CHAPTER ONE: POWERLESS

The worst thing about the catacombs under Sunport City, apart from the undead, had to be the smell. Hands down. The walls were slick and green with mildew and the air was warm and not properly ventilated. The damp was terrible this close to the ocean; the air felt sticky and wet down here. The tunnels were cramped and winding and maze-like. Clearly only barely thought through.

It was almost as if the catacombs were invented in a hurry as a place to stash a bunch of brand new dead bodies that could potentially become dangerous later.

Pretty sure that’s exactly what happened.

After the cataclysm, a lot of people had to come to terms with a brand new power pretty damn fast. A lot of the ‘lucky’ new supers were immediately out of their depth, out of control, unsustainable -- they burned themselves out figuratively or very, very literally. Cities needed places to throw the subsequent bodies before they started to stink the place up. If the body count remained a statistic, a number, the people were less likely to revolt, right?

Now, thirty years plus PC -- post cataclysm -- the cities were just about starting to thrive again. It was the underground areas, the hastily dug out and propped up caverns and tunnels populated by the poor, the unlucky, or the downright dead, that needed help.

The Sunport Catacombs was one such place. My foot snagged in a tangle of root as I ran my hand across a section of particularly wet, mossy wall, and I almost stumbled but caught myself. My palms weren’t so lucky as the rest of me, smooshing into the loose dirt and coming away brown.

The others, all four of them ahead of me by a short distance and strategizing in hushed tones, turned to look at the source of the hissed curseword I let tumble out.

“It’s alright,” Sonoro muttered from under the white mask across his eyes, a contrast to his dark skin. “It’s just the whelp.”

I looked down to ascertain that the rest of me wasn’t muddy or dirty, and noted gladly that I wasn’t. My dark jeans and green hunting jacket remained embarrassingly civilian, and clean. I resisted the urge to clap my hands together to rid some of the mud from my skin. Loud sharp noises like that would only attract trouble.

“Don’t call him that,” a deceptively soft feminine voice chided him, and I looked over to its source. The woman standing a little ahead of Sonoro was squeezed into a skintight red leather suit with no visible seam or zip or buttons. A black utility belt hugged her hips, the only combat advantage she would get with powers that were purely non-combat based. A cheap black mask covered her eyes, wrapped around her blonde head tight enough to alter the silhouette of her hair. In the dim light I could see the golden waves falling around her shoulders, curling by her full breasts; the way her lips, painted red, were twisted into a look of disapproval.

“You don’t need to defend me, Elle,” I said, looking momentarily over at the other two guys in costume, looking really bored already by having to stop. I didn’t blame them -- it wasn’t exactly comfortable down here.

She forced air out from between her teeth in a sharp noise that made me look back over at her. “Zander, I know this is your first time out with us, but you can’t use our real names. It’s a real no-no on the super scene.”

I tried not to roll my eyes as I spoke again. “Sorry, Lady Luck.” It felt stupid as fuck to call her that when I’d known her most of my life, but it did make sense. If there was some kind of a villain or henchman around and they learned a hero’s name, yada yada, they could harm innocent loved ones, unpowered humans, to get to them.

I nearly thought us instead of them, but I stopped myself.

There’s nothing super about me. The only reason I was there, right then, was Elle had insisted I come along with them for the mission. And her power meant that generally no one questioned her decisions or argued against them. That was why she was the leader; because she made the best calls. To the untrained eye, she seemed like her name suggested -- the luckiest damn living creature on the face of the planet -- but there was more to her power than that. I didn’t know all the ins and outs.

I’d always known she was powered. My parents were both supers and she had once, funnily enough, been the down-on-her-luck neighbor kid. When she was granted powers my parents gave up on waiting for me to come into my own and finally get my own skillset -- as the kid of two supers it was basically guaranteed I would -- and decided to mentor her. Make sure she remembered herself and chose the hero’s route. She joined their team as the girl behind the desk, at the other end of the earpiece, and when she turned 18 they helped her form her own team. H-Bomb. She’d recruited Primer first, and there were whispers that he had just been a random guy she’d met and started fucking who had turned out to have a pretty fancy-ass power. Then Sonoro, a local super who was starting to go down the vigilante route until she convinced him to join her. Then finally there was Fissure, a real mysterious jackass with a wildcard power that was pretty much what it sounded like. She’d recruited him when he’d accidentally carved a gorge through the center of the park.

