Adam Powerhouse Episode 3
School, Sports, and…Superpowers?
By Kevin T. Goddard
Published by Kevin T. Goddard at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Kevin T. Goddard
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Table of Contents
Episode Three: School, Sports, and…Superpowers?
Scene 4: Back to the Beginning
Adam Powerhouse Episode 3
School, Sports, and…Superpowers?
Story by Kevin T. Goddard
Scene 1: New Kid at School
By age seven, Adam had spent as much time by himself as he could stand. His parents meant well by keeping him at home and letting him learn on his own. Sure, Adam was capable of surpassing any learning he could have accomplished in school, but he wanted to have friends. His parents were hesitant to enroll him, but eventually gave in and agreed to let Adam start at the public school for the next school year.
They wanted Adam to take some tests and be placed by his academic level, but Adam would have none of it. He wasn’t going to school to learn, but to be around kids his age.
On the first day of school, everyone wanted to be Adam’s friend. He was good looking, athletic, and smart. But Adam took his work seriously even though it was so easy. He flew through the assignments and had plenty of time to work on his other projects on his Dell laptop which the principal had reluctantly agreed to let Adam bring to school. He rigged up a wireless connection with his the local cell phone towers, much like his bike helmet, to create a network connection to his home computer and the internet.
At recess, everyone wanted Adam on their football team as the girls watched on and dreamed of him and his blonde hair. Adam would set up elaborate games of capture-the-flag which utilized the entire playground and act as a referee since it would have been lopsided had he been on one of the teams.
Despite Adam’s popularity, it quickly became apparent that he was different from the other kids. They began to drift away, seeking kids more like themselves to play with on a regular basis. At times Adam felt sad because he knew it would be hard for him to find someone he could really be friends with. As time went on, Adam learned to do his work at a level that didn’t attract too much attention from his teacher. He spent an incredible amount of time at school working on plans for gadgets and computer programs that would help the police department minimize crime in the city.
Girls tried to vie for his attention over his laptop, but soon they gave up since Adam’s one seeming weakness was noticing when members of the opposite sex were interested in him. Regardless, Adam would have taken his no-nonsense, logical approach had he noticed girls watching him and said, “Seven is much too young to be serious about a girl.”
So school went on, each year pretty much like the one before. Every time Adam would move up and to a different school, new girls noticed him and new guys wanted to be his friend, but Adam’s differences became more apparent with age as he matured quicker both physically and emotionally than the other kids.
Scene 2: Sports-centered
To help burn off some of the hormones and energy that came with having super-DNA, Adam began to join sports teams through the local Boys Club. Quickly, his basketball, football, and baseball teams rose to the top of the ranks as Adam helped them stomp opponent after opponent. He began to look forward to the buttered popcorn and Coca-cola syrup smell coming from the concession stand and the chlorine smell that wafted into the gym every time the door to the pool area was opened.
One night, Adam was leading the charge against the second ranked team in the league. He dribbled down the wooden floor, the ball echoing a satisfying ping against the planks underfoot. He cut to the center of the court, spun around one defender at the tip off circle, cut to the three point line and flicked a quick pass between two defenders to a teammate on the outside. Adam then cut through the lane and received the pass back from his guy, leapt into the air and ducked underneath the swats of the remaining two defenders. Hovering for an inconceivably long time in the air as he glided underneath the basket, Adam switched the ball to his other hand, double pumped, and then fingertip rolled the ball underhand up toward the basket, off the glass, and in for two points.
Adam gave his teammates high fives and ran back down to defend at the other goal. This was typical play for Adam. Sometimes he popped a quick shot off from the outside, sometime he just outran the other team for a quick layup. He could have dunked the ball had he wanted to gain a lot of attention, but Adam kept that to himself.
At the end of the game, Adam didn’t notice the other team looking at their feet as he shook their hands at mid-court. He went to the locker room and grabbed his duffel bag to hurry to a football game. As he ran out, he realized he’d left his laptop behind and turned around and went back into the locker room to get it. As he came around the lockers, Adam heard some of the boys talking.
