Chapter 46: New Challengers

Romaine's POV

Last night was quite the the thriller for me, if I do say so myself.

**Flashback**

Walking down the street of my neighborhood, I clenched tightly to the reverse inhibitor that I'd gotten from Cas in my coat pocket. I guess the excitement of having the rest of my life back distracted me from the fact that I had no plan, which I had only realized when I found myself knocking on my own house's door.

Now standing on my front porch staring my other dead in the eyes, I did what any normal person would do: I activated my superspeed, in order to bypass her reflexes, and stabbed her in the neck with the reverse-inhibitor. Child's play, really.

"Sorry mom." I whispered softly, as her body slowly lost consciousness into my arms.

I'd brought her to the couch and placed her to rest, then went and made a nice cup of Green Tea for her.

As soon as the aroma of the tea had filled the room, her body's natural instincts woke her up from her induced slumber, in order to consume this pleasant cup of tea. When her eyes regained normal functionality, they instantly widened as she saw me. Jumping out of the couch, she tightly hugged me and had began sobbing, only narrowly avoiding spilling the boiling hot tea over both of us.

After I finally got her to let go of me, and was done avoiding odd questions, I finally got to sleep in my own bed for the first time in... forever.

**End of Flashback**

Walking up the sloped street to Cas' house, the slight chill of the environment reminded me of the upcoming season, and my personal favorite: Winter. Taking another sip of my green tea, I got a great feeling of relief, as the swallowed warm liquid flowed down into my system, spreading heat to my lungs and stomach. Calmly exhaling a warm breath of air, I stopped at Cas' doorstep. Skipping the unnecessary formalities, I went straight to opening the door and entering inside, rather than knocking and waiting.

Exiting the elevator, everyone was already awake and alert.

"Well it seems the speedster arrives last, yet again." Kyle remarked

"Well it's not like we had anything in particular that'd cause any urgency." I chuckled

"Well we were waiting on you in order to begin our information discussion session." informed the Prince

"Well I'm here now." I said, approaching the group, "So what's up?"

"We think we might've uncovered the mystery behind your friend's unusual collision with that building." said the Prince

"Hm. Go on.."

"While Cassandra and I were here in the lab last night, I decided to look into something that was really bothering me a lot since earlier that day, and something I know has plagued all your thoughts at some point: how did Dondre survive being pummeled by a 50 ton building almost completely unscathed?"

"Well I haven't really given it much thought to be honest." said Dondre, "I just know I'm that awesome. Not even death can beat me."

"Hm, how quaint.. Anyway, Cassandra and I had decided to do some investigating of our own."

"And I'm sure you'll all be surprised at what we found." Cas added

"My dear Cassandra, would you mind bringing up the footage?"

"Sure thing."

Turning toward the monitors, Cas remotely cast what was on her tablet onto the big screens, and played the footage of when Dondre was hit by the building.

Dondre and Kyle were talking about some.. device, but then they were interrupted by the building in question being hurled toward Dondre and slamming him hundreds of feet away. The video then cut to a different angle, several minutes later, where the building was now just sitting on top of him.

"Alright, now for the part where you explain how awesome I am." said Dondre

"Cassandra, please apply the filter." requested the Prince

Cas slightly nodded and tapped a bit on her tablet, then replayed the footage.

Restarting from Kyle and Dondre's conversation, everything was normal, up until the point where Dondre got smacked by the building. Cassandra froze the video before it made impact. Looking at it, there was a weird highlighted yellow blur around Dondre, similar to the color of his lightning.

"This," Cassandra paused, "the footage that you're watching right now has been recorded at 30 frames per second (fps), only being able to capture each frame 0.03 seconds apart. I froze this video at the exact frame before the building made collision with Dondre, though it's insufficient; seeing as the frame right after this, Dondre is already in the process of movement, and in the frame before it, the blur that you're seeing isn't present. This would not be a problem however, if public places took the effort to upgrade their cameras to a 60 fps."

"Mhm, very interesting." Dondre jested, "Now can you please get to explaining my sheer awesomeness? And whatever that blur around me is."

"You're all so impatient.." She mumbled, "Anyway, when we first saw the original frozen frame of before Dondre was hit, the Prince was able to pointed out a very small detail; something I'll admit to not noticing at first."

Bringing up the original frozen frame, Cas magnified it by about a hundred.

"Now I probably would've noticed this if the pixels per inch (PPI) of the Image Resolution were better. But that slight blur that you're seeing in this image, is Dondre vibrating."

"Vibrating?" Dondre questioned, "But I didn't do anything like that."

"Hold on lad," stopped the Prince, "the lass wasn't done; there's more."