They all worked pretty great together, I had to admit, and I had been enjoying watching them fight a little tonight.

I’d been primed and trained to join when I got my powers, but they weren’t rearing up to greet me any time soon, so the others refused to acknowledge me. No big deal -- of course I wasn’t gonna join while I was still an unpowered civilian. I didn’t need them to treat me like an equal. The outright insults, though? Fuck that. They weren’t better than me.

I wasn’t really sure why Elle had bullied me into joining today.

“Are we nearly there?” Fissure asked, his Southern twang the most apparent when he was bored and irritated, which was usually. He wore his usual costume, dark brown padded armor with the faint pattern across it of cracked, thirsty earth. Since his power required him to stand still and concentrate, he needed to be able to take more of a hit.

“Don’t be a toddler, Fish,” Elle -- Lady Luck -- scolded him too. I was seeing a lot of her leadership technique here, too, and it seemed to involve a lot of telling off. I wasn’t looking forward to when it would be levelled at me in the future. If I ever got my powers, I mean. I wasn’t even sure I wanted them. Being in a team of superheroes seemed stressful as hell and filled with needless drama.

Primer made sure to catch my eye and give me a smirk just before they all turned to walk again. I was never sure what that guy’s aim was. Either he was on my side, and giving me friendly grins, or he was openly laughing at me. I really couldn’t figure out which it was. He was the traditional poster boy for superheroicism. The ash blond semi-quiff, the blue and white skintight suit designed more to show his physique than be useful for anything else, the sweeping cape that trailed behind him when he strode. And the dude never went anywhere without striding. I wasn’t sure yet whether I was supposed to be looking up to him or hating his guts.

A lot of my place within the group was going to be decided by what the hell my powers turned out to be. If I was more of a heavy hitter than Sonoro, or if I could totally turn the tables on the enemy like Primer could, or if I even had a more reliable wildcard power than Fissure’s, I would obviously earn respect way quicker than if it wasn’t that useful to them.

As it was now, I was a liability and I knew that. That’s why I didn’t want to be here.

“There’s a 90% chance he’ll be in the next chamber,” Lady Luck said, glancing down a tunnel arcing off to the right and choosing to move forward instead. “So we’ll just press on.”

As she fell behind, looking off into the distance as she tended to do when she was using that nebulous power of hers, I moved over and fell into step with her, just out of earshot of the others who had eagerly pressed ahead.

“Hey,” I said low. “What am I doing here? And what’s the plan when we find the Lich?”

The Lich was an up and coming villain. His power was insanely strong since he’d been turned close to the cataclysm, but it hadn’t torn him apart. And he’d gone underground and practised it for years. When a super like that decided to go bad, it was pretty bad. He’d sent his minions up to the surface to terrorize and flex his muscles, and that had forced the mayor’s hand. He wouldn’t have cared if he’d continued to bother people here underground.

“We are going to fight him,” she said, turning her head a little to look me up and down, bright red lips upturned in a slightly condescending, but sweet, smile. “You’re going to hang back and try to avoid his minions.”

I fucking hated his class of super -- Summoners could pull minions from an alternate dimension or plane, and Creators could pull them out of the damn thin air. I didn’t know how that shit worked, but I knew it would involve the same neural interface that Elle was staring at right now, which I couldn’t see, her eyes flicking left and right super fast as she took in information only she could access.

I’d heard plenty about how powers worked, of course, I just hadn’t experienced it.

“Why did you make me come then? Just to poke fun at the unpowered second gen?”

She shook her head, and her long blonde hair shook around her shoulders too, tracing across the tops of her breasts. I let my gaze trail down the body of the woman I had grown up with, now twenty-one years old and looking so fantastic, and then managed to snap my eyes upwards to meet hers before she noticed.

“You really wanna know?” she asked, suddenly sounding unsure.

“Well, yeah?”

“My powers, they aren’t infallible. Obviously. But if you say something as confident as ‘This event has a 95% chance of succeeding’, and it doesn’t happen? You’re gonna sound like an idiot even though you made it clear there was a 5% chance for failure.”

“Uh huh,” I said, understanding what she meant but not why she said it.

“Well, what if I had said to you that I saw, plain as day right here, that there’s a 95% chance your powers are gonna appear today? Soon?” She looked at me meaningfully and I felt my heart leap into my throat.

