Chapter 1

Chris Heaven's Point of View (POV)

I sat in the waiting room thinking while trying to remain calm. The world had changed so much since my youth. I was nearing seventy now and was probably the oldest client to ever approach 'The Catalyst' as she liked to be called. I almost snorted at the ridiculousness of the world.

I liked comics and superhero tales as much as the next man, but never in my wildest dreams would I have predicted that fantasy becoming real. The story of how it happened is well known now although it took years before the truth was revealed. Alternate dimensions and multiple different Earths was easy enough to believe so, in hindsight, it makes sense that at some point they could interact. In our case, a world that already had superheroes accidentally created a one way portal to our world.

The portal creating wasn't accidental, but as usual with Mad Scientists, things didn't go completely according to plan and in this case, it was the one-way nature that screwed everything up. That and the fact that all devices Mad Scientists created involved a connection to their mysterious ability, which meant the portal stopped working a week after the good Dr James came through.

Even that wasn't enough to kickstart our latent superhero potential. Before the portal closed a group of five superheroes came through after investigating why Dr James was missing. Of course, that meant they were trapped here as well. They say power corrupts and Dr James predicted that the heroes would eventually let the fact that they were the most powerful people on our world, go to their heads. He set a contingency plan in place which would go into effect if he was killed, knowing that he was the only one who could stand in their way and it would be a true test of their corruption. If the superheroes were willing to kill him just to prevent his interference then they needed to be stopped.

Stopping them was not going to be easy and Dr James' answer was to activate everybody's potential. How he did that is still up for debate, but based on the 'Mad Scientists' that have popped up since it was probably in a way that made sense to him but doesn't actually conform to known universal laws. The vast majority of people were and remain unaffected. Of those who gained 'gifts', most were minor like mine, but enough had real power and rocked our world.

It all settled eventually and most cities now boasted a few supers who mainly backed up the police. Supervillains were rare since there was a no-tolerance policy. If your abilities meant a normal jail could not contain you and you were convicted of a major crime, you got the death penalty. That draconian measure came about after several disasters involving escaped supervillains. Anyone convicted could request a registered telepath inquiry to prove their innocence, but they rarely did. On the plus side, twenty percent of normal human prisoners were cleared from jail by requesting telepath led investigations.

A professional looking middle-aged woman opened the door to the consulting room, ushered a young man who was looking dejected on his way, met my eyes and with a neutral expression indicated for me to follow her.

“Chris Heaven?” she asked.

I nodded my head and followed her into the room.

We both settled into our chairs. Hers behind a large solid looking wooden desk and me facing her.

She took a pen and paper and wrote something down and then looked up at me curiously. “Tell me everything,” she said leaning back in her chair and politely waiting for me to talk with every evidence of attention.

“Confidentiality applies?” I asked.

“Absolutely. Unless you tell me something illegal.”

“My gift is to taste DNA. I'm not sure taste is the right word. When I go into a room, or near someone I can sense all the nearby DNA. I can sort of quiz it and it will reveal information,” I explained.

“And you've come to me because?”

“I've always felt that there is more to it. To be honest, I've had a pretty good life and used the information to try and help people. Steer them towards healthy options that fit with the DNA profile I taste. More recently, my granddaughter was involved in an incident. She suffered head trauma and has been in a coma for almost three months now and I can't find anything in her DNA to suggest a way to help her.”

“What is it you think that I do?” she questioned me.

“I understood that you can tell if someone is not using their talent to its full potential and offer advice on how to improve,” I answered.

“Sort of. I am actually clairaudient. I have a spirit guide who seems to be able to examine someone's potential and offer helpful hints on how to improve. I schedule hour-long appointments because I have to use various techniques, mostly types of meditation with burning different herbs as an offering to try and convince Stormdancer to communicate with me. If at the end of that time I don't receive a message, then, in my experience, I never will.”

“I knew that you might not be able to help me. I just wanted to try everything I can,” I responded.

“Admirable. The thing is, I can't answer your questions, all I can do is pass on any messages I receive. Stormdancer is quite interested in your case and required no coaxing to speak to me. Yes, you have untapped potential and I have a message for you, but I don't know if this will help your granddaughter.” She picked up the piece of paper on the desk. “You must understand yourself completely before you can understand others.” She passed it to me. “I would suggest you meditate on that and see where it leads you. There is no point in coming back until you have made progress and reached another bottleneck.”

Chapter 2

I had paid quite a hefty sum for a five-minute consultation but I wasn't unhappy. I didn't honestly believe my talents would be able to help, however, I believed in the no stone left unturned philosophy. And for all its brevity the result had been positive, I could improve my gift, I just had to work out what the message meant.

My life returned to relative normality for the next couple of weeks with the exception of meditating solely on my own DNA and ignoring all the other DNA that surrounded me. That sounds easy, but I was constantly aware of different DNA interacting with me. Inside my body, within my gut, there were a plethora of different organisms that weren't part of my DNA but had their own DNA, on the surface of my skin there was a similar picture and whenever there was a gust of wind, somebody else's DNA was brought to my attention. Including whatever organisms they might have on the surface of their body, viruses and bacteria in the air, pollen and other small particulates that contain life and all the people that they had been in near proximity to smear them with their DNA.

It was information overload which was why concentrating only on my own DNA was something I had never done before and was also hard to do. Sure, I had examined bits of my DNA to improve my health. That was the main thing I did to utilise my gift. Examine people's DNA and give recommendations to improve their health. But there is so much information in a person's DNA that to try and look at it all felt like a monumental task. In theory, all I had to do was concentrate on what I was interested in and listen to what my gift was telling me. So what I was really doing was altering the focus from asking a specific question to imagining my DNA as a book and asking what information was on the first page and going from there. While I was doing that there was a plethora of other DNA trying to impinge on my concentration. It was sort of like reading a book while loud annoying music was playing in the background and several people were shouting for my attention. And a lot of the pages were quite boring which didn't help my concentration. Still, I persisted as I was very motivated.

I didn't devote all my time to it as I was still running a clinical practice and my daughter needed me. So much so that I was contemplating early retirement. My wife had divorced me over ten years ago and had now met another man and my son never contacted me. My daughter, Talia, on the other hand, had always been close. I had never been sure about her husband, Tom. In front of me, he had always been respectful and easygoing, but Talia told me everything so I knew if he drank alcohol he had a tendency to be violent. Since he knew that about himself he only rarely drank and Talia tended to visit me with Kalie as soon as he started.

I respected him for not drinking when he knew it was an issue, except I knew the only reason he did that was to keep Talia happy. Or more accurately, prevent her from giving him the cold shoulder. I was also proud of my daughter for being unwilling to accept violence from her partner. Up until it all went horribly wrong the most she had suffered was a bit of verbal abuse as she quickly left the house with Kalie in tow.

Unfortunately, all it takes is one bad episode of violence to completely change your life. Tom had gotten home early from work so had picked Kalie up from school. Talia had worked late knowing that Tom was home only to find Kalie unconscious on the floor and Tom missing. The empty beer bottles on the side table giving mute evidence to the likely story. Alcohol wasn't kept in the house so Tom had to have bought it on his way home. Kalie had slipped into a coma that she hadn't woken up from and Tom drove his car at speed into a tree. I think it was suicide, but it was ruled accidental. He had life insurance and to my surprise, they paid up with little argument. Not that we cared about the money. Talia moved back in with me, quit her job and spends most of her time depressed or visiting Kalie. I supported her as best I could. My examination of Kalie's DNA revealed nothing that would help and the specialist pointed to brain damage in MRI scans that suggested even if she did wake up, she may never fully recover.

My only hope was that my power would go from a passive to an active power. If I could activate Kalie's DNA, maybe I could cause it to renew her brain. I knew that we constantly renewed our bodies so I thought it was possible. I got my first taste that it might be possible when I got to a page of my DNA that told me its purpose which was relating to brain function, but also told me that I couldn't change this DNA without altering who I was. It was like a read-only file which, conversely, told me I should be able to change any of my DNA that was not read-only. Evidence that I was on the right track. I just didn't know how, yet.

I had tried to change my DNA before, back when I had first manifested and was exploring what I could do. I had heard that viruses could leave DNA behind and when I asked the question, I found an alarming amount still present, so I tried to remove it, replace it, inactivate it, but nothing worked, so I presumed my power was purely passive. Now I wondered if my power didn't allow me to change anything because I didn't know what I was doing. Similar to a teleporter being unable to go if they don't know the space involved is unoccupied.

The knowledge that I should be able to develop my power gave me the impetus to make some changes to my life. I retired, stopped booking appointments and would only see those I had already booked. To completely retire took me a month and during that time I doubled down on my efforts to understand my DNA. By the end of that month, I had got to the end of my DNA book, Kalie was still in a coma, but my persistent efforts were slowly bringing my daughter out of her depression. Not well by any means, but if Kalie passed on, I thought Talia wouldn't commit suicide now.

On reaching the end of my DNA book, I still didn't feel that I properly understood my whole DNA profile so I started from the beginning again and managed to get a deeper look, this time researching the concepts that I found difficult. Possibly because I had more time to spare or because it was my second reading, it only took me two weeks for my second read through. Despite knowing a lot more, I also knew there was more to know, so I went back for another read. In total, I read through my DNA seven times before I felt I couldn't learn any more about it.

Chapter 3

There was no light bulb moment that I was ready for my power to reach the next level, it was just when I looked again at the foreign virus DNA that was incorporating itself into Chris DNA and wanted to change it, my gift agreed with me. It wasn't as simple as just deleting it, my DNA needed certain base pairs to be in certain points or the complex DNA folding that occurred on a macro and micro level would go wrong. My understanding was sufficient to change the sequencing to nonsense whilst keeping the overall structure.

Most importantly, I knew I could make the changes without creating damage and interestingly, as soon as I made the first change, I felt some weird potential come to life. When I quizzed my power I worked out that after I made a change I had the ability to activate the DNA either on a small scale or over my whole body. I chose a small section in my arm, no more than a hundred cells and watched as they renewed themselves which did... nothing. Not surprising really, since I was taking out junk DNA which didn't have an active purpose.

I still thought it was a good idea to do, so I carried on eliminating all virus caused junk DNA and correcting any damaged DNA which did require me to look at other human DNA to compare. When I had finished I checked my changes by activating a small section of my thigh muscle and when nothing went wrong, I decided to activate my whole body.

A wave of tiredness swept over me. Fortunately, I was in bed lying down, but it happened so quickly and so irresistibly that my last thought before succumbing was to question whether I would wake up.

When I did wake up I was confused. I seemed to be in a hospital bed with someone holding my hand. I followed the hand to its owner and found my daughter sitting next to the bed slumped and half asleep. I squeezed the hand to wake her up a bit and when she looked up, I smiled at her to let her know that I was alright.

I didn't know what was going on, but I felt amazing. By the time I was in my sixties I had all sorts of little aches and pains that you get used to and ignore. They were all gone. I didn't want to move in case that would bring them back and just revelled in the painlessness. The absence of pain was bliss.

“Don't scare me like that!” Talia said with a broken voice, tears streaming down her face.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Shouldn't I be asking you that?” she said with a slightly aggravated tone. “All I know is I found you unresponsive on your bed and nothing I could do would wake you. I called an ambulance and they brought you here. All their checks suggested there was nothing wrong with you, you were just in a deep sleep and when they noticed you changing they set you up in this room.”

That was when I noticed I was lying naked on the bed and there were a few cameras set up around me. Acute embarrassment rushed through me.

“Do you think you could get me something to cover up?” I asked quietly, shifting my other hand to cover my junk.

To add to my embarrassment a stream of three doctors entered the room, two male, and one female.

“Can I have something to preserve my dignity?” I called out as my embarrassment started transforming into anger.

“I do apologise, Mr Heaven, it's just not every day that someone regresses in age from near seventy to late teenage and does so where it can be monitored. I'm Dr Brown, by the way.”

“I'm still naked here,” I reminded them.

When I taste DNA, especially human DNA I do get a sense of how old it is which I think is related to the telomeres. A quick check confirmed my DNA now read as age 17. Just after puberty had finished. Wow.

A sheet was brought that I was allowed to cover myself with and the questioning began. To be blunt, I told them as little as I could. Yes, it was a superpower, one that I had managed to develop from passive information to being active and able to regress my age. No, I couldn't do that to someone else. I didn't know that at the time but didn't want to suggest otherwise and it turned out to be true when I tried with Talia later.

On the plus side, I had absolute evidence that I was Chris Heaven, even if I now looked like his grandson. I had also lost about five kilograms in weight and since I was still a good twenty-five kilos overweight, I still looked fat.

I spent the next week sending off paperwork in conjunction with the hospital to get a new passport and driving licence. It would still look weird as they didn't change my age, so I looked like a young teen but my age was listed as sixty-eight. If supers didn't exist I'm sure I would have been questioned more. I was hounded a bit by the press as there was a rumour from the hospital which was now confirmed with paperwork that was supposed to be confidential. The story being that I was the first super who had the potential to be immortal, age-wise at least. There were regenerators who looked like they would be healthy and look young to the limit of the human lifespan but tests showed the cells were ageing.

I kept my life as boring as possible and they seemed to give up. It wasn't much of a story. I had no great powers and would never be on a super team. If I couldn't apply my age regression to anyone else it was only mildly interesting. Of course, I was only just getting started. The first thing I did was try to eliminate my genetic weaknesses. Weakness is probably the wrong word. I could compare my DNA to all the other DNA I had been subjected to and find the best version for a particular sequence and use that. Funnily enough, that process was a lot easier than my original quest to get rid of leftover viral junk DNA because all I had to do was cut and paste from existing work whereas removing the evidence of viral damage required higher knowledge to replace it with my own created version. The difference between plagiarism and creating my own work.

I also used the process to lose weight. Each time I used the full body activation I would go into a deep sleep and wake up after about sixteen hours about five kilograms lighter and almost all of it was fat loss. I believe my ability was a type of micro telekinesis, and I was able to branch out slightly to pick up and move immune cells to where I needed them to be and stop blood from leaking out of a burst capillary. If I concentrated I could speed up healing and even cause cells to die and be excreted which I used to eliminate a build-up of non-degradable artificial chemicals. Nothing outside of my body though. I tried very hard in the hopes that I would be able to help Kalie. I made another appointment with 'The Catalyst' in the hopes of getting more advice. Again Stormdancer was willing but only gave me a one-word message, cloning.

Chapter 4

I looked into cloning research and if Kalie needed a new heart I could see how it might help, but you couldn't replace a brain. Could I clone Kalie? I thought I probably could. I would have to turn myself into a female version, release an egg and change the DNA to match Kalie's DNA. Suffer nine months of pregnancy and give birth to an identical genetic copy of Kalie, but it wouldn't have her memories and what about her spirit or soul? And what if Kalie woke up one day? It would look like we replaced her.

In the end, I decided it wasn't my decision to make. As much as the idea of turning myself female, becoming pregnant and giving birth frightened me, if it would help heal my daughter, I would manage. Somehow. Lord help me.

It took a week after my message from Stormdancer before I was prepared to face my daughter. Nervous, stressed and probably a dozen other emotions were going through me, but I was also determined. We were both sitting at the dining room table. I was sipping a hot chocolate and Talia had a cup of coffee in front of her.

“You know I spoke to 'The Catalyst' last week,” I started.

“Yes. You told me you received another clue that might help you just needed to work out how.”

“Quite so. I am going to be blunt here, I know you haven't held out much hope that I would be able to help and neither have I. I've explained what I can do and without being able to influence anything outside of my body there is no way I can help Kalie,” I said before reaching across to stroke Talia's hand that was holding her coffee as it tightened up while her head dropped as more sadness rushed through her. “However the message I received did suggest something unexpected.” She looked up with sudden hope. “Remember I can change my body to look pretty much how I want and I can also manipulate or replicate any DNA that I have been exposed to.”

“You're saying you can look like Kalie?” Talia asked looking very confused.

“No... well yes, I suppose I could but what would be the point. No, what I meant was I believe I could clone Kalie. I think I could create a DNA identical baby Kalie. She would have none of Kalie's memories and if souls exist, unless Kalie deliberately shifted across, it would have a different soul.” I moved closer so that I could hug her around the chair. “I don't know whether it would be a good idea or not and I don't want you to decide right now. Just think about it and we can talk about it later.”

I then changed the subject and Talia let me.

Two days later she approached me and wanted to know how I would go about it so I explained how I would have to change to a female and use an egg and replace my partial set of DNA with Kalie's full DNA and implant it into my womb. I believed I would be able to solve the usual issues with cloning because of my DNA manipulation. Talia swallowed that information and again we left it for her to think about.

The next morning as we sat down to have breakfast together Talia questioned me again. “You're prepared to become a woman, get pregnant and have a baby?”

I laughed nervously. “I can't say the idea doesn't terrify me. For you. For Kalie. Yes, I would do that and a lot more. I would need a hell of a lot of help though.”

She looked me in the eyes almost convincing herself of my sincerity. Then she gave herself a small nod, took a deep breath. “Please,” she said and then burst into tears.

I held her in my arms until she calmed down.

It was then my turn to take some deep breaths.

“We need to be organised about this, go and fetch a pen and paper,” I told her. I didn't want to say anything but my legs were feeling a bit weak. I felt like I had just made a life-altering decision, but I needed to be strong for Talia.

I wasn't going to look anything like me for most of a year so I needed to set everything up so that my physical presence was not going to be required. With so much done online these days, that wasn't difficult. The biggest issue was going to be having a legal female identity. I would need that for Dr visits and eventually, the hospital maternity ward.

We thought about me pretending to be Talia, but she was now thirty-three years old and I didn't have the ability to chose the age of the person I copied and I would need her to accompany me. Although I didn't like explaining my talents I did approach my lawyer, but she couldn't think of a solution without revealing my ability. The only option she could come up with, was for me to pretend to transition, have my legal documents changed to show I was female and then move out of state before my bump showed so no one would question how I could get pregnant. It would still show that I was sixty-eight years old, however, my recent passport already had a section showing that I was a super and my ability listed as age regression. The biggest issue would be I couldn't really transition back without revealing more of my ability than I wanted to. It didn't worry me too much as I rarely needed to use my identity.

Of course, it wasn't that easy. I needed a psychological assessment to sign off on it. Both Talia and I were seeing a psychologist to help us cope with grief, but I am a terrible liar so I had to tell her about my ability to change sex. I don't think she believed me but I offered for her to be present during my change as I couldn't think of another way to prove my words.

Next, I needed to design my new woman body. The simplest thing would have been to use my X chromosome that already had all the information I needed to turn me into a woman, but my biggest fear was labour and delivery so I wanted to cheat. One of our friends who had children at the same time as my wife had the easiest childbirth I had ever heard of. She didn't notice most of her labour because the pain was so mild and if she wasn't in a hospital having a check-up I think she would have had a home delivery. The check-up showed she was eight cm dilated and the child was born less than an hour later. On the other hand, she really struggled with milk production, but another of our prenatal group had a terrible childbirth story but produced so much milk she donated to the prenatal ward at the hospital. I wanted the best of both worlds whilst using enough of my DNA to look like a female version of myself.

I had lost contact with those families but I had their names and with a bit of investigation, I was able to find out where they lived. I didn't want to disturb them and I didn't need to. I knocked on the door to deliver flowers, picked up the DNA that I needed and moved on. They didn't recognise me. I would have been surprised if they did as I was now biologically seventeen years old and I had known them when I was in my thirties.

Other details needed to be hashed out before I made the big change. The biggest one was about whose responsibility the cloned Kalie would be. Essentially, who was going to be the mother? Legally I would be, but I was doing this for Talia and considered myself a surrogate. I would carry the baby, give birth and provide breast milk for six months hopefully. I say hopefully because I was aware that I might start suffering from gender dysphoria according to our psychologist. She also said I could be just as happy as a girl and decide to never change back. Male pride was unlikely to be maintained through pregnancy and childbirth.

Talia agreed to be the mother but warned me that the whole experience might leave me too emotionally attached to back away and if that happened we would both be her mother or I could become her father although we would probably need to move to another state again. We also didn't think it would be a good idea to keep the same name 'Kalie'. We wanted something similar so we settled on Katie. The rest was just logistics. Rent or sell my house? I decided to rent it out. Where do we move to? We decided the Gold Coast would be a pleasant location since we didn't need to go to work. Me because I had retired and Talia because she had received a large settlement from Tom's life insurance.

On the advice of Susan, I had a weeks holiday in Thailand. I just relaxed in the hotel and lazed around the pool with occasional massages. People would presume I had been to Thailand for a sex change and other feminising surgery.

3 days after I returned...

I was nervous. The change night had arrived. I had worked out all the DNA changes. None of the read-only files that would alter who I was were affected and keeping all the corrected DNA, just changing to a female form that would hopefully have an easy time with pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, plus a few vanity features suggested by Talia. No hair below my eyebrows, long eyelashes and strong nails. My psychologist was going to observe my change but had agreed to keep my ability confidential as well as sign off all the paperwork if I proved I wasn't lying.

I lay on my back on my bed, naked except for a blanket that was preserving my dignity. Talia was sitting on the bed cross-legged holding my right hand and our psychologist, Susan was sitting in a chair on my left. I knew she would be peeking occasionally, but had agreed to not take any recordings. I would be too deeply asleep to care.

“Ready?” Talia asked me.

“Ready,” I said with an unintentional waver to my voice. “Here we go.” I closed my eyes, confirmed one last time that the DNA was what I wanted it to be and triggered whole body activation. The tiredness swept over me quickly, but I had done this multiple times now so I wasn't worried and gently allowed myself to drift off.

Chapter 5

Susan's POV

I wasn't quite sure what to think. I had no doubts that both Chris and Talia believed that Chris was going to be transformed and my experience with them never suggested any mental instability. If it wasn't for the clear evidence of superpowers in the world generally and seeing a much younger Chris turn up at my door I would have had him committed. As it was I was beginning to believe it was going to happen.

“Sixteen hours?” I asked Talia.

“That's how long it has taken previously and from what he understands, it should be the same. It is a much bigger change than anything he has done so far though.”

“She,” I reminded her.

Talia giggled nervously. “Not yet, but soon. It's hard to think of my father as a she.”

“Imagine how hard it is going to be for him to become a her. You are going to really need to step up. Teach her everything. And I don't just mean what clothes to wear, how to walk, wear heels, tuck the skirt underneath, get in the car without flashing the world. You will also need to show her how to have fun, enjoy life. She is going to be nervous and unsure almost all the time while pretending that she is fine. You need to be her rock, not the other way around,” I explained.

“You believe us now don't you?”

“It's hard to imagine you would bring me here if you weren't pretty sure it was going to happen,” I responded.

Talia sighed. “I'm being selfish, aren't I? What dad is doing is more than I should ask.”

“Yes.” I gave a pause for that to sink in. “But sometimes you need to be a bit selfish. He is doing this willingly, lovingly and I even think this will be a good experience for him. Theoretically, he no longer has an expiry date, but I don't think that idea has sunk in. He is still thinking like a sixty-eight-year-old man thinking that his life is mostly over. Don't treat him that way. Re-categorise him as a teenage girl. Show her the ropes, how to have fun, safely.”

“You mean take her out dancing, partying? He has never been interested in that scene.”

“That was when he was a sixty-eight-year-old man. Your mother hurt him deeply when she fell out of love with him and he has never looked for anyone else. If he is going to live for a long time it would be a lonely existence if he did it on his own. Plus he will have pregnant teenage hormones rushing through his system,” I reminded her.

“You think he should look for a man?” Talia said disbelievingly.

“I have no idea what his sexual preference will be, but considering he has been a heterosexual male for decades, I would be surprised if he didn't find women attractive. If sexual preference is in the DNA then I'm sure he has set himself up as a lesbian and if it is environmental then he is already that way,” I answered.

“But he is only going to be a woman temporarily.”

“Nine months of pregnancy followed by a minimum of six months of breastfeeding is what you have told me. At the end of which, everyone who will know him, will know him as female. To revert to male would require a major change similar to what you both are about to do. If he doesn't suffer psychologically for being female, I don't think this will be that temporary. And it will be up to you to make this as pleasant as possible,” I reminded her.

She sighed again. “I'm going to sleep for a few hours. I'll keep my phone next to me so you can call me if you need anything.”

Then she left me to my silent vigil. I set up a vibration alarm for an hour on my phone, downloaded a book and started reading. Every hour I would get up, check his body for any changes and walk around a bit. I was getting tired but I didn't want to miss anything. I had brought a few caffeinated drinks and snacks and I used these when I struggled to stay awake.

For the first five hours, there was little to no change. The first thing I noticed was the lack of hair on his body and groin. I wasn't sure, but it looked like his penis and balls were shrinking. His penis was almost monster-sized and I suspected that was one of the first improvements he made to his male body when he worked out how to manipulate his DNA. Now it looked large but not huge. I was tempted to use the measuring tape but the thought of Talia walking in while I was holding his penis and measuring it made me hesitant and a bit giggly. His face looked softer but with no hair on top, it still looked masculine. He had shaved his head and eyebrows in preparation. He said he couldn't alter dead cells which was why, previously, he had a seventeen-year-old body with grey hair and dark brown roots.

I did use the measuring tape to find his hips had widened, but his shoulders had narrowed. His nipples were larger and there was the beginning of fat appearing underneath them. Nothing major, but evidence that it was all changing. Any doubts that I had held onto disappeared at that point.

And each hour it progressed. It was fascinating, his hands and feet became dainty, his penis and balls slowly shrank, his whole body became shorter with his muscles reducing in size. His frame became more and more feminine. Talia joined me after about eight hours. She gave him a sponge bath and we discussed the changes.

Already he looked more female than male. The changes continued, a cleft started forming, his waist narrowed and his breasts got larger. The next hour he had a completely female groin and I felt a mental shock as my mind reclassified him as a her. She was a little overweight with narrow shoulders, wide hips and large breasts. Her face was girl next door cute, not ridiculously beautiful and you could see the resemblance to male Chris without having any real hints of masculinity. She still looked a little strange without eyebrows or a head of hair but Talia told me Chris would speed grow that after the transformation was complete.

