One of my commenters mentioned something. It was just a random one-off comment, but it was just one of those non-sequiturs that oddly make you think. In response to my sudden run of capital gains, they were surprised there wasn't any sort of regulation of powers. It gave me pause, and as is the usual thing when I have questions, I decided to look it up. Outside of explicit regulations pertaining to working with/for the H.A.A., there was surprisingly little regulation of anything super-related- in the U.S., at least. Yeah, invading minds with psychic abilities was out, but that... was about it. I mean, in ten years, no one had actively created any significant regulations concerning us outside of the H.A.A.. How the fuck does that even work? I had to get a license to catch fish, but not even traffic regulations for speedsters? The FAA had nothing to say about supers with sub- or super-sonic flight?

So, I did some more digging, and I got pretty pissed. So, at fourteen, you get enrolled in the academy, to learn to control your powers and abilities and get the education for eventual work with the H.A.A.. After that, supers immediately joined the H.A.A., and start their careers under them, or like Anna, they go to college for a more specific degree, then work for the H.A.A. in one capacity or another. Here's the part that got me: Contracts. People had talked about the things that child actors went through, there was a whole ass documentary on it, but the whole thing with supers was under a shroud... Until I found the contracts for Blacklash. She was the one who'd held the black tendril ability until Reaver killed her. After her death, Blacklash's wife found the old copies of the contracts and posted them online. They were almost immediately taken down, but it's the internet, the difference between immediately and almost immediately was a wider gulf than a lot of people realized.

Nothing came up on a reverse Google image search, but I didn't stop there. I kept rooting through the internet, and no reputable site had anything. It had been online, and then all traces of it seemed to vanish from the world. This is more or less when I backed it up, and using a VPN, went off-road. I needed the information, so I did what it took to get there, reaching out with my technopathy, and sifting through, with a clear goal, I saw it, and printed out all of the documents.

A nearly three hundred-page NDA agreement, and then as I was looking over the contract itself, I started to see a pattern in the wording. I looked up similar wording going through a legal site and got directed to a site that covered legality for child actors and other celebrities who were minors. The contract I would have entered into would have been like this, specifically sculpted, including an absolutely insane morals clause. Like, I'm a Boy Scout, I do a lot of charitable work, and I'm pretty sure I violated a few of these now. The NDAs essentially had the same weight as slipping classified information to China and could be treated as an act of domestic terrorism, they were literally worded to completely annihilate not only the enhanced individual's life, but it would burn their family down around them as well, since it would be the parents that signed it. Then you spend four years at their academy under the morality clause, and other stipulations, and at eighteen, you're given the bill that's been accumulating the whole time, and you're given more paperwork for contract work through the H.A.A.. The tuition price of the academy? Only around a quarter million for four years, in bankruptcy-proof debt akin to current college loans, before you factor in the ones like Anna who then went to college.

Violated the morality clause? Huge fines, which got tacked onto your debt, the lowest of which, for point of example, was $10,000 for "conduct unbecoming an empowered individual". Decide to fuck off right at eighteen? Well, sure you can, just give us back the quart-mil in tuition, and if you don't, we'll just deduct it from your every paycheck before you ever see the money. International treaties had been established to stop countries from poaching other nations' supers (No one wanted to compete with U.S.'s wallet), so regardless of where you went in the world, you were still screwed, since you couldn't get work there, and your home country was still owed their money. The few countries that you might be able to work something out in were not the sorts of places you wanted to be.

The adult contracts? Much like military service, they included abridgments of Constitutional rights, such as Free Speech and privacy (The right that made psychically pulling information from your mind illegal), and you couldn't be charged on crimes in a normal court, but a special one, similar to a Court Martial from the military. The NDAs got refreshed as well, this time with steeper fines and penalties for breaking it. All fines would be added to the "loan" balance, so nothing came out of pocket, but the interest on that stacked up. The kids who joined the academy would hit eighteen with a mortgage already, and a second one for college tuition. All in all, you would be over $400k in bankruptcy-proof debt by the time you had a degree.

That was why they were so hard up to get me in the academy, to get that financial weight around my neck. It could be used to control. How many parents had been duped into this? Parents of the enhanced, if my parents' reactions were to be used as a general gauge, were worried about their kid, and being sold this giant story about how great the academy was, and how awesome your life would be, with a guaranteed career as A Hero. Even when they considered me an F-Tier, the only one in existence, they'd been giving me the full-court press to join up, let alone someone like Crimson who had a higher tier power. Tim, the former 'owner' of Reaver, was still in the psychiatric wing of OHSU. Two years under Reaver had taken its toll on him. I packed up the contracts and rolled out. Since I'd been the one who saved him from Reaver, the staff was generally well-disposed to letting me visit with him, and I'd been checking in when I could. He didn't really talk that much, and I got it. I'd seen plenty of kids in school who got bullied that clammed up, and that was just the sort of low-level abuse. This? Yeah, I'd cry in a corner forever myself.

He was watching a documentary in his room when I entered. It was on Egyptian myths and legends, "Hey Tim. I need your help with something."

Tim nodded, "'K."

I dropped the contracts on the small rolling table by his bed, "You familiar with these?"

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Tim's eyes bugged out as soon as he saw them, "I'll take that as a yes. Are they real?"

He'd been to the academy, then gotten his graduate's in archeology, then started work. If anyone knew these contracts, it was him. Flipping past the cover page, he saw the name and spoke, "Blacklash.... yeah."

Time teared up, "I still... I can see her face... begging me... she has a daughter."

