CHAPTER ONE :: FIRST TASTE OF DISCOVERY

The first jolt shocked Claire so much she gasped and tripped over her own feet, attracting… well… no attention, but the moment was embarrassing enough to her on its own. It was her first day and, though she'd so far managed to remain relatively out of trouble's radar, it seemed to have decided to target her just as every student, it seemed, poured out of the front doors to launch themselves at the waiting buses beyond. Picture the blonde geek in glasses with her butt in the air and voilà, that was Claire Frost, who wanted nothing more than to melt into the floor. Pity her powers only froze.

Congratulations. As if you didn't already feel like an incompetent idiot already, she thought to herself wryly as she was rammed into a few times by eager students while attempting to straighten herself without making an even bigger "frosh fool" of herself.

Scrambling to her feet and blushing to the roots of her hair, Claire ducked her head and waded her way out without further embarrassing herself. Once safely seated in the bus, she promptly decided to forget the weird sensation that had started it all. She'd been spacing out after a nerve-wracking day of power placement in the gym, that was all. Being successfully placed in the hero class had been a small achievement, but the hours before that? Not so fun.

Anyway, that whole tripping thing had probably been a muscle twitch of her finger or something. Nothing to worry about.

#

The second time, it was in the chow line. Claire had been carefully ladling noodle soup into her little plastic bowl when someone stormed past her and made her lose her handle on the utensil. As she yelped, soup splashed up as if in slow motion and nearly made it onto her clean white shirt before it suddenly froze mid-plunge in front of her clenched shut eyes. Then she heard it clattering to the floor into a million pieces of shattered ice.

Phew. Organic dye job avoided.

Yet when she whirled, absently stroking her arm where she'd felt blistering heat, no one said sorry.

"You okay?" her new friend Perry asked her as he eyed the glinting mess.

"Fine." That was twice in as many weeks. Claire blinked down at the little red mark on her arm. She was definitely losing her mind.

#

A month later, Claire sat next to her small group of friends on the bleachers as usual, watching the action down in the tricked-out gym for the regulatory Save the Citizen class.

A wicked contraption that looked like what they might use for a theatre version of Jaws sat in the middle of the room, a symbol for "yickes better not fuck up". Just above it, a lifesized doll that was lowered every few seconds cried out an annoyingly robotic litany: "help… me… help… me…"

In the minimalist and wildly uncharacteristic recreation of Maxville, two teams of "superheroes" and "villains" fought for the prestige of beating the other team at all costs using some of the most super-agressive means Claire had seen in her life outside of the television. Actually, she even caught herself wishing she wouldn't have to fight down there in the next four years. Then berated herself. You're a heroine, Frost. Grow some proverbial balls.

The game fascinated her, actually, although she winced everytime a doll was mangled and she imagined it was a real citizen. Inwardly her gut knotted. Would she be up to the test? Hah, she was always so easily spooked that she doubted anyone would want her on their team.

Heck, she froze everything when it was mostly definitely not needed. Like her bed. Or her cereal, of all things. The former when her mother had yelled that she'd missed her alarm this morning; the latter when she'd calmly thought she had five minutes to spare but the bus had shown up early. The cereal bowl was likely still melting on the kitchen table.

"That's why you're going to Sky High, honey," her mother, who literally blew villains away for a double living, had told her the night before her first day when Claire had frozen the plumbing. "You'll learn how to control your power." Then, with a wink, she'd added, "For now, we'll just keep the antifreeze solution at the ready."

Yeah, control was elusive at the moment it seemed, because she accumulated blunder after blunder and made a crowning idiot of herself. Well, that was why she was here at Sky High, wasn't it?

On the Maxville-like floor below, a fellow freshman lit up like a human torch and… was thrown facefirst into the plexiglass by a snickering villain.

Tough lu– Oh, shit.

#

"Mind if I sit here? Everywhere else is taken."

Claire vaguely recognised the boy – the freshman who'd earned himself the nickname Hothead by Coach Boomer when he'd attacked the junior who'd apparently smartmouthed him in Save the Citizen. He was also in some of her classes but he kept largely to himself and sulked quietly so that no one dared approach the infamous Barron Battle's son. Claire never remembered his name. Something ironic.

As she awaited his response which was long in coming, he raised his head from the book he was reading and eyed her only summarily before raking the rest of the reading tables in the library to no doubt assert that they were indeed all taken. The midterms were coming and it seemed the student body had only just found the "room with the books". Then he shrugged as though, whatever she chose to do, he couldn't care less. "Suit yourself." A man of few words, Claire mused.

Claire unshouldered her bookbag and sat next to him with a little weary sigh. There was anti-social, and then there was anti-social. Pulling out her old beat-up copy of American Gods, Claire settled herself comfortably to read in companionable silence with the least likely companion.

#

It was a whole month before she felt it zing through her again. She'd honestly just begun to charter it down to the stress of beginning at a new school, and had promptly forgotten all about it since. This time, though, it caught her unawares and something flew into the air once more. Well, at least it didn't aim at h–

"Here's your glass." Peace, as Claire had come to know him as from listening to teachers calling out his name in class, not always kindly, handed her her unharmed glass and she automatically reached for it, but it had by then completely fled her mind as he touched her because this was a revelation. Twice in a row. By the person who'd bumped into her. This got her closer to explaining these strange occurrences.

"Thanks," she offered with a brilliant smile, but already he was gone. No matter; inside she reeled. And so she ran after the cause, her glass forgotten on her tray. "Wait. Peace!" she called before catching up to him, which wasn't an easy feat actually. she'd have given her left foot to know what he was fed to get so tall.

Her musings were interrupted abruptly when he barely glanced at her and growled out, "I wait for no one, so you talk or you walk. Either way, I don't care."

Her momentary rush of courage smashed by that offhand rebuttal, she stopped right where she was and watched his dark head walk away in the direction of the front doors. How could anyone be so cold?

#

Boldness is interesting in that it can be brought about by sheer willpower or by compulsion. One needs a good talking to to get your feet moving; the other is just driven by need. In Claire's case, need won out: she needed to experiment and to know with finality that she was on the verge of discovering something very scientifically interesting indeed.

Have a taste of your own medicine, Hothead.

Of course, she'd seen Peace power up several times since she'd seen him walking into the freshmen's bus, and wondered just how basically different they were on a biological level. Now was the time to explore their polar potentials.

Concentrating on her shaky and vastly unpredictable powers, Claire inhaled deeply. Through her body temperature ran ten degrees or so colder than normal, to properly freeze an object she needed it to reach a much lower degree than usual. As the first trickle ran through her arteries outward to her hand, she grinned triumphantly. Works!

And then she walked by Peace who rummaged inside his locker. And brushed her powered hand on the back of his neck, thinking how absolutely anti-climactic this all was.

Peace jerked, banged his head on the metal door of his locker, and let out a vicious curse. By the time he emerged, glaring and rubbing his sore head, she'd rounded the corner.

Mission accomplished.