“Boy, Adam sure is a ballhog.”
“Yeah, what a show-off. If we weren’t winning all of our games, I definitely wouldn’t want him on our team.”
Adam couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“I didn’t sign up to watch somebody else on the team do everything. I’m thinking about quitting if he doesn’t start sharing the ball more.”
Adam slammed the door and all the talking stopped. He quickly grabbed his laptop and headed to his football game.
Football wasn’t as complicated. He got the ball from the quarterback, ran the play that was called, and tried to gain as many yards as possible.
Adam went out with determination and had a record game. Everything that came his way, he snagged out of the air. Every run, he gained yards on. The other team began to look for him to get the ball every play, and yet, he couldn’t be stopped. At the end of the game, he looked at the scoreboard and realized they had won 64 to 13. Feeling satisfied, he trotted to midfield to shake hands with the other team. As he passed each player and shook their hand, he realized they had a look of hurt and humiliation in their eyes. At the end of the line, Adam no longer felt good. He felt like dirt. As he slowly made his way back to the bench, Adam thought about how many times this had happened and he’d never noticed. He looked at the crowd, short puffs of frosted breath coming from his mouth as his body soaked up oxygen to replenish all that he’d burnt out of his muscles during the game.
Adam could feel sweat beginning to dry and freeze from the cold air. He suddenly didn’t care as much about winning. He didn’t care whether the small crowd of parents and kids from school cheered for him or not. He cared that he’d made other kids feel bad.
That night Adam went home and began to really study the sports he played. He wasn’t going to rely strictly on his talent any more, but play the game mentally and try to help everyone on his team look good.
Scene 3: No ‘I’ in ‘TEAM’
The next time Adam’s basketball team took the court, Adam started looking for the pass. Although he couldn’t avoid the shot every time, when it was over he was the leading scorer for his team, but he also led in assists. His teammates looked happy. They enthusiastically gave Adam high fives and the other team, although it had been beaten, didn’t feel like it had been run over by a truck. Adam went home feeling much better.
The next football game, Adam started looking for the blocks he could throw to help other players gain more yardage. As they began to feel more confident, the quarterback used them more and Adam began to enjoy looking for the bone-crunching hits to open the field for another player.
On one play, Adam cut across from the other side of the field. He knew his defender would never be able to reach the quarterback in time, so he headed at an angle upfield to cross paths with a receiver who was supposed to catch the ball. Adam had seen the cornerback read the play, so he found him and cut him off as the receiver caught the ball. Adam then curved back around and hit the safety hard, planting him into the ground as his teammate ran the ball into the endzone for a touchdown.
Adam hopped up and felt incredible. The players were jumping around in the endzone celebrating their friend’s success. Adam trotted back to the sideline. The coach grabbed his arm.
“I saw what you did out there,” Coach told Adam. Adam’s heart leapt into his chest, afraid he was going to be chewed out for not following the play. “That is the most selfless thing I’ve seen a football player do. I’m proud of you.”
Adam’s heart swelled as he went over to get a drink of PowerAide from his bag. From that moment on, he was hooked on helping everyone on his team look good, not just playing for himself.
As time went on, Adam found he could maneuver around the basketball court or football field and cause other players to shift or fade to where Adam wanted them to be to catch a pass or block another player. The game moved to a cerebral level as much as physical so that Adam began to think and move in ways that stretched even his intellectual and physical ability.
Adam still wanted to win, but he didn’t want to simply dominate on his own. He wanted his team to function as a flawless machine.
Soon, Adam found that playing so many sports cut into his research and cyber crime fighting time. Detective Rice had even commented during one of their evenings on the phone catching bad guys that their numbers had dropped during the last couple of months. So he had to make a tough choice. Which sport should he play if he could only play one?
Walking around his room, Adam stopped in front of his dresser and picked up the little football his dad had given him in the hospital his first day in the world. With football, he could maintain a sense of individualism with his play while still helping the team look good. His extraordinary strength and balance weren’t quite as obvious during his runs on the football field as they were on the basketball court. And his dad really loved football. So it was settled. Adam would drop the other sports and play football only.
