Achilles ran down the side streets, looking desperately for the woman Jumper had been holding onto moments earlier. The woman who apparently had a Miracle. He didn't know how Jumper had figured it out, but the guy deserved some serious credit for picking her out of a crowd and connecting her to his lack of air.
Whoever she was, maybe she was a villain. Where there were superheroes, villains always emerged. And if she had powers - a Miracle - too, then there must be some god of some kind opposing the purple Miracle granter who had chosen Achilles and Jumper.
He turned a corner back onto the main streets. The lamps revealed several people. Achilles looked for the blond woman, but she was nowhere to be seen. No, wait! There - across the way. A woman with long pale blond hair. He ran halfway to her before realizing that she wasn't the same one Jumper had been wrestling with.
Where had she gone?
Olivia breathed an internal sigh of relief as she walked away from the scene. She'd ditched her wig in a trash can somewhere along the alleys and pulled off the dress she'd been wearing, revealing shorts and a blouse. Now she looked different. Only her skin tone and eye colour was the same, but hopefully Achilles wouldn't be intelligent enough to realize it was her until she could remedy that too.
The loss of the wig and the outfit was unfortunate, but it was a good thing she'd had a backup. She wasn't so desperate that she'd leave no avenue for escape in case things went wrong - and they had gone very wrong. Mr. Popcorn-Bag had seen to that.
She'd had no grudge against him before. If he hadn't interfered, she'd have let him do whatever heroing he wanted until he made some kind of unforgivable error like Achilles had. But now Popcorn-Bag, aka Jumper, was on her hit list.
She'd get revenge on him too.
Jumper hadn't known what to think when the Miracle woman had finally wrenched herself away from him and the pain still didn't fade from his hands. When he looked down at them, the skin was red and bubbly.
No. This had to be part of the illusion. His hands couldn't be burned. It was all fake. Like some kind of mind control that would fade when the caster was gone. It just hadn't worn off yet.
He fell back on his rear, his hands shaking slightly. One of the officers ran up to him and knelt beside him. She holstered her raygun and looked intently at him. Jumper glanced up at her in return.
"That looks pretty bad," she said, reaching to grab his wrists. Jumper instinctively pulled away, trying to stay calm against all odds.
He scooted back a few paces until his back was against the wall as the officer called for first aid. His hands hurt. They hurt horribly. And they were shaking uncontrollably.
It's not real. It's not real.
But the voices around him started to make even that small comfort cold and worthless.
"Second degree burns. Not sure where they came from, but we need to start working on it. Hey, kid? Can you hear me?" Jumper looked up, realizing there were now three officers surrounding him.
"I..." He could barely get any words out as one of them examined his hands.
"Do you know how you got burned like that?" he asked.
"You...can see it...?" The quiet words cemented that this was indeed reality. Jumper had just burned his hands to the point that he should maybe go to the hospital. But if he did that they'd find out who he was.
"Yeah," the female officer replied. "Looks pretty bad."
Jumper took a breath as the officers discussed first aid. Someone returned with a bucket of water, which his hands were then plunged into. The water felt weird to him, but he didn't have time to dwell on it.
"Can you tell us what happened?"
"R-right. Um..." Where did he even start? "The woman I caught was...I think she was distorting Achilles' perception or something. When I grabbed her, she started messing with my head and made me feel like her arms were really hot. Like, a metal pan in the oven or something. I thought it was all fake, but..."
"What is he talking about?" The officers began talking among themselves as Jumper tried to steady his breathing. The water felt somewhat nice on his hands now that he thought about it.
"Sounds like he's on drugs," another said.
"And yet we have the evidence right here that something happened. Those burns aren't a hallucination."
"Shut it, Larsen. The burns are probably a prior injury."
"Then why didn't we see them when the kid ran up to stop Achilles?"
The argument faded into noise as Jumper closed his eyes in an attempt to calm himself. The ground under him was solid and cold. The water numbed the pain in his hands. The popcorn bag was getting grease in his hair.
