#3 - Genius

 This was written by Christopher "Wani" K and may only be used on my site. SKI, Super Kids Initiation and all other names are trademark of Waniou. If SKI or SCI, or any event in this series take place, or are used somewhere else, it is entirely by coincidence.

Story #3

Rita

Prologue

"Well?" 

Oh god, here it came. "Well what?"

"How'd you do?"

"I did... okay," I knew that evasion was never enough though.

"Okay for you, or okay for a normal person?"

I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. I'd learned pretty quickly that there were two types of people when they encountered my sister and myself; those who thought it was some kind of trick, and those who were impressed and scared.

Emily was... a third? One of the few very supportive people but still. We didn't really like the attention, "Okay for me?"

The problem with being several years younger than your classmates meant that you were never as quick or agile as them and she easily snatched the bit of paper out of my hands. "Jesus Christ, Rita, you got 98%? That's amazing!"

Oh there was the blood in my cheeks again. I had to look like a small tomato at this point, damn it. "I know but..."

She wrapped her arms around me. "Don't be so modest. I mean, you'd already graduated anyway but you're twelve years old and you just got almost perfect marks in the last exam for your Bachelors. You and Amy are amazing!"

I mean... she wasn't wrong...

Genius

"What'cha doing?"

Holy crap, where did he come from? James had a good habit of sneaking up behind people like that.

I'm Rita by the way. Genius and all that. Which has its perks, but when you graduate from college before you hit puberty and apparently they don't like letting pre-teens start their doctorate just yet... it leads to a lot of downtime.

"Research?" I replied, trying to not sound suspicious while closing as many browser tabs as possible.

"That's interesting research," he said with a grin. "Sorry, I'm just being nosey."

James was somewhat of an enigma. While Amy, my twin sister, and I had been out of school for years, so spent most of our time at the SCI, James was, as far as I was aware, still school age and yet, he spent his whole day there too. Tom did as well actually, and we'd never been given a decent explanation as to why.

Which led to him sometimes just... lingering around us while we worked.

And, to be fair, perhaps going Wiki surfing does not technically count as research, although surely getting into an argument with people on the internet about the Deathly Hallows counted as sharpening my mental skills? Yeah, let's go with that.

Look, I swear it was relevant.

"But anyway, apparently once Mike and Dharma get here, we're doing a group activity today. I got asked to tell you,"

"Ah, thanks," I said, watching him as he left. Those were always very hit or miss. Supposedly they were supposed to both help us bond as a group whole developing our abilities, but Amy and I never saw the point. There was some amount of overlap in skills between our smarts, and Tom and Mike's psychic abilities but Dharma's ability was just being incredibly strong and James...

Well I still had no idea what he could even do or why he was even here. He'd never shown a hint at any ability, when we'd asked Mr Matthewson, he'd told us he didn't know either and Amy had asked Tom and Tom just said it wasn't any of her business.

So when we could be doing something actually helpful, not that we really were at that point in time, instead we were stuck doing this group activity.

In any case, I felt like I'd been successfully distracted from my work by being confused about James, so I got up and walked out of the room. Amy glanced over in my direction, but she went back to the hopefully actually helpful thing she was doing before speaking up. "Giving up?"

"For now," I said, but I'd decided on a slightly different mission.

Tom spent a lot of his free time in his own room, usually just reading books or on his laptop. Book this time. "No." And that was a pretty typical response for him.

"I-"

"You want me to tell you what James can do. And no, I won't," he was always very to the point but that's what came with him knowing what you were going to say before you did.

"But you do know then," I pointed out.

He grinned at me. "Sharp as always, Rita. But also no, Mike is right when he says he doesn't know." It did always throw one off when he started the next phase of the conversation before you realised you were going to.

"Why not?"

"Mike's a bit of a shit psychic really," He probably could have worded that better, and the swearing sounded a bit wrong from someone as young as him but his point was right. Tom's psychic abilities were incredible and compared to him, Mike was like a baby to a world class sprinter.

So on to the next question. "No, that wasn't me watching you the other night."

