A supervillain is a common-use term for any metahuman that refuses to follow the Proteus Accords or local laws. Since virtually any metahuman ability is considered a potentially deadly weapon, Certain Provisions of the Helsinki accords, ratified and signed in 1975, prevented metahumans from being deployed in a military capacity outside of their nation of citizenship. In 1988, a European-based organization known as Proteus helped establish a series of laws exclusively governing the behavior of metahumans referred to as the Proteus accords. Despite not being a sovereign nation, they were granted a seat on the UN security council and given the autonomy to police international metahuman events under the authority of the UN peacekeeping forces and Interpol. Their primary enforcement team, referred to in English as the Prometheans, enjoys international jurisdiction to enforce the Proteus Accords on foreign soil and can be called on in extreme circumstances to help enforce local law in circumstances where local security forces are overwhelmed by metahuman offenders, also known as supervillains.

See also- Metahuman, Proteus, Proteus accords, United Nations

Unipedia, the United Net free encyclopedia

I sighed, flexing my hands as I read the notification that was the absolute deathblow of my future employment opportunities. Since my mom’s funeral, I hadn’t been able to concentrate on my classes, and her insurance had barely been able to cover the funeral expenses, let alone pay for another semester of failure.

Computer-aided genetic design: failure

Arabic innovation and the Judaic medical paradigm: failure

Medical gross anatomy and embryology: failure

The science of practical medicine: failure

Metahuman physiology and theoretical biohistory: failure

The failure in computer-aided genetic design was not any sort of surprise. There was a huge amount of math involved, and I had assumed that I would have to repeat the class at least twice to compensate for my disability. Yes, I could do complicated problems in my head in seconds, but that was a party trick. The genetic design was all about formulas and theoretical mathematics, and I was terrible at remembering the various methodologies to resolve various mathematical abstracts. The phrase ‘show your work’ had been the bane of my existence since I was in grade school since the answers just popped out at me with my own peculiar forms of internal math rather than recognized and approved methodologies that teachers could inspect and grade.

My break was almost over, so I folded up my phone and headed back out to the Home workshop’s floor. After the funeral, my finances were absolutely rock bottom, I was grieving for my mom and little brother, dealing with injuries that my crappy meta ability couldn’t heal that quickly, trying to hold down a job, and finishing up a set of college courses that I could no longer afford.

Oh yeah, and I was technically a meta. No, not a superhero, I was one of that large group of people that had a superhuman ability that was almost completely worthless. Unlike the people with cool powers like flying and shooting laser beams from their eyes, most metas that were class F didn’t even bother getting registered. Sure, it was considered some kind of international crime, but the cops don’t care, Proteus doesn’t care, and nobody else cares. As long as you weren’t caught using a preternatural ability in the commission of a crime, no one would even check.

And my ‘powers’ sucked so bad I never even told anyone about them because they were also impossible to prove and it would have just made me look like a braggart. I almost envied the worthless powers like being able to change the color of your spit or look like you were aflame. At least those powers were visible and looked somewhat cool. Mine did not.

There was a stack of wood to be moved back into the storage lot. I put on my leather gloves and started hefting the 2x4 planks from the receiver pallet, the blue wooden frame that was currently on a pallet jack, into the sales pallet, where we displayed the various building materials we sold in the back lot. I was able to lift a stack of 20 each time, at about 200 lbs. total, and move them into the display slot, clearing the pallet in minutes.

No, my power wasn’t super strength. That would be cool. I was able to clear the pallet quickly because I worked my ass off and was pretty muscular, not because I could toss cars like toy bricks. I moved on to rearranging a pile of rather nice paving stones some jackass had decided to scatter from its holding area, breaking several, which I threw away and noted on my phone’s inventory app. I restacked the bricks into a nice cube with the top corner missing and grabbed a broom to sweep up the brick dust from the concrete flooring, watching some poor idiot trying to maneuver a large screen TV box into his car in the parking lot through the back lot fence. I headed back into the store and then out through the exit, arriving in time to help the guy wedge the big box into his back seat instead of the trunk, which was far too small. No, my power wasn’t super-speed either.

