Power Play: Charlotte Powers, #2

By BJK White

Villains Act. Heroes React.

But sometimes reacting isn't enough. Segregation events continue around the world, but Charlotte and her family are always one step behind, never in time to stop them. Thousands of people are being taken, but for what purpose? Towards what end? Charlotte doesn't have any answers, and even the questions are proving elusive.

But now there comes a single clue, a tenuous pattern, one fragile lead that points to Powerstone City, home to semi-retired superheroes, vicious gangs and armoured vigilantes ... and a greater threat than Charlotte ever imagined.

"Power Play" is the second book in the Charlotte Powers series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clover Island Publishing
• Release date: Nov 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386707295

Book preview

OpenPAL v4.2.1 Initialising . . .

Opening [CPowersJournal.ot]

Charlotte, it has been 19,204,147 seconds since your last entry.

xx49.07.16  |  19:24  |  Wednesday

Oh.  My.  Goodness.  I had to use Opal's calculator to even figure out how long that is—222 days!  (Daniel loves measuring things in seconds, do NOT ask me why.)  I mean, I knew I hadn't written an entry in a while, but I had no idea it was that long.  Has it really been seven whole months since I was in Emerald Hill?  That seems so wrong.  I have been pretty busy ... but I guess that's not really an excuse.  Or maybe it is.  I originally meant for this journal to be a record of my rise to superhero glory, but one thing's for sure, there hasn't been a lot of glory lately.

Basically, we're losing.  Big time.  The supervillains just have such an enormous head start on us.  Hard to even know how to catch up.  Dad says that's one of the downsides of being a hero, 'villains act, heroes react', which means basically that they're the ones creating these villainous schemes and all we can do is try to stop them.  I understand his point but still.  Unfair.  We've found like fifty places like Emerald Hill, all with the same story—I mean, they didn't all have someone like poor little Alice doing the mood/mind control thing, you wouldn't even BELIEVE some of the gross stuff we've found.  One of them had all of these rats tied together by their tails and they were all screaming, I've had about a dozen nightmares about that.  That's when we find anything at all, most of the time we're too late and all that's left is ... well.  Bodies.  Or people with their brains turned into mush.  That's 'Segregation'.  They take the ones who qualify for Advanced Self-Improvement and they kill or lobotomise the rest.

...

Sorry, I just had to go beat up a bunch of Virtual Bad Guys to calm myself down.  Mum and Dad are away so I don't have any fighty powers but actually I'm starting to prefer it that way.  I have to get used to not having super-strength and super-agility, I can't rely on having ANY powers.  Power Mimicry is a pretty good promotion, but it means I have to stay sharp.  Daniel's been helping me do some tests to figure out its limitations, apparently the more powers I'm copying at once the weaker each power will be, and the more I'm exposed to a certain power the more 'comfortable' my aura will get, and even some stuff about how 'close' I feel to the person I'm copying from—really it's pretty complicated, I don't understand half the stuff he goes on about.  Probably I should try to focus and get things straight for myself.  Here we go:

My promotion allows me to mimic the abilities of others.  I have to be within quite a close range, around twenty metres, to be able to do this.  Once I've copied their ability, I'll keep it for as long as I stay within twenty metres of that person, but if I move away from them it'll only stay with me for forty-seven minutes (well, unless I've been in copying range for ages—like a week or more—then I get to keep it for longer, we haven't really been able to test that properly, though, Daniel just intuited it from the fact that I didn't seem to lose Mum and Dad's powers when they took their trips away).  Daniel made a little app for Opal, a countdown clock, so I can activate that once I'm 'away'—I can even put in the name of the person I'm copying from and there are little icons for each different power, it's kind of cute actually.  Whoops, that counts as unfocused, let me try again:

If I copy Dad's super-strength power and nobody else's, I have around 80% of his ability.  We did a bunch of tests to get that number, it took hours.  If I copy Dad's super-strength and Mum's super-agility, then my super-strength goes down to about 70%.  Super-agility isn't so easy to test but Daniel says it's probably about the same.  If I'm also copying his phase-shifting, all of my powers go down to about 65%.  Apparently the reduction of strength isn't linear.

Phew.  Enough about that, I'm starting to get a headache.  I'll talk about something else, aside from depressing supervillain plans we know nothing about and brain-hurty power stuff, because I actually have a reason for writing in this journal again.  It's because I'm excited and I don't really have anyone to share that excitement with—C2 is coming to visit!  I haven't seen her for MONTHS, after all the unpleasantness in Emerald Hill—oh.  Right, I haven't written about that.

