Off The Pages
Chapter Two

Like a lightning bolt a few feet from a hapless victim, Manny’s eyes shot wide open when he heard his backup alarm clock ringing. An expletive rang out as he almost fell out of bed, shooting awake, tangled in his bedsheets. “What the…?” he yelled.

Recognition dawned on him. Right, he realized. Normally, he’d shut off his backup alarm clock on Thursday night so he wouldn’t be woken up on Friday morning, because he needed three days of sleeping in so he could recharge from the hectic work week. It was three forty-five in the morning, and he didn’t have anywhere to be. Instinctively, he flopped back into the bed.

A good minute later, he realized an absurdity: he was not only wide awake, but refreshed and not the least bit groggy.

“Strange,” he uttered.

His eyes went wide.

Well, shit, he thought. Having raced into the bathroom, in the desperate hope the previous night could be chalked up to a vivid, insomnia-induced hallucination, the mirror quickly removed that possibility.

In his mental…space, he guessed it was called…the images of his male self and the Capacitor, which stood side by side, gave him an idea. He focused hard on his normal self. Nothing happened. An agonizing series of experiments played out over the next few minutes, in which a great deal of nothing occurred. It began to frustrate him, and his nervousness started to bang its shoulder against the door of his reason.

Damn it, his mind settled on. It bothered him that he might be stuck in this form. Yet, why would he see his normal self if he couldn’t change back? Could he really live the rest of his life as this woman? How would he even begin? There existed no paperwork, so this person effectively didn’t exist. The thought of facing an uncertain future as a woman who, powers or no powers, had no way of conducting business of even the most basic nature, began to eat away at him. Did he have the strength to do that? Could he pull the trigger?

His head jerked abruptly.

“Son of a…!”

The involuntary utterance preceded an important realization. It wasn’t a ‘mysterious twinge’ in his mind. Well, he realized, actually, it might be, but whatever it actually was, it was a trigger! It served the important function of protecting him from accidentally letting intrusive thoughts interfere with the power! After all, he knew himself to be the kind of person who could imagine spiders crawling on him at the suggestion, and it only made sense that there would be safety precaution to prevent such ideas from wreaking havoc. Wait, he thought, does that mean someone’s behind this? He shook his head. Such were thoughts for later.

He focused. He focused on the…whatever, the trigger, and it came into sharp focus in his mental image. It appeared as an orange sphere of pulsating light jostling in its position. Somehow, as he focused his mind’s eye on it, it came to him that it was in the modified position. With will, he committed to pushing it into the default position.

His belly bulged out, hair becoming short and curly, his face and bone structure painlessly rearranged, save for a slight electric prickle, and eleven seconds later, he found himself back in normal, male shape. Almost at once, he felt less energized, less charged up, but he’d never been so happy to see his fat, dumpy self in the mirror. He stepped on the scale, and it read his prior weight, and he smiled at the result.

He sat on his bed, examining his fat sausage fingers, and his thighs that rubbed together, causing him irritation on those long workdays, and felt the weight of fear and worry melt away. Then, as if tasered, he shot over to his desk and retrieved his cell phone. Sure enough, the selfie of her remained. Somehow, it hadn’t been a hallucination.

So those lights had given him the superpower to transform into the Capacitor, he realized.

“God, this is fucking crazy,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

The next thing he tried, was manipulating his mental images. He changed her head to his, and only her head. The internal image responded exactly to his willful command. It struck him as a hilarious image. Then he dared take the risk and pulled the trigger. He felt a mild static travel from his chin to the top of his head.

“So that’s a change that…” His sentence cut off in the middle.

A mental agony hit him. The mysterious feeling of…well, he had no better word than just pure suffering…came upon him like an avalanche. He looked down with her eyes at his male body, from the lower neck down, and a sorrow as intense as any he’d ever felt smashed into him, a mental sledgehammer blow. Tears began to form in his eyes. Tears, for Christ’s sake. The only sensation as immense as the strange sorrow he could not explain, was the utter confusion as to what it was, and where the hell had it come from? At once he pulled the trigger in the opposite direction. His head transformed back into his own, and…

The feeling of misery was gone.

As if stung by a wasp, he shot to a vertical position, the reversal of mood came so abruptly. “What the fuck was that?” he thought out loud.

He changed his mental image to her whole body, and pulled the trigger, and was Capacitor again, intact from head to toe.

The feeling of misery was still gone. It had not returned.

