Deviation Actions
Literature Text
Outside in the hall, Router still pondered about Lora’s predicament, and paged her mother, “This is Weston calling home base. Sarah, are you there? Over,”
Sarah answered immediately, “I’m here, Weston. What’s up?”
“I’m worried about your daughter. From what I’ve heard, she’s been infected with that virus. Is she alright?”
“I brought her to the city hospital. I’m concerned myself, too: Not only is this virus undiscovered, dealing with metahumans is hard for the people here. Since Lora has no bones or organs, it’s harder to take CAT scans or X-rays since the calcium is less clear. But anyway, they’ve got people looking for a cure right now, but Lora herself’s getting worse. She’s starting to swell up, and since her body’s inflatable, it’s going to be a different reaction than a normal human.”
“So basically, if she doesn’t get a cure in time, she’ll pop like a gum bubble?”
“Yeah, but even if she got herself back together, it’ll still do its thing – and the remnants of her body would be highly infectious.”
“Yikes. Well, we’ve made it to the lab and Alan and Mindy are okay, they’ve just passed out from being locked in a freezer truck by someone looking for them. Maybe later we can...ask them about how to cure the virus.”
“Good idea, Weston.”
“Thanks, I’ll talk to you later. Router out,”
-----
Meanwhile, someone with a bald head was watching surveillance feeds from a security office. He felt both frustrated that his catches for the higher members had outside help, and sick pleasure from cold. The man muttered to himself, “They may be warm now...but the true freeze hasn’t come yet!”
Then suddenly he heard the sound of bees buzzing nearby, and only he and his teammates knew what that meant. He climbed up out of the chair and stepped away from the console to meet with whoever possessed that sound. The bald man hissed to him in a thick Canadian accent, “Larry, the fish we caught are out of the net, and they’ve got backup.”
The mysterious man swarmed by bees replied in a husky American accent, “Let them come to us, Nick. Prisoners always escape, but they never elude the warden’s grip alive.”
Nick hadn’t returned to the desk, but something happened a few minutes later on the surveillance console; one of the monitors was spitting up lines of code in command prompt, with sentences like “UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY BLOCKED>_HACK MANUVER CLASS_F” or “FOREIGN ENTRY DENIED> Override_protocol_627” Then something different came up: “WARNING: SECURITY SYSTEM COMPROMISED! VIRUS {B-Ram.CSL_33981.exe} DETECTED IN OUTER SECURITY LOOP! SERVER INFECTION IMMINENT!”
-----
Lucas and several other guests had come to see Lora, but the hospital room had been secured by guards wearing hazmat suits, and the party was told to wait downstairs in the admissions lobby. Like that was a fun experience. Even Mr. Hearst was there, and he had closed his shop for the day. The old man looked at that Australian redhead, and said, “Hi, I haven’t seen you around town, what’s your name?”
“Lucas, sir; I’m Mindy’s friend in class, and I’ve been kind of freaked out this week.”
“Yeah, I heard about the fire at the school. Good thing...uh, the Jett trio was able to put it out, huh?”
“Yep. I still don’t know why those people wanted to light it on fire, but I heard them yammering about the ‘Sons of Ra’. What’s that all about?”
“I’ve heard that name all over the news this week. They’re some group of Egyptian extremists...not necessarily terrorists, but still just as bad.”
Lucas looked over the low cubicle wall to see a line of people in front of the elevators leading to the ICU floor where Lora was.
Mr. Hearst sighed, “Look at ‘em, so many sick people upstairs infected with a virus no one has a cure for yet. How long will it last?”
Then he realized, “Crikey! That virus was manmade, and someone brought it here!”
“Huh? How did you figure that out, Lucas?”
“That fire was just a scare tactic, they used it as a cover for a carrier infected with the virus and spread it in town, and it worked!”
“Uh oh, I don’t like the sound of that!”
---
It was around 10:45 PM when Alan and Mindy were fully healed. The whole team was baffled as to why there were no immediate threats in the area.
“Where do you think the GeneGang would be hiding?” Io asked the man in blue.
“Probably the main lab control center, but that’s 2 floors up,” Alan answered. “Believe me, I’ve known this place since I was a teenager, and I don’t like that.”
“Why would they be there, Uncle Alan?” Mindy asked with curiosity.
Alan gulped, “Because my dad did his work there, all the time. But keep in mind: I took everything out of the computers, and had the main terminal and physical materials moved to my apartment. We don’t know what the GeneGang have done to this place, so be ready for anything.”
