Saint Joseph School

Continued from: Student Information

Now they sat in the office of Dr. David Conrads, counselor at Saint Joseph School. He had spoken at length with the director of Maple Ridge about this transfer, but this was the first time he had met the girl. She seemed stable enough. Sedate, apathetic.

"Ms. Hershfeld, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to speak with Scarlett privately."

"Of course." The nurse put a soft, brown hand on Scarlett's black one and smiled reassuringly.

As the door eased shut, Dr. "Dave" relaxed more in his chair and glanced over the swath of paperwork on his desk.

"Well, Scarlett, it says here that your last assessment with G.I.F.T. was in '97. They didn't list any healing ability, but you have no recorded medical visits leading up to your committal to Maple Ridge. Would you like to tell me about that?"

"What's to tell? I didn't have to go to the hospital."

He met her evasive attitude with a bluntness she could appreciate. "Scarlett, I want you to tell me about your suicide attempt."

She twisted in her chair, glancing back toward the door. "Monica...!"

"You can do this on your own, Scarlett."

"Monica! He's upsetting me, make him stop!"

The counselor simply sat there, patiently expectant. When the nurse failed to return after a few minutes, Scarlett sighed loudly and exasperatedly.

"We need to fully understand your abilities if you expect us to be of any help to you."

"I'm not here because I tried to kill myself. That's why I was there."

"I think that event has something to do with your mutation, Scarlett, and I think you do, too? If you explain to me what happened and you have no further problems like that, we'll never talk about it again."

Even though she maintained a scowl, this seemed to placate the girl. "Not why? Just what?"

Dr. Conrads nodded.

"Well... My parents were home, both of them, for once. Watching TV, unwinding. It was...four months after Sky died. I found a knife and locked myself in the bathroom." She paused, maybe for effect. "I did it. I saw it cut through. But it didn't hurt. Nothing changed." She eyed the counselor, gauging his reaction. So far, not much. "So I went a little nuts." She perched herself on the edge of the chair. "Started stabbing myself all over, screaming, everything. But nothing happened. Scared the hell out of my parents, is all; and they dumped me at Maple Ridge. Said I was too much for them." She flopped back again, frustrated at the doctor's perpetually calm demeanor. They were all the same. His vacantly attentive arched eyebrows even matched his woolly brown sweater vest.

Conrads refolded his hands. "Have you ever been injured since then?"

"Oh, sure." She tucked her feet up into her therapy pose, the contortion of limbs a part of her daily defiance-strengthening yoga regimen. "Burns from leather cuffs. Some girl pulled out a hunk of my hair. Shaving accidents. Sprained my ankle running away once."

Dr. Conrads appeared to be doing mental math. "Have you--ever, intentionally, harmed someone else--that is, using anything other than casual skin contact?"

Scarlett looked confused, tried to figure him out. "Um, no, I guess not. Like I said, I don't touch people ever if I can help it."

"I mean, have you ever tried, though? Thrown a punch?"

"Well, sure, when I was younger..."

"And you don't anymore?"

Scarlett paused, seeing now where Conrads was probing. "No, 'cause it--doesn't hurt."

The counselor nodded to himself. "Let me make some phone calls. There's someone I want you to meet."

Dr. Conrads escorted her across the grounds to the Athletic Center. Again, Scarlett found herself gawking at the variety of strangeness in many of the students. Colors, shapes, sizes, dealy-bops. Compared to these freaks, she thought, she'd have it easy. Unlike at Maple Ridge, where no one gave her crap because she was the meanest, the ring leader of the weird; but here, she wouldn't even have to be. Just slide under the radar. It didn't sound like a bad prospect at the time.

The gymnasium looked new and richly funded. High glass tile windows filtered light cheerfully into the space, highlighting the dust that was slowly settling to the rows of collapsed bleachers. She followed Conrads through a hall to an anteroom devoted to testing students' abilities: a bomb shelter-drab cube filled with a menagerie of targets, mannequins strung with wires, machines with screens and dials and needles and ticker tape, and a safety glass blast screen. Conrads introduced the people already present.

