To be fair, the loss of my armor… hurt. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it did its job, but good Kevlar and ballistic nylon were NOT cheap. The stuff had cost me nearly two grand, plus the time I’d spent modifying it to look the part of ‘Firetrap’, but I wasn’t made out of money.
And it wasn’t like I could send a bill to Glacier Girl for her screw-up. And it HAD been a screwup. She’d let fly some kind of combination power that created an exploding ball of ice, probably a modification of her primary and secondary power, and it had flown the wrong way when I dodged it… right towards a cluster of civilian press and bystanders with camera phones.
If I hadn’t dissolved it, who knows how many days or weeks of energy would be needed to reset it? I’d hoped to stash my armor during my getaway, for later retrieval, but she’d done a real job on it. It had been totally trashed, but at least that was better than ME getting totally trashed. I mean, I might have been able to reset myself, or I might have died… but the energy debt would have put me out of action for weeks or even months if I lived through it.
Hell, even if I COULD bill her for the damage without it coming around and biting me on the ass, that would have been pointless. I’d seen her costume… it looked barely better than homemade, and she’d probably mortgaged herself to a publicist just to pay my fee, or maybe even scraped it up on her own.
Of course, she was gorgeous. EVERY alpha was gorgeous if they didn’t go out of their way to look terrifying. She was also a solid class three or maybe even a class four with her power interactions, and I had given her a very solid performance. I was a professional and liked to think all of my performances were solid, and she’d offered nicely pithy banter with enough fire and ice-based puns to make her a solid media asset to whatever team she would likely wind up with.
Ice summoning and a nice, strong kinetic gift of some kind, either elemental manipulation or projection shielding. That meant decent defenses and better-than-average offense, paired with silvery-blonde hair to her waist, an hourglass body more Marilyn than an acrobat, high cheekbones, and almost oversized eyes and elfin chin that would cement her in fanboy spank banks for at least a week.
Sort of a teenaged Taylor Swift look that meshed perfectly with her powerset to create a ‘warm ice queen’ presence that could easily catapult her to some notice with her gifts. I had to rely on costuming to get the ‘villain of the week’ look right, but Glacier Girl was a walking theme that only required a white or blue domino mask and a matching leotard to perfectly fit her persona. To be fair, I probably would have chosen the clashing paradigms approach since it was almost TOO classically thematic a persona to ever get her noticed, but I wasn't an agent.
I had to admit, I was a little envious, but in the end, I was a speed bump, a launchpad that got paid to give other alphas the boost they needed. Despite my power’s versatility, I’d never be able to tap into the ether… which meant that I’d never have the sheer power necessary to be a celebrity.
Other alphas could recharge themselves from the ether quickly. I wasn’t a genius, but I’d been able to cobble up a ‘battery detector’ from an old quantum displacement meter that I kept in my flat. Over the last two years, careful exercise, frequent power debt, and diet had increased my energy storage potential, and I had just arbitrarily decided when I started that I had one hundred ‘points’ to play with, which had increased to nearly two hundred and sixty by this point.
But other alphas, even starting alphas, seemed to have storage potentials in the thousands, and could get it back easily and quickly through resting and their ether connection. One energy ‘point’ was about the equivalent of a single blatant effect, like speeding up the molecular vibration of air to create a ‘heat blast’ capable of putting a minor scorch mark on something, or a minor reset like a small wound, and healing myself after Glacier Girl’s misplaced ice explosion had cost me a solid forty points, which probably left my ‘energy balance’ at something like fifteen points.
And there was only one way for me to refill my balance. That was eating, exercising, and rest, and I ate a LOT. On a good day, I could recover a solid fifteen points with enough food and rest, or twenty-two if I got in a good workout without using my power, but if I had tried to reset my armor, well, that probably would have cost me hundreds of points, putting me into energy debt.
Energy debt sucked. It meant I had overextended. Of course, a little energy debt was inevitable since that was the only way I could expand my ‘bank’, but a serious energy debt could leave me zombielike, looking and feeling sick and wan, for days or even weeks until I managed to get back into a positive balance again.
That’s another reason I couldn’t just make myself rich. Creating something like gold, even starting from something like lead, would cost me hundreds of points between the actual conversion and absorbing the neutron fallout. Electrons were easy enough to push around, they almost seemed to want to leave their orbits and shift their charge, but neutrons were very unfriendly and difficult to pry out of their matrix, and protons wanted to kick your ass if you dared disturb them. Or, at least that was the mental impression I got from using my power.