“What the…?” His thoughts once more leaked out through his mouth. What had that been? What could cause such incredible misery? What, just because there was an incompatibility between her head and his body…

“I’m an idiot,” he mouthed, hand slapping his forehead. Incompatibility between a female mind and a male body. “I’m a big freaking idiot!”

The term was ‘gender dysphoria.’

Inadvertently, he’d stumbled upon the feeling that he’d read about being one of the primary causes of suffering among transgender individuals.

A chuckle emerged at the thought of his utter stupidity, and the slow dullness with which he took forever to realize his problem. It almost immediately raised in intensity to a belly laugh, and he spent a good thirty seconds guffawing at the fact that he hadn’t thought of such a thing ahead of time. No, big fat stupid Manny had gone off half-cocked and jumped into the deep end of the pool right away, not taking the time to consider the ramifications of any of it.

After the self-deprecating laugh, he swallowed as the magnitude of his realization hit him. He had given himself a newfound appreciation for the ‘T’ in LGBT. This was how they felt all the time? Good god, how could they handle it, he pondered?

Alright, so no more incompatibilities, he decided.

After a quick breakfast of an energy bar, he transformed back into her. Among the immediate problems he faced, was that his clothes didn’t fit her form, obviously. His mother’s clothes, maybe, he wondered? He shook his head. She’d lost a great deal of weight near the end. But wait, the thought that came to him said.

He put a large shirt on and held his pants up as he exited the house and went into his garage. Shutting the door, he took his pants off and hung them on a dusty old shelf. The stacked tubs of his mother’s clothes, packed up and in the garage since her death, bore the labels of each category. He pulled them down one by one and rifled through them until he found some that corresponded to earlier, before her illness. Aha! He thought.

A pair of old corduroy pants and a turtleneck looked like the least tacky pair of clothes. Her bras were in a nearby tub, and he took his shirt off his female form and set it on the side. Within his mind, he focused his efforts, and sure enough, most of his body fat transferred to his female self, leaving his internal male image skinny.

The external shapeshifted to match the internal, and he found he could fit the bra on, perfectly. Underpants slid on snug, but not too tight. Finally, the turtleneck and pants came on and he stood, nearly fully clothed and ready to go. Sadly, she didn’t have any of her old shoes lying around, but he found two pairs of socks made his feet almost the same size as his normal male feet. He slipped his normal shoes on, and with the extra socks, they fit like a glove.

Being a fat woman bothered him in this form, but practicality won in his mind. The first power he wanted to test was speed. Sure, he could get his keys, and drive to a park or a wooded area, but that could lead to people seeing a strange woman driving his car. Until he had a story for that, he wanted to be able to leave and come back without being seen.

More than once, Capacitor’s speed had been revealed to work in multiple ways at once. Sure, she could run or fly incredibly fast, but she also could stand perfectly still with everything frozen around her. This meant she had to be manipulating not just velocity, but in some sense, time as well.

“Alright,” he thought out loud. Looking over at the work bench his dad had used a long time ago, he saw a loose screw lying in a box of loose nails and other pieces of metal. He fingered the screw between his thumb and index finger, aimed, and flicked it into the air. As it sailed, he sprung forward, running, and…

It fell to the floor.

“Hm,” he huffed, picking it up and walking back to where he started.

In his mind, he drew up his knowledge of the comics and movies. Her power came from otherworldly power, various energies coursing through her body. With his eyes closed, he turned his focus inward. Her body coursed with barely explicable waves of power. Latching on to one that looked like a blue wave passing from his legs upward, he manipulated it. With little effort, he could push its intensity upward, so it roiled and bounced, rebounding back and forth across him in endless repetition. As he did, he found his mind expanded in focus like he’d never felt before. With all the mental effort focused on his power, he expected to have trouble keeping tabs on the world around him. Exactly the opposite happened: the more he focused on his power, the more his mind compensated by expanding the possibility of his focus on the world around him.

“My…God…” he uttered.

This is what the comics meant by “superhuman perception.” Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ Find_Nøvel.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

She didn’t just have super hearing, sight, and intelligence; her body perceived reality around her in ways no normal human could compete with. He didn’t just feel the air better, he felt it more completely. No longer was it a certain temperature, he could get a near flawless idea of how cold or hot it was relative to energies transferring from each object around him. Transfer of energy from one object to another only scratched the surface. The screw in his hand broke him out of his stupor. Solve the problem now, he decided; ponder this other stuff later.

