Last edited 02 Dec 2001 02:45 PM

Helena glanced around the room.  Kids at the TV, kids at the table drawing, kids making card houses out of flash cards on the floor.  Not a great scene, but nobody'd be getting into trouble while she answered the door.

She looked through the peephole, and saw the top of a tow-head blond at the bottom of the distorted lens.  She slipped the chain back and opened the door.

"Barbie!"  It was one of her young "charges," Barbara Koenig.  Small, quiet, usually well-dressed.  Eight years old.  Bad parents -- usually just dropped her off downstairs, rather than bringing her up to the large apartment which served as the school.  (Though running a business in the building was against the owner's association rules, not to mention zoning laws, Helena's plentiful contributions to apartment building functions, as well as functionaries, kept the complaints to a minimum.)

As she recalled, now, Barbara's mother had only come by once, during the initial interview.  Barbara was the spitting image of her mom, in miniature, and it was the child who was usually given the responsibility of bringing the monthly checks for the three-afternoons-a-week that she was scheduled to attend.

Scheduled, because Barbara was not a very regular attendee.  Ordinarily Helena wouldn't notice, but there was something eminently ... noticeable about Barbara.  A generally solemn girl who watched things a lot, rarely participated in play with the other children (though when she did, it was with abandon), and could usually be found standing to the side, observing, her gaze seeming to bore into the back of your --

Helena shook herself. "Barbie, what are you doing here.  I wasn't expecting you until this afternoon."  She hesitated, then added, "You know, I'll have to charge your Mommy and Daddy extra for the morning."

Barbara nodded, solemnly.  "That's all right.  I've come to tell you I won't be attending any longer."  Her voice was soft, as always, and her words enunciated very correctly.  If Helena had been inclined to loosey-goosey thinking like her friend, Madeleine Grey, she'd have called the child an "old soul."  Instead, she just thought of her as quiet, repressed -- possibly abused (there were never any visible marks, but that didn't mean anything except there was nothing so obvious that Helena would have to call CPS).  "Low affect" in psycho- babble terms.

"Won't be attending any longer," Helena echoed.  "But -- we have a new video that I'm sure you'll want to watch this afternoon.  And next week, we might get some new games, too."  Helena hated to lose a paying customer, and while Barbara didn't attend enough to bring in a huge amount, her bills were always paid promptly, and the check was always good.

Barbara quietly shook her head.  "I want to thanks you, Mrs. Torvald.  I learned a lot.  About other kids, I mean."  

She didn't quite follow, but it was clearly a lost cause.  Still, one more try.  "Is your mommy or daddy waiting for you downstairs?  Because I'd like to talk with them about this.  I'm sure they'll not find another school of this caliber in the city."  She improvised.  "You've come quite far in the six months you've been with us.  I'd really like to talk with them."

Barbara shook her head again.  "I'm sorry.  Please say good-bye to the other kids, too, for me.  Thanks.  And tell them not to worry.  Their parents will pick them up quickly when they hear."

Now Helena was confused.  "Hear?  Hear what?"

But Barbara was turning, walking away.

"Barbie?  Hear what?"

She closed the door and, over the objections of the children watching the same old Pooh video for the umpteenth time, turned the TV to a local news show.  Was there some sort of danger in the neighborhood, a fire or something?  Helena was deathly afraid of fire, living where she did.

She was still flipping channels, trying to figure out what Barbara had been talking about, when the police arrived.

*     *     *

I can fly!

It never failed to thrill her, and the thrills just kept getting better.

At age 15, her psychokinetic powers had begun to manifest.

By age 17, she could raise herself up into the air.  This was a great hit among her friends at school.

By age 18, she'd decided school was for kids, and was free-lancing as a super-hero.  She could climb on telekinetic stilts twenty feet into the air.  

That was last year.

I can fly!

It looked like a huge butterfly, of palest, transparent purple, soaring and swooping over Central Park.  In the most cosmopolitan city in the world, only a few folks looked up -- a jogger in a lime green sweatsuit, an old man holding a red balloon, a little boy folding up paper into a boat to launch onto the lake.

