Four years ago
Johnstown, New York
The school nurse’s office was a familiar place for Otto.
In elementary school, it was because he tended to get sick more than the other kids. His grandfather would have to drive down, pick him up, and he would spend the day laying in bed with an ice pack on his forehead and his grandmother pestering him to eat something, sitting and watching Wheel of Fortune with her, and sleeping.
The older he got, the more infrequent those illnesses became. He still got sick more than his classmates; his immune system was worse than the average, according to his doctor, but not cripplingly so. He just went to school with runny noses and coughs every once in a while.
The frequency of his nurse visits didn’t change much in middle school. It wasn’t illness that sent him there anymore: it was fights.
Otto stared at the cold tile floor of the nurse’s office. It was smooth and off-white, and he could see the big rectangular florescent overhead reflected across several tile’s surface. He sat in a chair with pads that deflated when you sat on them to where he wondered why they were even included, and held an icepack to his left eye.
Fucking Brett. He thought bitterly. He wouldn’t stop running his mouth at lunch, even when he knew it would annoy Otto. Because he knew it would annoy Otto, and he thought that was funny, him and his table full of cronies.
He probably doesn’t even know what the word crony means. He reads like a third grader. He was struggling through Lord of the Flies yesterday. Stupid piece of…
Boots came into vision in his right eye, brown, worn, and dirty. He glanced up a little and saw a small trail. The sight cheered him up a little.
He looked all the way up, and saw his grandfather’s unamused visage staring back.
“Hey, Papa.” He said flatly. His grandfather reached out and grabbed the ice pack from his eye and pulled it back.
Otto winced up at him, looking with his right more than the left. It was still at peak swelling despite the ice, and it smarted with every expression he made.
His grandfather studied it for a few moments and tossed him back the ice. He adjusted the Red Socks hat on his head and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket.
“Again?” he asked. A single word, but it hit Otto harder than Brett could ever hope to.
Otto’s face burned in a way the ice pack couldn’t help, and he looked away. He heard the nurse approach, and even without seeing, he knew her look was distinctly disapproving.
“At least it was a month between, this time.” She said. Mrs. Glenn was an older woman, older than even his grandparents, who had gotten to know Otto over his frequent visits to the nurse’s office. Unlike his school nurse in Elementary school, who he had established a repartee based in her sympathy for his frequent miserable sicknesses, they had nothing of the sort. Mrs. Glenn was deeply disapproving, critical, and oftentimes outright mean.
His grandfather didn’t reply, but she didn’t seem to care. She kept on going like Otto wasn’t there.
“You ought to put a leash on this one.” She said. “Doesn’t know when to let things go. Barks and bites at every little comment.” Mrs. Glenn took her blue plastic gloves off, balled them up, and threw them into a trash can. She crossed her arms, and Otto felt her gaze on him.
“If you ask me, administration is too light on him.” She glanced sideways at his grandfather. “And for what? It’s been four or five years. Too long to still be acting out.”
Otto gripped the sides of the chair hard, and his face reddened further, this time from more than just shame. That was really why he didn’t like Mrs. Glenn, and why she didn’t like him. She felt he was abusing the fact that his parents had - passed - to get off light in his punishments, or to vie for special treatment.
Otto’s grandfather grunted in response. He grunted a lot, and Otto learned to differentiate between them the longer he lived with him and his grandmother. He had acknowledging grunts, grunts to end the conversation, somewhat irritated grunts, very irritated grunts, and if you were lucky, amused grunts.
The one he just let out was an irritated grunt of the nuclear variety.
Otto stood hastily and started walking towards the door, grabbing his grandfather’s coat and pulling on it. He followed, but only after a moment of annoyance. Otto thought he walked a little harder than he needed to in the nurse’s office, leaving even more dirt that had been trapped between the ridges of his boots behind.
He followed his grandfather out of the building and to the parking lot. It was a quiet spring day, with a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds overhead. Crows squawked here and there, fluttering between trees, and the nearby road had a car drive past every once in a while but otherwise, it was silent.
