#odd abilities

Title: Chewing Bomb

  “Honestly, Ira, use your imagination once in a while!”

The brunette sitting in the pine tree gave her friend a baleful look. “You turn into a cat on a regular basis. I don’t need to use my imagination, Cory.”

Coriander, lifelong friend and confidant of one Ira J. Suresh, was about as persistent as her friend was stubborn. It was how they had met, more or less.  Or rather, it was how a two year old Cory had decided  that Ira was going to be her absolute bestest friend (Cory’s words, sometime during 3rd grade) forever and for all of eternity.

When life in the Suresh home was still good and easy and all things peaceful, Mama Suresh had regularly dropped Ira off at the local daycare center (T^4, or, Teaching Tots to Think!, which is  commonly acknowledged  as where all the toddlers who had been found to be a little too clever for the general population go.) When Ira had been attending for a little over a month, a new face had shown up and almost immediately attached herself in a rather barnacle like fashion to the wild haired child.

Cory had followed Ira around the daycare center determinedly for a week straight, no matter where Ira wandered, and shrieked whenever a flustered day care center worker had tried to separate them. Their mothers noticed the connection and cooed over their children, before they promptly cemented a dozen years worth of visits, sleepovers and barbeques between the two families.

The girls grew up in each others’ pockets for the next two decades,  and neither had any plans to leave the other’s side for the foreseeable future.

Even if Ira was often tempted to strangle Cory, she realized life would be a lot more dull without her best friend, and Cory knew that Ira wouldn’t ever dare, simply because Ira wouldn’t ever hurt her. Cory knew this because Ira could barely stand to use the flyswatter when the flies were swarming her in the hottest days of summer. She was weird like that, Cory knew, but it only endeared her to Cory all the more.

Cory snorted. “I may turn into a cat on a regular basis, but that’s less freaky than being able to conjure water out of nothing, which is, y’know,  breaking physics. Man, I remember my brain going  ‘blue screen of death’ the day it clicked about what, exactly, you were doing when you play with your water.”

Ira raised an eyebrow, looking down over the short distance from where she was perched in the branches and her friend was sprawled at the foot of the tree.

“You’re complaining about me breaking the laws of physics? What about you, you brat? You’re the one  ignoring the conservation of mass!”

“I’ve explained it to you, my body probably goes to like, a pocket universe or something, a reality hidden for me and me alone, where my cat form resides until I summon it, at which point I can see and hear and whatever that the cat’s body does.” She paused for a moment, thoughtful. “Or, y’know, magic. It’s always a possibility.”

“You watch too much sci-fi,”  Ira muttered, before climbing down a few branches and dropping to the ground. She tipped herself sideways from where she had landed in a crouch and let her head fall heavily onto her friends stomach, ignoring the 'oof!' of surprise and discomfort.

“And I suppose you have a better explanation for either of our physics defying abilities?”  asked Cory, raising an eyebrow even though she knew perfectly well her friend couldn’t see it.

“Not really, no,” admitted Ira. “But still, magic? There’s gotta be a better explanation than that- if there was magic in the world, there would be way too much evidence to disprove it. Especially today, with all the crappy cell phone footage and social media presence around the world.”

“Really,” said Cory, flatly, “I bet you five bucks that if I posted a picture on my blog of you ‘waterbending’ so to speak,  the first thing anybody would say was ‘I didn’t know you could photoshop that well!’”

“Yeah no. I would feel the need to go hide in that bunker we found a few weeks back up in the mountains if you did that.” Ira shivered and burrowed into her friend’s side.

Cory snorted. “If I read too much sci-fi, then you read way too many dystopian future novels. Freak.” Ira sat up and glared at the blonde who was giving her a sunny smile from in between the tree roots.

“Jerk. You know I hate that word-” Cory chanted the well worn lines along with her friend, “‘- when referring  to either myself or others.’ I know.”

It was an old argument for the two, and one of the few things they could not agree on, nor come to a compromise about.  Cory maintained that Ira was overly sensitive about the usage of some words, like freak, or retard, or other words and insults along those lines. Cory had a mindset that words were words, and they couldn’t be bad or good, only neutral. It was all in how a person chose to interpret them, whether they thought it an insult or not. This wasn’t  to say that she went about calling everybody names, rather that she put less weight upon the words she chose, and more on what she was trying to impart.

Despite all of this, she was well aware of Ira’s dislike for certain words, and chose to disregard this sensitivity so that she could needle at her friend.

Ira, on the other hand, was of the opinion that some words could indeed hurt, even if you were joking. She tended to be more conscious of what she said, as well as what other people said.  Thus, she tried to avoid saying things that could be hurtful to someone, thinking it only made sense, trying not to be rude or hurtful. It was all good and dandy if you could be level headed about words being words, but most people didn’t think like that, and it was unfair to expect them to.

Both of the girls were right, in some ways, but that didn’t stop them from arguing about it when it came up.

Cory sat up, leaning towards her friend. “Besides, I doubt you would last all that long in that old thing- it’s less of an abandoned military bunker, and more of something some paranoid farmer built in like the 40’s. The head honchos up in Washington could probably blow it open with a few sticks of dynamite. And since no one owns the land it’s built on, they wouldn’t have to worry about or obtain any warrants for blowing it to kingdom come with us inside!” Cory flopped dramatically down to the ground after she made a wild gesture with both of her arms, illustrating the ‘boom’ in question.

Ira gave her a half smile. “I’ll presume that ‘us’ is because you’re my best friend and would follow me if I decided I needed to hide from the government?”

Cory  propped herself up on an elbow, gave her a strange look, one that said ‘what are you high on?’ and said, airily, “Of course not. I’d be kidnapping you so that I had a bargaining chip to make the government keep me alive. ‘I will release her to wreak havoc upon the world if you do not let me live in peace!’” Cory’s lips wobbled from the effort of keeping a straight face, and Ira snorted, mood lightening considerably.