Well, basically?  People are pretty awful.  I never realised this before but non-supers have this weird inferiority complex.  Did I write about going to the party?

...

Apparently not.  Um, well, it wasn't as much fun as I expected it to be.  It kind of came out somehow that I was a super and after that people got kind of weird.  And then C2 tried to defend me and admitted to being a super too and then people got weird, even her friends.  Actually, especially her friends.  Apparently mundanes get uncomfortable about supers—of course I knew that, everyone knows about The Event, but I thought maybe people might have calmed down a bit, that maybe people might have grown up and become a little more comfortable with the idea that some people are just better.  Or superior.  Not like THAT, just ... if one person has the power to fly and another person has no power at all you have to view the flying guy as just higher tier, don't you?  Anyway, we're heroes, not villains, we PROTECT ordinary people, that's just how it works!  They should be, I don't know, I mean heroes don't do it for the gratitude, that's not what it's about, but this weirdness and hostility ... I just don't understand it.

Anyway.  Things got kind of tough for C2 and her parents, they actually moved out of town a few weeks after that party.  They went to Knight City in NoZo (that's where Emerald Hill turned out to be, near the Dead Mountains), because there's a girl's school there that C2 wanted to attend.  Blackbird Academy.  I looked it up and it seems kind of 'tough', I mean it's where a lot of military families send their girls if they want them to be soldiers or something, but C2 chose it and she seems happy so I guess that's the important thing.  Her parents are doing well anyway, her dad got a job in Knight City really easily, he's some kind of analyst or consultant or business guy or something, I don't know, but their house is much nicer.  Well, it's an apartment now.  But it's better than the house they had in Emerald Hill.  Kind of.  I mean it doesn't have a back yard but it's much tidier.  C2 sent me lots of pictures.  We talk every day through emails and stuff but it'll be SO good to see her again in person, I can't WAIT.  Mum and Dad are bringing her, she said she's really looking forward to travelling in Mum's spaceship.  Personally I'd be happy if I never had to get into that thing again, I mean it LOOKS cool but when you're actually out there in space it's just, ugh, just terrifying.  I know I live on the moon but at least there's a sky here, even if it's fake, and a sun, even if that's fake too, and jungles, which aren't fake except they couldn't exist up here if it wasn't for a bunch of artificial stuff so I don't know, you tell me.

What else do I have to report ... Mum and Dad are off investigating a lot, but to be honest (and I don't have much of a choice what with my can't-lie-curse and all) they're not doing a very good job of it.  I can't really put too much blame on them, though, it's not like we've got any leads.  Even stuff like the NeoTerra trucks in Emerald Hill turned out to be a dead-end, turns out they were just stolen.  Yep.  Daniel and me are up here on monitoring duty, trying to find supervillain plots before they hatch but it's just really boring and difficult.  The scanner goes soooooo slow and when you get a POI (that's 'Point Of Interest' but POI is way more funner to say) you have to flick to the 'real' map (not the radiation map) and do all this cross-referencing and stuff, I mean the computer takes care of most of it but it's just so boring and repetitive and BORING.  We never even find anything until it's too late, and mostly it's not even our scanning that gets that, it's Gaia's Compass system or a report from one of our allies—although none of them are really doing much.  They're all as 'careful' (read: hopelessly over-cautious) as Mum and Dad.  And I say 'all' but actually there are only a couple of them down there, most of the 1st Gens are in hiding or adopting Public Identities.  Envy Death is a LAWYER now, can you believe?  Litigation!  I mean ... okay, actually that kind of fits her really well and I bet her power—stirring up negative emotions—is pretty helpful for that, especially if she's subtle about it.  Envy was actually a supervillain but she switched sides like a week before The Event.  Not that it made any difference, I mean all of the surviving supers just pretty much went into hiding and the whole big hero/villain conflict never came to anything ... I'm letting myself ramble again, I should try to control that.  I guess because I haven't journalled for a while a bunch of stuff got pent up and ir's coming out in weird ways.  What was I even talking about?

...

Right!  C2's coming!  In like just a week, once her break starts, she's going to be here for almost a month, oh, I can't wait.  I want her here NOW, I bet she'd make even monitoring duty more fun.

Speaking of which, it's almost seven-thirty, time for me to get to work.  Sigh.  I just bet I won't find ANYTHING, we're doing the Sparkling Islands and the oceans around them (you know, in case of underwater bases).  What's going to happen THERE?  The Sparkling Islands are (is?) the most peaceful place (places?) in the world, I doubt supervillains would even know they exist.

xx49.07.17  |  11:23  |  Thursday

Well, I was right, five hours of endless blue and not even a blip.  The most exciting thing to happen was that I saw one ship.