I would guess the last few hours involved internal changes since the changes slowed down. We took measurements so that Talia could go shopping and buy Chris some clothes. I recommended that she wore overtly feminine clothing to help her mind adjust to her change in circumstances. I suggested skirts and dresses with casual tops. Talia revealed another secret, Chris had been holding onto her fat reserves because she needs them to power the process, but Talia thought there was a good chance Chris would get rid of any excess fat if she wasn't going to be changing for a while. That meant there wasn't much point in buying many clothes until she was happy with her new shape and they would probably wait for the majority of the new wardrobe for when they moved to the Gold Coast.

Talia prepared a drink of water and a protein smoothie with lots of honey for when Chris wakes up. I felt privileged to have observed something that looked like a miracle, I only wish it could be used on others. As agreed, I would sign the papers and do what I could to make the legal transition as easy as possible. Almost all records are digitised these days and I estimated all the paperwork would be done within a month.

Chapter 6

Chris Heaven's POV

I woke up slowly, bringing my scattered thoughts into focus. A quick check of my DNA showed my transformation was successful and my DNA age was even further reduced at fifteen. I guess it was true girls mature faster than guys. A quick mental check suggested no immediate backlash. I feared I would wake up wanting to cry, but instead, I felt a slight emotional distance, like an artist looking forward to appreciating the final form of their new sculpture.

I opened my eyes and looked at Talia and Susan.

“So, how do you feel?” Susan asked.

I smirked, I had predicted her first words. “So far, so good. How does it look?”

“How self-conscious are you feeling? Do you want us to go downstairs while you check yourself out?” Talia inquired gently.

“We are all girls here, I guess,” I said with a shrug. I would have been more embarrassed if I had my penis out especially with a fear of getting an inappropriate reaction. For a bit of a laugh, I had modified myself before my transformation with the biggest dick in my DNA library because I knew Susan was going to look.

“I don't think Chris is going to behave like a blushing teenager,” Susan commented. She was right I may look fifteen but I was sixty-eight.

“I don't think I can suffer from being self-conscious when I can change my body easily enough,” I said as I lifted the sheet off my body and tried to look at my new self. My fairly substantial breasts made it a bit tricky seeing further down, but I could see that I still had a bit of a belly which was more pronounced as I sat up and started drinking the water followed by the smoothie.

“Belly fat always looks at its worst when sitting. Talia suggested you can get rid of it easily. Is that true?” Susan inquired.

“Yes. If I reactivated my DNA I would have another sixteen-hour sleep and be about five kilograms lighter. Alternatively, I can speed up my metabolism or even change my gut with DNA from someone who absorbs fewer nutrients from food. Some of that is down to gut bacteria which I don't directly affect.” I looked at myself in a full-length mirror. “Ideally, I don't want to get rid of the excess fat in case I want to make any changes.” I thought about it and consulted my DNA library. “I think I am going to make a minor DNA modification that will only use up a little bit of fat and take a couple of hours.”

Looking in the mirror I had to admit, I was very satisfied with my work. Cute but not outrageously pretty. I didn't really want to attract male attention. My breasts were a little large for my small frame, but I had based them on milk production, not aesthetics. I knew theoretically large breasts had no relation to difficulty with breastfeeding but these were based on the best milk producer that I had known when Talia was a baby. The biggest issue was a lack of hair on my head and no eyebrows.

“What will that do?” Susan asked.

“It will change the location where excess fat is stored from my belly to my chest and butt.”

“I wish you could do that for me,” Talia muttered.

“Me too, sister,” Susan added.

I put on a dressing gown, spent a few minutes making that change and speeding up hair production. There was no point in being measured and Talia buying me any clothes until my fat had redistributed. I joined Susan and Talia for a cup of tea while we were waiting. I was surprised that Susan was still here. She was obviously exhausted.

“Are you satisfied, Susan?” I asked.

Susan giggled. “I will stick to our deal and organise the correct paperwork. I expect a new birth certificate will take about a month to arrive. Do you want to keep the same name, just changing Christopher to Christine?”

“Actually my first name is just Chris, no extra, so that can stay the same. I guess they thought no one would use the full name anyway so why put it on a birth certificate. My middle name of Andrew needs to be different. I was thinking Andie, what do you think, Talia?”

“That works, and I don't think your daughter should have a hand in naming her parent,” Susan started. “That sort of leads onto why I haven't gone home to my well-earned rest yet. Chris, you were a sixty-eight-year-old man. I think we can all agree that is no longer the case. There are a few big issues that I want you to think about. Generally, transition to either gender is a slow process. Usually, there is plenty of time for the mind to adapt and think about all the elements that are involved in the other gender. In this case, not only is the transition a mere sixteen hours, you have every intention of becoming pregnant at your earliest opportunity, followed by breastfeeding a baby. Two uniquely female experiences. I'm hoping that your sixty-eight years will give you the mental strength to cope. The problem is how much mental strength you will require will depend on how you cope with being female and if you are one of the people who ends up feeling trapped in the wrong body, you need to know that before you become pregnant. I know you have every intention of completing this mad scheme, but these emotions can be very powerful and adding pregnancy to that could end up in disaster.”

“What do you advise?” Talia asked on my behalf while I was working through what she said.

“When do you plan to become pregnant?” Susan asked me.

“My first attempt will be after I release my first egg. At the moment my womb is in perfect readiness but there is no egg. I guess it will be about twenty-eight days from today.”

“Then I would suggest for the next month you aggressively face womanhood. Only wear very feminine clothes. Dresses, skirts and no trousers. Go out often and interact with others as a young woman. Surround yourself with other women and see if you can fit in. Talia can school you in feminine deportment and no one could suggest you are not female. Even if you mess up, you will just be considered a bit of a tomboy, maybe lesbian.”

“I don't care if I get labelled as lesbian. I can't be certain, but I did base my attraction DNA on a lesbian. It's a bit complicated and I don't know how much sexuality is determined by environmental factors and how much DNA influences things. I don't fancy the idea of being attracted to men and was worried that my original DNA would make me straight,” I explained.

“That is fine and missing the point. Your sexuality is your own business and is unlikely to directly affect gender dysphoria. However, you do bring up a valid topic. You need to experience what sex is like as a woman. Man or woman doesn't matter. Or if that is too radical, just masturbate. It is common to find that sex is emotional and will be a good barometer for how you are coping. It would not be healthy to find yourself disgusted with your body or the idea of your body having sex with a partner. You need to know that you can cope before you commit to nine months of pregnancy,” Susan continued.

“I'll get right on that,” I said with a chuckle, trying to lighten the moment, but Susan just stared at me with seriousness.

“From what I understand, you are now essentially ageless. Your mindset is still that of a sixty-eight-year-old man. A life already lived and mostly over. No desire for a life partner or really living. You've retired, but your body is young and you have the opportunity to change that. I think living a lifetime as a female is the perfect challenge to reinvigorate your life.” Then Susan chuckled. “Are you man enough to be a woman? Do you have the balls for it?”

I think a good part of her laughter came from being overtired, but we all ended up giggling from her attempted joke.

Chapter 7

After Susan had left we discussed what we were going to do. I think Talia was conflicted because she had emotionally committed to having Kalie cloned and all that might entail. That meant, if I was unable to cope, that dream would be gone. I thought she was brave to agree in the first place. In a private session with Susan, Susan suggested that it was a bigger deal than I had even imagined. Talia would have to give up or admit that the Kalie lying in the hospital bed was never coming home.

I believed I would be able to clone Kalie since Stormdancer had mentioned it and I had most of the skills that would be required, but the Kalie clone would never have the same memories and possibly a different soul. To counter that Talia had been talking to the unresponsive Kalie, explaining what we were going to do and requesting that her soul move across. Begging would be more accurate.

I had three different ideas of how I might be able to succeed, but I wouldn't be able to try until I had an egg to play with. My power wouldn't let me take an ordinary cell of mine and replace my DNA with Kalie's. I think that was because of the read-only files and a safety feature. I didn't want to turn into Kalie as that would mean the death of my identity. That did mean I would have to go through one period which I was not looking forward to. It's hard to complain, especially to a woman who has the same issue every month of their fertile life.

So I was fairly confident that I could clone her, but the mental aspects hadn't been properly considered. I mean I knew the intellectual idea and I had read a few transgender stories, but feeling it for yourself is a different ball game. Neither of us could refute Susan's argument which meant, big gulp, I was going on a crash course in femininity. Some of it I wasn't going to even attempt. Looking for a partner sounded like a bad idea with all that was going on or maybe that was an excuse because the thought of having sex scared me. And I would never accept a casual partner. I hadn't liked the idea of that as a man and I certainly wasn't going to lower my standards because I was now a woman. For me, sex had always been more of the making love scenario, a profoundly emotional experience. If I was looking for pleasure, well that could be done on my own, so I accepted Susan's masturbation challenge. I was looking forward to it with a curious optimism.

Dressing femininely would have to be under Talia's guidance. My body had finished rearranging itself so we went upstairs and I was remeasured. 32DD, 24, 38 were my measurements. Big jugs and wide birthen' hips. Quite narrow up top which made me look and feel a bit delicate and emphasised my larger chest. Talia then left me to go to the shops and buy me some clothes.

Left alone in the house I decided to give my body a spin, so to speak. I straight away realised it was going to be a completely different experience. I won't go into details, but it took some time to work myself up and even longer to get there but the pleasure was much more profound. I had chosen the DNA configuration of my vagina based on the woman who gave birth easily and I wasn't going to change that and my breasts and nipples were carefully chosen for easy breastfeeding. My clitoris I could change out fairly easily, so I chose one that had more nerve endings and activated my body for that change. I also went online and bought a few adult toys. I also took the time to meditate to see if I was emotionally uncomfortable in any way from playing with a very different body. I was beginning to suspect that I wouldn't have any problems and that might be part of my superpowers coming into play. Or it could just be the knowledge that nothing was permanent, I could change in whatever way I wished. Becoming trapped in the wrong body was never going to be an issue.

Talia came back and I got my first experience of female clothing. The bra was quite the contraption. As a previously married man, I had enough knowledge to know about doing it up at the front, shifting it around and then getting my arms in. It wasn't comfortable though and Talia had to walk me through how to adjust my breasts within their cups.

Putting on panties was also a mind opener. These were just plain white panties although Talia indicated that if I wanted to go with the feminine crash course, I needed to upgrade to proper sexy lingerie. It was putting them on and feeling the complete lack of anything to get in the way that blew my mind. For some reason, putting on panties reminded me in a very visceral way that my groin was now female. There was nothing to support, it was merely a case of hiding my secret garden. The dress that followed just confirmed what the underwear was saying.

I explained that to Talia and went over my feelings which were mainly shock, but no negative emotions. I also talked about my belief that I wouldn't have a problem with being female but thought Susan had a good idea. With that in mind, we brainstormed ideas and Talia being the organised person that she is, took notes and started immediate action.

Before I went out she thought I should have some girl training. Practice wearing heels, putting on makeup, walking, talking, girl mannerisms like crossing legs, sweeping my dress into place before sitting down, walking with a book on my head and things like that. Some of it you can't teach, it either comes naturally or doesn't. I also needed a couple of days for my hair to grow out. My first trip out was going to be going to a salon and spa. Manicure, pedicure, facial, massage, hair cut. The works. Then I needed to go shopping, female style, which I was dreading.

We were both joining a gym for a month and would go to aerobics and yoga. Talia wanted me to go to ballet. I think that was revenge for making her go when she was a child, but her mother got the majority of the blame for that. Ballet wasn't really suitable for my lush frame so Talia looked for what was available and came up with belly dancing or grass skirt dancing. We had a look on youtube and decided on the Hula dancing that was being run by a New Zealander. Both looked very female, but we connected to the Hula more. We also signed up for some Salsa dancing.

It was going to be an interesting month.

Chapter 8

The next three days went so wrong, so often, that I literally broke down in tears of laughter. It was a good exercise in learning to laugh at myself. I put the difficulty down to mental inertia. I had spent sixty-eight years thinking of myself as a man and therefore spoke, moved and acted how I thought a man should. When I pretended to be a woman, which is weird considering I was one, I overexaggerated everything and looked ridiculous.

It was easier to get to what Talia thought was acceptable by constantly playing a female actress. I could tone down my excesses and even when I got it wrong I still appeared to be very much a woman rather than trying to add a lifeless femininity to my normal movements and, as Talia reminded me, I wasn't pretending and I really was a girl now. It was also a lot more fun.

My voice was an interesting experiment to get right. Obviously, I already had a higher register than a man, but I still came across as stilted. We tackled the difficulty by watching movies followed by attempting to talk like one of the actresses. Youtube was a great resource and had great explanations about the difference between the phrasing that men and women use.

I also took the opportunity to try and improve my singing voice. I thought since I had a huge selection of DNA, I could alter my voice box and develop a decent singing voice, but it wasn't that easy. Funnily enough, it required altering my perception and appreciation of sound to be able to correct my tonal errors. We both agreed that I could now carry a tune pretty well and I liked how I sounded.

Makeup was a completely different adventure. My first attempts were disastrous, but I didn't really need a lot as a fifteen-year-old girl. I decided this was another opportunity to practice using my superpower. I had Talia perfect my makeup for everyday and special occasions and then used my DNA to alter the colour of my skin to mimic the same colours. It meant, after a bit of experimentation I could permanently keep a mildly made up look and an evening look. The change between them took about an hour. I could mimic the colours but I struggled with the shininess. My lips looked stained rather than covered in lipstick. Talia disagreed with me and wanted me to learn all about makeup as well as applying it. We compromised by having discussions and watching a program that was about the best makeup artists. I just couldn't get used to the feeling of having all that stuff plastered to my face so my version was my idea of compromise. If asked I would say that I had permanent makeup. The hardest element was my eyebrows. I tried removing the hair and creating makeup eyebrows but it looked like two caterpillars had taken residence. I restored the hair, allowed Talia to pluck them into shape and then did a reverse healing to stop the hairs from growing. I didn't enjoy the plucking and didn't want a repeat.

I couldn't believe how much fun I was having swishing my hips, looking over my shoulder with my hip pushed out and either winking or blowing Talia a kiss. We were having so much fun, even with a toned-down version that I think we both felt a bit guilty. How could we be happy while Kalie was in a coma in hospital? Talia was still visiting frequently and I knew we had a plan that would involve leaving Kalie behind which also made us feel bad, even if we were taking a DNA double with us. Still, I thought we were doing the right thing.

After those three days, it was time to take my acting out into the public which gave me a bit of stage fright. Still, regardless of how I looked, I had sixty-eight years of life experience and usually didn't care what others thought about me. It was still uncomfortable thinking that everyone was looking at me even if that wasn't the reality. Rather than give in to it or hide behind Talia, I leaned into my acting, gave an extra sway to my hips and smirked at anyone brave enough to catch my gaze. My stomach fluttered a few times in anxiety, but I had dealt with worse.

Wearing a dress or skirt felt out of my comfort zone when I first put them on mainly because they are so different to trousers. There is a vulnerability involved that relates to easy access to private areas with occasional breezes getting to places that I had never experienced to remind you of the difference. The same could be said of bras, another very female item that constantly reminds you that you are not male anymore, especially when you have large breasts. When I no longer was breastfeeding I would be tempted to reduce their size. Both wearing tops that showed cleavage and dresses or skirts that showed off my wide hips pushed me emotionally, but also fit with the female persona I was developing of a feminine, flirty, confident and playful woman. Quite a difference to the calm, quiet, serious but confident male that I had been.

This did worry me a bit but speaking to Susan reassured me. I thought I was faking it until I made it. She suggested that aspects of my personality that I had repressed were coming out. I respected women, but after I was married, didn't want to admit that I found any other woman attractive, as that would hurt my partner. That would cut out a lot of my playfulness and my daughter agreed because I had been playful with my children.

By this point, my hair had grown to almost reach my shoulders, but Talia wanted me to try having longer hair so my haircut was a simple shape and trim. I still had to learn how to blow dry and brush my hair as well as a few different ponytails. One low in back, one a few inches up and one relatively high which kept the wet hair off clothes if I didn't have a chance to dry it. Kalie had always had long hair and Talia had played with it, putting it into all these different styles, so I didn't want to upset Talia with objections as this seemed to be a healing moment for her.

I enjoyed the facial and loved the massage. I have always enjoyed having a massage but my skin was now softer and more sensitive so a massage became heavenly. The mani and pedi I suffered through but didn't enjoy. The different colours did help to make me feel pretty, which was something I was beginning to appreciate. I slowed down the growth rate of the nail beds so I wouldn't be cutting them all the time, hopefully reducing the need for more active care.

Most of my DNA makeup was done with shades of brown or increased blood flow to pink an area subtly. I wanted to be able to colour my nails but didn't have any human DNA to use. I had colours in skin, hair and the iris of the eye, but that was very limiting without mixing to create a fuller palette. If I wanted to experiment I would probably have to use non-human DNA. I wasn't prepared to do that yet although I had thought about it because I was sure I could use animal DNA to make myself stronger. In my sixty-eight years, I had been to numerous zoos so I had quite a catalogue of DNA to chose from. Colour changing pigments from either an Octopus or Chameleon sounded interesting but how would you consciously control it? I think I would need to add something to the nervous system and that idea scared me.

For the moment I would stick to human DNA. I had wondered about using DNA from supers to give myself powers but when I examined other DNA I didn't get the same deep level of information that I managed to get off my own about their read-only files which included where their powers came from. For this reason, when I tried to experimentally add that DNA to mine, it didn't work and I knew that was because I needed to completely understand it first. My power was not saying no, it was saying it would be dangerous to mess with what you didn't understand.

If I was being honest, I didn't have much desire to be a superhero or superheroine. I didn't like violence and I didn't like getting hurt. I did have a level of protectiveness that had prevented me from looking away when I saw somebody in need or being bullied. I wouldn't want to search for it though or enjoy the repercussions.

I loved the hula dancing and found it forced me to learn proper hip movements. I could now move my pelvis in ways that I never had as a man. It made me feel sexy. It was almost like you were demanding that people look at you. The looks from men did nothing for me, but also didn't offend me. The occasional woman who gave me appreciative glances felt exciting. According to Talia, I was a mild tease, but confident enough to pull it off without offending anyone or giving them green lights.

On the few times we went out dancing I did draw a lot of attention despite not being that beautiful. There were a few men who didn't want to take no for an answer but I just told them I was fifteen which deterred them. I was careful with what I was drinking and had no interest in playing with alcohol. We stayed away from anywhere that required ID since it would be another couple of weeks before my female ID came through.

My period, when it came was mildly painful, but I think it was the hormonal changes and general feeling of not being at my best that I didn't like. There was also a sense of wrongness. Why should my body bleed when there was nothing wrong with it? I did feel more emotional and some of the emotions didn't make any sense. I felt it was unfair that I had to go through this and men didn't, even though, until recently, I had been a man and had chosen to be in this position. I felt vaguely angry at men in general and pampering myself with chocolate seemed to mollify my feelings somewhat. I guess emotions don't have to make sense or be logical.

Chapter 9

Throughout the month leading up to my first egg release, I found out what kind of woman I was going to be. It was a journey of discovery where I had to be very honest with myself and I knew the journey wasn't over with lots more to find out. Along with skirts, dresses, bikinis, thong underwear, sexy lingerie bras, garters and tights, Talia also insisted I wear high heels. We started off with two-inch and worked up to five, but after the first week, I put my foot down, pun intended. High heels are not comfortable no matter what shape your foot is and I know because I changed my feet several times with minimal difference.

Women came in all shapes and sizes as well as likes and dislikes and after a week I felt I was allowed a few non-feminine traits without feeling less of a woman. I didn't like shopping and although I wanted to look good, I was not willing to wear anything uncomfortable which didn't just refer to high heels but bras that scratched my nipples or tops that felt like sandpaper. I wore skinny jeans once before I was determined to never bother again. Yes, they made my butt look great, but it took me ten minutes to put them on. Likewise, with the heels, I didn't care if it made me look sexier if that effort caused me pain.

The only compromise I made on this stance was about my long hair. After a week my hair was almost down to my bottom and I stopped the growth. What I wanted to do was cut it short because I felt that would still look good, but also be far more practical. However, Talia begged me not to and promised to help me cope with it. Every second day I would wash my hair and condition it. Talia would brush it out, dry it for me and then try out different styles, teaching me at the same time. It was a bonding moment for us that echoed back to when I would brush her hair when she was a child. So, despite my occasional sigh and irritable grimace when I was dealing with long hair, I couldn't bring myself to cut it. I think it would have hurt Talia deeply. Some of her caring nature, which had always been a strong part of her character, had transferred to me while Kalie was out of action.

By the time my first egg was released, I think we were both confident that I made an acceptable woman. Very young looking and sometimes my real age peeked through with either my words or the look in my eyes, but clearly female albeit a cheeky one. We were also running out of time before we moved to the Gold Coast with our belongings either sold, given away or packed. We had arranged a long term rental of a two-bed apartment in Surfer's Paradise. My change of birth certificate and updated driver's licence had come through which meant we could book a flight whenever we were ready.

When my egg finally arrived and I was ready to try some of my ideas for how to clone Kalie, my power suggested visiting her and getting a fresh sample.

It was determined fairly early on in our world's superhero experiment, that our powers were fairly instinctive and connected to our subconscious. Those who could fly, wouldn't need to practice for months or years and those with super-strength wouldn't break everything they touched. My ability to read DNA and the job I had made for myself using it, required listening to the hints my power was telling me and I had been doing that for years. It wasn't direct conversation but it sometimes felt like talking to someone who was mute. They could understand what you were asking and nod or shake their head, or even gesture with their hands but rarely grabbed your attention unless you were asking them something. This time my power knew what I intended and prodded me that it would need to be with Kalie involved. I took that to mean I needed a fresh sample, but that was not what my power was telling me.

I explained what I was doing to Talia and we both went to visit Kalie. Talia was the only person I had told everything about my power. Being able to make a clone of someone could make some powerful people very interested in me so I didn't want it to get out. I sat next to Kalie on a chair and waited for the nurse who had shown us in to leave before reaching for Kalie's hand and closing my eyes to concentrate.

The first step was fairly easy to accomplish, I removed my DNA from the egg. Then I added Kalie's full DNA. I had various theories about how I would be able to clone her, unsure which method would work. The simplest way was to replace my DNA with Kalie's and then hope my power would allow me to activate the egg. I believed in the KISS principle, so that is what I tried first.

Once the egg had Kalie's DNA, my power seemed to gather itself for activation, so I released the trigger and all hell broke loose. I felt a rush of energy, like wind, pass up from the hand that was holding Kalie's through my body to settle in the egg followed by the monitor on Kalie flat-lining and alarms blaring. I was pulled away from the bed by one of the nurses rushing in.

I was confused and alarmed, but my subconscious was clearly satisfied and happy. Talia was crying and clutching me in a corner of the room while staff tried to bring Kalie back to life. Kalie had long been removed from her original hospital and placed in long care ward. One of the people in charge ordered us out of the room as they used a defib to restart her heart. Talia was reluctant, but with my encouragement, we got her out of there.

I was trying to comfort Talia while looking inside myself to see what was going on. The egg was moving quite quickly from the fallopian tube to my uterus while rapidly dividing. When it was firmly implanted I felt a lot more secure. I was pretty sure that was much more rapid than I had read as usual.

Something from Kalie had joined the egg. My best guess was her soul was now in my womb along with her clone. I wanted to tell Talia, but we weren't left alone until after Kalie was confirmed deceased. I drove us home since I now had a valid licence. I did worry about being pulled over, but we managed to return home without problems.

“She didn't die.” I said.

“What?”

“She didn't die, my power pulled her soul to her clone growing inside me. I'll be honest and say I don't know if that will include any memories, but I have no doubts Kalie is alive inside me and I don't think it will be nine months gestation. I'm already feeling hungry from the energy she is taking from me.”

Talia looked at me with wide eyes. After the crying and running makeup that had been inexpertly wiped, she looked so vulnerable. I think it took a minute for what I said to sink in.

“Seriously?”

“I felt her enter my body and go straight to my now fertilised egg,” I answered honestly.

“Hungry... do you have a craving, shall I make you a sandwich? We can order...”

“Slow down. A sandwich would be great,” I responded.

Talia shuffled away to the kitchen muttering 'Kalie's alive' as if by repeating it she could convince herself.

Chapter 10

While Talia was occupied in the kitchen, I did a bit of research confirming that my baby was going to be ready much sooner than nine months. Emotionally I already felt a bit defensive and protective with an urge to rub my belly.

“You are sure?” Talia asked me again.

I nodded my head. “But I don't know what it means. Will she remember anything, will my power provide a way to rapidly grow her to her real age? When I quiz myself I get the impression that I can. All I can get regarding memory is that Kalie will be Kalie if that makes sense.”

Talia sighed. “That is such a relief. I trust you, I do, it's just that it is hard to believe. I guess I had better start the telephone conversations.”

“I'm not sure that is a good idea. The Dr's will provide a death certificate and you are supposed to use that to register her death and arrange a funeral, sort out her belongings and so on, but what if in a month or two we have an eight-year-old Kalie that everyone believes is dead. No one but us visits her anymore. If we handle this right, she can keep her identity,” I suggested.

We had been through the process relatively recently with her husband's death.

“We can rush the funeral and keep it to ourselves but the funeral directors will require the death certificate,” Talia argued.

“Yes, but if we have the real one, I don't think it would be that difficult to use it to make a fake one. If we have her cremated with no service and I change my looks to a fake non-existent person to deal with it, if anyone questions that she is still alive they will find a fake certificate and a signature that isn't yours. If the body is cremated they can't dig it up and the cloned Kalie will have a DNA match to show that she is your daughter and clearly alive. We'll still need to go to the Gold Coast for a while and lay low. We want anyone investigating to do so from a distance, not going to the hospital and quizzing Drs.”

“What if mum finds out?” Talia asked.

