The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 443: 443 | A Practical Seminar in Heroic Proportions

"So manly," Eden whispered to himself, and I caught the reflection of his grin in the window glass, wide and unselfconscious and belonging to someone who had decided at a very young age that the world’s most obvious feelings deserved the world’s least apologetic expression.

"For the record," Percy said, his pen moving again, "Eden’s response time to the Apis question was point three seconds. That is faster than his documented reflex response during Steele’s conditioning circuit, which measures at point four seven seconds for stimulus-reaction pairs. His emotional investment in the subject produces measurably superior physical performance."

"Percy just proved scientifically that Eden is faster when he’s horny for Apis," Marco translated.

"That is a grotesque oversimplification of a nuanced data point."

"But accurate."

"Technically."

Caden had been quiet for approximately forty seconds, which for Caden Holt constituted either deep contemplation or system failure. He stared out the windshield at the highway traffic with his chin resting on his hand and his blonde hair catching the sunlight in a way that would have looked contemplative if his hazel eyes weren’t calculating something with the sharpness that most people missed beneath the grin.

"Grande Dame," Caden said. "Fuck."

"That’s what Belmont said too."

"Grande Dame fuck is the objective correct answer and here’s why." Caden held up one finger with the authority of a TED Talk presenter who had lost his slide deck and was proceeding on conviction alone. "Paradigm Shift. Her Aspect. She controls her size between eighteen inches and sixty-seven feet. Those are her extremes. Everything between those numbers is a sliding scale."

"We covered this," Marco said. "I mentioned the logistics."

"You mentioned the logistics of the extremes. I’m talking about the middle." Caden’s second finger joined the first. "Imagine you’re with Grande Dame. Normal height. Five eleven. Everything’s great. Beautiful woman. Violet eyes. Jet black hair. Hourglass figure she maintains with obsessive discipline. And then she adjusts. Not to sixty-seven feet. Not to eighteen inches. She goes to six foot two. Or six foot four. Or she stays five eleven and just shifts the proportions by five percent. Ten percent."

The interior of the Uber had become a graduate seminar in applied Aspect theory that none of our professors would sanction.

"She has complete control over her physical dimensions," Caden continued, his voice dropping to the register he used when he was being genuinely intelligent rather than performing stupidity. "Complete. She can grow and shrink in any combination. At will. With precision. Think about what that means for a person who already treats her body as a brand asset she maintains with the dedication of a professional athlete."

"I’m thinking about it," Eden confirmed from the back.

"Grande Dame is vain, arrogant, competitive, and obsessed with being the most spectacular thing in any room she occupies." Caden folded his arms. "Those are documented personality traits that translate directly into specific bedroom behaviors I will not elaborate on in front of Percy."

"I appreciate the consideration," Percy said, though his pen had not stopped moving. "For the record, I am documenting this conversation for archival purposes and will not be sharing the transcript."

"You just said archival purposes."

"Data preservation is a professional habit."

I watched the freeway signs blur past and felt the morning settle into something warm and uncomplicated for the first time since Dravid’s amphitheater lecture three days ago when I told an instructor with grey eyes and a Legendary Aspect that the gap between my file and my reality was the point. Caden’s Grande Dame analysis continued at increasing levels of specificity that would have gotten all six of us expelled from several institutions simultaneously, and Marco’s counterarguments about property damage liability during intimate activities involving size-shifting Aspects produced a sound from Eden that was half laugh and half reverent sob.

Finn opened one eye and contributed exactly once. "Nah man, you’re all sleeping on Tempest. Roza Guseva would be terrifying in bed. Zero patience. Zero performance. She’d just psychokinetically pin you to the mattress and take what she wanted and then fall asleep immediately without cuddling because cuddling is administrative overhead. That’s the most honest version of a relationship any of us will ever see."

"Finn just described his ideal partnership and it’s a woman who treats intimacy like case work," Marco said.

"I don’t see the problem."

"The problem is she’d file an after-action report."

"Hot."

Percy turned a page in his notebook. "For the record, Finn’s response time was fourteen seconds, indicating he has been constructing this answer since the question was initially posed and chose to deploy it at the moment of maximum comedic impact. This is consistent with his documented tendency to present as uninvested while maintaining continuous background processing of social dynamics."

"Percy." Finn opened both eyes. "I love you, man. But if you analyze my timing one more time I’m going to thread your notebook shut."

"Noted."

The Uber took an exit I didn’t recognize, pulling off the highway into a stretch of commercial district that sat somewhere between downtown Verano’s glass and steel ambition and the Eastside’s stubborn refusal to participate in the same aesthetic conversation. Strip malls gave way to older storefronts with hand-painted signs and parking lots where the asphalt had opinions about recent weather.

I sent a text to Sloane that said only: Eden watches Apis footage forty-seven times. He has her costume description memorized.

Sloane’s response arrived in four seconds: tell him she does the waggling thing with her fingers when she’s thinking about her stingers. it’s a subconscious tell. maribelle showed me a compilation video last week.

I did not relay this information to Eden because some knowledge carries the responsibility of choosing when to deploy it, and watching Eden Wilkinson receive confirmation that a compilation video of Apis’s finger-waggling habit existed on the internet felt like a detonation best witnessed from behind adequate cover.

"Almost there," Caden announced, his grin returning to full operational capacity. "Two blocks."

"You’re going to tell us where we’re going now."

"Absolutely not. The surprise is the point."

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