The “camera” kept diving down, ultimately focusing on a mountainous region that ran parallel to an eye-catching shoreline. Winding its way through the mountains was a narrow, twisting road, and as I looked, I noticed a small red dot zipping along the thoroughfare in question. It didn’t take much imagination to understand what I was seeing, and my suspicions were proven correct moments later when the image magnified, revealing a red convertible sportscar with some thirty-something guy behind the wheel. He was wearing sunglasses and had the top down (of course), and was obviously driving well in excess of the posted speed limit.
It wasn’t clear what happened, but all of a sudden, the driver lost control of the vehicle. One second, he was cruising along, trying to set a new land speed record; the next, he was fighting to keep the car on the road as the vehicle fishtailed all over the place. And then the car smashed through the guardrail and went sailing over the side of the mountain.
The view then froze on an image of the driver, mouth open and looking completely terrified. More to the point, I could actually feel his dread empathically.
“Ursula,” Endow said, without taking her eyes off the driver.
By this time, I had already discerned that Ursula was Endow’s laamuffal, and this became fully evident when — upon hearing her name — Ursula immediately went into motion. She walked swiftly to one side of the room and seemed to bend down and grab what I initially took to be a bundle of stars. A moment later, I realized that it was some type of square-shaped receptacle, camouflaged in such a way as to appear almost indistinguishable from the actual stars around us.
With the container in hand, Ursula hustled back to Endow, who gently took it from her. She then lifted the top part of the receptacle (which turned out to be a hinged lid), revealing several rows of what looked like glowing, colored gems inside. Endow spent a moment staring at the gems, each of which was about the size of my thumbnail, and then — after selecting a blue one — she closed the lid and handed the container back to Ursula.
While her laamuffal went to put the receptacle back, Endow turned to the still-frozen image of the sportscar driver and placed the blue gemstone on his forehead. The stone flashed for a moment and then seemed to vanish. A moment later, the scene came to life again, with the driver wailing like a banshee as his car plunged toward the ground.
Like some car-chase movie, the vehicle didn’t simply nosedive and smash into the ground at the bottom of the mountain. Instead, it bounced along, turning cartwheels and going into barrel rolls and such as it struck peaks, crags, and outcroppings of rock on its way down. Eventually, however, it did reach the foot of the mountain where, battered, mangled, and leaking fuel, it finally came to a halt upside down.
Based on what had been observed visually, one would have thought that the driver had to be dead. However, my empathic senses were telling me something different. A few seconds later, as I anticipated, the driver came crawling out from under the wreck that had been his car, looking like an absolute mess and exuding shock at the fact that he was not only alive, but completely uninjured.
At that juncture, Endow made the circular motion with her hand again and the entire scene vanished. She then turned to me, smiling.
“You saved him,” I said, succinctly summing up what we’d just seen.
“Actually, I did a little more than that,” she asserted. “He has a destiny to fulfill which requires certain unique talents, so I made him invulnerable.”
My eyes went up in surprise. “Excuse me?”
“She made him a super,” Rune explained.
I frowned, focusing on previous comments that were now starting to make sense.
“Wait a minute,” I intoned. “She gave him powers?”
“Yes,” Rune confirmed with a nod. “It’s one of the things she does. She gifts people with certain abilities.”
I looked at Endow. “So when you said earlier that I wasn’t one of yours…”
“I was saying that you didn’t get your powers from me,” she clarified.
“Okay, I get that,” I stressed. “But the statement implies that someone gave me my powers. Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, not at all,” Endow assured me. “When Rune first told me about you, I was surprised. You possess an exceptionally rare combination of powers and abilities, but to have them all manifest naturally is rarer still. I thought that perhaps you had been gifted with some while others developed on their own, but from what I can see that isn’t the case. All of your talents are undoubtedly innate.”
I let out a sigh of relief. For some reason, it bothered me immensely that my powers might have come by virtue of someone like Endow. Not that she seemed like a bad person; it was simply the fact that my powers were an essential part of who I was, and the notion that I might be beholden to someone for them bothered me.
“So where are you from, Jim?” said a feminine voice, interrupting my thoughts.
It was Ursula. Glancing around, I suddenly realized that while I had been reflecting on my powers, Rune and Endow had moved on to another subject. Apparently thinking that I hadn’t heard her, Ursula repeated her question.
“Um…Earth,” I replied.
“I know that, dingbat,” she uttered playfully. “I meant where on Earth.”
“Oh,” I muttered, my head still not quite in the conversation. “Uh…”
“Never mind,” she said, shaking her head dismissively. Then she perked up slightly and said, “You wanna see something really cool?”
Chapter 11
I had to admit to being impressed. It appeared that Ursula, like Endow, also had the ability to manipulate items in the room,
