Seventy-five percent of new supers are between the ages of 14 and 24. Although it is not yet known why vials tend to present themselves towards this age range, the most common theory is that the fragnts of the Pacific alien seek those who are less emotionally stable.
This has made superhuman interactions rather volatile.
- A passage from On Superhumans by Alia Li, oftentis referred to as “the greatest understatent ever made”
#
Sun: Hey, Viv. I heard there was a super attack pretty close to your campus last night. Just checking in to make sure you’re safe.
Vivian: im fine
Sun: Good to hear. Is your project coming along well?
Vivian: peachy
Sun: Alright. Let
know if you need anything else, okay? I’m here to help. You’re doing great.
The last ssage hung there, unanswered. Sohow, it felt like an accusation.
Vivian suspected that for a while, everything would. Last night, she’d slept like a baby for the first ti in ages. It was nine in the morning now, and she found herself more disturbed by how little guilt she felt for the murder than anything else.
Saturday.
Distantly, she wondered if they were going to talk about her in class the day after tomorrow. A new, unregistered super killed an established villain less than half a mile from campus just after class on Friday! Can anyone tell
how many superheroes kill people on their first night out?
There was no guidebook for dealing with being a killer—nothing good, at least. Vivian was fairly sure that “turn yourself into the authorities” was not how she wanted to deal with this. She suspected the Guardians might have counselors who’d walk her through this, but she’d long since decided against asking them for anything.
Was she supposed to want to get away from it all, return to her ordinary life? It would be so easy to. It wasn’t like she’d developed a na for herself. There were no witnesses to her cri.
Funnily enough, the thought of going back to class and hiding from the consequences of what she’d wrought sent that familiar tightness into her chest.
Every source she’d seen on the Internet claid that anxiety ‘attacks’ occurred, lasted ten minutes, and went away, but she’d never thought of them as attacks. They ca without reason or rhy, at all hours of the day and night, and long overstayed their welco.
Yesterday, for a few golden hours, she had been free of it all.
Vivian took a long, deep breath, which she knew would help for a couple of minutes, then rolled out of bed, tossing her phone onto its charger. There was work to be done.
She promptly sat down at her computer and opened a different ssaging app there. I’m hopeless.
vivy77: hey rachel guess what
Rachel did not respond, which was fair. She’d stayed in California, which ant it was six AM. That ant maybe six to nine more hours before she woke up, since it was Saturday.
Click-click-click and Vivian launched herself into “being productive,” in which she maintained roughly a 1 to 20 ratio of doing howork to watching videos, arguing with randoms on online forums, and playing browser gas.
The incessant buzzing returned, quieter than it had been but present nonetheless.
She tabbed into a site that she’d opened a while back and neglected to close.
Arina Hero Association
Premier superhero services — contact us for a consultation.
There was a lot of marketing bullshit that essentially boiled down to “we’re a rcenary super group that barely stays on the SRU’s good side, hire us if you need a face punched with prejudice,” all of which Vivian scrolled past.
Accepting applicants. B-ranks and higher may apply directly. C, D, F, and unknown ranks must et the minimum Hero Threshold before applying. New AHA mbers will be chosen via a series of entrance exams, which are offered at each AHA headquarters in the USA.
Applications are processed each quarter. The next entrance exams are on: September 21.
It was already the seventeenth, so there was no chance of making the next cycle, but the one after would be on December 21st.
If soone asked Vivian what she wanted out of being a superhero, she would have given the sa answer everyone always gave: to help people. It was an admirable goal, to be fair, and she couldn’t say she didn’t want that. Hell, Sunrise had probably saved her life, and she wanted to make that impact on soone else, too.
But when it ca down to it, she wanted money. She wanted to feel like she had a purpose. She wanted more than what she had.
Had she truly just wanted to be the best superhero she could, she would have registered with the Guardians the mont her powers awakened.
That, unfortunately, just wasn’t who she was.
Arina was huge. They were one of the largest corporate hero organizations in the country, and that ant benefits. Their top earners, she knew, easily made hundreds of millions a year. Even their starting salary was nearly double that of the Guardians.