One.

Ship.

It wasn't even a particularly big ship.  Not even any islands!  It's not going to be until tomorrow that we get more of them because we're doing it by this stupid 'grid system', there are about a billion tiny little squares to fill in—grrrr fine there are exactly one thousand, five hundred and twenty-two tiny little squares to fill in, STUPID pedantic honesty curse, guess how many I got to 'tick off' yesterday?  Three.  I KNOW.

About the only good thing to happen was that Daniel showed me this new upgrade for Opal he invented, or adapted or something, I wasn't paying much attention to be honest, but basically it will let me do 'live updates'.  Apparently it'll read my mind and automatically translate whatever's happening to me into a journal entry!  It sounds kind of wacky, right?  I can't wait to try it out, he said it'll take a while for it to adjust to my mind so I have to do like 'practice runs' with it.  My next entry will be directly from my brain, exciting!

xx49.07.17  |  13:11  |  Still Thursday  |  [LIVE]

There's a tendency to overlook things when they're underdone if you wish the way to clear I feel I feel I feel strongly if you want me to be clear then everything comes back to this; try.  Try.  Rumblings of something new to be overcome, partridge of entropy.  Partridge!  Can't quite return to the beginning and find an overlooking emptiness, can you understand the intention of those who see?  Intention.  Intentions.  Intentions of those.  Trying to control but slip slip slipping away cannot find the exit—trying again but stop.  Stop now.  Stop.

xx49.07.17  |  13:22  |  Still Thursday  |  [LIVE]

Trying again but never never over-never you were there at the start the end was the start the end was the beginning and that's why you're special special special interest of worse.  Worse.  Worse worse worse than before worse than—overlooking something, worse.  Try again.  Stop.

xx49.07.17  |  13:23  |  Still Thursday  |  [LIVE]

BUNNIES! BUNNIES BUNNIES BUNNIES BUNNIES BUNNIES BUNNIES

[DATASTREAM LOST]

xx49.07.17  |  13:28  |  Still Thursday  |  [LIVE]

Slow.  Slow.  Slower.  Slower than.  Slower than the other.  Slower than everything.  Slower than you.  Slower than me.

Stop.

xx49.07.17  |  13:46  |  Still Thursday  |  [LIVE]

I AM CHARLOTTE POWERS.  I AM A HERO.  I HAVE SEEN WHERE THIS LEADS AND WE CANNOT LET—

I am Charlotte Powers I am Charlotte Powers I am Charlotte Powers IamCharlottePowers IamCharlottePowersIamIamIamIAMIAMIAM

[DATASTREAM LOST]

xx49.07.17  |  13:48  |  Still Thursday  |  [LIVE]

Red.  Blue.  Red.  Blue.  Green.  Green.  Black.  White.  White.  Black.

Hello.  Hello hello.  Testing.

It's working—Daniel, is it working now?  It's working!  Oh YAY thank goodness.  Do I have to keep doing the colours?  Okay cool.  Wow, this is really weird.  I'm thinking this and it's coming up on the screen.  I.  Am.  Typing.  With.  My.  Mind.

This is kind of.  Weird.  And kind of.  Cool.

What's with the wacky punctuation?  What?  Oh, okay.

RED BANANA MAUVE MUSHROOM COMMAND INPUT/EXECUTE EXTERNAL AUDIO TRANSLATE GREY BADGER PURPLE GIRAFFE

—learn as it goes.  Hm.  I guess I have to repeat that, the processing and output AI will learn as it goes—hey, this is cool, I'm speaking and you're hearing what I'm saying and then your brain is outputting it to your Opal and your Opal is throwing it back to the big screen—talk about your roundabout, buffered interface systems! said Daniel.

Why did it put 'said Daniel' at the end?

Just an identification thing, don't worry about it, said Daniel.

It's kind of annoying.  Can we turn that off?

Just deal with it, said Daniel.

And how come when I talk it comes out like this?  No quotation marks?

Because it's a diary, it's in the first-person, said Daniel.

But it kind of looks like I'm just thinking things and you're responding to them, that's creepy.

Fine, just a second, said Daniel.

There, how's that? said Daniel.

I don't know—oh!  Quotation marks!  Cool!  So if I stopped talking, said Charlotte.

And started thinking oh.

I was hoping for something more, I don't know, seamless, said Charlotte.

And if it's MY diary why is it putting 'Charlotte', shouldn't it just be 'me'?  Or ... no, 'I'? said Charlotte.

Hang on, let me fiddle with the settings, said Daniel.  Try it now.

Is this better? I said.

Yes, that IS better, I said.

Huh, I said.

