Shape Shifting Power

Once upon a time, a young scientist's daughter asked Garfield Logan to explain his power to her.

She was nine years old, the daughter of a marine biologist, and she had the particular precision of a child raised around careful observation. She sat across from Garfield at the kitchen table in Titans Tower, with a notebook and a pencil, and she said: "Explain it exactly."

So Garfield thought about it. Really thought about it. Because most people assumed they understood, and most people were only about half right.

"When I become a falcon," he said, "I don't just look like a falcon. I am a falcon. My eyes are falcon eyes. Falcons can see a single coin on the pavement from five hundred feet above. That means, if I'm flying over Jump City as a peregrine falcon, I can read license plates and spot your face in a crowd from up near the clouds."

The girl wrote this down.

"When I become a bloodhound, my nose works the way a bloodhound's nose actually works. I can smell someone's footprints on concrete, hours after they walked there. I once tracked a teammate across three rooftops just by the scent of her shampoo." He paused. "She was not thrilled about that."

The girl wrote: capable of stalking. Then crossed it out and wrote: very good at tracking.

"When I become a whale," Garfield continued, "I navigate by sonar. I send out a sound and I listen to where it bounces back from, and I build a picture of the ocean around me out of echoes. No eyes needed. The whole dark ocean, lit up by sound."

The girl looked up from her notebook. "What's the most powerful animal you can become?"

Garfield leaned back in his chair and thought about this seriously.

"Depends on what you need," he said. "For raw strength, an elephant or a polar bear. For speed, a peregrine falcon in a dive — almost two hundred miles an hour. For fighting, there's a creature called a mantis shrimp. It's about this big." He held up his fingers to show something the size of a finger. "And it punches so fast it creates a shockwave. The shockwave alone can stun things three times its size."

The girl stared at him.

"The size of a finger," she repeated.

"And it can punch through glass."

She wrote: mantis shrimp — look this up IMMEDIATELY.

"Can you become dinosaurs?" she asked.

"Yes."

"How? They're extinct."

"I've studied them. Fossils, museum reconstructions, paleontology records. Studying is what I need — not living specimens. If I know the biology well enough, I can become it."

She considered this for a long moment.

"What about made-up animals? Like from stories?"

"No," Garfield said. "They have to be real. Real biology, real DNA, real history. My power connects me to actual creatures — something in the green-monkey serum that changed me. It reaches toward real life. Made-up ones don't have anything to reach toward."

The girl nodded and wrote: needs real biology. Then she looked up and said: "Why are you always green?"

This was the question Garfield found hardest to answer. Not because he didn't know, but because the answer was so simple that it was easy to underestimate.

"Because I'm Garfield Logan," he said. "I'm green. Every form I take, I'm still me. The green is me."

He became a small green gecko for three seconds, then himself again.

"I tried to be a white arctic fox once," he said. "Got a green one. Actually easier to find in a snowstorm, so I consider that a win."

The girl closed her notebook.

"Do you ever get tired of it?" she asked. "Turning into things?"

Garfield considered the question honestly.

"After a long mission — a lot of forms, one after another — yes. I come back to myself tired and hungry and sometimes my elbows hurt for reasons I cannot fully explain." He smiled. "But tired-and-hungry is just the cost of being useful. And I can eat a truly alarming amount of cereal."

The girl picked up her notebook and tucked the pencil behind her ear.

"Thank you," she said.

"Did I answer it exactly?" Garfield asked.

She considered this with the careful honesty of a scientist's daughter.

"Pretty exactly," she said.

Garfield nodded. That was, all things considered, a very satisfying result.

He became a gecko one more time — just for a moment, just to make her smile as she walked out the door.

She smiled.

He had figured that she would.