More importantly, they didn’t force you to register. They didn’t throw your identity onto a public forum for the whole world to see if you ever decided you disagreed with their missions. They had an actual severance package.
They didn’t force their supers to fight on Cataclysm Days.
Of course, being corporate ant losing out on a fair few benefits—a more thorough education package, for instance—but that one guarantee was enough.
The only issue was that going corporate was ridiculously hard. While the Guardians took literally any super that registered, Vivian had crunched the numbers and found that Arina took about one in two hundred of their applicants. They weren’t even the most exclusive one.
Her phone buzzed.
Dad.
That familiar pressure grew tighter.
I’m a good daughter, and good daughters don’t ignore their only parent.
“Hi, Dad,” she said, forcing artificial cheer into her voice. “How’s it going?”
“Hi, sweetie,” Dad said in the deeply tired voice that ant he’d been working late or drinking. These days, it was usually both. He paused. “Is everything alright?”
You didn’t answer my question. “School’s going fine. I slept better last night than I usually do, which was nice.”
“Good—that’s good.” Dad paused again. Even longer this ti.
“Deep breaths, Dad. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.” She wasn’t sure if she believed that.
From the other side ca a long, shuddering breath. “Vivian, I—we’re going to have to sell the house. I don’t have enough for—to keep you in school and for everything else, and—“
“Dad, forget the school,” Vivian said. “I’ll get loans. It’s fine.”
“Loans will ruin your life,” he said. Vivian imagined him massaging his temples with one hand, frustrated like he’d always been. “You don’t know—“
“I do know, and I also know that I’m going to be making enough to pay them off,” Vivian said. “Don’t sell the goddamn house. I know how much it ans to you.”
Her computer rang with a notification. Vivian clicked onto it, staying on call at the sa ti.
sparrow: damn ur up early viv what’s up
“I’ll,” her dad said, and then he broke into a coughing fit. It sounded worse every ti she heard it. “I’ll figure it out. Don’t take the loans yet.”
I already did.
“Don’t sell the house,” Vivian replied. Her heart wasn’t really in the conversation anymore. They’d hashed over this topic half a dozen tis by now.
vivy77: you’re one to talk lmao isn’t it like 6
vivy77:im applying to arina in dec
“Alright, sweetie,” Dad said, surprisingly tender. “I won’t, but I have to go now. I have a call coming in soon. I love you.”
“Love you too,” Vivian said, hanging up.
She really wished that talking to her father felt less like driving a dagger into a stitched over wound and twisting it.
Unfortunately, interactions that didn’t do that were mostly limited to the internet now.
sparrow: holy shit rlly
This book was originally published on . Check it out there for the real experience.
sparrow: thought u said u were gonna hide it didnt u say it was useless
A green cara icon appeared on the app, indicating that Rachel was video calling her. Vivian picked up.
Rachel looked like she’d just rolled out of bed, which she probably had. Even though her tousled brown hair was barely down to her shoulders, she had a rather severe case of bedhead, which Vivian congratulated herself on not making fun of within the first five seconds.
“So you’re biting the bullet,” Rachel said without preamble. “What changed?”
Vivian had never been good at hiding secrets from her friends—Rachel had learned of her powers less than a week after she’d got them. I shouldn’t tell her I killed soone.
“I killed soone,” Vivian said. She winced. Oops. “I, uh, it turns out my range is shitty and my power is shitty but I can punch people in their internal organs.”
Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Huh. You’re not plausibility limited?”
“Huh? That’s it?” That was not at all the reaction she’d been expecting. Her expression had barely even changed.
“You know my whole deal with the SRU, right?” Rachel asked, yawning. “S’ the reason why I got up so early today, why I can pay for college, yadda yadda yadda. I took all the super classes already, so I know what the deal is. I was honestly surprised you haven’t up until now.”
“Wait, so are you, like, legally required to report this?” Vivian asked. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Eh, technically,” Rachel replied. “Don’t sweat it. Was it a bad guy, at least?”