"This is Janine Sinclair, you've already met, I'm sure; Valerie Atwood, our other counselor; Jeff Waters, the athletic director; and Dr. Steven Holmes, a liaison from G.I.F.T. Everyone, this is Scarlett Crosse." They each nodded in turn. "We'd like to assess your extraordinary abilities, both for all our safety and for helping you to gain mastery of them. Also, this will qualify as an official G.I.F.T. assessment for if you ever want to apply to be a hero."

Scarlett shifted, ill at ease from the odd surrounding. "A hero? I don't get it."

"Many of our students are registered heroes of Paragon City," Sinclair explained. "They aid the Paragon City Police Department in investigating and apprehending criminals who also have 'super powers.' Some of our young heroes have reached even the highest security levels of clearance, and they have worked very hard, earned, and deserve every one of them. It's a very big and rewarding responsibility." She observed the girl's expression of irate trepidation. "But it isn't for everyone. We won't make you do anything you don't want to."

Holmes adjusted the clipboard on his hip. "Shall we begin?"

Dr. Conrads moved behind the blast screen with the others. Scarlett folder her arms across her chest, alone and uneasy, feeling very much like a lab rat in a cage.

"Remove your gloves, please, Scarlett."

She did, slowly, putting them in one of the pockets of her black smock dress. Her skin was pale and smooth, having almost never been exposed to daylight. Her fingernails were painted a deep red.

"Please move to the mannequin labeled '2' and place your right hand on it."

She crossed the room, her long legs taking her faster than she would have liked. Mannequin 2 looked like a dress maker's dummy, a laminated card with the number two affixed where the head would be with a loop of stiff wire. A red "X" was painted on its chest in acrylic. She looked back at the scientist.

"Anywhere you like."

Scarlett gingerly laid the palm of her hand over the "X." Movement at the machines caught her eye. Holmes was looking over the still needles and frowning.

"Touch mannequin number three, please, Scarlett."

She moved to the next: a yellow-orange, gooey-looking shape that seemed somewhat translucent, as she could vaguely make out wires running through the Jell-O-like substance.

"It's ballistic gel," the scientist explained, "designed to mimic the density and conductivity of living tissue. Go ahead; it's not sticky."

Scarlett reached out with her fingertips and felt a familiar, foreboding tingle. Holmes scribbled on his clipboard. The outer layers of the gel warmed slightly and she winced, which only hastened the warming, a few layers beginning to peel and bubble.

"Can I stop now...?" The blistering intensified, spread.

"Yes, that's fine." The scientist finished his notes. "Is that effect similar to what happens with human contact, do you know?

Scarlett shook her head. "No, just pain." Usually, anyway. Sky had blistered. Sky had died. "The other people said it was neural disruption and damage, or something."

Conrads gave her a curious look, but Holmes continued oblivious. "Yes, it does say that in your file. I think that diagnosis still holds. Now, about these 'healing' effects." He messed with the equipment a bit. "Why don't you give that same mannequin a good punch."

Scarlett shrugged and wound up, the tip of her tongue poking out of the side of her mouth, and hit the dummy just above where she had touched it before. During the brief contact she felt the tingle again, as the dummy made a dull smack at the impact, the hard gel wobbling slightly on its steel pole mount.

"I'm hurting it, still."

Dr. Holmes scratched his ear thoughtfully. "Actually, you're healing it more than you're hurting it--it's just that the mannequin can't heal, but I've got it registering here."

Intrigued, the scientist's callous demeanor softened a bit, and he approached Scarlett with a set of wireless electrodes. "I'm going to need to--need you to put these on yourself." He gingerly handed them off to the girl. "Here." He pointed to his temples. "And here." The top of his right hand. "And here." Above his heart.

She stuck them on, the tape pulling uncomfortably at her hair, and smiled mock-sweetly at the scientist as she dug around in her shirt to attach the fourth.

"Alright, Scarlett, go ahead an punch that mannequin again, a little lighter this time."

They continued a series of tests to find the threshold at which Scarlett could heal rather than harm her target, but it refused to be a stable velocity or force.

