"I have a mission for you."
Like a spy? Felix sputtered. "I won't do anything to harm anyone... or hurt myself or..."
Hen's figure cast awkward, incongruous, shadows over the ground. The particles of this shape swirled and buzzed on top of the dirt when he raised his hands in defense, as if a projection of heated molecules. "Hey, woah. Chill kid. I just need you to take a field trip to the art museum."
Felix hadn't been there before, unfortunately. Not having crossed the forest limits many times in his life, let alone for entertainment purposes, he barely had an idea of how to get there.
"It's only on the edge of the city limits." Hen smiled as Felix shuddered at the proposition of entering the city.
"What's so important there?" Felix stared just behind Hen, instead of right at him, to avoid the nausea that resulted from looking directly into his spinning irises.
"Nothing tangible. Just your potential." Hen overdramatized, like a poet trying to confuse his audience instead of invigorate them.
"I don't get it."
"You're going to paint them a picture. Paint it right on their perfect, white walls. Between the canvases, just start glopping on paint, and if anyone tries stopping you... well, they won't. Not if you paint the right picture." He paused. "I mean, paint the picture right." At this point, he'd started walking circles around the rigid Felix. He had inch-long, pearly white talons at the ends of his dark blue fingers. He clicked them over the fleshy part of his palm and it clicked like the sound of two pieces of plastic, and licked his pointed teeth.
Felix didn't try escaping the orbit. "How will I know if I am?"
"What kind of question is that? It's about power." He gestured to Felix's left hand. "You already know what it feels like to be doing something right."
Verily, Felix hadn't witnessed much art, aside from the paintings he'd done on his own. Which, frankly, wasn't the best tactic to making anything revolutionary. It was like trying to write the next great American novel without having ever read a book, without experiencing a book's thick pages in a binding, its musty smell, or tasting its bones and organs. It was like being the first person to try baking a cake; no one could help with the recipe.
But he'd managed to figure out how to use paint from a young age and had just assumed he'd been doing it correctly since then. Janette often talked about how much she liked what he could do, so he knew there was something correct about it, even if it wasn't obvious what that component was.
Felix shifted his weight between feet. "So what's the point?"
Hen rolled his eyes. "Like, what's in it for me, you, and the rest of the world? Is that your question?"
"Yeah."
Hen grunted, like a teacher trying to explain something the students weren't understanding as quickly as she hoped. "It's simple. I get a new team member, you get a favor, and the world changes. It's like an interview. You're a powerful kid, obviously, but if you can do this with a strong mentality, you'll get the job."
Felix's face was blank.
"It's like hazing, I guess," Hen laughed. When Felix's face remained plastery and emotionless, his face fell. "You really don't know the bottom of an apple from the top, do you, kid? This interview won't have much of an effect on the world, other than to prove that you can help change it later. If you can do this one task without bursting into tears, you can be a part of my team."
Felix raised his index finger to ask every question on the planet, including what Hen meant by "team," but Hen was quicker to stick his nose up and ask, "Don't you read the news?"
Where would Felix have gotten a newspaper? He took a more timid stance at this, folding his arms over his vital organs and crossing his eyebrows at Hen.
"Oh, come on!" Hen threw his hands up and barked, "Are you telling me you've haven't heard of my upcoming superteam? It's only for the most useful and powerful of Jupiter supers! Ughkkk." He took a deep breath, as if to ease himself off his invisible pedestal. "Now I look quite stupid, don't I? I didn't think I'd have to explain why you'd want to join; I thought you just would know and be wishing for this day that I ask you to come along. Silly me; I already knew you don't know much at all about anything."
Felix grit his teeth. "Is there a point to this?"
"Fine, fine!" Hen was throw his hands in every which way at this point. He really was a gesture-driven creature. Kind of like a clown, except for the talons and tattoos and sharp teeth. He was just as jolly, though. Finally, he stopped waving his arms and folded his hands neatly into a triangle to point at Felix, like a businessman of sorts. "Thing is, if you help us, we'll help you. You want to suck the soul out of everyone in this place, right?"
"How did you-."
"There will be six people in the group. Joining will make your journey six times more productive."
