West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide (37 page)

“Well, good luck, I
hope it works out with whoever it is,” said Cosmic Kid who still suspected that
Blue Star was after someone he shouldn’t be. The man had a serious
self-destructive streak.

“It never does,”
said Blue Star with a laugh. “But that hasn’t stopped me from trying yet.”

11:45 a.m.,
Thursday, June 20th, 2013

100
Lighthouse Road

West
Pacific, CA

Injured
Reserve stretched on like a Lady Liberty movie marathon: mind-numbing tedium
punctuated with long stretches of irrelevancy. Dr. Sterling responded to all of
her messages with
Put your
HoloBerry down and get rest!
Starfish didn’t respond at all. Both
of them probably thought that the more she knew about the investigation, the
more likely she would be to go do something foolish. She could call Paul, but
he would just take it the wrong way. So Seawolf puttered miserably around her
lighthouse. Every attempt to work on her art failed; the creative spirit seemed
to have abandoned her. No book was able to keep her interest. She looked
longingly at the ocean, but Dr.
Gavriel
had made it
quite clear that if she got any water in her ear, she might never hear again.
Restless and irritated, she turned to the Internet.

Reports on the
Season so far were mixed. The capture of Dr. Wraith and a host of minor
supervillains had catapulted the team to #4 in the West Coast Conference. It
was the highest the team had been in the rankings for years and Seawolf had
almost nothing to do with it. Then came the
Avalon
One
fiasco. While she sat on the sidelines, a tsunami hit West
Pacific. She had refused to evacuate from her lighthouse when Dr. Sterling
refused to let her help with disaster relief. Injured Reserve was Injured
Reserve, even if the city was submerged. Fortunately, her lighthouse survived
mostly intact, but the team’s ranking did not. The irony was that it wasn’t
just the tsunami but also Keystone leaving to join the High Rollers that had
dropped West Pacific Supers to #8. Keystone, who had sat out the Season and
done even less for the team than Seawolf, left, and everyone thought the team
was worthless without him. The worst insult was that the Cool Kids of LA were at
#7 and the only heroics they ever did were in their lame movies. The so-called
experts were discussing the whole situation constantly, but never stating the
obvious: the rankings were meaningless. What could you expect when the voters
for the rankings were retired supers whose last heroics had been done decades
ago and reporters who had never done anything more heroic than meeting a
deadline?

Eventually bored
with the Industry news, Seawolf turned to her fan site. She didn’t have much of
one, just the page that the team web designers had put up on the main WPS site.
That was her own fault; she had never actively cultivated a fan base the way
that Camille, for instance, always did. The last post on the Seawolf fan forums
was from eight days ago, someone advertising that they had a 2002 Seawolf
action figure to sell. There had been no responses. Seawolf was tempted to buy
the damn thing herself. She got even more annoyed when she linked over to the
other team member’s fan sites. She had expected Cosmic Kid to have a booming
site, but Blue Star? The man was an aging
superhunk
who had been involved in a public altercation with a superazzi! And Camille –
she had been gone for years, but apparently the lunatic masses had been
desperately awaiting her return. Forty-six posts just in the last two hours,
including several candid photos taken of Camille on patrol. Seawolf couldn’t
think of when the last time was that someone had taken a photo of her on
patrol. Not that she wanted to be stalked or anything, but it would be nice to
think that someone cared.

She was scrolling
irritably through the team pages when a link caught her eye: the Mutant Dating
Service. She paused for a moment and clicked. Seawolf had heard of the Mutant
Dating Service, of course, few Federal programs had ever attracted such a level
of public ridicule as the MDS did when it was proposed. Some people even went
so far as to say that President
Cardile
lost his
reelection bid due to his unabashed support for the program. Republican
Presidential candidate
Carlington
derided the program
as shamelessly wasteful Government spending. She remembered the headlines at
the time:
Taxpayer dollars
used to find
soulmates
for freaks
. Even
most mutants considered it to be excessive Federal meddling.

