Whether or not the rise of social media could be considered a net positive for society was a contentious topic, but the king of these sites in the US wasn’t up for debate. Ask a kid in Idaho or a pensioner in Alaska what the white stick figure striking a heroic pose within a dark blue circle represented, and they’d probably answer with no problem.
Capebook had reigned supreme over America for a decade. Fighting off challengers like Superverse and Unmasked, it had cemented itself as the central hub for all things superhero. People posted pictures, videos, and even live streams of cape activity. Countless discussions of the latest trending news continued at every hour of the day. Millions of voices mixed together, shrouded in anonymity, to make a monster that reportedly saw fifty billion hits per month.
At this point, it was almost mandatory for superheroes to set up an official account, both for themselves and their teams. It wasn’t just a matter of fan interaction and building a community; the market for job listings was huge there, experienced capes ran blogs for tutorials on how to get into heroics, and there were systems set up for people to send tips about potential supervillain activity. Even USHA had thousands of accounts for their various offices around the country.
Even after so many years as part of a generation that some claimed had been raised by social media, I didn’t know how to feel about Capebook.
The site had launched way before I was born, before USHA had even been formed, by Mr Gold himself. Back then, it had been a place exclusively for actual superheroes, right when the concept of a superhero was only just starting to make the arduous transition from fantasy seen only in comics and crappy Hollywood movies to something real.
A forum had come first, the forerunners of the cape community coming together to trade tips, and eventually that information and advice had been collected into a popular blog: ‘How To Be A Superhero; or, The Capebook.’
As a natural consequence of being one of the only places where superheroes congregated, people in trouble started to flock there seeking help. Thus, the job listings section was born.
It wasn’t long before the job market became competitive. People with powers a bit more useful than average saw an opportunity to make a bit of cash on the side, and soon clients found themselves able to pick and choose who they wanted to get their cat out of a tree. With a schism between supply and demand—mitigated only slightly by the hero licence system that came years later—it was only natural that the supply had to find a way to stand out from their rivals. Superheroes on the site started to have to pay serious attention and effort to making sure their profile looked appealing, and features popped up to accommodate and encourage this. Soon, the site was far more known as the place one could go to see pictures and videos of real life superheroes in action.
Capebook became a marketing tool, a place for capes to show themselves off. As superheroes branched out into other areas such as reality TV and superpowered sports, enrapturing the world’s attention almost overnight, Capebook was right there to ride the wave.
In the modern day, the site was the epitome and focal point of everything about superheroes I had always… not disliked, per se. My feelings leaned closer to bitterness than contempt. The thing was, everyone liked to espouse the virtues of heroism and being good and all that jazz, but their actions never matched their words. That’d be one thing on its own, but the attention it got was mind blowing to me. People talked about values, but the follower counts spoke for themselves.
Take Mr Gold. In the early years, his profile had sat above the rest by a distance that many had thought insurmountable. Now, I’d be shocked if he was in the top 1,000.
I didn’t want to be the kind of contrarian asshole who looked down on something because it was popular, but it always made me a little sad knowing the truly heroic individuals out there went mostly unnoticed while vapid idiots like The Cobras enjoyed worldwide fame and adoration, not to mention their reported net worths. True heroes who weren’t part of one of the huge teams like the Olympians or the Valkyries had to compete for odd jobs.
As I scrolled through the endless pages, getting sucked deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of social media, I couldn’t help feeling a bit of melancholic nostalgia for something I never actually experienced. I hadn’t been there when Capebook first started, but I found that I missed it. There were other cape forums out there, of course, and Capebook still had hundreds of guides, but there was something about the genesis of superheroics that appealed to me.
Maybe it was the idea of being able to shape things, to enact change. Leaving my mark on the world was a concept I’d been giving a lot of thought to, recently.
My phone gave a high-pitched ping, and it was like getting pulled out of a trance. I blinked, my eyes sore and dry, and suddenly I was back in reality, staring at a dark computer screen rather than swimming through an infinite mire of social media muck. My back ached a little, and it gave a satisfying pop as I leaned back in my office chair and stretched out with my hands over my head.
I stared at my phone as it buzzed away, pinging intermittently, and it took me a moment to realise it was in its death throes, a red battery icon blinking on the screen. That made sense, now that I thought about it. I couldn’t remember the last time I charged the thing. Or when I last bothered to check what the pings were about.
I reached out and flipped it over. The noise would go away on its own, soon enough. Hopefully Uncle Adam wouldn't let Ashika in if she came over.
If there was one thing I appreciated about Capebook, it was the communities that congregated there, niche or otherwise. They’d been lifesaving for me, in the last few years. There were groups for F-ranks to commiserate with each other over their disappointingly weak powers, forums for speculation about powers and the current research behind them, and even places where people shared tips about revelations and ‘levelling up.’
My favourite had always been the Aegis Academy student groups. Of the tens of thousands of posts I’d made on Capebook, the vast majority could surely be found there. It was a bit cringe, in retrospect, to post on a forum meant for students attending the school as an outsider, and especially with such frequency. The only reason I was able to was because my dad sent me an invite when he was a teacher there, and after he died no one was going to kick me off no matter what I said.
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They probably should have, honestly. It must have been infuriating to be an actual student at AA and have to deal with some kid telling you you’re wrong about your experiences there, then have your complaints brushed off. I’d sometimes gotten… heated.
Scrolling back through my posts, my mood plummeted. People had tried to tell me, but I’d refused to listen.