Her enhanced intellect gave him an exact idea of how many steps it was from his current position to anywhere in the room he could imagine moving. Eyes alight with otherworldly vision perceived each object, and he could tell, roughly, how hard it would be to break.

A flick of his finger cast the screw into the air.

Intensely focusing on his internal storm of power, he manipulated the blue power, and reality froze around him. He stepped forward, the air curving around him, and he plucked the screw out of its place, frozen in the air.

One down, he thought.

His internal spectral environment roiled with powers his mind perceived as different colored waves, moving about, and changing arrangement as they bounced around. It occurred to him that it moved about in three dimensions, and he rotated his internal perception, and discovered these powers bounced around in all directions, but also remained connected at various points. One that shifted and bounced parallel to the blue one, a violet power, matched its sibling precisely, but slightly below. With a nervous mental effort, he nudged it. He took five steps forward.

A stream of images flashed through his mind at once. At his destination in less than a heartbeat, he grasped the frame of the garage to steady himself. It hadn’t felt like real time or like slow motion, which were the two things he expected. Rather, he’d seen every detail, and he made decisions about what to do, perceiving each step with an impossible rate of data processing.

So, that’s how a superhero can run across the country in minutes, he realized, without it seeming like days.

He took a breath. Baby steps, the saying went.

Slowly, he strolled over to the end of the garage. He saw a spot on the wall he would put the screw in. He let the breath out and dashed. When the movement ended, he found his finger on the screw, which he had manually screwed into the wood on the wall, exactly where he decided. In his mind, he had seen every action taken. Great, he knew, this meant his speed could be trusted. He looked at the garage’s contents and an idea came to him.

A blink of an eye later, and a tidying up he’d put off since the funeral two years earlier stood finished. All the loose clothes got put in the proper receptacle, the donation items set aside for later donation, and loose tools rearranged into various toolkits.

He looked around with his see-through vision and saw no one in a position to watch him. Houses were empty with people going to work, or else they sat in their living rooms, watching television, or in bedrooms playing games or working on the computer.

Leaving the garage and returning to his room, he grabbed his keys and locked the front door on his way out. He activated only the second of his two speed powers and ran. As the world moved on around him, he zoomed past, his power manipulating the air around him so as not to damage anything by accident. No sudden hurricane force winds would blow cars off the road or create a wake that would explode people like balloons. If he passed by someone a hand’s width away, they would hear a slight woosh as the air bent around him, but that was it. In less than a second, he stood in the enormous park in Belleville. He made his way to one of the isolated corners of the park, where woods on all sides made easy access difficult for most people.

He focused his mind on flight. After several failed attempts, he found himself hovering an inch above the ground. Moving in a specific direction required multiple inputs. Actual velocity acted like a gas pedal. Choosing to move at all meant hitting the gas and accelerating. Managing to hit a specific speed and stay at it required dedicated effort. It took eight different attempts just to be able to accelerate slowly and stay at a reasonable speed.

On the twentieth attempt, he flew from ground to the top of a tree without either blasting a hole in the ground or taking a whole minute. Grabbing the top of the tree, he pushed in the direction of a different treetop, and managed to turn his body in the proper direction by power alone, instead of having to wriggle in midair to change the way he faced.

Another forty attempts, and he found he could fly. He changed his focus to energy manipulation. Merely focusing on it allowed him to sense the way various forms changed between each other within the area of his influence. With a subtle shift of his internal power field, he found he could stimulate light into a laser beam. Ten minutes later, he projected a beam of laser light from his finger, which shone as a red dot on the log. It took another thirty seconds of manipulating before he could increase the intensity, and it began to burn through the log.

Soon, he could project beams of white-hot light that torched through the log like a knife through aluminum foil. Having accomplished that, senses had to be worked on. Activating super hearing presented a problem. Being limited to a certain range served a purpose. It prevented certain sounds from being heard. One aspect of super hearing was that being able to hear a larger spectrum of sounds made life miserable. Car brakes squealed at a high frequency, and normal humans couldn’t hear it. Now, being able to hear it, it became an irritation. Furthermore, on the low end, being able to hear the deep rumble of the Earth blocked certain other low frequencies.

He shut his eyes and closed his hearing to the specific range normal humans could hear. Within this spectrum, he raised his hearing, and everything for miles around became audible. Focusing on conversation proved taxing. It took full concentration just to be able to hear clear words.

He would perfect super hearing later; right now, he needed to perfect his sight. Sure, he could do some of his vision powers well, but this was one power he wanted to excel at. He managed to stand at a fifty-yard distance and see a ladybug in macro lens detail. With more effort, he could see the internal structure of grass cells from five feet away.

