Mutants & Masterminds: The Indigo Children - [Prologue] "Heavy" Lacro

[Heavy]

Sometimes, weighing almost half a ton was a serious inconvenience…

Okay, so maybe it was an inconvenience most of the time. But Honesto liked to keep a positive attitude going about these kinds of things, so he just reminded himself that ‘most of the time’ wasn’t ‘all of the time’, and therefore it legitimately qualified as only being ‘some of the time’, so: Sometimes.

One of those times being Right Now, unfortunately.

As Honesto finished getting himself ready for his ‘date’ (it wasn’t really a date, so much as it was a meeting, but it was a first meeting between two young heterosexual people of opposite genders so… a date) he reflected on just how inconvenient weighing over eight hundred pounds could be.

Take chairs, for instance. The vast majority of them couldn’t support his weight. They didn’t even try – he sat in them, they collapsed. Just like that. It was like counting whole numbers: just as there wasn’t anything separating 1 from 2, other than the intrinsically distinct conditions of ‘oneness’ and ‘twoness’; in the same way, there wasn’t anything separating a chair without Honesto in it from a chair with Honesto in it, other than the intrinsically distinct conditions of ‘wholeness’ and ‘collapsed-into-so-much-splintered-scrap-ness’.

Oh sure, there were some chairs that could support his weight, and Honesto was deeply, almost religiously, grateful for them. Park benches were a good example, especially the cast-iron ones that always seemed to be painted matte black. Sitting right in the middle of a park bench wasn’t such a great idea, but as long as he kept himself firmly to the right or the left they could generally support his weight. The seats they used in buses were another good example. The benches they put in the City’s subway cars were not.

And then there was the problem of beds. That was a problem that strained even Honesto’s generally positive outlook. Honesto’s current sleeping arrangements consisted of an extra large size sleeping bag, opened and spread out on his bedroom floor with some bed linens spread over that. Not exactly the kind of plush, sensual arrangement a guy hopes to bring the ladies home to, you know?

And speaking of ladies, Honesto had a (sort of) date with one of them and he needed to get going. Satisfied as he would ever be with his appearance, he grabbed his wallet off of the dresser top in his room and headed for the door. Once outside his apartment, Honesto locked the door, walked down the hall to the stairway entrance and started down. He didn’t take elevators very often.

Obviously, Honesto didn’t do much sitting. Ever. Which quickly got awkward in an extremely wide array of different situations, both social and professional. Take going out to eat with friends, for example; the vast majority of restaurant seating – whether booths or chairs – simply weren’t up to the task of supporting Honesto’s weight. Exceptions to that statement almost certainly existed, but he wouldn’t know which seats were the exceptions and which were the rule until after he’d sat in them, by which point it’d be too late. Needless to say, Honesto didn’t go out to eat with friends real often.

Cars were another good example. Oh, they could support him, but all that weight focused over such a narrow area – and all on one wheel-well or another – was hell on any almost any automobile’s suspension. Not to mention the fact that the cushioning of any car seat he used was never quite the same again. Ergo, Honesto didn’t ride in cars much either. Didn’t even know how to drive, in fact.

But then, it was such idiosyncrasies of his physical nature that had prompted Honesto to meet with his ‘date’ in the first place. Tricia was another member of the Indigo Network, the same as Honesto. Like him, The Event had made her ‘different’, and as the site’s creator had no doubt intended, the Network had allowed the two of them to find each other; each of them one of the only other people on the planet who might be able to understand what the other was going through. Honesto found that he was really looking forward to really being able to talk about things, and not just about the trials and tribulations of weighing more than the clinically obese without actually looking like it either.

Because of the aforementioned social limitations Honesto’s unique physiology imposed on him, he and Trish had settled on a nearby park as the location for their meeting; Bennett Park (the highest point on Manhattan Island!). It was only a few blocks up from Honesto’s apartment, and it even had some park benches! It only took Honesto ten or fifteen minutes to reach the park, and then it was just a matter of finding Tricia. He’d agreed to come wearing a green hoodie (it was more of an olive-green, really, but close enough), and she’d agreed to come in a blue one.

Now, where was she?

[jameson (ST)]

Bennett Park was by no means huge. Or even very big. It was about two blocks on its long edge and one on the short and surrounded by apartments and small businesses and a temple at the northern end. Honesto stood more or less in the middle and looked to and fro for the girl in the blue hoodie. Communication between sexes being what it was Honesto had a certain impression of the evening and the girl who walked by in a red hoodie had a different one. She was one of another half dozen to dozen people in the park this evening. Bennet Park thanks to its small size and location was actually mostly safe after dark, quite unlike Central Park and the other larger green spaces in post-Event New York City.