What the media failed
to play up, however, was that the program was shepherded through Congress with
bipartisan support and quietly signed into law by President
Carlington
early in his term. Seawolf knew that Republicans saw the MDS through a
different lens. The spread of China-backed Celestial revolutions and the rise
of the Evolved Coalition, especially in South and Central America, scared the
hell out of a lot of people, especially when mutant birthrates started to
skyrocket in Celestial countries. American military analysts talked about a
“mutant gap”, with many promoting genetic engineering and cloning programs. The
Mutant Dating Service was a benign, watered-down version of these ideas.

MDS was billed as a
way for mutants, particularly mutants with severe or obvious
mutancies
, to find someone to settle down with. However,
MDS also had several less publicized follow-up programs, such as genetic
counseling and financial support to cover health issues associated with
difficult pregnancies and challenging births that resulted from MDS matches.
Five years into the program, the public had largely forgotten about it, and it
was no longer considered controversial - or successful. The biggest obstacle
MDS continued to face was resistance from mutants themselves. Seawolf knew all
too well that only the lonely and desperate signed up for MDS.

The problem was that
she
was
lonely
and desperate. It made her angry to think of how easy it was for some of her
teammates. Camille had been a slut in high school and now she had Jules and Meghan.
Blue Star had a string of wives, girlfriends, and children too long to
remember. Cosmic Kid practically had to fight to keep the women away. Whereas
for someone like her or Starfish, it was almost impossibly difficult. Life was
patently unfair for obvious mutants.

Of course, there was
Paul. She still couldn’t fathom why he had asked her out. It would never work
between them. She’d learned the hard way back in college that normal men didn’t
see mutants the same way they did other girls. Most were repulsed by the idea
of being intimate with an obvious mutant. Even worse were the fetishists, who
viewed scoring with a mutant as some sort of personal victory. They didn’t
stick around for a second date, or even until the next morning, for that
matter. No, mutants like her needed to stick to their own kind. But the rare
hook-ups she’d had over the years - usually meeting up with a fellow desperate
and lonely obvious mutant at a conference - just weren’t enough. Seawolf
sighed. She was going to turn 40 next year and the way she felt when Paul
looked at her was one more reminder that what she really wanted was a committed
relationship. Plus, her fantasy that Grey Wolf would stop in to visit Blue
Star, pass her in the hallway, and spontaneously ask her out, didn’t seem
likely to happen.

Seawolf clicked over
to “Find the MDS location nearest to you!” and typed in her zip code. There was
an MDS office in the Department of Super Affairs West Pacific City regional
branch office. The building was downtown, not more than a few miles from the
harbor fish market, where she was planning to go tomorrow anyway. Surely it
wouldn’t hurt to stop by and get some more information.

The DSA
regional branch office took up several floors and Seawolf didn’t want to ask
directions, so it took her a while to find the right place. She waited until no
one was around before pushing open the door marked “MDS”, which led into a
small waiting room decorated with posters of happy mutant couples. Over the
receptionist’s desk was a disturbing image of a winged man and a reptilian
woman looking down lovingly at a little girl who was covered in both feathers
and scales. Seawolf shuddered.

A side door opened
and a young woman with a wide face and bright yellow eyes came out. “Welcome to
MDS!” she said with a broad smile. “My name is Carol. Are you here for an
intake interview?”

“No. I mean, not
really. I just wanted to pick up some information,” Seawolf said awkwardly.

The young woman
beamed at her. “Well, we have brochures, but since you’ve already come all the
way downtown, why don’t you fill out some forms and then we can do a quick
intake? I’ll answer any questions you have and enter you into the system, so if
later on you decide to enroll in the program, you’ll already be ready to go.”
She held out a clipboard loaded with papers and a ballpoint pen.

“I guess so,” said
Seawolf as she reluctantly took the clipboard.

It took longer than
she anticipated to fill out the form, more due to her own anxiety than the
questions being asked. She finally handed everything back to Carol, who gave
her another brilliant smile, and invited her into the side room, which was a
smaller office with a desk and computer. Carol sat down on the far side and
Seawolf nervously took a chair.

