiled grimly. “Yeah, I know. But I did have a reason. I had to keep you distracted – Rosalie, right behind you, had turned invisible while we fought. Only her clothes were visible, but apparently, she didn’t notice.”

“But I did, when I got here,” Caroline interjected.

Charles was filled with a new respect for the guy. “You know,” he said after a minute or so, “You’re tougher than you look, Kyle. Definitely tougher than I thought you were. You’ve got guts; I’ll give you that.” He stood up and walked over to shake Kyle’s hand.

Kyle got to his feet (wincing a little bit – everything neck-down was still sore) and shook Charles’s hand. Charles had a firm grip. “You’ve got a pretty powerful punch, yourself,” he said, returning the compliment grace for grace.

Charles laughed. “Yeah, but I’m a football player. I’ve got to be strong, or I get replaced!”

Kyle laughed along with him. He wasn’t really much of a sports fan, but he understood football.

Rosalie was pleased that it had turned out so well. “So… Everything’s fine, then?” she asked. Both men answered affirmatively.

“What I’m wondering,” said Caroline thoughtfully, “is how the whole thing started.”

Three sets of eyes studied her inquisitively.

“I’m wondering what that flash was, and how it happened, and what it did,” she explained.

Nobody had an answer, but Charles had a question. “What are your powers?” he asked Kyle.

Caroline wanted to hear this, too. “Yeah – Rosalie never told me.”

“Well…” he began, “Telekinesis – it’s very limited, though… I can freeze stuff too, but I’m not sure how yet… It’s possible I can melt things, but it’s only happened once, and I’m not even sure it was me… And apparently, I can heal myself… But… Only my face.” Kyle hadn’t realized how little he understood his powers until now.

“You can melt stuff?” Rosalie hadn’t heard about this.

Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know… I can’t think of anything else that explains it…” He told them the story of the strawberry soap, leaving out “minor” details such as flying across the room, the true reason for the staff member’s visit, the wrestling match, and others. He wasn’t quite comfortable enough with his new friends to recall embarrassing moments such as those.

“You left out a lot,” Rosalie said when he finished.

“What? How did you know?” Kyle asked, surprised.

Rosalie tapped her temple. “I read minds, remember? Tell us about your wrestling match with the bar of soap,” she laughed.

This time, it was Kyle who was saved from answering. The clock above the mantel rang out the time – ten o’ clock.

“Whoa – I’ve gotta go – it’s late,” Caroline said, getting her coat and purse. “The story can wait for another time, I guess. I’ve got to go over to Andy’s place and let Rex out – he’s away for the weekend.”

“Okay, Carly,” Rosalie said. “See you tomorrow?”

Kyle spoke up. “I think we should all meet up somewhere tomorrow.”

Charles nodded. “That would probably be a good idea.”

“Definitely: we should meet up tomorrow,” Caroline said, acting as if it had been her own idea. “But where… Rosalie, can you send thoughts, as well as receive?”

Rosalie nodded. “Yes, I can.” She sent a thought to Caroline as proof. “See?”

Caroline seemed a little startled, but regained her composure immediately. “Perfect. You’ll be the one deciding when and where we meet, then.”

“How about in the early morning, around ten o’ clock or so?” Rosalie suggested, to the agreement of Caroline and her boyfriend.

Kyle thought he should add something. “You know, we could all think of a solution separately, with Rosalie telling us who was thinking what, so we could come to a decision as a group, democratically.” He didn’t like it when people left him out of decision-making, even though he would have hated to have to make such a decision by himself.

“That won’t work,” Caroline countered, “Too many people at once. Decisions like this should be made by one person.”

“Fine with me,” Charles said.

“Okay, then.” Kyle made a decision of his own: not to argue. “See you all tomorrow, then.”

Kyle and Caroline left, leaving Rosalie and Charles alone.

“You’re the only one…” Rosalie said thoughtfully. “Everyone else doubted. Why were you the only one who believed me right away, Charlie?”

Charles walked over to her and held her close, stroking her long, wavy, golden-brown hair. “Rosalie,” he said earnestly, “How could I not? You’re everything to me. I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t lie to me. I trust you.”

Rosalie was pleased with his answer. It was honest, understanding, and so sweet. She gave him a goodnight kiss, and he left, leaving Rosalie alone in her house.

She could hardly wait to see what tomorrow would bring.

Chapter 15 - The Media

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:21:05 -0500

Rosalie awoke to the sound of birds chirping at the birdfeeder hanging outside her window. She could remember her dream – a thing that didn’t happen often. She wouldn’t be able to remember it in a few minutes, though – she knew that from experience. It had been a great dream as far as dreams go, and she was happy. She glanced downwards. She was invisible, too. She was going to have to learn to control this.

***

Kyle awoke to the sound of silence. All was dark… quiet… somber. The peace of the morning – Kyle loved this feeling. Enjoying the silence, he got out of bed and took his medicine, making plans as he went. He was going to try to learn to fly today. If he could push on the ground to jump twenty feet, there was no reason he could think of that he couldn’t push diagonally to fly. It would take a lot of effort to stay in the air… But he ought to be able to manage it.

***

Caroline awoke to the sound of her alarm clock. The sun was coming in her window. She wanted to go back to sleep, but then she remembered the events of the night before. She was going to have to get up – she had a lot to do. Today’s events needed organizing. But, she was hungry… She decided that everything could wait for a bit. She was going to get something to eat first. She got out of bed and walked to the kitchen to find something for breakfast. After that, she would brush up on her computer studies one last time, before driving over to Andy’s and taking Rex out. And then – off to Rosalie’s place.

***

Kyle was enjoying the solitude and experimenting with a bar of soap (which the hotel staff had been kind enough to replace), when he heard someone knocking on the door to his hotel room. He hurried over – it was a good thing he was dressed – and hesitated briefly before opening the door, wondering who it could be. He hadn’t made any loud sounds that morning… Well, so far, anyway. He’d spent most of his time programming and talking to his co-workers over the phone. But who could this be, at nine in the morning?

He opened the door.

A television camera stared back at him, as did a guy with a boom mike, a guy with a notepad and headset, and a smartly dressed woman with coal-black hair, who was holding a microphone.

“Are you Kyle Withers?” she asked.

Kyle’s mind was rushing. He couldn’t panic – not now. But he felt like he might… He gulped it down and put his mouth on autopilot: he could think, while his mouth did the talking. It was risky, and everything they asked he’d answer the truth to, and if they asked him a question they wanted him to think about, he’d space out. …He might also blurt. But he’d have time to think. “Yes, I am Kyle Withers…”

What did they want? Had someone seen me experimenting with his powers?

“Wonderful. We’ve been looking for you for a while. I have a little news segment I need you for, if you don’t mind,” the lady continued. Even if she hadn’t been a reporter, she would have made him feel uneasy. He always got a bad feeling about news reporters.

She doesn’t seem excited – this isn’t front-page news… Okay, so my secret’s safe, probably. “Sure. I don’t mind at all.” Stupid mouth. Don’t exaggerate. What could this be about, if it isn’t about my powers?

“I’m going to ask you a bunch of random questions, and then a couple serious ones. Is that fine with you?”

“Sure.” I haven’t ever done anything bad enough to deserve a news interview, not that I can think of. But why is she asking questions?

“I don’t have much time, so we’ll make this quick, okay?”

“Okay.” Why is she making a point of the fact that she was going to be quick? Should I read into this? Maybe she’s nervous… Like she might make a mistake… Let something slip…

He didn’t get a chance to finish his thoughts. The woman motioned behind her to the cameramen, and a red light went on. Great… Time to take my mouth off autopilot…

The woman’s personality changed. Instead of being tired and a little on edge, she was suddenly light and springy, as if she was having the best day of her life. “Good morning! This is Courtney Meyers of Channel 5 News, here with Mr. Kyle Withers of GeneSys. Good morning, Mr. Withers!” She turned to him expectantly.

Time for the act. Oh, he could be a good actor when he tried (as long as it didn’t involve precise accents). He suddenly became every bit as outgoing and friendly as Miss Meyers. “Good morning, Courtney!” Kyle said with an “I-feel-like-I-could-take-over-the-world” grin on his face.

This threw her for an instant. Apparently, she wasn’t expecting this type of enthusiasm from him. After all, he was only a computer geek – they’re not normally outgoing at all. But she made a beautiful recovery. “I’m here to ask about your recently released anti-virus program, BugSweep.”

“Sounds good to me!” He laughed naturally.

Again it threw her. Again, she recovered, this time with a glint in her eyes. She was starting to enjoy this guy. Normally, nothing fazed her – this came as a pleasant surprise. “But before we begin, I’d like to ask you a couple personal questions, if that’s fine with you. I’m sure our viewers at home would love to know about the man behind the scenes.” Without giving him a chance to reply, she continued. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

It threw him. He laughed to buy some time. She must be messing with him. But he could handle it… He grinned, and switched to impromptu mode. “Well, if you’ll have me, Courtney, I do now!”

That made her pause briefly. Only those who watched her regularly would have noticed. This guy was fast! “Sorry, I’m married!” she laughed, pretending to be flattered.

She was known for her crazy, spontaneous, random questions. She could get away with another one. “Which do you like more, dogs or cats?” This one was good – it had absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. His mind would have to switch gears. She didn’t know he had ADHD – his mind came with an extra set, so to speak.

“Cats, but I don’t have any. What about you?”

Now she had to switch gears. He’d taken her question and turned it on her. She decided it would be better to ignore it – something that everyone, and not just the regular viewers, noticed. “One more random question; are you ready?” Again, she didn’t give him a chance to reply. “If you were a Greek god, which would you be?”

She had him there. He hesitated. If he had just said the first one that popped into his head, he would’ve made it without a pause, but no, he had to think about it. “I’d be Hephaestus – he built robots.”

She nodded, feeling a little proud of herself for finally managing to slow him down. “Okay, enough with those,” she laughed, “let’s get back to the topic at hand. Tell us about BugSweep.”