The city was never so quiet. There was always something happening; people talking and yelling outside, cars driving by, horns honking, music playing. The hubbub was a constant, even late at night. Upstate, though, he could hear himself breathe with nothing masking the sound. It wasn’t quite unnerving, but he didn’t know if he would ever get used to it.
He pulled the door of the Volkswagen shut and buckled himself in while his grandfather did the same. Otto pressed the to-go icepack the nurse had given him to his eye – a Ziploc bag filled with ice with a paper towel wrapped around it – and stared with the other out the window.
“That nurse is an idiot.” His grandfather said. “She shouldn’t talk about what she doesn’t understand.”
Otto turned towards him. He didn’t sound particularly upset, but he knew that if it hadn’t irked him, he would have just stayed silent. What the nurse said must have really bothered him.
Forget superheroes. You know what the strongest superpower in the world is, Otto? One that all of us have? His therapist tapped his chest. Empathy. Put yourself in other people’s shoes. You’ll find that we aren’t so different after all. Race, creed, color – even heroes and villains. We’re all made of the same building blocks.
Otto was quiet for a moment before speaking.
“Her mom died a few months ago.” He said. His grandfather kept looking at the road, his expression unmoving. “I guess she think that…if she’s over it, I should be too.”
His grandfather glanced in his direction at a stop sign. “Her dad alive?”
Otto blinked. “Yes?”
He grunted. A satisfied grunt, one that meant he knew he had been right all along.
“She got eighty years with her mom, and more coming with her dad. You got eight with both.” He sniffed and scratched his nose. “She’s an idiot.”
Otto could hear his therapist’s voice in his head telling him not to succumb to those thoughts, to try to see the good in people, no matter what they say or do, but he still took a guilty pleasure in his grandfather taking his side.
He was never good at that part, anyway. The black eye proved it.
His grandfather glanced his way again and popped the top off of a can of cashews in his cupholder, tossing a couple into his mouth. He always kept a can in his car. Wordlessly, Otto took a few as well.
“You lose again?” He asked. His grandfather chewed the cashews weird, moving his jaw in a side-to-side motion that his grandmother said was like “a cow chewing cud.”
Otto’s hand tightened around the ice pack and he flushed. His black eye throbbed.
“…I guess.” He replied. The cashews remained in his hand. He didn’t want to eat them anymore.
“You guess?” His grandfather said with a note of amusement. He took a sip of coffee from a thermos tucked between his legs. “Seems pretty clear cut to me.”
Otto fell into silence, and his grandfather let it happen. He turned the radio on to an ‘oldies’ channel, and tapped one finger on the steering wheel while they went. Otto watched the trees zip past, trying not to get angry at Brett all over again.
Nobody cared. The bitter part of him said. They’re all assholes. ‘Superhero’ this, ‘Superhero’ that. Fuck you all. None of you will get chosen, and if you do, I hope you…
He couldn’t complete the thought. Otto shook his head of it, trying to rid his brain of the negativity, falling into the familiar rhythm of the breathing technique his therapist taught him.
They’re not all bad. The more reasonable part of his brain replied. Of course they want to be superheroes. You did too until not long ago. Your opinions aren’t better than theirs.
He just couldn’t help it. Hearing them talk about how much they want to be chosen by the Donor, what superheroes they looked up to, what kind they wanted to be when they grew up, how great and perfect all these heroes were…it made him sick.
They weren’t perfect. Some of them were good – most of them, according to everyone trying to console him for the last four years, but they never met his eyes. Maybe they were right.
It didn’t change that some were selfish, lazy, incompetent, or downright malicious. There was an uncomfortably thin line between hero and villain, as Otto had learned. Following the death of his parents, and the more ‘hands-off’ approach his grandparents took, he had delved deep into the dirt of superheroes and villains online. Even the squeakiest heroes had things they weren’t proud of in their pasts just waiting to be dug up; collateral damage, ‘mundane’ crimes like sexual assault covered up for them by their agencies and even the governments they worked for, abuse of their powers, and more. On the other hand, there were people branded ‘villains’ who did little more than refuse to live in Babylon with the other Agreed, and used their powers – without explicit permission – for good.