Carol looked at her
through strangely unblinking yellow eyes. “Now, we have a whole list of
questions to go through, which I know might be a little tedious, but they
really do help us help you. I’ll just read them off one by one and you can tell
me if I’m going too fast or if you’d rather not answer any of them, okay?”

“Okay,” said
Seawolf, bracing herself.

“First, let me read
over the demographic information you filled out. Stop me if anything’s wrong.”
She picked up the form that Seawolf had filled out and typed the answers into
her computer as she talked. “Okay, so you’re 39, female, a professional
superhero and non-practicing Greek Orthodox, with two years of college and
interests listed as swimming, fishing, and water sports. And you prefer to go
by the name ‘Seawolf’. Is that all correct?”

“That’s what I
wrote,” said Seawolf gruffly.

“Excellent, alright
then. Let’s get into the
nitty
gritty!” She smiled
broadly again. “Heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual?”

“Heterosexual.”

Carol nodded and
inputted the information. “What are your mutant factors?” she asked.

“I have fur and
scales if that’s what you mean,” Seawolf said with a frown.

“Special abilities?”

“Superior senses,
better than normal strength, excellent underwater abilities.”

“Any special
disabilities?” Carol said, her yellow eyes bright and sympathetic.

Seawolf stared back
blankly. “Special disabilities?” she asked.

Carol slid her chair
out from behind her computer so that she could give Seawolf her undivided
attention. If the woman looked any more sympathetic, she would melt, Seawolf
thought with annoyance. “Do you have a mermaid problem?” Carol asked, her voice
thick with compassion.

What the hell?
Seawolf had a
mental image of mermaids swarming her lighthouse. If that happened, she’d call
the team, or perhaps exterminators, not the Mutant Dating Service. “What’s a
mermaid problem?”

Carol straightened
up, looking a little relieved. “Well, if you don’t know what a mermaid problem
is, you probably don’t have one,” she said with a smile. “It’s when you can’t…
well, it’s when you have a special disability that prevents you from being
intimate with someone else. Not that MDS is only about sex,” she quickly added.
“We’re here to help you make an emotional connection with a special someone,
regardless of your sexual orientation, life goals, mutant factors, or any
special disabilities you may have.”

“No mermaid
problem,” said Seawolf curtly.

“Excellent,” said
Carol, returning to her computer with a smile. “Speaking of life goals, what
are yours? Specifically, what are you looking for here at MDS: a relationship,
a life mate, the future father of your children?”

Seawolf flinched. “I
don’t want to have children,” she said. “I’d just like to date, with hopes of
finding a life mate, I guess.” She felt awkward saying the words aloud.
“Wanting children isn’t a requirement, is it?” she asked as an afterthought.

“Nope, not at all,”
said Carol, though Seawolf thought she looked slightly disappointed. She
wondered if MDS employees got a commission for every mutant baby that resulted
from their matchmaking efforts.

“Alright, now enough
about you; let’s talk about what you’re looking for,” said Carol cheerfully.
“Would any of the following be obstacles to your emotional attachment to
another individual: exotic appearance, powerful mutant abilities, strong odors,
unusual skin color or texture, wings, or other extra appendages?” She looked up
at Seawolf brightly, waiting for her response.

Seawolf wasn’t sure
what was worse: the thought that she was about to cross out from consideration
whole categories of mutants whose only offense was their physical appearance,
or the thought that somewhere else right now some other mutant might be doing
the same thing to her. It was bizarre really. She had come to MDS to get away
from being objectified, and yet here she was being required to objectify
others.

Carol noticed her
hesitation. “I know that these are hard questions,” she said, “but it’s
important to be honest. It’s better to nix someone here for a physical factor
than to do it in front of them. If you absolutely know that there’s no way you
could be attracted to someone who looks like a giant cockroach, it’s a lot
better if you tell me now rather than having to sit through a really
uncomfortable date, because that’s not fair to either of you.”