Chương 70: Calories

Two hours of research on a tiny little screen that I didn't understand the big deal about told me, rather emphatically, there was no precedent for raising liquid metal as a pet. The closest I had to any results came from the fact Shivvy did eat the canned clams and sardines, and ate far less of it than he was eating the Spam. Sam's theory seemed to be on the right course, but there was a bit of a hitch with that. That's all he did. He'd eat and then he'd "sleep" in whatever he ate.

Hibernating, going slack, however this thing worked. I didn't even know if he was alive. Talking to him did nothing. And if he didn't get his food quickly, he'd lunge on me. Never thought I'd know what it'd be like to get assaulted by water, but it was probably pretty close to Shivvy's pounces. What did have me curious was it never took any specific shapes. That weird bladed weapon the guy who owned him before turned him into seemed to not be a shape it innately took.

There had to be some kind of communication or command for it. Part of me wanted to find that guy just to get some answers, but Tancred said he was in some place called Rikers. An internet search verified this to be an island up in New York, so I wasn't getting there any time soon. Felt weird I had no idea what Rikers even was. Then again, I wasn't really watching TV much and I'd never been to New York, so I didn't see how it would occur to me.

Once Shivvy was finally satiated with his food, I went back to trying to practice those higher kicks Casney had shown me. Being able to do more than just punching would probably do me some measure of good. I tried using my reflection in the window to the underground tributary to watch my form, but it just didn't look right no matter what I did. Even after an hour of rote repeating of movements, it never felt like I actually was getting the limberness I needed.

My thoughts about that were repeated by the alarm on my phone. Another thing I'd been tasked with alongside the resistance training was upping my calorie intake to guarantee actual muscle development and not just muscular endurance. This meant going up to the cafeteria and eating some pre-designed meals meant to maximize on protein. Trudging up to the location, I was handed a tray of one of those meals. Twelve ounces of grilled chicken. Had the texture of a bike tire. Ten and a half ounces of baked salmon.

This went down a bit better. Four hard-boiled eggs. They didn't even taste like anything. A cup of lentils. Tasted like dirt. They probably just heated them up. A pair of three ounce cracker-bar-brick things called "tempeh." Actually didn't taste bad, crunched nicely. There was probably some catch to eating these if they came out that well. A cup of milk alongside a cup of orange juice. They tasted as they always did. This added up to about twenty-one hundred calories, apparently.

They told me since the goal is to gain weight, I should focus on finding snacks and other meals alongside these, but frankly this was too much for me as it was. Halfway through and I was actually sweating from trying to pack it all down. Made me feel sick. I could probably break these apart into three meals to make it less agonizing, but eating distracted me from training. From trying to just piece myself back together.

As I was wolfing down my provisioned meal, a clattering noise took my attention and sent it towards that sound. It was Jairo, sitting beside me with just a couple sandwiches that he immediately took a bite out of.

"Hey Leo," he croaked out with food in his mouth.

"Hey, Jairo," I mumbled out before taking a bite out of one of the tempeh... I was best off just calling them bars for now.

"What's that? Some kind of Rice Krispy Treat?" I scrunched my face.

"No, it's one of the things they're making me eat to put on weight. It's called tempeh. Doesn't really taste like cereal." He shrugged in response to that.

"Can I try?" I shook my head.

"Don't want to get bitched at for not eating everything they give me. Maybe ask the kitchen if they have more later." Following that, I took a swig of milk just to try and help wash down the food. The meal had turned me into a clogged drain. Made me want to suck-start a plunger. Laughing, he just nodded.

"I'll have to do that. How are you holding up, by the way?" Terribly.

"I'm still able to get up in the morning, so it could be worse." Jairo just watched me for a few seconds, giving me a better look at his frankly unnerving eyes. There were so many random little details about his mutations that took him from being a normal human to something else entirely. The eyes were the ones that stood out to me the most. A lot of how you read someone's face is by the shape of the sclera, being able to see the abundance or absence of off-white in different parts. His were black. Completely.

It resulted in those same legible "zones" being much harder to read. I didn't bother with reading his lips, since I hadn't trusted a smile in a long, long time. The eyes were what mattered. And I just couldn't pick out whatever the Hell they were conveying. Knew him for a few weeks now and still couldn't get used to them.

"I get you!" He answered after those scant few seconds where I failed to read him.

"The ADU stuff's always got me like stressed out. Feels like every other day we're seeing random signs of them now. Every time we think they've slowed down a bit, they're still going. It feels hard to keep up with."

"Don't tell me you're thinking of giving up." This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Giving up!? Hell no!" Despite the aggressive words, he was almost laughing as he said that.

"I ain't giving up on one of the best things to happen to me just because there's a tree problem. I'm gonna solve it." I nodded.

"Wish I could say the same. They're just kind of holding me back here like they want me to give up. Not that I can really blame them, what with all the..." I roll my hand.

"Leo, man, I don't think they're firing you. Sam told me you're doing training with some power expert to try and keep everything under control, yeah?" Of course she did. No confidence with her, apparently. Should've realized that sooner when she told me about Christian. All I could do was nod.

"They got me to figure out how to keep my head on my shoulders when I'm in a fight. Other stuff too, which is part of why they're having me eat so much crap. But no headway on what the Hell I'm actually doing." He shook his head, putting his food down and resting an elbow on the table.

"I don't think you need to know every little bit and bob of how your powers work if you know the important stuff, dude. I don't know why my thing gives me scales, but I know how to not let it give me scales. Do the same. Figuring out anything but what lets you do the important stuff is for like Sam since she's the smart one." With a sigh, I nodded.

