The Law of Averages

Book 2: Chapter 171: Tunnel Vision

By the morning, the fires had been put out in the Madison property. The whole affair had been deemed an accident very quickly. The flight recorder had been recovered, the surviving pilot, interviewed. Police and fire trucks had left, salvage teams had arrived. Men in orange coveralls were picking through the wreckage, while others broke it down and transported it away.

The senator himself had spent most of the night drumming up support on television by playing a sad victim of circumstance, whose home had been destroyed through no fault of his own. The value of said home went unmentioned. Nobody quite had the balls to question Madison's financial state right after his flaming lawn had been plastered across state news. Some might later call him an opportunist, but none could deny the effectiveness of his pleas. And it made for damn good television.

The salvage team was under the employ of one of Anastasia's subsidiary companies. They were allowed onto the property without complaint; something Anastasia had immediately proclaimed to be a trap. According to the old matron, Madison was almost certainly watching them, hoping to catch the team in some kind of nefarious act. He would assume that their purpose was to plant surveillance, an expectation which would be neatly foiled by the fact that Dan had already done so.

Anastasia explained this to Dan with the same kind of glee as a little girl opening her Christmas present and finding a box of puppies. Except, the child in this case was a psychopath and was looking forward to drowning them all. She just had that sort of face. And she kept cackling like a supervillain in the spotlight. The two had met very briefly in the morning, at Anastasia's New York office. The consensus on how to proceed still remained 'wait and see', but Anastasia seemed satisfied with the situation. Things did appear to be going her way, after all.

While Madison was occupied at his house, Anastasia's little minions were swarming all of the man's other properties. They would plant more surveillance, both on the off-chance that he might miss something, and to justify the salvage team's lack of action. Their work was meant to be caught. It would help sell the narrative they were going for, and hopefully ensure that his house would be seen as his only safe haven. It was a not-so-subtle push, but one that had every chance of success. They weren't even selling a lie. The man's home was a fortress.

Madison would remain on site during the salvage, which was still ongoing. So long as there were people on his property, he would be there to watch them. His interviews were done from just outside his scorched front gates, with the man framed by twisted metal and blackened trees. The salvage team was also usually in frame, upgraded men and women breaking down pieces of plane with their bare hands and chucking them into an oversized dump truck. Madison rarely glanced towards them, but Dan knew where the man's powers would be focused.

The team, for their part, knew nothing. They were genuinely just a group of contractors who were doing their best to clean up after a plane crash. They would break down the largest pieces, and use a mix of magnetic clamps and specialized upgrades to scoop up anything larger than an apple. The directional mics were much smaller than that, so most should remain undisturbed. Once the salvage team was gone, Madison would be forced to conclude that he'd either missed something, or they'd genuinely not planted anything.

"Pride will be his downfall," Anastasia had said. "He won't believe he's capable of being deceived, not on his own land. And he'll be right, too. He just has no idea that the deed has already been done."

After his briefing with Anastasia, Dan spent the morning with Abby, brainstorming ways to refine his veil and running tests. They mostly consisted of Dan standing in a different room, eyes closed and ears plugged, and attempting to sense where Abby was drumming her fingers. His veil could pick up vibrations, technically speaking. It could feel the tiny impacts of Abby's fingers against the wood, could feel how the wave propagated through the material, making microscopic shifts until the force bled away. He could feel these things... if he focused absolutely on a single point.

When he flooded the entire room with his veil, and asked Abby to randomly pick a location to tap, he struggled to feel much of anything. His instincts were tuned towards vast changes in material composition, finding plastic amidst concrete, or live flesh against linen, things of that nature. As a scouting tool, it made sense. Dan didn't need finely honed senses to figure out where a person was. He just needed to bump against them with his veil. What he was attempting now was several orders of magnitude more complicated.

Dan wanted to hear through his veil. He wanted to parse sound waves as they splashed against the walls, to understand the words by the way they shifted matter. He just had no idea how to do it. His veil didn't translate sensation in a manner that made it possible. He was essentially attempting to fabricate synesthesia. Dan eventually concluded it would require more time, and probably some research. In the meantime, there were other methods he could explore to accomplish the same thing.

The easiest method, and the most obvious, was to open a tiny portal inside his own ear. This neatly solved the visibility problem of his portals, because he plant them just about anywhere in a room and still hear what was going on, more or less. He tested it by having Abby mutter random phrases for him to repeat, keeping her voice low as if she were whispering to a companion. Dan's house had plenty of nooks and crannies to hide a portal in, and though he couldn't perfectly make out the words, he could often get enough snippets to make sense of things.

This new trick was immediately declared a tentative success, and Dan stuck it in his metaphorical pocket for later training. He hadn't really worked out all the kinks, quite yet. The most pressing issue was one of range. Dan preferred to use an exit door inside his ear, rather than an entrance. The difference was one of positioning, and limitations. Dan could only open a door from the surface of something solid.