Free molecules, like air and water, were easy to push around. Creating a wall of air to ‘simulate’ some kind of kinetic ability wasn’t particularly difficult, although lifting the tightly bound molecules of something as small as a penny was a hell of a lot harder. Heating it up, electrifying it, freezing it, or even releasing the molecular bonds to turn a penny into copper dust barely took a point of energy, but simultaneously and in concert pushing every single molecule in that penny to actually move it was a nightmare that could take hundreds of energy points.
No, I don’t know why it worked that way, it just did. I wasn’t a quantum physicist, I just assumed that state changes were easier than telekinesis, and for me, they were. If I robbed a bank, which I had done twice in order to set up a scene, ripping an old vault door off of its hinges was absolutely impossible, but melting the entire door into a pile of dust or a pool of bubbling alloy was as easy as pie if a bit energy expensive. Ironic, I know, since ‘super body’ was one of the most common enhancements. It was a weakness in my performance, I couldn’t play the ‘super strong villain’, which unfortunately affected my earning potential.
My small studio apartment cost me over a thousand dollars a month. When I’d moved in, it had only been six hundred a month, a student special that was reasonably affordable for a single occupant without roommates, or a couple just starting out. Last year, though, a new management company had bought it up, painted all the ceilings black, added a neon lip to the pool, and started re-marketing the apartments as edgy because there were two mid-scale bars and a student club within walking distance.
And, of course, edgy doubled the rent. If I could have afforded to move, I would have, since I had about as much attraction to edginess as I did to bulimia, but the same company had bought a bunch of the local apartment complexes and done similar ‘flip theming’ to them, and I still wanted to stay within jogging distance of the school. I had my choice between overpriced theme parks, only this time I’d need a roommate.
A roommate would be a bad thing considering my side gig. Hell, I couldn’t even risk a girlfriend or hook-up culture. All I needed was a nosy neighbor or date barging in while I was trying to recover from a beating, or wondering why I was walking around like a drugged-out zombie when I went into energy debt. I wasn’t necessarily an introvert, but like Bruce Wayne, my lifestyle demanded I act like one, only without the faithful butler or limitless trust fund.
Between my ridiculous food bills and my rent, as well as scraping up enough cash to afford my next semester, I might have to get a new gig at half power, and resurrect my old ‘junkyard armor’ I’d built out of stainless steel scrap when I first started out. All because some hot girl, who might even be a student right here, mistimed her ultimate combo breaker.
I sighed and threw myself onto my futon once I got back to my apartment and threw some frozen hamburgers into the air fryer to cook. No, I didn’t use a microwave. I knew exactly what a microwave actually 'did' to food, I didn’t want to blow off a power point to fix it, and the air fryer cooked food just as well at a fraction of the cost of using a range or oven.
I needed the protein and carbs from a half-dozen burgers to start recharging, and frozen patties, lettuce, tomatoes, and a loaf of bread were a fraction of the cost of buying burgers from a fast food joint, and much better for me, anyway. I was no chef, but wrecking food with a front-loading air fryer was actually difficult. Another reason not to get a roommate, since they would question why I needed two refrigerators and a chest freezer in a fifth-floor walkup since I wasn’t a hunter.
Like I told the cop, messing with electrical frameworks, even stuff like short-range digital wireless, was easy and took almost no energy. I was no cyberkinetic, but using my powers to simulate a wireless keyboard or mouse was pretty much a no-brainer, as I brought up my laptop from across the room. The Vilnet app was, to be honest, illegal, but it was the sort of illegal that no one ever prosecuted. Absolute anonymity, but it was hefty enough that my decade-old tablet just couldn’t handle it, so I had to keep it on my slightly newer school laptop to check my stuff. I also checked my quantum displacement meter.
Yup. Eighteen points. Ugh. I could only regain about ten points a day, even if I stuffed myself, so I was looking at over a week before I could even take a ‘Technotron’ gig, one of my old standby supervillain identities that looked fine in even repurposed junk armor. He was a fake technopath, which was easy enough to simulate as long as I was someplace with a lot of semi-functional mechanical and electronic garbage, and I could muscle together some scrappy drones as minions easily enough. They wouldn’t be very useful, but throw on a few whirring saw-blades and maybe a welder or two and they could trundle around stupidly and be intimidating enough for a hero to wreck convincingly.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Glacier Girl, though, had left me a five-star plus review, which made me grin. Apparently, she had REALLY appreciated my performance, and probably appreciated me saving her from a costly and potentially career-wrecking mistake that might have even gotten people killed. Not that she, or the publicist she might be using, actually mentioned her superhero ID, not on Vilnet. Heroes didn’t touch Vilnet, at least not in a way anyone could ever trace.
