CHAPTER 12
“Better Late Than Never”
By Flank McLargehuge
Manhattan’s Lower-East Side: Twilight.
“Niels? NIIIIIEEELLLSSS!” Robbie Baldwin let out a heavy sigh, and added softly (trying -- failing -- to keep his companion from hearing the sadness in his voice): “C’mon Niels, you’ve gotta be here someplace. I don’t know where else to look.”
Rina Patel put her hand on his shoulder and took another long gaze across the piles of rubble that surrounded them.
(Until a short time ago, the collection of large cement slabs the two stood on had been part of the Crash-Pad, the factory-cum-meeting place/party house/home-away-from-home for the New Warriors and the other young adults associated with the team. The surface structure had been reduced to its present... disassembled... state by an alien energy cannon(1), but the Taylor Foundation, the property’s owner, had immediately stepped in. Thanks to their construction crews, the rubble was now in neat piles, rather than strewn all over the landscape.
But Robbie and Rina weren’t out for an evening of appreciating the wrecked building’s new-found tidiness. They were looking for a missing cat. A bouncing cat.
An indestructible, invulnerable bouncing cat named Niels, who’d been living in the Crash-Pad up until the day it was blasted, and hadn’t been seen since.)
Robbie turned his head to Rina. “Did I tell you about when he fell off the roof of Hammond Labs?” he began, but she finished the story for him: “... And was bouncing uncontrollably for the rest of the day(2). Yes, Robbie, several times.” She wondered once again what would happen to the cat if he’d been blown clear by the explosion. An impact with that much power could leave him at the mercy of his kinetic field for days, even weeks, and had the potential to toss him an incredible distance.
But the pair were concerned with the more accessible danger of the Crash-Pad’s collapse: The superpowers Niels had in common with Robbie would’ve kept him from being hurt, but getting trapped in a collapsed room or pinned under a mountain of rubble led to the same problem as getting blown clear. Eventually, powers or no, the poor cat would starve. And so every night since the building’s destruction, as soon as the construction crews finished work, Robbie’d be there, to dig through the passages cleared by the day’s work (and to use his own kinetic powers to help with the repair work), to leave food and water out (in case the cat had gotten free during the day), and to generally worry himself silly. So for the last couple nights, Rina’d come along with Robbie to ply her slowly-resurfacing precognitive abilities in the hunt for Niels. And to do her best to reassure the young man she was coming to care about more and more.
And as the light glinting off the harbor caught a slick sheen forming in Robbie’s eyes, Rina saw it was time for the second part of her mission.
“You’re worrying about him too much.” He hand found his, and she gave it a reassuring squeeze. “If he’d gotten stuck in the ‘Pad, the construction crews woul’ve dug him out by now. ... And even if he got blown clear, you know the stories about pets finding their way home, across hundreds of miles.”
Robbie’s voice was noticibly thickening when he replied. “I’d bet it’d be the first time a cat had to cross continents to do it though...”
Rina sighed quietly. “Cheer up kiddo. I’ve got a hunch he’s going to turn up just fine.” Robbie relaxed considerably, and a bit of his smirk crept onto his face. (‘I’ve got a hunch’ was Rinaspeak for ‘my temporal intuition is telling me...”, which was quite reassuring, even if she still couldn’t get a definite sense of what’d happened to Niels. But what raised Robbie’s eyebrow was what’d come before. ‘Kiddo’ was also a word Rina used that had a deeper meaning.)
“I’m acting like I’m 16 again, aren’t I?” Rina smiled slightly, and made an almost imperceptible nod. “Ya know female... You really should hurry up and get used to the differencein our ages. It’s just two-and-a-half years, not a decade or somethin’!”
Rina put her hands on her hips. It was her turn to smirk. “No, not a huge gap. Just enough to make you jai--”
“Don’t even say it!! Jeesh...” (Rina smiled inwardly. She knew all it’d take to improve Robbie’s mood was to distract him with something he’d rather think about.) Robbie looked at the ground and shuffled a hunk of cement around with his foot, speaking quieter, more furtively. “You know, if we were in, say... Alaska at the time... you being 19, and me 16... would be perfectly legal...”
Rina couldn’t keep from giggling, and Robbie looked up at her with his best Harpo Marxian grin. “Hmm, really? You’ve obviously put some research into this!” She gave him a fake glare, and a large shove, pushing backwards onto a big piece of concrete. “Don’t be so *male*!”
Robbie rolled forward and grabbed Rina’s hand, pulling her down on the slab next to him, and they found themselves facing the river. Robbie sighed, his good mood already forgotten. The open water reminded them both that Niels was hardly the only thing to go missing since the Crash-Pad’s destruction.
“I wonder what happened to Nita(3)?” said Rina quietly. Robbie nodded slowly, picked up a small piece of stonework, and tossed it into the water. It vanished with barely a ripple. And as the river smoothed out and caught the reflection of the sky once again, the two young Warriors lifted their heads in unison to face the stars. And as Robbie slipped his around around Rina’s waist and she scooted closer to him, they shared a silent wish for the safety of their space-lost friends.
(1) At the end of NEWS Chapter 9
(2) SPEEDBALL #6, second story
(3) NEWS Chapter 10
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