Tricia, a.k.a. Octachoron, spun around and walked backwards for a few steps, checking out "Heavy Buddha" in the green hoodie. They'd agreed to the distinctive clothing but that didn't mean that Tricia couldn't do a walk by and check him out first. As a young woman in New York she couldn't be too careful, especially in a park, and at night. Tricia and a rather un-aptly named Heavy Buddha (she felt upon seeing him), a.k.a. Honesto, had chatted for some time online before agreeing to meet. Most of that was Tricia wanting to be careful though. She noted that he seemed fit for a guy named after a portly Indian dude, he was also cute, she blushed a little at the thought before her own self consciousness banished that away. Tricia was maybe five foot three inches, but she carried more weight than she needed. She wasn't fat so much as plump, pudgy, or any number of ways of saying that those last ten or fifteen pounds were not strictly needed.

She vanished behind a tree, literally, and then reappeared a minute later and two hundred feet away adjusting a pale blue hoodie with an explosion silk screened on the front and the words, "The Event", stenciled in below it. She rounded the tree she'd appeared behind and made her way casually toward Honesto still gripping the slightly greasy edges of fourth dimensional space, if things didn't work out she'd simply fold the world over on itself and flee, that was one of the fun parts of being an Indigo. Less fun was being unable to share it with most of her freinds and family. She sauntered up to Honesto with her hands in her front pocket. "You don't look that heavy. Or very much like Buddha," she added after a second. Honesto opened his mouth to reply but Trish added, "Not that I look much like my namesake either."

[Heavy]

Honesto grinned. So this was Tricia!

He stuck out a hand for 'Octachoron' to shake, which she did. He looked at her mischievously and said, "Not that anyone could see it if you did", in reference to the fourth-dimensional nature of the object she had taken her name from. Honesto had had to Google the word before he had any idea what it meant. He still had trouble grasping what Tricia meant when she claimed her powers were 'fourth-dimensional' in nature; he'd never been especially good with that kind of stuff.

Tricia grinned dutifully at Honesto's jibe as she shook his hand. "That's true", she giggled, not so much because it was funny as because a really hot guy had said it to her. "I suppose the same could be said about you, huh? Nice to officially meet you, by the way."

Honesto smiled and said, "you too", and then looked down at himself. "Yeah", he continued after a second, "in my case, the statement 'there's more to me than meets the eye' is a literal truth." He looked back up to Trish with a self-deprecating look of humor on his face.

"Do you really -?", she started to ask, but then stopped herself and leaned a little closer, glancing from side to side in a semi-conspiratorial, semi-joking fashion, and started again at a much lower volume. "Do you really weigh eight hundred pounds?", she asked in a breathy whisper. "You look like you weigh one-seventy, tops!"

'Nesto grinned again, showing a fine set of very white teeth in the process, and chuckled. "Eight hundred and twenty-five pounds, actually", he corrected her. It hadn't been easy to figure that out, either. It wasn't like the average bathroom scale went up that high.

Honesto decided that, unless she went through some kind of startling and dramatic change in the next ten minutes, he liked Trish. She wasn't gorgeous like he'd secretly hoped she would be, but despite being a little bit 'thick' she wasn't altogether unpleasant on the eyes, either. And she was nice, or seemed to be so far.

And being able to talk about this kind of thing with someone else out loud was leaving him feeling almost giddy. Like the first time he and some friends had managed to stay awake until after midnight, back when he was about eight years old.

Trish whistled appreciatively at Honesto's correction, and he offered, "So what about you? Can you really move around in fourth-dimensional space? You look like you only exist in three dimensions, tops!"

[jameson (ST)]

She shrugged, "Its not really what you think. I mean, I'm not really able to fully perceive and move in fourth space. If I could do that I could travel in time and see the full state of objects over time, which I suppose would get awkward. Its really more like three and a half dimensional space. I mean I can kind look around objects or even move through them by exploiting temporal ... well let's just say the older it is the harder it is to my perceptions."

She saw the blank expression on his face, "Oh, sorry, sometimes I do that. Ramble on I mean. It's just that Hollywood preaches so much bad science and the people just eat it up and so you end up with terms that don't mean what they should. It's a pet peeve of mine." She smiled shyly as she realized she'd been rambling again.

"It's OK, really. I don't get the chance to talk openly much either," he replied reassuringly. "Why don't we find someplace to sit down, I'm pretty sure the stone benches here will support me."

"OK!" She followed him toward the benches and as he selected one to sit on she frowned, "Not that one, it's new. How about over here?" The bench in question was older, its edges worn by time and weather. She turned and slowly, gingerly, sat down. The bench seemed to be acceptable as she looked up and nodded, "This'll do, it's solid enough."