The next two seasons, Adam’s team made it to the Pee-Wee championship game and played a local bruiser of a team called the Gladiators. Adam’s team, the Tigers, wasn’t nearly as good, but with Adam, they were hard to stop. Both years, Adam’s team won by a touchdown. The main battle was between Adam and the Gladiator’s cornerback who was fast, strong, and smart. He kept an eye on Adam and had a feel for where Adam would be with the ball. Both years, Adam barely made a run past this c-back during the fourth quarter to put them up by a TD.
Adam felt good about football, crime fighting began to pick up, his gadgets were getting better, and school was a breeze. But Adam’s body was starting to change more quickly and life being easy-kid’s-stuff was about to change.
Scene 4:Back to the Beginning
Ok. Back to the where we started in Episode One. Adam confronted a thief in a convenience store. Yada yada. Adam attacks the guy. Yada yada. Adam gets away. Yada yada. Adam seems to have discovered something a little scary about himself…now we are all caught up. Back to story:
Once in his room with his security system set, Adam flipped the switch to open up his laboratory. He sat down at his work table and looked at his hands. He kept trying to figure how he had opened the gate without touching it.
After several hours of practicing with a few Lego blocks, which Adam figured were light and should be relatively easy to move, Adam gave up and put his head down. His hands moved around aimlessly until they settled on something metal. Adam looked at what he was holding and realized they were magnets. He flipped the ends around so the charges were the same and began pushing one ahead of the other on the surface of the desk without them ever touching.
Adam quickly put the magnets aside and went back to the Legos. The excitement of his discovery building, Adam realized he was shaking with adrenaline once again. He envisioned the blocks moving ahead of his fingertips as he reached for the closest one and it scooted away from him.
“No way!” Adam exclaimed.
He began trying to control his excitement until he could move small objects without having to rely on his adrenaline bursts to do it. Before too long, he didn’t have to envision what he wanted to happen in his mind before doing it with his hands. Adam also found that he could pull objects toward him if he thought about what he was doing in reverse until he could will things to scoot towards him without thinking about it.
Adam began to study this phenomenon, measuring what was happening on his workbench until he found that he shocked himself with static electricity when one of the objects touched his hand. He reasoned that he must be changing the electrical charge around his body to attract and repel objects just like the magnets he had played with did. Somehow, the extreme rush of adrenaline caused his body to change its charge without his thinking about it. But now, he had pretty good control of causing it to happen whenever he wanted it to.
While he puzzled over the day’s events, Adam closed down his workshop, his bed easing down on hydraulics until it was back on the floor. He felt bad having to tell his mom that lie about the store being out of milk, but in the end, he felt he’d done a good thing. Only one other thing bothered him, he felt like he could have ridden the skateboard better. It was a great replacement for the bike even though it did only have limited speed. The board itself made a shield and a weapon which he figured he could use more effectively if he became a better boarder.
Scene 5:Training
Adam first strengthened his board for the high impacts he figured it would take while he was learning to use it. With new, bullet-proof strength polyurethane he had created, Adam coated it over and over until it was practically indestructible. He also recoated his helmet to give it added strength just in case.
Then he began watching ESPN, the Discovery Channel, and even MTV to study the moves of other skateboarders. Pretty soon, he discovered Tony Hawk and began to copy his moves. Before too long, Adam had the basic feel of Tony’s style through practice and playing the Tony Hawk video game he’d talked his mom into buying for his Playstation. After learning every move he’d ever seen Tony perform, Adam began to create his own moves, based primarily on the need for flight and defense, although he couldn’t help creating some killer attack and disable moves.
The problem with creating moves was that the board was ultimately limiting because he could only move from front to back when landing or jumping. Adam tackled this new problem with gusto until he found the answer: The Streetboard.