“He was trying to kill ,” Vivian said. “Jester. He’s a nobody, but it’ll be on the local news. I think.”
“Does anyone still watch the news? Don’t answer that.” Rachel stretched. “I won’t report you, don’t worry. I will advise you to register, but—“
“No.”
“Yeah, that’s about what I thought. Back on topic! If you’re going for Arina, I have bad news for you.”
“I know, I know.” Vivian was passingly familiar with the ranking system, and she was reasonably sure she was in the lowest tier. Her power barely did anything. “If not Arina, I’ll find soone less exclusive. I just want to give it a try.”
“Great, as long as you know what you’re getting into,” Rachel said. “Look, I woke up earlier than I was supposed to. I have, I dunno, an hour? If you’re going to get serious about this, you’re going to have to know what your deal is. Your roommate still out?”
“Has been for a couple days.”
“Fantastic. Let
grab a list.”
#
“This is pretty standard power testing for the Guardians,” Rachel said. “You’re a Kinetic, right?”
“A garbage one, yeah.”
“You punched soone in the brain. Find
another Kinetic that can do that.”
Vivian cringed, but she conceded the point.
“You didn’t want to share any details earlier. What kind of Kinetic? Do you have an elent?” Rachel’s tone was businesslike. Formal. Vivian cracked a smile at that. Two years ago, Rachel had barely been able to look people in the eye. Now here she was, on track to being a professional SRU agent.
“I don’t think so,” she said out loud. “I think I can affect basically anything, just not much.”
To prove it, she took a bottle of water, unscrewed the cap, and poured it into the air. Her power was strong enough to hold the water, at least. Microscopic alterations was still mostly beyond her, but she had sufficient fine control to make a shape out of the water before catching it in a glass.
Rachel whistled. “Look at you!”
Vivian chuckled. “Yeah, it’s a neat party trick. I can’t lift anything actually worth lifting, though. Watch.”
She picked up her chair, raised it into the air, and focused the entirety of her power on it. Then she dropped it. It clattered to the floor a mont later.
“Hold on,” Rachel said. “Could you do that again?”
“Sure,” Vivian said. Rachel had always been the powers nerd. If she thought it would help, Vivian could demonstrate her incompetence to her all day.
She dropped the chair again, trying with all her might to lift it once again. Just like before, it hit the ground.
“Now do it again, but this ti don’t use your power.”
Ah. Vivian could see where this was going.
“My downstairs neighbors definitely hate ,” she said, dropping the chair again.
“Fantastic,” Rachel said, peering closely into her screen. “Let
fra-by-fra that real quick. In the anti, can you float a pencil or sothing to the edge of your range as fast as you can?”
She complied. Pencils were pretty light, and they responded to her power easily. It accelerated quickly, and it left her range at the door. The pencil cracked into two pieces when it hit the doorknob.
“Do the sa, but with two pencils.”
She did. It didn’t feel very different, but neither of the pencils broke this ti. They weren’t moving quite as fast.
“Hmmm. Alright. I think I might have a better general description for your power. C’re, let
screenshare.”
Rachel showed her a side-by-side comparison of Vivian’s chair dropping.
“You slowed the fall,” she said. “Not by much, but enough to be noticeable. And the pencils you threw, you were using all your power both tis, right?”
“I was.”
Rachel clicked over to another comparison video, this ti displaying the difference between the single pencil and the pair. “They accelerated slower when you had more mass. I think you’re just choosing forces to apply. It’s not the standard Kinetic deal where you just grab hold of whatever elent you want. It looks like you have a pool of force you can use? You might want to do more testing on that.”
“Yeah, I’ll look into it,” Vivian said. “I don’t know how much that’ll matter, though. It’s pretty weak.”
“Sure,” Rachel snorted. “I hear that all the ti. Bet you fifty dollars Jester isn’t saying your power’s weak.” She paused. “Too soon?”
Vivian made a face. “A little soon.”
“Alright, my bad,” Rachel said. She reached out of cara to fetch a water bottle, eager to change the subject. “So. Arina. We both know it’s not likely that you get in—“
“Ouch,” Vivian muttered, but she didn’t refute her friend.
