Jimmy's mother was already on the phone when Jimmy woke up.

"— Uhuh... Uhuh. Yes that's perfect. Set the appointment. Yes, today please. Thank you."

"Who was that?" Jimmy asked, fumbling with the coffee maker.

Jimmy's mother didn't tend to hold grudges overnight. 'Tend' being the operative word. She still glowered at him darkly though before approaching for his morning hug.

"That was our lawyers' office." She said grimly. "You never make threats you don't keep, Jimmy. You either keep 'em, or you don't make 'em." Mom clenched her fist emphatically.

"Words to live by, Mom." Kaykes yawned and bumped into the counter. She blinked at it in disgruntled bewilderment then pulled herself up onto the stool next to Jimmy and slumped onto the counter.

"I ne—" Kaykes yawned again. "—ever make threats I don't keep."

Then she grasped Jimmy's coffee he was currently nursing and tugged it toward her.

Jimmy tugged it back. "Get your own —"

"Do you want me to help you with your girl troubles?"

Jimmy... hesitated. Then lowered his eyebrows and squinted besides. "If you don't let go of my coffee — which I made and poured into my cup — I won't let you help me with my —"

Kaykes scoffed.

"I have coffee Babe. I am more than willing to help with girl troubles. All you have to do is ask."

They both looked at their mother who was proffering her coffee mug and grinning extra sweetly.

Then they went back to glaring at each other.

"Yea. Ask Mom. Babe."

Jimmy glared back in hostility.

"Oh — Come on! Why's your mother the loose canon?!"

Jimmy won this exchange. Partly because he had the muscles of a seventeen-year-old boy, if a meager one, and his sister didn't. But also because Kaykes' need for caffeine just grew that dire, and she eventually released his coffee with a scowl.

"It's too cold now anyway." She snarked, and flounced off to the coffee maker to make her own fresh cup, while their mother folded her arms and huffed.

"Honestly, Babes, I don't see why I need to be left out in the cold. It's freezing out here! Give me some det—"

Jimmy escaped to his room, clutching both his coffee mug — it was lukewarm now — and his pride.

There was no school today either. Apparently, most states had decided that the day right after Legion aired his list on live television and turned part of downtown LA into a battle-zone signaled substantially elevated Super Human threat levels. And so the governor ordered all nonessential services to be halted pending review of their state's security infrastructure.

"And neither of you would have been returning today anyway, Babe. Not until I've had that talk with our lawyer. And the school realizes that I'm not playing around."

That too. Their mother was fierce.

Unfortunately, Jimmy would have dearly loved his sister's help right now, for all that her experience was derived from... what had she said?

'Mom... AND... All the conversations I've overheard on the topic.'

Right. And her distilled set of rules.... 'Maybe I should actually be taking Mom's offer.'

Jimmy flung himself onto his bed and, of course didn't, for multiple reason's, the simplest being that his texts to Vicky M, were all done on The Guy's phone and not Jimmy's and if ever Jimmy was going to introduce his Super persona to his parents — 'Hi Mom. Dad. I stole a phone, and now I use it for evil... and texting girls. Can you help me with....?' — Right. Not that way.

'Would have been nice though,' Jimmy thought. 'I think I'm in trouble.'

----------------------------------------

Jimmy was in trouble.

It was an... ill-defined sort of trouble, Jimmy thought, because it wasn't obvious. In fact, it looked downright innocent on the surface.

Jimmy looked at The Guys Phone For Illicit Dealings again... and paused with his thumb hovering over the text keypad.

It's just that every time Jimmy looked at the text he got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

It wasn't a giant sinking feeling. Part of him was actually pretty stoked that Vicky had started texting him back again.

But it was there. Maybe it was the fact that there had been a kind of fire to Vicky's texts previously that these recent ones lacked.

Or maybe it was that Vicky was sending only one text at a time now — and if Jimmy retraced their past texts which he had done exhaustively several times now — she average two or three in a row.

Or maybe it was simply a hereditary instinct passed through the Y chromosome and wailing to be heard.

Whatever the reason. Jimmy was getting a bad feeling about this.

[9:54 PM — (VM)] Its fine

Jimmy sucked his teeth and levered himself up on his elbows. "No." He said finally, to himself. "I don't think it's 'fine'."

And he settled in to craft his text.

'I just need to explain everything.' He thought as he typed. Then she'll understand, and it'll all be better. It'll be Wond—

----------------------------------------

"—rous!" The bearded man finished exuberantly. His eyes blazed with fervor. "Precisely. Last time. Say the words, boy, and —"

"But it's... ah." The Boy broke in. He glanced between the Bearded Man and the Woman still standing in the entryway looking expectant. "Wrong." He finished hesitantly.

