Degrees of Separation: 10/?
by Nan Smith
Previously:
Ally's eyes flew open again, but this time she didn't speak aloud. 'I really *can* hear you! Oh, wow! This is amazing!'
'It sure is,' Marta said. 'Try to aim your thoughts directly at us, though. You don't want anybody else to hear -- like Jonny and Jimmy. They don't get to find out about this stuff until they're ten.'
'Okay -- sorry,' Ally said. Her mental voice was quickly becoming firmer and more confident. 'Is this better?'
'Some,' CJ said. 'Try to look at what I'm doing. You try to send your thoughts directly to one person. Don't let them scatter. There's at least one other kid in Metropolis that Dad hasn't found yet, who can hear us, if we're not careful. Or there was, three years ago. I don't want to take chances.'
Someone knocked at the door, and CJ turned his head as his mother stepped inside. "Are you ready for me, yet?"
"Sure," CJ said. "Come on in."
**********
And now, Part 10:
Lois stepped into the attic playroom. She had originally expected Clark to run this session, but on the way home he had explained to her what Jim had found and she had agreed that it was more important for him to find out if they had anything to worry about with the three children that Graham Jersey was investigating. So here she was, attending a class taught by her thirteen-year-old son -- and the most galling part of it was that he knew more about the subject than she did.
She should definitely have done this before, she thought.
CJ was looking a little unsure of himself, and that made her feel better. It wasn't a case of her super powered son taking a superior position to her after all. The day would come when he would be a superman just like Clark. He was pretty super right now, actually -- but he was still human, or close enough. She should have realized that CJ would never consider himself superior to her or anyone else, any more than Clark did. 'Come on, Lane, there's no reason to get defensive about this. It's not CJ's fault that you were too chicken to try this before!'
She looked around and then pulled up one of the chairs that sat against the wall. "Okay," she said. "What do I do?"
"Well --" CJ hesitated. "First, I'd like you to try thinking *at* us. Back when Wyatt first learned, Marta could hear what he was saying, but the rest of us could sort of hear his voice -- just not his words."
"I get it," Lois said. "You want to see if you can 'sort of' hear me, too."
"Yeah." CJ looked relieved at her quick understanding.
"Okay." Lois fixed her eyes on him and concentrated as hard as she could. 'CJ?"
CJ had closed his eyes and his face scrunched up into a frown.
'CJ?' Lois thought again.
Ally turned her head to look at Lois. "Did you say 'CJ?'"
Everyone looked at her in surprise. "Did you hear her?" CJ asked.
Ally nodded. "Yeah. Like she was calling from a long way off."
CJ looked at Lois again. "Try it again, Mom," he said. "I'm not sure, but I think I'm feeling something -- sort of like a tickle in my mind. Try to think real loud."
Lois closed her eyes and pictured her son's face in her mind. 'CJ?' she thought again, as loudly as she could.
"I can hear you," Marta said. "I just can't hear what you're saying."
"Me, too," Wyatt said.
"Mom?" Jimmy's voice said from behind them, "why are you yelling for CJ? He's right there next to you."
Lois opened her eyes and turned her head to see her seven-year-old son poking his head through the attic door. Jim Olsen appeared behind him.
"Sorry," he panted, obviously slightly out of breath from hurrying up the stairs behind the boy. "Jimmy, I told you your Mom and the others are doing a science experiment. You head back downstairs. Milton the Monster is just coming on."
"Your Uncle Jimmy is right," Lois said quickly. "We're doing a science experiment with -- "
"Sound vibrations," CJ said at once. "Scram, kiddo. We want to finish this before dinner."
"Okay," Jimmy said. "Sorry."
"It's okay," Lois said. "Go on down and watch the cartoons, honey. I'll be there as soon as I finish helping your brother."
When the door had closed behind him, Lois looked questioningly at her oldest son. "What just happened?"
"I'm not sure." CJ was squinting at the door, and Lois suspected that he was tracking his younger brother's progress down the stairs. "Ally could hear what you were saying, and she's like Linda -- she's got something more than just the regular telepathy. But Jimmy heard you, too. Do you think that means he might be like Ally and Linda?"
"Maybe," Lois said. "I guess it's possible." She cleared her throat. "Look, let's get on with this. How did Wyatt manage to tune in on your special band?"
"Touch CJ and think at him," Wyatt said. "It sort of helps you to get it right."
CJ extended a hand and Lois grasped it. She closed her eyes, visualizing her son's face. 'CJ?'
'I can hear you,' CJ's voice said suddenly in her mind. 'You're not as loud as the others, but I can hear you. Now, touch Marta and try it.'