I hadn't seen it myself, Mike and Dharma had gone into the school by themselves while Amy and I watched the perimeter but Dharma had mentioned afterwards that Mike had sensed someone on the roof watching them. It had been in the back of my mind, but Amy nor I had talked to anyone about it since then. So, I opened my mouth to respond but he cut me off again. "Look, I don't care that much about your little superhero group that much. It's a pretty stupid idea, which is why I don't want any part of it."

I nodded slowly and thanked him, then headed out of the room, before his voice stopped me at the door. "Just... Be careful, okay? Don't let yourselves get in too deep to all this."

And with that ominous word of warning, I moved on to stage two of my mission.

James himself.

I found him in the indoor gymnasium the SCI had handy, practicing basketball. Ahh, I felt a wave of realisation come over me.

"We're doing basketball then?" 

James nodded and missed his shot. "Apparently. I think I need to practice."

"Yeah you're one to talk," I said, taking the ball off him. My throw didn't even make it to the hoop and he failed at suppressing a chuckle. "Look, sports isn't my thing, okay?"

"It's fine," he said, fetching the ball before sitting on the ground under the hoop. "So why are you here?"

"To ask you exactly that same question,"

"Again?" 

I sighed and sat down next to him. "You know me. I don't like not knowing things."

"I can get that, you know, but there's no big mystery. I can't really do anything," he said. 

"Uh huh," I said, looking him up and down. "So why are you here, at an institute for gifted kids?"

He shrugged, then patted me on the knee, stood up and walked off. "Nowhere else to go, I guess."

The guy was irritating sometimes, I swear.

And so, with my mission for answers a complete failure, I returned to our makeshift lab, where Mike had apparently arrived and was talking to Amy. "Oh hey! Amy says we're doing some group activity?"

"Basketball, apparently,"

"Oh? That's a bit weird," he said. "Hey, you know what would be cool? Tug a war with Dharma against the rest of us."

"Nah," she said as she entered the room. "For one thing, I want a challenge, and for another, I suggested it a while ago and Tom was very adamantly against it for some reason."

I nodded. "Came out with a bunch of stuff about how unsafe the game is or something."

"Right," Mike said, clearly not believing that reason any more than the rest of us. "But before we do, can we have a quick catch up?"

It had been a few days since our mission at the school; Mike only came to the SCI twice a week and so while Dharma, Amy and I had talked about it a bit, this was the first time we'd been together as a group to discuss things.

"Okay, so firstly, are we still all good with this?" he asked, pulling up a handy nearby chair and sitting down. I noted he was specifically looking at me when he asked that. Of course, he'd read my mind and Tom's warning earlier was still gently brewing.

Might as well come out with it then. "Tom seems to think we're being stupid and warned me that we shouldn't get in too deep with this."

Dharma stepped forward from her perch, leaning against the wall. "Too deep... with what?"

I shrugged. "Fighting crime, I guess?"

"More importantly, was he the guy on the roof?" she asked.

I shook my head. "No, that was the first thing he said."

"But is he lying?"

"No," Mike said. "I would have been able to tell if it was Tom, but also, I don't think Tom would lie about that."

That was definitely true. Tom didn't seem like the type to lie much at all. I suspected when nobody could ever lie to him, it meant he found the idea of lying to others to be a strange idea.

"So who was it then? Do we just have a fan?"

"Or an enemy?" Amy pointed out.

Not long after that, Mr Matthewson arrived to usher us into the gymnasium to begin the basketball. Oh goody.

He'd decided we'd play boys versus girls. I wasn't entirely sure which team had the upper hand. While men typically had higher than average performances in sports over women and this was certainly also true at our age level, for one thing, they had Tom who was the youngest of the group by far and wasn't exactly large for his age, and also, we had Dharma who was much stronger and faster than any man or woman.

Unfortunately for us, while Dharma was definitely faster than any of them, that ability didn't translate into an ability to make baskets. Turns out basketball is a different skill set to martial arts. Who knew?

There's also a somewhat common misconception that geniuses are good at sports. After all, throwing a ball is a matter of simple physics, and if you ignore friction, the parabola that a ball follows is a simple high school equation that Amy and I had mastered since most people were still struggling with "maths with letters". Unfortunately again, knowing how the equations work does not translate into hand eye coordination. So I made at least one basket! Amy made two. Not that I was being competitive. 