I moved back into the store, waving at Brandi at the registers as she smiled at me. Technically, I was the inventory supervisor, but because most of our employees were scrawny college students I wound up having to do a lot of the heavy lifting myself. Brandi was, like me, in her mid-twenties and we had gone on a date once. She thought I was a perfect gentleman for not taking advantage of the opportunity to take her home and sleep with her that she subtly offered after the movie, while I mostly just wondered if I wanted a relationship with a girl whose most interesting thoughts revolved around who in the store was sleeping with Brad, the manager, and how scandalous whatever pop starlet was currently popular was wearing in public. Don’t shit where you eat was one of my ex-stepfather’s favorite sayings, and even though he was a real piece of work, a few of his rules still stuck with me even after his presence was long gone. Yes, Redheads were my weakness, and Brandi certainly qualified, but it wasn’t worth the workplace drama of just balling and bouncing.

Charming girls was not my superpower either. Not that I would have wanted it if it were. I was considered a bit of eye candy and didn’t mind it much, since, while trying to use my superpowers, I had spent almost a year building my body up. It hadn’t worked, I was still well within normal human standards, but I had liked drawing appreciative female glances and my power DID help me maintain my build with only a couple of hours a day of hard exercise, most of which I got at the Home Workshop.

Alejandro was hiding in the lighting section, ignoring the customers and tapping away at his phone as I walked by. I swatted the blue steel frame of the 14’ tall shelving with a loud clang to draw his attention and raised an eyebrow when he glanced at me, and he quickly turned, putting his phone away and heading toward a trio of elderly ladies looking at a ceiling fan light combination and discussing it in loud, confused tones. Mind controlling employees wasn’t my superpower either, that was just me being a supervisor. I didn’t have the power to fire anyone, but I was expected to keep them working and the manager took my staffing suggestions seriously, as long as it wasn’t someone that could successfully sue for various stupid reasons if he let them go.

Sometimes firing an incompetent person was more trouble than just making them miserable until they quit, and I could name at least 3 employees that were just there forever doing almost nothing but pretending to work. They were impossible to fire unless they were caught doing something actively illegal, and if they were fired for being essentially worthless they’d probably get a million dollars from the company for wrongful termination as well as a lot of bad press for being bigoted against whatever category they happened to be hiding behind. It didn’t matter why you fired someone anymore, being a bigot was more about who hated you than who you hated.

Still, it was not my problem. Alejandro was actually a pretty good worker if you kept your eye on him. Sure, he skated off when you weren’t watching, but when you needed him for a special project he willingly put in the work, plus he was always there on time and was good-looking and knowledgeable enough that both little old ladies and fixer-upper types talked to him freely. You just needed to remind him occasionally that ‘slow time’ ended when there were customers around.

I walked over to painting and told Keiran to go on break, not that it made much of a difference. Keiran was one of those three unfireables. After switching him from departments several times, we finally realized the only place we could stick him was in the painting department because he could occasionally be convinced to run the paint mixer. He was extremely flamboyant and had to be sent home to change into a work outfit occasionally when he showed up dressed in something that would get us in trouble with the rather conservative customer base, like a pair of bedazzled short shorts with a print of a butt on the back. All we could do was cut his hours back to the 20-hour minimum, encourage him to take off early when things got slow and keep him away from the registers which always seemed to come up short when he was around, even though we never actually caught him doing anything. The chain owner had a ‘give ex-cons a chance’ policy, and it usually worked out well, but I think Keiran only kept working here because his parole officer demanded he keeps a job.

My superpower wasn’t the ability to see around corners, that would have been pretty cool too, and I probably would have caught Keiran doing something shady some time ago. I did wonder if he had some ability to see me coming, though.

One of the customers was struggling with a heavy-duty steel security door. He had a panel cart, so I went ahead and helped drag it out of its rack. Together we made sure that its dimensions matched the ones written on a post-it note he had, and even managed to upsell him into picking up a security knob and plate, deadbolt, and hole saw drill bit for installing it. I took him to Brandi’s register and gave her the sell, since as a supervisor I didn’t qualify for commissions, and then helped him load the 80 lb door into his pickup. He was older and tried to offer me a tip for the help, but I grinned and waved it off. “My job is to help our customers meet their needs. I don’t get tipped for doing what any good neighbor would do anyway.”

Salesmanship wasn’t my superpower either. I did get a pretty good paycheck for it though.