Still, that brought my overall rating to four point five. That was phenomenal as a villain-for-hire because there was always some douchebag hero that thought he or she was hiring a supervillain to take a fall and go to prison to boost their apprehension rating rather than paying for a publicity stunt.
As if 'anyone' with flashy powers would willingly accept a criminal record and jail time for less than twenty grand. My first one-star rating had come from a male hero who’d done his best to kill me since he thought he was buying a fall guy and got all steamed when I refused to lie down and let him arrest me.
He hadn’t been very bright, smashing and causing massive destruction to get to ‘Technotron’ rather than cleverly foiling my plot to turn the mayor’s mansion into the set from ‘Maximum Overdrive’ unless my price was met. He kinda wrecked the mayor’s mansion as well as several pieces of artwork that the London Museum got VERY upset about.
Not that my machines could have actually hurt anyone. Sure they looked scary, but a toaster with little robotic arms was still made out of a crappy toaster that even a toddler could have disassembled safely, as long as they unplugged it first.
My ‘price’ had been ONE MILLION DOLLARS in a conscious nod to Doctor Evil, but Hot Shot’s flaming entrance and subsequent spree of destruction had wound up costing the mayor and the city almost eighty-eight million in property damage, and when he realized that I was really escaping, he decided to turn the ‘unrepentant supervillain’ into a charcoal briquette.
That had been near the beginning of my illustrious career, almost eleven months ago, and I had learned a lot since then. First off, I had been flirting with the idea of becoming a male hero… I mean, male heroes that could actually get on a team were considered elite because of their sheer rarity, and the girls… well… some of the guys slept their way through entire teams, and alpha girls were always spectacular. Money, girls, and worship galore. It was a heady mixture.
But I realized that the celebrity also went to their heads. I mean the guy gave me a low rating because I wouldn’t let him murder me! Male heroes were almost universally absolute enema-blenders, and I refused to take any jobs with them in the future.
That was also the closest I’d come to breaking the ‘no killing’ rule. Do you know what happens when you cover someone with a thick layer of ice, even a fire-based hero, cutting off their oxygen and freezing them? They can’t be cinematically ‘melted’ later with a hair dryer and wrapped in a warm blanket with a cup of hot cocoa, no, they die. After my little fit of pique and turning him into a human Popsicle, I’d had to blow a huge amount of energy restoring his blueprint before he died of frostbite, low core temperatures, and muscular crystallization. It had been weeks before I had enough energy that a new persona could make an appearance, and I’d nearly been evicted for failure to pay rent.
And then he gave me a one-star rating. He didn’t even leave a review explaining why he left the star, probably out of embarrassment, just a big fat drop in my previously pristine five-star rating. But I triumphed over my innate villainous urges and did not stop by his house to demand an explanation.
I could have. I mean, with microkinesis, tracking a quantum signature was as easy as following a painted line, and I even stopped outside of his apartment building once, after he got a contract and moved out of his mom’s basement, but I was made of willpower, a true paragon of self-control and discipline.
Well, that and I didn’t want to blow my secret ID. Mostly that second part. Attacking a hero in his secret ID was almost as big a no-no as letting innocents die. Kicking his ass while he was trying to polish off his breakfast Wheaties in his tidy-whites would have been a worse career move than just accepting the bad review and moving on, even if I really wanted to put his damned fire out.
Especially when I saw him swat Aquamarine’s ass as she did the walk of shame from his new high-end apartment. Yes, that Aquamarine, the playmate class five with sonic projection and water transmission, with the DD cans and the glittering blue skin.
Yeah, before I awakened, I was a high school geek, focused on classes and getting into the right college, way too busy to have time to date or have fun. After I awakened, I was a college geek, way too focused on classes and making ends meet to have time to date or have fun. I was just religious enough to avoid hook-up culture, and the fact that girls went out of their way to make me notice them now just made things that much rougher.
I might have mentioned that male alphas are rare. Honestly, we are. Something about XY versus XX chromosomes. Women potentially had two superpowers, one for each X chromosome. If they were lucky, the power was broad and had a higher power rating potential, and the two powers were complementary, like force fields or magnetic control.
Men, on the other hand, had a single power. It was often broad and self-reinforcing, which meant that there were fewer men with high power ratings, but plenty of them with nice solid class two or three support abilities. Something about the Y chromosome, supposedly, was bad.
