You know, you wake up some mornings, and you think to yourself, ‘don’t do it Nicholas. Don’t get out of bed. You’ve got paid sick time, you just bought that new console, and you have a headache - maybe you’re even sick!’.
And you know, in those scant few minutes between when your alarm goes off and you need to physically leave your home to get to work on time, you think about it. You really, really, do.
Now, for me, it always goes something like this. Sure, I have paid sick time - but what if I actually get sick? I bought the new UltraBox 4, but it’s so new there aren’t even any games for it. And the headache? The headache could be illness, sure - but it could also be the lingering pain of going to sleep at 3am and waking up at 7am to go to work.
Then I get up like a good little drone, and get ready for the day.
Some days I spent longer thinking about it than others. You know, I really debated the point with myself. In those cases, I still end up going to work - I just have to give up on other things in order to be on time. At that point, it’s all about deciding if I want to skip showering - giving myself enough time to eat and therefore avoiding stomach pain all morning, or skip eating - allowing me to stand within ten feet of my coworkers without getting funny looks.
It probably says a lot about my character that I’ll get up for work on time purely to avoid giving up either of those two things - rather than because I like my job, or enjoy being able to afford paying my rent.
Today however, I really, really, wished I had called in sick.
“Alright! I know there are at least seven of you in here still! Come on, the sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can all go home!” A cheerful - if tired - voice called from deeper into the building I was in, accompanied by an eerie chorus of different voices saying the same thing slightly out of sync with the original.
“Nick what do we do?” My coworker Pamela - a middle aged woman who always managed to smell like alcohol swabs at twenty paces - hissed at me under her breath, trying as hard as possible to remain inaudible to anyone outside the break room - in which we were all hiding.
All seven of us. All seven of the people the supervillain raiding the store was currently trying to locate.
I carefully allowed the door I was holding open to shut - making sure to put the extra bit of effort into ensuring there was no clicking sound as the door touched the frame - before responding.
“Do you think you can fit through the window?” I asked in a panic. It should be noted that I am not courageous. I had never been in a fight in my life, and never planned on getting into one after this either. Thus, while I was of clear enough mind to contemplate escape, I was not calm enough to be able to say I was in any position to be making decisions.
“The windows don’t open, they’re part of the wall!” Pamela sniped back at me in a mix of anger and dismay. I glanced past the other five people in the room with me at said window, and winced.
I worked in a combination warehouse and superstore. Think Walmart, or Costco, and you’re on the right track. The building was easily the size of a small mall in and of itself, and was made a maze by the sheer number of racks holding all kinds of products throughout. The employee break room - which was at the front of the building - had a large window built into one of the walls. The glass was thick and durable, having obviously been made as hard to break as possible to prevent anyone from trying to get into the building through them. And while that was great from a loss prevention perspective, it kind of sucked for us at this exact moment. The durability of the glass, and the lack of any tool to make breaking it more easy, meant we were almost guaranteed to be heard trying to break it - which would bring the costumed nutjob outside down on us like a ton of bricks.
So back to square one.
Once again, I had to desperately curse the people who designed the place. There was an emergency exit available to everyone here - of course there was - but that exit was just far enough away that to get to it, we would all have to sprint out of the break room, past the bathrooms and the self checkout, and through an open area of the store where we were sure to be spotted. Based on how far the villain sounded like he was, that should have been easy.
Unfortunately, nothing about this situation was easy. The villain in the building with us was one of the old ‘classic’ villains. The type of bad guy who had been around long enough that he had become a part of the landscape here in the city. That meant he was both extremely powerful - and extremely dangerous. Honestly, I think it said enough that there were somehow groupies into the guy who would rush to get involved in half his crimes.
Adrenaline was what the cape geeks liked to describe as a Minion Master. His power let him produce a bunch of, well - minions. On their own, the leech-like creatures he spawned were basically helpless. However, when they latched on to a person they took complete control of that person's body, making them an extension of the villain himself.
Adrenaline was a fairly stalwart member of Toronto’s rogues gallery, having been around since the early two thousands. He, like most villains, suffered from power derangement syndrome, and as a result had a tendency to fade into everyone's collective memory just long enough for it to be a surprise when he popped back up again, doing whatever insane thing his psychosis was pushing him to do at the time.
Like right now. I had no idea what he was doing in the store, but I doubted he was here to steal money - there just wasn’t enough of it here to be worth it when he easily had the power to knock over a bank or something.
“Fuck. Okay. Fuck. Oookay. Let’s just… we have to run for the emergency exit.” I whispered, not turning to Pamela as I spoke because I was busy trying to see if anyone was coming through the tiny crack between the door frame and the door itself.
“No. We stay here until the Ultra’s get here.” A new voice spoke out, strong, commanding, and firm. Inwardly I groaned as I looked over my shoulder at my Manager, who had been in the break room with us when this entire nightmare had started.
He hadn’t been on break at the time, I should like to note. He was on the clock and supposed to be working. He just hadn’t been, which just goes to show you what kind of dick Mario was.
And yes, he was legitimately a short, chubby, Italian man named Mario. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. At least he didn’t work in the plumbing department.
“Sir!” I bit out, restraining my irritation through sheer force of will. “Adrenaline isn’t stupid - they’ve never caught him. He always starts a bunch of little problems on the opposite side of town whenever he’s going to do something. The local Ultra team is probably busy with-” I tried to explain.
“Nicholas, I understand that you want to do something - but reading about Metahumans on the internet doesn’t make you an expert on crisis response. Company policy is to shelter in place during Meta attacks. If we can bar the door we should be okay.” Mario said smoothly, cutting me off and instantly calming everyone in the room with me - even Pam, who nervously shifted several steps towards the manager while he was speaking.