No, most metas had power ‘themes’ that helped their abilities mesh together. Like a fire, a user might have flight, the ability to throw fireballs, and heat resistance. Not that many fire users considered themselves superheroes since turning a criminal into a screaming alpha was not exactly a friendly way to ‘subdue’ them.

Not me. I headed back into the store and then helped Brandi go off-shift and count her drawer in the office. We both sat down in the office to count the money, and she pestered me again, “Hey, I heard Alibi was in town, do you think you might want to go out and see them with me?”

I sighed, taking off my work gloves and folding them up on the table. “Sweety, you know I cannot afford that. I am barely making rent right now and last night’s dinner was Chef Boyardee. Heck, I am pestering Brad for OT if I can get it, and with my classes over my life is lifting, working, and paying off my debt. If I had anything valuable I’d probably sell it on Pibay, and if Brad didn’t give me OT I’d probably be looking for a second job as soon as work is over.”

Brandi shook her head looking at my rather large arms straining at the sleeves of the collared Home Workshop shirt I was wearing before looking back up at my face. “You know that I would be happy to get you a ticket. And then we could go back to my place and I could make my famous chicken Kyiv and we could sit on the couch and watch Grease.”

I shook my head. “I wish I could, I would love to see you in a kiss the cook apron, but right now is just a really bad time. Brad has me for OT for the rest of the week, and the tickets are like… 80 bucks each for nosebleed seats. What kind of a man would I be if I let you pay for me? Call me old-fashioned, but when I take a girl out I expect to cover it. A real man doesn’t ask the beautiful girl to dutch or pay his way, you know?”

She pinked up a little at the ‘beautiful girl’ comment but nodded, turning to her drawer and pouring the change into the counter and then counting out the 20’s, marking them on her control sheet before handing the stack to me. “I guess I’d better get counting before you bring me up for sexual harassment or something.” she joked, chuckling a little.

I took the stack, and somewhere deep in my mind, I could feel the information coming to me.

20 dollar bills. (18)

Value: 360

Aspects: currency, paper, fabric, greed, security

Power: 1

20 dollar bills in American currency. This money is a cross between paper and fabric, and is difficult to counterfeit, containing both special materials and woven threads as well as an electronic security strip.

That was my superpower.

Well, that was one of my useless powers. Basically by touching something I could tell all sorts of meaningless things about it, useless statistics as well as a bunch of stuff I already knew. I had high hopes about it when it first happened, a little over a year ago, distracting me from my family’s death and the broken bones and gashes that were healing.

That and an ability I called ‘tireless’ when I first figured it out. Basically, I was able to keep going longer than most people. It didn’t help much, but I could work long hours without getting footsore or exhausted and required about half as much sleep as most other people. I also healed a lot faster. Not superhuman fast, but about three times as fast as normal.

No special attributes came with it, though. The broken bones from the accident healed much faster and let me get back to work faster, although it didn’t stop the flashbacks or suppress the memories of flying through the air in my mom’s car. I might only sleep four hours a night, but those four hours were often filled with dreams of my mom’s screaming terror as our vehicle flew towards its impact.

Healing quickly meant that I got to do two workouts a day, easily, for longer, and far harder than most guys did. This helped with the memories for a while, but when I discovered that my real cap was not any higher than most guys that worked out, no superhuman strength or reflexes, I scaled it back to a more reasonable schedule. The only real benefit I got from it was not requiring ‘cooldown’ days for my muscles to heal in between hard full-body workouts. Of course, since I didn’t want to go prancing around showing off that I was weird, one day of workouts was at the gym while the next was on the free weights I kept in my basement apartment.

Last but not least, I could melt things.

Yeah, I know, you are probably thinking that that was a real superpower. Being able to melt anything. The problem was, it was always tiny amounts. I could probably melt one of the twenty-dollar bills into a weird useless goop, but I couldn’t even use it for criminal purposes unless I wanted to spend hour after hour trying to stick my fingers into each layer of a lock and melt a tiny amount of it.

A tiny jewelry padlock was possible in one shot, but a door lock took doing it, again and again, every few minutes for almost an hour. Not that I would consider becoming a supervillain, but the idea was there. It was useless because all it left was a pile of goo that said whatever ‘aspects’ the object started with.

