The Imperfect Man
Third of January, 1990
After I watched him teleport straight in front of a lamppost and smack his face into it, I couldn't contain my laughter. "Harumi! Not funny!" "Kind of funny." "Kind of funny," added Lena, who, as always, returned my fistbump before I'd even thought of extending my fist. "Seems like the council has voted, Bruno. Officially funny." As usual, he shrugged our jokes off. "Be serious!"
Serious we were as we continued our sprint through the Malaysian street. Not a single joke from me nor Lena, and as I'd predicted - as had Lena, but that was kind of cheating on her part - it took less than three minutes for Bruno to break the silence. "Okay, not that serious!" We both laughed, of course, and sat down on the soft grass of the secluded park we'd arrived at. I'd collected a handful of pebbles while Lena took a look at Bruno's forehead.
"Alright, enough nursing! When you're fighting villains, you're not gonna get time to lick your wounds!" Bruno stood upright immediately. Lena gasped for no clear reason, which threw me off a little bit, but I ignored it as usual. Bubbles of rapidly spinning air encircled the pebbles, and they began to float in the sky in about a twenty-centimetre radius around myself. "Your payback for making fun of my range earlier!" Like a rain of gunfire, the pebbles flew at Bruno's body.
I couldn't follow any of the movements that followed afterwards. He blinked to the left, the right, twisted his body completely, teleported himself into acrobatic positions I wouldn't have thought of in a hundred years to dodge the onslaught of pebbles. As the final pebble, a cheap shot I'd aimed into the air to prank him after he thought we were done, was about to land on his head, I instead felt a sharp pain on my forehead. Bruno laughed as he landed on his back from the frankly impressive bicycle kick. "No warning, Lena? Really?" I shouted, but I couldn't contain my laughter for long either. I let myself fall backwards on the grass, and there the three of us laid, under the sweltering sun, laughing until our ribcages hurt.