Enjoy.
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Our very first “mission” as a team wasn't really much of a mission. It was a little more like mud wrestling.
“Gordy! Cut around and block the exit!” Zoe yelled, pointing to the exit she was talking about. “Maria, Ian, Chloe, fan out around it!”
Obediently, I fanned out. To my left, Maria grumbled. She's a little stubborn. I'm used to taking orders, though, so I didn't mind at all. I just raced forward and skidded through a deep puddle of mud.
The pig we were trying to catch squealed, kind of like the way my best friend does when she's scared.
Yeah, okay, I know what you're thinking. What's the point of being a superhero if all you do is chase pigs around? But we really did have a reason. It wasn't just any pig, after all. This pig, name of Chester, belonged to the head of the CIA, and for some reason Chester decided that it would be a good idea to pick up one of the devices that me and my teammates use to change into our uniforms and swallow it.
That's right. Chester took Juliet's compact disk and SWALLOWED IT.
Now, I'm all for creative eating. I can put away some serious food when I feel like it, despite the fact that I'm only one inch bigger around the waist than five-two, ninety-six-pound Maria. I pride myself on being able to eat just about anything. Once, when I was hungry enough, I ate half of my mom's favorite flower bush.
All right, I was also six. But it was a big flower bush.
Our leader-of-sorts, Zoe, was trying very hard to catch the pig. She deserved an award. (Do they give out awards for pig-chasing?) She was the one that chased it into a fenced area, then had my best friend Gordy block the exit so that the rest of us could catch it without Chester running off.
This, of course, was after we ran after Chester in circles for fifteen minutes.
“Maria! He's headed your way!” Chester barreled towards the line we had made, between me and Maria. She flew sideways, trying to catch it in her sideways tackle.
(She has a signature sideways tackle that she uses all the time. I'm into math. I calculated that the likelihood she'll use it on our teammates is thirteen percent. The likelihood that she'll use it on me? Ninety-seven point three percent.)
Maria's fast, but Chester was faster. It dodged her, and she smacked sideways into a very big pile of mud. At least, I hoped that it was mud. It splattered everywhere – and because I'm a little slow, a great big gob of it hit me.
All over my uniform. I am not a fan of mud.
I fell over backwards. Partly from surprise. Partly from trying to avoid being splattered. Mostly on accident.
Of course, that's not what I ended up telling my friends. Because, see, I'm really tall, and I ended up falling on Chester. Complete accident. But I'll never tell.
Zoe ran up and dropped on Chester, too, who was wiggling around and trying to get loose. (I forgot to mention: Chester weighs almost two hundred pounds.) Chloe and Maria threw themselves on top of the pile. Like that, we were able to get a muzzle on Chester and snap on a couple of leashes. Gordy solved the problem by picking Chester up and carrying her after wrapping the leashes around his arms. Gordy's strong. And “strong” is an understatement.
“Great job in there, Ian,” Zoe told me as we helped Chloe and Maria out of the mud. During one of Chester's bigger wiggles, Maria slid off and landed in some very suction-y mud. I think she slid off because she was already coated in mud. Chloe was luckier – she just got what rubbed off Zoe, who she landed on.
I grinned. I was still pretty shy around all of them. “Uh, thanks. It was nothing.”
“No, seriously,” she said. “You did really good. That fall? I thought it was on accident at first, but then you caught Chester!”
That was when I started to laugh. I laugh when I'm nervous. “Oh, heh, uh, yeah, it was hard to time like that.”
Mr. Nobill, our science teacher, chose that moment to save me. “Come on, now,” he said. He kind of reminds me of my dad. He's started getting this fatherly voice with me and the rest of the team. “We should get you guys back to the Department so you can get cleaned up.”
Ah. Yeah. Getting cleaned up. Zoe wasn't bad off. The mud had only gotten on her uniform. Gordy wasn't rolling around in the mud with the rest of us, and Chloe hadn't gotten too much on herself, either. Juliet hadn't been able to race around in her uniform, so she was good.
Me, though – my uniform has short sleeves and short gloves, so the mud was all over my skin. I got some mud in my hair, too, when I fell.
Maria was definitely worse off. Her uniform not only exposes a lot of her arms, but a few inches of her legs. The mud was all over her – you couldn't even tell that her uniform was black and red. It streaked her face and was all over her hair. (Then again, when you don't fix our hair up when it goes down to your waist and you're a superhero, you're asking for something to happen to it.)
So when we got back to the Department, the only ones that needed shower-jobs were me and Maria.
I went into the guys' room as soon as I finished my debrief. After I changed back from my uniform, I noticed that my shorts and t-shirt were pretty nasty. The nanobots had ingrained dirt INTO THE FABRIC.
Last time I ever wore those.
I also noticed that the mud seeped into my uniform. There were streaks of brown on my legs, my stomach, and my face. It was stuck in my hair, and I could feel crusty mud on my face and back. Yuck. Seriously feeling the need for a shower.
Unfortunately, I remembered that I had no idea where the shower was.
So for a few minutes, I wandered through the hall. (I wasn't worried about any of the scientists. As long as I didn't exit the hall, nobody would see me: the team had private rooms that nobody else could access.) It took a while to find a door that had a bathroom in it. There were some meeting rooms. I found Gordy's personal shrine to his obsession, Juliet Martin. One room had six beds in it.
Finally, finally, finally – I found a tiled room. A bathroom! I was starting to get nervous – what if Maria saw me walking around? – but I decided that she was probably finished by now. I took my time telling Mr. Nobill about my tackle of Chester the Pig.
The room looked like a locker room, sort of. The walls and floor were covered with white tiles, and there were a few wooden benches around in front of hanging mirrors. No windows. There were some stalls lining the walls. I looked inside, hoping to find a shower, and found an overgrown locker instead.
Ugh.
It was empty, though, which was all right. I grabbed one of the towels, yanked off my clothes, then wrapped the towel around my waist. I headed back out and walked down the corridor towards a doorway at the other end. Then something happened.
Maria walked out of the doorway, obviously from the shower, wrapped up in one of the white Department towels. She was soaked, and her hair was clinging to her face and neck. Her skin was tanned, which was weird considering it was March, and her legs – oh, God, her legs. She's not very tall, but her legs are hot, especially when they're minimally covered by a towel. I have never seen that much of a girl's legs before. Ever, ever, ever.
So, uh, yeah. I kind of stared at her legs for a while. Then I noticed that she wasn't moving, so I looked up. She looked – oh, what's the word – HORRIFIED. Then I realized that both of us were practically naked, and I'm pretty sure that, right then, I looked pretty horrified, too.
Two horrified teenagers wearing nothing but towels. Joy.
It took a few minutes for either of us to come to our senses. Terrorists could have burst through the door with submachine guns, and we wouldn't have moved. Then we did what any two sensible teenagers wearing nothing but towels would do.
We started screaming bloody murder and ran back out our respective doorways.
I like the main character and the little group you've got going. I cant wait to read the next part.