So, basically, my power was to work harder than anyone else and break small objects uselessly. The only part I didn’t understand was the ‘aspects’. The power part was pretty easy since it only worked every few minutes, and the ‘power’ was the number of applications of melting I would have to do to dissolve something. A paper bill had a power of 1, but something like a brass hinge had a power of 6, meaning at least 6 minutes to turn it into glop. The aspects didn’t make any sense at all. I knew what paper and fabric were, obviously, but what the heck did ‘greed’ and ‘security’ have to do with it, other than emotionally?

Food was easier to melt since there seemed to be a lot more of it per power point. Mostly it just had aspects related to what it was made out of, and trying to eat it (or rather drink it) afterward was somewhat unpleasant. Stuff that reminded me of growing up was occasionally marked with the ‘comfort’ aspect, like macaroni and cheese or chicken noodle soup, but after glopping them, they weren’t much of a comfort anymore.

I hadn’t dared to try gooing anything alive yet, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t unless it was a bug or something. Turning a piece of someone into goop, if it even worked, would be flat-out evil.

That was probably the one aspect of my power that could truly be considered a superpower. I didn’t get words attached, but it was more like a feeling of the words when I brushed something or someone. When I brushed Brandi’s hand taking the dollar bills from her, I had a feeling of her general well-being.

Brandi Lake

Human, body, class G(G)

Power: 50

Conditions: Penicillin allergy, equine dander allergy, 12 days until menses

Projected lifespan: 61 years barring mishap, current age 26

Healthy, tired, aroused, nervous, disappointed

No current abnormal infections

Aroused? I glanced at her again and noticed she was watching my hands as I counted out the one-dollar bills, very closely. I didn’t need to count them, as I knew exactly how many were in the stack the moment she handed it to me, but keeping up appearances was important. She was supposed to watch while I counted them, but when her tongue flicked out to her lip for just a moment as I quickly counted them out I realized she had something else on her mind.

Very flattering. She was cute, but I couldn’t do anything about it, even if I wanted to. The attention caused me to miss a few bills as I recovered, and I cleared my throat and started counting again.

Her drawer was technically a dollar and twelve cents over, but over and under of less than five dollars was considered a normal margin of error so I had her sign the sheet and rebuilt the drawer, tucking both it, the sheet, and the cash bag into the automatic safe.

We both got up, and I said, “Hey Brandi?” and she turned to look at me after grabbing her jacket from the coat rack against the white cinderblock wall.

“When I get to a better place I will be happy to try and go out with you again. I am just too busy and too messed up about stuff to do it right now. Will you be cool if I ask you sometime when I am in a better place?” I asked her, curiously as she pulled on her jacket at the same time she tucked her badge into the electronic timekeeper.

She nodded, frowning a little, “Of course. If you need to talk about it sometime, you have my number, I’d be happy if you called or we could meet someplace to talk about it. I know you are going through some tough stuff, and I am a pretty good listener.”

Okay, as much as I appreciated her interest, I knew from experience that ‘good listener’ was patently false. But if I had some time and needed a distraction I might call her, as she could go for hours with minimal grunts of acknowledgment, and that might be nicely distracting.

She smiled and grabbed her backpack, heading out of the office and out of the doors, and I went back to work. It had been almost half an hour, and I was pretty sure by now that Alejandro was probably hidden someplace on his phone again if Brad or Dave hadn’t tapped him for a project.

I was right, but we had gotten in a new cardboard endcap for camping supplies that I was able to put him on. He was dis-tractable, but I knew that he would get it set up and stocked before spacing out again. My little phone break had technically been my last break of the day, and Brad let me know that my OT was over and it was time to get lost before I overcharged his labor costs.

My car was a twenty-year-old Mazda. It was a bit too small and tight for my 6’5” height and build, but I could fill the thing up for peanuts, few of the repairs were expensive if they were beyond my modest skills, it wasn’t worth stealing even though it was reliable, the insurance was cheap, it was paid for, and it could turn practically in its own footprint.

I wouldn’t mind replacing it with something bigger and newer like a Challenger with a Hemi v8, that was a financial decision that could wait until I was in the black instead of the deep red. For now, this got the job done even if it wasn’t something that attracted panties.