On his way out of the thick wooded area, the pants slid down, and he had to adjust the belt on the pants to make it fit. What was this? At first, his mind raced, but realization hit him and he rolled his eyes at his scatter brain.

Superhuman physiology, he remembered from the comics. Her body probably considered his excess fat to be an impurity that had to be burned off, because she always regenerated back to perfect health if not magically impeded. He took off at super speed, making sure this time to use both speed powers so no one would see him, and made it back home in a single tick of the clock.

What would he do next, he wondered? He could try going out and doing superhero stuff, but he wanted to put that off for at least a few more days. Perhaps just take in the sights? There were an awful lot of places he wanted to go that he’d never had the money to visit before, and with his separate speed powers, he could take as much time as he wanted without having to worry about being seen.

An idea came to him, and he grinned wide.

Twenty minutes later, having changed into his women’s clothing, he parked his car in the parking lot of a riverboat casino, one of many dotting the Mississippi River boundary between Missouri and Illinois. In his male form, he changed his brain, nervous system, and eyes into hers. He swallowed hard, steeling his will to repress the returning dysphoria and checked out the mirror. Nothing looked different, except his brown eyes were violet, but he doubted anyone would notice. After all, he hadn’t been carded at the casino in years.

He ambled down the ramp, and into the casino’s front entrance. The guard at the gate recognized him, saw the stubble on his face and decided that carding him would be a waste of time, and let him through.

“Good luck,” the guard said.

Manny smiled. “Thank you,” he returned.

A quick trip across the floor saw him arrive at the blackjack table. He’d already gotten his chips at the cage, and he sat down.

“Want to play blackjack?” the dealer asked.

“Absolutely,” Manny said, putting on a cheerful tone. He used her sight powers and saw he would win this one. He bet fifty.

“Five and a ten,” the dealer read out, handing the cards. He dealt his own. “A king, and a three. Thirteen.” He looked at Manny.

Manny knew his next card would be a four. “Hit,” he said.

“Four,” the dealer read out. “Nineteen.”

This forced the dealer to hit. “Jack,” the dealer read. A Jack was a face card, worth ten, thus bringing the dealer to twenty-three, which was over twenty-one, and thus, a bust. “Player wins. Play again?”

Manny looked ahead. He would win again. “Sure,” he said.

The dealer came up two short of Manny. “Player wins,” he said, looking at the cards. “Play again?”

“Yes,” Manny said. He looked ahead and knew he would lose this one. He bet only twenty-five dollars.

A few moments later, the dealer hit twenty, two points higher than Manny. “Player loses,” the dealer said, taking the chip.

Manny pretended to be mildly annoyed. “Well, you know,” he said, “can’t win ’em all.”

This went on for another hour. When he knew he would lose, he bet low, and high when he knew he would win. He decided to stop before he broke a thousand dollars, because first, security might escort him out, and second, over a certain amount, he had to pay taxes. He might decide to do that at another casino, but not the one closest to where he lived. At nine hundred dollars, he called it quits. He cashed in his chips, counted the bills into his wallet, and exited.

In the car, he reverted his mind and eyes back to normal. His breathing returned to calmness and he found a familiar weight off his mind. Pain or not, he looked with glee at the bills in his wallet. This was more than two weeks’ pay before taxes, in cold hard cash, just sitting there. Sure, he cheated, but it didn’t bother him, because he hadn’t cheated a person so much as a soulless corporation.

After about a fifteen-minute drive past endless road construction, he made his way to another casino, this one closer to the Saint Louis side of the river, and activated her powers in his normal form, once more pushing past the mental anguish.

“Good luck, sir,” the guard said, as he walked past.

“I appreciate it,” he replied.

Approaching the cage, he pulled out his wallet and removed all nine hundred dollars, converting it into chips. Afterward, he made his way to the blackjack table. By repeating his previous strategy, he managed to play for almost an hour and a half before security came. He got up and went to the cage and cashed out his chips. The cashier handed him a tax form and a pen.

“Here you go,” he said, handing the completed form to the cashier. She counted out his winnings, a total of eleven thousand dollars and some change, and he placed it in his pocket and walked out the door with security following him to his car to make sure he left.

He shut his eyes and reverted to his fully male self and opened slowly. His breathing slowly returned to normal as he left the lot and drove towards the nearest branch of his bank. Careful not to hit the curb, he pulled into the drive-up window lane.