By all accounts, it was the nicest open air prison ever constructed with amenities and privileges beyond many developed nations, but it still rubbed some the wrong way. Being able to visit their homes and loved ones only on scarce, rigorously pre-approved occasions was sour, no matter how Babylon tried to spin it.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Macabre as it was, the heroes with the best track records were the ones who signed the contract, were pulled off-world immediately and were just…never heard from again. Presumed dead in some galactic conflict, expedition, or whatever the Jarran were making them do that day. They pulled the Agreed to their planets for anything from working as butlers, to walking their pets, to fighting in their wars, and danger was neither guaranteed nor impossible in any task. Just like the powers an individual received from the Donor’s contract, there was no rhyme or reason to an off-planet call; you just had to show up and find out.
They pulled into the driveway, and his grandfather parked the car. Otto unbuckled his seat belt, but hesitated when he saw his grandfather unmoving.
Uh oh. He thought to himself. That usually meant he had something to say, he was just trying to figure out how.
“The school administration told me they think you’re acting out because of your parent’s death.”
His grandfather had never been one to mince words. Otto didn’t flinch, he just slumped back against the faux-leather seat. They’d had variations of this conversation before, but even his grandfather usually tried to be a little more delicate, likely at the insistence of his wife.
“What do you think?” Otto shot back. He crossed his arms.
His grandfather shrugged. “It’s part of it. Your brain is all messed up with hormones right now, which doesn’t help. You learn about that in health yet? Or biology?”
Otto gave him a flat look. “Yes. Last year.”
He grunted. “Good.” He looked at Otto, for a few moments, considering something.
“Are you starting the fights?”
Otto crossed his arms even harder. “That’s what the principal says.”
“I don’t care what the principal says, I want to know what you say.”
Otto looked up an met his eyes. He set his jaw.
“No. The other kids – this one Brett in particular – they keep egging me on. Once he figured out I get mad about…what I get mad about, it’s all he talks about. My reactions make his friends laugh.” He spat bitterly. His grandfather watched, impassive. “The counselor says I shouldn’t give them those reactions and it will stop.”
Easy for you to say. They aren’t making fun of your dead parents to your face.
“…I started a couple, though.” He admitted. “Not recently, though. Not since elementary school.”
“Hm.” His grandfather said. Then, he got out of the car.
Otto followed, and they entered the kitchen to find his grandmother sitting at the table doing a crossword. A plate with an excessive number of crumbs on it was beside her, and an open croissant box sat next to a vase with a few peonies starting to wilt.
She looked up when they entered, and when she saw Otto, she had a melancholic look on her face.
“Hey, Nana.” Otto said. He averted his eyes, looking at the magnets on the fridge instead. She sighed and shook her head, cleaning her thick glasses on the beige cardigan she wore. His grandfather slipped past, either headed to the basement and then our the cellar door to the garden, or to the living room. Given he didn’t take his boots off, Otto figured it was the former.
“Come on. Sit.” She said. He sat across from her, looking at the checkered tablecloth.
He felt her eyes on him, lingering on the icepack he held over his eye. Her tone softened.
“Let me see.” She said. He gently pulled the ice pack away, letting her lean over the table to hold and poke at his face. She tsked while she did. Eventually, she released him and looked across the table, concern plain on her face. Otto couldn’t meet her eyes, and the second part of the one-two punch landed.
“You can’t keep doing this, Otto.” She said gently. Her voice was so full of compassion, it made his heart ache. She reached across the table and put a hand on his own. He almost pulled away instinctually, but he caught himself and stopped. His eyes stung, his vision swam, and it wasn’t from the black eye.
“I know.” He felt small, and his voice matched. He cleared his throat, but it couldn’t dislodge the scratchy feeling inside.
“Do you know what the administration says every time?” She asked. Otto swallowed and sniffed and shook his head. He didn’t trust his voice if he tried speaking. He could still feel her eyes on him.
“They tell me that you’re a good student. You do your work, you aren’t outspoken, you’re friendly, but when it comes to this one thing…” She gave his hand a squeeze.
“I know, the other kids don’t understand. They can be mean, cruel little creatures, but you can’t let it get to you. Take the high road. It’s not easy, I know, but you can’t keep going on like this.”
Otto cleared his throat again, but when he spoke, his voice still came out scratchy, breaking towards the end.