It wasn’t a second job, but Jim let me work out for free at the UFC gym if I wore a gym shirt and spotted occasionally for the regulars. It was a traditional Gym with a ring, bags, and weights. I started coming here when I was in the 8th grade when I could afford it and took fighting classes to learn how to prevent getting bullied in junior high. I was lanky and nonviolent, and nearly a perfect target for someone trying to feel better about themselves, since I totally sucked at sports or anything requiring physical coordination.

I was still too slow and uncoordinated to be any good at real fighting, but I could take just about any level of punishment and come back swinging and Jim gave me a payout to play fighting dummy for some of the guys trying to compete. I technically had a black belt for technique, but even newbie fighters could outrun my hits without much trouble. I hit hard, but that didn’t matter when nothing could ever connect. I figured if I ever got into a real fight, I would just keep going until they wore themselves out. I could work hard.

Leslie just nodded at me as I walked through the glass-fronted door. This was not an 80’s boxing movie, and a hole-in-the-wall gym meant one stuffed into a defunct strip mall between a range and a surplus and camping supply store. I had considered trying to get a job at Joe’s army/navy, but he couldn’t afford to pay me as much as the Home Workshop even with the savings from a closer location.

I came out of the locker room wearing a UFC Gym tee-shirt and boxing shorts and headed over to start my workout, checking to see if there was anyone that needed a spotter or one of those idiot cross-trainers that needed to be shaken out of their insanity. I was going for 700 lb squats, and I made sure that there was no distraction before I started at 650.

I managed to make the 700 through sheer cussed persistence. One of the advantages, I recovered quickly enough from 680 to make the attempt, but I was using one of the Olympus machines so I didn’t need a spotter of my own. I preferred free weights, but if I tried to do a squat of more than a couple of hundred without a spotter and Jim or Leslie noticed, I’d be in for a major safety ass chewing.

Jim was actually watching me as I finished a set of three. He clapped appreciatively as I finished, coated with sweat and shaking my head a little. “Are you wiped?” he asked as I used my towel to sponge off a little and then wiped the machine down with one of the packets of wet wipes kept next to the machine.

I shrugged a little, stretching out after the lift and working my shoulders. “Not really. Give me a few minutes and I should be up for something.” He tossed me a water bottle and I chuckled, catching it and pulling off the cap before downing half of it in a gulp. “You must really need something. You usually charge me for these.”

He nodded, “Gotta keep the place in the black,” and then smiled slightly through his short, but thick, beard. “Well, we have a meta here that’s looking for a sparring bout.”

I wrinkled my forehead, using my towel to wipe down my short brown hair. “We aren’t a meta Gym. What’s he doing here? No one can fight a meta here.”

“She.” He said, nodding towards a young lady wearing a vented surgical mask. It wasn’t common, but some people took last year’s flu outbreak pretty seriously. I had noticed her of course, she had a kicking body, but I had thought she was here as a poacher. A lot of girls with a muscle fetish show up at UFC gyms hoping to pick up a fighter or bodybuilder. She had some decent muscles for a girl but was more of a fitness model type than a female bodybuilder. Long blonde hair tied into a ponytail down her back, not particularly top-heavy but fit, She was working at the other machine almost casually pushing 200 lbs.

The vented surgical mask was a good idea. Identity protection without looking like a registered superhero with a fancy mask, and the vents could keep you breathing right even with the mask covering the lower half of your face.

Most metas had enhanced physical bodies. I think that’s one of the reasons, besides the healing, that I was able to get close to peak form effectively. It’s also possible that the healthiness I worked so hard for was just natural to all metas. Have you ever seen a fat superhero where the bulk wasn’t part of their powers? I haven’t. They all seem to fit into spandex like they were born with a barbell in each hand.

Then again, I had never met a registered supertype in the flesh before. “Why me?” I asked Jim. There were lots of better fighters here even now.

“Two reasons,” he said. “The first one is that even though your speed sucks ass rock bottom, There’s no one here even close to as good at taking hits as you are. She’s named Calliope and she’s not a physical meta, which means you should be able to handle it. The second reason is that you aren’t training to compete. If she hurts you, you won’t be losing a fighting slot. It sounds harsh, but you know it’s true… and she is a registered hero, so Proteus will handle the bills and you might even get a real healer if she messes you up.”