“All she will find out is that Kalie is no longer there. I don't think they are allowed to tell anyone details and if you change your phone number and forget to give her your new one until everything is settled, she never will. If this works as I think it will, I don't want anyone to ever find out that I can do this. Theoretically, I can restore someone who is about to die of old age to the prime of their life and do that repeatedly.”

“Are you sure I'm getting my Kalie back?” Talia asked again.

“Yes. I'm not sure if it will be as a baby or eight-year-old. In either case, that body in the hospital is soulless. What is inside me is the real Kalie. Same DNA and the same soul. That I am sure of,” I responded.

That night I went over Kalie's DNA carefully. I didn't want to make any changes. I knew if I kept the read-only files unaltered I should be able to alter other aspects without changing who she was, but I didn't want to take any chances. Kalie was originally born with a tongue tie. A fairly common condition that made it difficult for her to breastfeed. I checked to see if it was genetic or a developmental abnormality. I could find no evidence in her DNA so I hoped that this time it wouldn't occur, but at least I knew to look out for it.

Interestingly, I now had greater knowledge about her DNA. Having live cells that I had access to enabled me to see much deeper into her DNA including her read-only files. I could see, for example, that she would have an altered form of my power. She would be instinctively attracted to men whose DNA could combine with hers to create powerful children. She would also automatically choose the correct egg and sperm to create the best pairing. She would do most of this subconsciously, choosing what powers she wanted them to have and what sex they were going to be.

I had hoped that if I was ever able to decode other read-only files and superpowers, I would be able to add them to my DNA to give me extra abilities. However, in Kalie's case, some of the DNA I would have to replace on myself would be in my read-only files and that meant it was not possible. Not that I wanted to be attracted to men and I had most of that ability anyway. She was genetically my granddaughter, so it was not surprising.

I was sure that if Kalie, when she was older, realised that I could have altered her DNA so that she would never need to shave or some of my other alterations, she will be upset that I didn't do it. This was, however, my first attempt at cloning and I didn't want to take any chances with my granddaughter's life. Plus I wanted Talia to know this was exactly the same Kalie as she had given birth to.

Talia was in a bit of a state of shock the next day, but we still progressed with our plan. Creating the fake death certificate was easy, all that was required was a scanner, editing software and the correct or very similar paper. All we did was change the signature from the Dr to an actors signature that we found on the internet.

We used the cheapest and fastest funeral director possible and I altered my face to that from the DNA of a random old lady I passed in the supermarket. The funeral director was clearly not happy with me. I got the feeling that they felt I was disrespecting the dead and not giving the proper send-off that everybody deserved. Either that or they were unhappy that I was choosing the cheapest options. I ignored their pressure with confidence.

At the end of the week, we had a jar of ashes that I buried in our garden and planted a rose bush on top. The next day we flew to our new life in the Gold Coast. I didn't know how to measure it, but I was already beginning to show a bump and was eating every couple of hours to keep up with the nutritional demands. I had also bought various nutritional supplements to help the rapidly growing fetus and Talia was treating me like a princess.

Chapter 11

We had chosen the apartment because it had great amenities and was close to restaurants. I was hoping to enjoy my time swimming, sunning myself in my daring bikini, using the hot spa and going out for food. Instead, because my pregnancy was progressing so fast I was stuck in the small space, feeding every two hours. My original plan was to see a doctor, do the usual things a normal pregnant woman would, but my abnormal speed meant that I would have to wait until delivery time. We also had to come up with a story so we wouldn't have child support workers visiting in case that speedy growth continued.

We decided that we would pretend that we were just visiting the Gold Coast and our life was back in Adelaide. Our driving licences were still from there, we would just have to claim that we came here by car on a short holiday and got stuck here with a temporary problem. Car trouble seemed the most likely. That would work for the hospital staff and we could have the birth certificate sent to our Adelaide address. We had already organised our post to be redirected so it would eventually find its way back to us. Neighbours and local people, on the other hand, just needed to be avoided until everything had settled. That meant I was stuck inside. That would have driven me crazy except after one week of being pregnant I was able to estimate another two weeks until delivery.

In the end, it turned out to be twenty-three days. Emotionally, I was a mess. Hormones going crazy, feeling hunger almost all the time, cabin fever and scared of labour and delivery. Talia was a star, going out at all hours to get me food, cooking whatever I wanted, massaging my feet and most of all, supporting me with her love.

My power did come in at the end. I knew exactly when the process was finished and then I was on a countdown timer. I could start the labour whenever I wanted and if I didn't it would eventually start anyway. I also knew the longer I left it, the worse the delivery would be. Despite being terrified I was more scared of making it worse. I visited the hospital and organised a check-up, explaining that we were on holiday and were meant to be back in Adelaide a month before, but car trouble had delayed our exit and I was worried because I was due any day now.

They agreed to give me a check-up and I started the labour process. I had done my homework to make my birth experience as mild as possible. Still, the slow, inevitable ramping up of pain, lack of dignity as you were naked with people examining your vagina, no idea how long the process was going to take or how painful it was going to go. When I reached eight out of ten on my pain scale I asked for pain relief, but they refused as I had only been in labour for an hour. Half an hour later they refused because I was fully dilated and needed to push. Kalie was born, or reborn, twenty minutes after that.

I was traumatised, but overjoyed. There was a little bit of tearing which needed stitches. My intention to get my body to rebuild the whole area would have to wait until after I left. I could feel my power working through my breasts as I fed Kalie, I just had to hope I could leave the hospital before they noticed anything.

They had rechecked her weight and were surprised by how much weight she had gained, but it was also a sign that Kalie was a healthy baby so after one day of rest in the hospital I was allowed to leave. Talia brought a bassinet and loads of baby supplies and we returned to the apartment.

Kalie was a quiet baby only grumbling when she was hungry or needed a nappy change. I was still feeding like crazy because she was drinking a lot of milk every two hours, so a new marathon started. We knew we had Kalie back after a week of this and Kalie started looking more aware, was physically the size of a two-year-old and turned to Talia and called her 'Ma'. We cried.

A week and a half later, with so many nappies filled, so much food eaten and feeling like I was more of a human cow than a woman, Kalie looked like an eight-year-old. My power still wanted to go to my breasts but we didn't want her to get any older so I pulled it back and stopped breastfeeding her. During most of this time, Kalie was only occasionally aware, spending much of the time sleeping, eating and shitting. It took about a day for her to return to full awareness.

Kalie remembered her dad hitting her and not much after that. It sounded like fever dreams where you are not quite sure what is real. We had to explain what had happened to her father. I think her emotions were very mixed. She was scared of him, but she loved him. We decided that we would take her to some professional help. We also needed to properly start a life here in the Gold Coast and I made the monumental decision to stay as a woman for the moment.

The pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding had been annoying, awkward, scary, painful and very exhausting. But. If I was being honest it was also satisfying, rewarding and filled with love. I was having fun being a woman so why would I go back?

I spent a week recovering my body reserves and my sleep. We had fun as a family, going to the beach, visiting the different attractions and relaxing in the sun. I cheated by getting a protective tan in three hours by choosing skin DNA with a Mediterranean background. Stretch marks and all other signs of the process, repaired and returned to normal.

Talia struggled to let Kalie out of her sight but also started organising her new life. Setting up schooling and looking for work as she was getting bored. She only wanted to work during school hours. The two-bedroom apartment wasn't feeling big enough anymore and I had to work out what I wanted to do with my life. Talia was pushing me to go out and live life. She found a salsa dancer offering lessons and signed me up.

Chapter 12

Stacy's POV

I was feeling a bit depressed going to the dance club and almost ducked out of it, feigning tiredness. Being one of the strongest regenerators that excuse was never going to wash and what I felt was more of a world-weariness. Again I thought about retirement. Despite being sixty-four-years-old my body looked to be in its late twenties and was in the prime of life, but ten years ago my long-term partner had broken up with me because everybody thought we were mother and daughter. Ever since then I had felt the weight of years. This new set of superheroes were great people and insisted on involving me in the more social side of life, but I still felt like an outsider.

My eyes were drawn away from my group to a young girl, too young to be in the club even, dancing with beautiful hip movements and a gentle swaying body. I wasn't the only one staring, but most were just giving her a bit of space and admiring glances. One guy, however, stepped forwards when her back was turned and gave her arse a good smack. I was there before I could think about it, shoving him out of the way. I turned back to the young girl who was looking at me with a raised eyebrow. That's when it dawned on me I had moved a little too fast and she probably thought it was me smacking her.

“Err... that wasn't me.” I looked about frantically for the culprit, but he had disappeared.

She looked at the lack of someone else to blame and the blush rushing to my cheeks. Then she gave me a naughty admiring look, top to bottom. “If it was you, honey, I don't mind. Come dance with me,” she said with a sweet playful voice, holding out her hand to pull me in and lord help me, I couldn't resist.

Her sweet innocence pulled me in and we danced together looking into each other's eyes, until I realised I was leading her on and I needed to stop.

“I need a break,” I said. “ Where are your friends?”

“Trying to escape, eh? I'm flying solo tonight,” she replied.

I lead her back to my group and got her an unopened soft drink that she requested and introduced her to the undercover superheroes. My body was very interested and I could tell that she was as well, but she was much too young for me and even as young as she was, I would outlive her. That was part of my depression, I was resigned to being on my own for the rest of my life.

“I am too old for you,” I told her.

She laughed and shook her head. “Tell you what, let's make a bet. If you are older than me, I will walk away, but if I am older than you, you will take me on a date.”

I laughed in disbelief. “Sure,” I said.

She passed across her driving licence. To be honest she didn't look old enough to have one. She was born four years before me. She was sixty-eight. There was a note in the superpowers that said age regression. I still didn't believe it.

She was smiling at me cheekily. “So where are you going to take me?”

My brain had stopped and struggled to get going again.

“I've broken you, have I?” She put her drink down, grabbed my hand and started pulling me towards the dance floor. “Let's dance then.”

She was older than me. I wouldn't outlive her, she would outlive me. Did that bother me? Should that bother me? I would become an old lady while she still looked young. I would be such a hypocrite if I refused even trying for a relationship. In fact, she was one of only a few people on Earth who I could have a long term relationship with. We grew up in the same era, we were a similar age. People would think I was robbing the cradle, but I have always claimed that I didn't care what other people think.

I allowed myself to be dragged onto the dance floor, stopped thinking and just tried to enjoy the moment. It wasn't that difficult, her dance involved a hypnotic hip movement that trapped my eyes and pulled my body closer.

I felt my depression lift as new life and possibilities lit up my future.

I'm not sure how long we danced for, to be truthful the building could have fallen down and I don't think I would have noticed, but Jordan found me, congratulated me on my conquest, and informed me that everybody else was leaving. I headed back with Chris to say goodbye.

Chris looked at her forgotten drink with a frown and then looked around, spotting something that upset her, judging by her face.

“What's wrong?” I asked her.

“My drink was spiked with something, and I'm pretty sure it was that guy over there,” she said pointing to a tall man almost holding up a woman, she looked out of it. Normally, you would think she was just drunk, but if that guy had added something to her drink as well, we could be watching a crime in progress.

“How do you know?” I asked curiously.

“Part of my power,” she responded.

“What do you want to do?” I asked her.

She smirked. “Hide behind my big strong regenerator with speed and strength, while she sorts it out. He doesn't have any powers if that helps.”

If she knew my powers and knew he didn't have any, did that mean she had uncovered the identity of all my group? What on Earth were her powers?

“And if I need proof?” I asked.

“I'm sure your friend, Jordan, can do a little look-see.”

So she knew Jordan was a telepath. I spoke to Jordan and told her what Chris suspected and also that I suspected Chris knew who we were.

She looked at the guy in question and gave a disgusted grimace. Then turned to look at Chris, a shocked expression briefly highlighting her face. Telepathy had turned out to be less dangerous than science fiction had suggested. Telepaths had the ability to read other people's surface thoughts, but couldn't influence those thoughts or even communicate unless that person was also a telepath. Nor did anyone seem to have a natural immunity except telepaths themselves and the very rare Null. Even mad scientists struggled to reliably block the ability.

“Yes, the guy is guilty as hell. The woman with her I can't read as she is largely unconscious, certainly her thoughts are incoherent. Chris expected me to check her thoughts and straight away admitted that she had guessed who we were. She is also very much in lust with you. She thinks part of it is that she is in a teenage body and she intends to hold herself back until she knows you better.”

“Enough,” I said before she revealed anything more personal. “I'll block him from leaving with her, can you stay here with Chris and call the police. Sarah can film this in case he tries to sue us or something. Hopefully, he has restricted products on him and the police can chase it back to his suppliers.”

Chapter 13

Chris' POV

I watched Stacy stride purposefully towards the slimebag, while Jordan phoned the police and explained the situation. They would need an ambulance as well. That woman was not looking in a good way.

“I'm surprised you didn't notice before I pointed it out,” I commented to Jordan.

“Like every telepath, you learn to treat the thoughts like white noise and ignore it. It's easier with more people about you. I'm glad it doesn't bother you.”

I suspected that her ability to read thoughts would bother a lot of people and, even if you had no choice to constantly hear other people's thoughts, to hear negative crap just because of something you couldn't help, would be a type of hell I didn't want to imagine.

“Yes,” she said with a sad smile, following my thoughts. “There are plus sides,” she said with a smirk of her own, “we make great lovers.”

Naughty, naughty, she wanted me to think about sex. No, she is probably a master of getting people to think in the direction she wants and was steering me away from thinking about the negative aspects. She wouldn't want me feeling sorry for her.

She sighed. “Too intelligent.”

Stacy hadn't actually intervened with the guy, just stood near waiting for the police while prepared to prevent him from leaving or catching the woman before she collapsed. Another of her friends had her phone out and was recording the situation in a non-obvious way.

“Do you know the woman's name?” I asked Jordan, I thought I could help with the woman if the police arrived first, if only to provide moral support.

“He isn't thinking of it and she is out of it. We can move a bit closer if you are worried,” Jordan suggested. “He is beginning to become suspicious of Stacy.”

When the altercation happened it was quick. The police arrived, the man pushed the woman away from him pretending that she was bothering him and tried to walk away. The woman fell to the floor, only to be caught by Stacy who managed to somehow trip him up in the process. Quite masterfully done. I rushed to help with the woman allowing Stacy to keep a better eye on the man, but the police arrived and hustled him outside quickly. We stayed until the ambulance men arrived and took her off our hands. This left me in the middle of the superhero group, feeling a little exposed.

“We need to have a conversation and I think it needs to be private,” Stacy told me. “Will you come back with us?” she asked.

I sighed. “Sure, just let me phone my aunt to let her know I am alright. I figure I should be safe with you guys.” It was half statement and half question.

Stacy nodded.

“Aunt?” Jordan asked.

Telepaths knew when you were lying, so I allowed the fact that Talia was my daughter, but looked like my mother now to rise to the surface of my thoughts.

Jordan still looked confused.

“I'm sixty-eight, I can't call her my daughter now, can I?” I responded.

“She's sixty-eight and knew...” Sarah started.

“This needs to be private. Just let her reassure her 'aunt',” Stacy interrupted.

I put the phone on speaker so they knew there was no funny business. “Hey, princess, I'm going to be a bit delayed, so don't wait up.”

“Oh, what's the problem,” she asked.

“No problem, I err...” I paused thinking of a good excuse and only think of one and it wasn't ideal. “I got lucky,” I said eventually.

“That doesn't sound like you,” she stated.

I pretended to sound hurt. “Hey, that hurts.”

She snort giggled. “I didn't mean that. You have never been interested in one-nighters, even more so now.”

“True, true.” I looked at Stacy with a grin. “But Stacy is special, she has even promised me another date so I should be good. Anyway, as embarrassing as this conversation is, I need to get going. See you tomorrow. Love you.”

“Love you,” she said automatically and I put the phone down before there could be more awkward questions.

Chapter 14

I thought I would be taken back to the superhero building for my interrogation, instead, we went to a set of apartments that were in a non-descript high-rise, behind and towards the sea from the very visible hero building. The entrance was average, clean with a set of post boxes and two elevators facing each other. Once we all piled into the elevator, Stacy placed a hand over my eyes as someone played with the controls. I noticed we were going down, beyond at least two floors below the basement.

As the elevator doors opened, automatic lights came on and showed a tunnel. There was a clear camera before with a phone on the sidewall. Stacy waved before the camera, picked up the phone and explained that they were bringing a guest to security. At the end of the tunnel, there was another elevator that took us up to an open plan area with a kitchen, large dining table with chairs and three different lounge areas, one with a bookcase overflowing, one with a large screen and multiple game stations and a more traditional multiple sofas with a TV.

I was expecting an interrogation room so when the girls steered me to the comfortable seats I was pleasantly surprised. I shared with Jordan my image of a white room, white table and a huge light that someone was shining in my eyes with the hint of a German accent.

“So, what do you want to know?” I asked innocently.

“Everyzing,” Jordan said giving the German accent I was looking for.

“You have compromised our normal identities,” Stacy stated.

“How have I done that?” I asked. “Just because I worked it out, doesn't mean anyone else has.”

“I don't think you get this. You know. We don't know you. That means compromise,” Sarah pointed out.

“That is why we need to talk to you,” Stacy said.

“And I want to know how she knew,” Jordan added.

“Well, I'm here to make sure I organise a second date with Stacy,” I sassed.

“OK, let's start from the beginning. Where do you live and what do you do for a living?” Stacy asked.

“I'm sixty-eight years old and am currently living with my daughter and granddaughter, in a two-bed flat, so I suppose, I am looking for new accommodation. Since I have a biological age of fifteen, I call them my aunt and cousin. I'm retired and moved to the Gold Coast to start afresh. Not really looking for work at the moment, just finding my feet and working out what I want to do.”

“How did you work out our identities?” Sarah asked.

“As is fairly obvious, I have a superpower. I don't mind telling you the basics, but if you try and dig deeper with Jordan here to listen to my thoughts, I'm going to want to leave quickly and if I accidentally think of any dangerous elements, you will cause me to change my identity and run away. Nothing illegal, but I don't want to be a target or let my family become one.”

Everyone looked a lot tenser, so I obviously hadn't expressed myself well.

“You have a lethal power?” Stacy asked.

“Not to other people,” I answered, but it did occur to me then that I didn't know if pulling the soul to a cloned egg was voluntary or my power forced the issue. Either way, it wasn't lethal. “Just has the possibility of ruining my life, not others.”

They looked at Jordan, who nodded her head.

“So you don't want us to ask questions?” Sarah confirmed.

“I don't mind polite questions to expand on what I tell you or for clarification purposes, but no questions about whether I can do anything else and anything I tell you will be kept confidential.” Then I laughed. “This sounds like I am bigging this up. I wouldn't have mentioned any of this if I didn't have a telepath looking at my thoughts. My powers are not really that impressive. It is all DNA based. I can taste DNA. Taste isn't really the right word, but I don't think there is a right word. In the case of my own DNA, besides a core bit of DNA that I call my read-only DNA, that I think represents the elements I cannot change without altering who I am, the rest of my DNA I can swap with other people's DNA. So I can make myself taller, shorter etc, etc. The more I change the longer it takes for the change. If I activate my entire DNA rather than just a section of it, my body goes into a deep sleep for sixteen hours and I wake up with all the changes done and biologically fifteen years old. So age regression is what is on my driving licence and passport. No, I can't activate anyone else's DNA, but I am aware of all the DNA that I come into contact with and can read that DNA to some extent. There is a difference between live DNA and dead DNA. Live DNA which is mainly my DNA as well as bacteria and viruses that enter my body, I can understand completely, whereas dead DNA, which I am guessing is skin cells more than anything else, gives me a general idea. I can tell what someone would look like, what powers they might have, but reading that is more an art than a science. In terms of tonight, I could tell you all had superpowers which is a statistical anomaly, then I noticed the skill sets fit with the known powers of the Gold Coast Supers. The man who spiked my drink left his DNA on my drink, so I knew a man had interfered with it and what he looked like. It was a guess that he had spiked it, but what else was likely?”

There was a pause while they digested my explanation and also thought carefully about what to ask.

“OK, I have a question. I am the strongest regenerator on record in the world. I don't mean that as a boast, but I was told that I am going to live for hundreds of years and would eventually become the longest-living human. Why haven't I heard of someone who could potentially live forever?” Stacy asked.

“Well, that is an easy one. I didn't know I could activate my entire DNA and regress to teenagehood until a few months ago. Let me tell you, growing old isn't fun, so now that I am in a young body again, I feel full of life and want to enjoy myself.”

“You would make a perfect spy. You could look like anybody,” Sarah commented.

“I don't like violence and as much as I appreciate the job you guys do, I wouldn't want to do it myself.”

“A telepath would pick her out in a hot second,” Jordan pointed out.

“She would be a great detective, though. She could probably show us all the faces of the people who were present in a crime scene,” Sarah suggested, not deterred.

“I don't mind helping out, but I wouldn't want to endanger myself or my family. It would probably take about three hours to change my face to someone else's. It wouldn't affect the hair, show any damage that might have occurred or the age although I can tell the age of the DNA I sample, I can't artificially age my body.”

“That would still be really useful. We have software that can age an image or you could work with a sketch artist. Kidnapping or child abductions could really use those abilities and having an idea of perps with what superpowers they possess would be invaluable. I will talk to Derek the manager tomorrow and see if he is interested. You can either be hired full time which includes an apartment that is connected to this office or work as a consultant for a case by case fee structure. That is if he agrees,” Stacy said thoughtfully.

“Do I still get my date?” I asked cheekily.

Chapter 15

Jordan let me stay in her apartment for the night since for whatever reason she had two bedrooms. She lent me a nightie and we put my clothes for a wash and dry ready for tomorrow. It did mean no panties for the night. That wasn't a big deal except I knew Jordan was reading my thoughts and when a movement or accidental action reminded me, I could see Jordan blush. I may even have paid attention and allowed my thoughts to wander in that direction to get a rise out of her.

I lay in bed that evening thinking about being a teenage girl. Seeing Stacy standing behind me looking strong and proud after someone had given my arse a swat had caused a rush of lust beyond anything I can recall. Maybe I had similar feelings as a young man on my first crush, but that was so long ago, my memory of it is gone. If I was truly as young as my biological age I would now think I was in love. Logically, I knew that all I had experienced was a chemical attraction and I knew Stacy had a similar reaction. How did I know that besides the obvious look in her eyes and acting possessively with me while we were dancing? The amount of DNA coming from her panties spiked in my presence in the same way mine did. If we did go on a date I think I will be putting a pad in place. Curiously, Jordan was also showing a minor spike from her panties, but that could be from the teasing I am intentionally doing with my thoughts.

I have also noted that I am behaving and feeling different as a woman. Stacy made me feel feminine by her being the protective one and I liked that. I would never have thought that I would be the submissive one, but I think there is an element of that because Stacy is definitely not submissive.

The next morning Jordan was up way before me and woke me up leaving it as late as she could. I had a quick shower, got dressed and followed her into the hero centre. She left me to relax in the lounge, told me to help myself with the food and drinks before heading off for her office.

I didn't feel that comfortable raiding their pantry but I was feeling hungry so I had a piece of toast and made myself a cup of tea. I suspected Jordan's first job was to report on me and her reading of me. It amused me that I had thought that before she left me, so she knew what I was thinking and didn't contradict me, which I felt was a confirmation and she knew that as well.

I had tried not to think about telepathy and Jordan in particular, but I'm sure some of my feelings leaked out. I felt sorry for her. Her gift was incredibly useful but made her a social pariah. Even though I tried not to be bothered by something she couldn't help, I had a secret that would be dangerous if revealed. My worry was that Jordan was doomed to a life alone. It would be hard enough to find someone who would be willing to date a telepath, but to never have a hurtful thought was nigh on impossible. She would have to date an angel or be hurt frequently.

In my own case, my wife stopped loving me when I put a bit of weight on. Of course, that made everything worse and I ended up putting more and more weight on. And that was without being subjected to her actual thoughts, just the looks of disgust and that was beyond hurtful. Maybe Jordan could date another telepath or a null. Null's were pretty rare and I suspected dating another telepath would either be heaven or twice as hard as dating a norm. People tended to be judgemental and withholding the negative verbally was fairly easy, but if someone could hear your thoughts there would be no holding back. It does get better with age. I have found myself much less critical as time has passed but that could just be me.

A guy in his forties came in, my DNA check put him at a biological age of forty-eight with a typical brick type superpower. Strength, flight and invulnerability. No regeneration so that was probably his real age. He glanced over at me and then concentrated on preparing himself breakfast and a cup of coffee before joining me.

“Here to try out for the Gold Coast Supers?” he asked before taking a big bite of his bacon and egg sandwich.

I smiled politely. “I'm too squishy for that. I may be a consultant for investigative work. I'm Chris.”

He waited until he swallowed. “Adam,” he said, “well, good luck.”

“Thanks.”

We then had an awkward silence before Stacy came into the room and gestured for me to follow her. She was dressed in combat fatigues, but still looked sexy.

“I've explained to Derek about your powers and suggested how useful they could be. The rest is up to you,” Stacy told me.

“Thanks. I wasn't really looking for a job, but I don't mind helping out. I still want my date though,” I reminded her.

“If you stay as part of the team, taking you out for a date will become a lot easier,” she commented but didn't look enthused.

I sighed, discouraged. “I'm not going to force the issue. I just thought it would be fun.”

We arrived before an unmarked office door. Stacy stepped closer to me and put a hand on each shoulder looking into my eyes. “I had a lot of fun dancing with you and would love to take you out on a date. I'm about ten years out of practice and had been resigning myself to be alone. I also don't look my age and my last partner broke my heart. I'm looking forward to shaking the cobwebs off, I just need a bit of time wrapping my head around it. Please be patient with me. My head is saying stupid things that I need to get out of my system.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“You are too young for me so I will look like a cradle robber if we go out. I will grow old while you still look young. I know neither of those makes sense but my last partner broke up with me because she started looking a lot older than me. I didn't care, but she did. It has made me sensitive to the issue and I need to shake it off.”

“Alright. I will back off. Let me know when you are ready. I will say I am not used to these teenage hormones, they are making me a bit aggressive,” I admitted.