Bad, as in If the Y chromosome develops a second power, the power self-destructs, killing the guy, often in gruesome or horrifying ways. The ‘net was filled with horror stories about men who started to develop the stigmata of a second power, and then something horrible happened that killed them and occasionally everyone around them, like teleporting into a wall and causing an antimatter explosion as the two types of matter overlapped that took out an entire block. Most of the stories were fake, but enough were real that it was a terror.
The worst part was, that q-powers only usually started to express themselves under extreme duress, as a sort of reaction to a life and death situation, and not only was it impossible to predict who would get a superpower, which was sort of rare, like one in a million, but the form of that power was unpredictable and somehow related to the stress that caused the power to jump-start.
If you got thrown out of a plane without a parachute, there was about a one-in-a-million chance you would gain a superpower before you hit the ground. And even if you do, it might be a minor power that isn’t enough to keep you from going splat when you say 'hello world' at extreme speed. I mean, how much would it suck to be flying towards the ground at terminal velocity only to suddenly discover that you could levitate… except that you were a class one who couldn’t actually change the speed you were levitating, and you are traveling towards that big green ball at fifty miles an hour. Yep, you found your superpower, but you are still wondering if the ground will be friends with you.
There were some death cults back in the seventies that promised to awaken powers in normals, but those were pretty much self-defeating since their score was somewhere around zero successes.
But, you know, there are a thousand minor tragedies a day even in a place like the old Unified States of America, and a lot of those tragedies involved women. So in the end, the hero gig pretty much was a woman’s world, just like the traditional emergency services were a men’s game. As a man, even as a class three or higher, trying to make it as a hero often puts you in competition with a lot of women, many of whom had their powers awakened as a result of some kind of conflict with a man, and a lot of whom had two powerful abilities that reinforced each other compared to your one. Talk about a hostile work environment.
Men also tended to be more… resistant to authority, which is why a higher than normal percentage of men with a serious power rank wound up doing the private sector or villain thing. While the hero gig was maybe one man out of a hundred, powered criminals were closer to one in five. Which made an alpha jogging near an ‘incident’ something that the police would just… instinctively view with justifiable bias.
Six delicious hamburgers, two fryers full of hand-cut french fries, a cup of fry sauce, and a shower later, and I was feeling a lot more human. I’d also regained two power points for my troubles, which made me feel a lot better at a solid twenty. I had a scheduled class in about an hour, and since I was so low I’d probably burn myself into intentional power debt before I worked out afterward. The power was already wasted, so I might as well take advantage of the chance to possibly add a few points to my pool, even if it meant I headed into training looking like I’d already been ridden hard and put away wet. It wouldn’t be the first time.
A short drive to the school and an eminently forgettable class session about warehouse management later, and I was at the campus gym, having burned through my energy supply during my walk by practicing holding a bubble of kinetically charged air around my body while moving.
So why such a boring major?” Well… long explanation short, Logistics and supply management was one of those careers that would always be in demand. It was not elite, it was not sexy, it was not STEM, but a guy who knew how to wrangle goods from point A to point B, and how to keep a plant or retail system going, would never have to fight for a job or worry about making rent.
It was one of those secret careers that had almost no status attached to it, you’d never be on a board of directors or be clamoring your way to the top of the pyramid, and yet you’d always be well-paid if you knew what you were doing, you’d never get downsized unless the entire company were falling apart, and if you GOT fired, you’d get snatched up again in a week.
And it was a lot less boring than an accountant or systems analyst. Hell, if I played my cards right, becoming a global logistics supply officer meant both stability and constant exciting world travel. I would never have the power of flight, running on kinetically neutral air doesn’t count, but I would love the power of first-class air travel with cute stewardesses and jet-set destinations.
I had no illusions that it would all be fun and games. It would be a lot of hard work, but I was no stranger to hard work. Ever planned an exciting scheme? Trust me, bringing all the pieces together into an aesthetically pleasing superhero battle required enormous amounts of work, especially when you were on a budget like me. Logistic management and the part-time supervillain gig went together like pie and ice cream.
Even if someday I went legit and went to work for a hero organization, it would be as one of the ‘chair guys’. And guess what skillset and career path would make the best choice for keeping a team outfitted and trained for whatever came their way? That’s right, logistics.
I was sort of patting myself on the back as I pushed through the double doors leading to the gym, distracted by my self-congratulatory reminiscences and the fact that I was kind of stumbling and exhausted from energy debt when I got hit in the face.