Chapter Text
“Could you please stop ignoring our calls?”
“Of course I’m gonna ignore your calls, I’m at school right now!”
In the locker room before gym class, Josh was in the middle of a heated phone call with Memnock. This conversation reminded Josh that he wanted to make sure that giving the alien virus trainers his number was the biggest mistake in the life of whichever of the ‘noobs that did it.
“But I’ve called after school hours and you still haven’t picked up,” Mem explained. “We’re getting concerned, it’s been three weeks since you’ve last come to training.”
“Well of course it has! How many times do I have to tell you I want no part in this garbage!”
“We’re also worried because we know you don’t sync with your battle ball regularly, and soon enough that’s going to cause problems for you — ”
“I don’t care, and I don’t want you to call me again! You’ve been on my case all week, ‘oh, why don’t you come over?’ I don’t want to, and I’m not going to!”
Josh hung up the phone and uttered a loud groan.
“You alright, Josh?” Simon asked. “That phone call did not sound good.”
“Ugh, just…” Josh realized he’d have to lie about the conversation. “A particularly rabid fan of mine. They’re kinda getting stalker-y now.”
“Yikes.”
Today was a particularly special day for gym class at Cornbury Middle School. It was the end of a unit, and this teacher ‘celebrates’ by letting the class decide on the activity for the following class. Dodgeball was almost always a unanimous decision. It was well liked, well-loved, familiar, and frantically active. Hence the teacher had no issues with putting out the balls for another round of it in class today. Josh, Simon, and Rebecca led one side of the gymnasium floor, while Jock Jockerson, eighth-grade-stayed-back captain of everything, single-handedly fronted the other side, though a few of his athlete friends flanked him, in the most constructive outlet all day for his jerk-a-riffic tendencies.
All the class waited with bated breath, anticipating the loud tweet of the teacher’s whistle.
Tweeeeet!
The cohort’s call to arms arrived, and Josh managed to grab a ball off the starting line. Narrowly missing a fastball from a jock, he guns for a seemingly unaware classmate on the other side of the room. He shoots, but just barely doesn’t score, as the kid moved at the last second. Josh retreats towards the middle of his side of the crowd in a bid to better avoid fire.
The barrage of balls and tactics continued on, the ever-shifting battlefield leading to the success of some, such as strong players like Josh and his friends and Jock, and the demise of others, as players began to get hit, slowly whittling down the playing field. About twenty minutes into the game, the field was down to an even dozen: six on the side of Josh and his friends, and six on the side of Jock and whoever else managed to keep up.
It was a very familiar setup, but what was unfamiliar about it was that Josh was actually starting to get out of breath. His lungs seemed to sting with somewhat of an asthmatic desperation. Josh tried to hide his borderline panting, but ever-observant Simon noticed anyway,
“You alright Josh?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Josh replied, trying to sound convincingly ‘okay’. “Let’s bring the pain to these guys.”
While Josh’s heart was in the game, it seemed like his body wasn’t, as his usually on-point dodgeball form was seemingly faltering. Despite this, he still seemingly managed to aim for, and take down, one Jock Jockerson, which at least helped keep up appearances. Illusions, and their maintenance, became an increasingly weighty thought on Josh’s mind as the field was brought down to eight. The room was now uneven, at five to three; Josh’s side of the court had the extra manpower. As the volleys kept coming, Josh’s thoughts turned less to dodgeball and more towards trying to figure out what was going on inside of him. This is weird, Josh thought; it usually takes way more than this to tire me out. His thoughts went back to that one time Josh and Simon spent an entire day at Funder Wunderland, from early in the morning to well after dark. Now that was a tiring day. Not dodgeball. And just as his focus returned --
Bonk!
Tweeeeet!
“Carter — nice work, but you’re out!”
Caught by surprise and disappointed, he began to walk off to the sidelines, where the rest of the class was leaning against the wall. On his walk, he tried not to wince; that dodgeball seemed to hit harder than any dodgeball before, to the point that it kinda hurt. Even more unusual, as Josh knew those balls felt the same as always. And they wouldn’t swap in ‘harder-hitting’ balls anyway, for safety reasons. It must’ve been related to the problems he was already having.
