The girl on the book cover had undercut blonde hair, a chipped tooth, and green eyes; she couldn’t have been over thirteen, in her tank top and baggy shorts, and she looked happy. No, not happy. She looked innocent. It wasn’t the same picture as the cardboard figure at the store, but it was the same girl. The frog-catching girl.
I cracked the cover, opened to page one, and started reading. But the first part wasn’t Golden Goose at all. Instead, I was greeted by a picture of a toddler with a shock of dark hair and a blue toy train in his hand. He smiled at the camera, just like Golden Goose did on the cover. Below the picture, the first sentence of the diary started, but that wasn’t Golden Goose either.
You. Supers. Powereds. Whatever you call yourselves,
You all think you’re so powerful. So untouchable. That your alien overlords are so advanced that there’s no point in resisting. If they’re so advanced, then why is my son Petro dead?
He liked trains. He wanted to be an engineer or a conductor, just like his dad here in Tokyexico and his grandfather back in the old country, before the fucking aliens shuffled us all up. He was three years old. He’ll always be three years old in my head. He and my beautiful wife, Sarina, had a whole life ahead of them. There’s a picture of her, too, in case they publish this with the rest of the journal.
The aliens said it was painless, but I’m not so sure. How can it be painless when it’s all I’ve felt for months? I never found his favorite engine. Their deaths didn’t mean anything, either. The next day, everyone went to work, just like they always fucking did. I got two weeks off. That’s all their deaths meant to anyone but me. I got a payout. A couple million dollars. And the aliens called it good. But I’ve paid the price for their deaths every day for the last seven months, and money won’t change that.
Now, Golden Goose is dead. That was supposed to be the end of it. My revenge was supposed to be complete. But after I killed Golden Goose, I found this diary.
And now I have something much more violent in mind for you so-called heroes and villains. Because as much as I hate you—and I fucking hate you—I hate the system that killed them more.
You all know the trap you’re in. You all see its flaws, its weaknesses. How it abuses people and spits them out. But you all think it’s someone else’s problem. I’m talking to you too, ‘Extras.’ You don’t care if Tapdance wipes out a city. It’s not your city, after all. And if Stella Lunar blows up someone’s Thanksgiving dinner and Grandma gets hurt? That’s the cost of having supers. That’s the cost of Launch Day. That’s life.
No more.
It's time you all find out who's behind the mask. How close you all are to a super snapping on any given day.
Jasmine Saxton would have wanted this. Petro and Sarina would have, too. My son and wife were worth more than a couple million dollars. I'll never forgive the aliens for that. And now, thanks to their deaths, the whole mess those bastards have created is about to be exposed.
Enjoy your read. And supers?
Fuck you,
The Extras you’ve killed
Had the cops known about this? Toll Publishing had to have told them and shared the letter with them, right? It could just be another case of the police not revealing their evidence. And what horrific evidence it was.
I’d watched that Episode. I couldn’t prove it, but last spring, during my stake-out, I’d watched Golden Goose pick something up on my phone. It had to be the train. That meant I’d watched someone’s family die.
If I’d been smart, I would have stopped reading right there. It would have been easier to wait for Bee because we both knew that whatever was inside the rest of the book wouldn’t be an easy read. But I couldn’t stop. I turned the page and now finally started reading Golden Goose’s words. Maybe she’d have an explanation, but right now, I felt the unnamed man’s anger pulsing through me.
My name is Jasmine Saxton. I am twenty-nine years old, and I’ve been Golden Goose since I was thirteen.
And recently, I’ve been staring at a little blue train engine. It’s not much of anything, but I can’t stop looking. Snowball doesn’t know. If they knew, they’d take it away.
I’ve got a penthouse suite in Yorkston. The wall’s covered in framed newspaper articles about all the great things Golden Goose has done. The people she’s saved from villains. The villains she’s put away. And until two months ago, that was me.
But I don’t want it to be anymore.
So, I’m going to write in this journal whenever I can. It’ll be my little secret, because if Snowball doesn’t want me to have a train from a little boy in Tokyexico, they won’t want me to keep this journal, either. And when I’ve written down everything, I’ll take it and get it published. Why? Because there are a thousand little girls across North America who wish they could be me, or Stella Lunar, or any of the other superheroines, and they need to know what it’s like.
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It’s not all fun and games.
It’s not fun and games at all.
I laughed. She was right about that. Did I love what I did? Absolutely. But did it suck watching The Agent slip through your fingers despite your best preparations, leaving you with a destroyed factory and a thousand angry Extras who all wanted to know where they’d live and work now? Yeah, it did.
I hadn’t killed anyone yet, either, and certainly not a kid. Dealing with that would be brutal. Dealing with as many kills as she had? Impossible.
I was fourteen years old the first time I wore the earpiece.
It was Snowball’s idea. They knew all the hero things to say, and I didn’t. I’d always wanted to be a star, and I had no idea what to say. Not a good combination. Snowball kept getting more and more angry with me. I remember that really well because they’d say, “Saxton, you have the power set to be the best, but you’re the most tongue-tied hero in North America. And then, one day, they came up with the earpiece as a solution.
And it was perfect.
