The gloves and baseball cap came off and Mason shook his head, whipping his hair free. Both clothing articles vanished into the inventory, leaving his hands free to zip up his jacket.
After multiple jumps using different levels of strength and differing weights, he’d finally gotten it down to a science. He could reach precise distances now, both vertically and horizontally, so his goal to go straight up and reach the highest peak possible was accomplished smoothly.
Still far away from touching the clouds like he wanted, he conjured four flame jets before gravity had anything to say. The instant they appeared and condensed into smaller, tighter shapes, he blasted off like a missile.
The wind gained numerous raking claws, yet they failed to stop or even slow his rapid ascent. A vanishing tail followed him all the way, becoming lost in the mess of clouds once he reached them.
Ten seconds. It took him ten seconds to experience the feel of clouds on his face. The sheer awesomeness of the experience urged him forward, higher, just to see how far he could go.
His hair and clothes grew more wet with each passing cloud. Twenty more seconds of this was all it took for him to break the cloud cover and soar past it. He grinned from ear to ear and angled the jets, calming them in order to decelerate and turn around.
It was a lot to take in. First of all was the moon. It looked larger and more real, shining like a jewel against the backdrop of the star dotted sky. Second of all, the quiet… he had no words other than perfect in mind for it.
Sound couldn’t exist here… or it seemed so at least. The air was also… nothing. His nose didn’t pick up any scents associated with the city below nor did it pick up anything for him to say it was cleaner.
He could breathe just fine though, and to him, that’s all that mattered in the end.
When he finally focused on the clouds, specifically the ones he flew through, he noticed something that made him take out the phone in his pocket.
Steam began to waft off him as he mentally reevaluated the “ten percent” he’d been using to quantify his flame jets.
It wasn’t accurate, not because his chi had grown stronger, but due to how it became more and more accessible and moldable with his every usage. This directly impacted the flames he generated with regards to his control of them.
Take this flight for instance, he compressed the jets even more than he did during the day, and that resulted in a direct increase in speed. There was no influx of chi needed. Not for this flight at least.
And this was at nighttime, when firebenders were supposed to be weaker.
With dry fingers, he went through the logs of the speedometer app he’d downloaded and confirmed exactly what he suspected and what the clouds he flew through told him.
782 miles per hour was the highest recorded speed. That was supersonic. He was supersonic.
‘Heh…’ He smiled, lips curling as he crushed the phone to dust with both hands and let the particles fall.
Who cared if he’d been framed? He could fly. He could be anywhere in the world he wanted if he put his mind to it. All of sudden, he started to reevaluate his plan to clear his name.
All the mental gymnastics he tried brought him to the same conclusion as before. Sure he could run, but would that be a good way to live the life Maya had given him? How would he honor his grandfather if the whole world knew him as a murderer and arsonist?
The Sloan name had to be cleared, not just for him, but for his family as well.
Two flames jets lit up once again underneath his palms, joining the two below his feet. Angling himself to face east, towards the orderly mess of lights he could see even from this altitude, he leaned forward and pressed both legs together, merging the two jets into a larger one.
As soon as he entered the horizontal plane, the jets flared up and he shot forward, leaving a boom and multiple donutted clouds in his wake.
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Two hours and seventeen minutes ago, the 24 hour mark passed since Mason woke up after being dosed with the V. He noted it down on the sheet with the list of his powers alongside the related things he’d noticed.
He was reluctant to call these related things powers due to how little time had passed, but he put them down nonetheless, leaving question marks beside each.
In the past day, he hadn’t taken a single bite of anything, nor had he taken a single sip of water. This should’ve been nothing new. Since before his death, he stuck to a rigid schedule to ensure he didn’t starve.
Not because he didn’t have access to food, but because he didn’t care enough to satisfy his body’s cravings when it asked. Now, the requests didn’t even come up, and it felt natural. Normal.
Sleep and tiredness were part of this category of unknowns. He hadn’t had a single minute of shut eye since escaping the center, yet his eyes were clear and his eyelids stable. Not one yawn had left his lips.
His memory was damn good now, so that wasn’t a guess.