“Well,” Kyle began, much more at ease than he had been before her random questions, “I wrote the code for it, and making it free seemed the right thing to do, with as many people affected by it as there were. After all, it’s not quite even a trial version – it expires after a single execution. You may note that it says it is version 3.56 – the earlier two versions were never released. GeneSys is primarily a gaming studio; we don’t make anti-virus software.”

“And yet you did.”

“Really, it’s been for my own personal use.”

“You never released it? Your product could put many other companies out of business. It’s been downloaded over thirty million times already.”

Wow. He hadn’t checked. Thirty million at twenty bucks a pop was… more than he would’ve known what to do with. His co-workers were going to be mad about this… “Well, it’s not everything, even if I had made it a permanent install – I didn’t include the firewall. As I said, GeneSys makes games. I’m only releasing this copy of BugSweep to help people get through this.”

“And a lot of people out there appreciate it.” She turned back to the camera. “This is Courtney Meyers, signing off. Remember, you heard it live on News Channel Five!”

The red light on the camera went off, and Miss Meyers lost 40% of her energy instantly. “Thanks,” she said, as everyone packed up. “That’ll be all for now. You did great – I actually enjoyed that one. But, I have to run – I have an interview scheduled with the movie director who’s filming here next week.”

Kyle had to ask. “How did you find me?”

Courtney, already starting down the hallway, said over her shoulder, “Honey, the media can find anybody.”

Kyle was left alone in the doorway to ponder this information. Several minutes passed before he regained enough control of his searching thoughts to return to his room.

Rosalie was alone, sitting at her dining room table and eating breakfast. It was quiet, just like all Saturday mornings. But suddenly something interrupted her silence.

“Rosalie? Are you awake?”

It was Kyle.

Rosalie wondered what would have happened if she was asleep. Would his voice have ended up as part of her dream? Could he actually take part in her dream? Or she in his? Hmm… This was interesting to think about.

“I guess not…”

Rosalie sighed. Saturday mornings were almost sacred to her. It was her alone time. This had better not become routine… “I’m awake, Kyle.”

“Oh, good. I have something to tell you…”

“What?”

“I got on TV a little while ago…”

Rosalie jumped, and almost accidentally pushed her plate off the table. “What?!?! What did you do?” She sounded more upset than she meant to.

“Nothing bad…” Now he sounded worried. It made her worry.

“What? Tell me!”

“It was for that program I wrote… The antivirus software that I installed on your computer – they interviewed me about it.”

Rosalie took a moment to think this over. Media attention was the last thing they wanted right now. But antivirus protection usually didn’t make the news… Something seemed off…

“Wait… Who interviewed you?”

“Channel Five News.”

This wasn’t good. Channel Five only took the biggest stories out there. They often disguised the interviews as something they weren’t to get people to act more naturally.

“Which reporter?” she asked him.

“Um… Courtney something… I’m no good with names…”

He probably meant Courtney Meyers, she decided. She was sent out to cover the lighter side of the news stories to add a little spontaneity, and even the lighter side was often pretty important. This could be very, very bad…

While Rosalie herself didn’t watch the news much anymore, she’d done a bit of watching when she first got her TV, just a couple of years ago, and she was always surprising herself at how much she remembered.

“What did they ask you?”

There were a few seconds of silence (in her head – the room was already silent) before she heard his answer. “A bunch of random questions, and then they wanted to know about the program I had made – the one I gave you.”

“Kyle, Courtney Meyers usually doesn’t ask the questions she’s sent to ask. She usually gets the information indirectly. Like when she interviewed me, she was talking about the new animal rescue shelter downtown, and she managed to work my bakery into the conversation. I need to know those random questions – what were they?”

Kyle tried hard to remember. Rosalie could sense him wracking his brain to come up with them. “Okay, question #1: Did I have a girlfriend?”

“She could have been trying to get info about me… Seeing if you’d blurt anything. What else?”

Kyle kept thinking. “She wanted to know if I liked cats or dogs better.”

“Now, that’s a weird question to ask… Did she ask any more?”

“Yeah, one more… But I can’t remember it…”

“Remember it.”

“I can’t!”

“Try harder.”

“I’m trying! Just give me a second to think! I can’t think while I’m – oh. I remember.”

Rosalie sighed. She was never going to understand guys. “Well?”

“She asked which Greek god I would be, if I could be any one I wanted.”

This one made Rosalie stop. Greek gods… Superpowers… Power in general… This could mean trouble. “Maybe you should come over here…” she sent to him. She was afraid he might do something stupid, and she wanted to be able to keep an eye on him.

“I’ll be right over,” he said.

“Give me an hour or so to get cleaned up.”

“Okay.”

Only thirty minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Rosalie groaned. She had told him to wait an hour. While she was dressed, she wasn’t completely ready for him. But, she couldn’t keep him waiting at the door.

“Just a minute,” she sent to him, and put her hair up quickly. Once that was done, she walked through the hallway and turned towards the foyer.

She opened the door, saying, “Why are you here so early?”

But it wasn’t Kyle. It was Charles. “I have something important to tell you,” he said, walking past her into the house. Rosalie sighed and closed the door behind him, wishing she had had a little more time to put on her makeup.

“Okay, what’s going on?” she asked.

She heard Kyle. “What are you talking about?” While it hadn’t been him at the door, Kyle had heard the question, “Why are you here so early,” that she had unknowingly sent to him, and he didn’t understand what she meant.

“Kyle’s been on the news,” he said simply. “Something tells me media attention is the last thing you want right now.”

“I know about it already,” she said, heading back to the bathroom. Then to Kyle, “I thought you were at the door, but it was Charlie. Sorry.”

“You already know?” Charles asked, following her down the hallway. “What’s going on with it?”

“Yup, I know. Kyle told me right after it happened.” She turned right at the end of the hallway into her room, giving the door a gentle push so it would close itself as she headed for her bathroom.

“Should I come over there early?” Kyle asked.

This was getting to be a juggling act – it was like trying to hold two IM conversations at once. She could manage – it wasn’t too hard for her. “Nope, don’t bother,” she sent back to him.

Charles caught the door before it closed. “I saw it on TV,” he said.

Rosalie stopped. “Wait… What? What were they talking about?” Rosalie feared he was going to say “her powers,” but was praying he wouldn’t.

“It was about some sort of Internet bug that’s going around,” he said. “There was also something about an attack on Washington, D.C.”

“An attack on Washington?” she asked, shocked.

“Yeah, but his bit was just him bragging about the software he wrote.” He stopped, and reconsidered his phrasing. It hadn’t exactly been “bragging”, but Charles decided not to correct himself – he didn’t quite feel that Kyle deserved that courtesy.

But Rosalie hadn’t heard him. Kyle was in the same news story as an attack on the Capital? It didn’t seem to make sense. “You’re going to have to tell me everything,” she said.

Charles began to recall the events of the day for her…

***

Charles awoke to a lack of noise, which he didn’t like – he wasn’t a fan of silence. Rolling over, he looked at his alarm clock. Hey… The game’s on… Charles’s favorite football team was having an incredible year, and he didn’t want to miss a bit of it. While he played football himself, he didn’t professionally. Well, not yet, anyway. He’d never done very well in school (he’d all but flunked science and mathematics), but on the field he was a force to be reckoned with. Right now he was just trying to find a good college that would take him.

He got out of bed and flipped on the TV. But there was no football… On every channel, it was the same: a news story about spies infiltrating the CIA.

Finally he got tired of flipping through, and took a look at what they were talking about.

“…But for those of you who are having trouble with your web browser, you’re not alone. Approximately 200,000,000 people are estimated to have had some sort of similar problem in the last several days, due to a computer virus.

“Yesterday afternoon, a heavily armed group of terrorists broke into the Pentagon yesterday, easily bypassing the security systems, which had been disabled by the virus. We’re not sure of exactly how much, but a large number of classified files were stolen. There is a known cure for the virus, however, supplied by GeniSys. It’s free to download and run. To obtain it, visit their website, at the address displayed at the bottom of your screen.” They rolled the address across the news ticker.

Here they started playing previously recorded footage: a man in his twenties talking to the reporter. “Well, I wrote the code for it, and making it free seemed the right thing to do, with as many people affected by it as there were. After all, it’s not quite even a trial version – it expires after a single execution. You may note that –”

Charles stopped listening and stared at the screen. He knew that face… It was… Kyle?

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked closer. Yes, it was Kyle, the same guy he’d beaten up the night before. The same guy who’d knocked him out. But why was he on TV? Rosalie was going to have to know about this…

Charles turned the TV off and went to get dressed. This was news – literally.

Suddenly the phone rang, startling him. Without checking, he guessed at who it was. Hoping against hope that he was wrong, he cautiously picked up the phone off the bedside table and turned it on. “…Hello?”

***

While Rosalie finished fixing herself up, Charles told her every bit of what they had said on the news, and she thought it over. But she didn’t have much time to think – the doorbell rang.

Rosalie got up and hurried into the foyer. Kyle was early, and she told him so as she opened the door. “Kyle, you’re early,” she began.

But again, it wasn’t Kyle. “Hi!” said Caroline. “Can I come in?”

“Carly! Hi! Yes you can!” Rosalie said, smiling happily. Maybe Caroline had some good news for her.

Caroline liked everything. No – let me emphasize that. Caroline loved everything. When she got interested in something, she would search out everything she could find on that subject until she had exhausted every available source of information, and then she’d latch onto another topic and drain it dry. And then the process would repeat. As a result, she knew just about everything there was to know about everything. But even she had to admit that she didn’t know what was going on with Rosalie and Kyle.

She had been up for a large part of the night hunting down everything she could find about magic, superpowers, and chi – anything and everything that might have something to do with the abilities Rosalie and her new friend had.

And she had found something. Something very important.

Caroline came inside, and Rosalie closed the door behind her. “So, what’s up?” Rosalie asked her happily.

“I found out something important!” Caroline said excitedly.

“Um… I don’t know if you’re aware of it…” She heard Kyle’s voice in her head. “But… You’re sending a lot of useless chatter my way.”

“Just come on over, Kyle,” she told him with a mental sigh. “Everybody else is here already.”

