Vim & Vigor 5 (A Worm/Bioshock Fanfic)

Vim & Vigor 5

(A Worm/Bioshock Fanfic)

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{-{ V & V }-}

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Telekinesis ruled.

That’s right. I’m telekinetic now. How cool was that?

I couldn’t help but giggle like a stereotypical Japanese schoolgirl from some decent anime I watched online last night while I levitated a bunch of junk in a circle in front of me, thanks to the new stuff that Taylor gave me. Since she didn’t want me experimenting with the powers near her base, not after the incident when I had just gotten the Shocker power, I was out-of-sight in a small junkyard with my makeshift outfit and mask on.

“Greg, you need to tell me what’s happening to you,” Taylor said from her end of the ear piece. “You’re supposed to be helping me test the powers, not goofing off. That’s the deal we had, remember?”

“Right, sorry.” I cleared my throat and released my mental grasp on the junk, letting it fall down. “Got a bit excited… where do you want me to start?”

“Tell me what you felt when you drank it,” she said. “Did you hallucinate?”

“The hallucination made it seem like everything was breaking apart. It was like the ground and sky shattered beneath me, rising into space endlessly before I snapped back to reality.”

“Okay. That’s about what I expected. The hallucinations usually match the power in some way.” I could hear her typing that down. “What then?”

“When I grabbed hold of the newest ‘echo’ inside of me, everything in my vision was colored differently. Even now, it’s like I’m living in a world of gray, with the only color being different shades of blue. Though, when I switched powers to see if it was permanent, my vision went back to normal.”

“Do you have any idea what the different shades mean?”

“I think it’s how much energy it’ll take out of me to move something.” I looked down to a wristband that Taylor had given me. It was Tinker-tech of some kind, displaying a long, blue gauge. “I’ve only used a pinch or so, judging from the gauge.”

When she gave it to me before I left her lab, she explained that whenever my body was in an excited state because of the Energizer, it vibrated in a way that couldn’t be perceived by the human eye. The band basically measured the vibrations from my baseline state and compared the rate I was currently vibrating to the peak state—in other words, I knew exactly how long I could go around with powers before I was burned out.

“The deeper the color, the more it’ll take to move it,” I told her as I lifted some random junk and judged how much the gauge ticked down until a rat scurried from its hiding place beneath a box I lifted and went the opposite direction. “And that rat that just ran by didn’t have any color, so I couldn’t use my power on it.”

“Hmm, it might be that telekinesis only works on inorganic targets,” she said. “Just like Zero-G only works on organic targets, similar to a Manton limit in some powers. Keep going. Walk me through the process of how you go about using your power.”

“Well, I can pretty much tell what I can and can’t grab by looking at it.” I turned my head towards a pile that had a rusted car door on it. “For example, that car door. I usually picture that I want it to move by imagining that I’m reaching out with an invisible hand to grab it and move it.”

I extended my hand and visualized a phantasmal copy of it was flying forward and growing, grabbing the car door. The gauge on the band went down a tick when it connected and I knew for a fact that I could move it how I saw fit. I gestured for it to come to me by pulling my hand back and the door flew towards me until I held a hand out to stop it.

“Do you have to gesture with your hand to make it work?” she asked as I twisted my finger in a circle to make the door spin like a pinwheel just for the hell of it. Sue me, this was awesome.

I put my hand down and tried to visualize that it was still spinning. It was wobbling as it did so. “I don’t, but it’s harder. I think that my hand is a sort of focus for me to use the power correctly, but while I’m handling this I can’t really do much else. It’s taking too much concentration.”

“If that’s the case, you might be limited to what you can do while multi-tasking. Good to know.” She mumbled for a bit before clearing her throat. “What about range?”

“Give me a sec.” I set the car door down and then started climbing the nearest stack of junk so I could to get a better view of the junkyard. Then I strained my eyes to the street just past it, where I saw a sewer cover that shone blue among the gray of the street and buildings that were probably too heavy to register. I gestured with a finger for it to rise, imagining that I was grabbing it from here like I did the car door, and it did. “I think it works as far as I can see.”

Actually, if that was the case, what if I had a pair of binoculars? Did the range increase the expended energy? So many questions for later.

“What does it do when you try to charge it?” she asked. “Look down at your gauge so I can record how much energy you have before you do it.”

I looked down for her so that she could record it before I tried. Then I grabbed hold of that power and focused on gathering it up, compressing as much as I could to be used in a single burst like I did with my electricity powers to form the crystals that made up the trap. When I did, my vision shifted slightly.