He would not deny it, having powers was fun.
Oh, he absolutely hated how he obtained them. Let’s not get that part wrong. A part of him still wished to go back in time and wring Stormfront’s neck so he could see the look on her face as a supposedly lower race choked the life out of her.
Because if his understanding of things were right, she basically sentenced him to death by telling the nurse to give him the full dose.
Even though he was close to passing out back then, he remembered their faces distinctly.
Stormfront gave him a look he’d seen thrown his sister’s way too many times. As for the nurse, she showed no hesitation during her compliance, just resignation. ‘Another failure,’ her placid expression all but said.
This vivid memory and his experience gave birth to a couple of theories about Compound V. After scouring the internet for the past eighteen hours, some of those theories began to look more like facts.
The one he had most certainty about had to do with Compound V and the safety of its usage.
Superhero culture in this world… let’s just say, looked and functioned more like celebrity culture. Popularity was valued above everything else. Be it movies, songs, social media posts, brand deals, food, drinks, make up… supes were featured heavily in these things and many more.
This resulted in a culture where heroes were more focused on growing the number of people that knew them. The more fans you had, the more successful you’d be as a supe.
As for saving actual people? That had gotten lost somewhere along the way.
All of this was to say, almost every supe had an active online presence. Their information was also freely available, things like their dates of birth and even addresses could be found if you looked hard enough.
And Mason looked hard enough.
Instead of directly googling Compound V and placing a spotlight directly over his motel room, he instead read every article talking about the origin of superpowers and also read the biographies of almost a hundred supes.
This included successful and aspiring heroes. A-listers to D-listers, and they all had the same nonsense to say, as if they all fetched from the same pool of talking points.
They claimed their powers were god given, others identified themselves as members of a gifted select of humanity… some even mentioned evolution.
Abounding stupidity aside, this painted a clear image; Compound V’s existence was not only a well kept secret, every supe that believed the nonsense they parroted had to have received their doses before they could form coherent thoughts.
In other words, they were dosed as infants. It was the only thing that made sense, since it not only explained the obliviousness of the masses, but why Sage Grove Center existed in the first place.
Mason had done research. Infant deaths in the country hadn’t experienced any significant upward or downward spikes since supes first started to appear. This meant every baby dosed with the V did not die from it.
Or the percentage that did was so small they made no dent.
This explained the existence of so many supes in America alone and the continued secrecy of their true origins. If Vought had ended up killing the children of multiple parents, they wouldn’t be the giants they are now. Or maybe they would.
Corporations were cockroaches here too.
Anyway, Mason was certain about two things; the survivability of humans on Compound V nosedived the older the user was, with babies having a highly likely, zero percent mortality rate and adults having at least 50.
Being twenty years old, Accentuate The Positive is what most likely saved him from a gruesome death. Without it, he might have ended up exactly how Stormfront envisioned his gruesome future.
With these leads in mind, what to do next became obvious; follow them to get his hands on some V.
More research on Vought as a whole ensued, their subsidiaries and associates included. There were a lot of them, and the sheer number brought to mind the quote, “this is the kind of greed they talk about in the bible.”
Surprise surprise, Sage Grove Center turned out to be one of them, adding more weight to his Compound V theory. He added it to the evidence pile and continued looking.
If Vought was indeed directly responsible for the creation of every existing supe, they had to have perfected a pipeline for the dissemination of the V.
1971-1972 marked the beginning of the “supe baby boom” or the “supe age.”
This gave them almost fifty years to put their stuff in order and make the distribution a perfect, seamless machine, one that supplied every city in every state in the country without anyone the wiser.
For members of this pipeline, he considered teleporters or speedsters like A-Train, since powers like theirs were perfect for subterfuge on this scale.
What made this theory leaky though was the scarcity of teleporter supes and how not one had ever been inducted into The Seven. And so did the establishment date of some of the subsidiaries he’d looked into in the same year supe babies began to spring up en masse.
Out of the four, only one of them made sense: Samaritan’s Embrace, a charity that made Vought look good by giving free medicine to hospitals. The guys were so evil they couldn’t even cosplay good properly.
