Oh, What Feeling is This? Chapter Three

Iskira’s daughter meanwhile had arrived at a conclusion. Throwing her long tresses back, her eyes alive and the colour high in her cheeks, Neetra spoke it ecstatically aloud: “I love this, Flashthunder! I love being here with you like this, I love feeling this way…!”

She shuffled close to him, filling his world with the nearness of her scent and the tingle from a loose lock of her hair that was touching his forehead. Inches from Flashthunder’s trembling lips and quick-working nostrils and wide wondering eyes glowed a small secretive smile softly smouldering with temptation and mischief. In light sing-song words, as if provoking him to some schoolyard dare that could land them both in trouble, she whispered:

“Let’s try something I’ve never tried before!”

“I thought that’s what we were doing,” Flashthunder responded.

“Yes, but this first,” Neetra went on, taking both his hands in hers. “There’s a trick you can do with psychic powers like mine. I’ll find a memory of yours – a special one, an exciting one – and we’ll live it together. It would be terribly wrong to do this without the other person’s permission, and I never would. But just as long as you’d be OK with it…?”

When Flashthunder indicated his consent, Neetra put her telepathy to work. In no time at all she had found just the one. Something amidst Flashthunder’s other recollections was wearing a veritable star’s corona made of exactly what she was looking for, so much so that even its peripheral light and warmth was juicing up her heartbeat with endorphins and giving her the urge to squeeze her thighs together. “Wow,” Neetra murmured. “Got it.”

“But, um, which of my memories, then?” Flashthunder cried in growing agitation. “Will I not know until we’re actually in it? Because there are some things I really never thought I’d share with anyone else, and…!”

Neetra’s little smile was back.

“I know,” she replied, with the tiniest trace of smugness. “That’s what makes this sort of thing a bit naughty.”

By now she was raring to go. Instructing Flashthunder to sit up straight and keep a firm grip on her hands, she commenced: “Now, don’t be – ”

A futile reassurance for this particular travelling companion. She tried again: “There’s nothing to be – ” But of course that wouldn’t do either.

Neetra allowed herself a quick sigh. “Let’s just agree you’re terrified but you’re going to trust me,” was what she settled on, and with that, they were away.

Unseen fingers skipping briefly over unseen strings flirted out a little melodious rill, beckoning Neetra and Flashthunder on as the other instruments struck up at once and swept the pair down into light and colour and joyous soaring noise. The tune starting out was like the last one of this galaxy Neetra had heard, with melodies that went exactly where you expected them to and did exactly what you anticipated, as if you were listening to what she would have called an oldie. Those time-honoured harmonies, those warm nostalgic refrains! They spoke of childhood trips with the orphanage to seaside provinces where somehow it was always a summer afternoon twenty years ago. The defining sound of that era whose whole purpose was to be older than you. Music your parents laughed about, which was perhaps the best of all these reasons to love it so.

Not that Neetra would have wanted her parents prominent in her mind as she beheld the scene unfolding ahead. What she was listening to may have sounded old-fashioned, to her way of hearing at least, but what she was looking at was anything but austere. Darting beams of multicoloured laser were at play throughout a surging roiling ocean made up of the young and pretty. Tall beehive hairdos and phenomenal fluttering eyelashes on the girls, trim flicky hair and breathless lopsided smiles on the boys, and on all of them short skirts swishing and bumping in the endless motion of their dance. From each and every chest shone a yellow lightning-bolt. Neetra had been here once before, but on a quiet weekday afternoon, and barely recognised the small space-nightclub now a concert was kicking into full swing. She had apparently become the first soul from her sector to gaze on the spectacle of Mini-Flashes letting themselves go.

It was impossible for her not to be caught up in the thrill, sharing what this memory had been and was now for her host Flashthunder as their astral selves coasted the abandonment side-by-side. There was the gang, Neetra spotted them together near the stage, her good friend Flashlight and dear Mini-Flash Luna the other four neophytes all in their beige, and this must have been before Dimension Borg came because there was Flashtease with them too, it was the first time she had ever seen him alongside his peers, and finally next to him was Flashthunder himself, the physical body he had been then seen through the eyes of his older spectral iteration.

Neetra guessed at a special reason this little circle was here tonight. She craned her neck to see above the heads and arms and waving hands, and yes! There was Flashshadow, in position high up on the split-level auditorium, misty and insubstantial and as motionless as a girl of glass but for the hands that plucked and strummed at her lyre. Neetra’s heart fairly burst with pride to be her friend. Never even mind that Shadow had saved the whole team from a monstrous asteroid mere hours ago. The girl rocked!

Excitement was swelling fast. Neetra quickly took in the other band-members one by one, a burly beetle-like bass-player who she remembered getting on quite well with, a robot drummer with hinged arm-units pivoting rhythmically, and the backing-vocalists, a trio of teen-girls each from a different world. Consequently they came in quite the spectrum of tints and hues, and one had antennae and another gills, but Neetra couldn’t help noting how on most points they were identical regardless, such as the swaying of their many-petticoated hemlines and the synchronised wiggling of their shoulders and the saucy smiles on their gleaming glossy lips as together they began to chant out:

Sha-la-la, sha-la-la…!

Sha-la-la, sha-la-la…!

And the crowd went wild. There she was, strutting onto stage directly in front, her sparkly curls and lacy flounce bouncing away. Cherry, lead singer of the band.