"You'll help save them?" He couldn't breathe at the thought.
"We'll help each other." And then, without waiting for the rest of the conversation, Hen started walking away.
Felix ran up without unfolding his arms. "Where are you going?"
"Well, you have to do the interview first, silly."
Finally, he took his arms away and threw them out in an exasperated gesture. "I didn't agree, yet!"
"Why wouldn't you? We're providing an easy way for you to complete your life's work."
Felix still wasn't sure what that "easy way" referred to. Whatever it was, he was sure it wasn't going to be easy at all. To get there, he'd have to cross the city limits, which wasn't something that made him anxious to the point of a panic attack, but it haunted him.
There would be real, adult humans over in their own habitat, not in Felix's. He shuddered.
Hen had his eyes on Felix. "Unless you did have a reason..."
But what did Felix expect would happen as he got older? There would be a time one day when there would only be so many people left in Jupiter and, by then, they would be smart enough not to enter the forest. He would have to go into the city to catch them, anyway.
"No," Felix said. "There's no reason. What's the plan?"
+++
When Hen had said they were going into a public place for the mission, Felix had imagined it would be a little more public. But after he hit his head on a rack in one of the museum's janitorial closets and blanched in pain, well, expectations weren't anything to live by.
On his way out of the closet, he rolled a wheeled cart, pyramided high with giant buckets of paint that he'd been told to choose like "gems in a room of treasure." It would be great to have them all, but he could only fit so many on the rickety, metal platform. He came out with light green, a moss green, a dark blue, and a blood red, plus a handful of thick thistled brushes, a hand rag, a sponge, and a carafe filled with what smelled like dish soap.
Hen had supplied the shelf of thirty different colors to choose from. He said something along the lines of, "It's important for you to decide your own colors in this creative process." Of course, Felix didn't object, despite the obviousness that his small frame would make it hard to transport the cart all the way across a few of the long hallways.
When the door clanked, the museum room outside the closet was void of people. All the rooms were cubes of white - bright and dizzying. He made his way through the line of these chambers, playing the worst case scenarios through his head. What if a human came in to rob the museum? What if a canvas toppled off the wall and squashed Felix, like an egg being hit with a wooden board? What if he got too nervous? Would the humans call the cops?
He continued rolling. He made it through works from the 1800s, traveling mostly through Rome and England and Italy. Then he hit the early 1900s where canvases displayed impressionist colors.
Seeing all these forms of art he'd never previously encountered was like walking through a desert lined on both sides with rivers, but a barbed wire fence kept him from taking a drink. He tried too hard not to stare at anything for too long, culture-shocking himself. It would have been easier to ignore the art, but he couldn't help noticing that they were there.
Finally, he stopped beside a painting of a young man with long hair. The long-haired man was in the arms of a woman. She had tears in her eyes.
Here, Felix turned to his load. His hands shook as they made their way toward the paints. Time to paint...
A voice cracked his thought. "Sir," a woman in a suit with neat hair came jogging from one of the arches in the walls. How had she been so fast to notice him? Felix imagined that she - or whoever else found him would pull a walkie-talkie from her belt and say something melodramatic into it like, "I'm gonna need some backup in Exhibition Room Three." But she was less organized than that. She didn't even have a walkie-talkie on her. "Sir? Sir!" Her voice broke and she looked twitchy, like she hadn't been trained for something like this.
He wanted to tell her that he was lost. It would have been the truth, but he whispered the scripted lines, "I'm going to paint you a picture."
The woman's eyebrows knotted harder. "Where did you come from?" She put her hand on his shoulder, hard, but also not yanking him back like he'd expected her to.
At first he didn't understand, but there was lightness in her voice - like she were talking to a sleeping baby, or more specifically, someone who had escaped from a psych unit.
"I want to paint a picture," Felix said it louder and turned to his paint cans, shoving his fingernails under the lids to get them loose. It was his first mistake not to hunt out a screwdriver. It was like his nails were about to come flying off under the lid, but his heart was pounding, and he pulled harder. The first lid came off.
The woman quickly threw herself in front of the cart to pull it away from him, but he already had blue all over one of the thick-bristled brushes.
