When I woke up this morning, I’d been looking forward to a day of research. The discoveries made at Superverse’s labs a few days ago had been disheartening in some ways, but in others they had motivated me: I had a new data point regarding my powers to investigate. The destination was still as unclear as ever, but I had a new path marked out for me to take forward, and I had been eager to forge on towards making the unknown known.
Today’s agenda had been to search up a wide variety of powers and power-related things I could try and analyse the signals from. I’d anticipated a good ten hours or more sitting at my computer, and I’d been greatly looking forward to it. Lame as it might sound, I genuinely enjoyed shutting myself in my room and getting lost in a new subject.
Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined I would find myself walking through the front gates of Aegis Academy at just past two in the afternoon, trailing my irate older sister. If I dreamed about returning to Aegis at all, it was on my inaugural day as a student, taking the first step on my journey to becoming a hero and, perhaps more importantly, setting this place to rights, restoring it to the institution of valour it was supposed to be. I’d anticipated picking a fight with the place in some form, but not like this. Not so soon.
Were we technically trespassing right now? Maisie was an alumni, but she hadn’t been invited or anything, as far as I knew…
There were barely a fraction as many people around now as there had been on the entrance exam day, but we drew curious looks from students and faculty alike as Maisie marched down Silver Road. Maisie barely seemed to notice, but I felt the sting of every stare.
As a rising star in the superhero game, she was undoubtedly used to people staring and muttering excitedly to each other wherever she went—her costume was eye-catching enough in its default state, but with a tweak of her power she looked like a living galaxy—but that kind of behaviour unfortunately held rather more negative associations for me. It was playing hell with my already frayed nerves, though I was doing my best not to show it. I told myself their attention was all on Maisie and I probably didn’t merit a second glance, but funnily enough that just kind of pissed me off.
But, well, anger was better than stage fright. So I’d run with that.
Some day, I’d draw just as much attention as she did, and I’d force myself to revel in it.
I stepped close to her and murmured in her ear, “Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?”
I really hoped she wasn’t actually going to burn anything, but she hadn’t given me any assurances on the matter thus far. Not that I’d been able to ask her many questions on the way over; hurtling through the air at eye-watering speeds wasn’t a conducive environment for conversation, it turned out. And I’d barely been able to get my bearings after the flight was over before she was striding through Aegis Academy’s famous front gate—the movement aspect of her power was more reality warping than flight, and it was deeply uncomfortable for passengers. But I’d insisted on coming along; I’d been more accustomed to the feeling in the past, even when she was considerably less practised with it.
In retrospect, that was probably another factor in why we were drawing so many stares. A non-staff superhero appearing in a twist of warped space-time outside the front gate with a thunderous expression and striding in was probably a sight to see.
This little incident was undoubtedly going to end up all over social media. Fun times.
Maisie glanced over her shoulder at me, still marching forwards. She’d pulled on her costume properly, her night sky cape draped regally over her shoulders, making her look like a celestial empress; she’d extended the effect to her head, constellations woven into her strawberry blonde hair. Even her eyes twinkled, her irises replaced by revolving spiral galaxies. She was very much in Vesper Mode right now.
It was, admittedly, very impressive. It was easy to see why she tended to do so well in cape fashion polls online.
“I need to shout at some people,” she said.
Dread pooled in my stomach. “Who?”
“Guess.”
The dread settled like a solid ball of osmium, dragging my stomach down between my knees. “Please tell me you’re not going to pick a fight with the Vice Principal.”
“Okay. I won’t tell you that.”
“Maisie!”
“Emmett.”
I took a deep breath. “As much as I enjoy the idea of knocking Marquise down a peg or two, I kinda don’t want to get expelled before I can even start my first term,” I hissed. Then added to myself, “Assuming they accept me in the first place, that is.”
Maisie abruptly came to a stop, and I had to quickly side-step so I didn’t go crashing into her. None of her Aspects truly enhanced her physically, but I was still pretty sure I’d come off the worse in a collision between us. Her gravity manipulation Aspect was a finicky thing.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She turned away from me, and her eyes softened, anger bleeding away. It was only when I followed her gaze that I realised where we were. My heart stuttered a little, and my breath left me like I’d been punched in the gut.
I’d spent years avoiding any mention of Dad’s memorial statue, and now this was my third time seeing it in a matter of weeks. In the future, there’d be no avoiding it; I’d surely have to see it hundreds of times.
I wondered, then, if this feeling would ever go away. If I’d ever be able to look at it without a lump appearing in my throat and my eyes turning hot. If there’d ever come a time when I could look at this statue of my father in his full Roman-style costume and feel like I measured up to a fraction of what he’d believed I could be.
In the silver sheen of the statue, I could see my own warped reflection, alongside the evening sky pattern of Maisie’s costume. We both looked so small, compared to him.
“If he was here now,” Maisie said, “what would you tell him about your test?”