“Mister Voren,” the cashier said via intercom. “How can I help you today?”

“Just had a great day at the casino,” he said, making sure to ‘explain’ the sum of money. “I want to make a cash deposit into my savings account.” The tray extended out and he placed his driver’s license and the cash into the tray.

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

Manny couldn’t believe the money in his hand. It amounted to a stone’s throw away from half his yearly pay. Sure, he cheated, but by playing blackjack, the only thing he cheated was the giant companies that owned the casinos in his area. That was his logic for specifically avoiding poker, where he would have had to play against other people. By playing the house, he took chump change out of the pocket of an enormous business that had no feelings to be hurt and never had to worry about the rent being due, so it didn’t bother him.

“Mister Voren?” the cashier asked.

“Hmm?” he replied. His heartbeat quickened; was there a serious problem?

The tray extended and his license and receipt with current balance sat. Taking them, he smiled, and put his identification in his wallet. “Your deposit will become available within one business day,” she explained. “Will there be anything else?”

He shook his head. “No, thank you,” he replied.

She waved, as the tray retracted. “Have a nice day,” she said. “Thank you for banking with us!”

The shifter slid into drive and he moved forward and out of the lane. He’d gotten away with it. Sure, he would have to pay taxes on his winnings, but he’d drastically improved his financial situation. He felt a twinge of worry about his lack of guilt but shook it off as he remembered that his actions amounted to a drop of water in the bucket of a corporation that wouldn’t notice.

Once home, he put the receipt in his desk drawer. His body plopped down into the loveseat in his living room, and he turned on the television. When he had been a teen, he’d fantasized about being a superhero, but as an adult, the harsh reality had set in. Now that the option stood wide open to him, the logical side of his brain argued with his child mind, insisting that the issue was not as simple as mere desire. The law, he knew, didn’t act like it did in comics. In the comics, there existed systems in place to allow supers to go about saving the world. They could fight crime, and be de facto police, with examples rife from fiction of heroes simply rounding up villains and dropping them off at police stations. This would not fly in the real world.

He needed to know about what the law actually meant.

A decision was made. He clicked off the television and grabbed his house keys once more and shifted into his female form.

“Excuse me,” Manny in his female form said to the librarian, “where’s your law section?” He’d made his way to his local library, Alton’s Hayner Library, and walked in, approached the circulation desk and asked his important question. The fact of the matter was, he wanted to know what he could actually do as a super.

The man regarded the heavy-set redhead in front of him, a twenties-ish young woman dressed like a septuagenarian. It wasn’t her weight that struck him as odd, but rather, her traditional fashion sense. Or maybe, he figured, it was because she was sensitive about her weight that caused her to dress that way. In any case, he had to be professional. “What specific categories are you looking for, ma’am?”

“Well,” she replied, “I’m doing research for a comic book a friend of mine is writing, so I was wondering if I could read something about civilians being involved in crime fighting.”

The librarian pondered for a minute. “Here, let me look that up,” he said. He typed away at his computer and his eyes scanned several paragraphs of results. “I think…” He stopped scrolling and landed on a specific result. “Here. Let me see if that’s still on the shelf.”

He got up and Manny followed him. The section held a solid wall of bland, legal texts, and it became apparent right away that the answer would be hidden and would require a needle in a haystack search. “Is it in this area?” she asked.

The librarian put his hand on a book. “It says the most cases related to civilian involvement in vigilantism are in this book,” he explained. “It has cases going all the way back to the early eighteen-hundreds.”

Manny smiled. “Great,” she said. “Thank you.” As the librarian retreated to the front desk, it struck Manny as odd that, in her female form, she started thinking of herself in female terms, and male terms in her standard male form. This duality of mind thing is really weird, she thought. Carefully, she plucked a volume off the shelf and sat cross-legged on the floor. With a quick scan by her senses, she felt safe that no cameras or wandering eyes were watching her, and she activated one of her speed powers. If anyone had walked by, they’d have seen a bit of a blur as a woman opened and shut a book. In truth, she’d read the whole thing in under a second of real time, devouring over a thousand pages of legal tripe. The boring academic read did, however, provide her with interesting points.

The main takeaway was simple.

If I’m a super, she realized, I can’t act like they do in the comics.

If any clue as to her involvement in stopping criminals became apparent, it would mean the prosecution’s case would be thrown out at once. That meant it would be safer just to act either when no one could tell she’d gotten involved at all, or to only fight against crimes that fell far outside the realm of what ordinary people could do even if they had weapons.