Caroline certainly looked like she had something important to say. “The flash?”

Rosalie nodded. She knew what her friend was talking about, but where was she headed with it?

Caroline’s next sentence made everyone do a double take. “I know what it was.”

Even Kyle, half a mile away, could sense the astonishment Rosalie was unknowingly sending him.

Chapter 16 - Flashes Explained

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:45:06 -0500

“What!?!” Rosalie couldn’t believe it. How had Carly found out what it was so quickly? She thought back a couple days…

She had been standing in the break room off the kitchen in her bakery… Kyle stood up, and reached for a bag of mini-muffins she had baked, and their hands touched… A bright flash of blue-white light blinded them… And then it was gone, just like that.

“What do you mean you know what it was? I only told you about it yesterday!”

“Well, I didn’t know then, silly! I would’ve told you!” Caroline laughed like it was funny.

Caroline – when she laughed – had the curious ability of being able to cause everyone around her to laugh. And this was no exception.

“I know that!” Rosalie laughed, “I was asking how you learned it so quickly!”

Charles was laughing too. He didn’t even know why they were laughing.

Caroline (after several unsuccessful attempts) stopped laughing so she could talk clearly. “Well, I looked it up on the Internet after I got back last night. I actually found a great deal about it, but it was only by accident.”

“By accident? What do you mean?” Rosalie asked her friend.

“I typed the wrong word,” she said, laughing again.

Everyone else followed suit.

In the midst of all the laughter, the doorbell rang. Rosalie ran to see who it was, hoping it was Kyle. And this time, it was Kyle.

“Hi, everybody,” he said, looking in the door unconfidently. “What are you guys laughing about?” He had a vague idea that they were laughing at him, if not about him.

“We’re laughing because Carly is laughing,” Rosalie explained, without explaining what she meant.

Kyle assumed that Caroline must have a crazy, nasally, snorty laugh, which is the only thing he could think of that would make sense. But then, he didn’t know Caroline.

“Kyle, Carly says she knows what the flash was,” Rosalie said, expecting a reaction, which she got: Kyle’s eyes grew wide.

“Are you serious?!? How does she know? Does she know about this type of thing?” Kyle began firing question after question, curious to the greatest degree about Caroline’s knowledge.

“No, I just found out last night,” Caroline said from behind Rosalie.

Rosalie brought Kyle inside and closed the door behind him. “Well, now that everybody is here, you can tell us, right?” Rosalie said eagerly.

“Hey,” said Charles, “Let’s all go into the living room so we can sit down. It’s kind of crowded in the foyer.” And it was – the foyer was a six-foot square room at the end of a hallway.

Everyone migrated to the living room and sat down – Kyle on the loveseat like before, Charles across from him in a chair, and Rosalie and Caroline on the sofa. They were all pretty much the same distance away from each other.

Caroline began. “Well, I started searching for things like ‘superpowers’ and stuff like that, but all that got me were comics. So I tried something else – telekinesis, telepathy, and flashes of light, and while I didn’t find anything for a long time, I finally did. And it’s crazy – but it’s been documented before.”

“What? You mean there are people out there like us?” Rosalie was awestruck. She could hardly imagine it – a whole community of people just like her, with abilities and powers. It would be so nice to meet some of those people! But she was to be disappointed.

“No, no, no,” Caroline said, shaking her head. “Nobody has had anything nearly as powerful as yours and Kyle’s. Not recently, anyway. The most powerful case documented in the past hundred years was a man in New York who was able to move metal marbles short distances with his mind, and a woman in China who could sense the way people were feeling across short distances. It’s easy to see that anybody who claims to have more than that is lying.

“Most of the time, people stay pretty quiet about it, and as a result, the media never hears about it. Or if they do, they don’t think it’s important enough to talk about, or they think it’s fake. So, you two are pretty much the only ones with powers that are actually useful.”

“So… They’re the only ones out there like this?” Charles asked.

Kyle grinned. “You make that sound like it’s a bad thing!”

Charles made a quick comeback. “You make it sound like it’s a good thing!” Ever since last night, he had often found himself wishing none of it had ever happened.

Becoming more serious, Kyle replied, “Well, it might be. Consider: What would the world be like if there were thousands of people running around with superpowers? Crime organizations would always be looking to hire them. And even if they didn’t, the temptations these people would have to use their powers for personal gain would be too much to handle for some of them. Whole countries could be wiped away overnight.”

“Yeah, that might be good for a movie,” Charles said, rolling his eyes, “but hello! This is the real world. Things like that don’t happen.”

“And things like this do?”

Charles didn’t have a response. The guy had a point. He was accepting things that he had previously considered impossible as reality. At this point, anything should seem possible.

Rosalie sighed. Why did men have to act as if everything was a competition? “Okay, Carly! Keep going! What was the flash?”

Carly hesitated. “Well, you have to believe a number of things for any of it to make sense. One: you have to believe that tiny parts of people’s souls remain here on Earth after they die – sort of like copies of the souls, but only tiny parts of them.”

“The Bible never mentions anything about that…” Rosalie put in. As a Catholic, this seemed to clash with her religion, and it made her uncomfortable.

Kyle was in a philosophical mood, thanks to Charles’s comment earlier. “Well, the Bible never mentioned electricity either, or dinosaurs, or other planets, but those are all just as real as the things the Bible did mention, right? The Bible didn’t say everything.”

Charles thought he could poke a hole in Kyle’s observation. “Those things have nothing to do with the Bible. Souls and spirits do.”

Kyle was stuck. He couldn’t think of a single thing soul-or-spirit-related that people universally accepted as fact to use as a comparison. That was the problem – nothing of supernatural origin can be proved to be true, as it can’t be seen. Fortunately for him, Caroline continued.

“Two: you have to believe that the little bits and pieces of souls are passed down the family tree, with every person holding a tiny bit of their ancestors’ souls with them. Three: you have to believe that these ‘soul pieces’ can be ‘united’ with other ‘compatible’ soul pieces.”

Curious, Kyle asked hesitantly, “And… How are two ‘soul pieces’ determined to be compatible?”

Caroline wasn’t sure. “Well, it never said anywhere exactly, but I think it has something to do with family lines being kept separate and still remaining extremely similar as to their likes and dislikes, tendencies, that sort of thing. But, anyway – the soul pieces are supposedly responsible for things people have noticed like karma, luck, and intuition – like when someone says ‘I just had a feeling I’d find you here,’ or something similar.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Charles’s mouth. “I don’t believe in any of that stuff,” he said dryly.

“Neither do I,” said Kyle, absentmindedly knocking his knuckles together.

“Well you don’t have to,” Caroline laughed, “I’m just trying to get a point across!” Everybody laughed with her – albeit uncomfortably. “It’s essential to my point. Four: you have to believe that ghosts are real, and that they can interact with the physical world.

“When two people with large (and I mean really large) numbers of compatible soul pieces touch (and it has to be the hands, from what I’ve read), their pieces ‘unite’, forming a number of new ‘souls’, which are completely controlled by the two people who the pieces belonged to. It always comes along with a flash of light, and the color determines the powers the people get.”

“Like what?” Rosalie asked. She recalled the color of her flash clearly – bright blue-white.

“Well, there are many different ones… Reddish means evil powers, like being able to cause pain… I don’t remember all of them – I’d have to go look it back up.”

Charles rubbed his chin thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger. “So… This could’ve happened to anyone…”

“And it still could,” Caroline continued, nodding in agreement. “It might happen all the time and people just keep quiet about it.

“Anyway, the ‘new souls’ are controlled by the people who were present at the time of the flash – the people who touched hands. They can do different things, like phasing through solid objects, changing temperatures, altering gravity, flying, telekinesis, invisibility, morphing, et cetera.

“Oh! The two people are always connected mentally – they can send thoughts to each other. The powers are symbiotic – if one person dies, the other person loses their powers. But… yeah, that’s pretty much everything.”

It was a lot to take in all at once. Everyone sat there, trying to imagine what Caroline had just explained.

“This is pointless,” Kyle said suddenly. Three sets of eyes bored into him.

“That’s a pretty hurtful thing to say,” Caroline said, a little hurt that Kyle didn’t believe her. “It took me a long time to find all that, and now you won’t even consider it?”

Kyle shook his head. “That’s not what I’m saying at all! I’m saying that while it’s nice to know how it started, it’s irrelevant now. It’s pointless to sit here and ponder why it’s happening when we could choose to focus on what we should do about it, especially if we’re the only ones who have ever had powers this strong before.”

“But you aren’tthe only ones! There have been cases where people have had powers at least as powerful as yours!”

“You didn’t say there were!”

“I did too! I only said that there haven’t been in the past one hundred years or so.”

Rosalie thought she should say something to stop them from arguing. “It kinda sounds like the passage of time makes it so that it’s more and more likely for two people to be compatible, with all those souls piling up over the years.”

Raising an eyebrow, Caroline answered thoughtfully. “Yeah, I did think of that last night… But apparently, that’s not so – all the soul pieces have to be compatible… Or at least, the most recent ones.”

She thought it over. “That makes sense… But Carly, how can we use this information to help us?”

“Easy. I tell you what people with powers like yours were capable of, and you try to master your powers. Some are emotionally based, some are mentally based, and some are physically based, but they’re all capable of being mastered. Most cases were in ancient China, interestingly.”

“The Chinese worshipped their ancestors…” Kyle noted.

Charles had been quiet for a while, but now he spoke. “It seems to me…” he began purposefully, “that the first thing we should do is find out what the color of your flash was, and what it means, so that we can accurately predict what powers you’re likely to have.” He decided not to add “so that we can prepare against them”.

This made sense to everybody.

“It was a very bright white-blue,” Rosalie said.

Kyle hesitated. “Well… There was a bit of a cyan color in there too…”

“I didn’t see that…”

He shrugged. “It flickered, just like the blue did… And white and blue mixed resembles cyan anyway, so…” His voice trailed off.

Caroline sat thinking for a second. “I only read about one instance where there were three colors… It’s extremely rare, as far as I can tell. It doesn’t mean anything special, either – the other person who had it happen wound up with only fragments of the powers from their set.”

