We zipped off over the scrub lands at insane speeds and Connie was doing all sorts of weird maneuvers. It was neat. I wasn't sure, but I thought I saw water ahead of us. I knew I'd seen mountains below us. We must have been most of the way across the state.

We slowed down and I could see a meadow surrounded by woods below us. We were heading right for it.

We'd slowed almost to a stop and couldn't have been more than a few feet up when these blinding lights came on and a loudspeaker or something thundered out "Don't Move!"

Connie was frozen, with me still in her arms. I grabbed one of her hands and hoped it'd work. And blipped us to that spot in the woods where I'd first blipped.

Connie was still going "Wha?" when I managed to get her attention.

"Connie? I'm a mutant too..."

Name: Dorothy Gayle
Aliases: D'artagnan "Art" Gayle
Code name: Blip
Ratings: [unknown]
Techniques:none
Weak vs.: [unknown]
Backup/ Team affiliation: none

Name: Ronald Sutherland
Aliases: Constance "Connie" Sutherland
Coden name: Flying Fox
Ratings: [unknown]
Techniques:none
Weak vs.: [unknown]
Backup/ Team affiliation: none

When I woke up I wasn't sure if it was a weird dream or something. Blipping out to where I'd left the bike the day before proved it wasn't a dream.

I took care of my chores and went across the street to Ron's. We were supposed to go out to the Renn Faire this afternoon, and I didn't want to miss it. If it hadn't been for that, I'd have spent the day trying to figure out what I could do with my newfound gift.

Ron had his stuff too, and we looked through some of his comics while we waited for our ride. Neither of our parents were into the Faire, but fortunately some friends of theirs that they trusted with us were into it.

I think our folks mostly let us hang out with House Blue Frog because it kept us out of their hair. I think somebody told us once that our folks used to be really into fandom, and the SCA and stuff like that. That's when they were part of the Frogs.

They'd gotten more into their jobs and stuff (Gerard once said they'd "gotten all boring") but their friends in the House had babysat us and stuff since before we could remember. So we got to go to neat stuff and our folks didn't pay a lot of attention.

We spent a lot of weekends at tourneys, the Faire or even cons sometimes. And during the week we got to "help out" (read get free lessons) with some of the classes folks in the House taught. Ron and I both like gymnastics and fencing. There were other things Ron liked and I didn't, and vice versa.

Our folks didn't mind because they didn't have to pay for it and we were learning stuff. Of course, sometimes we were a little misleading about who was doing what, but never mind.

Anyway, we were going to the Faire. We each had outfits and stuff, but as usual, we wore our mundane clothes to and from. We had good reasons and everybody in the House knew.

The ride was a lot of talking about all kinds of stuff interspersed with music and folks dropping out of the conversations into books (fiction, stuff for projects, all sorts of things. What do you except from geeks? :-)

At last we were there. We did some fetching and carrying while the House set up. Then we ducked into the back of Gwen's booth and changed into our outfits.

Ron and I traded clothes bags. That was one of the things the folks didn't know. At the Faire and some other events, I didn't have to be Dot. I could be young D'artagnan! And Ron could be Lady Constance.

What can I say, we really liked that old version of The Three Musketeers.

Our folks put up with me being a tomboy. Connie. I mean Ron (yes, he picked the name partly because it sounded like Ronnie, which his folks call him a lot, so it was easier to answer to) had it harder.

While his folks didn't pay a lot of attention, he couldn't get away with dolls or girl clothes. Luckily we're the same size. So I've loaned him a lot of the frilly stuff mom keeps pushing on me. And I've been known to "forget" a doll or two at his place.

Mostly, when we are at home we manage by spending a lot of time playing with each other. I can put up with dolls so he can play with them, and he'll put up with army men and stuff for me. We just have to fake liking/not liking if the folks are around.

There are a lot of "different" folks in the House. Our folks aren't against folks like that. Not exactly for them either. But we were pretty sure they'd not react well to their own kids being "like that". So were the folks in the House when they caught us a few years ago.

They had a long talk with us and finally decided that they wouldn't stop us as long as we were careful. And they wouldn't tell our parents either. But they wouldn't lie either. I think a lot of the House just figured that if they let us alone, we'd get bored soon enough. I think a few suspected the truth.

Anyway that's why we both had blue feathers we couldn't wear. A gift from some of the Clan Blue Feather folks in the House (Clan Blue Feather is a sort of unofficial GLBT group in the SCA. Wearing a blue feather signifies that you are GLBT).

Anyway, in very little time, I was dressed as a (very) young swashbuckler, and Connie was wearing a wench outfit. I was almost jealous in that Connie could use that outfit all day. I could only use mine to show off a bit or if they had some kid fencing stuff. Otherwise, I'd have to change into a page outfit or an apprentice outfit for most stuff.