“I’ll try. I’m sorry.” He said.
She smiled sadly at him and put both hands on his, squeezing hard.
“I know you will.”
She let him slip away, walking to his room with tears in his eyes, sniffing all the way. When he made it inside, he collapsed on his bed, struggling against his emotions. His desk sat in the corner with a window looking out towards their neighbor’s house, and his laptop rested on it. A poster on his wall
I’m stupid. Why do I keep doing this. He thought to himself while he felt drops fall on his pants. He blinked and more fell.
“I just…I get so mad.” He whispered to himself, blowing his nose and throwing the wadded tissue into the trashcan in the corner. He shuddered with his knees to his chest.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, silently crying to himself while unrealistic thoughts swam through his head. My grandparents probably hate me. I’m such a burden. All I do is cause problems for them.
I miss my parents.
Eventually, his emotions calmed down. He got off his bed and moved to his desk and started idly scrolling through different websites on his laptop. Most of them: superhero forums.
For a long time, he did it from a place of self-flagellation. He would torture himself reading about superheroes, about the people who love them, and the amazing deeds they did. He would spend his time getting angry at his screen until he was so miserable he would close his computer and go to sleep. For reasons even he didn’t understand, he kept coming back. It made him angry, he hated seeing what people had to say – the saccharine sweet praise peddled to heroes for doing the bare minimum of their jobs, the well-wishes and sympathy given to heroes whose jobs went awry – and the offhanded mention of prayers to the families of those affected.
It made his blood boil. The heroes were just people: as far as he was concerned they didn’t deserve the title until they did something actually heroic. Attending a special college you could only get into after a magical program a civilization of aliens created deemed you specifically worthy of becoming superhuman didn’t automatically make you a hero. Not even being hired – or conscripted in some cases – by a nation or specific city made you a hero either. Being heroic made you a hero; there were no shortcuts.
Otto didn’t hate superheroes. He had…complicated feelings towards them, but what he did hate was the blindness he felt people had towards them. They weren’t perfect. They were just people with too much power. Some – many – of them wanted to do good with it, and that was great. It was better than the opposite.
Even more didn’t become heroes at all. They lived in Babylon, or Nova Babylonia if you wanted to be accurate, had normal jobs – usually augmented by their gained powers – and waited to be called by the Jarrans, if it ever came.
Now, he scrolled more out of routine than anything. It didn’t make him as viscerally angry anymore; he had resigned himself to seeing the same dumb comments over and over. Every once in a while he saw something that piqued him more than usual and he would type up a response, but he almost always ended up deleting it. Getting into a multi-comment argument just wasn’t a good use of his time, especially since they wouldn’t change their minds no matter what he said.
For the most part, the forum reported on and discussed recent Agreed and the powers they were suspected to have. The Donor itself had a website anyone could go to with a constantly updated list of recent Avowed. It contained their full name and country of origin as well as the title of the class assignment they had received. Most were common and only interesting if the person was notable – the child of a known superhero, for example – but others were unique classes that the members of the forum who stalked the list liked to speculate on.
The fact that the Donor had a website bothered Otto at first – why would something so global, so powerful, so alien decide to purchase a domain? Where was it hosted? When he looked into those confusing details, it became immediately apparent it wasn’t a normal website. It never went down, it hosted an unfathomable amount of information – such as the name and class of every single Agreed to ever exist on Earth ever – and was accessible without internet access. You could be deep in a cave system but as long as your device turned on, it could access the Donor’s website.
The Donor acted as more than just an ephemeral granter of powers; to the Agreed, it was everything. They could communicate to one another through it, access the internet and the Jarran equivalent, and more. They were teleported through the Donor, managed and interacted with their class through the Donor, and more. When they accepted the contract, they became somehow connected to it, instinctively seeing screens appear and interacting with them through little more than gestures in the air and speaking – a fact that nobody other than Otto and a few small communities online found disturbing, apparently.
A knock at his door took Otto away from reading about some new hero who got discovered in Malaysia – they were apparently an S-rank “Mind Melter” which had people nervous, or weirdly excited.
Otto opened it to find his grandfather standing there. He tossed a coat at him and jerked his head to the side.