Since Neetra was immersed in Flashthunder’s psyche, she experienced everything of what this entrance signified for him. Nor did she imagine his to be the only set of male hormones in the house tonight that Cherry’s mere materialization was whipping into a frenzy. It wasn’t hard for Neetra to see why, especially now she was witnessing the latter in her element at last. No girl could honestly begrudge her a little admiration for that face, that figure, and that cosmos-black hair glittering with its very own sky of constellations. But Neetra had thought on her previous meeting with Cherry, and she thought it again now, that there was a teenager from outer space for you. So alien, so distant, so strange. Beautiful in the way a quasar spanning the heavens was, and every bit as untouchable and awesome. The dark matter of desire.

Cherry scarcely needed a good singing-voice on top of it all, but Neetra was already aware that that was something she boasted too, and no-one was disappointed when in every corner of the club the first verse began to resonate and ring.

Neetra, her telepathic self nestled in snugly amongst her jumping cheering Mini-Flash friends, closed her eyes. This was bliss. It was bliss because they were sharing it. Boys and girls all the same, and all feeling the same, and no-one had to be any different, no-one had to be ashamed of how they were feeling. Oh, why had this been a stranger to her for so much of her life?

The accompaniment was shifting into another tempo, and Cherry as if on this cue halted her striding about the stage to pose directly above where Flashthunder was standing. Neetra apprehended they had reached the part of the memory that made it so precious for him. His past and present selves alike were gaping upward at she who had drawn close enough to bring even her perfume with her.

It was hallucinogenic. It was rhapsodic. Luminescent red lips, a star-white underskirt, one lissome arm pushing up and under her spilling ebony locks, the perfectly round tops of two shiny legs, satin panties in electric blue, her bodice stuffed out by twin taut swells…Neetra couldn’t even say where, in Flashthunder’s fevered sensations, each different aspect of Cherry began and ended. Every scintilla of his frame was energizing in synthesis with the vision before him.

All of a sudden this felt to Neetra like the sort of recollection she had no business intruding on. She turned hastily to Flashthunder and whispered: “Um, if you’d rather I wasn’t here – ”

His psychic hand gripped hers. “Stay,” he responded intently. “I want you to share this too.”

And that was a privilege indeed, because for Flashthunder it had been a moment in which he and Cherry were the only two occupants of the universe. Slowly, sensuously, that same girl enunciated the next lines as if for him alone.

Neetra had never imagined it possible to be inside someone else’s perceptions and notice something they themselves had not. That however was what happened then, for the look Cherry let linger on her companion as she murmured these words was intended to do far more than favour an audience-member picked at random. Girls half Neetra’s age would have known the promise in that glance for what it was, whereas Flashthunder’s essence remained happy but oblivious. Neetra was not jealous, not exactly, though it did confound her more than it had ever done that boys should be capable of missing what girls worked so hard to shove right under their noses.

Jeez, Cherry, our heroine thought privately. I know what starburst you fancy sharing in.

The band was bringing it home. Cherry sprang at once from her unspoken intimacy with Flashthunder and bounded to centre-stage in a triumphal bouffant swirl, now bestowing her charms on the whole of the audience as she delivered unto their climactic paroxysms the resplendent finale. Then the last fading bars of the song whirled Neetra and Flashthunder up and out again, back to their corporeal bodies and the small hot sleeping-quarters on their ship. Both were simmering within from what they had shared. In addition they were united in another guilty pleasure, that of feeling like a somewhat older couple whose date had brought them directly from the nightclub to the bedroom.

“Flashthunder, are you sure there’s no history between you and Cherry?” Neetra couldn’t resist asking. “The way she was looking at you, a girl didn’t need to be psychic.”

But she had been inside his mind, and knew already he had registered none of it The dumbfounded expression he returned was not even required. Neetra however had a hunch as to how this conundrum might be solved.

“Too terrified to ever go and find out?” she hinted. Flashthunder nodded his confirmation, while secretly marvelling at how well Neetra had come to know him in such a short time.

“Bet the first thing you’ll do after we’ve saved the galaxy is go to her next gig though,” Neetra teased him. “Try out a few of the lessons you learned in this little test-run.”

He blushed, as she’d expected him to, but he beamed at her through his blushes. Neetra already knew what his next question was, so answered it without his having to ask.

“I did love it, Flashthunder,” she told him earnestly. “It’s just that…”

She smiled at him with wet sparkling eyes.

“I wish I’d had that,” Neetra declared. It was said at last. The thought had been with her since practically the moment she first looked on Mini-Flashes interacting with each other, but she had dreaded voicing it aloud, knowing that to do so would be to commit the most heartless betrayal of everything her many years with The Four Heroes had meant to her.

“When I was growing up, I mean,” Neetra continued with a sigh. “Still fighting in the name of good, but only around girls and boys like me. Training sessions and concerts and fun with them, like it’s always been for you. Just having a crush, without anyone minding. Because everybody else was going through the same.”

They were sitting close by now, and touching. It would have been impossible to live their last experience together without ending up thus. Neetra felt Flashthunder’s caresses stroking gently on her face and hair.

“The Flash Club is where you belong,” he whispered, and his plaintive little voice had never sounded so determined and sure. “Just look at everything you’ve achieved since you stepped into our lives, everything you’ve done for this team, for this entire galaxy. Your place is here. I knew it the very minute I set eyes on you.”

“Then maybe it’s not too late,” Neetra responded, as she sank into his embrace again. “Now show me what I’ve been missing.”

END OF CHAPTER THREE