"W-wrong? What do you mean wrong?" The Bearded Man snatched the parchment from The Boy's grip and stared at it dubiously as if looking for an imperfection somewhere in the gold and fiery letters. "What is wrong about it?" He asked again gruffly, with the word 'wrong' enunciated with such vitriol that it sounded like it was a curse.

The Boy shrugged. "I don't know. It just is."

----------------------------------------

[10:29 AM — (TG)] So, I'm sorry I texted that. I don't know what happened. It just came out.

[12:53 PM — (VM)] ok

[12:53 PM — (TG)] It doesn't sound ok

[12:55 PM — (VM)] It is. Whens our next date. I have 4 dates to offload

"Don't write that."

Jimmy tugged his phone out of sight and glared accusingly at his sister who had snuck up behind him. "What?" he hissed back, but his thumb was already deleting his response. "Why —"

"Hush, babes. Commercials are over." Their mother turned the volume back up with a hand gesture that looked like a rising wave, and the Azure Mirror covering much of the far wall in the living room picked up the feed just as the scene shifted from something banal involving an M&M and a football touchdown, to the now iconic imagery of downtown LA.

Schools and offices around the nation are closed right now in the aftermath of the Super Human, Legion's assault on NFR News station. Relief efforts are ongoing and emergency personnel—

"So what should I say?"

Kaykes cocked a slow eyebrow at him. "Remember the coffee this morning?"

Relief efforts are being hampered by the continued security in the area. Authorities have closed off all roadway access for a square mile around the scene of the battle and are keeping a tight lid on personnel entering and leaving.

"Oh, c'mon!"

"Mom says you never make threat's yo—"

"Shush! Either watch the news or get out! Kayla... stop torturing your brother."

— ve Elisa Snowsi bringing you live coverage from the scene of the battle.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

It was the same reporter from Enderson, Jimmy saw as he settled on the arm of the couch. And while the bags under her eyes had cleared up, the intense look in them had not. There were the flashing lights of a heavy police cordon behind her, with police drones flitting and hovering overhead, and Jimmy could see SHRPs personnel in their urban digitals and "Super Rated" weapons at elevated positions behind and around the cordon. There were more of those spider drones too. These weren't moving and looked liked they were in some form of standby mode, but Jimmy bet that someone somewhere had their thumb hovering next a little red button ready to activate them all at once. The scene... just had that feel to it.

Elisa flicked her hair back over her shoulder and her lips were thin as she spoke to the camera.

"I'm standing about as close I can get to NFR, just outside the police cordon, where just under twenty-two hours ago the Super Human Legion fought federal authorities to a standstill after taking on-site employees hostage and releasing what's being known as Legion's List, live on air.

Not much is known yet as to the veracity of Legion's list, with some authorities indicating that there is a strong possibility that all or much of it was fabricated."

"Bullsh—"

"Such Hogwas—"

"Babes!"

-less. Legion's list appears to have instigated a spreading panic in the Super Human community and at large. In only the last twenty-four hours the US has seen a concerning uptick in reported disappearances many of whom hold names on Legion's List. In most cases, the disappearances appear to be voluntary and the Federal Government is denying any involvement.

Meanwhile, on Capital Hill, calls for a third party investigation are growing.

The NFR cordon gave way to a quick flurry of video clips showing severe people in suits gesticulating in front cameramen and microphones.

"If the government is engaged in clandestine activities on US soils we the people have a right to know!"

"— ell, I think claims of an AI lock on sensitive media need thorough investigation."

"I want to know how a-an army was deployed in Los Angeles, and who gave them authority to use those weapons."

Jimmy didn't catch any of the names which flashed by except for the last one.

Andy Houser: Republican Senate Minority Leader, Chair of Super Human Affairs.

"If our government is doing even half of what that Terrorist, Legion is claiming — I firmly believe that we are not — But if we are," Senator Houser said as he exited the conference room and re-buttoned his suit. "My office will find out and — and there will be hell to pay. Law-abiding Super Humans should have nothing to fear from their government, and by the time I get to the bottom of this, they won't."

However, such calls are being drowned out by a ground swell of support for a mandatory Super Human registration program, with mounting calls for 'chipping', a term for surgically implanted tracking hardware, along with other forms of active surveillance and incarceration at the forefront of these debates.