Ironically, Alan felt his suit for something – which he should have noticed in the exam room, but was too tired and cold to remember; all of a sudden, he realized that his dart rifle was missing, along with the ammo pouch. “Frack! My dart gun’s gone!” He shouted.
“Dart gun? What do you need that for? I’ve got one of those in my chopper,” Emergency Man asked with a fumbled eyebrow.
“No, I’m talking about darts that drain superpowers! They contain the antidote to metahuman RNA. I don’t know the whole story about them, but I have a hunch that they’ve used the chemicals here to give themselves powers. And Mindy and I have already seen what happens if civilians get injected with that stuff. Not. Good. At. All,” He forcefully stated.
“Oh. Well, if this was a James Bond movie or something, anything stolen from the hero would be stashed where the bad guys are,” Weston suggested.
“We’d better start looking, then,” Alan answered.
He called the elevator back down, and pressed the button for the ground floor once everyone was inside.
-----
Lora was thrashing back and forth in her hospital bed. The pain had spread all over her body over the last several hours and she could feel outward pressure on small parts of her body. Trying to stretch only hurt more, changing shape caused the pressure spots to move with her. Flashbacks of being rendered helpless by Lydia Nirvana’s anti-power spell hit her throughout it all. Lora was scared out of her hide after her mother explained what the symptoms were stated to be, and some people on this floor were entering the later stages of this infection.
Down the hall, a man also infected with this virus was now too late to save; the process took over 15 minutes, a slow, painful death. The pressure in his body caused bulges all over, and they grew and grew as if his flesh was bubble gum, like Lora’s. Over time, stretch marks turned to full-on cracks that spewed blood everywhere, staining the sheets and dripping onto the floor and walls; and as the final minutes ticked down, those who looked through the window saw the poor patient as nothing short of one giant blood blister. He had been screaming and crying his lungs out the entire way through, and they ended when that blood blister finally popped completely. Organs and sinews sprayed the entire room for about a 3-foot radius, and all that remained on the bed was a dripping skeleton, bare as a weathered rock.
Sarah Jett was lucky not to have let such a scene scar her aged mind with nightmares, but one of the suited doctors thought, “This has to top the Alien queen hive scene by far!”
On the ground floor, Mr. Hearst had gone to the hospital’s chapel to pray for his cashier to make it, and for Alan and Mindy to not get infected.
Lucas was trying to calm himself with an iPhone game of checkers.
Everyone in the entire hospital was afraid; afraid of death, or afraid of infection.
-----
The lift opened to an ominously dark corridor stretching off left and right with motion-sensor doors along the way. Adam strapped on a head-mounted LED light and revealed that in front of them was the main entrance to the primary lab, marked with a sign over the top: “PRIMARY LABORATORY”. That door was set in a smaller side corridor containing an empty dressing room with what would have been lab uniforms.
Alan remembered something and looked down at the left side of the door; he noticed a keypad and a fingerprint scanner. Recalling the code from many months past, Alan punched in “5-1-0-0-6-9” and scanned his thumb. Before the others could ask questions, he said, “When I said I wiped the servers, I only took out the information archive records. The scanner IDs and codes are still intact, but that’s it. It’s an emergency protocol.”
“So basically...Anyone registered can get in or out, but they won’t find anything in the computers?” Io asked.
“Yep.”
The doors pneumatically hissed open, and the lab was disturbingly black.
“What’s going on? Why are all the lights off?” Adam asked while trying to keep quiet.
“I don’t know. I hope they’re not expecting us or something.”
“Uncle Alan? I’m scared!” Mindy gasped while elastically hugging her uncle’s waist.
“Don’t worry, Mindy. We’re just going to find the bad guys, get my gun back, ask them what they know, then take ‘em to the police and get out of here.”
“I know, but I’m still really scared!”
“Should we turn on the lights?” Io suggested.
“They might see us if we do that,” Alan warned.
“Ugh, the suspense is killing me!” Router complained.
“Who’s there?” someone’s voice called out.
“Uh, hello? Where are you?” Alan asked whoever was talking.
“Alan? Is that you? Come over to the right,” the person beckoned.
Carefully, the group hugged the right wall and continued forward until they arrived at a strange cubicle of blacked out reinforced glass. From what little Alan could remember from this place, he guessed it to be a safety booth for dangerous experiments.
Adam knocked on the glass, and that person spoke again, now from what could be discerned as an intercom, “We’re locked in this safety booth, and I don’t have the keys!"