"That's easier said than done. There's just so much of it I don't understand. Most of you guys have at least the idea of where yours came from. I just woke up like this." He then squinted at me, which frankly raised my hackles a little when it's being done by someone with his appearance.

"Have you told the power expert about when you woke up with it? Anything like that?" I could explain the dream to him, or to Casney, but it probably wouldn't really do anything.

"Just not sure what that would get me. There's so many ways you can end up with powers that I might be the first with my specific case and then there's nothing to do."

"Dude, they're with the government, they probably have an entire list of how a lot of powers work. They might be able to pick out exactly what happened to you!" Jairo declared with a point.

"My bet is ghosts."

"... Ghosts?"

"Well, when we fought the robot guy together, I noticed everything around you looked almost like... smeared and almost kind of smoky. Usually you look the same anything else does when I'm seeing electromagnetic stuff but in that fight when I could see you actually using your powers it was like that." I dropped my food onto my tray, just kind of static still at that information. Confusion rolled out the red carpet for anger, but it seemed to be kept in handcuffs by some measure of common sense.

Didn't mean the anger was muzzled, though.

"You knew that and you didn't bother telling me this whole fucking time?" He shrugged.

"I was bleeding out and the guy kept hitting me in the head a lot. I thought, like, maybe I was just punchdrunk and hallucinating. Emotions and adrenaline were really high in that fight so I don't remember everything. I haven't had a chance to see your powers since, we haven't done missions together, man." Groaning, I rubbed my face. That was something pretty substantial he was just sitting on and he's not even sure if it was real. No such thing as a step forward for me.

"Well there's probably not going to be any missions with the two of us any time soon at this rate."

"Well, maybe we could try the hydraulic press thing Sam tried on you before? Christian couldn't see anything but if I wasn't hallucinating then maybe I could."

"I don't really want to be around her right now," I admitted.

"Why not?" Taking a sip of my drink, I took a deep breath.

"Look, I just don't want to." The doors toward the spiral stairs leading to the cafeteria clattered open as May entered in her full costume, moving on a limp so decently coordinated you wouldn't notice it if you weren't already familiar with her gait. Jairo and I rather instinctively just quieted down to observe her in case she needed assistance. It only took a few seconds before my orange juice began to boil that I realized she knew we were watching.

Turning our heads back to our food, a few more minutes passed before she sat down across from us.

"Busy, busy day," she complained.

"What happened?" Jairo asked.

"Attempted bank robbery. Chris and I dealt with it, he's accompanying them to the station for reports, I just signed my statements. I'll do my report tonight after debrief. It was exhausting," she explained, rubbing her face.

"Why's that?"

"For starters, he wouldn't shut up, so getting our three warnings out took forever. And he kept yelling 'I have a bomb in my clothes!' if we got closer. He had some mining charges he probably stole from somewhere under his shirt. I had to focus these really tiny bits of infrared on one loose piece of wire the whole time in order to defuse it and it was starting to give me headaches," she added on. Finishing my tempeh, I spoke.

"Why not just do it all at once or knock him over with one of those bigger blasts you do?"

"Well I just said we couldn't do our three warnings while that thing was active and he kept interrupting us. We were worried if we got too hostile he'd freak out and hit the detonator. And if I did it all at once, I wouldn't cut the wire and would instead have given him an amateur appendectomy."

"So you were cutting the wire and trying to get him to a position where he'd hit a button and get confused by no follow-up to the click?"

"Which we did exactly, and then Christian went for a chokehold and made him take a nap on the nice tile floor after dropping this last warning. He's honestly really fast at that, I think if the guy didn't interrupt him so much we'd have dealt with it all a lot faster." I nodded, taking a sip of my orange juice and coiling my face in disgust as the flashboil had turned what was normally a perfectly fine drink into what tasted like a mix of paint thinner and shoe polish. Putting it aside, I rubbed my face.

"I couldn't even imagine what I would do in that position. Probably see if I could break a bit of tile with my heel and punt it at his hand, maybe."

"You'd need to get the three warnings out."

"Shit," I conceded.

"Not sure, then." All of my best options besides that would probably kill him. Couldn't risk that even on an asshole with a bomb.

"Well just me or just Christian couldn't necessarily make it work either. I can't fist-fight a fully grown man, but Christian can't shoot lasers out of his eyes. I bet Jairo could, though." Jairo struck a pose.

"Well yeah, I could easily do it because I'm a sick dino ninja."

"Dino ninja?"

"Well I'm some kind of lizard. Dinosaur sounds cooler." May raised an eyebrow.

"Never heard of any lizards that sound like you do when you transform."

"Yeah, well how many dinosaurs have you heard?"

"... Lots."

"Where?"

"Outside? You know dinosaurs still exist, right? They're birds. The only difference between a chicken and a T. Rex is size." Jairo scoffed, looking off to the side.

"That doesn't count and you know it." He then blurted out an "Oh, yeah!" and pointed to me.

"Leo needs to test his powers more. But he doesn't want to use the hydraulic press because he doesn't wanna talk to Sam right now. Do you have any ideas?" May pursed her lips, before looking at me. She seemed to be sizing me up, but just her focus on me left me a little uneasy. Put the reminder of her current situation back in my mind when I was starting to let it glide over. Especially now that I've had that realization about the Tyson situation. My gaze shifted back to my food.

"Oh, I think there's a way we can test it."

"How?" Jairo asked.

"I think we should play a game of tag."