A new voice ripped him back to reality.
"Jumper! What happened?"
Achilles ran over and knelt by them, taking in the bucket of water and Jumper's blistered hands.
"She burned me. I guess she can affect reality to a certain degree." The words came slowly and shakily. Achilles put a hand to his chin in thought.
"It would seem so. My illusions could probably be written off as just that, but that looks pretty real. Where did she come from? There's got to be someone opposing the purple mist figure. I lost her somewhere in the side streets, so we can't take her in unfortunately."
"That woman was actually responsible for this?" an officer asked.
"Who else would be?" Achilles shot back. "I'm lucky Jumper figured her out when he did. If he hadn't, I'd be out of air right now. And you can see what she did to him, can't you?"
"You're saying all this is supernatural?" the female officer asked.
"Of course it's not," another officer interjected. "Supernatural is restricted to those weird books."
"Lots of people like 'those weird books', and I'd like you to provide a different explanation, O'Neal."
He didn't get the chance to try explaining it before Achilles jumped back into the conversation.
"Basically Jumper and I both received Miracles from a purple figure. If we got Miracles, then why couldn't someone else get one too? And based on how she acted, I'd say there's someone opposing the purple figure who chose us to help people. Someone who wants to use Miracles to cause chaos and destruction."
"You sure he's not high?" O'Neal asked. The other two shrugged and returned their attention to Jumper.
"You got gauze?" the woman asked.
"Richardson should be back with it any second." As the other officer finished talking, a fourth officer ran up with a roll of gauze.
"Thanks, Richardson." The female officer grabbed the gauze and slowly lifted one of Jumper's hands out of the water.
"We'll want to get you to a hospital soon so the doctors can get some antibiotics on those," Richardson said. "We can go as soon as Larsen finishes wrapping them."
"No..." Jumper said. "I don't want to go to the hospital." Not only because he was sick of clinics and stuff after his accident, but because they'd find out his identity if he did.
"Can you guarantee that Jumper's identity will remain secret?" Achilles asked.
"You both need to quit running around hiding your faces and pretending to be dealers of justice," O'Neal spat.
Larsen finished with Jumper's left hand and started working on his right. Everything hurt like heck, but he endured. He'd managed to survive breaking every bone in his body. Two burns shouldn't be that much worse.
"Shut it, O'Neal," Larsen said. "We can deal with everything when we get to the hospital. Right now we need to get the treatment over with and get eyewitness testimony. If you have nothing better to do, there are a bunch of other people we need statements from. Ask Barron if you're stuck."
"I don't want to take orders from someone under review," O'Neil replied.
"Then take a recommendation from me," the other officer said. "We need more people getting statements. You and Richardson should get on that."
As the two officers left, Jumper tried moving his bandaged hand. It just hurt worse, so he quit. Larsen finished with his right hand and helped him up, making sure not to touch the bandaged area.
"Thanks," Jumper mumbled. Larsen and the other officer smiled at him.
"Now we should get to the hospital so they can do better than our stopgap measures," she said.
"No." Jumper looked around quickly. Panic was starting to set in as he realized they would probably identify him soon enough. That felt like it would mean his life was over.
"You got a better idea?" Larsen asked sarcastically. "Wait and hope you don't get an infection? They've also got stuff that should help speed up the healing."
"Do you promise to keep his identity secret?" Achilles asked.
"It's not up to us," Larsen replied. "You'd have to ask the sergeants. And they might not be able to make that call either."
Jumper took a couple steps away from the wall, examining his hands. The bandages made it look less bad, but everything still hurt. He was not going to that hospital. With one last look at the officers telling him to go with them, he crouched and launched himself upward.
Three whole levels.
There was yelling below him as he started running home. He was late. He ripped off the popcorn bag once he was away from people and stuck his hands in his pockets as he walked home. The pockets seriously hurt, but he endured it.