While watching the X-Games on ESPN, Adam found that snowboarding and skateboarding were surprisingly similar, but a snowboard had an unlimited range of movement over the surface of snow. He built that general concept into a board with round wheels, like the ball inside the mouse for his computer or the castors on the bottom of a rolling chair. The biggest obstacle was finding a way to get the board to respond to direction changes when the wheels would turn freely in any given direction. Adam didn’t want to limit the board by giving it a computer chip that would read and respond to body shifts because such technology could be damaged or go out while riding. So, he put in a series of bearings inside the housing for the castors on the bottom of the streetboard that acted like brakes and shocks. They would give a little as weight was shifted to one side of the board, turning slower than the main ball of the castor and providing friction, causing the board to turn in that direction as the other side was still moving faster. A really hard turn would cause the bearings to stop bringing the whole board to a power slide that acted as brakes for the entire board.
Once Adam’s board was completely done, it weighed surprisingly little as the whole castor housing underneath had been made with a mold poured full of Adam’s super-strong polyurethane recipe. Adam could get more air from both its light weight and his extra strength bursting forth from superhuman DNA.
Adam could ollie onto a railing or banister, then summersault off of the end, gripping the board in both hands to swing it like a baseball bat to hit someone, then bringing it back under his feet and making a smooth landing and powersliding to a halt.
He could even ride toward a wall at a sharp angle, jump onto the surface of the wall, riding for a few short feet as he let his momentum pull him into a crouch on his board, then jumping back off the wall and landing in a full rush back down the sidewalk. As Adam thought of new moves and visualized them working in his head, he began to map them out on his computer to get the correct physics down before attempting to do it in real life.
All the while, school went on by without much effort or notice on Adam’s part. He had too many things to think about to notice he was in his final year at his elementary school before moving on to the local middle school which all of the elementary schools fed into.
Scene 6: Winners and Losers
Between practicing on his streetboard and playing football, Adam found himself at the annual Pee-Wee league championships again before he felt ready. Things were just moving too quickly. Nevertheless, the game was here and he went in feeling exhilarated.
They were playing the Gladiators once again. The team seemed to have had a growth spurt throughout the year and the boys on that team were taller and bigger than any of the boys on the Tigers. The game swung back and forth as they double-teamed Adam and made it hard for the quarterback to get him the ball. Several times, Adam could have used his new power to slow the ball down or make it fly further so he could catch it, but Adam didn’t want a win where he had to cheat. By the last few minutes of the game, the Gladiators were up 18 to 16. The Tigers were moving the ball down the field in one last fierce attempt to score. As they moved the ball down to the ten yard line, it became apparent that Adam would be getting the ball.
The quarterback dropped back as Adam sprinted into the endzone. Two Gladiators dropped in behind him and the quarterback let the ball fly over Adam’s head. Even with Adam’s leaping ability, he knew he wouldn’t be able to pull this one down. Adam checked his power, his magnetism, and as he fell to the ground with the two defensive players on top of him, he watched the ball bounce off of the turf several yards ahead. Very slowly, Adam got to his feet as the Gladiators danced in victory around him.
Adam walked, head down, for what seemed an eternity to the sideline. The coach clapped him on the shoulder pad and said, “That’s okay.” He didn’t sound okay as his voice cracked with shock and emotion. Adam turned around to watch the Gladiators run out the clock.
Both teams lined up and the quarterback called, “Hut!” As the center hiked the ball up into his hands, a little too hard for a play where the quarterback was going to take a knee, he turned the underside of the ball up from the grass where the evening’s dew had begun to form. The hide of the ball, wet and smacking the quarterback’s hands much harder than he had anticipated, slipped and spun out at a crazy angle between the quarterback’s legs.
Adam watched in disbelief as his team plowed through the line and pounced on the ball. “Get back in there!” the coach shouted in his ear.
Adam didn’t have to be told twice. He jammed his helmet over his head and raced back in. His team bounced back, jubilant from their luck. The Gladiators still seemed to be unsure of what just happened.
“Let’s take it to them,” the quarterback said and called the same play they had just run. Adam glanced at the clock with three seconds left and hoped that this time the throw would be right.