“—but I think it’s not impossible. Your power is pretty abnormal for a Kinetic, though to be fair, no super can really call themselves normal. The lack of a plausibility limit is big, but being unranked hurts a lot. You’re going to have to get ranked, and you definitely need to start bolstering your resumé.”
Vivian shuddered. Now that was a phrase she’d heard far too many tis. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
She had no idea what to do. Was she supposed to just keep on combing the police scanner, hoping for a lucky break like yesterday? Was she supposed to make the murder she committed public?
“Keep
updated,” Rachel replied, combing her hair back with her fingers. “Work starts in ten. I’ll talk to you soon?”
Soone knocked on the dorm door.
“Ah, shit, I think my roommate’s back,” she said. “Talk to you later.”
Rachel waved goodbye and the call ended.
Vivian walked to the door, using her power to toss the scattered pencils into the garbage.
It was not, in fact, her roommate.
“Hi there,” a boy that looked to be around her age said. He extended a hand. “Na’s Lachlan, but so people prefer to call … Lachlan. May I co in?”
Lachlan. The Esper.
A Guardian.
She shut the door.
#
“Okay, I get that it’s weird to barge into your dorm room. Wanna go elsewhere?”
Vivian leaned against the door, very much not hyperventilating. Does he know?
She fully acknowledged that she wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she could put two and two together. Alexander had called for Lachlan back in the lot where she’d—
A cold, dead stare from a boy’s face. He would never move again. No, that was wrong, that hadn’t been her brother, he’d been trying to kill her—it didn’t matter. She couldn’t afford to be distracted.
It was clear from context what he was and there were vanishingly few reasons for him to be here.
“Look, I just want to be fair here. I know what you are, and it’s not fair that you don’t know that I know.”
Of course he knew she was a super. Why else would he barge into a won-only dorm and knock on a random girl’s room?
The million-dollar question: if he was aware that she had powers, did he know that she’d ended a man’s life yesterday?
“If you’d rather not talk, I can leave,” Lachlan said. “Though—“
Vivian opened the door before she could stop herself.
“If you’re going to talk about my s—sensitive topics, don’t do it where everyone can hear you,” she hissed, grabbing him by the wrist and dragging him inside. “Don’t step on the blue carpet.”
To his credit, Lachlan did not stumble.
“You’re not much for decor, are you?” he asked, looking around the room.
There was a very distinct line between the two sides of the room, and Vivian’s was spartan. She honestly didn’t know how her roommate made her half look like sothing out of a fairy tale, but it made her stark lack of any decoration stand out more.
“What do you want?” Vivian asked. Are you here to investigate a suspect?
“To get to know you,” Lachlan said, raising an eyebrow. “Why else?”
How about the super corpse Alexander discovered?
“So who are you?” Vivian asked. She knew, sort of, but the girl who was supposed to have no idea about what had happened yesterday definitely wouldn’t.
“I told you. Na’s Lachlan. Alias Lachlan.”
Vivian crossed her arms and waited.
Lachlan blew a raspberry. “You’re no fun. I’m a Guardian. Not even a student, believe it or not.”
“I can be plenty of fun when people aren’t randomly accosting
in my own room.” That was a lie. Vivian had the personality of a wet sponge when she went out. “Did you seriously have nothing better to do?”
“Yes,” Lachlan said seriously. “Want to go grab lunch? I’ll pay.”
#
“I don’t like school food,” Lachlan said, screwing his face up in disgust as if the re ntion was enough for him to taste the bland, overcooked patties that the school claid were burgers.
“Neither do I,” Vivian said, taking another bite out of her steak-and-cheese sub. “I don’t like any of the food in this city, really. How did you end up here, if you’re not in uni? I refuse to believe anyone would voluntarily co to Lafayette.”
“They wanted a safe place to put an ‘asset,’” he said, making air quotes around the word. “College towns tend to be low cri. Just my bad luck that this one’s in the middle of nowhere.”
As it turned out, Lachlan hadn’t located her dorm on behalf of the Guardians. He hadn’t even connected her with the killing last night. The topic of the dead villain hadn’t even co up yet.