It was not, however, a butterfly.

I can fly!  This is so ripping cool, I just cannot believe it.  I can frickin' fly!

Her real name was Lydia Maria Bustamonte.  The only person who called her that was her mother.  Even her dad called her "Liddie."

Everyone else called her Wild Iris.

Look at me, world!  I can fly!  I can soar up and down, I can glide, I can swoop, and stoop, and loop-de-loop!

She was known as one of the members of the Big Heroes, New York's pre-eminent (you mean, kick-ass) metahuman hero team.  A psycho-kinetic, she could punch a hole through the side of a car, or lift one into mid-air.  

Until a month ago, she could also raise herself on telekinetic stilts (still need that goddammed action/reaction stuff) 30 feet into the air.  It was fun, it was useful, but it was precarious, too, and (when she thought of it) kind of dorky.

Then she'd had an inspiration.

Seraph was not someone who would ordinarily inspire her.  In the first place, Iris had little use for religion, much to the chagrin of her mother (and the silent indifference of her dad).  In the second place, even if she had, the whole quiet-submissive-woman act was so not her thing.  Ain't nobody putting chains on Wild Iris, she whooped.

The Big Heroes had been in Los Angeles, helping thwart an invasion by inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria.  Said Lemurians were sworn enemies of their Atlantic counterparts of Atlantis, yadda-yadda-yadda (Iris had not followed along the lecture Victor had given), and so, accompanied by the freelancer half-Atlantean Deep Blue, they'd jetted off to LA, just in time to pitch in with that city's heroes to drive back all the fishy-folk.

Amongst said heroes were a group called the Archangels, darlings of the Conservative Christian set, dressed in white and oh-so-cleverly named after, well, archangels.  (Iris remembered vividly Sister Mary Teresa drilling them on the names of all the angels revealed in the various books of the Bible, as well as Church tradition.  Sister had not appreciated questions on why the various lists didn't match up.)

The newest member was the exception, at least to the naming bit, a woman who took the name Seraph.

She was relatively quiet, she followed orders well, and she stayed out of the limelight (well, really, all of them did, which had surprised Iris a little).

What made this little woman with the long, braided black hair inspirational had nothing to do with her theology or her personal philosophy of living.

She had wings.

Hey, there, Mr. Peregrine Falcon, circlin' around the city, too.  Lookin' for some pidgies to munch on?  Look -- I can fly, too!

She had large, white, gorgeous feathered wings.  It has to be a stone bitch to try to do anything on the ground with those things stuck on your back.  But, boy, were they pretty.

During the final battle at Venice Beach, as the mecho-organic yadda-yaddas of the Lemurians had been finally taken down by the various heroes, she'd watched Seraph soar and swoop.  She was actually a PK, too, though it was pretty limited, manifesting itself in some sort of glittery web that could entangle people.  Big whoop.

But she could fly.

For the first time, she watched something with wings fly.  She watched how the various feathers stretched, twisted, spilled air and caught it, how the wings themselves beat in different ways.

On the way back to New York, she'd watched the wings on Hero 1, as their rudders and ailerons and other thing-a-ma-bobbies went up and down and back and forth.

And then she did something she'd never done before.

She studied.

She read books.  She surfed the Net.  She went to the zoo.

She learned how wings worked.

And then she made some for herself.

I can fly, world!  Look at me!  I can fly!

She'd seen her file in the Big Heroes master computer once.  Her PK was classified as "concrete."  She'd asked Donato what that meant, and he'd explained that she actually extended her PK out in visualized shapes and forms (she could always see them, though most folks only saw a pale purple aura, hence her code name).  So, for example, when she picked up a car, she actually imagined her hands extending out, and used those long, psychokinetic hands to lift the car up.

On the other hand, an "abstract PK" would simply think of the car rising, and it would. It was simpler and more straightforward, but had less imaginative applications, he said.  (Donato then went into some long-winded yadda-yadda about leverage and stuff like that.  She found an excuse to duck out.)

