“By my body, I swear to become the Aegis that protects the ones unable to protect themselves. By my mind, I swear to set aside the disputes that divide us when the inevitable arrives. By my soul, I swear to stand on the shoulders of the fallen and seek vengeance.”

- Oath sworn publicly by Archangel, Kinetic, and Hope after the third appearance of Quetzalcoatl. Fulfilled by one, and later sworn by Victorious.

_____________________________________________________________________

“Pick a fight with me.”

I should’ve known better. It was late enough that the sun had gone down, I wasn’t familiar with the area yet, and this area was a particularly seedy area of an infamously seedy city. The only comfort was the still hot cup of cocoa I had bought on impulse ten minutes prior. It had been cooked too hot and scalded my tongue on the first sip, but had just reached reasonable drinking temperature. Being out at this time was asking for trouble and to top it off, I was pretty sure I’d made a wrong turn trying to get home.

The guy mugging me had a few inches over me, putting him at around six foot and forcing me to look up to meet his eyes. His clothes were rough around the edges, and I saw a bruise going up his neck and creeping over his jaw. He had a knife, I could see it strapped in a holster on his belt, which had me on edge.

He was taking a really strange angle to approach mugging from though.

“Hey. Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.” I said reluctantly. I didn’t want to pick a fight with him. I’d just come out of the theatre. A movie I’d been waiting for had come out earlier in the week and this had been the first chance I’d had to see it.

It had been a good one. A drama about a lonely girl whose world had come apart at the edges, causing her to realise her life was just a movie. Typical fourth wall breaking, but I’d been pleasantly surprised several times watching it. By the end it became a piece about finding friendship in unsuspecting places and closed on a wholesome note. I’d give it an eight overall. But that was neither here nor there.

Here was a guy who I wanted nothing to do with trying to pick a fight with me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a figure in a hoodie a few dozen feet back leaning against a wall.

“Is he with you?” I asked, gesturing with my thumb.

“Yeah, but he’s not fighting you. You and me. That’s it.”

“...” I looked past him, wistfully looking at a worn poster barely hanging on to a bus stop.

Long ago, a heroic silhouette would have advertised the Sentinel, and how they were here to protect us. The fine print would have informed me that the Sentinel did in fact use precognitive facilities to predict certain crimes and promised that sensitive information relating to such events would not be used for any purposes beyond securing the safety of the public.

The Sentinel was an organisation of crime fighters with superpowers. They were heroes by another name. People who had been fortunate enough to manifest abilities that could only be described as ‘supernatural’ and had decided to use it for the purposes of ‘good’.

I couldn’t help but wonder where they were now. Maybe they only showed up after the first punch was thrown. Maybe they wouldn’t show up at all.

They probably wouldn’t show up. That was the reputation they had.

“Is it the knife?” The guy asked, putting a hand on the weapon.

I tensed, ready to give him a face full of hot chocolate.

The man’s expression didn’t change as he unclasped the holster from his belt and tossed it to one side. The knife hit the wall and dropped to the ground with a soft thud. My eyes returned to the man. There wasn’t any crazy in his eyes, and it didn’t look like he was enjoying this. It didn’t look like he was regretting this either. However, he was apparently unarmed right now so I let myself relax somewhat.

“Just punch me.” He tapped his jaw where it was bruised. “Come on.”

I didn’t let myself react. He was playing the same tune as he had been the entire time so I was able to keep my expression even as I tried to think of a way out of this. I did have an ace up my sleeve.

The Sentinel was made up of normal people who had superpowers. I had no idea how they got their abilities but they were far from the all-seeing crime fighting force they made themselves out to be. They wouldn’t be appearing to save me today. They would be too busy dealing with the darker side of the coin. The ones who had turned to selfishness after getting their powers.

For all I knew there was a bank heist happening right now. Three blocks away from that two gangs could be starting off the next gang war, each headed by someone with powers. The Sentinel would be managing those things, not worrying their heads about some kid getting mugged.

Well, some kid with superpowers getting mugged.

“What are you waiting for?”

There were three factors stopping me from using my power to remove myself from the situation. The first was that I didn’t want to reveal that I had powers. Not to my friends, not to my family, and definitely not to strangers that seemed like they had gang affiliations. Who else would have the gall to pick fights with randoms on the street? Plus, the degree of secrecy both heroes and villains seemed to enjoy appealed to me.

