A Tale of Two Masks

Mrs. Mcshay had once been a proud mother with a successful husband, thriving in the life of the big city. Her family was far from perfect, but she was happy. When did everything go wrong? She closed her eyes and could only come up with one answer. Superhuman Industries. Nothing had gone right since they got involved.

It was bad enough when they used her darling son as some embarrassing comedic relief to appease the viewers, but now that he had spoken out against them, he had even been dragged to prison. That was only the beginning. It wasn’t enough for them to steal her son’s future, they stole her husband’s as well.

As the father of the infamous Connin’ Collin, he was fired from his job. Every job he applied rejected him the moment they realized who his son was, no matter how pleased with him they were in the interviews. Their savings wouldn’t last forever, and she could only imagine their fate was to live on the streets. Perhaps Collin was safer in prison than suffering this fate with them.

The phone rang, jolting Mrs. Mcshay out of her wallowing and despair. Was it another position calling to say they found her husband unsuitable? Was it more bad news? Or was it Collin? He was allowed one call home a week.

“Hello?”

“Is this Mrs. Mcshay? We need to speak to you about your son,” the voice on the other end said.

“Collin? Did something happen?” she asked, anxiety hitting her with no hope left to hold it back.

There was a pause. “There is no easy way to say this. There was an explosion in your son’s cell block earlier. The paramedics are on the scene but we don’t believe he will make it. You need to come now if you want to say your goodbyes.”

Her mind went blank. An explosion? Not make it? This couldn’t be reality. “H-have you called my husband?” she managed to ask through her heightening breaths.

“We are contacting him now,” the voice assured, then told her the address of the hospital, “Please hurry. We don’t know how much time he has left.”

She wasted no time, hanging up the phone and grabbing her purse. She was likely a mess, but presentation didn’t matter in times like these. Mrs. Mcshay and her husband arrived at the hospital at nearly the same time. Even though the heart monitor’s steady beep showed their son was alive, the comatose figure in front of them looked anything but.

The explosion had left his body covered in terrible burns and… Mrs. Mcshay could no longer bear to look. “How did this happen to you?” she asked him through her sobs.

Of course, there was no answer. Inside, she felt she knew the reason. It was SI. It had always been SI. That foul corporation that played with the fate of others like it was some sick, twisted game. She would destroy them. Now that it had come to this, she had nothing left to lose.

==========

Somehow, her father’s crazy plan had worked. He had gotten himself that meeting with the CEO. That only served to make Summer more nervous, though. What if her father threatened him and made things worse? What if that dratted CEO had a silver tongue and convinced her father to stand back? What if he found out some big secret and had to keep it from her? The last one was probably the most likely, but Summer didn’t like any of them.

Unfortunately, it didn’t matter how much she disliked it. There was no stopping her father when he had his mind set on something. He gave Summer a hug before heading off with Ashton. Unlike her father, Ashton did not seem very hopeful about this meeting. Hopefully nothing would go wrong.

Instead of moping around and doing nothing, Summer decided to work on her power. Ashton had given her a hint on the research he was pursuing with one word. Wavelengths. The more she thought about it, the weirder the word became. It did give her an idea. What if her power was not light at all, but energy wavelengths? Of the many kings of wavelengths, light was the most visible making it the easiest to manipulate.

Before she did any testing Summer did some quick research just to make sure she wasn’t doing anything dangerous. A little diagram told her that the faster the little waves were, the more dangerous. The actual range for visible light was quite small, too. How would she tell if she successfully slowed it down? Would it change color, maybe? If the change was too drastic, would she make, she had to check again, infrared? Were microwaves dangerous?

Summer decided that she should try just enough to see if she could change colors. Everything else would be too hard to tell if she succeeded. She reminded herself that red was the slowest and purple was the fastest. Rather than her overhead light, she tried with a lamp this time, since it would be easier to change the lightbulb if it broke. Currently the light shone yellow, which should put it towards the middle.

She focused on the earlier image, slowing the waves down in her mind. The lamp became dimmer, glowing an ominous red just like she had imagined. Summer had only half expected this to work. She slowly made it faster, rising from red to orange as the light slowly grew brighter. She let it to return to yellow, then to green and blue. She stopped there. Summer was a bit nervous about going over purple.

Instead she grabbed her phone and sent Ashton a text. “Your wavelength idea worked! I made the light change colors!”

After she sent it she realized that getting a notification in the middle of a big important meeting with the CEO was probably a bad thing. Hopefully he had his phone on silent, or at least vibrate. Since she was already on her phone, she habitually scrolled through her usual sites, but she didn’t get far before her finger froze.

It was one of those breaking news headlines she would usually ignore, except this time she couldn’t ignore what it said. SI was suspected in the bombing and murder of Collin Mcshay, also known as RefRain.