The Law of Averages

Chapter 12

"So stop me if this gets too personal," Dan began, picking at the remains of his fried catfish, "but why were you so willing to go along with Margaret's, er, story? Is that style of personal training more effective or something?"

Abigail choked on her drink. "I-i-it's not because I enjoyed the idea or anything!" she denied extraordinarily quickly. "I just really needed the work!"

"Really?" Dan glanced over her and couldn't help but add, "You certainly look like you know your fitness."

Abby coughed to clear her throat, then smiled bitterly. "There's not much call for personal trainers these days, I'm afraid."

Dan blinked in confusion. Did people not exercise in this strange new world?

Abigail picked up on his thoughts. "Its because of all the health related body mods that have come out in the past few years."

"Mods?" Dan clarified. "Not an upgrade, then?"

"No, that would make things much simpler," Abigail griped. "The OhMyBod mod is compatible with about three-quarters of the most popular body upgrades, and it forcibly modifies a person's fat content."

She furiously dragged a piece of shrimp through some cocktail sauce. "I'm surprised you haven't heard of it. They have dozens of different variations. Mods to control where the fat goes, mods to increase muscle mass, mods to artificially increase endurance and lung capacity. Why work out when you can just buy a better body?"

"That... can't be healthy," Dan said slowly.

Abigail shrugged. "Seems like it right? But nothing has come up thus far. The mod was developed by AgriBuff, which is one of the largest frontrunners in that field. They've got the money to grease the wheels of the FDA, but its been five years with no major lawsuits."

Dan was referring more to the act of repeatedly modding oneself, rather than any single issue. Constantly irradiating yourself to alter your physical features just seemed like a terrible idea to him. It reminded him a bit of the tobacco industry, and idly he wondered if people would start dying in droves a decade or two down the line. Hadn't Doctor Mercury mentioned something about superpowered cancer?

"Anyway, business has not been booming," Abigail finished, stuffing a piece of shrimp into her mouth and chewing angrily.

"I can understand why," Dan remarked, poking at the remainder of his meal. "That mod sounds very useful."

He glanced up, only to meet Abby's stricken gaze. The poor girl looked absolutely miserable, though it took Dan a moment to understand why.

"That's not for me, though," he quickly reassured her. "I've got a power that isn't compatible, but even if it was I'd rather do the work myself."

It was a filthy lie, but it visibly brightened her mood.

"I've been meaning to ask, what kind of upgrade are you rockin'?" she said to him.

"Uh, short-hop." Dan wracked his brain for the script Marcus had given him.

"A mutated short-hop," he corrected himself.

"Really!?" Abigail asked, leaning forward excitedly. "I've never met someone whose upgrade mutated before! Aren't the odds of that like one in a million?"

"S-somewhere around there, yeah," Dan confirmed uncertainly. He didn't know the actual figures, but an upgrade occasionally went... not wrong precisely; more like differently than expected. A mutated upgrade still performed its expected function, but did so in a way that wildly defied standard deviation.

Every upgrade settled in a person differently. For short-hops, there generally existed small differences between individuals regarding distance per jump, frequency per jump, and the mental stress accumulated with repeated use of the power over the course of a day. Dan's power, which seemed to have virtually no limits on these three factors, could be reasonably passed off as a mutated version of the existing upgrade in casual conversation. It was even listed as such on the official registry, though Mercury had warned it would not survive a thorough investigation.

"So? What did you get?" Abby's voice was eager and intense.

Daniel recognized the reason. Mutates essentially possessed unregulated upgrades, like the vigilantes and villains of the 50's. A registered mutate was not put under any particular extra scrutiny, at first, but they were generally more capable than a standardly upgraded individual. They were also the way for a normal law-abiding citizen to gain obscene levels of power. It all came down to luck.

"I got a bit lucky with my mutation," Dan explained quietly. "My range is exponentially better than a standard short-hop, and I don't need to see where I'm going."

Abigail continued leaning forward eagerly.