She gave me a small smile. “I've enjoyed the attention.”

She knocked on the door, waited for a response and then indicated for me to enter.

Chapter 16

“Come in, have a seat,” Derek said. He had stood up when I entered and sat again after his gesture towards the chair on the other side of his desk.

“Pleased to meet you,” I responded.

“Stacy and Jordan have told me about your powers and they do sound useful. I don't think we will find out how useful until you join the team and show us what you can do, so I am thinking of hiring you for a trial period. Are you interested?”

“What are you offering?” I asked.

“What do you need?” he countered.

He was probably expecting me to name a sum of money but that wasn't the first thing that came to mind.

“I need a new ID, at the moment my present ID reveals my real age of sixty-eight and I think that is dangerous. I also need a place to live and since I have just retired, I don't want to have a nine to five job.”

“We have apartments available, so that is no problem. We can make you a consultant, rather than an employee, which means we will call you when we need you rather than have you sitting in an office. How much you get paid with then be determined by how often you are needed. That is a bit of a risk though, financially,” Derek responded.

“I am happy with the standard rate for a consultant. I am not rich, but I am set up for my retirement, so I am not worried about money and only want to be paid if I have earned it,” I replied.

“Excellent. The ID request sounds reasonable, but I will need to kick it up the chain. I don't have the authority or the connections, but we do a similar thing with the regenerators, so a legal ID shouldn't be an issue. For superheroes, we tend to be quite thorough and label you as an orphan so no criminals can come after your family. It is standard policy that you need a full-body suit including an armoured mask before you can officially start, but since you are not part of the offensive team, a Raven suit will be sufficient. There is not much point in filling out any paperwork until you have your new ID,” he said, then pulled open a drawer and withdrew a phone. He wrote down some notes and then passed the phone to me with a cable for charging. “We will give you a call when everything is ready.” He used his landline phone to ask for his assistant to come to his office. “April will take you for the three-dimension scanning and then show you one of the available apartments. You won't be able to officially move in until all the paperwork is done, but she can give you a key so that you can start moving your stuff in straight away.”

He then stood up with a genuine smile on his face. “Welcome to the team,” he said holding his hand out for me to shake it.

After a quick hand crushing shake, I was allowed to escape. I guess I had a job again.

April took me to a room where I had to strip down to my underwear and put my feet on the marked spots with raised hands. Thirty seconds later I was able to get my clothes back on. The Raven suit is just a black armoured cloak with a hood. Worn in conjunction with a mask it provides bulletproof protection, anonymity and looks pretty cool.

We returned to the apartment complex and I was shown an identical two-bed apartment. Apparently, the joke was on me last night when I was told to stay with Jordan as she had a two-bed apartment. The smallest built was a two-bed. I was given a key and shown the communal swimming pool, spa bath, sauna and gym. I wouldn't have access to the secret tunnel until I officially joined. All the residents were either superheroes or relatives of superheroes, however, some of those relatives didn't know that, so we had to pretend to be normal and not give anything away. The gym was a normal gym and useless for those with physical superpowers.

I exited and made my way back to Talia. It was most of an hour walk, but I didn't mind the exercise, it gave me time to think. I hadn't really had much time to enjoy my retirement, but I knew I would have gotten bored quickly. I didn't have regrets about the life I had lived up to now, but there were things that I wished I had done. I loved to travel and there is always more to see, so I had been vaguely planning a round the world trip, but that could be done later. The two other things that I had wanted to start was learning a musical instrument and foreign languages. I didn't want to stop learning Salsa, Hula and any other dances that caught my fancy. If I was only doing consultancy work, I should have time to start all that.

I didn't want to stop seeing Talia or Kalie, but I also wanted to keep them safe from any involvement that my new work might bring. Kalie was more interested in the friends she was making than anything else, still getting over what her father had done to her and coping with a mother who was smothering her but trying not to. Adding me to the mix and explaining who I was would have been dangerous since I doubted an eight-year-old can be relied upon to be discrete. She only vaguely remembered that I breastfed her and soon put that down to her head trauma. She considered me her older cousin whose presence meant she didn't get a room of her own. I would keep an eye on her as best I could from a distance.

Talia had been my main concern, but she had met a man when she was looking for a lunchtime waitressing job. I think it was just what she needed although it was early stages and may not go anywhere. It was interesting talking to her now that I was a woman rather than her father. I got far more details and was able to giggle with her as she explained his clumsy attempt to get her phone number.

I felt a little sad to feel less needed and slightly like I was getting in the way. In a weird contradictory way, I also felt satisfied. I had been through my kids leaving home before and it was sort of like that, except I was leaving them.

I did want to reduce any connection between us from affecting them and since I had the ability to change my looks I wanted to take advantage of that. Changing my whole body would take too long, but changing my face would take anywhere from two to three hours depending on the changes. I waited until Kalie was back and explained that I was going to change my face so she would associate the new look as still being her cousin. My new look was designed to be quite different to my usual look, but I could only know the generalities of the changes until I looked in the mirror. My face went from round to more heart shaped, my eyes separated slightly, turned green and appeared bigger, my nose shrank slightly and turned up a bit.

“Nope,” I said with a sigh. I'm not that vain, but my face was now too beautiful. It would attract attention and that was the last thing I needed. Kalie would be going to bed soon, so she would have to see the new me tomorrow.

I tried again, making my face square, my eyes bluey grey and my nose straighter and a bit bigger. I now had three face settings. Normal, Beauty and Plain. My normal I would categorise as a seven out of ten, Beauty was nine and possibly a ten with the right makeup and Plain dropped a bit to a six out of ten.

I was hungry after all that, so I fixed myself a meal and went to bed. From now on, Talia and Kalie would only ever see Plain me, and I had asked for them to come up with a name for me. Talia thought Tina would work as it was a short form of Christina. I removed all my stuff from the bedroom in one go the next day by hiring a man with a van to do the heavy lifting. I would be sleeping in the provided apartment from then on but spent the days with Talia and Kalie. We had fun shopping to fill Kalie's new room and set it up properly. Likewise, I had to order furniture for the apartment.

At one point I had to go to my apartment, change my face back to Chris and get some passport photo's done and pass them to April who came to my apartment to pick them up. Two weeks after my talk with Derek, I was presented with my new ID and introduced as an official new member of the team. My new name was Josie Christina Hughes, I was eighteen years old with a Queensland driving licence and Australian Passport and birth certificate. I had to learn a fake history, but it was sparse and fairly easy to remember.

Chapter 17

Derek's POV

“So no thoughts about babies in her mind?” I asked Jordan. It didn't make sense to me, according to my records, Chris Heaven had given birth to a baby daughter a little more than a month ago.

“No, sir. She said she had a daughter and granddaughter. Maybe the granddaughter is the baby?” Jordan suggested.

“No. Her granddaughter has entered the school system. Age eight, according to my notes. There is no evidence of any baby beyond a birth certificate. An analyst suggested that with her DNA manipulation ability she created a fake baby just to get a birth certificate so that she can create her own fake identity in fifteen years. It all sounds very suspicious especially with the conversation where she stopped you asking questions about her ability in case you learned something she didn't want you to.”

“She did say it wasn't anything dangerous, just something that would make her a target,” Jordan said.

“Being able to make fake babies would not make her a target. With her ability to change who she is completely, if she decided to disappear it would be almost impossible to track her. She has already moved her money into a Swiss bank account so we won't be able to trace her through her money. Now apparently, she has created another different face for when she visits her daughter. She is clearly worried about security, almost paranoid.”

“I don't think she is paranoid. Those people are constantly thinking that people are watching or listening. I would describe her thoughts as cautious,” Jordan corrected.

“She is definitely hiding something that she thinks is a big deal and until we know what that is, we can't trust her. Your new assignment, outside of your usual duties is to hang around her as much as possible and see if you can work it out. We will assign you together as much as possible.”

“Do you want me to bring up the baby or press her on her abilities?” Jordan asked.

“No, we don't want her to know that we are watching her or do anything that will cause her to run. We will accept her into the team and treat her normally, only you have been informed of the discrepancies in her story. We want her to relax and let her guard down.”

Josie's POV (Previously Chris)

I was kept a lot busier than I was expecting. I didn't see much of Stacy because she was training with SWAT most of the time. Because of her speed and regeneration, she was the pointy end of the SWAT spear when it was needed but only brought in when violence was necessary. That was pretty rare in Surfer's Paradise, but they trained constantly so when they were needed they were the best they could be. Adam, Sarah and another guy called Pedro were the obvious superheroes. Their job seemed to be more PR than action. They were dressed in superhero costumes, albeit all body bulletproof versions, did patrols and helped out where they could. They were all fliers and could cross the city quickly. Superhero versus supervillain fights were rare and usually ended up in a life or death battle, which was both why those fights were rare and why there needed to be superhero groups rather than individuals. Supervillains tended to be individuals, but the clever ones stayed beneath the radar, usually working for organised crime. Groups of supervillains tended to be stamped out quickly by the superhero governing body, the Superhero League.

Every superhero registered with the Superhero League. I didn't know that until I joined up. I was now considered a superhero. Small s. I had to sign an agreement which the world governments had agreed to, which meant I was not allowed to use my powers aggressively outside of Australia unless the Superhero League recruited me to become a member. The most powerful superheroes became members and took an oath to be apolitical and work purely for the good of mankind. It was these people who stopped several wars that almost started when superheroes first started appearing and was the reason for its formation.

As for my job, I was paired with Jordan and attended crime scenes. Most of my cases were solved pretty quickly, it was just a case of gathering the evidence to prove what I had already said. That was mostly Jordan's job, so we worked well together. I had to work with a sketch artist and in a few cases, transformed my head to show how a fifteen-year-old version would look.

There is not that much crime in Surfer's Paradise so my work didn't take up that much of my time, but when you added dancing lessons, Spanish lessons and guitar lessons, along with time to practice, my time was nicely filled. Not so busy that when Stacy contacted me after a week I was unwilling to create some space. We started slow by going out to dinner, followed by a dance club. The spark was still there and I had to reign in my lust and just give her a kiss when she brought me back to my apartment. That was when I realised I needed a girlfriend to talk to. I felt like a volcano ready to erupt with emotions and needed someone to vent to. I did phone Talia, but it didn't feel right beyond a bit of squealing. Jordan was wonderful. We had been spending a lot of time together. I suspected that was deliberately done, as I was both new and admitted that I had secrets. Still, Jordan could literally hear my thoughts so there was no holding back with her. It was like I felt the need to go over everything, from what I was wearing, what we ate, talked about, where we danced, everything, including our first kiss.

The kiss was interesting, as Stacy took the more dominant role and there was something nice about feeling small, vulnerable and protected. My body started reacting and I exited quickly before I changed my mind. On the second date, we had a romantic walk along the beach with an ice cream. We held hands and sat down together in a slightly secluded part of the beach to watch the sunset, before a lot more kissing and a fair bit of groping.

For the third date, Stacy invited me to her room for a romantic night in. She had cooked spaghetti meatballs and the first movie we watched was Lady and the Tramp. We didn't get to the end of the movie before we were in each other's arms, kissing and touching. We moved to the bedroom with my heart beating like mad. Stacy definitely took the dominant role and I was made love to rather than the reverse. The loving was very nice and I had lots of orgasms, but it was the shared music, films and books that we had both grown up with that made our connection easier. Dating someone similar in age meant we had so many things in common that there were always things to talk about.

We announced to the team that we were officially going out together and had another girls night out, this time without drama. The loving got better as time went on. Stacy had a love of using a strap on and I altered my body so that I could enjoy what she enjoyed. Not that I didn't enjoy her initial efforts, I just couldn't orgasm from penetration alone, at least, not without some DNA changes. Similarly, she wanted to penetrate my bottom. I think it was a mental dominance that turned her on more than anything, and with the right DNA I found that enjoyable as well. I determined that I could be submissive to a point, but anything that caused me pain and I would rebel. We almost broke up when she spanked my bottom. Lightly done and I was fine, but when she hit me too hard and I felt pain more than sting and it was like a switch turned off and all my lust left me.

We managed to talk it out and return to a very happy relationship, to the point that we moved in together after another month of dating. Work-wise we barely saw each other, occasionally in the hero lounge, but most of the time together was when we were both free.

Chapter 18

Work-wise I was very successful but limited by the freshness of the evidence. Because I was so sensitive to DNA, any attempts by the criminals to hide the truth quickly came to light, but if too much time passed, so much other DNA contaminated the situation and made it very difficult to make progress. I was so successful that I moved quickly to become a national consultant. I was flown to the highest-profile cases across Australia and even had an amended agreement to work in the US, Canada, Britain and Europe. It would need to be serious if I was called abroad considering the freshest crime scenes were the most valuable and by the time I got there the crime scene would no longer be fresh. However, that was solved with the help of the Superhero League. They had a powerful teleporter who would get me relatively close and travel with me so that he would have more locations available and return me after the job was done.

Jordan stayed with me even though most locations had their own telepaths. Part of that might have been because we worked well as a team. I would often communicate with her by thinking clearly about my results so that she could take action. We didn't want the perpetrator to know that we were on to him and if we were in a location that wasn't secure, it was a good way to keep operational security. Having said that, any telepath could have done the same thing. If I was being kind I would say they were trying to help the little teenage girl by having her friend go with her, but honestly, I thought it was so the Australian government could keep tabs on me.

Before the Washington case, my life was close to ideal. I was in love with my partner who loved me back, we didn't smother each other but had great nights out and even better nights in. I had a close girlfriend in Jordan and, although I didn't have much time to spend with Talia and Kalie, both were doing very well and getting on with life beautifully.

The Washington Case

It was about mid-afternoon when I received the phone call. A twelve-year-old girl had gone missing during an evening party. That was enough for me to agree. The twelve-year-old girl, Abby, was the daughter of a Senator's Aide. I didn't know what a senator's aide did, but I figured that they would have the senator's ear and therefore a certain degree of political power. I cared for none of that, just the missing girl.

Jordan and I put our Raven suit on and waited for pick up. Cole, our teleporter, arrived promptly and a few seconds later we were in Washington. We actually arrived in the superhero lounge. They were aware of our impending arrival and had cleared the room so we didn't meet the superheroes until later. At that point, we went out the front and into a police car that put the sirens on and whisked us to the mansion where the girl had gone missing.

I was introduced and given a sample of the girls DNA from a toothbrush. The mansion had a garden with a hedge maze. Nothing too elaborate, still the hedge was thick enough that you couldn't see through it. I did my best to follow the highest concentration of her DNA like a bloodhound. I could tell where she stopped for a while as the concentration was higher than when she just passed through. My initial pass through took me through the maze, out the back end and then across a lawn to meet with the driveway where the DNA tapered off. The back of the maze had no lighting so a picture was beginning to emerge of her being kidnapped, taken to a car and driven off. In the maze there was too much different DNA to be useful, however across the lawn, with her DNA was the DNA of a man that was high enough to suggest he was the one to carry her or force her to the car.

These findings were a political hot potato because every car that came into the mansion was filmed and identified, which meant it was someone from the party. I was relaying my thoughts to Jordan who spoke to the FBI agent to organise a sketch artist.

Fairly quickly we were ushered into a large RV type vehicle and we went through the usual process. Since it was the only lead I was also asked to change my face to what the DNA suggested. I'm pretty sure they knew who the guy was long before my face had completely changed. They took photos and aged the face to the biological age of thirty-four. I set my face to change back as I went to sleep in a nearby hotel. Jordan and I sharing a two-bedroom suite.

What happened next I only vaguely remember. I heard something, possibly my name being called by a stranger. Not sure exactly, but something that made me wake up and raise my head to look. There may have been a person at the end of the bed, then brief intense pain, that I remember clearly.

I woke up in hospital with a police guard next to my bed.

Apparently, I died. Shot in the head, twice. Whether it was because I had already activated my body to change my head back to normal or an automatic reaction from my superpower, my heart kept beating and my head was already in the process of repairing itself when they found me in the morning. Jordan was not so lucky.

I insisted on seeing the body. I'm pretty sure they thought I was in denial, but I had a plan. My body was already changing to my birthing best, as in the same womb and vagina DNA I had used to have Kalie, at the same time as I was preparing an egg. If it was Kalie's soul that I had sucked into my egg previously, then maybe I could restore Jordan. It has long been hypothesised that the soul lingers after death for at least a few days and with some people having superpowers who insisted they could talk to these souls for up to three days after they had died, I hoped Jordan's soul was still available.

I was checked out by doctors who had to admit that I was physically fine. Eventually, I was allowed to see Jordan. I suspect some of the delay was to try and make Jordan look a little more presentable. She had also been shot in the head and that makes a mess. I sobbed when I saw her. I tried holding her hand with her DNA in my egg, but it didn't work. I was beginning to panic and probably looked crazy when I started waving my hand above her body, hoping she was there somewhere. At the end of my reach, I felt it. A rush of wind through my body settling in my womb. I cried even more then, in relief.

As far as the case goes, we followed normal procedure. The man I had identified was lined up with other people looking similar and I picked him out with his DNA. That was enough evidence to allow questioning with a telepath. He was a different Senator's bodyguard and the child had been abducted for the Senator's sick pleasure. The case unravelled very quickly after that and the child was returned to her family. I don't know whether she had been abused before they found her, I just hoped not. I had done as much as I could as fast as I could and tried to console myself with that.

Chapter 19

I was an emotional mess when I returned home. Based on my experience with Kalie, I had twenty-three days before I would give birth to Jordan. That meant in a week I would be the equivalent of almost three months pregnant. Around that time my belly would begin to show signs and up until then there would be other signs like increased hunger, restlessness when sleeping and more emotional generally.

It helped that I looked as bad as I was feeling. Besides behaving without my usual sass, I looked pale and withdrawn. My head injury resulted in large patches of baldness. I could have sped up the hair growth, but I didn't feel like it, I had a haircut to bring all my hair to buzz cut length and wore a wig when I needed to look presentable. The ability to swap my hair for different colours and styles would make me even harder to find when I wanted to disappear.

I was probably not at my most logical but I had to make decisions and make them quickly. My first and most obvious was that I didn't want anyone to know of my ability to resurrect someone. I was sure it was a limited type of resurrection, where I need their DNA and soul. I had no way of knowing how long a soul lingered after death. I wanted so badly to tell Stacy. I loved her and should have been able to tell her everything, but a telepath would be able to hear anything that I revealed. Likewise, I couldn't be around a telepath while I was thinking revealing thoughts. I had a brief respite while they looked for and hired a new telepath since Jordan was no longer available.

My body would start showing signs of changes within the first week and if Stacy was making love to me, I was sure she would notice, so I had to use my emotional vulnerability of having died and come back to life as well as lost Jordan as an excuse. I would also need to go away for an undetermined length of time to birth Jordan, breastfeed her until she was fully mature and stop thinking about it so my surface thoughts wouldn't give me away. I couldn't go before the week was up because I wanted to stay for the funeral. Actually, not wanted but needed to stay. I knew she was in my belly, so I wasn't grieving, but no one else could know that, so to keep the secret, I had to be there. I was still shaken up from the whole affair so manufacturing tears would not be the problem.

Two things occurred to me regarding my death. First, my age had returned to just fifteen, not almost sixteen which meant my body had done a full reset. I was also missing a day which meant I had gone into a deep sleep for more than my usual sixteen hours, presumably to repair as well as restore. My initial thoughts were that my face reset had been interrupted and just started again, but that wasn't the case. I had died and that had caused a whole-body reset.

The other thing was that I was too squishy to be a superhero. I was wearing a Raven suit for a reason, but I looked into the Raven suit and although it was classed as bulletproof that was only true for a certain calibre of bullet. It didn't cover explosions, energy blasts or mad scientist weird weapons. I wanted to help people, but most of the time I was called in, it was to find the culprit, not save someone and the said culprit didn't want to be found. They were even prepared to make sure that they couldn't be found and as my ability to find them became more well known, an incidence like this was inevitable.

That was the excuse I was going to give to Stacy and the team. I was re-evaluating my career choices and needed some time away to determine what I wanted to do with my life. Stacy was the hardest one to leave. She offered to give up superheroing, but she loved the life and I couldn't do that to her. I did consider it. If we weren't worried about a telepath I could tell her everything and I wouldn't have to bear this burden alone. My power was both a gift and a burden. Since I was able to save my granddaughter and now my best friend, I would never regret having this power, no matter what sacrifices I would have to make.

Making decisions was only one part of the equation. Somehow I needed to work out the logistics. It was hard enough to go through pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding when I had Talia to help me, to go through it alone would be a nightmare. The pregnancy and breastfeeding I thought I could manage. I could order food online whether that was takeout or home delivery of shopping. I thought I could get away with others seeing the obvious weirdness of a rapidly progressing pregnancy or growing child by renting a holiday home in a busy high rise and changing my face every few days. The different wig possibilities would add to that dynamic.

For the childbirth, I would need help. Unlike the usual process, I could predict the exact day and initiate labour deliberately. What I needed was secret help. Talia couldn't take two months off, but a week was possible. Kalie would have to come as well, but if she was only present for the end days of the pregnancy and the first days of breastfeeding, the weirdness would not be apparent and if I had a different face on she wouldn't know that it was her cousin let alone her grandfather. The trick was convincing Talia to help. She was not a midwife or qualified in any sense of the word and was more than a bit reluctant.

I wasn't that keen myself, to be honest. I was firmly of the belief that being close to pain relief was a very good idea as well as expert help. However, there could be no official record which meant no hospital, no proper midwife or other experts. And no pain relief. I tried to console myself that they hadn't let me use pain relief last time anyway and I had carefully chosen my body to make pregnancy and childbirth as easy as it gets.

Talia reluctantly agreed to help, but only because I admitted that if she said no, I would be attempting to go solo. She wanted to be present in case she needed to call an ambulance. Of course, Talia didn't know who I was giving birth to and I didn't like her even knowing that I could clone people. If she was ever questioned by a telepath it would all come out and that possibility had kept me awake some nights. I did have a disappear strategy if it ever came out.

Chapter 20

The other major decision was that I couldn't have Jordan be an exact clone of herself. That would give the game away. She also still needed an identity. Changing Jordan's face to look like someone else, was not a problem. I was confident after my experience with Kalie that as long as I left the core read-only DNA intact, Jordan, or whatever she was called, would still be herself. This also gave me the possibility of using some DNA from one of my cases.

Hannah Serra was an abduction case I had worked on where the perpetrator was a Null. I had identified him easily enough, but Jordan was unable to read him. We had used my evidence to obtain a warrant to check his apartment where I found more DNA evidence of Hannah's presence. Fortunately, for the case, but not for Hannah, he kept trophies of all his victims and we obtained enough evidence to put him away for life. We were pretty certain that Hannah was killed, but he dumped his victim's bodies at sea and it was never found. Age-wise she had been sixteen. I didn't know whether I was able to age a cloned body to anything past fifteen, but if not it would be close enough.

The biggest downside was that it was a high profile case in New York because Hannah's parents were very rich. I'm not sure if it would be kindness or nasty cruelty to believe that their daughter had survived with little memory. The fact that Jordan was a telepath would help her fit in, but it would be likely that an investigating telepath would be involved so she would either have to pretend that the experience had caused her to develop telepathy or a Null state. It did mean I had to choose a location in the states for my rental location. I chose Florida because I would only need Talia for one day and there were lots of attractions that we could take Kalie to. I would have to go to the park either very pregnant or with a small baby, but that was still doable.

I wish I could have discussed all this with Jordan, but if wishes worked, she wouldn't need me to rebirth her. I had to do what was practical and what I thought she would like. We had both commented when we had worked the case how nice Hannah's parents were. I had expected entitled rich parents with a superior attitude but instead found a lovely couple devastated by the loss of their daughter.

I thought a few genetic modifications that would make Jordan's life easier would be appreciated. After all, Jordan had expressed envy about my hairlessness, strong nails and ability to eat what I wanted without putting weight on. In addition, I decided to give her the elements I had tried and tested with Stacy so that she would have a rewarding sex life if she would ever go out on a date. So her bottom, vagina, clitoris, nipples and feet were all going to be highly reactive. Hannah's DNA indicated only an A cup in the breast department, so I increased that size to a C cup. Partly because that is what she had had as Jordan and claimed to be satisfied with, but partly as that would suggest she had matured and time had passed suggesting she was older than when she was abducted.

I contemplated other changes but decided that I needed her to be a close match for Hannah's DNA to the point where it would be a ninety-nine point nine percent match and indistinguishable from Hannah's original DNA. I knew that just because she looked like Hannah, that didn't mean they wouldn't test her DNA.

Having her inside me also gave me the chance to examine her read-only DNA much closer as well as the rest of her DNA that was now 'live'. Two things occurred to me, I could alter my DNA to become a telepath and Jordan had another ability that she didn't talk about either because she kept it a secret or she didn't know. Unlike in Kalie's case, becoming a telepath did not require any alterations to my core DNA, likewise with her other ability which was to partition the mind. To be honest, I didn't want to become a telepath and yet, at the same time, I didn't want a telepath to be able to read my mind and this would solve that issue.

Telepathy itself was nothing like I expected. It wasn't the case that a telepath reached into people's minds to read their thoughts. No, people were constantly shouting their thoughts and a telepath just had the ability to hear them. And the reason why telepaths couldn't hear other telepaths was more of a feedback mechanism. If you could hear people shouting their thoughts from some distance, imagine how loud your thoughts would sound. As a consequence, telepaths naturally reduced the loudness of their thoughts so that it was only a whisper and even other telepaths wouldn't be able to hear them. They could, however, deliberately speak louder which allowed telepaths to talk to one another, but only what they wanted to say, not unwanted accidental thoughts.

Partitioning the mind was a wonderful ability that was the ultimate in multitasking. You could set a part of your mind to do something different to the other parts. It might be something simple like work out a shopping list while your main mind was on the phone with someone or watching TV. I played with having both abilities and it allowed me to have a compromise where I was telepathic but the part of my mind that could hear other people's thoughts didn't report those thoughts to my main mind unless there was a good reason. My main mind still needed to be telepathic or I couldn't learn to reduce my shouting to a whisper, but I had the sensitivity of my main mind at the minimum. The hope was that I would get all the benefit of having an unreadable mind with none of the consequences of hearing unpleasant thoughts.