I nodded, “What’s she offering?”

Jim grinned, “Ten Grand. Two for me, eight for you. That’s reason number three. I know that you can really use it right now, and if you get hurt fighting, Brad will just cop to it and give you time off while stroking himself over living vicariously.”

I nodded, Brad was weird about that, he begrudged the FMLA leave time after the accident, but was more than happy to give me vacation time to recover when I pulled muscles occasionally in the ring. I think he had dreams of being a UFC fighter at one point, and he and Jim were drinking buddies. The one time I had had a drink with the two of them, Brad had just soaked up Jim’s stories about up-and-comers at the gym, although I had never seen him set foot in here himself.

I shrugged and rolled my head on my shoulders, heading towards the gear room to pick up some pads. Jim was scrupulous about keeping his gear clean, thus the wet wipes by all the equipment, so I could count on the pads in my size being fresh and non-stinky.

Elbows, knees, head, and torso pieces went on, but I wasn’t a kicker so I left out the foot pads to keep my footing more easily. Hopefully, she wasn’t a stomper, but I made sure that I wore a steel cup instead of the usual high-impact plastic. If she took this seriously I really didn’t want to see how my fast healing dealt with a crushed testicle or two.

I came out looking like a rubber robot, and she was standing next to Jim. “Wow. Usually, when I challenge a guy your size, it’s hard even getting him to wear a mouthpiece. You look like you are ready to go up against Bruce Lee.” She said. Her voice was slightly more musical and lower-pitched than I had expected, based on her appearance, and sounded trained for singing.

I chuckled a little, “I’m a target dummy, not a contender, and not an idiot. If you weren’t a super I’d probably be spraying the ego stuff all over you just like any other guy here and trying to get into your pants, but you watched me lift and know what I can do, and I know that you get hit on by bigger, buffer, and stronger guys constantly. You are paying for a match, and even if you aren’t a brick, you are probably capable in a fight. I’d rather walk away with fewer bruises on my incredible body than try to show it off to a girl that’s seen a million times better.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Buff and smart at the same time. I won’t say I have seen a lot better, though. Little secret, If you can toss a dumpster there’s not much incentive to build yourself up. Capes don’t tend to get chunky because of the energy we burn, but you’d be amazed at how many of even the physical types wear padded suits instead of doing the work.”

I was genuinely surprised. In every picture I’d seen of superheroes, the guys looked like they did at least 4 hours a day of solid building, especially the Class C and higher folks on the Prometheans. “So, how do you want to do this?” I asked her curiously.

She smiled, I could tell by her eyes. “Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off, two hours, unless you don’t need as much time to recover.” She looked down at my feet. “No stomps. Jim told me you were hard but not fast. Mostly I am looking for blockers. Most of the time bricks don’t bother blocking light melee, and I recently ran into a few lights that I couldn’t power down, and who were really good blockers. I need to practice getting around it, and my teammates aren’t suitable. I’d like you to swing a bit to keep me on my guard, but mostly I want to train at getting around a good guard, and Jim tells me you are the best he has.”

I nodded, “UFC goes to the floor almost immediately, so not many people train in guarding but I am not as good at the floor work because I am too tall. I assume you don’t want to go to the floor?”

She smiled broadly enough that I could see it even though the thin mask. “If you can take me to the floor, I deserve it. I didn’t want to assume, but ground work is also something I have to work on… but most of my ground work stuff is going to be dirty since that was how I was taught. I almost always work with a brick for that, because most non-bricks are not ready to get an elbow to the face. I plan on holding back if I can, but if you take me to the ground I might not be able to be as careful.”

I chuckled a little, heading into the ring between the ropes. “Important note then, don’t take you to the ground unless I am willing to take everything you can give. I will try to bear that in mind and see how much you have to offer first.” I was a little surprised at my own audaciousness, but since I already knew that she was probably going to beat the shit out of me a little flirting probably wasn’t going to make things worse. “No powers?”

She nodded, put one hand on the rope, and lightly vaulted into the ring. “No powers. I am a storm, so if I used them it would be pretty obvious anyway. I won’t ever use powers against a norm unless it’s needed to save their lives.”

I grimaced. Great. A lightning controller. Tasers sucked. I hope she was as good as her word, or else this was really going to hurt.