The train glided along, its engines utterly silent. Lights flashed by outside the window in a blur. The journey was a familiar enough one that I could gauge how long we had left just by looking at Foresight Tower far in the distance. Night had fallen, and the ziggurat was a shining gold beacon in the dark. Somehow, we were almost home. It felt like I’d rested my eyes for a moment and suddenly 90% of the hour-long trip had gone by.
I was, to be frank, absolutely exhausted. No workout I’d ever put myself through had ever left me this tired. It turned out Dr Klein was a far more sadistic taskmaster than any personal trainer. It wasn’t a soreness of the muscles or a bone-deep desire for sleep. Nothing so tangible as that.
It was like something had reached into a place I hadn’t known existed and squeezed it in a white knuckle grip, only letting go when I put some distance between myself and those evil machines Superverse pretended were designed to measure powers. They were clearly elaborate torture devices.
The thought bullied a chuckle out of me, and I felt Ashika’s scrutiny on the side of my head. I waved her off absently, and she huffed.
I couldn’t really complain. No matter how ragged they’d run me, it was, ultimately, exactly what I’d asked for. I knew more about my signal than ever before.
And, at the same time, it felt like I knew even less.
The scientists had insisted on as many tests as they had at their disposal, with Dr Klein overseeing it all. They’d been meticulously thorough. Dozens of expensive machines had shrieked their quasi-signals at me.
Over several hours of testing, they’d determined that my signal weakened minutely whenever I interacted with another power signal. Even weirder, it weakened faster when I was actually focusing on an individual power signal; passively existing in the vicinity of a power in use did affect me, but a minute amount in comparison. When no power signals were active, my own signal, such as it was, slowly crawled back to strength.
Unfortunately, it was practically impossible not to be around powers in use unless I was willing to go live in one of those wacko anti-power communes. Only a coordinated effort and a specialised isolation chamber had managed to achieve the effect at the labs.
And even then, they estimated it would take me a week of isolation to reach F-rank. There was some indication that it might climb faster over time, but it was hard to test in the limited time we had available.
Honestly, just that much information on my signal would have been an unbelievable boon to me. The knowledge that my power grew at all was a game changer for my self-motivation, if nothing else.
But the real fruit of the day’s effort came from one of Dr Klein’s suggestions. For the most part, his advice had amounted to spending as much of my time as possible around powers which… yeah. With the data gathered, you’d think it would make more sense to shut myself away in the woods until I could gather enough power to lock in a revelation, but he and I were of the same mind about going the other way entirely.
I intended to attend Aegis Academy. Being around powers was unavoidable and non-negotiable.
If my sense for powers could be refined after all, somehow, it could be a useful tool in and of itself. That was something I’d always known, but had yet to come up with any great ideas for.
Until Dr Klein advised me to sign up to power therapy sessions with Superverse and place myself in a situation where I could be present for someone experiencing a revelation, AKA the moment in time where the resonance of a signal was at its most powerful.
Somehow, I’d never been around for one before. Hadn’t even really considered trying.
Revelations were generally perceived to be more and more personal the higher once climbed through levels. ‘I want to be strong’ could easily become something like ‘I want to make sure no one has to experience that horrible thing I did’ with a few levels. It usually wasn’t much of a group activity.
But there were people who didn’t mind sharing. Therapy groups. They existed both in the sense of psychological care and physical rehabilitation, but there were also groups dedicated to actively guiding one’s revelations for the best effects, and Superverse offered a combination of all three.
It wasn’t exactly a club you signed up for without an invitation. But with Dr Klein’s word, I could get in, and I fully intended to. But I wasn’t going to just stop there.
The machines’ signals hadn’t lit a fire in me exactly, but they had opened up possibilities. Signal sensing hadn’t seemed an obvious path for me to pursue, since it was a thing a lot of people experienced before their own signal got strong enough. It seemed too common.
But if it turned out my signal sense really was a unique thing and not just a product of experiencing it longer than was typical, it was suddenly worth looking into. If I could sense something from specialised psionic equipment, what else might I be able to sense that I hadn’t bothered to look out for before?
That question had been buzzing in my head throughout the day, the possibilities making me dizzy. It had buoyed me all throughout the rest of my exhausting tests even as the machines and their signals battered at my… whatever it was in me they were battering. My own weak signal, I presumed. The concept of feeling my own signal in that way was strange, defying conventional understanding of powers yet again, but it was the best explanation I had.
Ashika’s tests had taken up the rest of the day, and I’d had no problem waiting around for her, thinking. The scientists had seemed overjoyed to get into the thing they were actually being paid for, and relief hummed in the crowd as they finally got to tackle something they understood. These were people who’d built their expertise in the study of strong powers, not weaklings like myself. I wasn’t bitter about it. Not at all.