Well, I guess it's pretty impressive but it looks kind of weird, I said.

The post-processing stuff is just cosmetic, but I'm massaging it now.  Uh, try 'thinking', as if you're narrating, said Daniel.

...

Hello.  Okay.  I am testing my new Opal live update thing.  Hello.

Look, stop laughing!  It's not easy to narrate on cue! I said.

Try doing the talking-thinking thing again, it should be more natural now, said Daniel.

I am talking— I am thinking —and talking again— and thinking again oh wow —this is cool.

I bumped up the sensitivity and tolerance of the P&O AI, also I'm feeding it back into your diary files in a loop, it should learn your weird 'style' pretty quickly which'll make everything smoother.

It didn't put a 'said Daniel' after that one, did you tell it not to? I said.  Oh cool, —it put 'I said'! I said.

Huh.

Yeah, it'll take a while to get used to it, said Daniel.  But it'll get better as you use it more—hey, did you see that?  It put the speech indicator in the middle of the sentence, this thing is smarter than I expected.

I'm starting to get kind of a headache, is that normal?

Dunno.  This is all experimental, I'm a little surprised it works at all.

"Maybe we should

[DATASTREAM LOST]

xx49.07.17  |  14:12  |  Still Thursday

Okay, this is just me doing a regular entry now.  That live update thing is cool but to be honest it kind of freaks me out a little.  I'm going to play with it again later, but Daniel said it's probably a good idea for me to take a rest first.  My headache's already gone, which is good.

Phew.

Anyway, I have a few hours of free time now so I'm going to hit the ol' Training Room, beat up a few VBGs, maybe even run through an infiltration exercise, if we ever actually manage to find a school before the supervillains hit it I'll definitely be using my sneaking-and-stealthing skillset.

xx49.07.17  |  19:22  |  Still Thursday  |  [LIVE]

Hello.

Hello.

Rainbow.  Pink.  Pink ... pinkness.  Blue balloon.

...

Okay, so just staring at something won't make anything come up on the screen.  What if I...

...

[Session Paused]

[Session Resumed After 458 Seconds]

Okay, let's try this again.

I get up from my seat and walk across the room and pick up a small slim object five inches in length composed of plastic and black ink and—

Daniel!  This stupid thing doesn't know what a pen is! I shout.  My brother's response isn't worth writing down.  Wow, this thing already knows me.

[Session Paused]

[Session Resumed After 221 Seconds]

I'm holding a pen in my left hand.  I sit down—

RED BANANA MAUVE MUSHROOM COMMAND INPUT/EXECUTE SET T/S: LOW SET TENSE: PAST GREY BADGER PURPLE GIRAFFE

I sat down and wrote:

This is still really, really weird.

Hm.  I guess it's starting to work, I said.

Okay, so this whole diary-of-my-brain thing seems to be starting to work now.  I just wish I had something to write about, all that's happening tonight is more monitoring duty.  It's morning in the Sparkling Islands.  Did I just think that?  I don't even ... this is so weird.  Well, anyway, time to sign off and go to the monitoring room.  If I'm lucky I might even get to see an island.

Hm.  This thing doesn't do sarcasm very well.

I'll write more later.

Or think more later.

You know what I mean.

In any case, later.

xx49.07.17  |  22:10  |  Still Thursday

I am DEFINITELY not trusting the live update system to record this, because THE most exciting thing just happened.

I found a blackout field.

Not just a 'spike', the last one of those we found turned out to be the winning goal of a soccer match, apparently our sensors aren't very good at distinguishing between 'types' of psychic energy.  But this isn't a spike, it's a blackout field for reals.  The computer says it's VERY similar to the one that covered Emerald Hill, Daniel's just running some checks now—it's over a little place called Arrow Island.

I think probably they've changed up.  Daniel's talking while he works, I'm writing it down because I'm too excited to just sit still and do nothing.  I think this stage of their plan is coming to an end, based on what we've seen and the lower frequency of possible Segregation incidences.

If you didn't talk could you do the checking faster?

No.  Mostly I'm just waiting.  Why are you writing down everything I say?

Because I can't stand just sitting here doing nothing!

Did you just write down what you said, too?  You're really weird, Curls.  You take that whole diary thing too seriously.  Or is this part of your half-curse?

Actually maybe it is, I do kind of feel a constant need for things to be accurate.

How fast do you type on that thing, anyway?

Ninety-eight words per minute, ninety-six percent accuracy.  And the spellcheck thing takes care of any little mistakes that slip through.  Well, mostly.  Homonyms can trip it up if there's not enough context.

Huh.  Well even so, why don't you turn on auto-transcribe instead of typing?