Rosalie nodded slowly. “Okay… So… What about our colors?”

Her friend grinned. “I’m getting to that,” she laughed. “White is referred to as the ‘ethereal’ set – sometimes, but infrequently, as the ‘divine’ set – and is supposedly the most desirable. The person’s powers can’t be used to fight with, but they’re very powerful: invisibility, mind-reading, teleportation, control of time and life, manipulation of light, etc.”

Rosalie was astonished. “But I only have two of those!”

Caroline laughed. “Well, I never said you’d get all of them!”

“And blue?” Kyle asked anxiously. “I think Rosalie got the white set… I’ve already used mine aggressively… Sorry about that,” he added, to Charles.

“Don’t worry about it,” Charles said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand.

Caroline thought for a moment. “Blue…” she said, “is simple – cold-related powers. Some of them are the most difficult to master. But cyan, on the other hand…” Here she paused, searching her mind. “Cyan is a set that has a wide variety of powers that come with it…”

“What are they?” Kyle wasn’t trying very hard to conceal his eagerness, and it came across as impatience.

“Hold your horses!” Caroline laughed. “I’m getting there! Just give me a second!

“They’re usually focused around telekinesis. But not always. Some people can cause objects to implode, when they gain enough skill, others can boil water by doing nothing other than looking at it.

“Oh! That reminds me! Cold temperatures heal the wounds of a person with the blue set! It explains why your face healed so quickly!” Caroline was switching topics rapidly. She had a very active mind.

Charles laughed. “So we’ll never know how much I hurt him! Hey – wanna go another round?” he asked Kyle jokingly.

Kyle laughed nervously. “Nah – I’m fine.” He really didn’t want to fight Charles again. Sure, it would heal – but it hurt! Looking back at Caroline, he asked, “So, what else do you know about them?”

Caroline collected her thoughts and began relating everything she could remember. She had studied a long time the night before, so that she would be able to tell everybody all they needed to know from memory. “Well, the telekinesis is completely controlled by physical motions, like moving your hand around. And according to what I’ve read, you’re nowhere near mastering it.”

Kyle felt like she was accusing him of something. “What do you mean? I’m pretty good! Are you saying I’m lazy?”

Rosalie almost rolled her eyes. Why couldn’t Kyle just listen without jumping to conclusions? “No, she’s saying exactly what she said – you haven’t mastered your powers yet.”

“Exactly,” Caroline continued, “And your ice powers are controlled through your emotions.” Suddenly she remembered something else she had read. “Have you always been somewhat resistant to cold weather?”

Kyle was very proud of this fact. “Yes, I am,” he said.

“That’s what I thought. It said that people with the ice powers are usually already resistant to cold temperatures even before the flash happens.”

“Well, it never healed me before,” Kyle said. “But I don’t usually wear a coat. Hey…” Kyle remembered something. “Does flying come with the blue powers?”

Caroline laughed. “Oh, I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Kyle nodded slowly, unaware that she’d just answered his question. “Yes… but does it?”

“No, silly!” she laughed again. Charles and Rosalie were laughing too.

Kyle felt like shrinking. Or maybe turning invisible…

“No, flying is one of the gold powers,” Caroline clarified for him, suppressing a laugh.

Kyle was embarrassed. Why were they all laughing at him? He felt his ears turning red. But, he was still determined to learn to fly, even if it was rather awkward. With them still laughing, he decided to ask another question so they’d stop. “So what’s the purpose of our powers?” he asked.

And everybody stopped, as they considered the question. “Do they have to have a purpose?” Rosalie asked. “Maybe they’re just there by chance.” She didn’t want to lose Charles, and she was afraid this might creep him out, which she was right about – she knew him well. And besides, Charles was sure to be jealous of Kyle, since it was he who started it all in the first place.

Charles agreed with Rosalie. “Yeah, not everything has some ‘fate’ to it, you know. There’s no such thing. We make our own choices. There doesn’t have to be a reason. It just is, and that’s all we need to know.”

That wasn’t what Rosalie had meant at all, but she wasn’t going to say anything. They all sat there uncomfortably, each having a different opinion of what they should do next.

“Okay, let’s vote,” Kyle suggested.

“Vote on what?” was simultaneously voiced by the other three individuals present.

“What we should do next, of course.”

“That’s crazy,” Charles said, “There’s only one thing that can be done – we don’t let it rule our lives.”

Caroline got up. “We’ll vote anyway,” she said decidedly. “Whoever wants us to try to help Rosalie and Kyle master their powers, raise your right hand. Whoever wants us to forget about it, raise your left hand.”

Two rights and two lefts rose in the air.

“What?!?” Kyle couldn’t believe Rosalie’s vote. “You want us to just forget about it? But why? Do you hate your powers or something?”

Rosalie was uncomfortable with her decision herself, and uncomfortable that he should even ask. “Well, I do like my powers… They can be really fun. I just… They make everything so complicated! I liked it better when I was just plain old Rosalie Grace. Everything was so much simpler then. I have to worry about not using my powers just as much as I do about using them.”

Kyle made an analogy. “Yes, everything was simpler, but didn’t the world seem simpler when you were five than it does now? You wouldn’t like to go back and be five again, would you?” he asked.

“True… But I don’t want to have to hide who I am from everybody.”

Kyle sighed. He hadn’t realized she felt this way. He was so excited about all of it. And she… She didn’t feel comfortable with it yet. “You don’t have to hide who you are… Just what you can do…” he said, though it lacked the confidence it needed to make it convincing.

Charles ignored him. “And why did you vote the way you did, Caroline?”

“I don’t want all my research to be useless. Plus – I think it’s all kind of cool.”

“You like the idea of people snooping around in your head?”

“Hey!” Rosalie interjected. “I don’t do that!”

“What is it, Charles?” Kyle asked, with a grin creeping over his face. “You have something to hide?” He didn’t really like Charles at all – and why should he? The guy had beaten him up the very hour they’d met. As if that wasn’t enough, he had Rosalie, and while Kyle kept it well-hidden, he was a little jealous deep down.

Charles was taken aback by Kyle’s satiric remark. “No… I just don’t want everyone to know what I’m thinking all the time. I want privacy.”

Rosalie thought she knew exactly what he meant. “I know what you mean…” she said. “I feel that way all the time. Everybody stares at me when I go out…”

Kyle smiled. “But there’s a good reason for it,” he began, but then he stopped. This wasn’t a good time to continue. And besides – Rosalie knew she was famous, though she clearly hadn’t made the connection.

“There is no good reason for it! They make me all feel like I’m stupid or something!” she said unhappily. “Just think how they’ll stare when they know I can do all of this, too.”

Caroline thought about it. Suddenly fame didn’t seem so attractive.

“I’m so weird…” Rosalie said, her face in her hands.

Charles got up from his head and sat down beside her, giving her a hug.

“You’re not weird!” Kyle said comfortingly, trying to cheer her up. “Trust me – I know weird, and weird you’re not! I…” He stopped. Charles was glaring at him with a look that meant something along the lines of “go get your own girl to comfort.” Apparently, Charles is still holding a grudge about getting knocked out, Kyle reflected. Or it might be because he’s jealous of how I had something so special happen with his girlfriend. He didn’t realize there was a third option – that Charles could be holding a grudge about the fact that his girlfriend had powers in the first place.

“I just wish none of this had ever happened,” Rosalie said in a broken voice. She began to sob quietly, shaking in Charles’s arms.

Caroline sat down by her friend and gave her a hug. She was there for her.

Kyle sat awkwardly on the loveseat, the only one not allowed to comfort his new friend. He was feeling so depressed – his empathy kicking in – he was feeling almost like crying himself. All he wanted to do was hug Rosalie to try to let her know he cared. But what she’d just said… She wishes none of it had ever happened… She wishes she’d never met me, he conjectured. He felt awful.

And Rosalie cried.

Charles, still holding his girl, looked over at Kyle and nodded in the direction of the door. Kyle understood – he wasn’t wanted around anymore. Once an outcast, always an outcast.

Kyle stood and walked quietly out of the house. Not even Rosalie heard him as he left.

Chapter 17 - A Kidnapping

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:09:05 -0500

Rosalie shook silently, and the tears streamed down her face. She wasn’t sad, there was just too much for her to handle at once. Besides, she tended to cry easily, though that fact embarrassed her.

She was being attacked from all sides, and she couldn’t find a way to escape. But her friends – her friends were there for her. She felt safe; warm; protected. As long as her friends were there, she was fine.

But she wasn’t fine. It hurt so much – the realization that she wasn’t just different; she wasn’t just unique – she was alone in her mutation. Before, she had only been different. Now people had a good reason to stare – she was a freak of nature; something unintended by genetics; a flaw in the structure of the universe.

“I’m such a freak,” she cried. Her friends held her tightly. They were there for her, and she felt glad of it. They wouldn’t leave her, not even in her darkest hour. She would never be alone.

Then why did she feel so alone? She was going alone into this new, dark world of spirits and powers… And she couldn’t stop it from happening, either.

Divine… Divine nothing. She felt like a stain: she wasn’t supposed to exist, but she couldn’t just leave, either.

Charles kissed the top of her head. He thought he’d felt what she was feeling, though he hadn’t felt like crying about it. He assumed she didn’t want her powers, and he began to wonder if there might be a way to reverse what happened. Possibly… Well, if the powers required Kyle’s existence to function… But no! He wiped that thought out of his mind. But maybe… He made a mental note to ask Caroline if it was possible to take Rosalie’s powers away.

Rosalie continued shaking in her cascading tears. Everything was so complicated now. There wasn’t just black and white; real and fake. Now there was a gray area: the unknown. Anything could be real. And anything could be fake, too. She couldn’t trust herself – she couldn’t trust anyone – no one could understand what she was going through. She was… alone…

Charles hugged her closer.

No… She wasn’t alone. Her friends were there. They may not have understood how she felt, but they cared. She felt so thankful for her friends, Carly and Charlie. And Kyle, too.