Lois obeyed. 'Marta?'
'Hey!' Wyatt's voice said in her mind, so suddenly that she nearly jumped. His "voice" was softer than CJ's, but she could hear him clearly. 'Nice going! I can hear you, too!'
'So can I,' Marta said. 'Mom's really good at this!'
'It's sort of like a whisper,' Wyatt said. 'That's how I started out, but if you practice hard at really projecting, you'll get louder, just like I did.'
Someone knocked on the doorframe, and Lois opened her eyes to see Valerie and Alex Henderson peeking through the partially opened door. She beckoned to them.
"Come on in, kids. CJ's teaching the class today."
"Where's Mr. Kent?" Valerie asked, giving Alex a light push. The two children entered the room, and Valerie shut the door behind them.
"He and Linda went to check out three other kids that might be like us," CJ said. "I hope they'll be back pretty soon., but in the meantime I'm supposed to put everybody through their exercises. Mom's going to tell you what we've found out in the meantime."
"Okay," Valerie said.
Lois smiled at Alex. "How are you doing these days, Alex?"
The boy, whose appearance was such a surprising mix of Lex Luthor and Clark, grinned at her. Alex had just turned eleven, and he was a far cry from the scared kid that CJ and Wyatt had rescued from Arianna Luthor's basement, a little less than two and a half years ago. The child had been Arianna's special project: a clone made of a mixture of the DNA from both Clark and Luthor, and had been scheduled for death because he hadn't developed any super powers by the time he was nearly nine. Of course, most of the super powers didn't kick in until about the age of ten, when the first early stirrings of puberty were apparently beginning in Kryptonians, but Arianna hadn't known that. Alex's DNA was 48 percent Luthor's and 52 percent Clark's, and Lois had always thanked providence that her son and Wyatt had been able to prevent him from being one more innocent victim of the Luthors' insane drive for power.
"I'm great, Mrs. Kent. I floated in my sleep last night! When I woke up I fell onto the floor, all the way across the room!"
"Hey, that's great!" Marta said.
"Yeah," CJ said. "I started floating when I was almost eleven, so you're right on schedule. Come on, let's get started." He waved at Ally. "Alex, this is Allynda Myers. Everybody calls her Ally. She's just learned how to use her telepathy, and Mom just learned, too. We're gonna wait on the heat vision stuff for now. We don't want to set the house on fire by accident, but everybody line up. We're going practice floating just a little bit off the floor, and teach Ally how."
Lois got to her feet. "Do you need me anymore, CJ?"
"Not unless you want to practice your telepathy more," CJ said.
"I'll work on it a little later," she said, smiling at the group of super-powered children. "When you finish, come down and I'll fill you in on what your dad and Uncle Jimmy found out. I think I need to go downstairs and let him go home. Sandi is going to be getting impatient. Besides, I need to start dinner." She almost laughed at the look on both Marta's and CJ's faces. "I'm just going to heat up one of your dad's casseroles!"
"Oh," Marta said, imperfectly concealing her relief. "We'll be done in about an hour, I guess. You don't have to rush."
Lois sternly smothered the urge to giggle as she left the playroom, closing the door behind her.
**********
"Okay," CJ said. "Ally, the kids here have all practiced floating. Most of us have floated by accident at least once, while we were younger. Have you ever floated?"
Ally shook her head. "I don't think so."
"Do you ever have dreams where you're flying?"
Ally frowned. "Yeah -- sometimes."
"How about when you wake up? Do you ever feel like you just dropped suddenly, sort of like when your car goes over a dip in the road a little fast?"
"Well..." Ally frowned, obviously trying to recollect something. "Yeah, once in a while it's happened like that, but I figured it was just cause I was waking up suddenly."
"Maybe you were," CJ said with a grin. "Okay; Dad did this the first time he started teaching me to float on purpose. He'd seen me float a few times, but when I realized what I was doing, I'd lose it and land on the floor. Watch."
The trick was, of course, that his body would defy gravity when he *wanted* it to, just like his hand reached out to pick up a pencil when he commanded it to do so. The signal was almost unconscious, but initiated by his wish to float, just like the order that went out for his hand to move, but trying to explain that to Ally was a little difficult. Instead he fixed his eyes on her face and rose slowly and gradually from the floor, until he hovered a good four feet in the air.
Ally's eyes widened just a little as she silently watched the feat, but although she swallowed once, she didn't say anything.
"Okay," CJ said to his classmates. "Everybody line up like I said before and do the same thing. Alex, if you have any trouble, grab onto Valerie."