Auto-what?

Auto-transcribe—give it here a moment.

[Auto-Transcribe: ON]

There, see?  Look, I'm talking and it's recording it perfectly, no need to type.

This is a little bit less fun, and also now I'm not doing anything again and getting all antsy!  Is it finished yet?

Still waiting.

Well HURRY!  In fact, let's just skip the check and send me there—

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop the car.  We're not sending you anywhere, Curls.  If this does turn out to be something then all we're going to do is tell Mum and Dad about it, they're in Free Paradise anyway, it'd only take them half an hour to get there—

Half an hour might be half an hour too late!  You said it yourself, the supervillains are changing things up, nearing the end of their plan, they could be doing something as we speak!

Daniel's thinking about that.  I can tell, he always—

Look, would you stop narrating?  It's really starting to bug me, seeing you type away while I'm trying to think.  You actually have kind of a point, I mean the whole reason I got you to scan that particular area was because of a spike the wide-scan picked up—

What?  You never told me—

Because I knew you'd get over-excited and start jumping at shadows.  This way—

The computer just beeped THE COMPUTER JUST BEEPED it must—

O-kay.  Definitely something weird happening on Arrow Island.

What is it what IS it?

Daniel's frowning.  He's taking SO LONG to answer—

Cut out that typing, I said.  There's a really weird ... I mean, the blackout's there, that's suspicious to begin with, all they've got on Arrow Island is a little town of a couple of thousand people and a marine biology institute ... which is ... also a school, a training college—

Aha!

Yes, yes, it fits the profile ... and this energy ... this radiation...

Daniel's frowning again.

This ... could be bad.

What could?  What's bad?

I'm calling Dad—

No, just send me!  You can send me, right?  The teleporter's working, right?

You don't have any powers—

WRONG!  I have YOUR power, and if this is a Segregation event then there'll be supervillains around, I'll copy their powers once I get there—Daniel, this is SO important, I have to stop this, this could be our last chance to get a lead, and you already said, there are thousands of people living there, if there's even a chance I could save them—

Stop.  Stop talking.

But—

You're right, we can't just let this happen.  Come on, Curls.  Let's zap you to the islands.

xx49.07.17  |  22:14  |  Still Thursday  |  [LIVE]

Testing.  Okay.  Daniel's getting the teleporter set up.  I just changed into my infiltration gear in the fastest time anyone's ever put on a form-fitting suit of phase-compatible stealth armour.  It automatically blends—

Two minutes, Curls.

Two minutes two minutes TWO MINUTES until I go oh it's been way too long since I got to do anything SO excited this is going to be great I'll have Daniel's phase-shifting and at like 80% power for forty-seven minutes that is DEFINITELY enough time to save everyone—

I'm going to rez you somewhere safe and open, okay?  Schematics of the building are in your Opal as well as a map of the island.  Once you 'port you'll lose communication with me, there's nothing I can do about that, but I've messaged Mum and Dad—

You didn't call them?

Couldn't get through, not sure why.  It could be they're in a blackout zone, or using anti-monitoring devices.

Oh.

Worried you'll need backup?

No!  Yes!  Argh, this stupid honesty curse—I'll probably be fine by myself, I just ... I was kind of hoping Mum and Dad could, y'know, be there to help me.  And see me.  Being a hero.

I'll keep trying, don't worry.  I've also sent messages to all our allies, if there's anyone in the area they'll try to get to you.

Okay.  Okay, thanks.

But, I mean ... it's not likely, Curls.  You're on your own for this one.  Your Opal will automatically upload your live update to any secure local archives, but I won't be able to monitor you—

It's fine, I'll be fine.  I have your power, right?  Unless there's another phase-shifter there they won't even be able to touch me.

Unless they have weapons attuned to the Seventh Field.

Well how likely is that?

I don't know.  I mean that, I genuinely don't know.  These supervillains seem pretty smart, and very prepared.  And they know we're trying to stop them, and they probably know your ability is mimicry, and they definitely know my ability is phase-shifting—

Isn't that two minutes up yet?

Daniel grins at me.

Yeah.  Any time you're ready, Hero.

I am SO ready.

The teleporter looks so normal, like always.  It doesn't even glow, not until Daniel activates it andCAN'T HEAR HER WAIT THIS ISN'T RIGHT HOW DID NO I REMEMBER THIS I REMEMBERI drop from a height of several dozen metres but only my phase-shifted legs sink into the ground, up past my knees.  It's easy to pull myself out.  This island is beautiful, there are palm trees around, the sky is deep blue, I'm on a lush green hill, it's steep but not—

Whoops.  Timer.