They’d spent about two hours on Ashika’s tests. She hadn’t felt the slightest thing from the test machines, but she’d sent quite the buzz through the scientists anyway with her scores hovering around 8000X. That kind of score in a sixteen year old was, it turned out, more exciting than an anomalous sixteen year old who lost power when exposed to power signals.
Ashika had looked mighty uncomfortable at all the praise, and I had a horrible feeling her awkwardness was because she worried I might be jealous or something. I’d tried to give her a thumbs up to show I didn’t care how awesome she was, she’d always be Ashika to me, but I wasn’t sure it had gotten through.
Well, might as well make sure.
“I’m not jealous, you know?” I asked her, eyeing her side-on.
Unfortunately, she’d been nodding off, and my sudden interruption made her jump halfway out of her skin, smacking the back of her head on the railing above us as she sprung to her feet. She collapsed back into the chair with a groan, rubbing her head. “The hell?” she growled, squinting at me suspiciously. Her signal flared up, slowly building.
I smiled at her. “Sorry. Just wanted to make sure you knew.”
“I didn’t think you were jealous of me. I know you’re not like that,” Ashika said, pouting a little. “I was worried you’d feel like shit about… everything. It all feels so unfair, man.”
“It is a little unfair,” I admitted. “But there’s no point getting mad about it. Things will work out.”
“The world would be much nicer if everyone had your optimism.”
“Optimism,” I repeated the word, tasting the feel of it on my tongue. I scoffed. “Some people would call it delusion. Most people, even.”
“Fuck people,” Ashika said.
“Nahhh. Wouldn’t want to give them the satisfaction.”
Ashika snorted. Her power’s signal was still building just from where she was tapping her foot, and I focused on it. It was so much clearer than the scientists’ had been; apparently, all of them were in the D to B range. It was almost as powerful in terms of pure resonance as any one of the machines I’d run tests with today, but without the focus directed at me which made my own signal tremble. Thinking back, Tempest’s had been similar.
I was desperate to understand what it all meant, to find a hint at the destination this path I wanted to follow could end up taking me, but life was never that simple. Especially not for me.
Speakers played a catchy jingle as the train pulled into the station, and only a handful of people aside from Ashika and I stepped off when the doors slid open. There were no staff on either of the two ground-level platforms, and the LED timetables hanging from each small waiting room showed there wouldn’t be another train for thirty minutes. That sparse service wasn’t a product of the time of day, either. If anything, it was usually less frequent than that.
It wasn’t hard to see why. Suburbia sprawled out for miles around Sunnyside Station, an endless sea of cookie cutter homes flowing over the flat landscape. Foresight Tower and the skyscrapers surrounding it lit up the horizon, projecting all kinds of colours on the clouds. Nearer but still far, South Point Station loomed over all, an eyesore of a cuboid-shaped building, like a horizontal skyscraper that glowed a pinkish-red at night. Being a hub serving multiple lines, anyone who wanted to catch a train would just go there for the wider range of options it offered.
There was barely anyone around at this time of night, so I navigated to the usual exit on autopilot, Ashika following behind me in silence. A few people milled about, but I paid them no attention as my feet carried me towards the familiar route home, following the main road that stretched out directly onward from the station.
This walk always made me a bit melancholic, introspective. Everywhere I looked seemed to trigger an onslaught of increasingly bittersweet memories. Since Ashika was so quiet, I assumed she felt the same.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Barely a few minutes from the station, we cut through the park Lucas, Ashika, and I had played in throughout our childhood. There were other parks that were nearer to our neighbourhood, but they couldn’t offer the combination of playground, wooded area, and wide space that let us play Heroes vs. Villains to our heart’s content. It cheered me up a bit to see the jungle gym was still there; Ashika had always liked to make it her base in our games due to its resemblance to Fólkvangr, the marble colosseum-like building in Northern Europe that the Valkyries called their main headquarters.
Then a dark, bitter part of me that had been born back during AA’s entrance exams reared its ugly head and I found myself wondering whether the Valkyries were truly as heroic as they seemed, and that little nostalgic happiness drained away. Lucas’ presence in those memories didn’t help, either.
Next on our route came Hillview Elementary. Sunnyside was one of those dumb suburbs where you’d have massive neighbourhoods with only one road leading in or out to the maze of residential streets, all branching off from one main road. Somewhere along the way, people had figured out you could hop the fence at the back of the Hillview grounds (which, infuriatingly, was neither in view of, nor did it hold a view from, a hill) and cut off thirty minutes of walking along a main road by skirting around the edge of the sports field and behind the gymnasium.
It felt a little hypocritical to use this shortcut. As a kid, I’d taken great pride in my ‘heroic deed’ of running out to accost anyone who dared to trespass on school grounds during recess. I’d been so confused when I got scolded for it.