"Especially from this biometric data, I'd have to say it's psychologically linked. There's indication of some siphoning effects, rather than just using internal reserves. It's hard to say. But it seems that the trigger for both these effects is the reverse of an archetype that I see much more commonly. You harm unintentionally, and heal when attempting to harm."

"Well," Coach Waters piped up for the first time, "you said she hurts more when she doesn't want to." He looked to Holmes, who nodded. "So the reverse...?" The adults exchanged glances. He turned to Dr. Conrads. "And you said the effect worked through other objects?"

Conrads nodded.

Coach Waters came out from behind the screen and motioned for Scarlett to follow him, leading her through the gymnasium to one fo the equipment rooms. "You don't have much of a punch there," he chuckled good-humoredly. Scarlett was cowed enough by the ordeal to keep her temper. "So maybe we can save you some work with one of these." He gestured to a long rack of baseball bats, hockey sticks, golf clubs, tennis rackets, lacrosse sticks, ping-pong paddles, jai alai scoops, croquet mallets, and a myriad of other striking, catching, and throwing implements. "Plus, holding a bat always helps me to get angry at the ball." He chuckled again.

"Alright, whatever." Scarlett moved to peruse the racks, peeking around the mess, letting her fingers play over the handles. "What's this?" She withdrew a long, narrow paddle on a long handle.

"Oh, that's a cricket bat."

"Is it good against zombies?" She smiled a little unsettlingly.

"Well, I don't see why not." Coach Waters paused. "But, since we do have zombies in Paragon, you'll get to try for yourself," he offered, which wiped the smile from her face.

He led Scarlett back to the testing room. "Why don't you give that dummy a good smack, now?" He looked to Holmes. "Is that okay?" The scientist shrugged.

Scarlett adjusted the bat in her hands, getting a feel for the balance. Get angry, huh? She visualized the face of her mother, too furious to grieve, right in the center of the firm, orange blob. She swung baseball-style at the ballistic gel mannequin, and it connected with a loud smack and a shock that jarred her arms. Dr. Holmes smiled.

"Very impressive, Scarlett. A swing like that would save a life for sure, but I don't know if I'd want to get hit like that.

"I'll take one." Everyone turned to look at Coach Waters. "If she does more good than harm, why not? We should know what it feels like." He paused, searching his peers' faces for approval. "...For science."

Dr. Conrads laughed. "An epidemiological study. Of course." The others chuckled as well.

Coach Waters stepped out from the screen. "Alright, Scarlett, hit me. Don't be shy, now, or it will hurt."

Scarlett screwed up her face with an unpleasant smirk and shouldered the bat again. "If you say so, Mister." She swung without hesitation, to he surprise of the adults, catching Coach Waters across the bottom of his ribs. He made an, "Oof," noise to accompany the wet pop of ribs as the wind was knocked out of him, but he remained standing. He took a moment to recover, steadying himself with his hands on his knees.

"Are you alright??" Ms. Atwood gasped.

Coach Waters straightened himself and grinned. "Doesn't hurt a bit." He fingered his abdomen and winked at Scarlett. "You cracked some ribs there for a moment." She just shrugged.

Dr. Holmes scribbled on his clipboard. "Alright..." He tore off a sheet and delivered it to Scarlett. "That's a Controller Class hero application if you ever change your mind.

Scarlett frowned. "Sure, whatever."

"Either way," Coach Waters added, "you can hang onto that bat. Cricket isn't very popular outside of Europe."

"Well, I think that takes care of everything," Sinclair said, gathering her papers. "I would suggest some elementary mental control classes for the sake of safety. "Can you see to that, David?"

Dr. Conrads nodded. "Come on, Scarlett. We'll get you all set up and enrolled in classes. Then you can get unpacked and settled in in time for dinner."

Scarlett didn't know what to think, but she felt a little better with the cricket bat slung over her shoulder. A little more sure of herself, even though she was still defenseless save for her sharp tongue. And it wasn't until they were back in Dr. Conrads' office that she realized that Monica had not been at her side. Maybe...maybe she would be okay here. She might even have to break her promise to the girls back at Maple Ridge that she would soon return.

Continued in: Interludes