The other children sorted themselves out and then, one by one, copied him. Soon, all of them hovered, more or less gracefully, on a level with CJ. Alex wobbled a little at first, and he could tell that the boy was working to stay steady, but he didn't grab onto his sister. Instead, his face contorted in a frown of concentration as he fought to keep himself suspended in the air.
"You're doing great, Alex," CJ said.
The boy grinned tightly. "Yeah. Some day I'm gonna do this where Arianna Luthor can hear about it on the news. I'm gonna make her eat her words."
"Just don't let her know who you are in real life," Marta said.
"Not a chance," Alex said.
Which, CJ thought, was true. No one could know where Alex had gone after they pulled him out of that basement and took him home. The Hendersons had quietly adopted him and had the records sealed on the grounds that Alex's parents were abusive, and it was in the best interests of the child that they not be able to locate him. CJ wasn't sure how Mayor Henderson had managed that, but he was glad of it.
But back to business. CJ dropped lightly to the floor and held out a hand to Ally. "Here; grab on."
Ally took his proffered hand, holding it rather tightly. CJ grinned. "Relax. All I'm going to do is help you do what you probably already can. It isn't hard. I want you to imagine your body getting light as air, and think about moving *up*. Ready?"
Ally nodded and CJ squeezed her hand reassuringly. "Okay; here we go." He mentally told his aura to extend itself around Ally and began to rise slowly and steadily from the floor, bringing her along.
**********
For Allynda Myers, the feeling was uncannily familiar. All of a sudden, without any warning, the pull of gravity dropped away and she felt lighter than a feather. CJ held her hand, tugging her gently upward and she went with him easily with nothing to pull her down. CJ was grinning at her, and she grinned back, delighting in the amazing sensation of freedom.
She *had* done this before, she thought. This was something her body knew how to do, except for the fact that she had not realized it consciously. Maybe, as CJ had suggested, some of those times she had awakened with a jolt and the feeling of falling she had actually been floating.
'Float, Ally,' CJ's voice said in her mind. 'You don't need me for this. Just do what I do. *Want* yourself to float. It's the same as when you make your arm move, or when you walk. You don't think about it. You just *do* it."
Oh, she wanted to be able to do this by herself, that was for sure. She never wanted to stop. She *wanted* to be able to stay floating free like this, after CJ let go of her hand.
She began to rise slowly, unsure whether it was CJ that was providing the motive power, or her. And all at once, she realized that he was no longer holding her hand.
She dropped several inches and then caught herself, concentrating on remaining aloft and weightless in the air.
"You're doing great," Marta's voice said. The other girl was floating inches away, and grinning from ear to ear. "I knew you could."
"Okay," CJ said aloud. "Now try to lower yourself back to the floor, slowly, so you don't come down too hard."
That part was a little harder, and she landed with a thump, but the amazing thing she had done remained with her. She could actually fly -- or at least float, and if she could float, she could fly, if not now, then soon.
"Wow!" she said.
**********
Down in the kitchen, Lois removed one of Clark's frozen casseroles from the freezer and examined his handwritten directions.
"Preheat oven to 375 degrees," she read aloud. Okay, that was simple enough.
She set the oven temperature and turned on the heat, feeling slightly smug. As recently as last week, she had preheated the oven for half an hour without it getting warm, before Marta timidly pointed out that she hadn't actually turned on the heat. That wasn't a mistake she was willing to make again. What was it with her and cooking, anyway? She could pick a lock, hotwire a car, crack a safe and scale a building like a cat burglar -- and it was all she could do to heat up a frozen dinner without burning it to a crisp. Why on Earth couldn't she figure out how to cook up a simple bowl of oatmeal without turning it into some kind of ghastly soup or setting off the smoke detector?
It really didn't make sense, she thought. At least when you cooked, the directions were right there in black and white, on the page, often with illustrations of how the final product was supposed to look, but somehow hers never did. Like the attempt a few weeks ago to make a tuna casserole. Tuna casserole wasn't very complicated, except, apparently, for her. Fortunately, a few swipes of the paintbrush had covered the signs of her handiwork before Clark came rushing home to put out her latest attempt to burn the townhouse to the ground.
Lois sighed. She knew better, but once in a while she had the ambition to make something besides her chocolate desserts or macaroni casserole, and it usually resulted in an embarrassing situation where either Superman had to deal with it, or one of the neighbors called the fire department. It just wasn't fair.
She glanced out into the living room. Jonny and Jimmy lay on their stomachs, watching the television. Outside in the back yard, the triplets were involved in some kind of game that involved a great deal of yelling and squealing and running back and forth. At least it was easy to keep track of them by the noise. Again, she glanced into the living room at the two boys.