Lucas had rushed to my defence, of course. He’d been in a phase where he’d tell anyone who would listen he was going to be a member of the Olympians some day, an arbiter of absolute justice. He’d sworn he would return in the future with the full might of (arguably) the world’s greatest superhero team to bestow righteous judgement on the teachers for failing to punish such heinous crimes. There’d been a lot of hardline views on crime from the Olympians back then, and Lucas was just that kind of fanboy.
Hard to believe that was seven years ago. Sometimes, those kinds of memories felt like yesterday. At others, they could’ve been from another lifetime. Another person’s lifetime, even.
Countless memories surfaced throughout my walk home, and there was a throughline theme to them. The three of us had been obsessed with heroism since childhood; every game we played, every TV show we watched, every book we read, all we ever talked about… everything revolved around superheroes.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realised it stemmed from admiration. Ashika with the Valkyries. Lucas with the Olympians. Myself with, well, all of them.
What did all that mean if the Heroes we’d so worshipped turned out to be unworthy of our respect?
The thought made me a little sick. I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to think about it at all.
So I did my best to put it out of my mind as we walked on, lowering my eyes to the ground so my surroundings didn’t flash increasingly more-bitter-than-sweet memories into my mind.
A little while later we passed the local stores, a row of buildings squatting on one side of the main road that sliced through the middle of Sunnyside. Most of them were crappy fast food chains, though there were a few general stores and a lone garage.
The only building of interest was the one at the very end, and I couldn’t keep my eyes on the ground anymore as we approached it. It looked how someone from the 60s thought a building of the 2010s would, all shiny floor-to-ceiling windows and smooth white walls, with a glass dome on the roof. The only thing missing was a boxy flying car. It was rare to see places bother with the retro-futurism aesthetic this far from the forest of towers downtown, so it had always stood out. That being said, the architecture wasn’t what interested me about the building.
Above it, glowing white letters read: The Sunnyside Sons.
Our local superheroes.
If you only watched the news, you could be forgiven for thinking that every superhero lived a life of globetrotting, ever-escalating adventure, constantly jetting off to deal with a new crisis; supervillains, natural disasters, even war. Obviously, that couldn’t be the case. There were no reliable numbers on power scaling since not everyone bothered to get tested, but researchers generally estimated that around 50% of the world’s population would be Ranked F and didn’t get past level 1, their powers more quaint tricks than something that held actual utility.
On the other end of the scale, the number of confirmed S-ranks counted in the twenties.
Not all superheroism was about countering earthquakes, intervening in armed conflicts, or beating up Dr Evil before he could fire his laser beam at the moon. Online, cape fanatics had taken to measuring it by scale. You had your aforementioned world-class supes, active around the planet. Then you had nation-class, the types who worked all over the country, generally on a quasi-freelance basis where they moved for specific jobs and cases. Below that was state-class, with basically the same deal as the nation-class except more local. It kept on that way, from state to county to city.
All the way down to your friendly neighbourhood superheroes.
The Sunnyside Sons had settled in our hometown when Lucas, Ashika and I were in first grade, and from the moment they’d showed up, we’d thought they were the coolest people to ever live. Sure, they hadn’t actually needed to fight any villains in this cushy posting on the outskirts of the city—the most severe crime they’d ever personally dealt with was probably a bunch of shoplifters.
But who cared about that? They patrolled the neighbourhood with winning smiles, always visible, always approachable. Constantly involved in local events, they were fixtures in the community, and everyone here took pride in them. They didn’t need to be world-famous. Hell, they didn’t even need to be any higher than D-rank to be beloved.
I couldn’t hope to guess how many hours we’d spent following Tumble, Captain Smoke, or Limit on one of their patrols, chattering away at them, asking questions, and they never once lost their patience with us. We’d spent a stupid amount of time outside their HQ over the years, hanging around to get even a glimpse of our hometown heroes.
“If it ain’t Emmett and Ashika!” someone called out. “What’s got you out so late, kiddos?”
A smile found its way to my face. Whatever mood I was in, that jovial voice was always a balm to the soul.
Tumble was known to be the oldest of his team, somewhere in his 40s, but you wouldn’t think it by looking at him. His afro offered not a hint of white or silver, and his dark skin was utterly unmarred by wrinkles or marks of age. Behind the black domino mask barely covering his eyes, his gaze was friendly and, above all else, alert. As their leader, he always talked a lot about being professional, which was funny considering his rather silly power; a muscular man in a tuxedo cartwheeling around at speeds that technically qualified him to use the highway wasn’t the most dignified sight.
I’d once asked him why he smiled so much and acted goofy with his acrobatics if he wanted to seem professional. He’d told me that, for neighbourhood heroes like him, that was professionalism.