“You totally could’ve dodged that,” Simon noted.
“Yeah, that was just… some poor timing,” Josh responded. “As long as one of you two win out, it doesn’t matter to me. Go get ‘em!”
Simon smiled and returned to the game, and no sooner, as a ball proceeded to whizz by him, the line of fire just inches too far to Simon’s left.
Despite the reduction in physical exertion for the rest of the day, Josh felt little relief after gym class.
I don’t know what’s going on, Josh thought, but at least it’s not getting any worse.
“Josh, are you okay?” asked Simon as the three friends regrouped to head home. “You kinda look a little pale.”
“It’s just… the lighting,” Josh lied. He knew it wasn’t the lighting, but he hoped that would be enough to throw Simon’s suspicions off. “I’m fine.”
“I mean, if you say so,” Simon said, attempting to show that he trusted his friend, “but maybe you should take it easy tonight.”
“No, I’m ready to go,” Josh insisted. “Whatever you’ve got, throw it at me.”
The moon shone on a seemingly-typical night in Cornbury. It was just after 8:30, and Josh was holed up in his room, slowly pacing around his dresser, racking his brain to try and figure out what was going on today, why he wasn’t feeling like himself. He was also regretting telling Simon to ‘throw it at him’, as he felt worse now than he did earlier. But he didn’t understand why he was in such a state. He swore he wasn’t getting sick, he hadn’t gone anywhere unusual lately —
At the end of what seemed like an eternity of long, contemplative thought, Josh eyed his nightstand, and something that he saw as an uncomfortable possibility.
Josh opened the bottom drawer, where his yellow battle ball hid, nearly pristine and untouched. He took it out and held it in his hand, bouncing its weight on his palm.
And then a frightful realization seemed to hit him.
Josh recalled one of his first, and most tense, conversations with the aliens.
“We need to tell you something important about you and your battle ball,” Mem explained calmly. “When you got hit with the yellow battle ball, it uh… how do I say this nicely… it altered your body chemistry in order to support your powers.”
Josh recalled his surprise. “What?”
“Yeah, it altered your body chemistry, but to support all of that, you have to…”
“You’ll have to stick your ball in from time to time or else you’ll end up like rotten Earth fruit,” stated Zen in a stern nonchalance.
For the first time since Mem and Zen told him that, Josh felt the emotions he felt after hearing that indelible truth — the anger, the despair, the fear, the rage — float to the front of his mind. It reminded him of how much he didn’t want to be a superhero, and how he didn’t want anything to do with the Superdudes.
It also reminded him of how much he had already sacrificed that position. He had to apologize to them — well, their non-hero identities — to save his social game, acknowledging their existence to his friends and peers. He had already lent his stretchy hands to some of their sticky super-situations.
It seemed tonight was another crucible. Tonight, he had to acknowledge he was a Superdude to himself; once again, just so he could live his normal life. Away from the heroics. Away from the virus warriors. Arguably, the stakes were a little higher this time — ‘rotten Earth fruit’ and all — but the principle felt exactly the same.
Regardless of the situation, Josh still fought with himself over it. He didn’t want to, but he knew inside that he had to.
After further mental deliberation, Josh relented. He sighed, and pressed his battle ball firmly into his chest.
That vaguely striking, warm heat returned. Josh had only gotten a little more used to it since the ball landed on him the first time, partly due to his intentional lack of experience with it.
Josh sat down on his bed. He felt… normal. He felt… fine. The pain and the burning that burdened his day today was completely gone. It was as if nothing ever happened. The renewed teenager took a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. After a few more long, silent moments, he ejected his battle ball. The feeling of absolute normality, of regularity, stayed with him. But so did other realizations.
Josh put his head in his hands.
When all the people and places and things and distractions go away…
A sigh.
This is my life now, he thought.
I don’t want it to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way…
His thoughts turned back to the aliens, and that fateful Friday night.
Why do I have to live like this?
As all the implications of the battle ball and the changes it wreaked on him resurfaced and rolled through his mind again, Josh tried his hardest to hold back the tears welling up inside of him.
He couldn’t do that for long.