Reset - Junction City

It’s the third Thursday, or the fourth, but seeing as we get 5Thursdays in July and the point is 3 weeks to write it I think this still counts.

Life held me back from getting ne out last month so this will be a little longer than usual. This piece centers on the armature super hero Block, real name Ramirez, in my Junction City setting. Consider this another preview of what’s to come when I launch the series proper in Kindle Vella.

Reset

Sirens warred with the sound of explosions and screams. The ground rumbled as the squeal of buckling steel and crumbling concrete filled the air followed by a thin mist of building dust. Ramirez eyes were pulled to the sounds of the collapsing building but he dragged them away. There was nothing he could do there, he was here to save lives.

Ramirez pushed past the sound of the disaster around him, of his hammering heart and looked around at the multi story apartment complexes flanking either side of the street. Even now he could hear the discharge of weapons from within the buildings and had to restrain himself from rushing into the nearest one. A blast of fire belched from a second story window to his right drawing his attention just before the sound of shattering glass came from somewhere behind him.

Ramirez spun, eyes hunting for the source of the sound spotting the glittering fragments of glass in the air and the body hurtling toward the ground with a scream.

“No!” shouted Ramiriz, hand out stretched materializing a plane of obsidian force to intercept the falling body.

He missed.

The body crashed to the ground and bounced, emitting the sickening sound of broken bones and pulped flesh.

Everything stopped.

BRRRZZT blared through the air sending waves of anxiety down Ramirez’ spine.

“Reset,” commanded Volt’s stern voice through the P.A. system. Immediately the lights, sirens and all sounds of calamity ceased. “Mission failure Block.”

I know, Ramirez groused before walking over to the simple automaton that approximated the weight and form of a human adult. There was a read-out on its chest that displayed the ‘injuries’ it sustained from the fall. The assessment was gruesome. Ramirez watched a person in the simple blue uniform of the support staff came over and begin inspecting the automaton to make sure it was still serviceable as another with gossamer wings replaced the broken window. “Do they have to make that sound when they hit the ground?”

The staffer cringed as he helped the machine to its feet. “Pretty gruesome, yeah. Boss figures if the sound in simulation is too much for you then bodies actually hitting the ground is more than you can handle.”

Ramirez supposed their was a logic there, but it still made Volt a jerk.

“Block, are you ready?” asked the P.A. system.

Ramirez walked back to the start point, rotated his shoulder and nodded. “Yes.”

“Drop-Fall exercise. Session seven: start,” announced Volt and all the sirens, lights, and indications of calamity resumed. Even knowing it was all fake Ramirez couldn’t help but feel his heart race, his pupils dilate, his ears burn to pick out sounds as he ran back into the ‘neighborhood’, idly he wondered if actors on the sets of disaster movies felt this way. Focus Ramirez!

The next ‘victim’ came off the roof of a three story building. Ramirez caught that one.

BRRRZZT

Too late, the body had already reached terminal velocity and died on impact with his obsidian square of force.

“Reset.”

The next fell without sound, no screams, no breaking glass just the wet pulpy sound of an impact behind him.

BRRRZZT

“Reset.”

The next flew out a third story window. Ramirez got a square of darkness beneath it but it skipped off the plane of force and collided with a wall.

BRRRZZT

“Reset.”

The hour crawled by punctuated by the sound of meat hitting the ground and the teeth rattling blare of the siren punctuating his failure.

“Enough!” roared Ramirez. “I need a break!”

Silence hovered in the air like a sword about to fall. “Fifteen minutes,” conceded Volt.

Ramirez attacked the ground with his feet as he marched away to the break area. The smell of food and burble of conversation only ground on his nerves further but he knew better than to lash out at his fellow students. Most were training just like him and to see the pained and forlorn expressions many were doing just as badly.

“You look horrible Ram,” came a gentle voice to his right.

Ramirez could feel his lips spread into a smile as he saw Dhaval approaching. He wrapped his friend in a warm embrace. “Man am I happy to see you Dhav.”

“That well huh, what are you in?”

“Drop-Fall.”

Dhav cringed.

“Yeah. I’m minoring in rescue, why do I even have to do this?”

Dhav shrugged, looking away in the fashion he did when he didn’t want to say something uncomfortable to a friend.

“What?”

“If not you, then who, Ram?” asked Dhaval. “Cinder shoots fire, Shimmer can’t fly, and Ren is just brainy. If you can’t catch someone, no one can. And it will probably be one of them you have to save.”

Ice climbed his spine. His selfishness was abominable. He was training to be a hero and whining about training to save lives. “It’s just, it’s just so hard, I don’t know if my powers can do it.”

“Maybe,” considered Dhav. “Or maybe you’re not thinking of them right. When you have powers you tend to just use them but not really analyze them. We analyze everyone else’s but just sorta take ours for granted like we just know them. If you weren’t you, what questions would you ask to understand your powers, and how would you test them? You taught me that, remember? Asked me if my lasers bounced off mirrors.”

Ramirez smiled. “That’s how we figured out you don’t shoot lasers, more like plasma.”

“Exactly, I saw light shoot from my fingers, called them lasers and just kinda assumed I was right.” His watch beeped. “I gotta get back to hostage rescue. Think on it.”

Ramirez nodded, as he put back the orange in his hand and strode back toward the Drop-Fall ‘neighborhood’. I create walls of darkness, thickness marginally effects durability, on average they take three tons of psi to breach—

“You’re back early,” noted Volt through the P.A. system.

“Yes,” affirmed Ramirez. “Let’s do it again.”

“Start,” declared Volt and once more the sounds of catastrophe washed over him. Ramirez cast it all aside, the lights, the sounds, he needed to be here in this moment alone. There was a scream, pulling his attention to a three story window and then the shattering of glass as an automaton was pushed through it.

Ramirez stretched out a hand and created a square of darkness just below the apogee of the fall. The ‘body’ shattered the wall of darkness as it struck, plummeting several feet to break through another, then a third and finally hitting the ground with a thud.

He waited.

No horn.

Ramirez dashed to the body and looked at the read-out. If this were a living person they would have bruises and some cracked bones but they wouldn’t be dead. He’d been focusing on stopping the fall, but all he needed to do was slow it to the point it wasn’t lethal. A sigh of relief escaped his lungs.

“Good job,” commended Volt. “Can you do it again?”

Twin screams entered the air as two more automatons were cast from the near buildings. Immediately Ramirez created a stack of squares beneath one. The other, however, was traveling more vertically and skipped off the first plate it struck. Whipping his hand to the left he materialized another wall of darkness, this one at a forty-five degree angle. The ‘body’ hit it, spun and arrowed toward the ground. Ramirez created another wall, this at a softer angle below it. The body struck this too and slid slower plopping directly onto the last plate a foot from the ground.

No horn.

“Congratulations Block. You passed,” announced Volt.

Ramirez walked to the second body, the one he had almost failed to catch and inspected the damage. Broken bones, damaged ribs, dislocated vertebrae. Alive but severely injured. Growling he marched back toward the start point. “Again!”

There was a long silence before Volt answered. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, if that last person had been a child, elderly or just medically fragile they’d still be dead. That’s not good enough.”

“Very well.”

Ramirez took a deep breath, “reset!”