[Heavy]

Honesto sat down just as gingerly and carefully as Tricia had - which was odd, when you thought about it - why did she need to worry about how sturdy the bench was? He settled his weight onto the bench's seat slowly, but there was no observable reaction to his weight as far as he could tell, so he finally just relaxed and turned his attention back to Trish.

"So what was that about?", he asked.

"What?"

"Well", he said, looking at her thoughtfully, "you seemed as nervous as I did about how sturdy this thing was. And what was that about the other one being 'new'?"

Trish smiled a little and let out a shy laugh but seemed hesitant to answer at first. Honesto watched her for a second and then tilted his head as though suddenly seeing her from a new angle. He leaned towards her (carefully, so as not to place too much of his weight towards the center of the bench), his eyes squinting in curiosity and he asked her, "You said you can move through things... is that - Were you worried you might fall through this bench?"

That actually made Tricia blush. "It's not what you think", she said, "I could have sat on that new bench just like I'm sitting on this one. It would've just been harder is all."

She could see that blank look returning to 'Heavy's' face again, but she pushed on with her explanation. "See", Trish said, staring at her hands as she gestured with them, "it's like this: even though most people can only perceive in three dimensions, we all exist in four and the longer we've been around the bigger our imprint in the fourth dimension is."

"Huh..?", asked Honesto after a slight pause.

Trish rolled her eyes as she smiled, "Look", she said, "say that you really can move around in time,and you're in a room with a newborn baby and an eighty year old man, ok?"

"Wait, what happened to the parents?"

"What?"

"The parents. You said its a newborn baby, so where're it's parents?"

"Forget the parents, Heavy", said Trish with a laugh and a playful swat at his shoulder, "it's just a stupid example anyway." She stopped and gave him a playful I dare you look, and Honesto looked right back and gave her a playful I dare not look.

"So anyway", Tricia continued with a lopsided smile, "you've got a newborn and an eighty year old right there in the same room with you. And in three dimensions, they're both equally solid and equally 'present', right?" Honesto nodded his agreement, and Trish kept going, "But you can travel through time, so you go back to the previous day, and now the newborn's not there..."

"But the old man is", said Honesto, finally catching on to what Trish was getting at.

"Right!", she exclaimed, pleased that he was understanding, "The baby is - from a fourth dimensional perspective - very small and 'easy to miss', I guess you could say, but the old man, he's been around for decades and he's really hard to miss."

Honesto smiled as he nodded his head at 'Octachoron'. "Ok", he said, "I gotcha. But what's that got to do with benches?"

Tricia rolled her eyes again. "New benches are like the newborn, dummy. They're 'easy to miss' for someone like me. Old benches aren't."

"Oooohh...", said Honesto, nodding his head slowly and trying very hard to look like he understood exactly what she meant. He kinda did (or at least he kinda thought he did), but all this talk about fourth-dimensional reality was starting to give him a headache. Maybe it was 'time' to move on to something else.

"So when did you know you were.. y'know... different than everybody else?"

[jameson (ST)]

"No, no. No changing the subject, I'm not done yet."

Honesto frowned, "But I get it, the bench is new so ..."

She smiled, "That's only part of it. What happens if you went forward into tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or next decade?" Heavy thought about it but Trish just steamed on ahead, "The baby gets older, becomes a toddler then a boy. The old man though, maybe he dies in a week, or a month, or a year."

Honesto nodded, then shook his head, "I'm confused again. So in one direction the baby is less solid than the old man and in the other more?" Trish nodded. "And so the other bench is, what, going to be removed?"

"Not exactly, but if we expand that example to say that the room is in a house that is built on a mountain. If you go back far enough, or ahead far enough, the people are both gone and eventually the house is gone too." Honesto nodded slowly trying to follow along. "In the longer time scale the amount of time that the mountain has been, and will be, there is thousands of times longer than the house, and the people. Its geological scale, and so its very solid in time."

"OK ..."

"This bench is stone, that one is a metal frame, but wooden slats. In the long term this bench will outlast that one ten or a hundred times unless something actively acts upon this bench."

"And so its that much more solid to you," he finished finally feeling like he grasped what she meant.

She nodded happily and rapped on the bench seat, "Yup. Solid as a rock, in the literal and temporal sense." They sat in silence for a moment while Tricia contemplated something and Honesto tried to recover from the download. After a few moments she broke the silence, "Three and a half years ago."

[Heavy]

Honesto had thought he'd understood Tricia as she'd tried to explain how all this fourth-dimensional crap worked, but then she'd gone and added in all that business about how long stuff would be around in the future, and any hope he'd had of understanding what she was talking about had been dashed. He guessed he understood the basics of it ok, but then why did it matter whether a bench was new or old? If what she'd just tried to explain to him was true, then an old bench was no more 'solid' then a new one...