No – she wasn’t alone! Kyle had the exact same problem she had – if she was weird, then he was weird, too. He knew how she felt. And he cared, too.

Slowly the sobs subsided, and Rosalie regained her composure, wiping the tears from her face. It felt good to cry. It helped. She sat up and looked around. There was Charlie on her right, and Carly on her left. Charlie was still holding her, and he leaned back to see her face. Carly was giving her a hug, too. But… Where was Kyle?

She looked around the room. She didn’t see him anywhere. Where was he?

***

Kyle drove aimlessly around town in circles, listening to sad-themed songs with tears of frustration and disappointment in his eyes. He would not allow himself to cry. Not over something as simple as this.

He tried to force himself to believe that there was no real problem. They had rejected him. So what? It happened all the time. He had entered a circle of friends and destroyed it with an unexpected event. It was his fault. He knew it, and nobody could tell him otherwise – if he’d never shown up, Rosalie would still be happy.

“Darkness, darkness everywhere, do you feel all alone?” a voice sang. The radio seemed to be mocking him, and Kyle shut it off, with a bit of undeserved roughness.

If he had simply posted the antivirus software on his company’s website immediately, he would never have had to visit Rosalie. He never would have met her. He never would have ruined her life. And it was ruined – she hated what he had done to her.

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Why had he been so thoughtless? “What is there to lose,” he mouthed silently, mocking his thoughts of a few days ago. If he had just kept his mouth shut and not tried to see her in person, none of this would have happened! If he hadn’t taken a break! If that stupid popup hadn’t shown up!

Kyle began to think over the series of unusual events that led to his meeting of Rosalie. One, he was programming online – not something he usually did. Two, someone had released an incredibly potent virus. Three, the virus had evaded his firewall. Four, the virus evaded his antivirus protection. Five, the popup had shown up. Six, he had fixed his antivirus software. Seven, he hadn’t wanted to continue programming, so he got on Yahoo Answers instead. Eight, Rosalie had contracted the same virus, and posted on Yahoo Answers. Nine, he had looked at a question with over a hundred answers – not something he usually did. Ten, he had answered and gave the only useful answer out of over a hundred. Eleven, Rosalie couldn’t use MediaFire. Twelve, she had written to him. Thirteen, she had signed her name wrong – not using her screen name. Fourteen, he had written back saying he could come over and give it to her. He couldn’t, really – he was too far away. Fifteen, she wrote back and accepted his offer.

He mentally counted up the score: Kyle, 6; Rosalie, 4. It was all because of him – if he hadn’t written back instead of sending it to her, none of it would have happened.

But it wasn’t his fault! Kyle angrily pounded the steering wheel, accidentally honking while in the left turn lane. The drivers nearby looked at him in annoyance. He shrugged off their stares and turned slowly onto the next street.

He felt so depressed. Why should he feel depressed? There was no reason. He’d only known these people for a couple days – two of them for less than a day, actually. So what if he ruined their lives?

But it wasn’t their lives that were concerning him.

It was Rosalie’s.

No!!!!! he yelled wordlessly, angered at his thoughts. He would not be weak like this! So what? If they were depressed, fine! He’d leave them, just like everybody else had left him! Let someone else see how it feels! Serve them right, too!

But he couldn’t… Rejection and abandonment were two of the things he feared most. For a guy who claimed to be fearless, of all the things there were to be feared, he feared two that were immaterial. They couldn’t physically hurt him.

But oh! His emotions were crushed; battered; bruised. He was in pain, but mentally.

He couldn’t do it to someone else.

But hadn’t he already?

By leaving the house with Rosalie still crying, he had abandoned her. He’d done the same thing to her that people had done to him time after time. So many people had done it to him before.

People would say they were his friend, and then they’d leave – without even saying goodbye. They’d still be online – he could track them down. They’d still be around – if he drove by their houses, occasionally they’d be outside. But he couldn’t make himself stop the car and talk to them – he respected their decisions, no matter how much it hurt him.

He cared about those who hated him. He cared about those who didn’t. He cared about everyone he ever met. But no one returned the favor.

I’ve grown used to it over time, he told himself.

That was a flat-out lie, and Kyle knew it, too. He was lying to himself. You couldn’t just grow used to the disappointment and abandonment. The pain stuck with you. And it piled up. It got worse, and worse, until you just wanted to scream! But you had to suck it up and keep going. People were counting on you to be ready to help. If you needed help, what good were you? None. Just about as useless as a mop at a landfill. But he was useless… He needed help… He needed a friend; a shoulder to cry on.

But Rosalie – how could he have done such a thing to her? He was just as bad as the people who had left him. After everything he had been through with her – all she had done for him – with him – he had abandoned her… Just like everyone had abandoned him… She would hurt so badly when she knew…

The guilt began slowly eating away at him, as he drove along. He cared about her. A lot more than he’d ever let on, in fact. A lot more than he should have. So what if Charles had practically told him never to talk to her again? She was his friend. Kyle felt he’d done the wrong thing by letting Charles order him out of there, and wanted desperately to fix it. But… he didn’t know how. He’d already left – there was no way she’d ever forgive him for abandoning her like that – especially not as he’d left right when she could’ve used his help the most.

Kyle’s eyes narrowed. So what if she never forgave him completely? He’d done the wrong thing, a victim of the same bully he’d met the night before. And he’d let that same bully order him out the door.

He would not allow this! Let Charles beat him up again – he’d bear the scars as medals of honor. He valued his friendship with Rosalie too much to abandon her completely. He’d accept the punishment and face it head-on.

Kyle swung the car around, doing an illegal u-turn through four lanes of traffic.

***

“Where is Kyle?” Rosalie asked in confusion. He had been there just a few minutes before.

“He left when you started crying,” Caroline said truthfully. The look on her face showed she was sympathetic, and that she didn’t approve of what he’d done.

“Why would he have done that?” Rosalie couldn’t figure it out. “I thought I knew him better than that – I would never have thought he’d do something like that.”

“Hey, it’s okay, Rosalie – you only met him a couple days ago.” Charles said. “Some people fake their personalities. Maybe he did the same.” Not a direct lie…

It didn’t help Rosalie any. Now she was upset. “I know he wouldn’t have done something like that! He can’t fake his personality, I read minds, remember? But how could he just sneak off like that?”

“Yes, I know you read minds.” Charles sighed. “How could I forget?” He figured she was probably reading his mind more than she was listening to him. He figured he should probably stop figuring before she figured out what he was figuring.

He figured wrong. Rosalie actually rarely read minds. It made you feel guilty about yourself. It was invasive – it was like peeking into someone’s bathroom window. Sure, it could prove interesting, even enjoyable. But it wasn’t really worth it – you felt so bad about it later.

There was a knock at the door.

Rosalie hastened to get up out of her seat. She was positive it must be Kyle. Her friends stood up and followed her there. Caroline wanted to know why he had left. Charles didn’t seem surprised, only tense.

***

Kyle made it to Rosalie’s house as quickly as he could. He had his car door open before he had even come to a complete stop. He was in a rush – he didn’t want Rosalie to notice his absence, or if she did, he wanted that absence to be as short as possible.

He ran up the front walk, and tried the door. It was locked; it wouldn’t open. He knocked loudly.

He waited. There was no response from within.

He knocked harder and longer, ringing the doorbell as well. There was still no sign that they were coming to open it for him.

He waited for five minutes. Just in case they couldn’t come, he wasn’t going to sit there pounding constantly.

He tried one last time, but still no one answered. They left? That doesn’t make sense, he thought. Why would they leave?

Leaving the front door and walking around the side of the house, he looked up the driveway. The cars were still there. Okay, so maybe they didn’t leave after all, he thought, a little hurt and relieved at the same time. But something didn’t seem right…

Poking his head around the back of the house, he noticed that back door into was ajar, and the doorframe damaged. Cautiously, he walked over and went inside.

It looked like a tornado had hit. Papers were everywhere. The couch was lying upside down. A smashed vase of flowers was in the middle of the foyer floor. The kitchen was untouched, however. Most of the damage appeared to be in the living room and foyer. What had happened here?

He noticed a small piece of paper on the floor – it seemed out of place – it was a single post-it note, face-up and written on in hastily scribbled handwriting…

***

Rosalie never made it to the front door.

The door flew open – Kyle had left it unlocked, as he had found it. Three armed men in suits walked in. A number of men in ski masks followed. Everyone was wearing black…

Rosalie screamed, and Caroline did the same. Charles leapt into a well-practiced defensive stance. Rosalie knew he’d taken fight lessons in high school – he was going to give them a taste of pain.

The tall man in front – easily seven feet – yelled orders and the masked men formed a line, preventing Rosalie, Charles, and Caroline from escaping. From behind them, they heard someone kick open the back door, and more men in black started piling in behind them. The three friends had no chance of escape.

Tank leaped out for the throat of one of the men in the back, growling viciously. A tranquilizer swept out and injected something into him, and he was down, the man sporting only minor injuries.

But Charles wasn’t going down without a fight. As the men rushed at him, he turned into a tornado of fury – left and right men flew, smashing into others behind them. Someone jumped at him, and a well-aimed punch destroyed their efforts, sending them crashing to the floor.

In the midst of all the confusion and panic she was in, Rosalie felt loved – Charles would stop at nothing to protect her.

Someone grabbed her from behind.

With another strike, Charles sent yet another man tumbling to the floor. Someone leapt at him from behind, and kicked him in the back. The blow knocked him to his knees, but he got up and prepared to return the attack – a double-barreled punch, both fists at the ready.

“Stop!” yelled a deep voice. It was the tall man, as he held up a black-gloved hand. Everything he wore was black, from the sunglasses to the tie to the wing-tipped shoes. Even his shoulder-length, greased-back hair was jet black. His white shirt under his suit jacket was the only exception.

Charles stopped and turned around. The two men who had walked in with the tall guy had guns to Caroline and Rosalie’s temples. The kick to the back had distracted him for a little too long. But they had him, and he surrendered.