"Er, that's it," Dan admitted awkwardly. It wasn't. He could theoretically do all sorts of neat things with non-living materials, but he couldn't tell her that.

"Oh." She settled back into her seat with a thoughtful look. "How far can you hop?"

"About five miles," Dan stated with a serious face.

"That far!? Without line of sight!?" Abby exclaimed incredulously. Dan did his best not to grin with pride. He quietly reminded himself that he had not earned his power in any way.

"Yeah. If a thing is occupying the spot I want to hop to the power just doesn't trigger," he said, making a slicing motion for emphasis.

"So when Nan said her Austin friend could meet me here, in Georgia..." Abby pondered slowly.

Dan nodded. "Yeah, I teleported here. Around two-hundred rapid fire jumps, a compass, and a map, got me here in half an hour." It was easier to lie than he had expected. The thought made him uncomfortable, but he soldiered on.

"Alright, I'll admit it, that's impressive," Abby stated, leaning back and drumming her hands on the table. "Not quite what I expected from a mutate, but extremely cool nonetheless."

"What exactly were you expecting," he asked, bemused.

Abby shrugged. "I took a class on Villains Past and Present in college. They were pretty much all either mutates or non-regs, but Cold Star was the only one with any specifics listed about his power. So something like him, I guess?"

Non-regs? Non-regulated upgrades? Another colloquialism that Dan had to guess at. Best not to mention it. That said...

"Cold Star?" he queried with interest.

"You haven't heard of him?" Abby asked in surprise.

Dan shrugged helplessly. Vigilantes and Villains might be looked down on in this society, but bizarre code-names were very much a thing. There were simply too many for Dan, who had barely skimmed through half of a history book, to bother remembering.

She giggled at his ignorance. "He was a big name, back when upgrades first became a thing. The story goes that his temperature endurance upgrade mutated. It was the old timey one, before they upped the regulations on those kinds of powers, so it was supposed to let him safely absorb heat from his surroundings to stay warm, and disperse it to stay cool. Simple, right?"

Dan nodded uncertainly. To him, that honestly sounded like a superhero worthy power in of itself.

"Right well, it mutated like I said. Instead of having a limit on how much he could absorb, he could just keep going and going." Abby's eyes widened dramatically. "He went totally crazy when he figured it out! He just sat down in the middle of Lake Superior and kept absorbing heat from his surroundings. On and on and on for months."

She sniggered softly. "It took people a good while to even realize what was happening, because he started in the dead of winter and that area is so damn cold anyway."

"I'm surprised he was able to keep it up. Even mutates tend to have some sort of drawback to their powers," Dan remarked absently.

"Most people think that his power sustained him somehow, but that he couldn't move while he used it," Abby offered. "It would certainly explain how and why he sat in the same place for so long."

She glanced at Dan shyly. "What's the drawback to your upgrade, if you don't mind me asking?"

"When I hop with my eyes open it disorients the crap out of me," Dan admitted. It was an excellent opportunity to tell the truth without garnering suspicion. He hadn't dared to stare into the abyss again, not after Mercury's vague warnings and his own sense of looming terror.

"You can only jump with your eyes closed?" Abby clarified.

"I can jump with my eyes open," Dan replied defensively. "I just... throw up a bit, afterwards."

Abby snorted at his words.

"So what happened to Cold Star?" Dan inquired, unsubtly changing the subject off his power's embarassing side effects.

"Feds took him out," Abby replied frankly. "He never issued any sort of demands; he never even said a word to anyone about why he did what he did. You can't reason with people like that."

Dan blinked at the abrupt ending. "And you thought I'd be like him?"

She puzzled over his words, then blushed vividly.

"Not personality wise!" she stammered. "I meant, I expected your power to be more, uh"

Dan watched her hands flap around like confused birds.

"More more, you know?" she finished lamely.

Abby fidgeted beneath Dan's stern facade for a few moments, then he chuckled and admitted, "Yeah, I do actually. Sorry to disappoint."

The tension drained out of her as quickly as it came. She smiled at him. "That's okay. I'm not disappointed at all."

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