I loved the ability to set part of my mind on task and then forget about it until it chimed in with a conclusion. So I could be constantly alert, even when I was asleep while not worrying about it. I set that up about a week after I had left Australia, not realising how tense I was about going to sleep until I had played with Jordan's abilities and come up with that solution. Not surprising when I think about it in hindsight. I was, after all, killed in bed shortly after I had fallen asleep.

I did a bit of internet research to see how Hannah's parents were doing and the answer suggested not very well. Hannah was an only child and without her in their life, her parents had withdrawn from society, with her father resigning from being the CEO of the family company. It had only been about three months since she had been abducted and they were clearly still grieving. The process was even harder because there was no body to bring them some closure.

That element of my plan was a bit hard to deal with. I was constantly having second and even third thoughts about it but just couldn't find a better answer. Jordan would have to decide what she was going to tell them. I would have to stay away which was also giving me some emotional pain. I was trying to save my best friend, but in the end, I was going to have to leave her to fend for herself and have nothing to do with her. I couldn't or connections could be made and secrets revealed.

The other element I was struggling with was my relationship with Stacy. She had not wanted me to go and I couldn't tell her when I would be coming back. At least now that I had protected my mind from telepaths, I could return after Jordan was ready, but I would face some questions about becoming a Null. Not that I was one, but I wasn't going to admit to being telepathic. I phoned her every night but refused to answer when she phoned me out of the blue. I couldn't admit that the reason was because I needed to change my voice box back to one she would recognise. I couldn't do video calls because I didn't want her to see me pregnant and after the baby was born, a crying baby would be hard to explain. I claimed that I was on a journey of self-discovery. We were both going to live for a very long time and I needed to work out what I wanted out of life. I claimed to be meditating and even did do that so that I would look practised when I returned and my phone was permanently on silent.

Chapter 21

Saying goodbye after the funeral was difficult, but the trip to Miami was quick and easy. I was on good terms with Cole, the Superhero League teleporter and he agreed to drop me off and pick me up when I was ready. I think he felt sorry for me after my time in Washington. He also told me that he would be speaking to his superiors and if I was willing to work again, he hoped to arrange superhero bodyguards.

The next two weeks passed quickly as I played both with Jordan and my genetics and powers. I went out frequently, mainly to eat, but every couple of days I wore a different wig and different face. Then Talia came with Kalie. It was quite a long flight so they arrived exhausted and spent the next day recovering with only a short trip to the beach and out for food.

Then it was time for the birth, the most dangerous and worrying part of my scheme. I tried to stay strong and not cry out and really the pain never reached the highest level. I was so grateful that my power allowed me to chose a configuration that made the birth process more manageable. Talia had been studying both textbooks and watching youtube videos so that she could help me as much as possible. Two hours after the start of labour and Jordan/ Hannah was reborn. I tore again, but since it was just the four of us, I could reset my vagina, in fact, I returned myself to my normal settings ready for Stacy again, apart from my breasts.

We then had three wonderful days taking Kalie out to Disney. I had to watch and carry baby Hannah, but nothing brings a smile to your face better than watching a child have such fun. They then returned to Australia and I soldiered on. Once Hannah was too big to fit in a pram I was mostly stuck inside the apartment. Theoretically, she was big enough to walk, but in reality, she was either asleep, feeding, pooping or half-aware. I did realise that was coming so I stocked myself up with loads of protein powders, and food generally. Takeout food deliveries were also very helpful, but, by the time Hannah had finished maturing and my breasts stopped naturally, I was exhausted and probably a bit malnourished. Constant sleep interruption with forcing food down so you had enough to give to a young child to grow quickly, resulted in a level of tiredness I don't think I have ever experienced.

Curiously enough, Hannah stopped at the biological age of sixteen which I think just shows different people mature at a different age. I returned my face to my Josie appearance as that was the one most familiar to Jordan/ Hannah.

It was all worth it when awareness finally returned to Jordan/ Hannah's eyes about a day after her last breastfeed. Her eyes lit with recognition. “Josie? What happened? Why can't I hear your thoughts?”

I sighed in relief. “What is the last thing you remember?”

“You had found a lead on Abby, we went to bed and now, I'm here, feeling... weird. Do I sound right?” She tapped her throat trying to work out why she sounded different to normal.

“You need to stay calm as some of what I am going to tell you will be alarming. Remember I told you originally that I had some secrets that I didn't want anyone to find out,” I asked.

“Yes. To tell you the truth, I was asked to spy on you, but I knew you had guessed that.”

“Well, you have just had a front-row seat to my secret. I have the ability to clone someone and pull their soul or spirit from their original body and into my clone. It is sort of like reincarnation without losing your memory. In your case, I had to push the boundaries a little. Come with me, I need to show you something,” I said, before leading her to the bathroom so she could see her new face.

“That's... that's Hannah's face. Why did you do this to me and why do I have Hannah's face?”

I took a deep breath. “You might want to sit down for this one.” We both went back to the lounge. “I don't know how to say this gently, but that night when we both went to sleep, an assassin entered our room and killed us both. For some reason, my ability activated and after a day and a half, I woke up, restored. You did not. I believed that souls linger after death so I rushed to your body, which took some begging, I assure you, cloned your body and crazily started waving my hands above your body until finally, I felt your soul join your clone.”

“I died?”

I just nodded and gave her time.

“Why Hannah?” she eventually asked.

“First of all, I don't want anyone to know what I can do. Every rich old person in the world would be after me. Even worse if they think I can raise the dead and I could hardly tell everyone, no, don't have a funeral for Jordan, she is alive as an embryo in my womb. So your Jordan identity is officially dead. Nice funeral by the way. Your mother was sweet, your dad a bit emotionally dead and your brother talked about how horrible it was to have a telepath as a sister. Aside from that, I cried buckets and I knew you weren't really gone. Whilst you are within me I have the ability to alter your DNA. There are some core elements that I can't change or you wouldn't be you, other than that there is much I can change. Incidentally, when I can see your DNA in action, I have a much better understanding of it and if it doesn't correspond to areas of my DNA that are my core elements, I call it my read-only files, I can add your abilities,” I explained.

“So you are now telepathic?”

“Yes, well, sort of. You have another ability that I call mind partitioning. I didn't really want to be telepathic so I have set a part of my mind to receive all the data but not inform my main mind unless there is something important being revealed. My main mind is telepathic with the minimum level of sensitivity, just enough to keep my mind quiet. Anyway, back to you. You couldn't be you anymore, but you still needed an identity. I have to be honest and tell you that I made the choices for you that I thought you would have wanted. I would love to have consulted you, but that wasn't possible,” I admitted.

“OK, so Hannah because we were sure she had died, but there is the possibility that she is alive.”

“And she would be the right age. I can only mature my clones until they reach maturity then my power stops. And her parents are lovely although they are still grieving right now and how you want to deal with that I will leave up to you,” I agreed.

“Was there anything else you changed?”

“Maybe, but just a few cosmetic things that you had already admitted you liked. Like hairlessness, C cup breasts, having a metabolism that means you will never become fat, things like that,” I said, looking away.

“What else?” she asked.

“Humm?” I asked with an innocent look.

“I may not be able to read your mind anymore, and I hope we are still best girlfriends. I can tell when you are being economical with the truth, so, what else?”

I smiled at her a bit naughtily. “I didn't touch your sex drive, but let's just say I made sure all the working parts are in spectacular order.”

Chapter 22

It was easy enough for me to say that her old life was over and the identity burned, but not so easy for Jordan to say goodbye, especially to her family. To be fair, being a telepath was not good on social interactions. It's hard to smile at someone who was scared that you would unearth their darkest secrets while thinking of those darkest secrets that you had to pretend to unhear. It pretty much ruined her relationship with her father and brother and even made her mother uneasy. Her brother was just paranoid and blamed her for anything that went wrong in his life. Her father worried that she would reveal his marital indiscretions and kicked her out of the house as soon as he could. Her mother didn't fight for her and even knew that her father hadn't been faithful but didn't want to confront him.

For all that I felt her family had treated her poorly, she loved them, so agreeing to never contact them or speak to them again was difficult. In the end, she realised that letting them know she was still alive was impossible and she had to let it go. They had buried her physical body. There was no way they would believe her and any attempt to prove it would only be by revealing secrets they didn't want to be known, that any telepath could have found out.

Similarly with friends, besides me, who was old enough that I didn't really care if she could hear my surface thoughts, most people tended to shy away from telepaths. It was also a decision she had to make for her new life. She had no idea of the potential in the mind partitioning. She had used it unconsciously, but only for little things. Telepaths usually revealed themselves by knowing more than they should and Null's were rare so when another telepath couldn't read you, you were considered a telepath until they realised you couldn't hear other minds. She could do something similar to me and pretend to be a Null. For me, it was an easy decision, but Jordan who now insisted I call her Hannah so that she could get used to it, anyway, the Jordan that she was had tied her identity with being a telepath. It was the reason for her social isolation and also the ability that helped her find work and get paid.

Hannah's parents were very rich, so if she pretended to be their daughter, she would never need to worry about money again. After much thought, she decided that the pain of being a telepath was not worth the compensations, so she set up her mind partitions and telepathy like me. Hannah's next moral dilemma was what to tell Steven and Joy, Hannah's rich parents. As a telepath, she hated the idea of lying to them at the same time she couldn't reveal my involvement.

Hannah wanted to tell them that she was a clone rather than their original daughter. We started with that premise and tried to create a story from there. The only people who would logically be able to create a clone was a mad scientist and most mad scientists were too science obsessed to be either good or evil. However, they also couldn't hide their thoughts from a telepath so the only option was to pretend to be cloned by an evil mad scientist who had died recently.

There were none in the news in the right time frame in the US so we stepped it up a gear. It was also where we found that combining telepathy with mind partitioning made the telepathy much more effective. Hannah knew what mad scientists sounded like from using her telepathy previously. Of all the different superhero types, only mad scientists think differently. First Hannah set her mind partition to inform her main mind of mad scientist type thoughts. We then travelled around Miami until we found one, mainly on the bus. I was then given a brief training in telepathy and listened to the difference between a mad scientist and everyone else. We found a hotel within listening distance so that one of us could listen in to determine if he was good, evil or morally grey. While one of us stayed to listen in the other continued the search for another.

We found three in Miami and all three were morally grey. We moved on going through larger population centres and essentially spying on the resident mad scientists. I asked why the government didn't do something like what we were doing and Hannah explained how difficult it normally was to go through thousands of mind voices to pick out the ones that were saying anything actionable. Our mind partitioning was really showing its value.

We found one in Tampa and two in Orlando, both grey, however, we found an evil one in Jacksonville. We bought a burner phone, I changed my voice to a random male voice and we gave an anonymous tip to the police. Because of what we had telepathically heard we could include that he was a super doing human experimentation. Evil mad scientists had a tendency to have hidden labs which is what we had found, but they also tended to have self-destruct triggers and elaborate escape plans. The normal tactical response was to send a telepath to check it out. We couldn't hear the thoughts of a telepath if they did send one, but we did hear the explosion when it happened and the mind of the mad scientist going suddenly silent. This was our chance. I said goodbye to Hannah although I hoped to use a disguise and check on her at a later date. We set up passwords so that she could know it was me. She then headed towards the explosion so that she could hand herself in to the police while I headed back to Miami. When I got there I phoned Cole and he teleported me back to Surfer's Paradise.

It wasn't even a week before Steven and Joy announced the miraculous return of their daughter. She was being tutored at home to catch up with all that she had missed before she returned to school the next year. There was not a doubt in my mind that she told them she was a clone of their daughter, but that didn't seem to bother them.

Before she left, Hannah made two confessions. Despite not realising it, when my mind was open to her telepathy, there were several instances where my mind had marvelled at the difference between being a woman compared to a man. So she knew that I had previously been male. It hadn't bothered her then and didn't bother her now. The second confession was that she had fallen in love with me. I was the only person who knew her and loved her, warts and all. She knew I loved someone else and had therefore never mentioned it, but now we were saying goodbye, possibly forever, she felt the need to get it off her chest. She knew I loved her as a friend, but she had always yearned for more. She gave me a passionate kiss and then walked away.

Mind blown.

Chapter 23

Although I had used my needing to work out my future as an excuse to justify my absence, there was an element of truth to it. The more successful I was, the more likely criminals would target me to prevent me from catching them. I needed to balance my desire to help and save lives with the danger doing so involved.

My answer was that I would work abductions, kidnappings and missing children on the condition that I was properly protected. I met the new telepath who was working for the team, but he would not be accompanying me on any journeys outside Australia. He immediately questioned why he couldn't hear me and I was brought before Derek to explain. I talked about my ability to alter my DNA and my experimentation with the Null I had met in Hannah's case. What I said was true, but in reality, I hadn't found a way to incorporate or use any DNA from the Null. Regardless, the story seemed to make sense. I could tell they didn't like it and much preferred when my mind was like an open book, but they could hardly tell me to undo my changes to make them more comfortable.

Life slowly returned to normal, I was whisked away on a regular basis and was as successful as before. Rather than jump straight back into bed with Stacy, we went on a few romantic dates and our passion was reignited. She became my main bodyguard when I was out on cases. At first, our relationship was even better than before. My main mind was still telepathic, but with sensitivity dialled down to the minimum which meant I didn't hear anybody else's thoughts. At least, that was what I intended. How it worked practically was that I could only hear the thoughts of someone who was very close to me. Normal social distances and I didn't hear anything, but when I was intimate with Stacy her thoughts made themselves known. Since we had had a long absence, her initial thoughts were very complimentary, however, after we had got back into more of a routine she expressed a mild dissatisfaction. She wanted me more submissive, willing for her to smack my arse red, and quite harsh thoughts when she was holding my head in place so that I could pleasure her. Things like, 'suck it bitch', 'know your place' and even 'that's my good little slave girl'.

I suppose I had probably guessed she was thinking things like that, but it is quite different when you can hear it. Ignorance is definitely bliss. I didn't blame her or think badly of her for her thoughts, it's just the fantasy she found turned her on. I was sure there were women who would have been turned on if those things had been said aloud. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.

It didn't stop our lovemaking. I think it just took the shine off. I wasn't quite sure what I should do. I certainly didn't want to admit that I could hear her thoughts. The person I would have normally talked it all out with was Jordan. Nor could I call Hannah because there was no logical reason for us to know each other. In the end, I did nothing. I was happy enough but aware that both Stacy and myself were not quite matched sexually and that left a mild strain on us.

On other levels, life was changing as well. Talia was getting serious in her relationship with the cook at the restaurant where she was waitressing. She had moved in with him which meant my casual visits had to become a lot more structured and that was difficult with a job that could call me out at any time of the day or night. At the same time, she didn't need me anymore. That brought a certain amount of sadness, but I had been through it before when my kids first left the family home. I consoled myself with the knowledge that both Talia and Kalie were happy. Robert, the man in question seemed like a nice man. I may or may not have had Jordan check him out previously and did my own telepathic check. He was a good man and cared deeply for them both. It was time for me to step back and let them live their life.

Six months after I returned from Miami, Stacy revealed thoughts that killed our relationship. 'I wish she was Celeste.'

I couldn't sleep that night and I couldn't leave it. It wasn't just the words, it was the emotion behind them. I had no question in my mind that Stacy still loved Celeste. When Stacy woke up that morning I spoke seriously and told her we needed to talk. We both got up and got ourselves ready before sitting at the kitchen table.

“You spoke in your sleep last night,” I told Stacy.

“Oh, what did I say.”

“I wish she was Celeste,” I stated.

“Ah,” she said quietly. She seemed to deflate a little. “I can see how that would be hurtful. I don't want to break up with you,” she said looking me in the eyes. “I'm going to call the office and have a day off. I will tell you everything you ask as truthfully as I can and when you are ready, I will take you to Celeste.”

She already knew I was free unless someone called me for an emergency. I was half wanting someone to call because I was not looking forward to talking. My heart already felt broken. Most of my tears had fallen last night after I knew Stacy was asleep.

Stacy came back to the table. “There, all organised.” She took a deep breath. “Celeste was the person who I thought was the love of my life. We met when I was barely twenty and we stayed together until I was fifty-four. Thirty-four years of what I thought was relationship bliss. The only argument we had was about what other people thought. I aged slowly and Celeste aged normally and she started off eight years older than me. People started to think we were mother and daughter. I laughed it off, but Celeste took it seriously. I'm not sure if there was one specific incident or a gradual accumulation, but ten years ago, I came home to an empty apartment and a letter. She had accepted a job application in another country.” She paused for another deep breath. “You are the first person I have dated since then.”

“Why do you think you were mumbling about her last night?” I asked. I have to admit I wanted her to talk about her dissatisfaction in the bedroom, expecting that to be the answer, but what she said surprised me.

“I found out yesterday that she has retired and returned to Surfer's Paradise for her last few years.”

Chapter 24

Celeste was not in great health and was now in a nursing home. I'm not sure who was more nervous, me seeing the proverbial other woman who, after ten years, was still bright in Stacy's mind, or Stacy who hadn't seen or spoken to Celeste for ten years.

I wasn't feeling angry or jealous, just sad. To some extent, this woman had ruined Stacy for love. Ten years after leaving, and a harsh breakup, she was still who Stacy wanted to be with, who she compared anyone else to. I knew I couldn't continue the relationship because I had been compared and come out second best. That wasn't acceptable to me.

The meeting was awkward. I looked like a young teenager, Stacy looked to be in her twenties and the love of her life was seventy-two and looked old. I've seen some seventy-year-olds who were full of life and could probably have passed as people in their fifties, but not Celeste. There was still love in Stacy's eyes which told me it was true love and I couldn't compete with that. I left them to have some time together and then requested some private time with Celeste.

“Please don't hurt her,” Stacy begged me.

If she truly thought I was going to hurt her, she really didn't know me at all.

Celeste smiled at me. “So you are Stacy's new love. Quite ironic that she is going to be the old lady in your relationship.”

“You seem happy,” I commented.

“Yes. You prove me right. Leaving Stacy was the hardest thing I have ever done, but I had to do that or she would never have found love again.”

I sighed. “No. I'm afraid all you've done is lost ten years when you could have both been happy. She pretends to be happy and she is certainly less depressed than she has been for the last ten years. But...” I took another deep breath. “I am not Celeste. I do not measure up.”

“How can you say that? You are young, pretty, talented I hear. You can be with her for centuries.”

“And yet it is you she still wants. That tells me you have something real,” I said quietly.

“Bah, if I have another year I will be doing well. I can tell you love her. That will have to be enough. As time passes she will forget about me.”

“You are right. I do love her. Let's talk about something nicer. Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked her.

“No. I don't believe in god with a small g or a big G. To be honest, I am looking forward to the end. I used to be so scared, but now I am in constant pain and I can't wait for the end.”

“Say I had a superpower and I could wave a magic wand and return you to your youth, full of health and vitality. Would you want that?” I queried.

“Of course, but that is not what I have to look forward to.”

After meeting Celeste, I knew what I had to do. Before I announced anything I needed to prepare.

Stacy was quiet on our journey home. I set one part of my mind on the task ahead of me, with my main mind I concentrated on Stacy, giving her space to get her thoughts in order and waiting for the right time to talk.

“You know our relationship is in trouble?” I asked her.

Stacy took a deep breath. “Yup. I brought you to Celeste to show you that she is an old woman and not worth your jealousy. As old as she is, I still love that woman and that is not fair on you. I don't know what to do.”

I thought about arguing the jealousy label. I wasn't jealous, just sad. It wasn't going to help the conversation though.

“I need you to book some time off. Two months should do it. We will spend two months together in Miami, in one of those apartments where I found peace after Jordan died. In the meantime, I am going to start visiting Celeste. I want to hear of your life through her eyes and I know she will enjoy telling me. You should probably spend some time with her as well, just not when I am there. She said she won't last a year, but the nurse I spoke to suggested it could be soon. They couldn't give me details because I am not a relative, but I could almost see her DNA breaking down.”

“OK,” Stacy said quietly.

When we got back to the apartment I made up the bed in the spare bedroom. I didn't want to cry in front of her and I certainly couldn't handle physical intimacy. Stacy booked the time off and one of the same apartments I had used previously. She even booked flights although I knew it was not going to go as she planned. I anonymously booked a different apartment in the same building for the same time. We had about a month before we were going and it was an awkward time for us. Stacy threw herself into her work and I avoided her when I could. We both went separately to visit Celeste. I couldn't tell Celeste what I had planned but I made sure I had verbal permission with hypothetical scenarios.

A day before we were due to leave, I pulled Celeste's soul into my cloned egg and her body died. No one was really surprised and there was no attempt to resuscitate her. I informed Stacy, told her to stay for the funeral and I would move to Miami ahead of her. I cancelled the flight and called Cole for the favour.

I knew Stacy might need support, but she would also think it reasonable that I wouldn't want to give it for the other woman. I couldn't tell her the truth because she would be in the company of the telepath and I wanted my reveal to be on my terms. Not that I doubted the reveal was coming.

I checked into one room, changed my face and checked into the other room. I bought some new clothes, a wig and essentials that I placed in the second apartment. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I worried that tracking devices had been put in my clothes, so the second apartment contained nothing that wasn't newly bought and I had a new outfit that I would keep for the eventual disappearing act. It was just a bikini and wrap. Enough to be acceptable attire for moving between rooms and nothing more.

While waiting for Stacy, I had the chance to check out Celeste's DNA and see if there was anything that was worth adding to my own. Celeste was clearly a superhero. Her mitochondria produce a ridiculous amount of energy that seems to fuel a mental ability to channel energy. She could fly, create an energy shield, which was surprisingly rare, and release bolts of intense energy. I worked out that the reason she had deteriorated quite quickly as she got older was because she stopped releasing that energy, which bottled up and started causing damage.

I couldn't use the mental ability to channel energy as it covered some of my read-only core files, but I could alter my mitochondria. I needed to experiment a little because I needed an outlet for the extra energy and I didn't know if my powers were a sufficient outlet. Nor could I change my whole body as I was pregnant. I started with just a finger. I worked out if there was going to be deterioration it would be slow so I was safe to change a bit more of myself. I changed my arms and legs.

I didn't notice any change with the finger, but when I changed my arms and legs the increase in energy fuelled my natural micro telekinesis and my domain. I didn't actually know I had a domain, just that my micro telekinesis only worked within my body. My body was the limit of my domain and now that more energy was available, my domain expanded. It was, to be honest, too much information and if it wasn't for my mind partitioning, I would have had to revert quickly. I had an awareness of everything, down to the level of DNA, which is very small, that was within ten metres of my body, in all directions. More than that, I could use my telekinesis on anything within my domain, both micro and macro. I could pick up a grain of dust or I could pick up a heavy weight. I couldn't test out any limits, but within my domain, there didn't seem to be any. I could even pick up myself. I could fly! It also meant I was constantly using energy, so I would never have the deterioration issue.

The extra energy also meant my transformations were quicker. It took about thirty seconds for my face to change. Although the energy in the cells was there, I still needed physical materials to build a baby, so that element wasn't any faster and I wasn't using fat stores when I changed now.

I would need a lot of experimentation to work out what I was capable of and I would need to do a complete body reset, but both of those would have to wait until after Celeste was mature.

Chapter 25

Stacy didn't join me for two weeks. I suspect one week was for the funeral and one week was to get her emotions under control. She thought the love of her life had died. I was sure she still cared for me, but spending two months with me after Celeste had just died was probably the last thing she wanted to do. After a week and a half, I was beginning to think she wouldn't be coming.

Leaving it two weeks meant I was the equivalent to five and a half months pregnant with only nine days to go before birth. There was no way I could hide that so she just looked at me in shock when she opened the door to the apartment.

She hadn't warned me that she was coming and it was hot so I was swanning around in a bra and panties, bare belly, clearly showing my pregnancy. The expression on her face tickled my funny bone and I burst into laughter. As sometimes happened when I was pregnant, my laughter turned into tears for no apparent reason.

Stacy dropped her bags and cautiously approached to give me a hug, confusion written large across her face.

“You're err... you're pregnant?” she half asked half stated.

“Sort of. Come and sit down and I will explain everything. Not that you will believe me.”

We sat together on the sofa, half-turned towards each other, holding hands.

“First of all. No, I have not been unfaithful. Remember when we first met and I said I had an ability that I needed to keep secret,” I started.

Stacy thought for a moment. “Yes. I think you said if Jordan found out you would have to run away, or something like that.”

“That's right. Well, now I am going to tell you my secret. I can create a clone and pull that person's soul into the clone that my body makes. It's not like a normal pregnancy. The whole process takes twenty-three days until the birth and then about the same to fast grow the baby to maturity using my breast milk. It is sort of like a quick reincarnation with memories kept intact.” I pointed to my belly. “Say hello to baby Celeste,” I told her.

Stacy was quiet while the penny dropped. “Celeste is alive, inside you? Why didn't you tell me?”

“Do you think you wouldn't have been thinking about it? I might as well have just told the telepath and government what I could do.”

“Why does that matter? If you can restore Celeste, you can do the same for all the ageing superheroes. Imagine the possibilities.”

“You're right,” I said with a sad smile. “I could just stay pregnant, reincarnate every superhero older than say, sixty. Of course, why stop there, the rich, actors, politicians, maybe the scientists who had won Nobel prizes. Hang on a second,” I said, bringing a finger to my mouth to pretend hard thinking. “What about spouses? If you do one, you have to do the other.”

“Now you are just being ridiculous.”

“Really? Imagine you aged at the same rate as Celeste and when you both reached sixty or maybe seventy, I offered to return one of you to your youth, but not both of you. How would you feel? You know what, let's not talk about this, I suspect we would have different opinions. In nine days time, I will give birth to baby Celeste. Let's enjoy our time together because after the baby is born, I will be breastfeeding every two to three hours for three weeks and it is exhausting.”