They bound him, Rosalie, and Caroline, and put them in the back of one of the vehicles. It was a generic utility van – but it was all black. The rest of the men piled into the other two vans, and all three drove away.

Rosalie was frightened and bewildered. Who were these people? What did they want with her friends? Did they know about her secret? And where was Kyle?

They had tied her hands behind her back, and they had bound her feet as well. They hadn’t skipped her mouth; they had gagged her – she couldn’t make a sound. But she could still see.

A man, crouching to keep from knocking his head on the low ceiling, approached them, holding a syringe filled with a translucent liquid. He injected some of it into Rosalie’s arm.

As the liquid surged through her veins, Rosalie’s vision blurred, and she felt her eyelids growing heavy…

***

Kyle walked over to the small square of paper and picked it up. He didn’t recognize the handwriting scribbled over the surface, and he could just barely make out what it said:

“KIDNAPPED – HELP!”

There was a phone number scrawled along the bottom, complete with an area code. It wasn’t his own – that much he knew. Nor was it Rosalie’s – she’d given him her phone number the day they met, and the number on the note he was holding didn’t match it, though it looked kind of like her handwriting.

Suddenly everything started making a lot of sense. “Rosalie!” he called out for her mentally, but to no avail. Rosalie wasn’t answering.

Obviously, Rosalie and her friends had been kidnapped… Who would do such a thing?

He quickly came up with the most obvious answer: someone wanted to use Rosalie’s powers – and possibly his, too – for themselves. If he had been there when it had happened, he would’ve been captured, too. Since he wasn’t… he was their only hope.

He ran to the phone and began dialing the number on the paper. Then he stopped in mid-dial. A phone call was the last thing he wanted to make right now – if she had her phone with her, someone else would answer. He’d seen the movies about hostages – the owner of the phone is never the one who picks up once they’re kidnapped. It would be someone trying to bribe him with their safety… and it would most likely end with Rosalie or her friends getting hurt.

An idea struck him, and he grabbed a pen from next to the phone and wrote the number down on his hand.

Running outside to his car, Kyle retrieved his laptop. Then, coming back into the house, he got a cable-modem connection going, and connected to the internet.

All phones sent out a signal to all nearby towers, and the signal strength any given phone to each tower could be used to gauge the phone’s distance from them. Kyle happened to know from experience that all this data was recorded. If he could hack into the system and triangulate where Rosalie’s (or whoever’s) phone was, he might be able to save them. Well… That was his plan so far, anyway. The rest of the details could be filled in later.

Working carefully and quickly, he hacked into the satellite data system. He needed to be sure he couldn’t be traced, so he set up a modulator to scramble the outgoing data from his signal. It wasn’t his first time doing this type of thing, actually…

A quick scan of the data showed that one did indeed exist in his general area with the number he’d copied. But he needed more…

He turned his attention to the data for that particular phone. This area was more heavily encrypted – he’d need a decoder. Which he had.

He’d written it when he was sixteen – it would take meaningless scrambled data and convert it to readable text. And it worked fast, too. He was only waiting twenty seconds. Then, the information he needed showed up on his screen.

He had the password for obtaining the administrator privileges for the site.

After sending out a decoy bot to disguise his hacking, he put in the password, being careful to include the eight-character binary signature at the end, which was apparently supposed to be some sort of trap for the unwary.

Two minutes later, he’d accomplished his goal, even better than he’d planned – the phone in question had GPS. His laptop was uplinked directly to the site’s GPS information. In fact, he even had a map display of where the phone in question was – down to the foot. It was in an abandoned warehouse downtown. He got the feeling that there was no way that she could be there – it had to be a trap. He’d learned to trust his intuition (though half the time he was wrong).

After thinking for a moment, Kyle punched in Rosalie’s cell phone number, and found her phone just as quickly. It was moving away from him, and fast, too.

Kyle packed up his laptop and put it in his car. He was going to need it.

After locking all the doors, he left, headed for the last known location of her phone.

Chapter 18 - Enemy Territory

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:34:05 -0500

As he turned out of the neighborhood and onto the main roads, Kyle was already coming up with solutions to different possible scenarios in his mind – but then he realized he was going to have to find Rosalie first.

Taking out his cell phone, he hooked the charger into the cigarette lighter in his car, and then hooked his phone up to the charger. Removing his laptop from his bag (still driving with one hand), he set the laptop up and hooked the phone to it. Now he could have internet access anywhere.

Kyle quickly re-established his connection with the GPS site, and found the little blip on the map indicating the location of the cell phone he was tracking. It was moving steadily on the interstate…

He was going to catch it.

Oh, if only cops were non-existent. Then he could go at whatever speed he wanted… He was thinking 120 mph sounded good right about now.

He turned onto the interstate and began weaving wildly in between cars, dodging traffic in a dare-devilish sort of way.

Despite his reckless driving, he feared it would still be several hours before he caught up with them…

***

Rosalie awoke from her drug-induced sleep. It was dark… So dark… She couldn’t see a thing. She couldn’t hear anything, either.

Wait… My powers, I’ll use them, she decided, in a light-bulb moment. She listened carefully, and heard many things: the footsteps of someone patrolling; the sound of heavily loaded vehicles; the sound of someone unlocking a security door – she decided she must be in a high-security compound of some sort. She continued to listen, and she heard the sound of breathing. Quiet breathing, but it was breathing, nevertheless.

Someone was in the room with her.

She sat up and tried to figure out where the sound was coming from. But there were so many sounds – bouncing, echoing, and mixing… It was hard to sort between them all – it felt like the way someone with poor eyesight feels without their glasses.

Rosalie focused carefully. It was coming from her right, about fifteen feet away. There was some sort of obstacle between her and the other person, but she couldn’t tell what it was. It was pitch black in the room – too dark to see.

Slowly and carefully, she got to her feet. Nothing bad had happened so far… Her hands and feet had been unbound at some point – she could move around freely.

Taking a few steps forwards, she walked right into a wall. No, it wasn’t a wall…

Feeling carefully, she discovered it was a metal door, with a small window in the top crossed by vertical metal bars. There was a doorknob, but it was locked, and wouldn’t turn.

From behind her, the breathing became louder, and the person stirred. Rosalie decided that finding out who it was had to be her first priority. She turned towards the individual and took several blind steps forwards.

And tripped over a toilet. Apparently, the toilet was the obstacle she had sensed earlier. But she had woken up the person, whoever it was – they were pulling themselves upright from lying on the floor.

“Rose?” a voice asked uncertainly.

“Carly!” Rosalie cried happily, running over to her friend. Amid all this darkness was a ray of sunshine – her best friend was by her side.

“Rose… I can’t see a thing. Where are we?” Caroline asked her friend.

“I dunno – I just woke up, right before you did.”

There was silence for a moment. Neither woman knew where they were, or more importantly, why they were there. “Is Charles here?” Caroline asked, as much to break the silence as to gain information.

“I dunno… I can’t hear him, but I remember he was in the van with us when we left. I hope they didn’t dump him somewhere…” Rosalie said unhappily. If only he was there. He’d get them out of this mess.

“It’s so dark… Pitch black. Like there was never such a thing as light…” Caroline said.

Rosalie had no response. She carefully walked over and sat down next to her friend. Neither of them spoke.

Suddenly, Caroline remembered. “Rose – your powers… You’ll have to learn to use them now.”

Rosalie sighed. She knew Caroline was right – she didn’t have a choice, now. “Yup… I guess so. But I thought I used them well already – do I need to get better?”

Caroline nodded before she remembered her friend couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she said instead, “and we need to know if there’s any you have that you haven’t discovered yet.” She thought over everything she had learned about the ethereal set, and tried to recall all she had read. “Oh! I have a good test to try.”

“Wait – what?” Rosalie was confused. “Test?”

“Yeah! Okay – put your palms and fingers together like you were praying.”

She didn’t know what Caroline was talking about, but she trusted her friend. Hesitantly, she put her palms together, only to be disappointed. “Nothing’s happening!” she said in a singsong voice.

Caroline laughed. “Silly, we’re not done yet!”

Rosalie wasn’t in the mood to join in, but she couldn’t help smiling.

“Okay, now slowly pull them apart.”

Rosalie did so.

There was a brief flash of light from between her palms, as a tiny pinprick of light materialized, and then sputtered from existence. “Whoa! What was that?” Rosalie was tremendously surprised – she could make light?

Caroline laughed again, this time at her friend’s reaction. “It works! Wow! You can create light globes!”

“What are you talking about?”

“That was one of the powers in your set – being able to create globes of light between your palms.”

“Like in those kung-fu cartoons?” Rosalie asked, unsure if she recalling the old TV shows she had flipped through correctly. She hadn’t exactly watched it; she had only seen it from flipping through channels. And it had been a while ago, too.

Caroline hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah… Like in those… I guess they had a grain of truth in them… But the ability to form light globes is passive – it can’t be used aggressively.”

“But it wasn’t a globe that I just made, Carly, just a flash.”

“You didn’t do it right, then.”

Rosalie tried again several times, always getting the same result. The light would flicker to life and then sputter and die. “It’s not working.”

“Try curving your hands a little. That’s what it showed in the pictures.”

She sighed, and took her friend’s advice, curving her hands a little as she pulled them apart, as if she was holding an ever-widening ball. From between her palms, a tiny flash of light spawned, which grew, and grew, until it was a sphere roughly the size of a baseball, floating between Rosalie’s hands.

Rosalie looked up excitedly at Caroline’s face. “I… I did it! I did it!” She could see her friend now – nice, plain, lovable Carly, who had a look of excitement on her face, too.

“Wow! Look at it!”

Rosalie looked. The globe of light was twisting; turning; remolding itself constantly between her hands; flinging flickering ribbons of light across its surface. It was beautiful – a little ball of bright white light. “It’s like my own little star…” she said thoughtfully.

It was almost hypnotic to look at. Rosalie could feel energy flowing from her into it, and it was not without awe that she looked at it, realizing that the light illuminating the room was a part of her.

“It’s so purty,” Rosalie said, practically purring with pleasure.

“Shine it about the room,” Caroline suggested.