How insulting. He wanted to stick a brush at her and wipe it all over her face. Instead, he whispered and broke the gaze, "It's going to be alright. You just won't know it until we've saved you." He'd have Faded her right then if he hadn't had another task in place, and if there weren't cameras in every corner.
There were cameras in the corners... Had he thought this through?
It was too late, then.
The woman looked like a rabid dog, shivering like it was lost but ready to bite at any given moment.
In any case, she didn't have the necessary speed of a rabid dog. When Felix darted to the wall, she was far behind. When he made it there, he had enough time to make one streak and then had to duck out of her way to get back to the paints.
This time, she caught up with him. "Nuh-. Nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh. No." She dove at his torso and ripped him from the ground. It was so easy for her to snatch him, she was able to hold him in the air and began to walk him away from the cart.
He, of course, thrashed for the sake of what he had to lose - saving the world. But what got him free was twisting his arm around and shoving the paint brush into her yelling mouth.
She let go of him to spit her blue blood all over the floor and gag. When she stood up, Felix was sure of what he had to do to keep her down for at least the next thirty seconds.
She charged at him, arms clawing.
He fled behind the cart, where he heaved the top shelf up with as much non-existent muscle he could muster.
It turned in the air with a momentum that threw all five of the paint buckets into her and allowed that the heavy top shelf catcher her in the stomach. She toppled to the floor.
Along with another unfortunate event. The ajar bucket of blue hurled paint into the air like a wave - as if coming out of the ocean, only it came down with a spray that stained more than cleansed. The red cracked against the floor, spilling all about like a pool of blood. She fell into both messes, mixing it into purples as she tried to stand up and push the cart off of her without slipping again.
Before she could make another move, he grabbed the only brush that had avoided the mess and both buckets of greens, and ran. When he got the darker shade open, he threw his hands in. It was cold and thick and ran across his skin in blobs.
He noticed a young man walk into the gallery, probably a civilian - but the man didn't insert himself into the fight. He stood there with wide eyes. He wondered if this was Hen's disguise to enter the situation.
But he had to turn away, because there was really no time to mess around. With hands oozing with green, he threw his entire upper body into the wall, like a flapping fish, and rubbed his arms against the white, getting his upper arms and the front of his shirt covered.
Splotches hit and devoured the white wall. The woman screamed from behind him. It was like she had just gotten stabbed. He could imagine her grabbing at the paint on her abdomen and staring at it in her hands like she was dying.
He could have hesitated, really stopped to figure out what he was doing. Why was he hurting her like this? Would the woman get fired afterward?
His forehead was burning, but he pushed on. A voice beside him whispered, and he flinched. "Do it with more passion."
"What?" He turned to an old woman beside him, another one of the crowding civilians.
She had a gospel-like voice and a pink skirt and, most importantly, shining blue eyes. "I said, do it better. You're thinking too much of the now. Relay back into your motivations to paint and Fade." Hen. He'd explained it before coming into the museum. Motivation is where your power comes from. Painting, for you, is an expressway for that energy. Any Super with an influential mindset can do it, but yours specifically is through art.
"Remember the magic word?" Hen whispered.
"Hale."
Hen nodded.
Hen's explanation had been that Felix wasn't only supposed to motivate himself to paint as a form of saving souls, but to find what motivated him to save souls in the first place. And the answer to that was his twin brother.
At the simple vocality of his name, Felix's guts wrenched.
Think about him...
If Hale Ruby-Hohl were at the party the night before, watching the fight, he would've laughed and told Felix he deserved being threatened for being so guileless. And then he would have let the bully take the first punch, then punched the bully into a pulp of skin and bone, smothering him into the dirt.
That's what Felix and his twin didn't have in common. Hale was a defender of planets. Felix was a wallflower.
It was too bad Hale wasn't around to shovel Felix's remains off the battlefields anymore.
Felix, with the mixes of greens, painted with this moment before him. He ribs ached the same way they had when Hale had said painting was stupid and then again when Hale told him that his paintings were the best he'd ever seen. What would it be like for Hale to be right there with him, laughing at all the awkward pictures of naked women and grassy landscapes? How had he managed to come without him, when it had been Hale's great idea to visit all those years ago?