Instead of a bunch of blue objects, there was a sort of luminous sphere that appeared. It moved with a thought as long as I was charging, casting a bluish shadow over everything around it. I repeated that to Taylor and she gave me the go-ahead to release the power.

When I did, everything within the shadow that wasn’t nailed down was pulled towards where the sphere was—even the rusted shell of what was once a car. It all balled together, with the metal screeching loudly, until it was like a katamari ball. It then slammed into the ground hard enough to shake the pile of junk I was standing on, and forcing me to jump off as it collapsed onto itself. I landed on my stomach, but no lasting harm.

“It seems that when you charge it, rather than allowing you to pick and choose what you can pull in, it creates a sort of telekinetic core that pulls in everything that it can around it in a set radius. I’ll be able to measure it from the video footage. Show me how much energy you have left.”

“It took out a fourth,” I said, looking down at it for her. That meant I couldn’t use it too often. I snapped my head up when I saw a light coming on across the street. “I think that may have made too much noise.”

“Get out of there then,” she told me. “We’ll call it a night there so we don’t get the PRT looking into it.”

“Can I go out patrolling?” I asked as I slipped out of the junkyard by climbing over the fence and triggering my invisibility. Now that I had more practice with it, I understood that it covered me in thin field that basically camouflaged me from view, as well as anyone or anything else I touched with my hand that was warped by my powers. With it, I didn’t have to worry about being spotted as I moved through the main streets and could sneak up on bad guys.

“I don’t think you’re ready for that,” she said. “There’s already a gang-war on the verge of breaking out. No one will hesitate to put a bullet in you if they can.”

“But it’s not like I can sleep if I haven’t burned the energy off and we still have a lot left,” I added. It felt like every cell in my body was jumping around so much that sleep was a foreign concept. “And I did take on the Merchants. I can handle a couple of guys with guns.”

“The Merchants were in a set location, caught off-guard, and you still nearly got beaten by Skidmark and Squealer. And, ability to heal or not, if you take a bullet to the head, it’s over.”

“I’ll be careful,” I promised. “Come on, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t want to be a hero if you have the chance. That’s why you’re making these powers in the first place, right?”

She sighed after a moment of thought. “Fine…but stay away from the Merchant’s territory and try to avoid getting in the middle of the gang war if you come across it. You don’t need the attention from one of the bigger groups.”

“Cool.” I punched the air in celebration as I walked through a dark alley. “If we get lucky, maybe we’ll even find the Undersiders and take them out. They’ve gained a bigger reputation since they managed to rob that bank.”

“They did?”

“Yeah, it was on the News,” I told her. “My parents were watching the report. It said the Undersiders managed to get away from the Wards thanks to the two new members they got. One of them is Chain Man, a villain from the south-side of the city. The other is some guy who calls himself Hermes and has these rocket-boots—a Tinker with a presumed specialization in mobility.”

“Picking a fight with that many Capes at once is a bad idea,” she said. “Don’t try to find them.”

“Okay.” So who did that leave? No Undersiders, none of the bigger gangs—there was probably plenty of regular crime going on that I could deal with somewhere, help someone else out, but given the sheer size of the city there was actually very little chance of me just running into someone that unlucky.

I didn’t think I could arrest anyone, and I don’t have a burner phone yet. But I could scare them off or hit them with a blast of lightning… then again, given the sheer size of the city, chances are I wouldn’t find anyone either unless it was a really active spot for trouble. Where to go then that fit all of the above?

I’m betting that the Protectorate would be patrolling in the main parts of the city, and we’re too far north for me to waste time going to the south-side. The area around the Market then? There’s bound to be something I could do there.

I was a little more than a fourth away from the Market area when I heard something moving above my head and caught a silhouette jumping over the rooftop. The street lights briefly caught them with the glow, so I knew it wasn’t just my imagination. It was a woman judging by the body shape, and the white and black mask split down the middle was one I’d seen posted on the forums.

“Circus,” I whispered. The burglar cape that was the arch-nemesis of the Beauty and Beast of Brockton Bay—at least if the rumors were to be believed .What was she doing this far north?

No time to think on that. If I remembered from the PHO she had a number of minor powers and was unaffiliated. So was I. Perfect match. Seeing how she ran along the edges of the rooftops without any problems—enhanced spatial awareness and balance, right?

How was I going to get her down? Blast her? No. Even if I hit, the fall from that high up could kill her. Actually, is it right for me just to assume she committed a crime just for her being out in costume?

I looked down at my band to see I still had a good amount of energy left. It’d be best to follow her invisibly and then go from there. I grabbed the mystifying echo and let it wrap my body before I ran after her down the street….

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{-{End}-}

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End Notes: This is the start of Arc 2 – Circus Games.