“Just on our way home,” I greeted him with a wave, then pointed a thumb at Ashika. “This one’s had a long day wowing a bunch of scientists down at Superverse HQ.”
Ashika shot me a sour look, but she was smiling too. Tumble had that effect on people.
Tumble slapped his thigh and barked a laugh. He was standing just outside the front door of the Sons’ HQ; he sometimes liked to be visible and greet passers-by. “Good for you, kid. Remember good ol’ Tumble when you’re in the big leagues fighting evil aliens or whatever it is the Olympians get up to, yeah?”
“I could never forget you, Tumble,” Ashika said, giving the man a pat on the shoulder as she passed him.
“There’s a good girl,” Tumble said, grinning. He wiped away an imaginary tear, then looked between us. “Say, I had Lucas through here earlier. Made me realise I don’t see the three of you together much anymore.”
Ashika stopped, stiffening. The mention of our former friend was a punch to the gut to me too, but I didn’t let my smile drop. “We grew apart,” I said with a shrug. “It happens.”
Tumble sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Yeaaaah. He didn’t seem impressed when I brought you two up. Suddenly looked grouchy as a cat that let the bird it was chasin’ get away.” He frowned for a moment, then flashed a grin and a thumbs up. “I can put two and two together, kid. I was already in my twenties when powers popped up, so I missed the whole hero school fad by quite a good while. But I know all about losing out on a spot at some place I wanted to go because of things that were outta my control, so take it from me: it doesn't matter. Keep working hard, and you’ll find something that works for you. You don't need a fancy school like Aegis to be a hero. Just remember that these places all give out the same licence, in the end.”
It took me a moment to realise what he was implying, and I have to admit it stung a little, despite everything. While I hadn’t followed him around like a starstruck duckling in a long time, I still spoke to him whenever I saw him around town, pestering him with questions about what was happening in the hero scene lately, and he was always happy to answer. A few months back, it became obvious he’d found out about my, as he referred to it, affliction. Lucas’ work, no doubt.
He’d tried comforting me, in his own way. He knew all too well how much I wanted to be a hero, and he’d had a bunch of pamphlets on hand, all of them giving info on the kind of small-scale superhero work he and his peers engaged in. Sidekick 101, local heroics courses, neighbourhood patrol tips, and that kind of thing. It was clear he didn’t think much of my chances of making it ‘big’, so to speak.
It made sense, from his perspective. I believed in myself and had no concept of giving up, but I always tried to be realistic about how other people would see my circumstances. Tumble was just being his usual self, doing what he thought was the right thing: trying to comfort a kid with big dreams who’d failed. Lucas had probably fed him more info along those lines too, despite not actually knowing how my test had gone.
“Thanks for the advice, Tumble, sir,” I said, keeping my smile steady through force of will. “I’ll be sure to keep it in mind.”
“You’re a good kid, Emmett,” Tumble said, meeting my eyes with a look that oozed sincerity. “And good people always make it to where they want to be in the end, no matter what some cynical silly-heads would like to tell you! A good person who wants to be a hero? You’re all but guaranteed to go far. Don’t need some fancy schmancy school for that.”
My smile became more genuine. “I certainly hope so.”
“I know so. As long as you keep that smile on your face,” he said, pointing at my mouth with a grin of his own, “you’ll get where you want to be. A good smile never fails.”
“Never?” I asked.
“Never ever,” Tumble said.
Ashika snorted, but I couldn’t help noticing she was smiling again too.
“It’s the first rule of heroism,” Tumble continued. “You always gotta smile.”
I thought about that for a moment. Then, since he was already feeling sorry for me, I decided to milk it. “Hey, could you show off your power for me?”
Tumble’s grin widened, and his signal buzzed to life. It was a low, soft thing compared to the signals I’d been blasted with today, familiar and comforting. I tried to study it, but wasn’t sure what to even look for. Even after everything, I didn’t yet know what I could actually do with the signal sense.
There was a frenetic quality to it, I supposed? Was it giving a vibe like the signal was spinning, or was I just imagining that based on what I already knew of Tumble’s power? It was hard to say. Results inconclusive. Further study required.
The suit-clad superhero launched straight into his signature move: tumbling. Seeing a massive man cartwheeling up and down the street at such high speeds his body blurred into circular streaks was always great for a laugh, and Ashika and I were giggling like kids by the time he landed before us with his arms lifted like a gymnast, then swept into an overly elaborate bow. He never stopped grinning.
We left shortly after that, and I had no doubt Ashika was feeling as light and refreshed as I was. Even if there were heroes out there who weren’t worthy of the name, at least we knew there were a few who did deserve it, and they were right here at home, doing what little they could and always, always smiling.
That was the kind of hero I wanted to be someday, no matter how weak or strong I ended up being.