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 fragments of the Pacific alien seek those who are less emotionally stable.
This has made superhuman interactions rather volatile.
- A passage from On Superhumans by Amelia Li, oftentimes referred to as “the greatest understatement 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 me know if you need anything else, okay? I’m here to help. You’re doing great.
The last message hung there, unanswered. Somehow, it felt like an accusation.
Vivian suspected that for a while, everything would. Last night, she’d slept like a baby for the first time 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 me 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 name for herself. There were no witnesses to her crime.
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 claimed that anxiety ‘attacks’ occurred, lasted ten minutes, and went away, but she’d never thought of them as attacks. They came without reason or rhyme, at all hours of the day and night, and long overstayed their welcome.
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 messaging app there. I’m hopeless.
vivy77: hey rachel guess what
Rachel did not respond, which was fair. She’d stayed in California, which meant it was six AM. That meant 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 homework to watching videos, arguing with randoms on online forums, and playing browser games.
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 mercenary 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 meet the minimum Hero Threshold before applying. New AHA members 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 someone asked Vivian what she wanted out of being a superhero, she would have given the same 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 someone else, too.
But when it came 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 moment 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 meant 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 meant 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 meant 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 time.
“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 came 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 means to you.”
Her computer rang with a notification. Vivian clicked onto it, staying on call at the same time.
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 time 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 times 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
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sparrow: thought u said u were gonna hide it didnt u say it was useless
A green camera 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 someone.
“I killed someone,” 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 me,” 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 someone 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 me 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 someone in the brain. Find me 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 element?” 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 moment 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 time don’t use your power.”
Ah. Vivian could see where this was going.
“My downstairs neighbors definitely hate me,” she said, dropping the chair again.
“Fantastic,” Rachel said, peering closely into her screen. “Let me frame-by-frame that real quick. In the meantime, can you float a pencil or something 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 same, but with two pencils.”
She did. It didn’t feel very different, but neither of the pencils broke this time. They weren’t moving quite as fast.
“Hmmm. Alright. I think I might have a better general description for your power. C’mere, let me 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 times, right?”
“I was.”
Rachel clicked over to another comparison video, this time 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 element 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 time. 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 camera 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 times. “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 me updated,” Rachel replied, combing her hair back with her fingers. “Work starts in ten. I’ll talk to you soon?”
Someone 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. “Name’s Lachlan, but some people prefer to call me… Lachlan. May I come 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 women-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 something 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. Name’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 me 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 mere mention was enough for him to taste the bland, overcooked patties that the school claimed 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 come 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 crime. 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 come 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 some other intention-detecting power as an Esper, surely. If she had been someone 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? Somewhere where I can actually do some good. I’m not needed here. City’s small enough that they don’t need an Esper like me.”
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 home, I’m sure. They pull some 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 some noise now that some 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 home, they look down on outing supers when their identities aren’t public?”
“Yeah, I figured,” Lachlan said. “But I don’t have your name, 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 me to know what you are and not the other way around.”
“Huh. That’s surprisingly considerate of you.”
“I try.” There was something 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 me 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 something 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 moment they let me 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 name I can call you by?”
“I haven’t thought that far yet.”
Lachlan chuckled. “Believe me, I get you on that. I’m still thinking of a good name for my grand debut, y’know? There’s a lot that goes into a good one. PR keeps on shutting down the name 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 something 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 me at them.”
And that was the part that made decisions.