I didn’t have to think about what to say or do anymore. I just had to follow orders. To do what Snowball told me through the earpiece, and to say what they wanted me to say.
It wasn’t until I’d killed my first Extra that I realized the earpiece was a trap, and by then, I couldn’t stop.
The covers were up around me, even though sweat covered me. I reached for a glass of water, but it was empty. How long had I been reading? A while. Yeah, a while. But Bianca wasn’t home yet, and she wouldn’t be for most of the evening. She’d said not to wait up for her or to worry, and that she might crash at the other girls’ place off-campus if she had too much to drink.
I was cool with it—more time to read this. Rocko had never been that horrible. Sure, they’d been annoying, but not beyond what any employer would be with a deadline approaching that’d make or break their business.
Right?
By the time I hit the Major Leagues at fifteen, Jasmine Saxton didn’t exist anymore. I was Golden Goose, whether the mask was on or not.
I’d see my parents a couple of times a year, and I’d send them part of my paycheck. It kept them out of debt, but didn’t move them into a new house or any of the dreams I’d had for them. “Just a little more,” Snowball would say, “Just a little more, and we’ll get that mansion for them.”
I’d nod, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen. And when I went to see them, I went as Golden Goose, not Jasmine.
It wasn’t until I picked up that god damned train engine that Jasmine resurfaced, and she was a scared fifteen-year-old girl in a twenty-nine-year-old superhero’s body.
The hours ticked by. One. Two. Three. I wasn’t usually a big reader. I’d been bouncing off textbooks my whole school career, and reading for fun just wasn’t something I had time for. But even though I wanted to sleep, I couldn’t pull myself away from it. Before I knew it, I was on the last page, shaking as I sobbed under the blanket, with my cell phone lighting the last paragraph in The Diary of Golden Goose.
I can’t write down all the things I’ve had to do. All the people I’ve hurt. It’d be too much. All I can do is write this and hope it keeps some little girl out of Snowball’s hands. Or the others. Because it’s too late for Jasmine, but maybe not for Rebecca.
Golden Goose
Jasmine Saxton
----------------------------------------
I stood on my rooftop balcony, the cold night wind whipping through my hair and blowing tears across my face. The diary sat on my bed, open to the last page. I couldn’t move—my muscles shook too much. I could hardly breathe. My throat felt like it was as narrow as a coffee straw. All I could do was stare off into the night. Golden Goose had always been a monster. A legendary hero, yes, but someone I’d have paid every dollar I’d had to never see up close again. And when she’d died, that had thrown the entire Power War into chaos. I’d thought that was bad.
The man who’d killed her was right. This would be worse.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Rocko, though. Had they been playing the same game with me? There hadn’t been an earpiece, but had there been something else? Was I expendable, just another movie star to chew up and spit out when my show stopped being popular?
I refused to believe it. But I couldn’t deny it, either. And those thoughts wouldn’t reconcile in my head.
Then, suddenly, something snapped. I couldn’t do this anymore. Something had to give. Something had to break. And I only had one option.
I raced down to my closet and tore into it, clothes flying every which way. The book had released today. If Rocko was fucking with my head, I’d know tomorrow for sure, when they clamped down on Fursona and me. And if they were fucking with my head, tonight might be my only night to think about this before The Agent or Theseus or Lord Destructo did something, and I was right back in the Power Wars meat grinder without any time to stop and think clearly—just like last semester, but worse.
So, this snap that was happening? I couldn’t put it off. Not for another minute. I had to destroy something. Or at least make a plan to. Then maybe I could think straight again.
I pulled off my pajamas and stepped into my mom’s supervillain costume. What I was about to do couldn’t be traced back to me, and that meant only one option—if it even worked. I’d never tried making a Costume of my own without Pataki’s help. But then again, this was a complete Costume. It’d work. It had to.
The tight outfit’s yellow-and-green colors looked strange on me, and sparks wove across it as I zipped it up and velcroed it shut. I peered smugly from behind the domino mask, and this time, with Tails looking at me worriedly, I said, “Transform.”
Truthfully, I didn’t think it would work. I hoped, but I didn’t believe. But the sparks started arcing farther and farther away, a storm built around me, and when it finished, someone who looked kind of like Madame Shockwave stood in front of my mirror, staring back at me. Tails hid under the bed as I whispered, “Time to make some waves.”
Tails looked at me, a lightning pattern to her fur, and shook her head sadly. “Time for a full villainous breakdown?”
No. It wasn’t one of those. I had to do something about this, though. I was a superhero, and I couldn’t let what had happened to Golden Goose—and Mom, and all of us—slide. But I wasn’t breaking down, either. I needed a plan. Even though the snap was happening, I couldn’t just push.
“Not yet. But soon.”
[Costume - Dark Girl Shock and Awe]
[HP X/X]
[Styles and Skills]
►Archetype Skill - Transformation Sequence
►Badass
►Blitz 3
►Cunning
►Live Wire Limit Break 3
►Drama
►Shock and Awww 3
►Flamboyance
►Signature Skill - Adaptive Armoire 1
►Stored Costumes: (None)
►Wallshocker 3
►Grit
►Grounding 3