As the ball was hiked, Adam saw the coverage would be the same as last time. Instead of cutting straight in, he juked to the outside and the cornerback bit. Adam saw the corner realize his mistake too late as Adam then turned inside and sprinted into the endzone. The corner’s feet went out from under him as he grabbed wildly for Adam’s legs and Adam could see the name “Connor” on the back of the jersey. He sprinted past the startled linebacker who had covered him last time as well and looked back over his shoulder to see the ball coming in too high again. Adam’s adrenaline kicked in and he took three amazingly long strides and leapt into the air, reaching out as far as he could. The ball hung forever just above his fingertips and then landed ever so gently against them as if it were a giant egg that might break if handled rough.
Adam touched down in a smooth belly flop and slid to a stop just shy of the back of the endzone. He could see the official out of the corner of his eye raise both arms into the air. Before he could even begin to get to his feet, hands grabbed him and drug him to a standing position. Everyone started slapping his shoulders and back, congratulating him on a great catch. The Tigers had won the championship again, 22 to 18. Coach came running up and yelled, “Pizza at Pizza Hut for the whole team on me!” Adam couldn’t quit grinning from ear to ear.
The rest of the year went by in a blur with football season over. Adam continued to get better at using his magnetism for all sorts of things, from cleaning his room to giving him a boost of air or pulling his board back in when riding his skateboard. Every once in a while, he would peek in on his bike and wish he could get it out, but he knew it just wasn’t time.
Preview of Episode 4: Bad Guys Beware
The gunman looked up, surprised, and brought the gun around. The clerk dropped to the floor behind the counter. Adam jumped from his board as he flicked it into his hand and slid down onto his side and across the tile of the floor. He brought the board between him and the robber as the robber unloaded several shots toward Adam. Adam felt the impact of each bullet jolt the board and push him backwards toward the ATM machine. As the bullets ricocheted off of the bulletproof polymer Adam had strengthened the board with, the camera caught the explosion of bags of chips and bottles of alcohol getting ripped apart by the stray slugs.
The gunman stopped in surprise as one wild bullet hit the bottle of whiskey in his hand leaving him holding just the glass neck. Adam used the moment of shock to jump to his feet. Grabbing an open box of Slim Jims, he flung them toward the creep in a rain of spicy goodness. “What a waste,” flickered briefly in Adam’s mind as Mr. Robber flung his hands up in defense before he realized it was something that wouldn’t hurt him.
Dear Brothers and Sisters of Adam:
Don’t forget to email me your suggestions and thoughts about Adam at adampowerhouse@gmail.com.
Thanks,
Kevin T. Goddard
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About the Author
Kevin T. Goddard was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1975. He grew up watching shows and movies like Transformers, G.I. Joe, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dukes of Hazzard, A-Team, and much more action/adventure/science fiction. Kevin is currently a school administrator in Missouri. His family consists of a wife, 8 kids, and a chihuahua. Kevin earned a Doctorate of Education, Ed. D., in Educational Leadership in 2010. He started writing when he was a kid, but as he worked on his advanced degrees in the field of education, his writing turned academic.
About 9 years ago, Kevin wrote a short book entitled Adam Powerhouse: Birth of the Double Zero. After finishing it, he didn't know what to do, so Kevin saved it on his computer and forgot about it. When he reopened the file in 2010, Kevin was surprised to find that many of the things Adam invented in 2001 were now a part of reality...cell phones that connected to the internet, skateboards that work more like a snowboard, video games that allow you to be a rockstar, and more! So, he's had to update Adam's world. It continues to evolve and Kevin hopes Adam lives for a long, long time and you enjoy every adventure Adam has.
Kevin plans on starting more characters with the help of his two oldest daughters and chronicling those characters lives through episodes as he has Adam's.
New Adam Powerhouse Episodes by Kevin T. Goddard will be available at Smashwords.com every two weeks!
Connect with Kevin T. Goddard online:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_192520634101730
Email: adampowerhouse@gmail.com
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/kevintgoddard