Our relationship for the next nine days was strained. Stacy felt my duty was to pop out babies that would enrich the world. I didn't agree and didn't want to talk about it. I had a feeling that Stacy had already told Derek or someone like that. Her belief had always been about the greater good, and I could do so much, that what I wanted was not important.

I used my domain and micro telekinesis to set a mind partition to look for suspicious items in my clothes and found what I presumed to be electronic bugs of some kind. I left them active since I didn't want to let them know I was on to them. You are only paranoid if they aren't out to get you.

The big day arrived, Celeste was ready to meet the world. I wanted another home birth but Stacy insisted on calling an ambulance when I told her I was in labour. This time they offered me pain relief, but now I was worried that they would dope me up so I refused. It was as bad as usual, but not worse. They kept us in for observation and we returned to the apartment the next day. This time was a little easier since Stacy helped as much as she could.

We had a health care visitor come to check on what should have been a baby only a week old, but we had to tell her that it was a superpower thing. I have no idea what she told her superiors, but my secret was not much of a secret anymore.

I had been making a habit of slipping out for occasional walks when Celeste was sleeping, particularly in the late evening. When Celeste was mature with a DNA age of fifteen and a half, I told Stacy it would be just one more day, went for my usual walk with my bikini worn underneath a dress that had a tracking device on it. I went to the ground floor, then further to the sub-ground floor where the cars were parked, took off my dress and threw it on the ground just past the lift doors, changed my face to a random stranger and took the elevator up to my other apartment. The room key was a card that I had put in my bra, so I entered and locked the door behind me. I checked the apartment for electronic bugs and when it was clear I went to the bathroom, shaved my head bald, lay on the bed and did a whole-body reset.

This time I reduced my height from five feet eight inches to just five feet, used the beauty face that I had created in front of Talia, with sparkling green eyes and golden blonde hair. I had to grow the hair after I woke up but with the extra energy in my cells, the whole reset took half an hour and growing the hair was only another five minutes.

Now that my whole body was converted to the high energy cell version, my domain had grown to a little over twenty metres. Because I had reduced the size of my body and didn't use fat to make the conversion, my little body was a little overweight, but I would be able to burn that off within a week. I put on some black stretchy yoga pants and a black sports top, the rest of my supplies I put in a black backpack. It was dark outside but there were lights on. I stepped onto my balcony, used my telekinesis to shut and lock the door behind me and flew straight up into the night. At about three hundred metres above the tallest building, I felt pretty safe. I used my telekinesis to pull a compass out of my backpack and used the faintly glowing needle to find out the right direction to head towards the Bahamas. It was time for a holiday.

Chapter 26

I was an emotional mess and it took two weeks of doing almost nothing but relaxing to wind down and find some stability. I did a few experiments with my new powers and set up a few mind partitions to protect myself, but other than that, I lay on a beach, swam in the ocean, read a book or danced in a nightclub. I used holiday visa cards but didn't stay in any hotels.

Whilst Stacy was with me I hadn't wanted to give away any of my abilities, but I had plenty of time to think about what I might be able to do. One of my first experiments was whether I needed to breathe. According to my DNA, my mitochondria were producing massive amounts of energy, a tiny percentage of which was used to create ATP, which is the normal energy that the cell uses. ATP generation normally needs a combination of glucose and oxygen, but my mitochondria were producing energy by pulling it in from somewhere else. No idea where from. Anyway, that should mean, no oxygen requirement and that was true, but trying to convince my body that it didn't need to breathe was impossible.

The next question was what happened to my domain when I went underwater. The answer was whatever I wanted to happen. I could take the surrounding air with me, I could allow water to replace some or all of the air in my domain. I presumed that also meant I could travel into space and take my air with me. Then I wondered if the cold of the ocean or space would freeze me which led to my next experiments. Theoretically, my micro telekinesis should allow me to increase the vibration of atoms or molecules, which would heat them up and likewise, slow the vibration down which would cool them. Both were true but for my conscious mind to do it took great concentration and only affected a small area. However, with mind partitioning, I could set up the general principle and use my conscious mind for direction.

I dug out a hole in the sand, pulled water into it leaving the salt and other impurities behind, prevented the water from draining and then directed my mind partition to heat it up. I could boil it, freeze it or make it the perfect bath temperature. For safety, I set my mind partition to heat up anything that was dangerously cold and freeze anything that was dangerously hot. I did wonder about the electromagnetic spectrum and whether I could affect that with my micro telekinesis.

I remember reading about wave-particle duality. As I understood it mass was related to energy as Einstein had proven, so everything could be expressed as either energy or mass, which meant I should be able to affect light. I was thinking of becoming invisible by altering light. Maybe because I thought I should be able to, or maybe there was another reason that a physicist could work out, but I was able to either increase or decrease the energy of any elements of the electromagnet spectrum that was within my domain. However, it was too complicated to make myself invisible. I could alter the frequency, but couldn't bend it around myself. At least I didn't have to worry about the sun's rays being harmful, I just used a mind partition to alter any harmful rays to harmless. Funnily enough that could be done by either increasing the frequency so that it passed straight through without interaction, or only interacting in such a small way as to be negligible or decreasing the frequency until it had no effect.

Most of my experiments were done at night, where no one could see me and I slept underwater about thirty metres deep but set my telepathic mind partition to warn me if any person came with a hundred metres. Most hotels, even the backpacker's hostels wanted some kind of identification, which I didn't have, but I didn't really mind, it was so peaceful under water. I could choose to let the sounds of the ocean pass into my air bubble or cancel out the vibrations. I usually kept about five metres of air around myself as that seemed to deter the marine life and a small percentage of the sound through to give a nice ambience.

The one thing I did miss because I didn't have a room to stay in, was a way to have a proper wash. Hotels didn't really check if you were a guest, and there were some outside showers available, mainly there to rinse off before entering the swimming pool. I felt too embarrassed to have a proper wash there, and I had to keep my bikini on anyway. I tried to use a bath at night, by digging a hole in the sand in a deserted area, filling it with water, removing all the non-water elements and heating it. I could even use my telepathic mind division to make sure I stayed private, but I didn't have any soap. That was when I discovered how micro telekinesis can be used to clean yourself. I could also use it to clean a room which would come in handy when I had one again. The next day I bought some soap and had a lovely bath. Micro telekinesis gets you cleaner, but a hot bath with soap fulfils some other pampering need I seemed to have.

Hair length had been an issue with me. Originally, I had it long to help myself to feel feminine, and when I found it was a pain in the ass, Talia's love of playing with it while she was so distressed about Kalie, prevented me from cutting it. When I was in a relationship with Stacy, she insisted that I kept it long and then I was shot in the head and had to cut it short to make it even. I liked the shorter length and didn't mind using wigs. It certainly made using different disguises easier because growing real hair to any length used to take me a week. Since my DNA upgrade in terms of energy, I could grow my hair in under a minute. The energy required was not an issue, and since I wasn't using much of the food I ate for energy, I had usually had plenty of resources so that wasn't an issue. However, caring for long hair was tiresome until I discovered micro telekinesis cleaning and micro telekinesis styling. It wasn't quite as simple as it sounds as if you remove everything from the hair, the hair looks dry, but the body naturally produced oils that we usually remove and replace with conditioner. I'm not against that as how else do you clean your hair? Well, the answer is micro telekinesis where you can leave the oil behind, and even better, you can leave the right amount behind so it never looks dry or greasy, but just right.

I'm sure if you practised for long enough putting your hair in all kinds of different styles can be time-consuming but easy. I had never got the hang of it, probably because I was spoilt with either Talia or Jordan helping me. Stacy liked my long hair, but kept hers short and was useless at styling mine. Fortunately, styling hair is what a hair salon was for. I told them I wanted to try lots of different styles and used a partitioned mind to remember and be able to copy each style.

The only other issue I had was getting rid of my excess fat. I had reduced in size fairly substantially without using fat reserves as the energy to do it which meant I now had excess that didn't look good and there was no great reason to keep it for emergencies because my cells produced more energy than I could use. My normal methods for getting rid of excess fat was increasing my metabolism or making my body less efficient in absorbing food. Neither of those techniques were going to work when my body didn't need the energy from food and just wanted a few elements to replace what was naturally lost. Celeste didn't have a weight problem and there was nothing in her DNA that I could see that would allow her to eat normally and not put on weight. My guess was that she ate very rarely.

I loved food, so I didn't want to use that method. Initially, I used my micro telekinesis to move the excess fat into my gut to get rid of it normally. I didn't really enjoy that process. I wouldn't have to do it every day and I could set my gut to be very inefficient but that usually meant the gut bacteria ate more which resulted in bloating and gas. Option three, using my micro telekinesis to break apart the chemical structure of fat, join the carbon atoms together to make diamond, attach the hydrogen to oxygen that I wasn't using for anything else to make water. So fat to diamonds and water. Thank god for partitioned minds so I didn't have to think about it and could just act normally.

Chapter 27

What I really wanted to do was go to Hannah in New York. I had been really hurt by my experience with Stacy and needed my best girlfriend to talk to. After Hannah had expressed her feelings I knew I had to wait and deal with my emotional trauma on my own. Now the idea of having a relationship with Hannah had been brought to my attention and with feeling so hurt emotionally, I was pretty sure I would have fallen into a relationship with Hannah quite quickly. However, I was old enough and wise enough to know that would have been a very bad idea. Whether you call it a rebound or something else, the fact that you start emotionally vulnerable and are looking for the wrong things for a long term relationship. I needed to get my shit together first.

Instead, I spoke to the fish around me. I did wonder if I was going mad, but decided I would only be considered mad if I expected the fish to answer. I had loved Stacy and I didn't blame her for having loved someone before me. I couldn't really blame her for deciding that previous love was better, it was just my telepathy that had revealed what she had kept hidden and I imagined that would be true for a lot of relationships. Ignorance is bliss. Sexually, I had literally had to change my body so that we were compatible and that doesn't sound healthy. Although I didn't mind acting a bit submissive, I don't think my natural character is that submissive and Stacy needed someone properly submissive. I suspected that attitude was probably behind our last argument. I thought I was making a great sacrifice by bringing Celeste back to her youth. I gave up my secrets. There was no way I could have hidden Celeste, so what I could do, was revealed. I felt I was giving up my identity and made contact with Talia and Kalie very difficult. I was sure they would be monitored in the hopes I would contact them. To me it was all a big sacrifice, to Stacy I was just doing what I should have been doing and wasn't doing enough. This left me feeling betrayed. Part of the issue was probably that Stacy thought I should do what I was told.

There really wasn't an answer to my heartache, I just needed time to distance myself from it and distraction. So I tried to enjoy myself. Lying on the sandy beach wasn't distracting enough, so I bought or borrowed books, spent time snorkelling, dancing and trying to not spend too much time underwater so as to seem strange.

When I went dancing, I tended to attract a fair amount of male attention. I didn't mind chatting to them but wasn't interested in anything else. I usually told them I was fifteen and wasn't allowed to date and that deterred almost all of them. One of them was very environmentally concerned and I wondered if I could do anything about the carbon dioxide in the air, at least within my domain. Another experiment showed I could pull the carbon off the oxygen and attach it to other carbons. To make it easier I concentrated the carbon dioxide, pressurised it and then when I had enough to make a small diamond, about a carat in size, I did the conversion. Carbon dioxide was naturally occurring and plants needed it to grow, it was just the level that needed to be adjusted. I created an exception for any plants within my domain, to allow them a normal amount. Carbon dioxide was only a part of the problem according to my environmentalist. There were pollutants in the air, chemicals that either had a similar effect to carbon dioxide or created free radicals destroying ozone. So any chemicals in my domain that were not normal air, I separated and broke down.

This reduced the smell to an odourless quality that seemed quite boring so I experimented with natural chemicals in the air and through a process of elimination, determined which ones I would allow resulting in a more pleasant aroma. This did screen out all viruses and bacteria, but I still tasted the DNA, all of it from anywhere within my domain.

I did wonder how many mind partitions I would be able to create. There were all running on my brain and possibly using parts of the brain that often don't get used. I didn't think it was unhealthy and I had heard that neuroplasticity meant that if I challenge my brain it will adapt, so I didn't worry about it too much and figured if at any point my brain started suggesting it was struggling I could go through my brain partitions and remove less important ones. Just in case, I set up a brain partition to monitor my partitions and determine if there was any problem.

Both my micro telekinesis and my domain were incredibly useful, but without the brain partitioning and without the extra energy my cells were producing, neither would have been of much use. However, put it all together and I had a very useful tool that was heavily powered.

Anyway, I set my air filtering all up to occur naturally which also led to experiments with the airflow through my domain. I didn't produce any carbon dioxide, so I needed to pull it in from outside which required allowing the airflow. It wouldn't massively reduce carbon pollution, but at least I was doing my bit towards the environment.

The speed of the air flowing through my domain became an issue after I had been on the island for a month. We were hitting hurricane season and a tropical storm was moving in our direction and due to pass through and on to Florida. I was able to set a mind partition to limit the speed of the air in my domain to a pleasant breeze and another partition would prevent any speeding objects entering my domain from reaching me, I even set the water to pass through my domain interfered with only enough to make the rain miss me. So I wasn't worried, I should be protected from the storm, however, panic was beginning to affect the residents.

Chapter 28

There was a normal panic that holidaymakers were feeling especially if they came from somewhere that Hurricanes or similar didn't occur, and then there was the panic from a lady who was practically vibrating with distress. I couldn't walk away from that without taking a little peek with my telepathy mind division.

Her husband and three kids had hired a catamaran and should have long returned. There was a hotel employee who was the captain and the boat had a radio, however, for unknown reasons they were out of contact and with the approaching storm, even the normally laid back staff were worried.

Of course, if I didn't think I could help, then I would have felt sad and worried for them, but that would be it. However, when I wondered if there was anything I could do to help, I realised that my telepathy would probably be a good way to locate them, my flight would allow me to get to them and when they were within my domain, I could protect them from the storm. It still wasn't a certainty that I would find them. The ocean is overwhelmingly large and my domain was going to be largely useless in locating them.

Telepathy has practical and theoretical limits. Normally after you get past a certain number of people all shouting, hearing someone else a bit further out is almost impossible to hear. Listening to the ocean where there were no other people confusing the signal, meant even a whisper could be heard. Add to that using a mind partition that can put all its focus listening and the distance that can be heard is much further than telepaths normally claim is possible. Even with that being true I would have to use a search pattern and hope.

I didn't have an identity to burn, but I didn't want my latest face to be associated with superhero powers. I didn't have a mask ready for use so I had to come up with an alternative. I put on a pair of jean shorts and a white top as both were so common as to be non-descriptive. I changed my eyes to a crystal ice blue, darkened the skin of the top half of my face to make it look like I was wearing a mask and set my hair to braid itself and bring it up to make a crown. I reduced the redness from my lips and made my skin very pale, aiming for the ice princess look. Satisfied that I was unrecognisable from my usual look, I set off in search of the missing catamaran. From listening to the mother's thoughts I knew what general direction I needed to search.

Casey's POV

I was really scared. Alyssa, my sister was holding me while trying to hold the steering wheel, but I think she was just as scared as I was. Thomas was still fiddling with the radio, but it looked dead, and dad was trying to do something with the sails outside the cabin, but he had been trying for a while now and nothing had changed. The waves were throwing us around and with the wind whistling loudly and the water pounding, I just knew we were all going to die.

With a suddenness that was startling the noise cut out to a strange quiet, and the boat stopped moving. We all looked at each other confused.

“Ho, the boat,” a gentle female voice greeted us.

We all scrambled out of the cabin to the strangest scene I had ever witnessed, even from a movie. Our boat was floating above the ocean, the storm was still there but it was like we were in a giant bubble, protecting us from harm, while a girl in shorts and a T-shirt hovered next to the mast. She was really beautiful even with the mask covering her face. My fear left me in a rush. A superhero had come to save us.

“Umm... hello?” my dad said uncertainly.

“I am going to start moving us back to shore. Hold on while I get us moving,” she said.

I felt a force pushing me like I sometimes felt in the car when dad felt the need for speed as he called it, but rather than fall over I felt something hold me in place, gently but firmly.

“What is your name?” I asked her.

“I'm new at this, so I haven't got a name yet, at least, not one I can give you. What name do you think I should have?” she asked me.

“Angel,” I said almost instantly.

She gave a beautiful tinkling laugh.

“Could you hold me?” I asked. I wasn't as scared now, but I still wanted to be held.

She smiled at me. “Sure.” I floated towards her. I faced away from her with her arms around me, still floating in the air, looking out towards where land should be.

For the first time in hours, I felt properly safe. As the dread and excitement left me I started to feel sleepy. I woke up when she passed me to dad. “Thanks,” I mumbled, vaguely aware that dad was standing on the beach.

Josie's POV

The wind and rain was still too strong for the family, so after leaving the catamaran on the beach and pulling the unconscious local, William, from the cabin, I led the family to the hotel where the mother was panicking. I helped them get through the locked door, gently placed William on the floor. I waved goodbye as I stepped back and locked the door again. Hopefully, the hotel would have someone with medical training who could look after William, but I didn't want to stay for any questioning.

Finding them hadn't been easy. I had gone to where I had thought they should be and then started flying in a large spiral until I heard any mind thoughts. Flying back was a little awkward since I don't have a natural GPS or phone to give me directions, so heading in what I thought was the right direction and then used my telepathy again looking for life. I don't think they noticed me change directions, not that it really mattered, I just didn't like the idea of appearing incompetent. I should have brought my compass.

I was a little surprised by how easy I found it. Flying I knew was pretty effortless for me, but carrying a catamaran with family aboard should have increased the difficulty. Obviously, not enough to make me strain.

Author note:
In Chapter 30 there are unpleasant scenes referring to child abuse, but the details are not mentioned to keep only the idea present. It is about rescuing them, rather than the event and dealing punishment to the perps. If this is something you don't want to read I completely understand and I would suggest you skip the chapter. Why is it there? Because I would love a world where someone was able to stop it and punish the offenders.

Chapter 29

The hurricane didn't quite get strong enough to be named, and although a bit of damage was done, no one died. I stayed underwater with my telepathic mind division listening for cries of help. That did happen a few times, but on closer examination, didn't require my help.

I thought I had managed to help without any pictures being taken, but I didn't consider hotel security. Since the storm was a bit of a letdown on the disaster front, the news service ran the story of me saving the family on the catamaran. There was CCTV footage of me opening the hotel lobby, a floating William, the father carrying the six-year-old Casey along with an older daughter and son. They bigged it up with how they were all going to die before I turned up and how grateful they were. Casey stole the show with an enthusiastic 'Thank you, Angel.'

Of course, that became my official name, at least until I earned another. Supers generally stayed away from names with religious overtones and the church's response was the reason why. They were angry that anyone would pretend to be a supernatural being of the Lord and demanded proof, which was laughed at by the majority since no religion could demand proof without appearing hypocritical. It didn't matter that I wasn't the one who had named myself and when some reporter asked Casey she just said, 'we were about to die and an Angel came and saved us'.

I was still going through my grief from my breakup and trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life. I had power now, I was no longer a squishy and could be a proper superhero if I wanted. I wanted to be close to Hannah which would mean living in New York.

Being a superhero in America was different to anywhere else in the world. The US took the moral ground and refused to execute supervillains and instead built a containment facility in the desert to contain them. The one exception being murderers although it took years before the legal process was finished and they were put to sleep. The cost must have been astronomical as no one had managed to produce a way to block powers as yet. What that meant on a practical level was that supervillains tried to avoid outright murder, but were otherwise more numerous in the US than anywhere else. In fact, supervillains often left their own countries and set up base in the US, because of the laws there. As a consequence, there were more superheroes to combat them. And combat them they did.

The rest of the world pointed out the increased number of casualties from collateral damage, which meant more people died than if they had a more draconian way of dealing with supervillains, but America was holding the high moral ground and refused to change.

All this was good news for me if I was going to use my new superpowers. I wouldn't have to kill anybody. The trouble was my heart wasn't in it. I didn't mind helping and, as I found out, there were always more people who needed help, but I felt like I was holding back the sea with a bucket.

I decided to leave the Bahamas, partly get away from the Angel debate, which seemed to have settled in my favour with the Christians who objected looking like religious fanatics, and partly to scope out New York. I decided to dress as 'Angel' cross to Miami using my compass and follow the coast up. I had never really tested how fast I could go. I didn't have any way of checking and no great desire to do so, which was another reason I didn't think I was suited for being a superhero. When I thought of superheroes, I thought of people pushing themselves to their limits, constantly training, like Stacy used to, never being satisfied and always reaching to improve and that just wasn't me.

If I pushed it, I could have reached New York faster, but I had no great urgency so I meandered up the coast, travelling at night, stopping a few hours before the sun rose to sink beneath the waves and have a few hours of sleep. I didn't need sleep that much anymore, but I enjoyed it so refused to give it up.

I would try and find somewhere deserted and used my telepathy to check that I was unobserved before returning to my more normal appearance. I was still thinking of myself as Josie but knew I would have to change my name again. The name Chris I now associated with my male life.

I would wander in with my backpack on and pretend to be an Aussie travelling around the world. I would have breakfast in whatever cafe I could find and then have a look around town, taking in the sights before it got dark enough to continue my journey. Then it occurred to me, if I was an Aussie travelling around the world, why didn't I check out a few tourist destinations? I put on hold my trip to New York and picked up a cheap phone to use the internet and google maps and started really being a tourist.

Obviously, a young girl travelling on her own across America is not the safest thing to do, but I had superpowers so I was never in real danger. I did have a few incidents. In Nashville, where I went to sample the music, I was approached in the bar by a fairly forceful male character, who even had a pair of flunkies. I tried the 'I'm fifteen' routine, but that didn't even slow him down. So I told him I had a little superpower that allowed me to be safe. I didn't want to suggest I was super powerful, but a small power was acceptable. I remember reading a fantasy book with a telekinetic who moved the fluid in the semicircular canals of your ears to cause people to have vertigo. A bit of dizziness sounded like a small but useful power, but I underestimated the effect. When I told him to back off and he didn't, I shifted the fluid in his ear and he fell over and started vomiting. His two flunkies didn't know what to do and I left as quietly as I could, while everyone was focused on the man lying on the floor.

I walked into the darkness and then changed into my 'Angel' costume before taking off and flying away. Normally, I enjoyed the sights during the day and travelled to the next place during the night, spending a couple of hours sleeping either underwater, if I could find any water deep enough, floating in a tree or not bothering to sleep at all. That night I felt like enjoying the nighttime music with the possibility of dancing, but I hadn't got to the dancing before having to leave in a hurry.

Persistent 'man' trouble is annoying, but 'older couple worried about a young girl on her own' is much harder to deal with. That happened when I was enjoying the Grand Canyon. At first, it was a simple request for me to take their picture, then asking where my parents were. I made the mistake of telling them I was eighteen and travelling on my own. They didn't believe me. I had the DNA biological age only a little above fifteen, but with my short stature, I probably looked younger.

It was during the daytime so I couldn't disappear into the night and I didn't have an obvious transport so they presumed I had hitchhiked in, which was dangerous for a young girl. I couldn't hurt them since they were only being nice, so I ended up travelling in their car to Flagstaff and having a meal with them. I got up pretending to need the toilet, paid for the meal for all of us and slipped out the back.

I spent almost a month in Huntington Beach, learning to surf and enjoying the relaxed atmosphere, but had to leave when some idiot started chasing me thinking I was some kind of mermaid. He probably caught sight of me diving into the water and not coming back up in the evenings. I did have a few nice nights out dancing there, the surfing crowd being more chilled.

I was living pretty cheaply since I didn't have to pay for accommodation and only ate something when I felt like it. I bought a steel drinking bottle and would surreptitiously add water that I had filtered to be pure water and then chilled with my mind.

It was after I had spent three months looking at the sights and trying to enjoy myself that I realised I was having to work harder and harder to have fun. I was lonely, but I also was over my emotional meltdown and ready to go and visit Hannah. I hadn't worked out what I wanted to do with my life, but there was no rush.

Chapter 30

I was on the wrong side of the country when I decided to start heading back to New York. I was in Seattle and still thinking about working as a superhero, so I decided to use my telepathic mind division to listen for young girls calling for help. I thought I would travel, stopping at major population centres and do a bit of superhero work and see how I felt about it. To my horror, I was inundated. I have never deliberately killed anyone and that night I came the closest.

I changed the orders I had given to my mind division to only give information on the closest case. I flew quickly to an ordinary house and hovered outside the house closest to the eight-year-old girl who was crying in her mind as her father did unspeakable things to her. Both were well within my domain, as was her mother who was asleep in another room. I had to restrain my urge to tear the man apart, instead, I woke her mother and checked with my telepathic division that the mother was both clueless and blameless and then levitated her into her child's bedroom with the light switching on so she could have no doubts about what was occurring before physically separating the man from the child. I turned the man away from the girl and crushed his man bits to a useless pulp before levitating him with his lower half naked outside his front door and locking it behind him.

I left them to get to my next case, my heart bleeding even for the seconds that I had left the girl while getting her mother. That first case was better than most. It wasn't always the father, there were uncles, cousins, friends of brothers or fathers, and often there were women who knew it was happening but couldn't or wouldn't stop it. In every case, I made sure the groin was unrecoverable on the men. I took video on my phone as I turned the lights on. Later on, I made sure all those videos were uploaded so none of them could claim innocence.

I didn't know what to do with those girls who didn't have a safe place to go to. I asked the children if they had a safe adult who could look after them. Some had divorced parents, some had grandparents or aunts that they felt safe with, but most didn't know addresses or other ways of contacting them so I took those children to the police, asking them to keep the children out of their abusive parent's hands. Mothers who wouldn't protect them I considered part of the problem. I showed the policewoman who had responded to my request the video and allowed them to take a copy of the video for evidence. After my second visit to a police station, a superhero with flight started following me, keeping a little distance.

