They wasted a few hours in stores and cafes, but quickly found that there wasn’t enough to do nearby to keep them busy until nighttime. The two of them were sitting on a park bench when Kat was struck by an idea.
“Why didn’t we think of this already?”
Gene sat up quickly and pulled his old, grey beanie from over his eyes. “What? You could have just told me. You don’t have to punch me all the time.”
“Yeah, yeah, shut up,” She was digging through the duffel bag she had brought with her. “Think about it- we’ve got time, we’ve got our costumes, and we’ve got nothing to do.”
“Oh, I see what you’re saying.” Gene grinned. “We really should have thought of that sooner.”
They ran off to the public restrooms at the park to change fully into their costumes without being seen. After a minute, they both ran out, fully clad in their dark-colored suits and masks.
“Well, where do you think we should head first? We’ve still got like ten hours before training actually starts, so we can cover a lot of ground.” Gene asked, his bag slung over his back, covering some of the holes from the previous night.
“If we find a rooftop with a good vantage point, we can just wait there until we spot some crimes taking place. Or, preferably, about to take place.” Kat smiled as she walked with Gene to a fire escape on the side of a municipal building. They had found out that this was the easiest and safest way of getting to where they could see over a large area in a city, even if it seemed a little less glamorous than one would expect of superheroes. In fact, there were many aspects of being a superhero that didn’t seem as dazzling from the inside- not the least of which was the origin.
Many superheroes had grandiose stories behind how they got their powers, and, whether they were true or not, they were certainly interesting. Vivaman, one of the premier international heroes, gained versatile energy powers in an accident involving a super-concentrated vitamin compound at one of his company’s labs. Dynamo had been given a containment suit to concentrate her electrical abilities by a spacefaring alien adventurer. Even some low-level vigilantes that Kat and Gene knew personally had wild origin stories. Kat’s roommate at college, Maria, had been captured by deep-earth dwelling creatures and used a magical crystal that turned her to stone to escape. However, the two of them shared a story that was less than glamorous from their perspective.
Almost a year ago, they had been walking through this same part of town when an alien warlord new to Earth had begun a rampage over a misunderstanding, sending clouds of gas rolling out from his body. These mixed gases had a number of dangerous qualities, which Kat and Gene got to experience firsthand. Neither of them was paying much attention to the furious being screaming in the intersection, so it came as a complete surprise to Gene when his nervous system completely shut down, and to Kat when all of her internal organs were burned away. They later learned from the much calmer warlord that his grasp of Earth languages was shaky at best, and when he had found that no insult was intended from the barista, he felt terrible about the whole scene. He rushed everyone harmed by the gases to his flagship’s lab and repaired them with advanced technology. However, Gene and Kat’s injuries required a different approach.
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The warlord had gathered genetic information of many different now-extinct alien species throughout his travels, and had a DNA bank in his medical lab. He used this bank to introduce alien biology safely into their bodies. Gene’s nervous system was replaced with a network of self-repairing nerves that could shut off at will, blocking any pain and re-growing entire limbs in seconds. Kat’s intestines had been replaced by a single, all-purpose alien organ from a long dead species of aquatic creatures, allowing her to eat and digest any known material and convert all of what she ate into a more efficient form of energy, or anything her body needed, without wasting any part of it.
After the two of them had sat looking over the edge of the building for a couple of hours, they had stopped a few petty crimes and potential muggings, but hadn’t gotten any of the supervillain action that they had been hoping for. Gene was listening to a police scanner app with one earbud, and Kat was sitting in the middle of discarded takeout containers trying to pick up rocks and bits of metal with chopsticks. Suddenly, the sound of an explosion echoing down the street jarred them from their important work, and they both scrambled over to the side of the roof to try and see where the sound had come from.
A couple of blocks away, a smoldering hole was left in an office building, only big enough to let the fall afternoon breeze into the cubicles, although that probably wasn’t the intention of whatever caused it. As Kat and Gene watched, a missile streamed through the air, arcing up fifty feet into the air, and landing on top of several cars parked on the side of the street.
“This is exactly what we were waiting for,” Kat said, hopping over the side of the roof onto the fire escape. Gene was right behind her, and they started running down the street, taking the shortest path to the location of whatever was firing those missiles. They turned one last corner before a bright yellow streak nearly knocked them off their feet and caused their hair to stand on end. Kat stomped on the pavement for a minute. “It feels like my feet fell asleep,” She explained to Gene, “You probably can’t feel it, but I think there was a lot of electricity packed into whatever just passed us.”
She was right that Gene didn’t feel anything, but he definitely saw the light beam past them. “Electricity, huh? That was headed in the opposite direction of the missiles, so could that mean-?”
Kat gasped and ran out into the street to look. “Oh man. Oh man, it is!” She dragged Gene out so that he could see, and pointed in the direction that the electric wave went. A figure was floating, suspended by fingers of white-yellow lightning and covered by dark gray body armor, crackling with power.
“It’s really Dynamo!”