“Come on.”
He followed his grandfather, slipping his coat on without question. They walked to the door underneath the stairs and started down the steep stairs to the basement.
The basement was large, but cramped. Filled with random junk his grandfather acquired over his life, there were paths that wound through the sea of tools, furniture, appliances, and more. He passed an industrial freezer filled with whatever meats his friend Dale brought him from his hunting trips, an old jukebox that didn’t work anymore, and enough shovels to dig another layer. The floor was concrete, the walls mixed between reflective and regular insulation, and wooden supports had bright lightbulbs every dozen feet, turned on by dangling strings.
His grandfather had dug the basement himself, way back when. It was his pride and joy, a space where he could tinker with anything he had found or salvaged, cook, read, or anything else unbothered, separate from society. It was the same reason he liked his garden.
Otto was thankful for the jacket when he felt how cold it was. It might have been spring, but the night hadn’t been defanged quite yet.
They wandered through until reaching an abrupt empty space. It looked recently cleared, with scuffs and bits of whatever had been moved scattered on the floor. Otto didn’t remember there being an empty space like this last time he had been in the basement, and he definitely didn’t remember the punching bag hanging from the ceiling.
It was old. There wasn’t even a visible brand on it; the bag was blank, cracked leather with a chain securing it to a beam going across the ceiling. The sight made Otto a little anxious; he trusted his grandfather’s construction, but punching bags seemed heavy.
His grandfather stood and faced Otto, who looked at the bag with hands in his pockets.
“Where did you get this?” He asked.
His grandfather gestured to the basement as a whole.
“Bought it when I was a little older than you are now. Haven’t used it in decades.”
Otto looked back. “You boxed?” He said with mild surprise. His grandfather had a powerful build suggesting some level of athleticism or weight training in his past, but he had never heard about a boxing career, no matter how amateur or casual.
“Few years, here and there.” He said. “Never professionally.”
Otto nodded slowly. “Okay.” He looked to his grandfather. “Why am I here?”
His grandfather paused for a few moments.
“Do you know who else had our last name?” Otto shook his head, and his grandfather continued. “A man named Max Schmeling. A professional German boxer, he was the heavyweight world champ for two years: ’31 and ’32. We aren’t related.”
His grandfather saw Otto’s confusion and continued.
“What I’m trying to say is…if you’re going to get into fights, you might as well win them.”
Otto blinked. “What?”
He pointed to the bag. “I’m going to teach you to box. Nothing special, just the basics. Some footwork, how to throw a punch. Enough so that-“ he pointed at his black eye, “Doesn’t happen again.”
His tone brokered no debate. It wasn’t that he was willing to teach Otto to box if he wanted to learn, it was that Otto would learn to box. He spoke like that sometimes; in absolutes, where it was his way or his way. No highways.
“Grandma said I should stop getting into fights. She wants me to just…ignore them.”
His grandfather chewed on the inside of his cheek. He seemed like he was struggling to find the words.
“Your grandmother is a kind woman.” He said eventually. It was clear he heavily disagreed with her, but of all people in the world, his wife was chief among the few he wouldn’t call an idiot.
“Sometimes, someone says something deserves a punch in the face.” His grandfather said with complete certainty. “Some kids think they’re hot shit. They were born a little stronger, a little taller, and think they own the world. That their actions don’t have consequences.”
His hands tightened. “Some of them end up being right. But not if I have anything to say about it.” He met Otto’s eyes.
“Come on. We’ll do this for a bit before bed every night. Now, show me a fist.”
Otto was mostly confused, but he felt a bead of excitement build in his chest. He held a hand out and made a fist. His grandfather took one look at it and shook his head.
“Wrong.” He made his own hand into a fist and started pointing at it.
“Your thumb should be bent like this, not being held against your palm by your other fingers.” He explained. “If you punch something hard enough with your fist like that, you will break your thumb. Copy me.”
Thirty minutes and a shower later, Otto lay in bed. He couldn’t fall asleep, not yet. His body hadn’t calmed down from the training, as light as it was. Still, there was something satisfying about it. Learning to protect himself. No contract required.
For the first time in a long time, Otto was looking forward to the future.