I ignored him and followed the next call. The next case shook my belief system, it was a child in an orphanage and judging by the clothes the man was wearing or half wearing, I believed him to be a man of faith. I switched the lights on as my camera recorded his behaviour, pulled them apart and destroyed his genitals. The abused orphan, Brook, I took with me. I used my micro telekinesis to clean her and held her in my arms as I continued my crusade. I couldn't leave her behind and didn't trust a system that had failed her so badly. She was fourteen years old and bigger than me, so my princess carry probably looked odd, but she needed the comfort along with my reassurance that I would never allow it to happen again. The superhero man following me and reporting my activity left shortly afterwards and was replaced with a female superheroine. She turned up at my next case and I had to telekinetically restrain her from killing the man who was abusing a three-year-old.

The second child that I rescued that didn't have a home to go to, Holly, was seven and I think the location was a brothel. The superheroine following me introduced herself as Cali, full name Caliente because she had heat and flame powers. She offered to carry Holly. We had two more cases, one where the mother was unaware and one where it was a visiting uncle before we had a third case where there was nowhere safe to leave her. After a discussion with Cali, we stopped off at her parent's house and borrowed their caravan. I only later realised the level of trust she showed me that night. She thought we would just hide the kids in the caravan until later but I just picked up the caravan and carried it with me as we continued.

By the end of the night, I had four girls to look after. Holly age seven, Simone age nine, Terese age thirteen and Brook age fourteen. I bought the caravan off Cali's parents with a few diamonds, stocked it with what food they could spare, said goodbye and took the caravan with the girls inside off to the ocean. I smiled at the confused look on Cali's face as I and the caravan sank beneath the waves.

We hid there until the next night, the girls enjoying the magic of being underwater and the gentle sounds of the ocean. Then I flew high and fast across the country until New York. I had planned to hide beneath the waves again, but I was met as I descended by five of New York's superheroes who had somehow known I was coming.

At that stage, I hadn't uploaded the videos I had taken although I had given a copy to the police, so the public was confused by the events of my rampage. There were lots of men with crushed genitals, some left screaming in pain outside their front doors with a number of kids left at a police station with a number of arrests. Obviously, I had been caught on camera, often with a girl in my arms and a caravan floating beneath me. The media was treating it cautiously. Young girls were saved, but men were hurt in a horrifying way and the probability was that I was responsible. One politician tried to use the story to convince the public that superheroes needed more restrictions on their power and suggested that I was a man-hater.

This left the New York superheroes unsure how to treat me. Was I a supervillain? A rather arrogant man in army fatigues, also known as the Colonel, demanded I surrender myself to justice. I asked what I had done wrong and he replied that I had wilfully maimed men.

I pulled out my phone and started playing the videos. The screen was small, but what I had recorded was obvious. The only female flyer from their group asked for a copy and my permission to publish it online. She also requested I did the same thing here in New York. A few of the men winced at that. The Colonel suggested I gather the evidence but leave the justice to the courts. I felt he was saying what he was supposed to, but his heart wasn't really in it.

I didn't wait for the phone to be returned as I suspected that was the way I had been tracked. I headed for the sea, said goodbye and disappeared into its depths. I travelled underwater so they wouldn't know where to watch for me and the next night I found a camping site which turned out to be Heckscher State Park Campground. I pretended I just arrived and paid for a week. And then surreptitiously moved the caravan to that spot. In case anyone was looking I pretended to pick up the tow bar and pull the caravan to its correct place. I had changed out of my Angel costume and had to introduce my new look to the children. I kept the Angel name since I didn't have a different one to use. I was pretty sure no one would associate my new look with Angel. I was going to have to retire my jean shorts and white T-shirt as a precautionary measure.

Chapter 31

Meeting Hannah wasn't as difficult as I worried it would be. I knew what school she was going to so I just waited with the other parents for the usual school pick up. I called out 'Jannah' which was the first keyword to get her attention. She was met by two bodyguards and I had to wait for her to convince them before she could approach.

Hannah had explained to me how telepaths normally talked to each other. It was essentially a version of shouting and listening, so I set my telepathic mind division to listening to her mind and mentally shouted 'Hello'

'Oh! Hello Josie. I'm going to call you Sophie, just go with it,' Hannah thought back to me. Generally, when telepaths talked with each other it was almost painfully obvious so she had warned me previously that if we weren't in a private place that it would be better to only use it for initial contact before talking normally. Nobody knew she was a telepath and we didn't want to give that away.

“Sophie, you made it. I can't wait to introduce you to mum and dad,” Hannah said as she moved in for a hug.

I hugged her back gratefully. I had missed her terribly. “I've missed you,” I couldn't help saying as tears escaped while I tried to hold them back.

“I've missed you too,” she said gently back. “Let's get in the car.”

When we got in the back we clutched each other and cried. I cried in relief, I think, and she cried because I was crying. We arrived at her mansion before I had finished so we stayed in the car in the garage until I managed to get myself back under control.

As we went into the house the bodyguards stayed behind to go wherever they were supposed to.

“So, I've told mum and dad the truth, they know that I am a clone of Hannah, not their real daughter. They had already mourned her so they weren't too disappointed. I told them that I wasn't the only clone and my best friend, Sophie might turn up one day. They told me that if you ever turned up they would love to meet you! I don't know if they are in yet, but they will definitely be back by dinner. It's a family thing they insist on that we all get together to eat at seven.”

“That's wonderful. I can stay for dinner, but I will need to leave after that,” I said.

“I was hoping you could stay for a while,” Hannah said, sounding sad.

“I can stay as long as you want, but I have some dependants that need help. How trustworthy are your parents?” I asked.

“Very. You can tell them anything, literally anything. They know I have some secrets that I am keeping because I have promised to keep them and they haven't pressured me to reveal anything. Just made sure it wasn't anything dangerous. They are in enough danger as it is. There is still a contract out for their deaths. They don't know who is responsible,” she said before speaking to my mind 'it's Steven's brother who is involved with organised crime and hoping to inherit everything.'

“Maybe I can help. Have you heard of Angel?” I asked.

“The man mutilator of Seattle?” she queried.

I pointed to myself. “Hopefully there should be some evidence uploaded to explain her actions,” I stated optimistically.

Hannah led me to her bedroom and pulled her laptop out of her school bag. All she had to do was put Angel into the search and the latest updates were available. We weren't allowed to see the footage unless we declared we were older than eighteen, but even the tame version made it obvious what happened.

“How do you think she found them?” Hannah asked.

“She set her partitioned mind to pick out young girls with thoughts asking for help, and give directions as to where they are coming from,” I answered. “I mean, that is what I would do,” I said with a smirk. I lost my smirk as I remembered the thoughts that had inundated me when I had made that order. “Best if she only looked for the closest one, so she wasn't overwhelmed.”

“Can you guess what powers she has?” Hannah asked, but I knew what she was really asking and I didn't want to say it out loud.

'I re-birthed Celeste,' I sent and then sighed. 'I could have really done with your council. Even with my main mind telepathy set to a minimum, I could still hear Stacy's thoughts when we were intimate. When I accidentally overheard Stacy compare me with her, I came out second best.'

'I'm so sorry,' Hannah sent with feelings of sympathy.

'It was months ago. I've come to terms with it. I re-birthed Celeste to give her love back to her, but it didn't go well. I knew I would be burning my identity, however, I didn't realise that Stacy would be angry at me for not using my ability more freely. I think I went from lover to asset in her mind and I am fairly sure she told Derek about me. If it was up to her I would be spending the rest of my days pregnant.'

Hannah just reached forwards and held me.

“I think I have already cried enough on that subject. Looking back I do wonder how good the relationship really was. I mean I had to literally change my body so that I would enjoy sex with her.”

“I'm sorry I wasn't there for you. Why didn't you come sooner?” Hannah said verbally.

“I didn't want to come to you while I was still an emotional mess. Instead, I travelled around America, took in the sights until I realised that it wasn't as much fun when I didn't have someone to share them with,” I admitted. “I was still trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life.” 'Because I re-birthed Celeste I was able to examine her DNA and incorporate some of her power. It has expressed itself quite differently but I am happy with it.' I sent. 'But it does mean I am no longer a squishy and could be a superhero, I am just not sure that I want to.'

“Steven and Joy might be able to give you some ideas. Not that I am biased but I think they both are pretty clued in,” Hannah crowed.

'How come you had this whole Sophie thing already set up?' I sent.

'You're too nice to keep a life-saving power secret for long. Someone you cared about was going to die or close enough to force you to save their life. It was only a question of when,' Hannah replied in her mind. 'That's why it might be a good idea to suggest that you are a clone of Josie. You could then tell them about all your powers and they would probably be able to help you hide it from others. I will leave it up to you what you want to reveal.'

Chapter 32

Steven and Joy returned to the house before dinner and Hannah was taking me down to meet them. I was still stewing about what to tell them. I didn't want anyone to know that I could re-birth them, especially after they had died, and return them to their youth. But... I knew Hannah was right. If she died again or anyone else I cared about, I probably wouldn't even hesitate. It would mean that I had to burn another identity unless I had some powerful help. Help that I trusted and I certainly didn't trust any government or organisation.

Hannah's only advice was that she trusted them and she had cheated by listening to their thoughts for weeks before she realised she just didn't need to. I thought about listening myself, but I wasn't used to it and the distraction may be an issue. Did I trust Hannah? Absolutely. Should I trust her judgement? Probably. Not that Hannah had told them everything. She had kept my secrets and hadn't told them she was telepathic. She had told them that she sometimes got a danger sense, which is how she had set up her mind division and telepathy, so it was also true. All she was not revealing was that it could be different if she wanted it to be.

There was a cook who was preparing dinner, so Hannah took me to a private lounge to introduce me to her parents. Joy was reading a book and Steven was working on a pad, probably on the internet. I knew who they were because I had met them before when I was working on their daughter's case, but not with this identity. Steven pressed a button on his pad to make his screen go black and Joy put her book down and both stood up to greet me. Hannah did the introductions and then we all sat down.

There was a period of quiet while I tried to work out what to say.

“How about I start,” Joy said. “We know Hannah is not our Hannah although she has the same DNA. She has told us that she vaguely remembers a life in Australia and that does match her accent, so we have come to accept her belief that her soul is not our original Hannah's soul. We do occasionally see some familiar mannerisms and in the end, whether it is our Hannah with different memories or a different Hannah with odd memories doesn't really matter. Our daughter that was, is lost to us, but we have a new daughter who we are very pleased with. Hopefully even grandchildren someday. She told us of you, Sophie, another clone, and asked us if we would be prepared to accept you into our family. Our answer was, let us get to know each other and see if it works as she hopes.”

“I have spoken to Hannah and she clearly loves you already and has a tremendous amount of trust in you. I have secrets that I am scared of sharing, but Hannah believes you guys are worthy,” I said.

“I can promise you that we will keep your secrets,” Steven assured me.

“Hannah trusts you and I trust Hannah, so by default, I am inclined to trust you, the problem is that a telepath can read your thoughts and I know telepaths are obligated to not reveal any secrets, but they still report to their governing body if the secret is important enough.” I took a deep breath. “Regardless, I am going to tell you almost everything because I need your help and just hope and pray that any telepath doesn't pass on anything they learn about me.

“I am not like Hannah, my DNA is a patchwork from other people, mainly supers, probably in the hope that I would be a powerful tool. One of the women I am based on found me, but she is very secretive.”

“Can you tell us who that is?” Steven asked.

“Yes. She is called Josie Hughes, although her nickname is Nancy for Nancy Drew, the detective. I don't know all her abilities but I know she can examine DNA which is why I know about my mixed heritage,” I answered.

“We know her,” Joy exclaimed. “She tried to help us find Hannah originally. Lovely lady. Worked very closely with a telepath. Her name escapes me.”

I had to force myself not to smile and look at Hannah.

“I think she uses her DNA detection to help solve crimes, or at least she did before she revealed her other ability. I don't know how widely known it is, but the authorities know about it, so I can tell you about it. She has the ability to do something she calls re-birth. She becomes pregnant with a clone and pulls in the soul that matches the clone. She can then speed grow that person until they reach puberty. The whole process takes time, about six weeks in all, and she has to go through the uncomfortable process of pregnancy, the pain of childbirth and then three weeks of sleepless nights with breastfeeding. The reason I am telling you this is because I have promised to help her which means at any point I may have to disappear for about six weeks.”

“Do these clones remember their previous lives?” Steven asked.

“Yes, they remember everything. Imagine if it was you, Steven or you Joy. You would experience vague memories of the six weeks, but still be you with all your memories, just regressed in age to sixteen. Josie herself is not powerful, she has no great strength or resilience so she is worried that she will become a tool for the rich and powerful, to keep them young and earn them money. That is why she is in hiding, but she can't help herself and will occasionally take pity or for some other reason go through it all again. If a telepath knows that Josie has contacted me and may contact me in the future and passes that on to the Superhero League, there is a good chance I will be put under surveillance. So if anyone asks you about Josie, please don't think about this conversation,” I pleaded.

Hannah laughed. “As soon as you tell someone not to think of something, that is the first thing they think of.” She turned to Joy and Steven. “If someone asks you about Josie, concentrate on what you remember her looking like, try and get as much detail. To a large extent, it doesn't matter if it is accurate, but by concentrating on that you won't be thinking of anything else.”

“Well, I'll try my best,” Steven responded with Joy muttering agreement. “I think you mentioned help. How can we help you?”

“I think I mentioned that I have a bit of DNA from a few supers. I don't want to tell you exactly what my powers are but I can give you a few of the basics. I can set my mind to listen for specific thoughts. Like people crying for help, or even narrow it down to the closest young girl asking for help. Not exactly telepathy but something close. My main ability is telekinesis. Only within a short range, but inside that range, I am pretty strong. Then there is the reason Josie tracked me down. I have some of her DNA and her ability to alter my appearance.” I changed my face to my masked 'Angel' face, receiving the appropriate oohs and aahs.

“I have been nicknamed Angel and have been on the news lately. Basically, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a superhero. I mean I have the strength to be one, but I don't like fighting, or violence generally. I was in Seattle when I made my mind up to come and seek out Hannah, but I thought I might do a bit of superhero work on my way. I set my mind to listen for young girls asking for help and, unfortunately, I was inundated. I spent that entire night rescuing girls. The frightening thought was that I could only hear those girls who were being attacked at that moment which can only be a fraction of the total number.”

“And is that what you want to do?” Steven asked.

“Want to? No. But I can't bury my head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist and that I can't do anything about it. The New York Supers have already asked me to do something similar, just less violently.”

“Less violently?” Joy asked.

“I neutered the men involved,” I admitted.

“Is that what you want help with? So you don't get in trouble with the law?” Steven asked.

“No. I took video evidence before I did anything and it would be impossible to prove that I did anything. However, there were four girls that didn't have a safe home to go to, who had been abused that night, so I took them with me. They need more care than I can give them and if I do the same here in New York, I need a place to bring any similar cases.”

“Why didn't you leave them with the police or take them to one of the state orphanages?” Joy asked.

“Because I had to save one of the girls from the orphanage. The police would just have been a stop-gap before being sent to an orphanage. They had already suffered enough.”

“Of course we will help,” Steven said firmly. “Where are those girls now?”

“In a caravan at Heckscher State Park Campground.”

“How many of them are there?” Steven asked.

“Four.”

Chapter 33

We delayed dinner while Steven organised a stretch limo to take us to the campground. With a subtle hint from me, Steven decided to leave the adventure to us girls. I was worried about how the girls would react to any male presence. This led to discussing with Joy what kind of orphanage we wanted to create. Joy said that there would be no problem taking in these four girls, but if this was going to be an ongoing project, we would need to set up an orphanage.

Besides the obvious housing and staffing issues, there would need to be legal representation and then there was the question about adoption and fostering. I didn't want adoption or fostering as I wanted to mother them all, I just knew that wasn't going to be practical. I hated the idea that someone could come, interact with multiple kids and pick one. That would lead to others feeling they were worth less because they weren't chosen. All the kids would need counselling and might have issues with male presences. I didn't know what the right thing to do was, but I knew I needed help.

I was greeted with enthusiastic hugs when we arrived. I introduced them to Joy and Hannah. I caused a brief delay by wanting them to be clean before we left. I invited them into the caravan, one at a time and used my micro telekinesis to clean their bodies and clothes. They said it made their skin feel all tingly. I could have done them all at once, but I wanted them to know I was concentrating on them individually and realise they were clean.

It amazed me that they could all go through something so horrible and be normal happy kids so soon afterwards. None of them were first-timers, and as terrible as it was to say, they were all used to it. All they could feel was a sense of freedom with that innocent belief that I would never allow it to happen again. And I had to live up to that. I think there was also a feeling of camaraderie since they had all been through the same thing and I had even been carrying some of them as I visited the next case. Brook wanted me to check in with Cali back in Seattle to see if all the girls were being properly looked after. I had passed Brook to Cali at one point in the night and I think they bonded. Since I didn't have a phone anymore, Joy phoned the Seattle Supers and as Cali was out patrolling, we left a message for her to call us. We told the receptionist what it was about so hopefully Cali could do a bit of checking first and give us a proper report.

Dinner was a boisterous affair with all of the kids wanting to express their opinion and usually all at the same time. Interestingly, I was the only one they listened to when I tried to keep them calm and take their turn talking. We let their imaginations go wild and they talked about having a house under the sea, where only girls were allowed to go. When asked about schooling and after Steven coming in with the dad joke about schools of fish, they talked about learning at home with each other. Joy mentioned Madeleine, which was a movie about an orphan girl living with other girls her age in a big building that also was a school. Hannah managed to find it on a streaming service and the girls all watched it like a slumber party. They didn't have any PJ's so they were down to underwear and wrapped in blankets.

Brook's mother had passed away, Holly was told to call several different women mother since hers had likely passed away as well, Terese hated her mother, but Simone missed her mother, so I was going to ask Cali to check in with her. She had clearly been complicit or I wouldn't have taken Simone, but that doesn't stop someone from feeling love.

I was overwhelmed with the task ahead of me. I had been shown a problem that I knew existed although I had no idea of the scale of the issue. Now that my eyes were opened I could never close them again, so I needed help. Joy and Steven had promised to help. Hannah had even told them that her danger sense worked very similarly to my asking my mind for specific thoughts. She was willing to help find those in need, but she would need to be protected. There were systems already in place with lots of people willing to help and with telepathy almost all of them had been checked or were checked to make sure they weren't abusing the system.

Do I just help New York, or just help America. Where do I draw the line? The one thing I knew was that I couldn't do it alone. I needed a General or the female equivalent, which was probably a politician or businesswoman. Someone who could see the end goal, look at our assets and work out a way forward.

Steven agreed and together we set up the Angel Foundation. He would look through business agencies and interviews. I decided to go a different route.

Ruth's POV

Goddammit my mother was right. “Geroff me!” I yelled.

I saw his hand briefly, heard a loud smack as my head was thrown to the side, followed by pain on the side of my face.

“Yer me wife! Do your duty, woman!”

I felt his knees pushing my legs apart. I struggled but he was too heavy and too strong. 'Help me,' I prayed. 'Please God, help me.'

He turned my face towards him and I managed to spit in his face before he brought his face any closer. His face turned red with his anger and I braced myself for the hit I knew was coming, closing my eyes. I felt the impact but it was as light as a feather. I opened my eyes, confused.

“Arr..” he shouted in pain, leaning back from me and staring at his red hand.

His weight lifted off me and he rose in the air to dangle like a puppet. I heard the window unlatch itself and then open wide. I stared at the opening in wonder as a small woman flew through before turning upright and gently landing on her feet in front of me, ignoring my drunk husband.

“Let me down, ya bitch!” he said, refusing to be ignored.

She turned to him with obvious disgust on her face. She dropped him on the floor. He got up quickly and came at her. She didn't move and allowed him to hit her. It must have been like hitting concrete, his hand snapped and he cried out in pain again, falling to his knees and clutching his hand.

I managed to get to my feet and tried to move my clothes back into place so I didn't look as bad.

She turned back to me. “Your choice,” she said.

“My choice?”

“Stay,” she said looking at my defeated man, “or go.”

I knew what she meant. “Go,” I said. “I don't ever want to see this piece of shit again,” I told her honestly.

“Gather everything that you want to take with you onto your bed. I'll keep an eye on bozo.”

“Are you going to do what you did in Seattle?” I asked. “Please,” I added in case she was wondering what I wanted.

She sighed. “I want to, but I promised I wouldn't.” Then she grinned, “I'm sure God will punish him though.”

I gathered my clothes, jewellery and paperwork on the bed. I called out to say that I was ready and watched in amazement as the duvet gathered itself into a sack and hovered behind me.

“Let's go out the front door, shall we, with heads held high,” she said and we did, but a few steps past the front of the apartment and we lifted into the sky. I vowed to myself I would pay this woman back. She had saved me.

We dropped down in a caravan park and she led me to a caravan and gestured me inside. There was another woman there who looked as bruised as I probably did.

“Hi, Emily, I'm just going to ask err... I'm sorry I didn't get your name,” Angel said.

“Ruth. It's Ruth. Nice to meet you Emily, Angel,” I responded.

“Ruth. I have a need of like-minded women,” Angel started.

“I'm in,” I stated confidently.

Angel chuckled. “I haven't even told you what it is about.”

“You don't have to. I'm in. I owe you.”

Angel frowned. “You don't owe me anything. I was just looking for women who would understand the importance of what I am trying to achieve.”

“We'll agree to differ. So what do you need? Oh, and what did you do to my husband?”

“He may be inflicted with incurable impotence. Nothing to do with me, obviously,” Angel said with a wicked smile. She checked that I was aware of what she had done in Seattle and talked about starting an organisation to first stamp out paedophilia worldwide and then work on domestic violence. Starting in New York, then other big cities and eventually the whole of the US, then on to the next country until everywhere was covered. She wanted to create a network of telepaths with superheroes. The difficulty was manyfold with issues about the law, finding and training the appropriate women, looking after the children who had been abused as well as management to help work out how to make this all happen. Emily wanted to be a paedophile hunter which involved giving Emily specialised telepathic powers. Apparently, there was a way to do that. I wanted to be in management. I had studied business and wanted to put it to good use.

That decided, Angel went out again to help someone else.

Chapter 34

Angel's POV

Ruth became my general. She was the shadow head of Angel Foundation. We found there was no way to do what we wanted to do and stay within the law, so the Angel Foundation became the centre for looking after the abused children who had nowhere else they could be safe. That part was headed by Joy with Steven supporting her. The Shadow Angels were a vigilante group who would go out to gather evidence and save children from abuse.

Of course, it wasn't that easy. I explained everything to Ruth. All my abilities although not exactly how it worked but the possibilities that I thought could help. Essentially there were two elements that were necessary for our plans to succeed. We needed money, not small amounts either, and we needed superheroes who could find and protect those children in need. As far as money goes, the Angel Foundation was going to be supported by Joy and Steven, but I would need to find the money to support the Shadow Angels.

I suggested various schemes to Ruth until we came up with one that would work. I had to do a few tests though. The idea was to go into space and collect asteroids, bring them back to Earth and refine them for their high mineral content. Apparently, most supers who can fly, can't fly that high because they utilise the electromagnet field that the Earth produces to defy gravity. That is not how my power works but a quick trip to the moon and back checked that out pretty thoroughly. Speed is important but it is acceleration that really matters in space. As long as I was able to accelerate in space, going vast distances wouldn't be a problem, navigation, on the other hand, was a lot harder.

The other issue was about the size of my domain and affecting things outside of my domain. Anything within my domain I didn't have trouble moving, however, most asteroids that I would be aiming to bring back were going to be larger than a sphere with a twenty metre radius.

I practised on icebergs. If I just landed on the surface then what usually happened was I broke off a semicircular sphere of ice. If I burrowed in so that I was twenty metres below the surface, whether I could lift the iceberg depended on how big the iceberg was. Not that the weight seemed to matter, it was just a question of how strong the ice was and whether it could take the strain. I was most effective if I burrowed to the centre and lifted.

Navigation I couldn't solve. However, if we made a small spaceship with sensors to work out which asteroids to choose and hired a navigator with an expensive computer, it all became possible again. We didn't have to worry about oxygen since I would automatically convert carbon dioxide to oxygen and carbon, the weight didn't matter to my lifting ability and insulation wasn't important as long as everything was within my domain. This meant most of the normal issues you would have with such a project, didn't exist. Design-wise, my domain was crucial which meant the ship needed to be circular and there wasn't much point in making it higher than we could comfortably stand so it was going to be disc-shaped or as everyone said, a flying saucer.

Another of my ideas to make money was to make diamonds. With my domain and micro telekinesis, it would be easy, I just needed carbon which was easily available. The only diamonds I could make were either flawless or to copy a flaw in another diamond. Ruth believed we would quickly flood the market and reduce diamonds to something relatively worthless. However, I could use my diamond making ability to help with the spacecraft. Rather than have panels made out of glass, I made them out of diamond, multiple layers with vacuum in between for insulation and graphene so thin it was see-through. Although insulation didn't matter, nor did oxygen supplies because of my domain and abilities, the spacecraft was going to be built with the idea that if I was briefly unconscious for whatever reason, the occupants would be alright for a few days at least. This meant it would be built with insulation and there would be a few oxygen tanks for emergencies.

Whilst my spacecraft was being built, paid for by a few diamond sales and Ruth searched for an appropriate navigator, I had other tasks ahead of me. I needed to create the Shadow Angels. The process of re-birth was painful and time-consuming taking about six weeks. I could carry two at once, possibly more, but since I only had two breasts, I intended to limit myself to a maximum of two at a time, unless there was an emergency. In order to save the children, we needed someone with the ability to find them, someone who could fly quickly and someone strong enough that no one would mess with them. Because of the difficulty and time involved, it made sense for all those abilities to be concentrated on each Shadow Angel. I might add that while Ruth and I plotted, Hannah was going out with the New York Supers and continuing the process.