“I’ve got lockpicks, Emergency Man can break people out of anything, anywhere!” Adam proudly stated while getting his lockpicks once more.
He quietly picked the locks and pushed open the door to the safety booth; then he stood aside to let Alan go in and see who these captives were. To his surprise, those two were some of Alan’s closest friends!
“Dr. Kenneth? Chris Torrance? I...Oh my God, How did you get here?” He stammered in realization.
“We were...captured by those...mutants,” the African American guard named Chris replied groggily. “I owe your sister one for locking her in a freezer. Almost feels like karmic payback.”
“Funny you should say that. Someone with ice powers locked me in a freezer truck and I almost died from cold, and I’m not as invulnerable as those elastic people!” Alan chuckled.
“It’s a good thing I control fire and lava then, eh?” Io jumped in.
Chris glanced at her and nodded, “Yeah, and that’s a nice suit you’ve got on.” He paused, then added, “Oh, Kim! I hardly recognized you there!”
“Why did you lock her in the cold storage bay anyway, Chris? That’s not a very nice welcome if you were expecting someone from the leader's own family!” An old man next to him, Dr. Kenneth, asked.
“Dude, I was brainwashed by that witch, remember?” the guard claimed.
“Oh yeah, you're right. I forgot how intentional all those events were. Poor Grandpa," Alan stopped his trip down memory lane and cleared his throat, "But enough about that, can one of you tell me what’s been going on here? My team and I only know that the GeneGang have holed up here, but how and why are you guys involved?”
Dr. Kenneth, the 50-year-old genetic researcher, explained, “Those people...the male members are monsters! They captured us both, thinking that we knew how to make more of those compounds!”
“Oh. Is that it?”
“You didn’t let me finish, Alan. You see, your Dad is the only one who really knows how metahuman RNA is created, I was just the one who monitored the subjects and ran the tests.”
“But why did they decide to come here?”
Chris answered, “It’s obvious: Those compounds they stole from Howard came from here, so they thought that there’d be more.”
“But I took all the evidence, and we destroyed every last trace of Superbus Vitriol. Which reminds me: Why did dad choose that name? It’s not an acid.”
“Beats me, but anyway, they found that out and aren’t too happy about it. That’s probably why they brought one of the founder’s kin here.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up,” Io interrupted. “Alan, what’s this all about?”
“Hold on, I’m getting to that. Dr. Kenneth, what happened just before you guys got locked up?” Alan got back to the subject.
“I heard the computers sound an alert that the security system had been busted wide open with a Class-A Battering Ram hack. Who did that?”
“We have a hacker on our side, Amelia Finnegan. She did try to break in before, but she was bewitched by that Lydia Nirvana at the time. But there’s something I don’t get: I took all the records out of the system and all that’s left is the emergency security protocols and personnel IDs, excluding the computer credentials. Did the GeneGang do anything to the servers?”
“Yes, they’ve been downloading news articles and police records about what you and your family team are doing out in Centropolis. They’ve been leading you here the whole time,” Dr. Kenneth explained.
“But what about that virus, and the Sons of Ra? How are they involved with all this?”
“They’re not. It’s a cruel coincidence. If this was some kind of TV episode, it would be too predictable a plot if they did know.”
Everyone paused for a few minutes, struck with a horrible realization.
“Great. My sister’s infected and in the hospital with a bunch of other people about to literally blow up! What the hell do we do now?”
“Oh for the love of Pete!” Router groaned while turning away.
Router stepped into the center of the lab, focused his mind on the most horrifying images possible, including what he imagined that virus was doing to people back in Centropolis, and within a matter of 10 seconds, monitors on the walls and probably throughout the entire complex flared to life with a loud cacophony of evil laughter, high-pitched static noise, distorted nightmarish music and dozens of other frightening sounds. The screens showed all manner of scary visions: An arm with its hand brutally ripped out, maggots writhing with an unpleasant squishy sound, zombies attacking someone up close, being shot to death, hit by a car, a random clown with a menacing expression, and an astronaut falling out of a shuttle. There was even a psychic recording of that same man who just blew up in the Centropolis hospital from the virus. Then Router remembered something from an old video game, and all the monitors changed to show that same odd female face surrounded by electronic geometric lines of energy, and she spoke as if a sound card was on the fritz: “Are you afraid? What is it you fear, Insects? The end of your trivial existence? When you come out to face us, your so-called ‘powers’ will be no more than a footnote to my magnificence! SHODAN shall rule for all eternity, and no one will be able to prevent that!”