"My power’s great for finding new vials,” he’d explained as Vivian begrudgingly left with him. Hey, free food is free food. “That, and detecting new supers. I make it a habit to greet new heroes. You… are a hero, right?”
She was still astounded by his sheer confidence. He had to have so other intention-detecting power as an Esper, surely. If she had been soone like Jester, she could’ve just killed him right then and there.
One thing had led to another, and now they were eating footlongs and sitting in a weed-overrun park, talking. Vivian hadn’t realized how much she’d missed live human contact.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Going on half a year now.” He heaved out a sigh. “I wanted New York or San Fran. Big cities, y’know? Sowhere where I can actually do so good. I’m not needed here. City’s small enough that they don’t need an Esper like .”
Vivian resisted the urge to point out that apparently nobody had noticed the villain gathering until Lachlan did last night, but there was no normal way to say that without revealing that she was the type of weirdo to listen to police scanners for fun.
“I’m actually from San Francisco,” she said instead. “It’s way quieter here. The super scene’s pretty limited too, isn’t it?”
“Sort of. There aren’t any corpos here, probably because the city barely cracks forty thousand people, so it’s just the Guardians and two villain factions plus a few indies. You heard of Killjoy and Pine?”
Very recently, both of them. “I have. B-ranks, right?”
“Yeah. Nothing like what you have back ho, I’m sure. They pull so shit every now and then, but mostly they stay quiet. Most nights, there isn’t much cause for concern, though I think they’re making so noise now that so idiot opened fire on one of Killjoy’s enforcers.”
The idiot in question coughed to hide her surprise, then tried to change the subject. “You know back ho, they look down on outing supers when their identities aren’t public?”
“Yeah, I figured,” Lachlan said. “But I don’t have your na, do I? I’d be able to tell either way if I saw you on the street. I’d rather we get to know each other. Relationships should go both ways, and it’s not fair for
to know what you are and not the other way around.”
“Huh. That’s surprisingly considerate of you.”
“I try.” There was sothing more to the story, Vivian could tell, but he hadn’t asked any inappropriate questions so neither would she.
“So what do you want out of being a hero?” Vivian asked. “I’m sure you get that a lot.”
Lachlan snorted. “Thanks for your concern, but nah. They don’t let
do interviews. I’m a hero because I have to be. Superpowers can be good or bad, but having one gives you the responsibility to do sothing with it. Whether that’s save kittens out of burning buildings or rob banks or stop people from robbing banks or fighting a Cataclysm, powers are made to be used. I have to use them, and I’d rather make the world better than worse.”
“Good answer,” Vivian said. “You sound like you’ve been practicing that.”
“The mont they let
portal to a big city, you bet your ass I’m delivering that exact paragraph to every interviewer,” Lachlan replied with a grin.
“You get to use the portals? Oh, stupid question. You’re a Guardian.”
“No stupid questions here… uh, you got a na I can call you by?”
“I haven’t thought that far yet.”
Lachlan chuckled. “Believe , I get you on that. I’m still thinking of a good na for my grand debut, y’know? There’s a lot that goes into a good one. PR keeps on shutting down the na Big Brother, which sucks.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“Right?”
He must have seen through Vivian’s very poor attempt at hiding her chagrin, because he broke his composure. “Nah, that one’s a joke. It would be kinda funny, though.”
“It—“
Lachlan’s head swiveled away from the park. “Hold on.”
Vivian held on.
The Esper tapped the side of his forehead. “I sense supers. Villains, I think. I’m going to contact the Guardians.”
“That sentence doesn’t sound finished. You have sothing else to say?”
“I hate being confined to the ops desk all day,” Lachlan said. “Want to go bust a robbery?”
His grin was infectious.
This is a bad idea. I don’t have the powerset to non-lethally handle anyone, and I could be risking my life just doing this. I should wait for the authorities. That was the rational part of her brain.
“Alright,” Vivian said. “Point
at them.”
And that was the part that made decisions.
Reviews
All reviews (0)