The BART station stank like pee. Violet thought going upstairs and getting outside would help, but the second they stepped outside, the smell of rotten seaweed and hit Violet right in the face. This time, Liz was prepared and a breeze the scent of urine and rotten seaweed away from the knot freshmen. At least Liz didn't want to deal with the stench either.

All eight freshmen lived in the same suite in the dorms. Two rooms branched off either side of their shared living room, the boys on one side and the girls on the other. So far as Vi knew, only she and Liz were supers. They'd trained at Preston Castle together, and the Super Commission had helped them choose a college and a path towards their future. No one else on campus, or in town, was supposed to know that htey were licensed supers. They were just two friends who had requested to room together. True enough, even if they hadn't gone to the same high school. The hours at Preston Castle had forged a friendship, and getting their provisional super licenses had meant a lot.

"Smells better outside this time," Nina said, tossing her shiny red hair over her shoulder. She was the one who had insisted that they go down to the Embarcadero and check out all the tourist sites.

"Of course it does, it can't smell like that all the time." Liz winked at Violet. "And if it does, we'll just get used to it. You know, like people who live on a dairy or live in a hoarder house. They don't smell it anymore, right?"

Seriously, how had no one warned them of the stench before they had signed up to go to college here? She would have picked someplace else for sure. Vi nodded and hung back from the group. She tried to fit in. She really did. She just wasn't like Liz who could go with the flow and was as flexible as the wind she could control.

"Think we'll see any supers? I hear SF has a lot," Josh said. He was from somewhere in the midwest, Kansas, maybe, and supers weren't as common out there as they were in California. Almost all the supers out there had moved from the West Coast after the EastTech launch and the eldritch invasion that had given Vi her own powers.

"How do you know you're not seeing a super right now," Liz asked, turning backward and meeting Josh eyes, her tone light and flirty. "Some of us are from California, right in the flight path of the EastTech launch."

Stolen novel; please report.

Vi almost choked on her boba tea. She'd been just a litlte kid when the weird thing had flown through the sky and then Sklowdoska had claimed credit for launching a space craft, the EastTech founder hadn't admitted that it had radioactive material–something from her homeworld that had caused those exposed to it to get a superpower related to what they wanted in that moment. She hadn't been one of the fortunate or unfortunate ones to get a super power in that first rush of heroes.

Josh stopped walking and studied Liz. She breeze she'd summoned brushed the blond hair out of her green eyes. Vi frowned. Her roomie shouldn't be playing like this. They were supposed to keep their identities secret. Finally, he said, "If you were a super, you'd be getting paid a nice salary by EastTech and you wouldn't be living in the freshman dorms. You'd have some fancy apartment off campus."

"Is that so?" Liz pushed him on his shoulder and sauntered down the sidewalk away from the BART station.

"I don't want to see any supers," Maddision said. She was in the other girl's bedroom in the suite. "They don't come out just for fun. They're always stopping crime, looking into portals into the Eldritch, and that sort of thing." She shuddered. "If we see a super, we could get hurt."

"Oh come on," said a dark-haired guy with thick coke-bottle glasses. Ricky maybe? "I heard that sometimes Dragon Girl and the Dredgetown Speedster do autograph sessions. The Embarcadero is the perfect place for that."

"That doesn't happen so often," Vi said. Or like at all. She'd never seen an autograph session and she'd only met Dragon Girl when the famous super had saved her as a kid. Both supers Ricky mentioned had pretty much retired after the Eldritch attack. If not retired, then definitely secluded themselves away from other supers.

Whatever. Vi fell back behind the rest of the group as they wove their way between brick fronted buildings, up and down the hills of San Fransisco. She didn't want to talk about supers.

Jenny, a cute girl with curly brown hair fell into step beside her. "What's wrong?"

Vi touched her earpiece, knowing it would look like she was pausing a podcast or music. Inside though, she was dreading hearing Minerva, her AI's voice in her ear, and having to ditch the group so that those supers the boys wanted to see would show up–those supers being Vi an dLiz of course. They were assigned as provisional supers to monitor SF and, if needed for backup, New Eastopolis. "I guess I'm with Maddy. I don't want for any supers to show up while we're out today."

On the Embarcadero, they found a wax museum that some of them wanted to go into. The wax figures though, weirded her out and made her think of dead bodies, the way that her mother and sister's corpses had stared off into nothingness after their apartment had collapsed. Why she was the lucky one who had survived and gotten the power to be indestructible, she didn't know.