“What the heck is that?” Chris asked in confusion.
Alan muttered, “Well, not what I really had in mind, but...”
As Router finished his psychic broadcast, a door hissed open and they could faintly hear the sound of buzzing honeybees.
“You dare to challenge us?!” A man yelled.
“Oh God, that was terrifying!” a woman shrieked.
“Aye, who did all that? Come out and show yourselves!” That Canadian-sounding man yelled while turning on the lights.
Alan shut the safety booth door so as not to let his friends come to harm, then stepped forth with the other 3 heroes behind him. He declared, “I’m guessing you guys are the GeneGang. If that’s the case, why are you here?”
The guy surrounded by bees, whom Alan could now see was encased in armor that looked like honeycombs, spoke, “These powers are the nectar of the gods, and we intend to make more by any means necessary!”
“Oh, yeah? Do you know how those chemicals actually work? Because I have one in my bloodstream too; Observe,” Alan challenged.
Then he turned on the belt, grew a foot taller, and snatched up the guy in the honeycomb suit, glad that his gloves kept out stings.
“I’ve read the files about you, you know. Like how your alias is HiveHands and that you derive sick pleasure from hurting others. So if I were you, I’d--”
HiveHands interrupted the monologue by firing a stream of bees at Alan’s face, which from his size only stung his right cheek. But that didn’t keep him from screaming in pain from so many stings at once.
“Attack! Attack!” HiveHands yelled.
The icy man known as CryoNick blasted the floor with a jet of super-chilled air, making the entire floor freeze over with ice, and causing Alan to slip and fall to the ground, returning to normal size. He and several other heroes tried to get their footing, but it was just too slick. Then Io struck back, throwing balls of flame at Nick and weakening him, melting the ice off his skin like a piece of meat being defrosted. She also spread her hands out to melt the frozen floor. Then one of the girls, named Decibel, shrieked in a frequency so loud that the reinforced glass on the security booth and some of the flat-screen monitors began to crack. Emergency Man retaliated with a strange device that cancelled out that sound. Alan would want to know what that was, later.
The combat ground to a screeching halt when all the monitors flashed on, bearing the face of Amelia Finnegan. “Stop right there! All of you! My friends came here for information, and god damn it, we’re getting it!”
HiveHands wanted to retaliate, shouting, “Information my ass! No one’s leaving here alive!”
Amelia paged Alan directly on his radio, “Alan, listen up: I’ve been monitoring the security systems, and I found where they took your gun. It’s in a security locker up the hall they came out of. First door on the right, code 9-8-5-1-9.”
“Thanks, I almost forgot,” Alan replied with a sigh of relief. Then he addressed Router, “Weston, head down that hall and go for the first door on your right. Enter the code 9-8-5-1-9, get the dart rifle and its ammo, and bring it back to me.”
“Roger, Alan,” the cyborg agreed before taking off in a sprint.
CryoNick noticed this and tried to shoot him down with a 60 Kelvin blast, but Io struck back by throwing a fireball at his hand and making the beam shoot off-course. Then Alan turned to his niece who had been hiding in the corner the whole time, too scared for fighting this time around. “Okay, Mindy, do you want to help me fight off the bad guys?”
“No, they scare me!”
He crouched beside Mindy, keeping one eye on the GeneGang who were still fighting Adam and Io, 4 to 2. “What are you scared about?”
“Being frozen again by that bald guy! I don’t want to get cold again, Alan!”
“You can help Io; she can keep you warm, and make sure you don’t melt at the same time.”
“Okay, I’ll give it a shot,” Mindy sighed while stretching low towards Io’s legs. She reformed there and promptly tried attacking the GeneGang by firing puffs of cleansing mint air, but that did nothing considering there already was a cryopath among the opponents. Then Mindy attempted snapping her limbs out in various forms like Monkey D. Luffy, and that did manage to keep the GeneGang busy for a few minutes. She kept it up alongside Io's fire blasts, but she knew it wouldn't last forever.
Meanwhile, Router had located the security locker, punched in the code, and found the gun. Strapping it to his back and pocketing the extra magazines in a thick pouch on his belt, he proceeded to return to the lab. But just as he rounded the corner into that room, something assaulted his mind like a taser. Noticing it was coming from the right, he looked and saw that midget girl staring straight at him with a blank expression. Router realized too late that she was Uplink, the GeneGang’s technomancer, and she was trying to overload his implants. Straining in pain from mental assault, Weston reached for the gun, noticed it was already loaded, aimed weakly like an amateur FPS player, and fired at Uplink’s shoulder. She screamed in agony for a few seconds, then collapsed to the floor, out cold. One down, three to go.