So while she couldn't simply "levitate" herself into the air like an abstract PK would, she could manifest stilts.

Or, now that she thought of it, wings.

She'd practiced at night, when the others were gone or asleep.  She still only crashed at the HQ about a third of the time -- the other two-thirds were either in a loft she shared with a couple of other girls, or at her folks' house.  So there was plenty of opportunity to try it out.

It was hard work, a lot harder than she'd expected.  She could make something kind of flat and glide around a little bit, but that was stupid.  Manipulating things the way she knew they had to be manipulated took a lot of practice.  She found herself glad that Victor had insisted on training her fine control, even though that was a lot more limited in range than the big, flashy stuff she could do.  But she didn't have to have much range in order to manifest wings.

And then, this morning, she'd gone beyond gliding around in the training room.  She'd gone up to the rooftop of their building, taken a running start toward the edge, gulped a deep breath, and leapt off into space ...

Well, it wasn't quite that dramatic.  Even if she couldn't make the wings work that way, she was sure she could simply create a cushion to stop herself from going splat on the sidewalk (which would have been a bummer for the street vendors down there selling Big Heroes t-shirts and wind-up toys and sandwiches).

But she hadn't had to worry about that.  Because it had worked.

"I can frickin' fly!" she finally screamed at the top of her lungs, high above Central Park.  "Woooo-hooo!  I can fly!"

That's when she heard the police sirens.  She smiled to herself.  This was going to be fun.

*     *     *

Chuck ripped away the counter in front of him, sending the terrified bank tellers scrambling.  He knew they had a time-table, because Scotty kept telling him that, repeating it over and over like he was a big dummy or something.  Well, Chuck ws big.  Big enough to bash through the marble and wood and metal so he could get to the other side of the teller line.

Scotty shook his head.  He kept his pistol moving around the room, watching the rent-a-cop lying on the floor, but also watching to make sure nobody tried to be a hero, either.  "Time-table, Chuck!  Get the money in the bags, and let's get moving!"  He knew that someone would have triggered the silent alarm.  They only had five to ten minutes to get out of there.

Chuck stopped.  "I know there's a time-table, Scotty.  I'm not dumb!"

"You are dumb, Chuck.  You've stopped moving and started talking."  That was Gene, the third man in the bank.  He'd gone around the long way, hopping the gate.  He had one of the big plastic sacks they'd brought.

Scotty shook his head again.  Gene was the dumb one.  Though Scotty was the only one of the trio -- quartet, if you counted Hank out in the van -- who didn't have any sort of super-power or stuff, he was the only one with a brain worth mentioning.  Gene thought, just because he could always dodge Chuck's fists that he could dis him.  That was dumb, because that meant that Chuck would keep arguing, rather than sticking to the time-table.

"I am not dumb!" Chuck growled.  "Stop saying that!"

"You're not dumb," Scotty intervened.  It's not a lie if it's meant well, he thought to himself.   

"Yeah, right," muttered Gene, finally getting it as he opened teller drawers and dumped the contents into the bag as quickly as he could.  "You're not dumb."

"I'm not," Chuck repeated, defensively, but, at last, he, too, started doing his job.

Scotty shook his head again.  When they split the money, he was gone.  They were all a bunch of dummies, and he was not going to stick around until they were finally, inevitably caught.

He heard sirens in the distance.

*     *     *

She knew where that was.  And, in fact, based on where units were responding from, she would be able to get there first.  Because I can fly, neener-neener-neener!

After a minute, she could see the BankOne street sign.  She'd lost altitude, but still had enough for a good stoop on them.  Just then, a trio of individuals -- clearly the criminals by the way one of them was waving the pistol and all of them had blue ski masks on -- ran out onto the sidewalk to where a black van was double-parked.

Eat your heart out, Mr. Peregrine Falcon!

She dove.