I knelt down, and I could feel Reaver pulsing. It had been becoming more aware of all that it had done, who it had hurt, and its pulse soundlessly matched the sobs of Tim. I put a hand on his shoulder while I held my backpack in my right hand, "Hey, crying is good, and that stuff? It wasn't you. It's not your fault. I get it, Reaver tried to kill me, so I have a fairly unique vantage point on this one, but we can set at least some of this down right now. It's not your fault. What happens to debt in the event of a hero's death?"

He sniffled, blew his nose on a napkin, and responded as he idly pretended to tie his shoes, shoes that had no laces in them, not looking up, "If they died while on duty, the debts are forgiven. They're given a special burial in Arlington, too... but Blacklash isn't there. Her wife, she..."

"She released these. What happened to the debt?"

He finally looked me directly in the eyes, "It fell on her. She was... ruined."

I nodded and fished out a chocolate pudding cup for him. The nurses had pointed out he loved them. It was one of the only things here that he would eat immediately. I got up, and slung my backpack back up onto my shoulder, "Alright then. How about next time I bring a board game with me?"

Tim followed my eyes with his, "What will you do?"

I smiled, and raised my eyebrows, "Same thing I always do: Piss off the H.A.A.."

I didn't wait for a response, heading out. Outside, I took a moment to breathe, and felt the voice of Reaver from within: H.A.A. are the enemy?

"In this they are, but no violence," The government might be slow in a myriad number of ways, but once it came to violence, they were unmatched.

What could I do? I had the contracts, but what to do with them? I mean, contacting Anna was just dead out. If these were true, she was under them too. She would probably help, sure, but it could easily cost her everything, potentially cost her family everything. That was too much to ask, and her job was important, not just to me.

Okay, putting it back out on the internet was a wash. They swept it away once and kept it buried, and no other super was going to go offside to help me. The supervillains were out because they both wouldn't help and wouldn't be taken seriously... Blacklash's wife. I swung by Black Rock, grabbed a coffee, and sat over by the faux fireplace. How to find her... I texted Dad to tell him I'd be home later... I erased the message, and called him directly, "Hey Dad. Your old company: Did they employ a headhunter?"

Headhunters, however, needed a name if they were trying to scoop someone specific. I combed back through old interviews. Blacklash had been a decently popular hero based out of Atlanta, Georgia, and as a black woman who openly identified as lesbian, she'd been in a ton of interviews. Watching them all chained together, there were some pretty cringe bits, like how, regardless of what was going on, pretty much every interview brought the questions back to her skin color and her sexuality. Less than 1% of interviews done by Blacklash lacked these two subjects. It had to have sucked for her, and I felt a little guilty myself. No one had asked me about anything like that, and even when I mentioned having a girlfriend, it wasn't a major part of the interview, it was just an off-comment and the interview moved on. I couldn't get bogged down on the facet, though. There were larger concerns, and all I needed was one of them, a time when she talked about what her wife did for a living. She wouldn't give out a name, heroes were very wary of that stuff... with a notable exception. Looking around online, I got it, though I had to comb through rather a lot of false leads. Ironically, this was on YouTube as a reaction video. In the interview, she talked about her life, and the normalcy of things outside of being a hero, and mentioned her wife working in Human Resources for a non-profit. Okay, so we have a career path, and non-profit would generally state that she hadn't been in it for the money. I checked the Atlanta obituaries the week of Blacklash's death. Wrong age, wrong age, wrong gen... HAAHAA! It took a while, and I'd had to search through multiple papers, but I found it. She was the right race, gender, and age, and the article included that she was survived by her wife, Beth, and daughter, Marie.

From there, I cross-referenced the names involved and looked up for a second to see I was about six large white chocolate peppermint mochas in. Well, I'm gonna need a seventh. Secure in my continuing drip of caffeine, I pressed on. Okay, so we had a name, a career, the city, and it's a non-profit. I looked up non-profit groups in Atlanta, then cross-referenced with the details I already had... and BOOM! goes the creeper!

Beth was working for a senior-living group, and had been there for almost four years, starting as a volunteer in college! YES! She was now the Human Resources director. I called Dad, he called the headhunter, and the headhunter called Beth to arrange a good time for an interview. Me and Dad would fly out Sunday night, do the interview on Monday, and then Dad wanted to rent a car, and wanted to go to some cafe in Louisiana to get doughnuts. Alright, frickin' crazy, but let's do it.

We booked business-class tickets to Atlanta, set up the rental car, and generally got our stuff together over the next couple of days. We would be meeting Beth for lunch, and Dad would mainly conduct the interview, but since I was running the show, my being there was important. The headhunter sent us her LinkedIn, and it looked like she was looking for work. I mean, honest truth, we need a proper human resources lead anyway. The employee counts were going a bit nuts.

Aimee insisted that, since I would be missing another basketball game, we needed to go shopping on Saturday, and I would get her a present. It seemed vaguely reasonable, and I mean, getting her something nice to wear wouldn't be such a bad experience. I was a little perplexed when she steered away from the clothing section, then past sporting goods, and ended up in the lawn & garden section. She seemed to know where she was going, so I just kinda tagged along, until she came to a spot and my head went to the side: A hammock. She did this to get... a hammock, "Um, this won't fit over at your apartment. Not with the frame."

She scoffed, "No silly. it's for your backyard."

Okay then, apparently I'm getting her a hammock for my house. I deeply didn't get the point here, but it was clearly amusing her, which was the current point. We got the hammock, and some drinks, and on back home. I got the hammock set up, and looked over it, "Behold, the hammock, in all its glory."

She giggled a bit, "Well, go ahead, get in the hammock!"

I shook my head. This was just an odd direction for this to go in. I got myself situated in the hammock, "It's ni-"

Aimee climbed into the hammock, laying down on top of me so her head was on my chest, and her feet dangled over the end. Oh, yeah, I get the advantages of the hammock now.