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Chapter 13 - Shiny New Suit

This guy wasn't any Desmond Pierce, but he was good with people and complicated situations. I'll give it to him, if he wasn't so disgusting and dirty, I might have enjoyed being in his company.

Ruby explained my situation as I sat on one of the tables Miles so graciously cleared off. He nodded the whole way through.

"Ah yes, I see. Merlin came to me earlier in the week, after he first found you, and told me about your problem. Lucky for you, I was able to manufacture some gloves that might be able to control your powers." Miles walked off to one of the far walls and pushed a few buttons on a panel to reveal a secret storage room. Inside of it, I could see failed inventions of all kinds, but what Miles pulled out wasn't anything close to a failure.

He wheeled out a mannequin that wore a black and white super-suit with a mask that was struck down the middle with a lightning bolt shape; one half jet black and the other stark white. It came with grey boots and grey gloves. The whole thing looked so clean and different from everything else in the room that I thought it was fake. That is, until Miles took off the gloves and handed them to me.

"These...are for me?" I asked, hesitantly taking the gloves from him. He nodded.

"Yeah, and so is the rest of the suit. It's made from a rubber solution that won't let your electricity get out of hand, but still makes everything easy to move around in. These gloves are a little more reinforced--I heard you had the most trouble keeping it from exploding out of your hands--but they're still flexible."

I placed the grey garments over my hands, curling and uncurling my fingers. It didn't even feel like I had rubber on my hands, it just felt like I had another skin over them.

"How are you sure that they'll work?" I asked, looking up at Miles who was watching me. He shrugged.

"Ninety percent of the time my stuff works, but there's always that ten percent that flops. Anything could happen, but I always expect the worse," Miles explained. I snorted.

"That's kind of pessimistic."

"Well, that's how I work."

Ruby rolled her eyes and changed the subject. "Does the rest of the suit work?"

Miles walked over to the mannequin and pointed out its features. "It doesn't have much but it's good enough. The fabric is pretty stretchy, so it'll take most of the damage that threatens to tear through. That should protect you from getting cut really easily. The design and color were primarily made by me. The mask has built in comms that I synced to Ruby's and Tristan's suits so that should make it easier for all of you to communicate in the field. The boots have good traction that should be able to hook on to almost any surface, but ice is always the tricky one. The gloves should be able to control almost all of the runoff that you get after fights. Also, on the mask, there are mini visors that you can send over your eyes when you're out in public if you don't want others to know who you are. There's a button on one side of your head for comms and the other side for visors."

I stared at Miles and couldn't help but gape at his invention that he had made. It was truly incredible that he had thought all of this up in a matter of days. And there wasn't even a hundred percent chance of all of this working.

"Thank you. For all of this," I said. Miles waved his hand to brush it off.

"It's nothing, really. This whole thing was just a tiny project compared to what I normally have to do. Merlin really gets more than he pays for with me, not gonna lie."

I laughed and thanked him one last time before leaving. Needless to say, I was excited to try these things out.

——

A couple days passed and soon enough Aer was healed enough to participate in our training sessions. I hadn't yet used the gloves because I didn't need to; Ruby had kept Tristan and I away from each other so that I didn't blow up--literally--again. We were civil; for now.

Aer turned out to be a really great support system for our group. When we went up against the metal attack dummies, she would back us up whenever we were caught off guard, or she would protect us from attacks that were too hard to avoid individually. She was the tank of the group and she was incredibly good at it, too.

I was happy that we had acquired her as a part of our team. She was a great asset and, in some ways, she had seemed to be a part of the team that we were missing in order to make us a team. It felt like we needed her since...well, since forever.

One day, Tristan and I's little break had broken. Our latest training session with the attack dummies had ended with me "mortally wounded" on the sidelines because of a mistake that he had made. I was incredibly angry because I had woken up badly that morning and had neck pains, so this didn't help either.

"Way to go, Ghost," I called from the bench as they ended the session. "You finished the mission, but I think that you forgot something. Oh, right. You forgot to keep me from getting hurt!" At this point I was up and walking toward the idiot, fuming mad and feeling the familiar tingle of electricity at my hands.

"Well maybe if you hadn't gotten in my way, we would've finished as a team. But you decided to take the hit and completely obliterate the mission. If this was real life, Dead Bolt would have kicked our sorry bones into the next universe," Tristan growled back.

"News flash, Tristan, this is real life and I'm telling you that I would have saved you and your slow rear-end from getting thrown into the-"

Suddenly there was a loud boom that silenced us. The electricity fled from my hands and I looked around to see if any damage had been done to the room we were inside now.

"That sounded like an explosion," Aer said. There was another boom and we all ran out into the hallway to see that other people had heard the explosion, too. I made my way down the hallway some more to see out the courtyard windows. Behind the courtyard, a building was on fire and black smoke was rising into the sky.

"The laboratories," I whispered. Without thinking, I ran out of the building and to the other end of the courtyard. I didn't have to look behind me to know that the other three were at my heels.

Expecting a fight, I took the grey gloves Miles had given me out of my back pocket and slipped them on. Then, a terrifying thought came into my mind.

Miles. Was he in the lab building? There's only one way to find out. I ran up to the front of the building, but another explosion threw me backwards. I landed next to the others and pulled myself up enough to see blue electricity zap from inside the building. The next thing I knew, a figure rose out of the building on spider legs of lightning.

"It's him," Aer whispered, but loud enough for all of us to hear. "The man who attacked my city." The guy laughed cynically and flung a few bolts of electricity down at us. We all scattered, narrowly missing the strike spots. I got up, still staring at the figure.

He eventually lowered himself to the ground and stood before us, electricity rippling off of him. I could see a devilish smile beneath his almost full-face mask. Then he spoke to us in a voice that sounded like the depths of space itself.

"Welcome to chaos."