-----
Back in Centropolis, two hijacked planes were starting to descend towards the airport. What no one suspected was the fact that all the passengers on board were carriers of the virus, all nervous about spreading because they knew what would happen. They had protested during the flight, but with the pilots carrying assault weapons with them, resistance was pointless.
Fortunately, one of the backup heroes was able to slow their efforts. Patrick Dickerson had driven his daughter to the airport, several hours after his flight had landed. Although unsure as to why she’d asked him to take her here, he’d known Samantha’s secret identity for years and had no second thoughts about letting her try to defeat this enemy. Sam hopped out of the car and, ignoring the guards, raced as quickly as she could to where the nearest plane was landing. She could already hear screams as the pilots entered the place, guns blazing.
She ducked into a restroom, whipped out a brush from her paint box, and dipped it into an enchanted ink stone set apart from the regular paint tubes. Sam then set about sliding the brush against her clothes, and amazingly, the paint on the bristles spread like waves across it, transforming her simple cotton T-shirt and khaki pants into a skintight canvas suit glistening with swirling colors. Her hair, which she always kept dyed magenta, remained the same.
As she left the restroom, Palette noticed the growing number of carriers. Then she got an idea, dipped her brush in a palette with some paints mixed on it, then swiped it sharply across the tiled floor. The resulting streak morphed into a puddle of rapidly changing colors, growing on its own across the floor. It gradually morphed into the form of a Chinese dragon, with glowing gold eyes, and swiftly chased after the Egyptian extremists, while at the same time forming two prisma-colored walls, both preventing the carriers from reaching any of the surrounding civilians and to contain those extremists. The dragon found nine dark-skinned men, carrying heavy weapons and tripping metal detectors at the gates. They tried firing at the dragon, but the bullets simply got absorbed into the fluid dragon’s body; the dragon slashed and snapped at the extremists, and expanded its liquid mass around them so that they couldn’t remain standing. Then those men swiftly drifted down the hallway up to a third solid wall of paint where Palette was waiting with a sword. The Sons of Ra tried to fire their guns once again, but now they were clogged with paint.
“All right, Sons of Ra, you’d better tell me what the cure is to that virus of yours, or you’re in for an early execution!” Palette snarled in anger.
In a heavy Egyptian accent, one of them argued, “Not on your life, young lady!”
Palette snapped her fingers twice, then the dragon turned around and headed for those men again. In a panic, another cried, “All right! The antidote is--”
But one of the other terrorists managed to get his 5.56 caliber assault rifle unclogged, and he shot Palette in the leg, causing her to fall to the ground. In shock and hardly able to so much as pull out her phone and call 911, the painted girl was thoroughly crippled. No one had ever shot her before, and she underestimated how much protection her suit would provide. Thinking about someone stealing her paint box was as bad as the mission where the Jett team took down her mad brother. But as it happened, a security guard saw all this and bandaged her leg using an emergency first aid kit. Seeing as those six terrorists were helpless and practically swimming in paint, the guards had no trouble snatching them up, taking their guns before they could fire. As for the carriers, they were to be escorted in private shuttle buses to the hospital for examination.
A thought raced through Palette’s mind as she was hauled into an ambulance while her painted creations dissolved into thin air: “Oh my god, I’ve been shot, and I don’t even know if I managed to stop those guys!” But that thought was quickly snuffed out by the agonizing pain that she endured when two paramedics injected her with morphine, then raised the damaged pant leg of her suit, carefully pulled the bullet out, and stitched up the wound. Even with the morphine, relief didn’t kick in until after that brief operation was done.
Simultaneously, the Sons of Ra were successfully taken into custody, and the guard informed the police that Palette had spoken with them, and the man who was about to confess was scheduled for interrogation.
-----
While Router was recovering from mental assault in a corner of the lab where the GeneGang couldn’t see him, he tapped into the activity in Centropolis and recognized Palette’s serious injury and the Sons of Ra, or at least a number of them, being taken captive by the police. He relayed this to Alan by radio, “Alan, do you read? Samantha’s down, but some of the Sons of Ra are in custody. Uplink’s powers are neutralized as well, but there’s still no lead to the virus’ cure. Over,”
“Samantha? What happened to her?”
