*YESTERDAY:
'Two minutes,' Bella thought. 'I could be HOME in TWO MINUTES! What am I still doing here?' Nobody would blame her- with all the chaos, she wasn't even sure anyone would notice she was gone. But she couldn't do it.
The last couple of days had been flat out terrible. At first it was just the rain. Living in the dorms at Pine Oaks meant that was just annoying, but still better than snow. Bella had grown up in Southern California, and while it didn't really rain often, when it did rain it could get crazy. Snow was worse, even just staying on campus. She had bought an umbrella and gone on with her life, complaining just like everybody else.
But then the rain didn't stop, and the weather kept getting worse. Classes started getting cancelled, and flooded streets made travel a nightmare- well, not for Bella, but for those around her. The office where she had a work study job had closed for a while, after the roof had started leaking under the meteorological onslaught. Bella had hunkered down in her dorm room, only occasionally bothered by her roommate, and tried to get ahead on some of her assignments- "Going out" meant going down to the dining hall; nobody was going into town even with the convenience of the Train.
And it kept getting EVEN WORSE. People started talking about hurricanes, and flooding, and "Weather anomalies". The other stuff was worse. Bella had grown used to half-seen images at the edge of her vision, things that vanished when she turned to look, and at sounds (Almost but not quite voices) just at the limits of her attention. Usually they stopped after a while, once she started concentrating. But now she was seeing stuff right in front of her- supervillains she remembered from the news back in San Angeles, even things she remembered from old clips Mercurio had shown her years ago; and she was hearing voices- clear voices, calling for help, or shouting threats. None of it made any sense. And she could tell that other people were having the same problems.
The campus-wide safety alerts on her phone grew into a near-constant shrill claxon- the fire department and emergency services weren't able to keep up. And the steady stream of Breaking News Bulletins online from all the local outlets showed things were even worse out in the city. Bella tried to buckle down, tried to hibernate in her room.
But in the end, she just couldn't hide. She had been thinking about going out to help around campus before. Mercurio, when she had talked to her about it, had approved. But she hadn't actually done it. Not yet. She had put on her costume, the sleek grey bodysuit she jokingly called her "Sealskin", and she had put on the elaborate metal glove Mercurio had made for her- the so-called Dimensional Field Matrix Manipulator... And she had gone up to the roof of her dorm, and looked out over the campus, wondering where to start. But that was it, that was all she had done.
Until now. She had called her mother (Again), and delivered the latest installment of reassurances. Everything is all right, the weather is terrible but I'm staying inside, the dorms were build to handle a tornado- all the things she knew her mom needed to hear. And she had called Mercurio- the old man was worried, but he couldn't talk; he was in the midst of some very long, complicated divinational ritual.
The campus alerts on her phone made it easy to track where the trouble was. Once Bella was in costume and ready, she didn't have to wait long. She started simple.
>Car accident, with entrapment: Someone had hit a flooded patch of road at the edge of campus, and another car hit THEM when they tried to back up suddenly, rolling the car and pinning the driver inside the rising waters. FD in route, ETA two minutes. Warp was there in seconds. She couldn't just lift the car or stop the water. But light danced around the metal glove on her left hand, and the driver was free, lying on the sidewalk under an awning to wait for more help.
>House fire: At the other end of campus was a tree-lined street of older Victorian-style houses- they were almost all owned by senior faculty, and the campus slang had dubbed the area Emeritus Row, or "the Tenure Tract". And even in this weather, houses like that could burn. The Fire Department was rushing to the scene, but the closest engine had had an accident of its own. Warp was there way before any other help. The neighbors and onlookers were still gathering on the street, in cars, and on nearby porches- but so far they were just watching. The house itself was fully involved, and there was screaming somewhere inside. Warp watched from a roof across the street- but she didn't watch for long; just long enough to listen, to make sure the screams didn't fade out or change pitch, like the shadow voices she had been hearing the last few days. Three minutes later, there were four people on the neighbor's porch, watching their house burn, and the fire department still wasn't there. Warp was gone, but some of the bystanders had had cameras...
>>TO BE CONTINUED