My reaction surprised me, actually, because I’d always told myself I didn’t give much of a shit whether I got powers or not. I had an okay job, a nice place to live -- though sure, it was with my elderly aunt at her farmhouse outside the city -- and a couple of friends I liked enough. My life was, you know, a life. I told myself I didn’t need this drama and this danger that came with getting a power.

But knowing I might get one today? Soon? My heartbeat was faster, there was a roaring in my ears … I was excited. More excited than I thought I could ever be about something like this. 95%? That’s basically a certainty, right?

“...OK, yeah, I get what you mean now,” I said, clearing my throat and rubbing my neck. “Do you, uh, think I will, then? Like, with all your experience with powers?”

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Elle let out a soft little laugh. “I know, with 100% certainty, that there’s a 95% chance. Do you know how frustrating that is? There’s no way of knowing which way something will swing. I just understand what’s likelier. So yeah, it really might happen, Z. It also might not. 5% isn’t so insignificant.”

I felt heat spread through my body and wondered for a second if that was it -- was I some kind of a flame projectile master like Fletchsinger or a pyrokinetic wizard like Sahara? But no -- it was just normal unpowered excitement making my skin tingle like that.

She sighed, and then shoved me. “See, you’re grinning like an idiot. That’s why I didn’t tell you.” I looked over at my old friend to see that, despite her words, she was smiling. In a way, I was really jealous of Elle. She not only got powers back when I would have killed for them, but she also got the mentorship and guidance of my parents. Now they were gone, permadead, and I never would have any of that after my powers came in. I didn’t harbor any anger towards her specifically, but the thought made me feel really crappy. And, yeah, looking at her reminded me of all I’d lost. We could have been closer friends than we’d ended up being, if I hadn’t struggled for so long with all that jealousy.

“So, what’s this kinda thing usually like?” I asked. “What’s the deal gonna be when we find him?”

Elle looked like she wished I hadn’t asked. “Honestly? A bunch of this is all for show. The real money in being a super is in the fandom right now. With no world-ending events coming up right around the corner, it’s all about televised events. Word of mouth. Stuff like that. It’s about the merch. Have you thought about what your alias is gonna be?”

I raised my eyebrows. “No, not until I know what my power will be,” I admitted. I had a bunch of notebooks filled with names and costume ideas from when I was a teenager, but I’d lost interest in the whole super thing around 18, when Elle had been starting up her own team and my parents had been killed.

“So don’t be surprised if a lot of the stuff with Lich is just, you know, pretty formulaic. Good guy stuff. Bad guy stuff.”

“I don’t think I would have noticed,” I said.

“I mean, who really gives a fuck anymore about right and wrong? Life is shit up there.” She pointed at the ceiling of the tunnel, referring to the actual city of Sunport, where we both lived. Where we’d grown up.

“This is way more cynical than I expected from you,” I admitted.

She shrugged. “I had to do a lot of growing up now that I run a team. The only thing that actually separates the four of us from the Lich? It’s who’s bankrolling us. For me, it’s the mayor. The taxpayers. For him? Who knows, but I don’t think he got this powerful this quickly on his own. He’s being told to make waves.”

“So … are you saying this is a trap?”

“In a way,” she said. “Don’t worry, he probably won’t kill us. We’re all just spinning our wheels, fighting and gaining more skills until something serious gets here. If someone arrives who actually wants to, you know, kill everyone? Take over the world? We’ll get right on that. This is just a pantomime until then. Everyone knows it.”

I furrowed my brow and tried to take that all in. I guess this was it; the other side. I was seeing behind the curtain at all the inner workings. No wonder I got such a bored vibe from everyone with powers. They were just all battling each other, endlessly, for no reason. Waiting for some real purpose.

With a jolt of disappointment I realized that was exactly what my current life was like already. Spinning my wheels, making money and spending it, waiting for something bigger and better to come along so I could ‘finally shine’. Elle gave me another small shove to snap me out of my introspective frowning, and I looked over at her. She was really fucking hot. Why was she caught up in something so fucking pointless?

Did I even want powers if it was just going to trap me in some kind of hamster wheel of repetition?

You won’t be like that, a voice inside me said. A voice I wasn’t sure I exactly recognized… Maybe you’ll be the one to finally shake things up around here, when you get powerful.

Lady Luck quickened her pace as I rubbed my arm right where she’d playfully pushed me, and I watched her walk away. Her body was amazing; her curves seemed to almost shift and undulate, lit by the artificial flickering candles set in the walls.