In a letter to our editor, Democratic Presidential Nominee Kent Maccabee states — 'Humane is not the issue. We can make it humane. What is at issue is our humanization of an emergent threat profile that we can neither counter, nor antici —'

Everything else was drowned out by the clamor of Jimmy and Kaykes talking over each other.

"He just publicly dehumanized an entire —"

"—ven hiding it anymore. What happened to 'All men are created—'"

"—lienating an entire —"

Until their mother finally had enough and shouted over them. "Alright, my geniuses! What are your answers to that?!" She jabbed a finger at the Mirror, which had switched back to showing the NFR police cordon.

"What are your answers to Enderson?! You think the "humanity" of that psychopath Ren Yoshida, who their calling Ama-who-F-ing-cares would have done a damn thing for your father and me? If it had been Eastwall High instead of Enderson? When I was in college, the day's low lights were all the tragedies happening overseas, and the highlights, the soaring stock indexes, but now, all those tragedies are Super Human related, they're happening here, and Super Human Related Deaths is a tracked metric, and it looks like Tesla's stock did in 2020!"

"Well?" Their mother demanded glaring at them. "I'll wait."

Kaykes didn't care to leave their mother waiting long, going by the glint in her eye and her squared shoulders. But any retort was held up by Elisa Snowsi.

Here at NFR, the cordoned off areas were recently expanded to include the entirety of Beverly-Elm and much of the Oxnard-Cutlass area. Traffic is backed up all the way to Fifth street and Angelica, and —

Privately Jimmy was having a little bit more trouble than his sister. His hand crept into his pocket and felt at all the edges of those impossible cards, their names and contents flashing into his mind as he touched them with crystalline detail.

He poked tenderly at the gaping piece of himself that was Missing, at the Vicky thread that felt more and more tenuous by the hour and the nearly overpowering Itch that was causing his fingers to inch closer and closer to his sister's phone — it felt valuable even if her wallet wasn't — that even now he kept having to pull back. What if he slipped?

The problem, Jimmy thought as Elisa Snowsi spoke, was that Kaykes was substantially more sensitive to an individual's concerns over a population's. In that context, Jimmy thought that the notion of an individual's 'inhumanity' might be a sin.

He asked her about it privately after.

"Don't be an idiot, Jimmy." She said, eyeing him. "I care about your individuality because you're my Bro. I care about Mom's because she's Mom."

"That's a bit clannish of you, don't you think?"

Kaykes snorted. "I've got a caring budget, Jimmy. It's not anemic, but it's not large either." She waggled her hand in midair. "There's ten, maybe fifteen slots in it? And those are ordered. Also, everyone does this. You do it. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."

"I say otherwise!"

"O-oh-kay Jimmy, but let me ask you something. When Mom asked us about Enderson, were you thinking about poor Kyle Knightly who sat next to Ren Yoshida in class? Or were you wondering whether you'd be the next news story because of how much harder it's getting to keep your hands off my phone?"

Jimmy pinked and looked away.

"Mom's problem isn't that she's wrong about Super Humans, it's that she's buying into the spiel. Super Humans may be a new source of deaths, but it certainly isn't the highest." Kaykes ticked them off her fingers.

"Auto accidents are still the leading cause of deaths because the Artificial Intelligence Committee is still dragging their heels over philosophical nuance fifty years after the first viable model was developed. Suicides are increasing parabolically in time with AI's increasing presence in industry. Normal mundane homicides have remained pretty consistent with pre-Super times. Drug overdoses, cancer, assorted diseases...." Kaykes shook her head. "But you've got this one group that shows up in the last ten-ish years, and you think the reason why everyone hates them is because they make the kill, rape, pillage numbers go up?"

"Yes!"

"No! "

—cue operations are still ongoing, but thankfully, authorities are indicating that civilian casualty's appear at a minimum considering the scale of the conflict. Current counts stand at three dead, twenty-seven injured, four critically.

At this time, the government is still refusing to release names or numbers of personnel casualties, however experts are saying that these numbers are likely staggering considering video footage of the altercation.

This is Elisa Snowsi on site outside NFR, and I'll be bringing you live updates as the situation unfolds.

The scene switched to a dapper man with salt and pepper hair, sitting behind a polished desk with steepled hands.

Thank you, Elisa.

This is John Hannon with On The Nation.

This incident follows a fast-growing number of high profile cases involving Super Humans. Nearly two weeks since the Tragedy at Enderson High School perpetrated single-handedly by the Super Human, Ren Yoshida, dubbed Amaterasu by the public, and only a week since both he and Legion rampaged through Menrose County in Arizona with the combined death toll capping five-hundred and sixty-four.

