The Many Faces of Tully

I walk to the living room as soon as I’m done. Jace is there, with his laptop hooked up to the TV again. He also has his glasses back on. He looks up at me as soon as I walk into the room. He pats the couch next to him.

I walk forward and sit next to him. The video of my explosion is on the screen again. I’m hunched on the ground already and my heart rate is flat. It’s paused that way. What does he want to show me? I’ve seen this already. A second later he is telling me.

“So, I was curious to what happened with your body when you exploded, other than the obvious,” he says, clicking away on his laptop. “I watched your explosion a couple different ways to get a better understanding on what goes on. I looked at it with X-Ray, and thermal. I wish I could get a CT scan while doing it but I don’t think that is possible.” He sounds disappointed.

The view suddenly changes on the screen and I am seeing my skeleton. He zooms in so the whole screen is just me.

“Now watch this.” He presses play. He talks as it slowly moves forward. “I was curious about your X-ray after they said yours wasn’t like Toshi’s. His body is always in a constant state of movement because he can change it in an instant, at will. You on the other hand, don’t change unless you explode. So I watched what happened when you exploded.”

My skeleton is hunched in the fetal position and as I watch my body starts to blur on the screen. Almost as if it is vibrating so fast that even slow motion couldn’t capture the tiny fast movement. Then I watch in amazement as it starts to shrink. The whole process takes a minute and a half.

“Cool, right?” he says to me. He’s looking at the amazement on my face.

“Very. I never knew…”

“That’s why I wanted to show you this. I’d want to know what was going on with my own body. Actually, I did want to know what went on with my body. You should see that video, if you don’t mind open wounds that is.”

His eyes are lit up. He must be one of those nerdy people. Or maybe not. I’m not too nerdy and I’m sort of excited about this. Maybe he just likes understanding why we are different. Why are we different?

“Are there others like us?” I ask him.

He stares me right in the eye. “I don’t know. There must be though, if we have to fight this great evil. He must have powers. How will he stand a chance against us if he’s ordinary?”

The thought makes me uneasy. Did any of my friends have powers? How many others were there? A part of me wants to know, the other part wishes it is just the fifteen of us.

“Worry about that later,” he says, “you in thermal is much more cool.” He taps on the laptop again and the screen becomes colorful. My body is a mixture of red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.

“Now, I was expecting you to get really hot, since you’re exploding and all, but you don’t.” He plays it in normal speed from the beginning. My body slightly turns a brighter red from my pumping heart, and that’s it. I see my body shrink, and then it starts to cool down a little.

“That’s it?” I ask him. I feel a little disappointed.

“That’s exactly what I thought. But then I remembered that Nash wasn’t burned at all, and the equipment wasn’t melted or anything, just smashed. Were any of your, uh, victims burned?” He hesitates. I make him uncomfortable. I’m a murderer.

“No. Blunt force is always the cause of death.” I drop my eyes, and I start twisting the watch around my wrist. I never thought about it though. Whenever I imagined my explosions I imagined like the videos they show of bombs dropping or something. Not this.

“See. It’s like, pure white energy just surges from your body, from underneath your skin. It’s pretty cool,” he admits.

“Yeah. As long as I didn’t kill them like a bomb but with energy, that makes it all right,” I say sarcastically.

“That’s not what I meant.” He looks at me over his glasses. He takes them off then. “Hey, listen,” he says awkwardly, “I’m sorry. About the way I acted the other day. I was a little rude, and I want to apologize for my behavior. I judged too quickly, and I shouldn’t have. I don’t know what I was imagining really when they said you’d be the most powerful of us all, but I wasn’t expecting this. This is better than what I was expecting, and I’m really sorry for underestimating you.” He holds out his hand.

I take it and we shake hands. I smile at him. “What power can a girl have anyways?” I quote him.

“A lot more than all of the guys do.” He smiles back. “I still can’t believe you actually knocked out Nash. Nothing hurts him. Not even rockets.”

“You’ve shot him with a rocket?!” I exclaim.

He laughs at me. “Didn’t even scratch him. Though it did burn all of his clothes off…” He laughs at the memory. “You should see his video too. I’ll show it to you.” He starts clicking around on his laptop.

He spends the next few days showing me everyone’s video, CAT scan, and X-Ray. Calchas, Kato, and Rozen only have images, no video. Gunther’s and Damon’s videos are pretty boring, so we watched only one of theirs.

Everyone else’s I ask Jace to rewind them or to show me another video of theirs. I stare at them, taking in the information. No one seems as intrigued as we are. Nash watches a few of them with us, but everyone else is often yelling at us to get off the TV. We huddle around his laptop then to watch them. My sleep schedule doesn’t change much and I find myself waking up at four on the dot. Jace and I become fast friends.