“Trust me, kid, Aegis isn’t perfect,” one comment had said, not even a year ago.
“Just because you’re mediocre, don’t go blaming the school,” I’d replied, as if I could tell anyone about mediocrity. Talk about projection.
“Shitty people get ahead in life all the time, and the hero world is no different,” someone had lamented.
“Aegis Academy is the one place where bad people don’t get ahead and good people are rewarded. Maybe you’re just feeling insecure?” I’d sniped at them for it, and only now I could see they were as sad about it then as I was now, and I was such an ass to them for it.
“I swear, someone messed with me during the test! I didn’t catch who did it, but if you’re reading this, go f*** yourself!” an angry student had complained.
“There’s no way,” I had replied, a little shit who thought he knew everything there was to know. “The teachers would catch anything like that.”
They probably had. And if the test I’d taken last week was anything to go by, they’d probably watched it happen and done nothing then too.
My fists clenched, I closed the browser and stood from my chair before I could do anything reckless. Energy thrummed through me, pooling in my hands and begging me to release it in an explosion of violence, raining down painful punches on anything in the vicinity. I resisted the impulse, instead turning to the only healthy stress relief I had on hand.
Cleaning my room.
I’d been a mess of fury and frustration and sadness for the last week. The train ride home had gone by in a blur, and my feet carried me home on autopilot, dropping me off at the front door before I’d even begun to process my emotions, let alone face them. It had caught me off guard when Uncle Adam had opened the door, wondering why I was standing outside in the dark. He’d taken one look at me and dragged me inside to cook me dinner despite the late hour.
In classic Shaw household fashion, we hadn’t spoken a word about what happened, just existed in proximity to each other for a while. He hadn’t asked and I hadn’t told. He probably still thought I’d bombed the test and fallen into a pit of depression.
Honestly, I might have preferred that scenario. Given what Harlequin had said, chances were high I’d passed the test, and, even despite everything, there was no way I was going to turn away from my dream.
The problem I was having, in this case, was facing the fact that my hero school adventure wasn’t going to be what I thought it would be. That the school wasn’t what I thought it was. There was a part of me that wanted to go back to before all this, to a time when my shining ideal was untainted, unbroken. It was a much happier world I lived in, back then. Funny how much things could change in just a few weeks.
But that wasn’t on the cards. Unless I spontaneously manifested an S-rank time manipulation power…
I want to go back and change things.
No dice. Frankly, I would’ve been pissed if that worked.
I kept myself busy shuffling around my room, cleaning what I could. Dusting a little here, wiping a little there. Honestly, my room was probably the tidiest it had ever been at this point. Everything was neatly packed away in its rightful place, my clothes hung up in the closet at the back of the room, my bed made, my computer desk well organised, my books catalogued on the shelves lining the wall opposite the window. I stopped at the end of my bed, eyeing the posters on the wall behind it.
Runemaiden, Merlin, and Mr Gold were prominent faces, all AA alumni. There were a few of Herakles and his Olympians; Spartan, Aetos, Helen, among others. Teachers who worked at AA part time along with their hero duties. Even Marquise was present on my poster wall, standing among the Aegis staff in the last staff photo my dad had taken part in.
These were all people I had always believed in. The pinnacle. The kinds of larger than life heroes myths would have been based on if they were born in a different era. Their names would live on forever, immortal.
There was one face in particular that would, if nothing else, live on in my memory.
Valiant dominated the collage. His roman helmet, from every angle. Pictures of his costume at every stage of his career. Smiles, frowns, laughs. Looks of determination, reassuring grins, dauntless heroic miens. My wall wasn’t big enough to contain every bit of Valiant merch that had ever been released, but it had the best ones. The rest were stored in boxes taking up half my closet, ready to swap out if the mood took me.
My eyes trailed down to the table beside my bed. A single picture frame stood propped up, holding a polaroid small enough to fit in a wallet. I walked over and picked it up, inspecting it for any stray motes of dust.
People often told me I was a miniature version of my dad, but looking at this all I could see were the differences. Dad’s hair was a darker red than mine, here, and he kept it longer, falling past his ears; there’d been times when I was really young that he’d worn it in a ponytail, and my mom had hated it. His eyes were a brighter shade of blue, and if mine had ever sparkled with such life I’d never found it in the mirror. His jaw was squarer, more chiselled, and not in a way that came from being an adult while I was a teenager; the shape was completely different.
I felt so inadequate, comparing myself to him. It was starkest at this moment, still shutting myself in my room and moping about life eight days after my understanding of the world had been toppled. He would have charged back out, challenging every student in Aegis to prove their valour to him or get the hell out.
More than anything, I wanted to be able to do just that.
But I didn’t have the power, figuratively and literally. As I was, I’d just get escorted from campus and told never to come back. And in the unlikely event someone bothered to accept the challenge of a Level 0 F-rank nobody, chances were I’d lose. I’d back myself against most people my age in hand to hand with no powers, but why the hell would anyone agree to that?
That’s what it all came down to. Power. Superpower. Desperation and delusion had pushed me to challenge the Aegis Academy open admissions exam despite my lack of it, and through some miracle I’d come out the other end with a decent chance of being accepted.
For the next stage of my life, I couldn’t afford to be powerless.
My body emitted a signal like anyone else. It didn’t matter how weak it was, there was potential for power within me. I just had to find it.
No matter what it took.
Striding back to the computer, I opened up Capebook and dived back into the forums.