Still, Connie often changed several times anyway.

We had fun. I did some boffer fighting. We both ran errands and helped some of the House folks who had booths with things. That got us some spending money. Not a lot, but most of the "work" was stuff we liked doing anyway.

As usual, we switched back the last hour. I spent it working on some embroidery. Ron spent it helping a smith. Earlier in the day, it'd been the other way around. This way, though we could each honestly say we'd worked on some of the stuff we brought home but had to leave at the other's house.

And it's not like I loathed embroidery. Or Ron loathed working with the smith. Ditto for a lot of other things. I didn't loathe girly stuff. I was even sort of adequate at cooking and sewing and all that. And Ron was OK with a lot of guy stuff. But we each really preferred the stuff the other was "supposed" to be doing.

I did make one experiment that day. I'd bought something I was afraid might get damaged in the van, so I ducked into a biffy and chanced blipping home to my room. I stuck it in the closet and only then did I realize what a risk I'd taken. It wasn't just that the folks might have caught me. It was that not only would they have caught me, but they'd have caught me in a boy's outfit. I can get away with that in mundanes, but I know better than to try it with other stuff (let's just forget about my asking to wear a pirate outfit the Halloween before, OK That did not go well)

So I blipped back to the biffy, and made a promise to be a lot more careful in the future. I almost forgot about the other reason I'd tried. It wasn't until we were home that I realized that I'd blipped something like 30 miles with no more effort than it'd taken for the few miles between home and that bit of woods the day before.

I'd already been fairly sure I could blip to places I'd already been to before I made that first trip. The garage seemed to prove that. Some experimenting the next several nights proved that. I could get to a lot of places. But I needed to have a fairly strong memory it seemed. And it didn't always work.

Well, if I could get to someplace it always seemed to work. It was just that I couldn't get to some places that I thought I should be able to. Like the classroom I'd had at school last year. Spent lots of time there. So why couldn't I go there?

I'd been sticking to local stuff for the tests. Then I got a major clue. I decided to blip to the biffy I'd used at the Faire. I blipped and listened carefully. Then I cautiously opened the door. Only to find that I wasn't at the Faire! I was at a construction site somewhere!

I walked over to the fence, took a good look at the ground on the other side and blipped. Much easier than trying to climb it. Then I went looking for a street sign. Once I found it, I memorized it and blipped home.

I wrote down the intersection and tried to find it the next day. Finally had to use Google. It wasn't in town. It was in a small town on the other side of the Faire.

That worried me. At first I was worried that I could have wound up anywhere. But no, I had arrived in a biffy. Come to think of it, there were a couple of bits of graffiti I remembered from the Faire. So it was the same biffy.

OK, I'd blipped to the biffy, not to where it had been. That was sorta reassuring. But at the same time, it meant I had to be a lot more careful, because I might not wind up where I expected if I picked something that could be moved as a target.

Then it hit me. They were remodeling some of the classrooms. Maybe that was why I couldn't blip to my old one. They'd changed something enough that it didn't match what I remembered.

That did turn out to be the case when school opened. But it wasn't until a lot later that I realized something I should have about this sort of thing.

I was cautiously exploring more places I remembered (and my memory seemed to be getting better). I managed a beach on the coast we'd been to once or twice. And a park in Vancouver BC I remembered from another vacation. Both were 300 or so miles.

The real biggies were the Statue of Liberty, a park in the Bronx, and a couple places in Washington DC, all places I remembered from a trip when I was 4. That raised my range to 3000 miles!

I also discovered that while vacation photos helped for places I'd been to, photos of places I'd never been didn't.

A pair of binoculars let me blip to places, I could see, if I could see them "well enough". Ronnie's telescope worked a couple of times, but it was hard to find places I could see well enough when I dared try.

I tried some web-cam sites, but they didn't work. I guess it's not enough to see the spot, I need to "know" where it is with respect to me or something.

So, for several years, I spent some of my spare time on my bike (I'd finally found that if I was careful, I could port it while riding it. But I definitely had to be moving, and the landings were a bit rough sometimes) riding away from spots I'd been trying to learn new spots so I could start from them next time.

I could do that in broad daylight a lot of the time, because I'd pick spots that were off the road as the end spot on a trip. That way I could walk back onto the road and if anybody was driving by, the wouldn't wonder how I got there. I could have done 10, 20, even 30 miles a day just by riding. But a lot of times, the roads would be clear far enough that I could get a good look ahead with binoculars and blip a mile or two.

Even so, there were a lot of places I wanted to see, and it was gonna take forever to get to them all.

All that changed one night when Ronnie asked me to meet out in the woods.

When I got there, he was wearing the Supergirl outfit I'd had to wear the last Halloween. She looked nice in it, but really nervous too.