Turning carefully so she wouldn’t upset the light globe, Rosalie tried to shine it at the darkest corners of the room. Unfortunately, it sputtered out when she moved, dissolving into utter blackness between her hands.

The room went dark.

“Oh, no!” Rosalie gasped, “Why did it disappear?”

“I saw why,” Caroline answered, laughing. “Your hands slid apart! You weren’t holding it straight!”

“Don’t laugh so loudly!” Rosalie said, suppressing a laugh herself. “Somebody will hear us!” She put her hands together and formed another ball of light. Being extremely careful this time, she aimed it about the room. It was hardly a comforting sight: it only contained two cots, a toilet, and a single bench. The door was clearly visible, but other than the door, there was no other way in or out of the room, and there was no way to open it on this side, either.

“Rose! Quick! Dim the light!” Caroline said anxiously. She had just realized something she should have thought about a long time earlier.

Rosalie was startled, and the light vanished abruptly. “What?” she asked, a little annoyed that her efforts were ruined. She was just beginning to get the hang of this.

“What if someone walking through the hallway was to look in the door?”

Rosalie saw the logic in this at once. She couldn’t let anyone there find out about her powers – they’d lock her away forever, or torture her until she would serve them. And they would keep her from using her powers to escape… “Wait… I can use my telepathy here!” she whispered. She was surprised she hadn’t thought of it before.

“Great idea!” Caroline said quietly in return. “Find out what happened to Kyle!”

“Mmm mmm,” Rosalie said negatively. “Charlie first! Kyle can wait. I want to be sure Charlie is safe.”

Rosalie felt for his mind, and found it quickly. She couldn’t tell how far away he was, but she could tell he wasn’t in distress. She felt deeper, and heard his thoughts.

“…way to get out of this. I still have options, right? No. I’ll either have to muscle it out or wait it out. And muscling isn’t an option at this point. But why me? I didn’t know about her powers yet. I didn’t believe them until she told me herself, anyway. If only this had never happened… And to think they’re actually trying to bribe me… Well… It worked… But it wouldn’t have if they hadn’t gone and… but I shouldn’t think this way. There is nothing that can be done. I just have to keep Rosalie from finding out. And beyond that…”

“What?” Rosalie said aloud, unaware that she was voicing her thoughts. Speech and thought sounded so similar now. The only difference was that thought was a little faster.

“What is it?” Caroline asked.

“It’s Charlie… something’s not right… He’s hiding something from me…” How could he do this? They told each other everything! Well… Almost, anyway… She hadn’t told him about her powers… But what was he keeping from her? She had to know! But he had remembered her powers, and he was guarding his thoughts now. Something was wrong.

She thought over all she had heard. “Them”… Did he mean that he knew about her powers before she told him? And what did he mean by “bribe”? What had her friends offered him that she didn’t know about, and why had he accepted? And to what purpose?

Then she remembered Kyle, and her thoughts drifted uneasily in his direction, feeling for him with her mind.

***

Kyle followed the moving blip on his laptop screen for over three hours (thank goodness he had his backup battery with him) before he finally caught up with it. It was inside a black utility van.

He continued to follow the vehicle for thirty minutes or so, before it finally reached its destination: a small building in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a twenty-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. It didn’t look like much.

Kyle parked his car down the road and carefully out of sight in a ditch beside the road, turned off his laptop, and got out, climbing up to the top of the little depression. A dark van had stopped about a hundred feet or so inside the fence. Why were they there? And why was nobody getting out?

Then he saw something that made his eyes widen in surprise: the van was sinking into the ground! No… it was on a giant elevator. This was the sort of thing you saw on an aircraft carrier, not in a fenced-in lot in the middle of nowhere!

He was going to have to find a way in there.

The heavy metal gates clanged shut; nobody was going in or out. But he had to find a way…

He knew what he had to do. Sprinting over to the fence, he pushed on the ground behind him – hard. He pushed as hard as he could, in fact, flying an incredible fifty feet into the sky.

Kyle could see the entire compound from this vantage point. There was little shack in the middle, a barbed wire fence forming a perimeter around it, a short runway, and a single elevator – large enough for a small aircraft.

But he was coming down quickly. Simply bracing himself wouldn’t do enough…

He pushed down on the ground again, using his powers as retro-rockets to slow himself down, and managed a near-perfect landing. It was a good thing he’d been wearing jeans or he would’ve skinned his knee when he stumbled and fell.

Sprinting over to the lowered elevator, he looked inside. There was only one floor to worry about, and it was only twenty feet down. He dropped in, having much better results with the landing this time. He was getting a little more used to his powers.

Kyle suddenly realized how tight on time he was. The van had pulled away, and the elevator was beginning to go back up to the surface. He jumped off of it quickly, and hid behind one of the massive columns that held not only the ceiling, but also possibly five to ten feet of dirt.

He was inside. And his new friends were inside the van that was speeding away from him. But it was too fast for him on foot – it had already turned the corner and was gone.

He decided to wait fifteen minutes to make sure the coast was clear. Meanwhile, he would take a look around. This area was huge – as large as maybe a fourth of the lot above, and there were cars everywhere. Fluorescent lights mounted on the columns illuminated the entire area – each column spaced about twenty feet apart. Kyle couldn’t imagine the amount of work that would have to go into a place like this… It was unreal. And he wasn’t sure, but he thought this probably wasn’t even the bottom floor.

He looked at the walls. The two towards the edges (right about where the fence would be above) were flat and uninteresting, but there were openings in the other two walls towards the center. Kyle quickly decided that this would be the best way to go, since it was the last place he saw the van. He had to start somewhere.

Kyle sprinted his way as quietly as he could past hummers, SUVs, cars, and utility vans, towards the opening where the van had disappeared. Oh, if only he had some more useful powers! Like camouflage – that would have been useful.

Why were there no guards anywhere? He had gotten in so easily… Were they wanting him to come inside? It made little sense, but Kyle thought that perhaps that was the case – nothing else made any sense at all.

Kyle reached the opening and peered inside. Still no guards… But there was a small loading bay to the right, where a familiar black utility van was parked…

Jogging over to it, he looked inside. It was empty, but the door in the wall next to the van was open. He peered inside, and was greeted by a flight of stairs.

He walked through the doorway to the edge and looked down a dimly lit staircase that clung to the edges of the square-shaped shaft. He couldn’t see the bottom. They simply went on forever, fading past the edges of his vision.

Carefully – quietly – Kyle began his descent into the darkness.

Chapter 19 - Rat's Escape

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:00:05 -0500

Kyle was careful to check ahead and behind for anyone who might be watching. Why was this so easy? Nobody had approached him, even once.

Then he had an unpleasant thought: maybe this was a trick – was it possible Rosalie wasn’t down here at all? Maybe they were simply trapping him inside… Did they know he was here?

Fear gripped Kyle’s mind, and he struggled against it, halting where he stood.

Should he continue below into the dark? He didn’t fear the dark – it was like a friend to him. Nor did he fear the thought of being caged. It was where he was that he feared – in the very depths of enemy territory. And if they trapped him inside…

Turning, Kyle started up the stairs as quickly as he could. He had only gone down a few floors, looking for an open door – he was still close to the top.

With a loud clash of metal against metal, the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut. So… They know I’m here, he thought.

But what of their tactics? They refused to confront him… What could that mean? Kyle started dejectedly in the only path available – downwards.

He could only think of one reason that they might not be coming after him: they had seen him leap the fence – if it could even be called a leap – and they didn’t know what else he was capable of.

Something else occurred to him. Perhaps they had known what he was capable of before he had arrived… Maybe they were using Rosalie as bait, trying to lure him inwards and trick him into using his powers so they could see what he could do… And then, they would trap him, capture him, and force him to do what they wanted.

But what did they want? Why had they tried to capture him in the first place? If he wasn’t their target, they could’ve simply tried to kill him.

Kyle sat down on the steps. If they wanted him, they’d have to come get him. He wasn’t going to walk into any traps of theirs. Well… Any further than he already was, anyway.

Maybe these people had engineered that virus he had defeated. Maybe they had originally intended to kill him. Or maybe they hadn’t known about him at all; maybe they were after Rosalie. But then – why capture her friends, as well?

Kyle paused to collect his thoughts. He was thinking too disorderly; he needed to organize his theories.

Hmm… He hadn’t considered something before that he should have. No matter what he assumed, one thing remained constant: either 1. they were the unluckiest people in the world and this crime organization was more powerful than the U.S. government, or, 2. they had a traitor among them.

He hadn’t thought of that before… How else would they have known exactly when to strike? But who could it be? How would they have known exactly when to rush in when he wasn’t there to protect –

He remembered suddenly: Charles waving him out as Rosalie cried. Trying to get him to leave, was he? And what reasons would he have besides this? He had to be a traitor!

No. Kyle couldn’t believe that. That fistfight was real – Charles couldn’t have faked it. He wouldn’t do that to Rosalie.

But maybe… Maybe Charles hadn’t known about his powers then… Maybe he was a traitor – a mole, if nothing else.

He found himself once more back at the same question: why had Charles waved him out of the room? If he was working for someone who was trying to capture them for their powers, why would he wave him out of the room? Maybe Charles’s employers didn’t want to have to face off against him. Maybe they saw him as too much of a threat.

Kyle was a little proud of his powers, and it didn’t seem too hard to believe that they had left him out because he was too powerful. But then another thought came to his mind: maybe they were using Rosalie as bait to try to lure him in, and trap him in a place he couldn’t fight – then it wouldn’t matter how powerful he was. He would have to be careful…

And he couldn’t tell Rosalie, either. It would only hurt her to know that Charles had sent him out, and he didn’t want Rosalie to get hurt emotionally. No – that was the last thing he wanted, next to her being hurt physically.

Kyle stood up and started down the stairs, determined to find and rescue Rosalie from whatever harm might’ve befallen her. He was going to be her knight in shining armor. He would rescue this fair (and oh, how fair she was) damsel in distress from the fiery clutches of the dragon, and take her home to his castle.

