“And in Minneapolis, Super Tyler Freeze assisted fire-fighters in putting out a huge blaze that threatened the downtown area. The fire had spread over two blocks when…”

“Ty! Tyler! Tyler Kelly!” My older sister was calling me. I shut the television off and trudged up the stairs. 

“What, Sydney?”

“Mom left a note for us. She and Dad will be back late.” Sydney poked her head out of her room. “Get your homework done, okay? Then we’ll make dinner so it’ll be warm when they get back.”

“Okay.” I headed back downstairs.

“And Tyler? Don’t sit in front of the television.”

Sydney was pretty great, but sometimes she could be very bossy. I didn’t really care about the t.v. now anyways; the reporter had stopped talking about Supers. I took my schoolbooks and sat down at the kitchen table. English was hard. Sydney had been really good at it, so everyone expected me to be. But I wasn’t. Science was more my thing. I decided to save my English homework for last, when Sydney would be starting on supper.

She came down the stairs right as I finished the last of my social studies homework. Right on time. We worked on my English while she made supper: actually she made beef stroganoff out of a box. But it smelled good, and it seemed like forever till Mom and Dad would get back, so we went ahead and ate. Since Mom had gotten the job at the lab, they rarely made it back in time for normal people to eat dinner, and tonight wasn’t any different.

I thought about Supers all through dinner. I was always thinking about supers. I asked everybody I could about them. If you saw me with a book, you could bet it was a book about Supers. Other than that and comic books, I don’t like reading. 

Supers are so exciting. After the war, they had started appearing randomly across the states, usually adopting some city and settling down. According to “Supers: Where Did They Come From and Where Did They Go?”, some Supers assumed alter egos and lived a “semi-normal, assimilated life” while others “chose to remain anonymous, living in private, hidden quarters… sidekicks and servants their only connection to the outside world.”

Until they had to save someone or stop some crime. I thought about Tyler Freeze and his water control abilities. I scribbled down a note about him on my paper napkin, and stuffed it into my pocket. I had a secret stash of Super facts, that I was making on my own, and this was a new addition. “Syd? Why don’t we have a Super?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Seriously, T.J.? Again with the Supers?” Sydney sighed. “We’ve talked about this before. Ohio’s not really a ‘hotspot’ for crime. Dalton City is too calm for that kind of trouble.”

“But it’s such a big city!” We’d had this conversation a thousand times but for some reason I always expected there to be a different answer. “Maybe we do have a Super! Maybe they’re the reason our city is so peaceful.”

Sydney rolled her eyes at me as she gathered up the plates. “That’s not a super strong argument, kiddo. Almost impossible to disprove a negative. Put the rest in the oven, will you?” I put the glass dish with the leftovers in the oven as she asked and then, feeling the napkin crinkling in my pocket, I ran to the stairs.

“Tyler, you can dry the dishes tonight. Don’t worry, I’ll wash them.”

“Thanks, Syd. So nice of you.” Before she could yell anything back, I raced up the stairs and slammed my door shut. I just needed to get this new information entered. Carefully I lifted up my comforter so I could crawl underneath my bed. I dug around and finally found the electric outlet and plugged a cord in. I’d “taken care of” a half-burnt out string of Christmas lights last year and, like all of my other secrets, they ended up under my bed.

I found my dictionary of Supers under a pile of report cards at the back, and opened to a fresh page. “Tyler Freeze” I wrote at the top, then “Minneapolis” underneath, then everything else I had heard from the newscaster. I added his name and page number to the front of the book, then filled out the cross-reference information at the back. I pulled out “Supers:…” to see if I could find anything about Freeze’s power.

A water Super was pretty new to me. I had just started reading up when the stairs creaked gently. I quick unplugged the lights and wiggled out. Grabbing an old doorknob off of my nightstand, I hopped up on my bed and started fiddling with it.

“T.J.? Dishes.” Sydney cracked open the door.

“Okay, got it.”

As I dried the dishes, I thought about how little I actually knew about Supers, how little any of us knew, really. I mean, just imagine all the things that you could learn if you knew one. Dad had been obsessed with comic books as a kid, and ever since I was little we would read them together. He would do silly voices and make all the sound effects, even when I got old enough to read the dialogue. I’d do the Supers, he’d do the civilians and villains, still in silly voices. For a while I had him read Batman to me as bedtime stories, but that was how we found out that I occasionally had night terrors. There weren’t actually bats in my room. 

Whenever he took me to the park on weekends, we would play superheros and run around and rescue people in the park. Once we actually found a lost puppy and hunted all over until we found its owner. That day, I had the power to talk to animals, and Dad had clairvoyance, although at the time he just explained it to me as being able to see what people were doing. I thought it sounded like a sissy superpower and I told him so, but he just laughed.

Just think how much I could learn if we had a Super in Dalton City. I wouldn’t be a pain about it, I’d just ask them questions. Since no-one at home seemed to know, and there wasn’t a Super or sidekick around to badger, I decided it was time to go to the experts.