A fuzzy-yet-familiar room grew more detailed as Elsie blinked herself awake. Or maybe she was asleep and this was another strange dream of distorted light and comforting shadow.

Glitzy belts and arm bands dangled from the bed above and into her eyeline, bling blinding her as she fought to clear her vision. She fluttered her eyelashes so hard they could have swapped lids. The dormitory came into focus, lit up through the windows. Daytime. Her bed was made and she wasn’t in it exactly but on top of it. Fully dressed in communal patrol gear. A raw, tingling feeling at her lips pushed her to break through the drowsiness and search the floor for her phone, hanging from the bottom bunk and flapping her hand along the chipped wood planks until she caught it half-hidden beneath the bed frame. The camera showed them red and puffy. Elsie frowned at herself. She couldn’t remember her dinner to know if she’d eaten something super spicy. Now that she tried to, she couldn’t remember going to bed either. She couldn’t remember anything past lunchtime of what her phone now revealed was yesterday.

A bump to the head was a possibility, but she was pretty hard to break. Invulnerability was a difficult power to measure without really doing yourself some damage and yet she knew she took plenty of knocks in her training and had always been completely fine. If she was concussed, it would have had to have been at the hands of another super-powered-person. A villain? Had she gotten into a real incident? Did she get her butt beat?

Elsie tapped in her login to SupAssign with creaky fingers that couldn’t quite find the keys first time. Her schedule rolled out on the screen, the secret to whatever the heck she had been up to, and yesterday was a big, fat, glowing blank. She had nothing booked. Not even a piddly patrol around the block. With no assignments she should have been training. Should have. And yet here she was in the training centre’s communal patrol suit. Well-worn kevlar-reinforced seams strained over the curves of her muscled thighs, as ready for retirement as the practice dummies leaking foam. Hey, you picked your training centre for the mentors, not the fancy facilities.

She lowered the screen and closed her eyes, taking a few moments to let her body cry out any pain or problems. Nothing. Was that a worry in itself? Whatever, that was what the medical centre was for. As soon as she was washed and changed she’d get checked.

Elsie hip flipped off the bed, letting the rest of her body turn with the momentum, and practised her hover for the few seconds she could hold it before stumbling onto her feet (maybe with a bit of fingertip help too but no one was looking) and throwing her hands up in a gymnast’s salute beside hers and Tam’s bunk beds.

Behind her, the door to the rest of the training centre slammed against the opposite wall.

“What time did you get in this morning?” Tam exclaimed.

Elsie spun on her toes, pinkies still pointed to the ceiling and laughed, “No idea!”

Tam bumped the door shut with her bedazzled butt. “What?”

“I swear I don’t remember a thing past those bad meatballs yesterday.” She dropped her hands to the back of her head and scratched her pillow-fluffed hair.

“Don’t you blame some innocent microwave meal for whatever you got up to last night!”

Elsie couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m serious!”

“Are you hurt? Do you feel sick?”

“No and no.”

“Then you obviously had a great night out and you’re a real stinker for not inviting me!”

“Tam,” she cooed sickly sweet, leaning her head against the top bunk’s frame and folding her arms. “I would never go out like that without you. I genuinely think I might need to get my head checked or something.”

“I’ll come with you and make sure they test for alcohol poisoning too.” Tam flicked her head in the direction of their bathroom. “Have a shower and put some real clothes on before you get caught pissing about in a TC suit.”

She was right. Elsie hurried inside their tiny en suite and pulled the suit off. It didn’t have that dried-up sweat smell that they usually did after a tough session. She tossed it to the floor with a shrug at her reflection in the mirror, what she couldn’t remember, she couldn’t worry about for now. The movement drew her gaze to her collarbone. She hesitated. There had yet to be a day she wasn’t stilled temporarily at the sight of it. She stepped into the raised shower base and slid the glass shut around her.

Through the spray of hot water she took stock again, double and triple checking for anything amiss. No bumps or bruises, no lumps or ligature marks, not even any dirt under her fingernails.

“Let me do something fun with your hair today,” Tam whined through a crack in the door, knowing damn well she could set off the fire alarm. Again.

Elsie shook her head, letting the shorter strands flap back and forth. “What if they need to put wires on my scalp?”

Tam scoffed. “You’re really sticking to this brain injury thing?”

“I don’t know what it is!” She parted the foggy glass. Condensation covered the mirror opposite, turning Elsie into a smudge of green and pink. “I just know I don’t remember shit after lunch yesterday.” She snagged the hand towel off the rail by the toilet and launched it at Tam. “Now, close the door!”

Tam closed it but booed on the other side until Elsie was finished shampooing. It would be a health and safety nightmare if Tam were to grow out her hair like Elsie’s. The amount of accessories she already clipped, tied and sometimes glued to her bob would have her scalped in an MRI machine, let alone trying to go head to head with any villain with material manipulation. Until the day came that they got her into a hot spot, or gave her a bald spot, Elsie couldn’t see Tam giving up her decoration. She had to learn the hard way, it was just how she worked.