Maybe it was good we never ended up better friends. It meant I felt way less guilty about looking at her ass in that tight red leather suit. Her body was flawless, especially as her costumed alter ego. As herself, as Elle, she tended to wear loose sweats, tie up her long hair in a messy bun, train at combat styles until she was glistening with sweat, or don her reading glasses and study. The girl was a machine when it came to becoming a formidable super. She wasn’t going to let her non-combat power stop her from becoming someone you watched out for on the battlefield.

Elle didn’t wear makeup, hid her body, while Lady Luck was the opposite. She had a couple fansites online dedicated to her, and at least one of those was pretty pervy to say the least. Closeups of all known shots of her, long forum discussions about which of her costumes was the hottest. Etc. She was sexy in exactly the way most women could only ever wish they were. Those plump bright red lips were almost her trademark, and I bet there was hardly a straight guy in Sunport City who hadn’t imagined what they’d look like sliding up and down his cock.

Myself included... I hated to admit it, kind of, because I really did like being friends with her, but man -- I was only human.

As for why she had wanted me close by today, I was pretty sure it was because as a second generation I was a little more likely to get consumed by my powers. If it only affected me, you know, that sucked but at least no one else would get hurt. If it turned out to be another Angelo Verdini incident, she clearly wanted me to be near Primer so he could absorb any explosive energies before I could hurt anyone. The middle school had only just been rebuilt after Verdini levelled it.

“Minions,” Fissure warned from the front of the group. The four of them ran into the upcoming cavern, and I sighed and fell back. I needed to stay nearby just in case I needed Primer’s energy absorption, but I had to keep away from any combat so they didn’t need to worry about protecting me. It sucked being unpowered on a hero mission.

The Lich was a Creator, which meant he built his minions using materials on this plane, in this universe, instead of pulling them from a different place. The material he happened to be able to manipulate was bone. Any creature’s bone, as long as it was not attached to very much flesh -- I was unclear on his limitations -- he could mentally stick them together and send them out to do his bidding.

Creators were scary because they started out pretty weak, only able to make and control maybe one or two things, but if they worked hard to grow and improve, they could have armies at their disposal. The universe tended to have ways to balance itself out, so some types of supers with minions were only able to have a few at a time, or they could only control a couple at a time, or their material was really rare.

But sometimes you got a situation like with the Lich, where he took up residence in the catacombs and found a bunch of bone to work with from the get go, and slowly but surely built up his skill until he had a mob he could control all at once.

He’d been using it to terrorize the Subs -- the Subterraneans, people who lived underground by choice, paranoia, or circumstance -- for a couple of years to test his powers and gain skills, but now that his minions were breaching the surface to bother the cityfolk, the mayor had employed H-Bomb, Elle’s team, to take care of him.

Now in the cavern, I managed to catch a glimpse of him as the team members spread out. Down a slope, dotted with jagged stalagmites, sat an unhealthily skinny man, hunched over eating, wearing a gray ensemble, holding two sharpened bones in his hands. Surrounding him was a very small, but very real, army of skeletal constructs of varying shapes and sizes. They stood still beside their master, swaying a little.

When the Lich saw us enter, he hopped up from his seat and tossed his chicken bones across his shoulder, wiping grease from his mouth with his sleeve.

“Aha!” he cried in his best bad guy voice. “Lady Luck! Primer! I was wondering who they would send.” His grating voice echoed easily through the cavern.

I shuffled into the cavern, and picked my way across discarded and broken bones that littered the floor.

“Lich!” Lady Luck called back, her hands on her hips and her shoulders back. She really did look like a hero, in every sense of the word. Beside her towered the handsome and muscular Primer, grinning a dazzling grin. Nearby Sonoro kicked at bones and made a disgusted noise in his throat, and Fissure hopped up onto a stony ledge and kicked his feet, looking bored.

“We are here to stop you,” Primer boomed, his voice a stark contrast to the hoarse, higher tone of their enemy.

“Yes, yes,” the Lich said, and I could have sworn I saw him sigh. “Well, I’m going to stop you from stopping me. Shall we get started with the fight or would you like to hear my monologue, maybe?”

Lady looked at Primer. “Should we?”

Primer turned to glance at me, seeing that I was still creeping my way towards a ledge I could maybe pull myself up on. “Yeah, give Z a minute to get out of dodge.”