Honesto shook his head, making an effort to shake all this heavy nonsense out of his head and focus on what Trish was saying.

"Three and a half years, huh?", Honesto repeated, his eyebrows moving up his forehead. "Wow, that's not all that long ago..."

"Seriously?", Tricia asked, "I thought that was pretty good. Some of the other Indigos have told me they didn't start 'developing' until only a couple of years ago." She looked over at Honesto curiously, "When did you first start noticing you were 'different?", she asked.

Honesto did a little half-shrug as he thought about that. "I guess... at least eight or nine years", he said after he'd considered for a moment.

"Really?!", Trish asked, surprise written all over her face. "Man", she murmured, "I guess I was a late bloomer, huh?"

Honesto grinned at her, "Maybe", he said, "but that's the thing about us; who knows what's normal and what's not, right?"

"Right", Trish said with a chuckle, but then seemed to think of something. "Wait, how did you hide your weight for all that time?", she asked.

"Oh", Honesto answered, shaking his hand in a negating gesture, "No. It wasn't like that. My stuff all developed real slow."

"Oh", Trish said, seeming a little surprised by that.

"Yeah", Honesto continued, "At first, it was just that I kept gaining weight, but I wasn't getting any bigger." His voice drifted off and his gaze became distant as he thought about those difficult first few years. "It was actually kind of frustrating and a little scary", he said softly, "but there wasn't anything I could do about it, and me weighing a little more than was normal for a kid my size wasn't enough to get my parents or the doctors all worked up, so I just had to deal, you know?" He grinned again, "And then I started getting stronger and tougher and faster, and that was pretty sweet. But yeah, for me everything was real gradual - which I guess was a good thing in a lot ways."

"Why?", he asked, "Did your stuff all show up at once or something, or was it just not that gradual?"

[jameson (ST)]

Tricia colored and murmured, "Yeah, something like that." Nobody could have missed the embarrassment and discomfort written on her face as she looked away. After a second she said, "So ... do you go to school? I'm taking classes at NYU. Its not really what it used to be but the physics department is still good and its close to home which saves money. Of course if I just decided to demonstrate my powers I bet I could get in at MIT ..." She turned back and though her cheeks were still tinged with pink she'd clearly put the momentary awkwardness behind her, hoping that he would not ask for more details.

[Heavy]

Heavy cocked an eyebrow at Trish's obvious embarrassment over such an innocuous question, but decided to leave the matter be. He knew all too well that the changes brought upon them by The Event could be awkward, embarrassing and even traumatic. Who knew what stresses Tricia's own changes had inflicted on her own life?

"No", he said, "I'm not in school." With a moderately self-deprecating smile he continued, "School was never really my thing, honestly. I play in a band. We're called the 767's."

[jameson (ST)]

"Oh, that sounds like fun, what do you play?" She seemed happy to have left the discussion about her first manifestation of power behind, and also genuinely interested in his music.

"I play guitar, and sing some too."

"Is it bass? That'd be fitting, Heavy playing a deep sound." She giggled, "What kind of music is it? You know music has a lot of math in it. There's a guy in my class, he write piano music to his theories. Most of it isnt't very good but on occasion it surprises you."

[Heavy]

"Oh yeah?", asked Honesto, "I might like to hear some of it sometime.

"No, I don't play the bass", he continued, "though I can play it. But we've already got a bass player in the group, and he's a lot better at it than I am. I just play a regular guitar."

The bench hadn't shown any signs of collapsing on him the entire time Honesto'd been sitting on it, so he finally relaxed a bit, leaning back and draping one arm over the back. "We're a rock band", he went on, "I haven't really been keeping track of all the different genre's of rock there are now, so I couldn't really tell you which one we qualify for, but I guess our sound could be compared to bands like The White Stripes, or The Killers. We've even had some fans compare us to Fallout Boy."

Honesto shrugged and smiled again. "I dunno", he demurred, "all I know is I like music and I like performing, and I like the music that we perform. So that's what I do."

Suddenly changing the topic, he looked at Trish and asked, "What did you say you were majoring in?"

[jameson (ST)]

"Huh? Oh, physics. I was always kinda interested but with my ... condition it seemed a logic avenue of study. I can hardly understand my powers fully if all I know of the way the world works is, 'drop an object and it falls', right?"

Heavy chuckled, "Suppose so. Never really thought about it that way. I mean, I didn't study much bio in school even though it might help me learn about why I am the way I am, or at least how it works."

She shrugged, "Well it's not like somebody said we had to right? I just figured that my ability was so far outside the, umm, established range of abilities for a person that it couldn't hurt to study it. Plus the opposite is true!" She smiled, "I mean think of the insight I can put into things based on my own experience and unique perspective."