*     *     *

"Move!  Move!  Come on!"  Scotty was hustling Gene and Chuck out of the bank.  Gene had wanted to linger and steal wallets and jewelry, the idiot.  Scotty had demurred, and Chuck had started calling Gene a dummy, which had slowed them down even further.

They were midway across the sidewalk to where Hank was sitting in the van when Chuck stopped again, looking up.  "Hey!  What's that?"

*     *     *

The big one had spotted her, but of them all, the one with the gun had to be taken down first.  As she dove down, picking up speed, she reached out with her PK like a giant hand, and grabbed the pistol.

The pistol was grabbed.  However, her wings had vanished.

Wild Iris screamed with alarm, even as it occurred to her that she probably should have practiced using her PK to do other things while she was flying.  She was sure, as she thought about it with some little corner of her mind, that she could do it.  But it would take practice.  Boy, is Victor going to be torqued at me.

At about that moment, she crashed into the big guy at 70 miles per hour.

*     *     *

Aw, Christ.  Super-hero.  That was about all Scotty had time to think before he his right hand was enveloped by some sort of purple fog and the gun ripped away from it.  

And he didn't have much more time to think when the super-hero landed on top of Chuck.

Chuck was strong.  Chuck was tough.  

Chuck went down, hitting his head on the sidewalk with an audible thud.

The girl -- Scotty could see it was a girl -- bounced off Chuck, rolling, high into the air, and came down hard on her feet.  She screamed in pain.

The gun clattered to the ground, twenty yards away.

Scotty turned, and saw that Gene had already blurred his way into the van, and was shouting for Hank to step on it.  "Wait!" he yelled, knowing that as bad as it had gone, it was trending far worse.

*     *     *

For what it was worth, her reflexes had been good.  She'd extended a cushion in front of her at the last second, sufficient to let her bounce off the big guy, do a tuck and roll like Victor had taught her, and then -- land really badly, twisting her ankle.

Iris screamed in pain.

One of the guys had jumped into the van -- she hadn't seen him move -- and was yelling.  It was hard to tell what he was yelling while she was screaming, but it was probably to tell the big, blue-skinned guy at the wheel to start driving.  

If this had been three years ago, that would have been it.  But she'd been in pain before, and she'd been trained how to work through it.  Indeed, how to use it.

So she lashed out with another fist, this time not distracted by wings and stuff.  It punched out the front passenger-side window of the van, hit the blue-skinned guy, and drove him into the door hard enough to pop it open and toss him out.

The guy left standing on the sidewalk turned toward her, eyes wide behind his glasses.  They widened further as he finally recognized her from the TV.

The big guy she'd landed on moaned and started to rise.  The shock of the twisted ankle had passed enough that she no longer needed to scream about it.  Instead, she took a moment to make sort of a bean-baggy cushion beneath her, so she didn't have to stand on it, and then batted the big guy's head back down to the cement.  

The far door of the van slid open and the guy inside went running out, holding a big plastic bag no doubt full of loot.  Or that was the plan.  As he was half-way out the door, Iris slammed it back shut on him.  He managed to duck back in before getting caught.  She reached around and squeezed each door handle so that he wouldn't be going anywhere.

The big guy was moaning some more and, more slowly, trying to rise.

Thud.

She turned to the last guy standing, the one with the glasses. He glanced over at where the pistol was sitting on the sidewalk (which gun, along with the tableau as a whole, were being given a wide berth by the local citizenry), back at Iris, down at the big guy, no longer moaning, then back at Iris.

He blinked.  He sighed.  Shook his head.

Then dropped the garbage bag full of loot in his left hand, and raised both hands into the air.

Iris smiled at him, and blew him a kiss, as the police cars came screeching/sirening up to a halt.

Then, carefully, she extended her PK around her twisted left ankle, using it almost like a crutch, and got to her feet.

This was going to take some explaining, first to the cops, then to her Big Hero homeys.  

She laughed, a happy, wild, joyous sound.  Screw it.  I don't care.

Because I can fly.

*     *     *

This page and its contents, except as otherwise noted, are
Copyright © 2001 David C. Hill