"Art?" (when it was just us, or folks who understood, she called me Art. It sort of came from D'artagnan)

"Art? I need to tell you something. It's kinda strange and I hope it won't mess things up between us..."

It couldn't be stranger than my weird stuff. At least that's what I thought.

"I... I'm a mutant." My jaw dropped. I'd been trying to figure out how to tell her, and it turns out that she's one too?!

She mistook astonishment for something else and started to tear up. I quickly hugged her and tried to reassure her. But I decided to let her finish telling me before I dropped my bombshell.

"So what's different? And why are you wearing this silly costume?"

She smiled at me. and, then, to my surprise, she picked me up in her arms like I didn't weigh anything!

And then we were flying!

She started low and slow, zipping between the trees until we got to the rim of the valley. Then we swooped down into. it. I should have been scared. But I trusted her.

All of a sudden the wind in my face cut off, and we were moving even faster, judging by the few lights and things I could see.

"I've got some kind of forcefield thing. It cuts the wind and streamlines things."

All I could do was say "oh wow".

We were really zooming along following the river but still not too high. I checked a map later, we must have been a hundred miles downstream when she zoomed straight up. I'd have been scared, but I couldn't feel us moving., everything was rock steady.

We zipped off over the scrub lands at insane speeds and Connie was doing all sorts of weird maneuvers. It was neat. I wasn't sure, but I thought I saw water ahead of us. I knew I'd seen mountains below us. We must have been most of the way across the state.

We slowed down and I could see a meadow surrounded by woods below us. We were heading right for it.

We'd slowed almost to a stop and couldn't have been more than a few feet up when these blinding lights came on and a loudspeaker or something thundered out "Don't Move!"

Connie was frozen, with me still in her arms. I grabbed one of her hands and hoped it'd work. And blipped us to that spot in the woods where I'd first blipped.

Connie was still going "Wha?" when I managed to get her attention.

"Connie? I'm a mutant too..."

We both sort of fell apart for a while. After we pulled ourselves back together, we told each other about our powers. And we both apologized for taking so long to tell.

We were both pretty rattled by whatever had happened. I blipped us back home and Connie borrowed some of my clothes. We retrieved her stuff from the woods later after deciding that if we left it there, somebody might find it and that'd lead folks to us. It was scary sneaking up to where we started, half expecting to find someone waiting for us.

She was afraid to fly for days. But we finally decided that she'd used that spot too much. And figured that she'd been picked up on radar. Which meant that we were probably safe since she'd never flown above the valley rim until she was a long ways off. Mostly because she'd been afraid of running into planes from the airport or the "local" (20 miles away) airbase.

We found that as long as she was flying, even hovering, I could blip both of us. So her practice sessions had me blipping us somewhere before she did much of anything. And us keeping an eye out for things.

We hid the Supergirl outfit and the outfit I'd been wearing that night in a cache near one of my more isolated blipping sites. Later, we set up a stash that was really in the middle of nowhere by having her fly me (sticking really close to the ground) to a spot.

So we'd blip out, change, blip somewhere else, then fly around.

Several times we got buzzed by planes that we were pretty sure were fighters. We both wore masks, so even if they got pictures it wouldn't matter much.

We'd usually blip out after getting spotted. We'd try to get low to the ground and slow, but a couple of times we were high and fast. The first time that happened I was scared we'd come out of the blip moving that fast. But we didn't.

I was happy about that but I wished I understood what was going on.

Connie said she'd been noticing an odd feeling sometimes. And when she did, a lot of times the planes showed up.

I wondered if it had something to do with radar. Just a wild guess, but with the tingles and "pushing" she'd already told me about, being able to somehow "feel" radar wasn't that weird.

A few nights later, we'd decided to try a spot near Washington DC. I had only agreed because I could blip us out pretty fast, and Connie had convinced me her forcefield was really tough.

Sure enough, almost as soon as we were in the air, Connie complained of the itch again. I And a plane zipped by only minutes later. Connie complained that it was worse.

I think I said something like "Well, find a way to scratch it. Or push it away or something."

She said "I wish I could" and started dodging around, just to try to avoid the plane.

All of a sudden she made a zig and said "Ahh. That feels better."

I saw the plane fly by a ways off. A lot farther than they normally did once they showed up. Pretty soon it was obvious he couldn't find us.

Well, whatever she did seemed to stick. She never felt that "itch" again. And after not getting buzzed for a month she insisted on trying to get noticed. I finally agreed that she seemed to have it down after she scared me half to death by flying back and forth over an airbase (not the local one! I talked her out of that!) without getting noticed.

Once that was behind us, we made a great team. She could fly us places, and I could memorize the spots to blip back to. A GPS unit used up a lot of our savings, but let us go pretty much anywhere.

We've been to a lot of odd places on earth. And set up "clubhouses" in a few of them.