These thoughts made Felix's head heavy, like if he went too in depth into all of them, he'd be drowning in fifty different oceans.
But Hen's voice came again, this time unmasked by the woman's old vocal chords. In fact, Hen was behind him somewhere and, when Felix turned, I'lloozjhen in this form of a squat woman, was holding the employee woman down in the paint as if trying to drown a puppy in a puddle. He called to Felix, "Think harder!"
Which was more than Felix could bare, but he blinked, studied how far his creation had come, and began mixing the greens and throwing it into the blue at the same time - a rainbow of one analogous scheme.
He concentrated harder. Remember that day when Hale was on the roof? It was hazy out, but just a little lighter than it usually was. Rain was coming down in light mists, but a rainbow came out of the sky and blew me away. Hale explained how the rainbow worked, reflecting and refracting light from the sun. Then I threw a water balloon at him, and he almost fell off.
Felix took more blue and dotted it off to the side.
The sounds of Hen and the woman wrestling intensified. "Felix!"
Felix flinched.
"Don't just think about him!" A grunt. "Find that part of your soul where his story makes you shake. Find the root of him encapsulating your mind and ripping it apart."
Felix shuddered, imagining Hale literally putting his hands through Felix's skull and ripping his brain into shreds. "Are you sure?"
A mumbling noise. Felix imagined Hen's lips and nose being dragged through the paint pools, before wrenching free. "I'm sure!" More shuffling.
"Why are you going hand-to-hand with that woman if you could just control her mind?"
"Because that's what I'm waiting for you to do!"
Felix shook a little.
"You have to understand your paint so hard and emotionally that it'll make everyone else in the gallery understand it, too."
"I don't-."
"Don't tell me! Paint it!"
Felix hesitated another hot, flesh burning, second and then clenched his sticky fingers together. He ran over to the puddle and dipped a brush in for more blue. Hale's words were a dark blue - not a sad blue but a hard one. His entire aura was blue, all the time. His coat was blue. His eyes were a dull green, often misinterpreted as the ugly shade of Jupiter's unholy, morning sky - a rotten blue. And his words got more blue the harder he spoke.
There was Hale when their father left the picture.
That was teal. Dark teal.
Dad's face was so worn out and his skin was turning a pale green, but it was night time and the forest was growing purple-green. But Hale, standing next to him, was a hard blue and shoving himself in Dad's face. Dad was going crazy, with the windmills in his irises, turning electric green as he ripped things apart. Hale's eyes turned that static green, too, as he started yelling at Dad to stop. And then the door flung open, and Dad flung himself out and ran into the misshapen colors. The door was still open. The wind blew in. Cold. Midnight blue.
Felix's eyes were blurring over. He could barely will himself to blink.
Hale outside the laboratory.
Felix raced over to the buckets. Red. "Red!" It was all red. Only a little bit was left in the tipped bucket. He ripped it up and dug his green hands inside. He ran back to the wall to draw a horizon of the bright red. And then he threw the whole bucket into the wall. It clanked against the plaster and dropped with a thud on the tiles.
After this, he took a step back and sat down on the floor where a pool of the red and blue was, just a few feet from the Hen and employee war. But they had gone silent behind him and Felix's lips began to twitch.
"Red," someone said from behind him, their voice in pure agony. Then, all five of the civilians who had crowded in during the brawl began to weep.
Felix turned slowly, his eyes on fire with a red, not so much angry as despairing.
Two of the civilians were on their knees with their palms to their faces. The other was hugging himself with tight shoulders and cheeks soaked in tears. "Red!" one screamed. The woman under Hen - the real Hen, finally, was rigid and still in a fear, staring at the painting.
Hen got up from her and started to cackle. He held his hand to his stomach has he yeehawd like a cowboy and didn't stop laughing for three straight minutes. "You've done it, kid!" He came toward Felix with open arms. "You have the job!"
"I don't understand exactly what I've done." He shivered.
"You showed me that your abilities and energy is powerful enough to withstand in my exclusive team."
"But I don't understand what's happened!"
"You've been able to control their emotions, Felix. A very specific form of mind control."
The screams around them augmented and sirens blared closer to the building from outside.