I grimaced. “I don’t believe it would’ve happened that way if he was here.”
“Yeah. That kind of answers the question behind my question, doesn’t it? What he would think of some of the shit that apparently happens at AA these days…”
I looked at Maisie, assessing her. “What kind of shit are you talking about? You didn’t answer my question about your time here earlier.”
“Nothing like what you dealt with. Not even close,” Maisie said with a frown. The constellations on her cape shifted, white dots zipping across an inky black canvas until a nebula came into view. It was slightly nauseating to look at, so I focused on her face. Once upon a time, I might’ve been more confident in interpreting the furrow between her brows as her gaze trailed off towards the giant gymnasium at the far end of Silver Road.
“Things were way over competitive, at the start,” she continued. “It began with the entrance exam, where there were a few cases of cheating that went unpunished unless another examinee called it out. Then there were a few people in my year group who were clearly sabotaging others’ grades and shit, and it created a toxic as fuck atmosphere for a while.” Maisie snorted, turning back to him with a wry smile. “But a bunch of us teamed up with the teachers to put a stop to all that kind of crap. By senior year, things were more how they should be.”
“You think it’s gotten worse since your time?” I asked.
“Hell yes I do,” Maisie said, her smile vanishing. “Someone almost dying is so far beyond anything I saw. Like, holy shit dude, the worst guys in my cohort were just kinda selfish assholes who should’ve been training to become corpo capes or military goons rather than superheroes.”
“Some of the teachers said my test group was a uniquely bad one,” I said, then blinked. Why was I on the defensive here? I completely agreed with her that it was unacceptable. Old habits die hard, I guess. “You never said anything about bad people in Aegis before. You always talked the place up like nothing was wrong.”
I tried to keep any hint of accusation out of my voice, but Maisie’s hurt look told me I’d failed. “I knew how much AA meant to you. I didn’t want to ruin that.” The look in her eyes turned deadly once more. “Marquise made us some promises. I thought things would be better by the time you made it here. Four years is a long time for someone like Marquise to work, and she’s clearly made things worse in some subtle bullshit way, like she always does.”
“You sound like you subscribe to the ‘still a villain’ theory,” I said, eyeing her.
But Maisie shook her head. “Much as I dislike the woman, I can’t in good faith call her a villain. All this stuff at AA? It’s not some… I don’t know, some convoluted long term evil scheme.” She sighed and shrugged her shoulders, sending a ripple cascading through the starfield on her cape. “She just has a messed up view of the world.”
“What do you mean?”
Maisie looked at me, and the galaxies in her eyes blazed with the power of billions of stars. “Let’s go ask the woman herself.”
She started walking, and I was left with little choice but to follow in her wake once more. A small crowd had formed nearby, watching to see what Vesper was here for, and they quickly dispersed as she strode past them. There were several phones out, as I’d predicted. Not that anything particularly interesting was going on anymore, from a spectator’s perspective.
But there didn’t need to be. Superheroes made news merely by existing, and a rising star existing in a state outside their norms was a headline. It probably wouldn’t get pushed nationwide, but Capebook’s algorithms would probably show an article on plenty of people’s front pages.
A sense of foreboding chased me as I hurried after Maisie. I’d been too young for the vultures to come sniffing around in the wake of Dad’s death—it wasn’t so much that they were respectful of the dead as they knew they’d face Consequences with a capital C for harassing the family of a fallen hero—so I’d never found myself in the cape geeks’ sights.
That was probably about to change. The fact that Vesper had a younger brother at AA was more than likely about to become a well known thing among enthusiasts, and a connection to Valiant would come immediately after. But how long would it take before someone dug into my history and found my F-rank status? When would they start flaming me for daring to think I could make it into the world’s most famous school of superheroes? How long after that would the accusations of nepotism and favouritism come in?
It was interesting to think about, in a way. I’d never been on the receiving end of that kind of scrutiny, so it would be a novel experience.
Which was obviously just me trying to cope with the fact that I was soon going to be under the spotlight. A horrifying prospect, but I was always going to have to face it eventually, if I was going to be a superhero.
The admin building came into view, and I put all that out of my mind for now. Built in the fascinatingly odd Ancient Greek-slash-retro futuristic style that marked it as one of the earlier structures to go up on AA’s campus, its four story height had probably once made it one of the bigger buildings. It had long since been dwarfed by the crowd of facilities that seemed to pack together to be as close to the main gymnasium as possible, and its sleek white pillars had gone out of fashion in AA’s architecture quite some time ago.
Eight of the aforementioned pillars lined the facade of the building, with a single huge pane of glass spanning the gap between the two centre-most pillars, revealing the reception area of the building.
Where Marquise stood waiting for us in the lobby, her signature white suit pristine and her expression serene as Maisie stormed towards her.
“If it isn’t my favourite former student,” she said dryly when the doors slid open. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”