It gave her a sense of laser-thin focus on what her purpose should be. She should be more of an example, than a crime fighter. Besides, as she pondered it further, it didn’t make much sense anyway. Most crime came about because of an imbalance in the system itself. The average criminal was not a mastermind who sought to perform acts of ‘wickedness,’ because such would be a childish motivation. No, her focus should be the saving of lives. Just out of curiosity, she devoured several more tomes on the law before the minute hand ticked one over.

While she was here, she might as well read some of those books she’d put off, she decided. A few minutes later, she exited the front door. “Have a nice day,” the librarian said.

“You too,” she replied, waving absently.

Out the door, she had to adjust her belt again. Back home, she locked the front door and went into the bathroom. Two hundred and fifty-five, read the scale. Her head jerked rapidly in disbelief. “Twenty-three pounds?” she exclaimed. Sure, she knew her regeneration treated his weight as a harmful thing, but this fast? It dawned on her that she would soon have to buy real clothes once the body stopped losing weight. Capacitor’s bio in the comics meant she didn’t have to eat, so weight loss would stop, but given that she still loved to eat, well, she’d have to worry about that later. Right now, she had to see if any emergencies required her immediate intervention.

The television back on, the news returned to the wildfires raging in southern California. “Up until now,” the news anchor spoke, “there have been concerns as to whether the shifting winds would bring the fire into the path of a neighborhood of expensive properties. Just this morning, though, the worst happened as the winds shifted the fire away from the upper crust neighborhood and towards an area with campgrounds and various other groups. It has since cut off all exits for the people within who are now surrounded on all sides by fire encroaching in on their position.” An image of aerial photography of the affected area popped up in the corner. “Firefighters have been dropping fire-retardant chemicals, attempting to open a pathway, but it appears as if the populace, which could number as high as seventy people, are trapped. The fire chief has sworn…” But she didn’t wait around long enough to hear the rest.

Out the door and up into the atmosphere, she barely felt the cold as the chill of the thinning air shifted around her. From the vantagepoint, she focused her vision and saw the affected region up close. Like a shot from a railgun, she rocketed towards it.

A team of firefighters sprayed water and chemicals into the blaze. “Damn it!” a commanding voice swore. “We gotta punch through that wall or else these people are goners!”

“Captain!” shouted the one manning the nozzle. “I just…what the hell?” He’d happened to be looking in the direction of a smoke plume for clues as to a change in the wall of flame, before he caught a vague blur that popped into his vision for just long enough to register. Before his captain could answer, a person appeared by them, holding two people by the waist. After setting them down, the person was gone again, disappearing before their very eyes.

The fire captain blinked several times. “What was that?” he asked.

Manny zoomed over the wall of flame, protected by an otherworldly field of power, and activated several senses, becoming aware of the exact count. Fifty-four people stood across an area of some fifteen square miles. She collided with two more victims of the blaze, her power coursing through them as she grabbed them by the waist, allowing them protection from the laws of physics. She deposited them safely outside the danger zone, in the custody of the fire crews. One by one, she repeated this process, until she determined repeatedly, she’d gotten everyone.

“Wait!” the fire captain shouted.

Manny shot him a quick glance, then took off. At home, she stripped and changed back into her male self. After throwing on some guy clothes, he sat on his sofa, heart still racing. The television news had a breaking story.

“Our story of the hour is the California wildfires,” the anchor reported. “What was the situation earlier is radically different, and the authorities are not clear as to why.” The scene went to a fire chief.

“My captain was on duty,” the chief reported, “under orders to do whatever was necessary to make a pathway to secure those trapped campers and other guests. Approximately twenty minutes ago, I get a call that all the victims are safe, and that someone who could disappear kept bringing them back.”

The on-site reporter interviewing the chief raised skeptical eyebrows. “What do you think it means?” he asked.

The chief shrugged with his hands. “I wish I knew,” he admitted. “It could be some kind of chemical in the air from the flames, but, here’s the thing.” He leaned in, a spooked look on his face. “Every one of my men says there was no way in hell they were gonna be able to get through to those campers.”

It cut back to the main anchor. “Multiple corroborating reports from aerial views as well as FEMA crews have told the same story,” they stated. “They say it was utterly impossible for the fire to be penetrated enough to create an opening. So, many expert groups are stumped as to what has transpired to allow…” Manny shut off the television. The feeling of satisfaction that washed over him felt almost transcendent. He had done something.

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