Elsie hopped out the shower, dried, and realised she’d forgotten to bring any clothes in with her. One quick flash for her best friend (with lots of whistles and exaggerated fanning) and she was hopping around their dorm into mismatched gym gear.

“Breakfast?”

“Medical centre.”

“We’re already late, all the cooked stuff will be gone!”

“It’s on the way!”

“Fine. You keep this up I’m actually going to start worrying.”

“I’m just being cautious.”

They rocked up to the medical centre and Tam was shooed back out by the triage nurse since she didn’t need any medical care. Elsie was alert and ambulatory, she would have to face them alone.

“You’re young to be forgetting things,” commented the doctor as he tapped at her joints.

“It’s not so much things, plural, but just the last half-day.”

“Mmm.” He shone a light into her eyes and had her perform pupil acrobatics. “Any tenderness here?” He pressed around her skull, asking the question over and over. The answer was always the same. “No pain. No known injury. Neurologically you seem well. We’ll refer you for a CT scan but because we don’t do those in-house I can’t say how long the wait will be. In the meantime, we’ll do a tox screen.”

“You think I could have been drugged?”

He considered his answer. “No, I don’t. It would be poor care not to check, though.”

“Then what do you think it is?”

“Memory loss like this, with no physical explanation, can sometimes come from stress or lack of sleep – or the combination of the two spiralling into one another.”

“I sleep great,” Elsie assured him. “I train hard so it’s lights-out as soon as my head hits the pillow.”

“Any chance you are over-training? Do you feel pressure to get out on the beat?”

“No! I mean, of course, I want to raise my grade and get cool missions and maybe have a cartoon version of my face on a cereal box… but that’s just big dreams, I’m not being pushed by anyone.”

He had a pity in his eyes that she didn’t appreciate when he asked, “Do you compare yourself to others in your cohort?”

“No one in my cohort has gone up a grade since we graduated.”

“So, you do keep track?”

“No, I just- we would celebrate it.”

“Would it be distressing to you if I were to take you off-duty for a week of rest?”

“It would be annoying,” Elsie admitted through gritted teeth. “I wouldn’t be devastated or anything. I do take time off, I just do it when I want to.” Add an extra seven days to her allowance and she would be spending her lunch break browsing resorts in sunny destinations. Taking seven days for no reason was a waste.

“Fine. For now, we will see how your blood tests come back and wait for your scan date to be sent back. In the meantime, any changes you let us know.”

“Absolutely.”

She took the papers for her blood test to a private room where a nurse awaited with drawers full of needles of different materials, length, and girth.

“Invulnerability?” she clarified over her spectacles, and held the papers out from her as though they were only for decoration.

“Mild,” Elsie answered. She wasn’t going to have the extra-thick-and-pointy needle picked for her if she didn’t need it. Better to start small and let the first attempt bounce off. She sat in the padded chair and offered her arm to the robotic band that would squeeze her bicep in place of the rubber strap they used on people without powers.

“Make a fist for me…”

A few minutes (and two broken needles) later, she was free to leave with a cotton ball taped to the inside of her elbow and a timeslot to return for her results.

Tam had patiently skulked about outside the entire time. Elsie couldn’t believe she hadn’t left for breakfast without her, not that she would have done it if it were the other way round. She filled Tam in on her lack of diagnosis as they hurried to the mess deck. This only fuelled Tam’s accusations of a boozy night out without her.

Of the remaining buffet they managed to scrounge sausages, beans, mushrooms, and the last fried tomato to split between them. Tam took two protein shakes from the mini fridge and placed them between their trays at the table. Some heroes counted every macro… Elsie just focused on the protein and Tam just focused on food in, food out.

“I swear they get younger every year,” Tam murmured, shaking her head in the direction of a gaggle of cadets munching on toast and comparing bruises. The next generation were represented within the training centre by the cadets, those who were in basic training to graduate into becoming heroes.

“It’s crazy to think that was us three years ago.”

“We didn’t look like that,” Tam scoffed. “They’re so baby-faced!”

“To the heroes, we did.”

“They look like children!”

“They are!” The youngest graduates could be sixteen, the eldest were usually not more than eighteen. One year of basic culled most of them before that, though.

Tam grinned. “And so are you!”

“Will you be holding that one year over me for the rest of our lives?”

“Hey, until you turn twenty, it counts as two years!” She cracked the lid off the protein drink and took a long sip that didn’t match the disgusted look on her face. If you wanted the fancy shakes, the ones that weren’t gritty, you had to go out and pay for your own. “Have you decided on what you’re going to do for your birthday now?”

“Something quiet.” It sounded like she was pleading Tam, maybe she was.

Tam let the subject go graciously. “What do you have on for today?”

“Nothing till evening patrol.”

“Same. Let’s hit the gym.”