I shot him a look to determine, if I could, whether he was being shitty or genuinely concerned, but I couldn’t tell. I gripped a ledge and pulled myself up so that when the minions swarmed I’d be out of the way.

“Ready?” Lich asked, unsure.

“Mm, hang on,” Lady said, and then turned back to him, replacing her hands on her hips and then pointing straight forward. “We’re going to stop you!” she cried.

“Oh, you said that. Well, he said that,” Lich reminded her.

“Right. Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. Should I say my bit?”

“Go ahead,” Primer said with a nod. “Any last words?” he added, loud and commanding.

“Ooh. Yes. So -- for years I laid in wait, and--”

“Lay,” Lady Luck said. “You lay in wait. It’s a common mistake.”

“Isn’t that present tense?” Primer asked.

She shook her head. “No, I lie. I lay yesterday. I have laid.”

“Yeah you have,” Primer said, nudging her until she laughed.

“Jeez, guys, can we get this over with? I have a family to get back to,” Fissure groaned. Then he turned to point accusingly at Lich. “Don’t you think about using that against me, man.”

Lich raised his hands defensively. “Wasn’t gonna. Should I continue?”

“I don’t think we really have time, if you don’t mind,” Lady said. “Let’s get this started so we can all go home.”

I frowned, looking at all of them. This wasn’t … exactly what I had been expecting. It was just like Elle had said. Now I really believed her.

The citizens, superheroes and supervillains of Sunport City really, really needed someone new added to the mix. To shake things up. To remind everyone what life should be like. They had superpowers, for the love of crap. When had this become like a boring desk job to all these people?

I watched as Lady Luck pulled up her interface, invisible to me, and used it to bark orders at the others. “Primer, thirty feet to your three o’clock! Sonoro, on my count. Fissure, you ready?”

Sonoro sped forward, jumped into the air, and then made a motion as if to scream at the ground. The air rippled and he was shot into the air. Supersonic … sonar … something or other. He could weaponize blasts of sound. Luckily, he was decent enough to make most of the blasts too high-pitched for the rest of us to hear and get distracted by.

At Lady’s orders, Sonoro screamed a ripple of pure sound energy in Primer’s direction as they launched towards the army of minions. Primer turned, caught the energy of the blast in his hands, and crunched it into a little ball, which he then turned and threw at the army. The Lich screamed, and at least a dozen of his minions exploded in a shower of bone. He definitely seemed to have no secondary powers, or anything. He was really just depending on his army to beat back the entirety of this team of heroes. He had no chance, right?

Well, from behind him, two enormous bone minions lurched from the shadows, and Lich’s cackles of glee echoed all around us. They were at least ten feet tall and wide, with swinging arms of thick bone, sharpened bone at their elbows and knees and claws. Their empty eye sockets glowed with power, and Lady took a step back and gasped.

“Sonoro, give ‘em hell!” she shouted. “Start with the smaller ones. Primer, can you absorb the big ones’ hits?”

“A couple,” Primer said, and she nodded to confirm it.

“Two, read. 78% chance for you to remain unharmed and destroy them with that energy.” She clapped her hands. “Fissure, I need you, buddy. If you attack in fourteen seconds you have an 80% chance for a grade 9 hit.”

Wildcard supers like Fissure could use their powers whenever they wanted, but if they got a grade 1 hit, at random, it was colloquially referred to as a critical fail. It’d backfire on them and cause pain, or worse. A grade 9 was the hardest they were able to hit. Usually they never knew how their power would act. That was why Elle and Fissure on the same team suddenly became pretty lethal, I realized.

He nodded once and leapt off the ledge, ran forward, counting down loud so everyone on his team knew what was coming. I craned my neck to follow the action, catching myself before I slipped off my tall ledge.

I began to feel a small tingle at the base of my skull, and then all the way down my spine, and my breath caught in my throat momentarily.

Without a doubt I knew, this was it. My powers...

It was happening.

And just then, Fissure launched his power, driving a foot-wide crack through the earth that grew until many minions fell through.

“Shit,” Lady Luck screamed suddenly. “99% chance that--” She wheeled around. “Z, run!”

“Wha--?” I just about managed to get out before the crack split into branches, one reaching me on the ledge, and the ground gave way underneath me. I started to fall before I even noticed, through the ground, far, far beneath the surface, and into the dark depths of the lower catacombs.