Return to your lives

“Do we have to always sound like our Friend as long as we’re wearing the masks?” Kimberly asked while removing the rest of her suit. Mo removed his suit, too.

“Oh no,” said Arya. “That will be the default for any suit that hasn’t been registered to a user. It will also be the outward voice. The inner voice will remain yours, and will be the voice the team hears through comms.”

“That makes sense,” Kimberly said. “How do we register as the user?”

Arya answered, “They’re identical and virtually destruction proof, so just let Mtumishi know and it’ll register it for you. Once you’re registered in a suit, once you put it on again it will remember your settings. If you ever need a replacement, just let Mtumishi know and it’ll have one delivered to you or you can come here to pick it up.”

“So this is our lair?” asked Mo.

“Yes,” smiled Arya. “This is our base of operations.”

“Arya is my first selection,” said our friend.

“Okay,” I responded.

“Okay?” Kimberly asked. “What are you saying ‘okay’ about?”

I realized then that our friend was only speaking to me.

“I need to show Arya the sphere,” I said.

“I wondered if you knew about that,”Arya replied. “God showed me that I would receive a blessing from a gift that God had given to you to share.”

“You’re going to have superpowers, too!” Mo said excitedly. “Do we get to keep the suits?”

“Yes. The more you squeeze the ball, the tighter the compression becomes and the smaller the ball. With your super-strength, you should be able to compress it to fit easily into your pocket. Although it is round in its rested state, you can also flatten it or stuff it into a solid object to take on that shape. If you hold it in any state for three seconds or more, it will remain in that shape until you reshape it or release it.”

I squeezed my suit tighter and it did just as she said. I was able to squeeze it into the size of a golf ball. So did Kimberly and Mo. Then I released it, stepped into it, and put on my mask as fast as I could.

“Whoa,” Arya gasped. “That was fast.”

Then Mo and Kimberly did likewise as I took mine off as fast as I could and recompressed it.

“That’ll do nicely,” I said.

“Return to your lives and go about your normal business until next weekend, when you’ll meet back here for additional training,” said our friend.

“Okay,” Kimberly and I replied.

“Alright!” Mo said.

“Yes, Lord,” Arya said.

We all smiled. We knew that it wasn’t Mtumishi, but our friend speaking that time.

Arya said, “I’ll see you out.”

We rode in silence on our way back to get our cars from the Pizza Hut.