For some reason this line of thinking emboldened Kyle, and he felt like he could take on every single person in the entire complex not only single-handedly, but all at once, too. With courage rushing through him, he started bravely down the steps, and almost yelled, calling for his enemies to come out, fight, and stop hiding like cowards.

But he didn’t – the voice of Rosalie in his mind popped his fantasy bubble, and he reluctantly withdrew his head from the clouds. “Kyle?” Rosalie called to him.

Never before had hearing voices in one’s head been so comforting to someone. “Rosalie!” he thought back to her. “Where are you? Are you okay? What’s going on?” he asked, bombarding her with questions – a habit he had of doing when he was worried about somebody.

“Slow down! One at a time! I dunno where I am – I’m in a cell somewhere. The last place I remember being is at home, and now I’m here, wherever this is. I could be anywhere – they drugged me before they left!”

“I thought they might. But Rosalie – that was four hours ago!”

“What? Oh, no… Wait.” Suddenly she remembered something she had meant to ask him. “Why did you leave when I was crying?”

Kyle hesitated, trying to decide whether he should tell her or keep it a secret. He’d decided against telling her, and now she was coming right out and asking it.

His hesitation proved fatal. “Kyle… What do you know? Tell me.”

He sighed audibly. “Charles waved me out of the room.”

Rosalie thought it over. Why would he do that? Maybe he was jealous of Kyle… That idea made her feel loved, and she liked it. Then she remembered reading his mind. What had he been hiding from her? “Okay, so where are you now?” she asked, changing the subject of her thoughts.

“I’m here – where you are. I found the note you left, tracked your phone, and figured out where the van you were in was (by figuring out that your phone was in the van), and then I followed it here – into an underground facility of some sort – it almost looks like a top-secret military base, but something tells me this isn’t the military.”

“Wait – what?” Rosalie was confused. “What note?”

Kyle had the uncomfortable feeling that he had made another incorrect assumption. “The note… The note you left – the one where you wrote ‘kidnapped’, and then someone’s phone number.”

“I never left a note… So it probably wasn’t my phone number. And it probably wasn’t my phone, either.”

“I know it’s not your phone – it didn’t match the number you’d given me the day you left.” He read the number off his hand. “Nope…” she replied slowly, “I’ve never even heard that number before.”

Kyle was disappointed – all his efforts were for nothing. He’d done such a good job of tracking, too. Could this whole thing be a decoy?

Rosalie had the same thoughts that he was having. “Is it possible you’re in the wrong place?”

“I don’t know…” It would be worse than just “bad” if he turned out to be in the wrong place entirely – he had trespassed into a secret base of some sort, and used his powers, too. Kyle started back up the stairs again. “I’m going to check inside the van, to see if I can find any proof as to whether you were inside or not.”

After climbing up a few floors, Kyle finally reached the door again. Unfortunately, somebody had locked it from the other side – he couldn’t get out. “I can’t get back to the van…” he told Rosalie unhappily.

“Why not?” Rosalie sent back to him.

“They’ve locked me inside… I can’t get out. The only option I have is to go down.”

“What? Locked you where?” Rosalie asked, concerned.

“On a staircase. There’s probably a door that they want me to go through farther down, but I really don’t want to go any further into this trap… I don’t see any other options, though…” Sadly, he began back down the stairs, not quite as quietly this time, but still not loudly. There wasn’t any point in maintaining absolute silence anymore, since they quite clearly knew he was there.

“What’s going on?” Caroline asked her friend.

“Kyle and I have been sending thoughts back and forth – we think that we’re in the same building, but we’re not sure.”

“Wait, they got Kyle?! How??” Caroline was surprised, and even shocked. “He wasn’t even there when we left! And why did he leave, anyway?” She wanted to know the answers to everything, just as she usually did.

Rosalie counted it off on her fingers for her. “One, they didn’t get Kyle – he followed them. Two, he got back to the house after we got taken. Three, Charlie ordered him out of the room.”

This was puzzling. “Why would Charles order him out?”

Rosalie only shook her head. “I dunno…”

Ahead of him, Kyle finally saw the sight he had been expecting to see: an open door, beckoning him inside. Somehow, he knew it was going to close behind him after he stepped through.

He decided he wouldn’t go through the door. He would close it instead, and see what his hidden enemies thought of that.

Kyle descended the steps, and pulled the door with all his might, but it wouldn’t budge. It was almost as if it was locked open. “Rosalie!” he called to her. “I’ve found that door I thought I would find. Any suggestions?”

Rosalie thought for a moment before responding. “Well… If they’re actually trying to force you somewhere, you’re not going to have any other options, no matter how far down you go.”

“So you’re saying I only have one choice. Great.”

“Pretty much, sorry.”

“Well, I would’ve figured out that by myself! Hey – I don’t even know how to use half my powers, you know! Does Caroline have any help with that?”

“I don’t know – let me ask.”

Kyle grew impatient after a minute or two, and walked through the door and down the dim, shadowed hallway ahead of him. He had hardly gone ten feet when the door slammed shut behind him. Yes – they knew he was here. And they were going to force him somewhere. But where were they taking him?

Continuing down the hallway, Kyle tested every door he walked past. Every single one of them was tightly locked. Oh, if only he had his laptop with him. Those electronic keypad locks beside the door would be so easy to hack into, and he could break free of their trap. Now, he’d be lucky to even see his laptop ever again.

“I asked her,” Rosalie’s voice said in his mind.

Finally. “Yes, and what did she say?”

“She said your freezing powers are probably emotionally related. Was there anything in particular that the times you froze something had in common?”

Kyle thought over it. The first time was the tennis ball… He had thrown it too far, and had reached for it, but it turned to ice. But what was the next time? The bed? How had that happened? Why couldn’t he remember freezing it?

Yes… That was right… He hadn’t noticed. He was too surprised from being sent flying across the room.

Wait… Surprise? Was that the answer? “I think it might be surprise that triggers it… but not just any surprise – the reflexive shock type.”

“Like if something startled you?

“Yeah, like that.”

“That would be hard to duplicate on your own…”

“Yes, I know…”

Suddenly Kyle heard a click in front of him, and watched a door swing open. He looked around. There was no place to hide! Whoever it was would see him, and there was no way around it. His only option would be to get right next to the person so he could take out whoever it was before they could sound an alarm. Kyle sprinted for the door as quietly as he could.

He reached the door quickly, but no one was emerging. Kyle waited. Why weren’t they coming out? He began to grow frustrated, impatient with waiting.

A few minutes later, Kyle still sensed no motion from within. Poking his head around the door, Kyle saw the answer as to why. It wasn’t a room, just another hallway. They were still trying to force him inwards. His eyes narrowed.

He was a rat in a maze. That was all he was to them. They wouldn’t allow him a chance to fight – no – all they wanted was to see if he would go straight to the end for the prize – rescuing his friends. Kyle was fuming. He couldn’t believe the way these people were treating him. That was all he was to them – a rat in a maze. They were caging him and zapping him with electricity to see what he would do. It was almost inhuman.

And Kyle snapped.

This was for the second time in two days, which was incredibly unusual – it was only the fourth time in his entire life. He simply wasn’t used to the level of stress that came with the acquisition of superpowers.

The only goal in his mind was breaking free of the trap these people had set for him and getting to Rosalie as fast as he possibly could. With a roar of fury, he flung his arms outwards clumsily, intending on doing nothing but causing destruction. Hopefully he could open up a new pathway somewhere, something that would take him far enough out of the trap that he could get to Rosalie.

The walls around him splintered, sending bits and pieces flying everywhere in a cloud of drywall dust.

When the dust settled, he saw he’d carved a nearly perfect half-sphere into the complex. Not even the ceiling above had withstood whatever he’d just done.

However, right now, that didn’t matter in the slightest to him. He was half-blind with rage, focused as it was. All he could think of was taking down these underground enemies, and rescuing his friends.

Pushing against the floor telekinetically, he jumped upwards, landing lightly on the floor above. It was very clear that he wasn’t supposed to be here.

Shouting, frightened employees – of all nationalities, it would seem – scrambled to escape. But they could wait. They would meet their fate soon enough.

Grabbing the shirt of the nearest one – a giant African standing almost six feet ten inches tall, he pulled him down to his eye level. The man punched him in the chest. Kyle ignored it. “Where are the prisoners kept?” he hissed, almost spitting his words in the man’s face.

The man stood to his full height, lifting Kyle’s feet completely off the ground. Then, as he flung Kyle backwards down the hallway over the gap in the floor, he yelled with a heavy accent, “I will not tell such as you such things!”

Kyle landed in a pile of debris. The African picked up a nearby board and flung it at him. Instinctively, Kyle threw his arm in front to shield himself. The board came within two feet of him and bounced away; hitting an invisible barrier that it couldn’t penetrate.

Kyle saw the board deflected away from him, but for the moment, he didn’t care how. He sent the projectile back with a strong push, and for added effect, froze it as it flew. The frozen piece of wood caught the startled man full in the stomach, and he fell backwards.

Scrambling to his feet, Kyle readied a piece of drywall and prepared to fling it at his assailant, when something crashed into his back from behind, and he fell forwards, his spine like jelly.

Rolling over, he saw his attacker – a short, balding man with a long wooden board, which he was pulling backwards behind his head in preparation to strike. “Bad move,” Kyle growled, infuriated even further with the pain.

Bracing himself against the floor, He pushed his palms outwards towards the man with the speed of lightning, and the person flew backwards, slapping his head against the ceiling and finally coming to a stop near the end of the hallway. The guy stumbled to his feet and ran away.

Kyle stood and turned to face the African, his back screaming for mercy. The man, half standing, had a wild look of fear in his eyes. “Where are they?” Kyle roared savagely, and then, without waiting for an answer, prepared to leap the gaping hole before him.

“They are on floor thirty-seven!” the man yelled in terror. Kyle followed through with his motions and jumped across the gap in the floor. The man cringed in terror, but Kyle stormed past him, his focus elsewhere.

He headed for the stairs at the end of the hallway. There was no way he would leave his friends. Anyone who got in his way was going to regret it.