"After detecting this," Cas continued, "the Prince and I created a digital replica of a visual vibrometer, called the DVV."

"Why does vibrometer sound so familiar?" Questioned Dondre

"A vibrometer's the device used to detect and measure vibrations without having to make physical contact between the device and the surface in question." I informed him

"That's correct, though the visual vibrometer that we created only works with visual input, such a images or videos." Cas confirmed

"Hm, never heard of it." Dondre dismissed

Cas brought back up the filtered version of the frozen image, that had the highlighted blur

"I modified it to only detect close-paced movement, which would filter out normal motion that might've been falsely detected, then added a highlighting feature to the detection and scalar functions, in which any entity that is detected is highlighted and tracked by the pixel, which may in some cases causes a blur, and then the hue of the highlighting is color-coded based on the magnitude, abiding by Windsor and Newton's 24-Model Color Wheel, with red indicating the lowest, and blue the highest."

"So that's why the blur around Dondre in that picture is yellow." I concluded

"That's right. In that instant, Dondre was vibrating at 139 times the gravitational constant, or 'g's if you want. A single g is 9.81 meters per second (m/s), meaning that in less than 0.03 seconds, Dondre was able to accelerate his body to vibrating at 1363.6 m/s; essentially 4909 km/h."

"Well thanks for the science lesson." Dondre scratched his head, "That last part was kinda cool thought."

"Now for the fun part." She went on, bringing back up the video of the stationary building on top of Dondre, "This is roughly a few minutes after Dondre had first been hit. Now If we were to apply the filter with a detection-only protocol, then as you can see..."

"There's a black line there." I pointed out

"Precisely." Cas stated

Now looking at the filtered footage, (everything was grey and extremely faded, with only a few contrasts between shades and memory of the previous unfiltered video helping know where was what), there was a stationary black line at where Dondre was supposed to be.

"So Cas," started Kyle, "Tell us, what are we looking at here?"

"The grey background and lack of other objects is just what happens when the DVV is in detection-only mode, and that black outline you see there, is Dondre." Cas explained

"But you said that blue would've been the highest. So how's it black?"

"Well the highest g-value recordable by the DVV is 750, which is the lowest recognizable shade of blue. Anything beyond that, and it comes up as black; though the Prince and I have estimated his vibrational speed at this point to be around 830 gs. Which is roughly 29,300 km/h; over 6 times the speed of sound."

"Woah." Dondre awed, "Now that, is impressive."

"But before you'd mentioned that you didn't consciously vibrate, so it must've been your reflexes behind this." pointed out Kyle

"And the speed at which you was vibrating increased 6 fold when you were knocked out." Added the Prince

"And you're not seeing a blur of any kind because this is all happening on the cellular level. We had to zoom in by almost a thousand times the normal magnification in order to get these results. Each of your individual cells were vibrating at this speed, causing your body to almost phase through the building, but instead of that, you'd actually shifted the density of the air molecules between you, the building and the ground, causing enough resistance to keep the overwhelming force of the building off of you."

"Woah." Dondre excited, "Subconsciously vibrating to 800 gravitational what's-you-ma-call-it, moving six times faster than sound, avoiding death and density shifting? Why aren't I the number one hero?"

"Maybe because you're too damn cocky for you're own good." I mumbled under my breath

Hallelujah, the crime alarm to the rescue.

"I kinda missed that sound to be honest." I said, calmly listening to the alarm go off and watching the annoying red lights flare

"Bloody hell." sighed the Prince, "This thing again?"

"Where is it?" Kyle questioned Cas, who had reactively gone over to the keyboard and began typing

She brought up live footage of two girls attacking somewhere Downtown, at one of the gas stations.

"Montego Bay's Gully, right by the gas station."

"Well let's go, number 2 hero." Dondre teased

"Hold on you guys." Cas stopped us, "Something's wrong."

Instead of explaining her claim like we'd expected, she was instead silent and frantically tapping away at her keyboard.

"Well what is it?" questioned the Prince

After a couple more seconds of silence, she finally responded.

"I'm not getting an X-Gene reading from these two." Cas stated "If the satellite had picked it up, then it would've notified us as soon as they'd started attacking. The alarm we got was pinged by a local store across the street setting off their silent alarm. And I'm more than sure that the satellite's functioning properly, because I just checked."

"Then maybe they came from another rift." suggested Kyle

"I already reprogrammed the satellite to ping us when that occurs." She defended

"Then what in the hell are these two?" Kyle posed

"Well there's only one way to find out." Dondre smiled, "Romaine?"

After very little consideration, I decided it was better to embrace Dondre's single-mindedness in order to go help those in danger.

"Eh, sure, why not." sighed, walking to get my suit, "I'm sure you guys can figure this out while we're there."