“I’ll give you five dollars to throw the first punch.”

The second was my power, or the one that could be used for fighting. Of all the powers I could have manifested, I got telekinesis. It didn’t matter how big or heavy something was, I could move it as I pleased. The catch was that it wasn’t conventional telekinetic movement. If I wanted to move something in a direction I had to mentally alter the force on something and decide how exactly it would change. It gave me a lot of versatility on paper, but I could only use it on things I touched.

That meant the only things I could use my power on right now were my clothes, my keys, my drink, and my Vphone. Maybe I could use my keys as a bludgeoning weapon? That would cut my hands.

“Five not good enough? How’s twenty?”

The third was simple. I didn’t know how to fight.

“Mate, I was going home.” I said.

“Are you scared?”

I picked my words. “I’m not interested.”

“Surely you have something you need to work out.”

“...” Memories flashed in front of my eyes, but I didn’t say anything. This guy wasn’t listening to a word I said.

“Teacher that you hate? Girl troubles?”

“Seriously, I’m not interested.”

“Punch me in the fucking face.”

“No.” I said. This guy was beginning to sound like a broken record. Though, he didn’t have any forthcoming responses to that. He closed his mouth. The silence dragged on.

“Are you going to let me go?” I chanced.

“No.”

He said it as a declaration. As crazy as the situation was, this guy still looked as serious as ever. We looked at each other. He wasn’t giving any ground.

“What would get you to let me walk away?” I asked.

“Fighting me.”

“I’m not interested.” I said again.

“Why not?” When I didn’t say anything I saw him switch tactic before he said it. “Are you a pussy?”

Now he was trying to goad me. It hit a relatively soft spot, but it was such a blatant attempt to get a rise out of me it failed in doing anything.

“I’d rather not fight.” I told him. There was an instant shift in his expression. His fist unclenched. He had been holding it so tight that it was completely white, and now colour was snaking its way back across his hand.

“So you’re not a fighter.” There was something in his voice that sounded like gratification. It put me on edge.

“Well yeah.” I agreed, and threw my drink at his face.

The problem with throwing liquid is that it’s nothing like throwing a rock. Liquid sloshes around, leaves its container if you move the container the right way, and therefore could not be likened to pitching a baseball straight at a target. Though, my adversary had been right about to make his move, and the dark liquid had taken him off guard. It gave me a moment to act. I used that moment to try and double down on it by punching him in the face.

I got a fist in the face before I connected, and the next moment I was looking at the skyline. The next moment the skyline was sideways, and what breath I had left escaped me at the same moment. Then the ache on the side of my face made itself known.

The guy circled around me.

“Right now you’re either a fighter...”

A boot hit my stomach making me curl up in pain.

“Or you’re a punching bag.”

My arm flared in pain as it was driven into the ground. He had stamped on it.

“You threw the first punch though. I appreciate that.”

I wish I could say I used my power to get out of there, but a facet of my power was complicating things. While it allowed me near complete control over things that I touched, it also let me know exactly what forces were acting on said objects. Gravity, friction, other science words. It let me know it all.

Well, ‘let’ is the wrong word. It was a sixth sense that couldn’t be turned off. If I wanted to flex the mental muscle that let me move things, I needed to be making conscious changes to that information. However, as I was currently being beaten, I didn’t really have that mental capacity. Each blow became both a physical and a mental attack.

It was all I could do to take it.

After a while- I don’t know how long- my mugger grabbed my arm and pulled it up. I tried to stay in the fetal position but wasn’t strong enough to do so. When I was left hanging and no punches came I raised my head.

Now that I had a closer look at this guy I could see that his face was actually quite young. He wasn’t that much older than I was. His eyes were sizing me up.

“When I let go. Stay standing.” He told me.

Barely hearing him and noticing some blood had spattered on the ground below me, I nodded deliriously. He released my arm and I let it fall while remaining standing. At the same time I tried a swing with my other arm, but it was easily sidestepped.

“Thanks for this.”

Before I could ask him what he meant, he punched me in the chest. All the resistance had been beaten out of me, and I was taken off my feet and ended up sprawled against a wall. That last blow seemed more vicious than any of the rest. The part of my chest that had been hit flared with pain in time with my heartbeat.

The next thing I knew he was rifling through my pockets. He took my phone. A short while later it was dropped in my lap. I could see there was an active call. The american emergency number.