“Apparently she summoned some kind of paint monster and jammed all their guns, but one of them was able to get a shot at her leg. It was brutal!”
“Oh God, I hope she’s all right...and Lora, too! Who knows how much time she has left before she goes POP?”
“Uh, can we get back on track? Mindy and I are starting to slip here!” Io cut in. She’d been sustaining a constant beam of fire for the past 5 minutes, aimed at HiveHands who kept trying to send swarms of wasps past the flames, but whenever he tried a different angle, Io managed to notice. Mindy kept trying to attack CryoNick with her arms, but they kept getting frozen. Then, just now, she noticed how everyone was not watching their legs, and she melted into a green-shaded blob and slid quietly along the clean laboratory floor. When she approached HiveHands’ legs, she tapped into her cloning powers, and the puddle swiftly multiplied into three puddles. They ensnared their legs like the gum Mindy was made of, and kept them in a position to get a shot from Alan. Weston tossed the rifle over to Alan, he caught it fast, and fired a single dart at each of the members. In vain, they made one final use of their powers before they sputtered out and all of them fell unconscious. Mindy reformed into her original self, feeling a bit braver now.
“Wow, Mindy! That was pretty clever of you to turn into gum and hold them down by the legs like that!” Her uncle commended her.
“Thanks, Uncle Alan. Your friend really made me feel better, and I really didn’t notice that their legs were unguarded until after a few minutes,” Mindy explained.
He clapped her on the shoulder and smiled, “Y’know, I’m glad my sister adopted you. You’re just so bright and full of potential for someone your age! I love that.”
Mindy just hugged him while wrapping her rubber limbs around his waist. Alan noticed the drop in circulation and said, “Whoa, okay, you can let go now, Mindy.”
“Sorry, uncle Alan.”
Dr. Kenneth opened the door to the safety booth carefully and asked, “Is it safe to come out, now?”
“Yeah, the GeneGang is down. Now let’s get ‘em somewhere safe so they don’t cause any trouble once they wake up,” Alan suggested.
“The recovery room downstairs should do well,” the old man added.
“Let’s go then.”
Dr. Kenneth turned to Emergency Man and asked, “Adam, why don’t you fetch us some gurneys and help us escort these people to Recovery room 1 on sub-level 3?”
“Can do, Doc!” the rescue man in red nodded before racing into the wide-spaced elevator.
-----
Mr. Hearst was still waiting around with Lucas in the lobby. At this point, the TV had been showing a breaking news update on what just happened in the past hour. A dark-haired female reporter named Robin Morales was explaining the situation.
“We are live on the scene at the Centropolis Medical Hospital, where the number of patients potentially infected with the Bomb virus has skyrocketed since the terrifying plane landing at the city airport at 11:35 PM earlier today.” The scene changed to show security footage of the airport hallway where Palette unleashed her Chinese paint dragon. “The police recently revealed that local superheroine Palette attempted to stop six members of the Sons of Ra from getting into the city with potential carriers in tow. She succeeded in a daring show of...artistic skill, but she was shot by one of the terrorists with a 5.56 caliber bullet, during the process. The carriers and Palette have been escorted to the hospital and are currently undergoing testing for the virus; the Sons of Ra are due for detainment at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. On a lighter note, audio records indicate that one of the members said he knows a cure to the virus, and will be scheduled for interrogation soon. Back to you at the studio, Johnny,” she finished before the channel transitioned to a man at the news station.
“Crikey!” Lucas gasped.
“Yeah, those terrorists, all taken out by one supergirl! And she got shot in the leg while doing it! Painful, but it’s not every day a hero endures that kind of injury!” Mr. Hearst exclaimed.
The conversation came to a halt when a redhead nurse in green scrubs walked up and after looking at a clipboard, asked, “Richard Hearst and Lucas...Nicholson, is it?”
“Yes,” they said in unison.
“Please follow me,” she requested. The two men followed her to an elevator, and she selected the floor where Lora still remained. They only stayed for a short while, in irony to their incessantly long wait in the admissions lobby. Mr. Hearst couldn’t help but shed some tears at the sight of his favorite employee in such a horrible state, superpowers or no. Lucas hadn’t even known Lora that well, but still felt bad for her condition. Sarah stopped by, but couldn’t bear to look through the window at all. Her own daughter, sick with an infection that would make her explode in a period of hours, or who knew how long. But she did smile at Lucas and even shake his hand. Then when about 12 minutes had passed, the two adults left for the parking garage. Lucas called his mother with his smartphone to come pick him up at the valet area.