Portals were as wide or as narrow as he wanted them to be, so it was entirely possible for him to use a narrow layer of his own skin, but the feeling was extremely jarring. Likewise, he had no idea what would happen if the portal snapped shut. Would that upper layer just vanish into the Gap? That would probably be extremely uncomfortable. Dan hadn't dared test it, especially not on something inside his own head.

There was always more to learn, when it came to Natural abilities. Always something to improve. Dan was grateful for this aspect of his powers, as it gave him something productive to work on at all times. Even so, Dan could only occupy himself with his powers for so long before boredom and frustration took over. After three hours of fruitless experimentation, Abby took a long look at Dan's face, and declared them done.

She sat him down the couch, left him to stew while she made a quick phone call, and then announced, "We're getting lunch with Cornelius!"

This turned out to be an excellent idea. The trio met at a pizza buffet, styled like a hollowed out tomato. Cornelius had secured himself a corner booth. He was in full uniform, and eating for free. He had three large pizzas arrayed out in front of him, one covered in mushrooms, one with pepperoni, and the other plain. As Dan approached the table, Cornelius picked a slice from each pizza, stacked them on top of each other, and took an enormous bite.

"That's disgusting," Dan observed blandly, as he moved aside for Abby to sit. "You're gonna get indigestion, eating like that."

"My stomach is iron!" Cornelius belched loudly, then took another bite. Abby rolled her eyes and flung a napkin in his general direction. They bantered back and forth for a while, making small talk about the state of the city.

"Gregoir's pet vigilantes have been keeping their heads down," Cornelius informed them. "We haven't recruited quite as many as he would've liked, but the rest are at least being more subtle with their actions. No more daytime patrols in full regalia. And nobody is throwing up online videos, so we can be thankful for that."

Dan grimaced at the reminder. "Any news on Galeforce."

"He's in the wind!" Cornelius grinned at his own joke. "No social media posts in a month, and nobody is taking credit for his disappearance. I suspect he's relocating across the country, where maybe people won't be quite as happy to shoot at him. There's just no way that he quits the game entirely. He has too much notoriety to do anything else, and the money seemed good. Besides, he got to cut loose. Got a taste of his own power, you know? Kids that age, it leaves an impression."

Dan grunted unhappily. He was personally aware of just how true that was. He searched for a way to change the subject, and his brain automatically drifted towards his own power training. It wasn't something Cornelius could directly help him with. No matter how much the cop might have inferred, the two still maintained a polite fiction about the source of Dan's extremely flexible 'mutation'. Maybe there was some way to subtly lead him in the direction Dan wanted? Surely Cornelius had trained to master his own upgrade.

"How's your hearing?" Dan blurted. Abby gave him an exasperated glance.

Cornelius blinked at him, but accepted the non-sequitur. "Better than yours, I can tell you that."

Right. That was obvious. Dan flailed for something else, and said, "Can you hear with, like, just vibrations?"

"I'm pretty sure all hearing is just vibrations," Cornelius pointed out with an amused smirk.

"Yeah, but," Dan waved his arms in a way that was meant to buy time. "Okay. So, I once saw this Western, where a guy stabbed his knife into the ground and listened to it, and that told him how many horses were coming his way." Dan was pretty sure he'd gotten that movie detail wrong, but the gist of it remained.

"Oh." Cornelius paused, stroking his chin with greasy fingers. "Well, I can't do that. I'm pretty sure you'd need a specialized upgrade for it. I can put my ear against a wall and hear someone talking on the other side, but it's not like my upgrade makes the sound waves any less distorted. That's not a me problem, that's a physics problem."

Dan frowned. "So what do you do when you need to hear what's going on in another room?"

Cornelius shrugged, then reached for his utility belt. He pulled out a long flexible cord, tipped with a narrow, black sensor, and attached to a small box at his hip. He held it out for Dan to examine. The tip of the thing was tapered to a sharp point, kind of like a nail.

"I usually just use this," Cornelius explained, "or something like it. The tip functions as a visual and audio device. It'll slip right through sheetrock, and can bend enough to get around wood supports. Not great resolution, but good enough for a fast breach."

Dan stared at the thing, feeling very, very dumb. "You've got a gadget to solve the problem." He turned to Abby, who looked like she'd just sucked down a lemon. "Look, honey, he's got a gadget to solve the problem."

Cornelius glanced between the two of them, eyebrow raised. "Was it something I said?"

"No," Dan said. "Nothing you said. I'm just... reflecting on what tunnel vision feels like. Don't mind me." He sighed, rubbing his face. "Say, Cornelius, you know of any tech shops that sell this fancy cop stuff?"