Since its conception, the charity has had only two CEOs. The current one was someone his grandparents would detest with everything they had: Ezekiel, a supe pastor heading the Capes for Christ circuit and the charity.
Having sat in a real church and heard real sermons from real men of god, Mason easily categorized Ezekiel’s sermons as no different from the stuff he released from his other end when he was on a toilet seat.
His status as a con man and deceiver aside, Ezekiel had unknowingly become a target Mason intended to grill thoroughly. Evidenced by his need to be popular, the stretchy supe’s address wasn’t hard to pin down.
Probably because he lived on a tour bus, and tracking it was as simple as finding out where he’d give his latest sermon. He only strayed from Manhattan for large programs, so his current location, though outside the bounds of the city, was actually pretty close.
Less than a minute away, if Mason flew or stuck to the rooftops. However, his flames were conspicuous enough without his size added to the mix. Plus, the cameras. They were everywhere.
A corporation like Vought definitely had teams of people looking everywhere for him. He could severely impact their profits if he talked, so it was imperative they silenced him quickly. It would even be better if a supe did it.
So no, he wouldn’t be going out till the sun had peaced out. Even then, he’d have to obtain the leverage needed to loosen Ezekiel’s lips first. He hadn’t burned anyone with his powers, and he didn’t intend to do so now.
Especially not now.
The first episode of the tv show revealed one of the reasons he’d branded Ezekiel a deceiver. While he preached the Christian values of homesexuality being a sin, the dude was a gay man himself. As seen when he helped himself to a huge serving of meat in a secret supe club, eating more than enough for one man.
Thinking of how his stretchy powers played a role in his “sexacapades” elicited a displeased groan from Mason. He had no desire to make room in his mind for this stuff.
‘Why is this world so oversexualized and depraved? Or am I tripping?’
Casting the parallels his mind was drawing between this world and his former one aside, he thought back to Ezekiel and how the plan to get him to talk was simply recording him doing “gay stuff.”
This secret supe club in episode one is where he needed to go. Scouring the net had netted him nothing on its location. It had stopped being funny how similar to celebrities the supes were.
Their real homes? Easy to locate by a dedicated internet sleuth. Their secret clubs where they took off their masks? Impossible to find.
Luckily, just as the document in his mind stated, Robin Ward indeed got killed by A-Train yesterday. He confirmed as much on the news and on social media. Facebook and Twitter were the same here. Though the latter hadn’t become X yet.
Considering her funeral would be held three days from today, and Hughie and Butcher were shown in that club around that time, it was highly probable he could tail Ezekiel to the place.
He could not wait for nightfall.
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Jumping from rooftop to rooftop in the dark proved to be the safe choice.
Because being 7 feet tall in a sea of people made you realise some things quick. And no, it wasn’t what the top of what people’s heads looked like. That was about as boring and saddening—in most men’s cases—as you can imagine.
No, it was the spine chilling fact that there were no other 7 ft tall people. Not even one.
The first night Mason went out, he successfully tagged Ezekiel’s private car and tour bus without being seen.
Choosing to spend the rest of the night looking around the city, the persistent passage of people he observed from his temporary rooftop havens suddenly knocked over something in his head and lit a bulb so bright he nearly went blind.
A quick search on the internet confirmed his worst fears and added another layer of danger to his prancing about the city. If the danger level was orange before, it had turned a blaring, bloody red.
People who were 7 ft tall made up roughly 0.0001 percent of the population. They, no he, was literally one in a million. All Vought had to do if they even got a whiff that he was in New York was to direct their satellites and cameras to search for a seven foot tall white male.
They’d find him pretty easily, and this made his plan to infiltrate the supe club a huge problem. He might as well paint a target on his back and walk into Times Square. Then again, maybe he was overestimating them.
A-Train, a member of The Seven, proved his incompetence when he ran through a woman who was half a step off the curb. If he could be so bad at his job, how much more the ones in the club, who had no idea their sordid deeds were being recorded?
Having this in mind, he stuck to the plan. Screw Vought, and screw their supes.