Downtown Demons of Tennessee' most recently claimed credit for burglarizing the Regency Museum of Historical Art and Artifacts but are also accused of many counts of human trafficking and drug trade across eastern United States.

Less notable, but very current, Y'von York in Ionia Michigan tore apart Burk Casigne after apparently being assaulted, and then resisted arrest by law enforcement. And then there is the curious case of Rosette claiming to be a "Super Hero".

She has since leapt to national attention through her violent rescue of a large number of missing teenagers and young adults in Eastwall, and has since added to that number following a series of lightning raids, resulting in the incarceration of thirty-four additional suspected members of the Downtown Demons gang. Authorities are investigating two deaths now, in relation to Rosette's quote-unquote 'Super Hero' activities and in both cases she claims that they were Super Human. Law enforcement have so far rejected requests for comment.

The wall behind John Hannon faded into a map of the United States and Red dots appeared at the locations he mentioned.

Smaller scale Super Human crime is up three percent from the month prior, and twenty-seven percent year to date. Meanwhile, deaths attributed to Super Humans in the United States have reached an all-time high, driven by the Enderson Massacre. More than double the month prior and up fifty percent year-to —

----------------------------------------

Jimmy closeted himself in his room after that, the number five-hundred and sixty-four ringing in his ears.

That was a... large number. Maybe not on a global or even national scale. But to all be because of the same person? The same two people.

'Are you even all worth it' Jimmy thought, sending a waterfall of cards spinning into the air above him.

A world without powers would be... different. Was different not even fifteen years ago. Normal people, normal criminals. Normal shootings and bombings and stabbings....

'Five hundred....'

Door Of Self Reflection spun between Slippers of Fluff and Fury and Five Stones of Reckoning.

Rather Worn Sock danced with More Shoelaces Than I Know What To Do With and Three Sticks Of Bludgeoning, like some kind of 3d demonstration of the three-body problem and Stun Stick of Power!!! orbited them all — 'Were there more exclamation points there than there used to be?' — and did a loop-de-loop over A Little Bit Of Magic and Poorly Made Breakfast which he'd completely forgotten about.

It would still be fresh, he knew. Still steaming and oily from the pan.

Jimmy plucked the A Little Bit Of Magic from the air and studied it as it burned and hung heavy in his fingers. It was so beautiful, Jimmy thought. It was More in a way that was hard to describe with just colors and words. 'Are you even worth it?'

The card hung suspended between his two fingers and burned its wondrous blue and red-gold light, and the ever present Itch chattered hungrily in the back of his head.

The hunger felt like a dull ache in his head, and in the center of his chest now. If not ignorable, then at least manageable.

This was a lie. Jimmy knew. And, if those cards swirling above him were anything to go by, it was a quickly failing lie too.

The majority of those cards were things like lint, or a fork.

There were three hair-ties flying around in three different cards, some post-it notes and his mother's wallet which had so little nutritional content to it, it felt like he'd consumed air, and yet it still did more for him than his sister's wallet filled with its whopping grand would have.

Nothing made any sense. And nothing of any consequence floated around up there, bloating his whirling cloud of actual if meager value. His power was gobbling them up without him even realizing it. Scarfing down the equivalent of cotton candy and chewing gum.

He was starving.

No one had texted The Guy's Phone For Illicit Dealings in over a week aside from Vicky and Tim Cogburn aka Buck Higly, and both he and Kaykes agreed that he couldn't trust anyone reaching out to The Guy even if they had.

'What am I going to do?' he thought, sitting down on his bed sullenly and flicking through Vicky's text messages. 'Was this what it was like for you, Ren? Before Amaterasu? Did you sit on your bed watching magic burn at your fingertips? Did it keep you up at night? Did you hold it and keep it locked away until the power burst out of you in class?'

A Little Bit of Magic — Not Much. Just A Touch. It was beautiful.

'Or were you really just the evil fudgestick everyone's saying you are.'

And Jimmy imagined an Asian boy sitting in class who could pull black fire from his fingertips. Who set alight his entire classroom and then the school and then cut a swath through Menrose county side-by-side with a wanted murderer and Super Villain.

'Why?' he thought. 'Why did you do it, Ren? Did your powers make you? Were you starving? Would you have died? Why Menrose? Were they all just... Carrots to you?'

"I wonder what Rosette thinks of all of this," Jimmy muttered into his pillow. "I wonder if She's seeing what we are turning the world into."