In any case, we figured out a strategy pretty quickly. For one thing, we didn't understand sports enough to come up with any sort of complicated strategy, and for another, that was a pointless exercise when the opposing team had two mind readers and could instantly tell what our plans were. And so, simple strategy it was: try to get the ball to Dharma and try to get her to carry us.

It worked for the most part. The game was only ten minutes a side, but with twenty seconds left, we were ahead by two points and James had the ball. Dharma raced over to intercept the ball and he tried to fake sidestepping around her, but she was too quick to fall for it. 

I was positioned perfectly behind him when it happened though. He took a long shot at the hoop. It went wide and would have missed the hoop by at least half a metre.

And yet, as I watched, the ball curved in the air. Not by enough to notice if you weren't standing where I was, and yet, it clearly did.

The ball made it in.

Mr Matthewson blew the whistle. The game was over and we'd lost but that was the furthest thing from my mind. I glanced over at Amy and she had a furrowed brow that I had seen many times when she was figuring things out.

"Did you see that?" she asked when I walked over to him and I nodded. Apparently it wasn't as unnoticeable as I'd thought.

"No way that was going in," I agreed.

"No way in hell," 

The boys team were exchanging high fives, and I noticed Tom steal a look at me with a knowing look in his eye and that confirmed it for me. Whatever that was, was whatever James's ability was. But how.

Amy and I plopped ourselves down against the wall of the gymnasium, while Tom, James and Dharma retired to do whatever it was they were going to do for the rest of the day. Mike, however, came over to talk.

"So I have a question for you two," he said, sitting down in front of us and wiping the sweat from his forehead. "How do I do what I can do?"

It was a question I'd thought about before, particularly with regards to Tom because all scientific evidence said that mind reading was impossible. And yet, we had clear evidence of it in front of us on many, many occasions and no other rational explanation.

"Biology isn't really our specialty," Amy admitted straight away. "I studied physics and Rita did chemistry."

I nodded. "And there's a decent amount of overlap between chemistry and biology but I haven't studied enough to be sure. Plus, for some reason the SCI doesn't have the budget for us to perform neuroscience. But we have a theory."

"Your brain works," Amy said, "by the neurons that make it up sending electrical signals throughout your brain. We think that yours and Tom's brains are somehow able to pick up on these signals from other people's brains. This shouldn't really be possible, the electrical signal doesn't really go too far outside of your skull but for some reason, you two can do it."

Mike nodded. "And Dharma just has really highly developed muscles and reflexes?"

I nodded. "More or less, yes."

"What about you two? Because there's more than just having good brains, right?"

Amy and I exchanged another look. "We're not sure..."

Mike sighed and crossed his arms. "Okay, so I'd rather actually ask you and not just read your minds because healthy communication and all, so I'm not trying to read your minds right now, but I can still definitely tell you're lying there."

I sighed. "It's dumb, really."

"No, go on," he said. "I know you're embarrassed but it's fine."

"We... weren't originally twins," I said. "When our mother was pregnant with us, she was told we were quadruplets. Four heart beats, four fetuses and everything. There was absolutely zero doubt about it."

"And then, a few months into the pregnancy... two were gone," Amy said.

"Gone?"

"Gone. Not a trace," I confirmed.

"Like... miscarried?"

I shook my head. "No, although that's how mom interpreted it. She was absolutely devastated. But there was no other heartbeat, no other fetuses, just... nothing."

Mike began scratching his chin intently. "And you two think that you... what... absorbed the other two? Stole their brainpower somehow?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, it just seems like a strange thing to happen. And... I don't know, it just feels kinda wrong? Like we somehow cannibalised our siblings or something?"

Mike just laughed at that. "Now you two should know that that makes no sense and besides, you weren't even born yet, it's not like you can be held responsible at all."

"Yeah we know, like I said, it's dumb,"

Mike stood up and rubbed our shoulders. "No, it's fine. I'm glad you two told me."

I rubbed his hand, then stood up and looked over at the basketball hoop. "I suppose as well, it's not like it would be the strangest thing in the world when we have psychics like you and Tom running around."

Mike was following my gaze, staring at the basketball hoop. "Or someone whose mind says that he has no special abilities at all, and yet, can somehow change the direction of a ball in midair."

--- END ---