With all that power within each Shadow Angel, they needed to be very loyal, ideally devoted to the cause but not hotheads who would bring the name of the Shadow Angels into disrepute. Which meant we had to be very careful who we chose. Quality over quantity. I already had the DNA template for telepathy and partitioned mind that would allow for the detection of abused children, but I also needed some power that would allow people to fly and give them some offensive ability. My telekinesis hadn't been something I could graft onto someone else's DNA and it was the same with Celeste's mind energy power. I could give everyone the power cells that Celeste had, but that wouldn't be healthy unless they had a way to use the excess energy that leaked out of the cells. Otherwise, the excess energy that naturally leaks out would be harmful. Not immediately fatal, but shortened life expectancy.

I needed another DNA live sample, possibly more than one to get more powers for me to copy and the only way to do that was to re-birth someone. Before I trolled superhero nursing homes I decided to contact Cali from Seattle. She had the requisite flight power and I knew she had fire abilities. She also wanted to continue what I had started in Seattle. Not exactly a Shadow Angel but close.

Talking to Cali and revealing what I could do would be telling someone outside of our immediate circle a Shadow Angel secret and that was deemed a bad idea. So I had to travel to Seattle incognito, transform myself into Josie and have that identity talk with Cali. The travel was not difficult, I just did it at night over the ocean. That did mean a long detour, but I could travel fast and noiselessly, using my domain to muffle any sounds and ducking into the ocean if anyone approached or even came close and using my telepathic mind division to warn of anyone near. The main challenge was changing into Josie who was significantly taller and weighed more than I did. It meant I was a skinny version of Josie and all my bones were a little less strong than normal. Energy was not an issue, it was just a question of mass.

I couldn't fly around as Josie so I had to take public transport or taxi to get around. I arranged through Joy to meet with Cali at West Point Lighthouse. I introduced myself as a friend of Angel and explained that I had a way to give her the power to find those children who were crying out for help, but it would take six weeks and she would end up a bit younger. I refused to talk about the process but reassured her that it wasn't painful and all she was likely to remember from the six weeks would be some feverish dreams. I didn't want her to answer immediately, but to think about it and contact Joy if she agreed.

I waited for her to leave, dived back into the ocean, became Angel again and returned to base.

Chapter 35

Cali agreed with the plan within a week, but there were a lot of security concerns that needed to be addressed. Cali was an official superhero and although I didn't want to be paranoid, considering the bugs I found in my clothes when I re-birthed Celeste, I worried that Cali would be closely monitored to try and track Josie.

The plan was for Cali to meet Angel on a Miami beach and be taken underwater to Josie or at least, that was how we explained it. She was instructed to have no electronics on her person so that Angel could kill any bugs with her known telekinetic powers. The plan was then to go to a safe house that was stocked with food and drink. Ruth was going to be Cali's re-birth twin because I didn't know if I was going to be able to transfer any power other than telepathy to her, but telepathy was all she needed to prevent another telepath from hearing her thoughts.

The other security concern was how safe would the safe house be. If the government or Superhero League really wanted to find Josie, they could interrogate Steven or anyone we relied on to hide us. Instead, we arranged a massive pallet of frozen meals. We didn't need a refrigerator or freezer since I could keep everything frozen and even could function as a re-heater. I was going to go underwater and stay there for six weeks. I didn't need to create a house, but I thought it might be nice to melt some sand kick out the impurities and create a glass dome. By examining the behaviour of rapidly cooling glass drops (Prince Rupert's Drop), I could use my micro telekinesis to examine and reproduce the structure to create a type of toughened glass. I remembered about the glass drops from way back when I was in school studying physics. Using this material I could make beds, tables, chairs and fill the beds with a dry fine sand. The only thing it would lack was entertainment.

Ruth was not enamoured of the idea because although I didn't need help, it would be, well, helpful, especially during the childbirth. However, the number of people who could help me was limited. Ruth only wanted potential Shadow Angels aware of both the process and my secrets. That way it wouldn't be long before they were telepathic and able to hide our secrets. Thus far there were only two people who had passed her tests to become Shadow Angels and one of them, Brook, wasn't old enough yet. Regardless, I was going to have two helpers, Brook and Emily. Both were very loyal and had every intention of becoming Shadow Angels. The process of finding more appropriate people would be easier once Ruth was telepathic.

Nor was Ruth happy with a spartan type existence. I was tasked with setting up my underwater home and filling it with comfortable lounges, a bookcase filled with books and magazines, a proper wooden dining table, normal chairs, beds with memory foam mattresses in them, bathroom with sinks, bath, shower and toilets, electric generator with fuel enough to last two months, powering a huge fridge and freezer as well as an entertainment system of TV, films and music all downloaded and ready to play. They would still rely on me to keep the air fresh, the temperature right and to enter or exit. I could have left the floor as sand, but according to Ruth, that is a bad idea as sand gets everywhere. No sand particle could escape my domain sense but it wasn't worth arguing, so I created a floor of glass and had to take lots of rugs with me. I needed to seal the whole space anyway.

There was still the possibility that a random diver would find my oasis, but I placed it inside a natural valley and the sea is unfathomably large so it was extremely unlikely. I made sure I did not exceed my domain in size so if that did happen, I could lift it all up and travel to another location.

When I said that to Ruth, she slapped her own forehead, swore and asked how difficult it would be to bring the dome I had created to a random field a few miles off the coast and the answer was not difficult at all. So Ruth organised a location for me to bring it to shore so that we could outfit it properly. The electric generator was changed to a molten salt version that I powered by heating up the salt occasionally. A smaller fuel-driven electric generator was stored as a backup with enough fuel for a couple of days. Carbon dioxide scrubbers were emplaced, just in case and a proper sealable entrance door was purchased and used. Actually two of them with a short hallway between them and a way of letting water into the space or air to displace the water. Again, just in case.

I decided to add a layer of diamond to make it extra sturdy. The glass was already a metre thick because I wanted it to be heavy so it would still sink when I wasn't there to hold it in place. Another emergency addition of inflatable rafts attached as external boxes at the floor level that would provide enough lift to raise the dome to the surface as well as provide a floating platform to escape to with an emergency transmitter to call for help.

Ruth's explanation for all the work was that I could use it repeatedly, changing location whenever I felt a human presence getting close. Whenever I had finished a six-week stint I would bring it in for maintenance and for it to be ready for the next time it was needed.

Some of the ideas that we were using for the dome came from the spaceship design that was still in progress. The spaceship was going to have to be completely reliant on my abilities. They would build in what failsafes they could, but without relying on me, the whole idea became unfeasible. No engines, no fuel, no large oxygen tanks. The molten salt idea had come from the need to generate electricity without having to unfurl large solar panels or carry large quantities of fuel. I had practised on one of their generators and checked that it didn't strain me before it was chosen.

My life was busy and with what I considered to be a worthy goal I was relatively content. I say relatively because I had unfinished business with Hannah. Could we become a couple or would it just be good friends? There was risk involved, but after Hannah's confession that risk had already been taken. Hannah had been surprised by my long term planning. When I decided that something needed to be done, Hannah had thought I would just start attacking the problem, going out at night and rescuing as many as I could and when I finished with one town move on to the next. Of course, I was tempted by that idea, but I was old enough to see the problems inherent in that solution. I already felt guilty for not rescuing Holly, Simone, Terese and Brook earlier, let alone all the others that I helped that night. Logically that doesn't make sense, but emotionally I would be a wreck in a short amount of time. How could I enjoy life if every moment I wasn't helping meant another child being hurt?

By stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, I knew I would be able to help more children and by not being constantly confronted with it, I would be more emotionally stable. Likewise, I discussed with Ruth the idea of Shadow Angels having periods where they were not active. Month on, month off or whatever worked so that they didn't lose their minds. I had already saved a lady who was an excellent psychologist, Samantha, and she was going to help Ruth with assessing and helping our Shadow Angels. At some point, I would have to re-birth her so that she was immune to a telepath's power but she was in her fifties and it would affect her whole family so we were keeping her involvement secret while she decided how far she wanted to be involved.

The fact that Hannah was going out each night and working with the New York superheroes was helping with my peace of mind. Between us, we decided that when I had created two Shadow Angels, Hannah would not need to go out every night. She could then decide whether I re-birthed her to give her flight and an offensive power so that she could become a proper Shadow Angel or help in another way, maybe using her telepathy to help Ruth. At that point, we would create space in our schedules and start dating. Taking it very slow and seeing how it went.

First things first, I needed to be able to create Shadow Angels and to do that I needed to be able to give them Telepathy, Mind partitioning, Flight and an offensive power. And I didn't have the right DNA for that, hence taking a risk with Cali.

Chapter 36

I moved the completed Dome to a few miles off the Miami beach. We had Terese and Joy waiting for Cali to arrive on the beach and when she did, I started the planned procedure. First, I picked up Ruth, Emily and Brook before transporting them into the Dome. I left them there and swam to the beach in my Angel form. I met Cali and told her I was there to take her to Josie. When I was underwater, about halfway to the Dome, I readied my egg as Cali's clone and pulled her soul to join it. Her body immediately died. I knew that was going to happen and used my micro telekinesis to break her body into tiny, tiny pieces. It was then that I found a small tracking device that had been implanted under her skin in her arm.

Anything within my domain I can see, but it is too much information so I have to use my mind partitions to notify me, and they are guided by my wishes. I had not even thought about an implanted devise, so hadn't thought to use my partitioned mind to check for them. I now added that to my list of things to be informed about.

I moved to the Dome quickly and sped off through the water until I felt far enough that my anxiety from the tracking device was assuaged. Nipped in to clone Ruth, took her dead body out and reduced it to mere cells with powdered bone and then continued travelling with my Dome to my sea valley location. I was nicely hidden so I set my telepathic mind to keep a listen out for anybody approaching and finally relaxed.

Brook and Emily were looking a bit shocked because it looked like I had rushed in, killed Ruth without touching her and then got rid of the body. Not completely untrue either.

“Don't worry, Ruth and Cali are nicely safe in my tummy and they didn't feel a thing. You can ask them later,” I reassured them.

I guess they won't be properly reassured until they had been reborn and grown to maturity.

“I'm going to have a little lie-down, call me if you need anything,” I told them.

I lay down to think and examine the new live DNA available to me. I decided that Cali was probably fooled into having that tracking device because otherwise, my telepathic mind division would have likely picked up her worry about being found out when I was clearly security conscious and asked her to not bring anything that might be tracked.

I changed my face to Josie's face in case Cali ended up with any memories from this experience. I don't think she will be conscious enough to notice that Josie has shrunk in height. Examining Cali's DNA was interesting. Her flight power was her mind manipulating the Earth's field and that would be transferable. Her heat powers came from two factors. Her mitochondria opened to a hot dimension and she could pull that heat out and use it, but the ability to pull it out and use it was a personal one that I wasn't going to be able to transfer. Similar to Celeste's ability to manipulate the pure energy that comes from her mitochondria and my micro telekinesis. A little bit of the fire energy did leak out of her cells and do damage but this was mitigated by a weak regenerator ability. The fire energy couldn't be used by the cells to create or generate ATP so she would still need oxygen.

I could now create Shadow Angels with Telepathy, Mind Partitioning, Flight, and a combination of Regeneration with Power Cells. The weak Regeneration that I could take from Cali worked well with Celeste's Power Cells to make the Regeneration surprisingly powerful. Not exactly an offensive ability, but would make my Shadow Angels quite durable and long-lived. All the offensive abilities I had come across had been mind powers that I couldn't transfer, but I thought I had enough to start creating proper Shadow Angels and hope that I would come across other abilities later on.

To Cali, I didn't make any other changes apart from adding telepathy and mind partitioning. When she started to become conscious, Brook and Emily needed to be gone, but that didn't usually happen until a day after I stopped providing breastmilk.

Ruth, on the other hand, had the full works. I had been able to have a frank discussion about what I could do and what she wanted me to do. She was the first to be re-birthed to become part of the Shadow Angel group and she wanted to set a precedent. Power-wise she would have telepathy, mind partitioning, flight and regeneration with Celeste's power cells. Physically, her eyes were changed to an ice blue, just like the ones I had as my Angel form. She went with the full female preference of hairlessness below eyebrows, mild permanent makeup of eyeliner, naturally long and full eyelashes, slight blush to cheeks, red slightly plumped lips, the pelvis and uterus configuration for easy(ish) birth, sensitive vagina, anus, clitoris and nipples, an Angel specific skin colouration change on her back to look like a tattoo of a pair of Angel wings. She also actually wanted a breast reduction to a C-cup, hair that was less curly and no freckles. Lastly, hidden in her right eyebrow would be a small angel tattoo.

Her idea was that either all of that or most of that would become the standard, almost like a uniform. I certainly wasn't going to demand it, but I would go with people's preferences. I suspected breast, hair and skin would be very individual.

The first three weeks were very boring, but I could and did take Brook and Emily out for swims in the ocean, looking at the amazing wildlife and preventing cabin fever. I'm not quite sure how it started but since I kept the temperature constant and being pregnant, I sometimes struggled with my clothes, or more accurately, how I looked in clothes, we all wore less and less until we just agreed to be naked. There was nothing sexual about it, it was a mix of convenience, being comfortable with each other, being the same sex and letting go. Pregnancy and childbirth don't leave much room for modesty and, probably in sympathy, Brook and Emily followed suit.

The birth of twins wasn't much different to the other births I had been through. Ruth came out first and Cali followed. It was helpful that Emily and Brook were there. For the first time, I could make full use of my powers with the babies so we didn't have to constantly change nappies, I could just set a mind partition to catch their messes with my telekinesis put it straight into the toilet and clean their bodies. Feeding both of them at the same time was an interesting experience and my boobs grew larger than normal since I had to produce twice as much milk. I also had to eat more, but, since I, myself, didn't require very much food at all, it was quite manageable. Having Brook and Emily to organise that side of things was wonderful and made my life so much easier. The fact that I didn't require much sleep anymore also made the process much less stressful, but it was still a busy three weeks that passed quickly.

Once they had both had their last breastfeed, when they were fully mature although with a DNA age between fifteen and sixteen, I moved out of sight of Cali and changed my face back to Angel and put on my Angel costume. I then moved the Dome through the water and eventually, up into the air and back to the land Ruth had bought. I then took Cali dressed her and flew to Seattle, holding her in my arms in the princess carry. I sat with her on a park bench that was the closest I could find to her parent's house and waited for her to come to awareness.

When I saw her mind alight I helped her gain control of her mind partitioning and telepathy. I explained how she could set her mind partition to search for people crying out for help. I also mentioned that she had previously had a tracking device lodged into her arm. She hadn't learned to think quietly yet, and I had set my telepathy mind division to listen to her thoughts, so I experienced her shock at that news. I had contemplated not giving her the telepathy because of that, but now, I was glad I did.

I flew up into the air, pointed out where her parent's house was and started my journey home.

Chapter 37

The spaceship was mostly ready, it just needed a pilot navigator and any modifications that were necessary to gel my abilities with the directions from the said pilot. The pilot could hardly just point in a direction and ask me to push. Ruth, of course, had been unavailable for the last six weeks so Steven had taken the reins. Using a combination of money, favours and old boy charm, he had managed to get NASA interested. Steven negotiated an agreement. We would perform a number of jobs for them and they would program our computer, link it with theirs and lend us a pilot. To prove it was worth their while, I needed to take a couple of astronauts up to replace others at the space station.

For this trial run, a very sceptical pilot was loaned to us and communication was set up between our spaceship and NASA. We decided to call our spaceship Angel one. Programming our computer was a much harder and longer project but wasn't necessary for just visiting the space station. I did however need to be guided and someone giving me a set of numbers was completely unhelpful. We rigged up a device that would take the numbers that Bob provided, usually repeating what someone in a NASA control room was telling him, to mechanically point in the direction we needed to travel.

I could feel that metal rod with my domain and move us in that direction. I also needed to be provided with a number to work out how hard to push, how long to push and when to stop. It was too complicated remembering all the different levels of force so I used a mind partition to do direction, acceleration and even constant speed since in the atmosphere we had variable resistance. I could negate a significant portion using my domain, so it was easier to ask what speed and use a gauge they provided to modify my force to a constant speed or a constant acceleration. Gravity itself was interesting as, within my domain, gravity was what I wanted it to be and that was usually one G as that was what I was used to. My partitioned mind didn't immediately respond to the changes that the pilot wanted but waited for my go-ahead, which worked well because the pilot usually set up a clock timer for when the change was to be implemented, how long for, at what acceleration, or at what speed to maintain.

A lot of it was testing and set up for the longer journeys into space. Bob also came with multiple instruments that would be assessing things like oxygen levels, air composition and air pressure. Although Bob was very professional, he was also a condescending male chauvinist pig. I could deal with taking him on the trip to the space station, but there was no way I would be able to spend long periods of time in his company. He had already hinted at sharing my bed. I spoke to Steven about it and suggested that a female co-pilot be brought on and for any long journeys, Bob would stay Earthbound. I told Ruth that we needed to train one of our own and have some way of doing this without NASA. She told me that when we had enough money it would not be a problem and she was working on it.

Once everyone was happy with all the tests, I took Bob, Cathy, the requested female co-pilot, and the two replacement astronauts. All four were dressed in spacesuits and were surprised that I wasn't. I sat in the comfortable leather chair that was in the centre of the craft so that my domain had an even reach in all directions. There were two chairs at the front, meant for the pilot navigator and myself when I needed more of my domain for what was in front of us. In this case, Cathy was in that seat as the co-pilot. The two passengers were strapped behind me.

The first shock was the lack of acceleration that they could feel. I usually allowed my passengers to feel a certain amount of acceleration when I flew because I thought it would be helpful for their minds. You feel the acceleration, you know you are moving. It was, however, a choice for me and after a snarky comment from Bob that I did not appreciate I wanted to mess with his mind. I could see him constantly checking the gauges to confirm that he was actually moving. The next shock was the fact that the gravity did not change, even when we were docking with the space station.

For me, it was a very slow and boring experience. I just told my partitioned mind to act when it was time to, based on what Bob had programmed in. For the astronauts, it was a magical experience. The journey was mostly silent, with a few awed whispers, it was ridiculously fast by NASA standards and the views were amazing. Because I couldn't feel anything beyond my twenty metres of domain, I wanted to be able to see around me, so part of the design incorporated many windows in all directions. Since they were all made of diamond they were probably stronger than the metals they were encased in. In front of the pilot navigator were a bevvy of screens representing all the cameras that had been installed. We also had what I called the sensor suite, but it was just an infrared camera and spectrometer and an x-ray into gamma-ray spectrometer. Theoretically, that was going to be pointed at asteroids to determine their composition so we could work out which ones would be worth refining. It was going to be the computer's job to analyse the data and tell us the results.

The mission was a complete success, so the next step was to leave Angel one with NASA for them to sort out the computer and recommend any changes. I could see that being a headache, but it was Ruth and Steven's headache. The first fight was going to be getting Bob off the team, but there was no way I was spending a prolonged period of time in close proximity with that man. Ideally, I didn't want to go asteroid hunting until I had created a few Shadow Angels and Hannah could come with me. If she wanted to, which I hoped she did, not that I was expecting...

I had to tear my mind thoughts away from my loops in logic and emotion. What will be, will be.

Chapter 38

I couldn't do any more on the spacecraft front, although I had an interesting chat with one of the NASA scientists who had been very curious about my ability to create sheets of diamond. Surprisingly enough his interest was not about getting rich quick and he mentioned that they had increased security significantly when they realised what they thought was glass, wasn't. Joining NASA for Mark, the scientist in question, as well as for a large number of employees was about the dream of man conquering space. Many worried about an extinction-level event since asteroids have impacted Earth on a number of occasions and the next one was overdue statistically. Bearing that in mind, the dream of man living on more than one planet was shared by many at NASA and they were constantly thinking of ways to make that possible.

Mark's question was if I could make diamond from coal, could I make graphene and could I make contiguous graphene or single-crystal graphene. Mark was of the opinion that man's best chance to explore space was by using a space elevator and the main obstacle was producing a tether strong enough. Single-crystal graphene has been predicted to be strong enough but it would need to be a minimum of 36,000km long. I wouldn't have any difficulty creating the graphene, but a minimum of 36,000km? Not interested. You would need some kind of industrial process to produce those sorts of quantities. When I looked it up, 36,000km was just to reach geostationary orbit, but most suggested a tether of more than double that with a counterweight on the end.

Graphene itself, though, was a very interesting material and might be useful for creating our Shadow Angel super suits. It was electrically conductive which means it might be able to create a faraday cage to protect our girls from supers with lightning and strong enough to stop knives and bullets. Ruth would be in charge of organising that, or finding the right person to organise that, but it was worth letting her know that I could produce the material if it was needed.

Since I couldn't do any more on the asteroid-hunting until NASA was ready with our modified Angel one, I wanted to turn my attention back to creating Shadow Angels. While Ruth was researching Shadow Angel candidates, I felt I could use my traditional method of helping people who might then want to help others.

I tried to be as legitimate as possible. I spoke to the New York supers before I ventured out, I had a phone with GPS so that I could be obviously tracked, videoed everything for evidence and asked my telepathic mind division for a mature person who was calling for help.

Stephanie's POV

The problem with drinking was that there was a consequence. I tapped Karen on her shoulder and pointed to the toilets. The music was too loud to make talking worth the effort. She nodded her head and passed both our drinks to Isla and readied herself to get up. The last thing we needed was doctored drinks. Not that anyone would deliberately spike mine. I did my best with a wig, close shave and lots of makeup, but my jawline and adam's apple gave me away, so I still got the looks of disgust and abusive mutterings.

One of the reasons we chose this place was because it had disabled toilets. We had to line up with other, clearly not disabled people waiting to use it and went in together when it was available. It was only women in the line and I wasn't sure if that was because there was an even longer line to the ladies or because they were like me, just better looking and indistinguishable from genetic girls.

We had just left to head back to our table when I felt a hand land on my shoulder and grip strongly. Karen was in front of me and I called out her name as she was getting further away from me, then turned around to face whoever it was. It wasn't one person though it was three and they looked mean and angry. To say I was scared would be an understatement. I tried strongly to pull away, but more hands grabbed me. I started screaming, but something hard hit my jaw and shut me up and disorientated me. When I had gathered my senses, I was already halfway through a fire door exit leading onto a dark alley.

I took in a deep breath “Help!” I shouted, except one of them punched me in the stomach before I had got more than the 'H' out so the rest was more of a moan. I couldn't breathe and bent over from the hit. They were shouting things at me and punching me and I was panicking and just wanting to get a breath in. I fell to the ground after a sharp pain in my knee. I tried to curl up in the fetal position and protect my head as the kicks kept coming.

Between one moment and the next, it just... stopped. To be honest, I thought that I had died. The sound cut out and the kicking stopped, but I could still feel pain all over my body, especially my knee so I quickly realised that I was alive. Either that or I was going to be very disappointed in the afterlife. I took my hands away from my face and looked around to find the three men on the floor around me vomiting and clutching their balls. Looking up I saw Angel, floating serenely above, staring with anger at the downed men, holding up a phone obviously videoing.

Then she turned to me and compassion filled her face. “I'm not a healer, but I can do some repair to the bones and ligaments. Give me a sec while I work it out.”

I didn't see the difference between healing and repairing, but I wasn't going to say anything.

“Try moving your knee,” she told me and as she spoke the door burst open and Karen with Isla and Tania came rushing out with a bouncer following.

I moved my knee and found it wasn't as painful. I gathered myself and stood up.

“What happened?” the bouncer asked while my girlfriends looked on in shock.

Angel looked at him like he was an idiot. 'What do you think happened?' clearly going through her mind.

“These three... men, attacked this lady here. All I've done is stop them, but I would suggest they go to hospital to be checked out,” Angel said.

Then I felt myself and my girlfriends lift off the ground and be pulled together as we went straight up.

“I didn't think it would be nice staying there. I have all the evidence that the police should need if you want to press charges,” Angel said.

“Thank you so much. I think you saved my life.”

“You're welcome. I wish I could come before the action starts, but people don't call for help before the action starts, even in their minds. Anyway, first off, you don't owe me anything. I was happy to help,” Angel started.

“But...?” Karen questioned, the cynical person that she is.

Angel smiled at us, but it wasn't an upset smile. “But I could do with some help. Do any of you know what it is I'm trying to do?”

“You are part of that Angel foundation, looking after abused kids?” Isla asked more than stated.

“Yes, that is part of it, but I am also trying to set up a group of Shadow Angels to go out and save people,” she explained.

“Why do you call them shadow angels, doesn't that imply they would be vigilantes and how would we be able to help, we don't have any powers?” Karen asked.

“Unfortunately, going into homes, taking video evidence and saving kids is not a legal enterprise. Tonight, those three men will find they have a condition called twisted testicles or testicular torsion. The vomiting was just temporary vertigo. The testicle issue is treatable, but they could try and sue me if I was part of a legal superhero group. That is one reason and the other one answers your other question. A friend of mine has a very unique ability. She is able to copy people and transfer their consciousness into the copy, however, she can alter the copy so that her new self is a superhero. At the same time, they regress in age to about sixteen years old. She is paranoid and secretive because the process itself is uncomfortable and painful, taking six weeks, but the powers that be are already trying to get hold of her. She must not fall into the wrong hands. I, myself, protect her when she goes through the six weeks, but she is prepared to do that for a good cause,” Angel explained.

“Could the copy change sex?” I asked trying to contain the excitement that was trying to bubble up.

She smiled at me. “I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. It's a little complicated and I don't know it all, just what she has explained to me, but everyone has a part of their DNA that really matters, that can't be altered without changing who that person is. She calls them the read-only files. Anything else can be altered, so height, hair colour, you name it, most of it is in DNA expression and you can choose what you want.”

“So you want us to become Shadow Angels?” Karen asked.

“Not quite. I want you to apply. As you can imagine the cloning process is unpleasant and takes time. There is also the thought that power corrupts, so we have to be careful who we chose. I am not in charge of that side of things but the idea is to have a psychologist and a telepath interview you.”

“I want to apply,” I said almost before she finished. “I also know a lot of individuals who are transgender that would apply. Yes, a big motivating factor would be the complete genetic sex change where you can literally choose the body you want, but the group as a whole are very open-minded loving individuals who tend to care strongly about others. The idea of saving kids will appeal to most of them.”