Jimmy had 'heard' her talking mentally to CJ. Ally had also managed to hear her before she actually "tuned in" to the Kryptonian telepathic channel, but Ally sure wasn't her soulmate any more than Jimmy was. Did that mean that Jimmy had somehow inherited from Clark whatever it was that gave some Kryptonians superior telepathic powers? It seemed possible. Once he got back, she would ask Clark, although the chances were that he didn't know. The darned New Kryptonians hadn't really told him much. Of course, considering the situation with Nor and all the rest that had happened, it wasn't really surprising.
"Mommy!" Jimmy's voice rose in distress. "Something's wrong with the TV!"
It was at that moment that she realized that the red light on the stove, which told her that the oven was heating, had gone out. A quick glance in the refrigerator told her that the light was out there as well.
Lois cussed softly under her breath and stepped into the living room. The digital clock on the wall was also blank.
"Mommy!" Jimmy protested, "fix it!"
"I think we blew the circuit breaker," she said. "I'll go downstairs and reset it."
'Mom!' CJ's voice said in her head, 'the lights just went out up here.'
That was odd. The lights weren't on the same circuit as the stove. Come to think of it, neither was the television. It still felt strange, but she visualized her son's face and thought at him, trying to direct her thoughts directly at him. 'Just a minute. I think the power is out.'
Lois went back into the kitchen and unplugged the radio, thereby switching it to backup battery power, and turned it on.
Static. Lois turned the dial, searching for a station. More static. What the dickens was going on?
From somewhere, Lois heard a whoosh, and an instant later, Clark walked in the front door, accompanied by Linda Lennox. "Everything all right here?"
"Except for the power," Lois said. "What's going on?"
"Apparently," Clark said, "a transformer failed somewhere in New Hampshire. There was a cascading overload that blew out the whole system. The power is out all over the whole Eastern Seaboard."
"Great," Lois said. "How am I going to cook the casserole?"
"I'll heat it up for you before I take off," Clark said. "Metropolis's streets are already jammed up because none of the traffic lights are working."
"I should have figured that," Lois said. "Be sure to take good notes."
"I will," Clark said. He glanced at Linda. "Better go on upstairs and join the session. CJ probably can use the help."
"Okay," Linda said. She ran up the stairs. Clark followed Lois into the kitchen.
"By the way, what happened with the three kids?" Lois asked.
"They're clear," Clark said. "Just as well. I don't think we could handle any more complications for a while." He lowered his glasses and stared at the casserole, which began to emit delicious aromas within seconds. "There. That should do it. I suggest you have a salad with it." He added, "How did the telepathy session go?"
"Fine," Lois said. "A couple of things happened that no one expected, but we can talk about it later. You'd better get busy."
"Yeah." He leaned forward and kissed her thoroughly. "Take care of yourself until I'm back." He glanced toward the back yard. "The kids are covered with sand again."
"Terrific," Lois muttered. "Be careful."
"I will."
**********
"I think CJ should walk you home," Lois said.
"I'll be okay," Ally said.
Lois shook her head and pointed to the line of bumper to bumper traffic on the street. "Not with that going on. I'm not sure you shouldn't stay here, but since you want to go home, I'm providing you with an escort. It's going to be dark soon. I'll feel better if he goes with you."
"Me, too," CJ said. He was frowning out at the mass of traffic. "Linda and I will go with you; okay? Dad promised your mom you'd be safe when you were with us, and that means making sure you get home all right."
Ally shrugged and nodded. "I guess you're right. Did Mr. Kent have any idea when the power would be back on?"
"No." Lois waved to the battery-powered radio that was muttering in the corner. "The news reports aren't saying, either. I'm not even sure it's safe for you to be there alone."
"I'll lock the doors," Ally assured her. "I've stayed alone before. Mom has to work evenings and nights a lot. I'll be fine."
"Well -- all right." Lois gave in reluctantly, but she really couldn't keep the girl here against her will. "You guys be careful, all right?"
"We'll be okay," CJ assured her with a small smile. "If we run into trouble, we can always fly away."
"Yeah, but I don't want anyone to see you do that, either," Lois said.
"Don't worry," Linda said. "We know."
The three children left a few moments later. Lois watched them walking briskly down the sidewalk until they disappeared from her view. She set about putting plates and silverware on the table.
Barely fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. Clark had installed a battery powered bell years ago, since the knocker often couldn't be heard from the second floor, and the old brownstone hadn't had a doorbell when they purchased it. Lois went to the door and peeked through the spy hole. The sight of the person standing there made her hurry to unlock the door and pull it open. "Lucy? What are you doing here?
**********
tbc
