Adam Powerhouse Episode 3: School, Sports, and...Superpowers? Read online

to get a drink of PowerAide from his bag. From that moment on, he was hooked on helping everyone on his team look good, not just playing for himself.

  As time went on, Adam found he could maneuver around the basketball court or football field and cause other players to shift or fade to where Adam wanted them to be to catch a pass or block another player. The game moved to a cerebral level as much as physical so that Adam began to think and move in ways that stretched even his intellectual and physical ability.

  Adam still wanted to win, but he didn’t want to simply dominate on his own. He wanted his team to function as a flawless machine.

  Soon, Adam found that playing so many sports cut into his research and cyber crime fighting time. Detective Rice had even commented during one of their evenings on the phone catching bad guys that their numbers had dropped during the last couple of months. So he had to make a tough choice. Which sport should he play if he could only play one?

  Walking around his room, Adam stopped in front of his dresser and picked up the little football his dad had given him in the hospital his first day in the world. With football, he could maintain a sense of individualism with his play while still helping the team look good. His extraordinary strength and balance weren’t quite as obvious during his runs on the football field as they were on the basketball court. And his dad really loved football. So it was settled. Adam would drop the other sports and play football only.

  The next two seasons, Adam’s team made it to the Pee-Wee championship game and played a local bruiser of a team called the Gladiators. Adam’s team, the Tigers, wasn’t nearly as good, but with Adam, they were hard to stop. Both years, Adam’s team won by a touchdown. The main battle was between Adam and the Gladiator’s cornerback who was fast, strong, and smart. He kept an eye on Adam and had a feel for where Adam would be with the ball. Both years, Adam barely made a run past this c-back during the fourth quarter to put them up by a TD.

  Adam felt good about football, crime fighting began to pick up, his gadgets were getting better, and school was a breeze. But Adam’s body was starting to change more quickly and life being easy-kid’s-stuff was about to change.

  Scene 4:Back to the Beginning

  Ok. Back to the where we started in Episode One. Adam confronted a thief in a convenience store. Yada yada. Adam attacks the guy. Yada yada. Adam gets away. Yada yada. Adam seems to have discovered something a little scary about himself…now we are all caught up. Back to story:

  Once in his room with his security system set, Adam flipped the switch to open up his laboratory. He sat down at his work table and looked at his hands. He kept trying to figure how he had opened the gate without touching it.

  After several hours of practicing with a few Lego blocks, which Adam figured were light and should be relatively easy to move, Adam gave up and put his head down. His hands moved around aimlessly until they settled on something metal. Adam looked at what he was holding and realized they were magnets. He flipped the ends around so the charges were the same and began pushing one ahead of the other on the surface of the desk without them ever touching.

  Adam quickly put the magnets aside and went back to the Legos. The excitement of his discovery building, Adam realized he was shaking with adrenaline once again. He envisioned the blocks moving ahead of his fingertips as he reached for the closest one and it scooted away from him.

  “No way!” Adam exclaimed.

  He began trying to control his excitement until he could move small objects without having to rely on his adrenaline bursts to do it. Before too long, he didn’t have to envision what he wanted to happen in his mind before doing it with his hands. Adam also found that he could pull objects toward him if he thought about what he was doing in reverse until he could will things to scoot towards him without thinking about it.

  Adam began to study this phenomenon, measuring what was happening on his workbench until he found that he shocked himself with static electricity when one of the objects touched his hand. He reasoned that he must be changing the electrical charge around his body to attract and repel objects just like the magnets he had played with did. Somehow, the extreme rush of adrenaline caused his body to change its charge without his thinking about it. But now, he had pretty good control of causing it to happen whenever he wanted it to.

  While he puzzled over the day’s events, Adam closed down his workshop, his bed easing down on hydraulics until it was back on the floor. He felt bad having to tell his mom that lie about the store being out of milk, but in the end, he felt he’d done a good thing. Only one other thing bothered him, he felt like he could have ridden the skateboard better. It was a great replacement for the bike even though it did only have limited speed. The board itself made a shield and a weapon which he figured he could use more effectively if he became a better boarder.

  Scene 5:Training

  Adam first strengthened his board for the high impacts he figured it would take while he was learning to use it. With new, bullet-proof strength polyurethane he had created, Adam coated it over and over until it was practically indestructible. He also recoated his helmet to give it added strength just in case.

  Then he began watching ESPN, the Discovery Channel, and even MTV to study the moves of other skateboarders. Pretty soon, he discovered Tony Hawk and began to copy his moves. Before too long, Adam had the basic feel of Tony’s style through practice and playing the Tony Hawk video game he’d talked his mom into buying for his Playstation. After learning every move he’d ever seen Tony perform, Adam began to create his own moves, based primarily on the need for flight and defense, although he couldn’t help creating some killer attack and disable moves.

  The problem with creating moves was that the board was ultimately limiting because he could only move from front to back when landing or jumping. Adam tackled this new problem with gusto until he found the answer: The Streetboard.

  While watching the X-Games on ESPN, Adam found that snowboarding and skateboarding were surprisingly similar, but a snowboard had an unlimited range of movement over the surface of snow. He built that general concept into a board with round wheels, like the ball inside the mouse for his computer or the castors on the bottom of a rolling chair. The biggest obstacle was finding a way to get the board to respond to direction changes when the wheels would turn freely in any given direction. Adam didn’t want to limit the board by giving it a computer chip that would read and respond to body shifts because such technology could be damaged or go out while riding. So, he put in a series of bearings inside the housing for the castors on the bottom of the streetboard that acted like brakes and shocks. They would give a little as weight was shifted to one side of the board, turning slower than the main ball of the castor and providing friction, causing the board to turn in that direction as the other side was still moving faster. A really hard turn would cause the bearings to stop bringing the whole board to a power slide that acted as brakes for the entire board.

  Once Adam’s board was completely done, it weighed surprisingly little as the whole castor housing underneath had been made with a mold poured full of Adam’s super-strong polyurethane recipe. Adam could get more air from both its light weight and his extra strength bursting forth from superhuman DNA.

  Adam could ollie onto a railing or banister, then summersault off of the end, gripping the board in both hands to swing it like a baseball bat to hit someone, then bringing it back under his feet and making a smooth landing and powersliding to a halt.

  He could even ride toward a wall at a sharp angle, jump onto the surface of the wall, riding for a few short feet as he let his momentum pull him into a crouch on his board, then jumping back off the wall and landing in a full rush back down the sidewalk. As Adam thought of new moves and visualized them working in his head, he began to map them out on his computer to get the correct physics down before attempting to do it in real life.

  All the while, school went on by without much effort or notice on Adam’s part. He had too many things to think about to
notice he was in his final year at his elementary school before moving on to the local middle school which all of the elementary schools fed into.

  Scene 6: Winners and Losers

  Between practicing on his streetboard and playing football, Adam found himself at the annual Pee-Wee league championships again before he felt ready. Things were just moving too quickly. Nevertheless, the game was here and he went in feeling exhilarated.

  They were playing the Gladiators once again. The team seemed to have had a growth spurt throughout the year and the boys on that team were taller and bigger than any of the boys on the Tigers. The game swung back and forth as they double-teamed Adam and made it hard for the quarterback to get him the ball. Several times, Adam could have used his new power to slow the ball down or make it fly further so he could catch it, but Adam didn’t want a win where he had to cheat. By the last few minutes of the game, the Gladiators were up 18 to 16. The Tigers were moving the ball down the field in one last fierce attempt to score. As they moved the ball down to the ten yard line, it became apparent that Adam would be getting the ball.

  The quarterback dropped back as Adam sprinted into the endzone. Two Gladiators