Okay yeah, so I read about Meta's a lot. So what? Was I supposed to not take an interest in the Superheros? I was more confused by the people who could exist in the same area code as people like Adrenaline and not read about them. I might not be an expert but I knew more than Mario which was pretty important right now, because it meant I knew that not only did the people Adrenaline used his powers on get mind controlled - they also got super strength, which meant barring the door would be absolutely useless if they found us.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
As if to emphasize this point on my behalf, there was a loud crunching sound nearby, and I found myself pelted by bits of the concrete wall as a hand punched through the brickwork immediately to my left - where a wall separated the rear of the family bathroom from the break room.
“Fuck!” I screamed, scrambling backwards and nearly bowling Pam over in the narrow passage from the door into the break room proper. The hand - which had produced a sizable hole in the wall despite being directly next to the door - withdrew, and a single bloodshot eye peered through it at all of us.
“One, two, three, four- damn all of you are in here?!” A woman's voice called out in amazement.
“Shit, shit, shit-” I hissed, rolling off Pam with a grunt and rushing to the back of the room as fast as possible. There wasn’t actually an exit there, but I wasn’t the only one rushing away from the door. Maybe it was stupid, maybe it was some nascent survival instinct kicking in, but pretty much all of us were headed in that direction by the time Adrenaline’s voice had finished spilling out of the minion by the door.
I’d like to say I had a plan, or that I dredged up the courage to fight back or… something. Go out making a last stand, maybe. But that’s the thing about being powerless. Sometimes there really is just nothing you can do. Sometimes, you find yourself squeezing into a corner between several other people, while all of you desperately push and shove at each other in a desperate effort to make sure that you aren’t on the outside of the huddle, while a septuagenarian woman with a fist sized, pulsating red, leech sitting on her forehead power walks at you.
Sadly, as absurd as this scenario was, it wasn’t nearly as rare as anyone would really like. Metahumans had existed since the second world war, and the number of them out there had been steadily increasing ever since the first one popped up. I could wax poetic about the march of progress and the rise of caped crusaders and all that, but the truth was a lot simpler than that.
Some people had super powers, and those people tended to go insane and start treating normal people like me like… I dunno un-people is the best way to describe it. The difference between myself and a vending machine to guys like Adrenaline, was that I could run away if he wanted to hit me - and that was about it.
“Listen, I get that you’re scared but- hey, you! Dickhead in the back there! I saw that!” the old woman in front of us snapped at me, pointing a finger straight at me past the other six people in the room with me.
This, of course, instantly caused me to freeze in place with my elbow - which I had just used to crack my manager across the back of his head - still raised.
I felt momentarily ashamed for being called out, then indignant over it, given that literally all of us had been jockeying for position as far away from the minion as possible. Intellectually, I knew there was no point in trying to escape. There were probably dozens of similar minions already filling the superstore, and since this one had found us, all the rest would now know where we were and be on the way. But logic and blinding, animalistic, terror, rarely had much to do with each other.
Ironically, said animalistic terror was the only reason I was able to respond to what happened next the way that I did.
“Yeah, you. Hold still for a second would ya?” Adrenaline said with an unenthused smile as the woman he was piloting quickly lifted and flicked her hand in my direction.
Now, everyone knows what it means to flinch. Something surprises you, and you instinctively shrink and try to move away from it all at once. Usually in a comical, useless, flailing fashion. But sometimes, sometimes, you move just right, and by sheer bloody luck, the motions of your flinch turn out to have actually done something.
This was the case now, as I instinctively tried to swatted the object that had just been thrown at me away from my face, where it had been aimed. My upraised arm whipped out in an unconscious warding gesture that just happened to punch the leech that had been thrown at me out of the air, causing it to splatter against a nearby locker.
It was at this exact moment, with everyone’s eyes drawn towards the popped leech I had just struck, that I experienced a phenomenon known the world over as ‘The Glow’. It was a phenomenon that Meta’s experienced occasionally, typically when they first activated their Meta Gene. No one knew why it happened, despite years of study - but the going theory was that it was some kind of exothermic reaction caused by the sudden change from normal to super.
I could feel myself get stronger, my muscles tightening and moving around to that weird ‘ideal body’ every Meta seemed to have. My vision - usually requiring glasses for correction - went blurry, and I just felt… better. In every possible way - I felt better.
Now, for obvious reasons, you would probably assume that I would be ecstatic. I mean, here I was, in a dangerous situation, desperately doing everything I could to survive, and boom.
Superpowers.
I couldn’t really divert any of my attention towards the phenomenon though. I was busy staring. What was I staring at? Well…
You have earned 1 Experience Point from killing Psi-Leech!
Congratulations, you are now Level One!
Progress to the next level: 0 / 1000 Experience Points.
Please select a class to place your level in:
It was a blue square emblazoned with white text - telling me I had earned a point of experience. Then another telling me I was level one. Then yet another telling me to choose my class, after which was a long… long list of fantasy-esque sounding classes like ‘Fighter’ and ‘Wizard’.
As much as I normally would have taken to this like a fish to water - because even a neanderthal, I felt, could figure out what was going on - I was also in the middle of a very, very, dangerous situation. So all I was consciously thinking at that exact moment was ‘shit, I can’t see past these stupid windows.’
Which, ofcourse, had the immediate effect of closing all of them.
Which was good.
It meant I saw the old lady's fist heading towards my face, just before it impacted against my head - and knocked me out cold.
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