Twenty dollars landed next to it.

And then he was gone.

~~~

Black.

Then sirens.

~~~

“Careful. It’s not broken but there might be a fracture.”

Firm hands gripped my legs and armpits, and my head was lifted slightly. I was lifted onto something, with whoever was lifting me taking care to keep my head from rolling around. I was laid down on something that wouldn’t let me turn my head. Then I was lifted up and rolled away.

They put me in an ambulance. I recognised that. It brought me back to reality for a bit. There was a bump in the road that jostled me the rest of the way. I couldn’t turn my head, but I could see a paramedic was sitting off to my side. They had a hand keeping the bed I was on steady.

He made eye contact. “How are you feeling?”

I tried to speak but choked on something in my mouth. Despite the blockage, air flowed freely. I struggled to comprehend the object that was jammed down my throat.

“Don’t speak. Rate how you’re feeling from one to ten. Use your hands.”

My whole body felt like it was aching, but I was able to lift one hand and give a thumbs up, then turned it into a thumbs down.

“Humour.” There was acknowledgement, but he didn’t laugh. “That’s good. You don’t have any obvious breakages, but that doesn’t rule out fractures or internal bleeding. Did you take a blow to the head?”

I gave him a thumbs up.

He nodded “Do your best to stay awake. You may have a concussion, but we’ve got you. You’re gonna be fine.”

I nodded as best I could and stared at the ceiling.

~~~

I’d been to hospitals before, but never for anything this serious. That being said, the service I got was much better than anything I’d had in the past. I wasn’t shown the bill, but I was sure there’d be a price to match.

Such was healthcare in the land of the free.

For the most part I’d just been battered and bruised. Nothing had been broken but there had been a number of sprains, and I’d only started bleeding in more than a few places. I’d have multicoloured skin in blotches all over my body for a week or two, but they would clear up. I also had a sling, and was under strict orders to take it easy with walking and lifting things.

While in the ambulance the paramedic had been worried about me having a neck fracture, I’d been lucky enough to get away without that particular injury. Of course, it wasn’t the external bleeding that got the doctors worried.

The area surrounding my heart had taken significant trauma and had started bleeding internally. There was blood spilling around the kidney as well. So I was sent directly to the operating table to get that solved. There were no complications, but I was kept on hospital grounds for observation. The doctor’s had promised three days maximum before release. That was five days ago. I couldn’t figure out why I was being kept in. Considering the battering, I’d gotten off lightly.

It was some ridiculous stroke of luck that I didn’t have any debilitating fractures.

I was originally given a private bed, but once the doctors had spoken to me I was moved to a public ward. The one I was put in was mostly full of people younger than me. It was a short term ward, so over the past five days the population had entirely rotated out, I was the oldest one there. Both in terms of age and tenure.

Kathrine, my foster mom, had spent the first day and night with me. She and her three daughters visited every day at six thirty in the evening. Give or take an hour. Giving more than taking. I didn’t mind, but at the moment it was three thirty and I was bored.

The atmosphere of the ward was a strange one. It was full of kids, so there was a lighthearted energy to the place, but it was mixed with a sombreness that wasn’t usually normally associated with people that age. That was probably a result of most of these kids having their first serious injuries and coming face to face with consequences for the first time.

That being said, not all the kids acted sombre. They were kids. Again, it was a mix.

Each of us was mobile. I was hooked up to a vitals monitor for obvious reasons, but everyone in the ward also had access to a playroom. It had large building blocks inside that looked like it could keep four year olds interested, as well as a stack of children's books and some boxes of toys that had been picked out to be safe. By day three I’d been through the stack of books twice.

Right now that’s where most of my roommates were. I could hear the screams coming through the walls. There was an older screen on one of the walls that I was blankly staring at. It was showing kids movies with subtitles and no volume. The movies were aimed at children still learning how to person, so I wasn’t really the target audience for that stuff. I was looking at it, or, at least, in its general direction. It wasn’t like I had any control over the screen anyway.

I did have access to my laptop, but the wifi was restricted. There was some description of blocker that meant my legitimate streaming website could only access the G rated stuff I wasn’t interested in. So my options were limited to that or homework, and I didn’t like the prospect of the latter.

While time slowly weathered itself away I flexed my other power. A far cry from telekinesis, I also had the ability to change the colour of anything I touched, but only where I touched. To say I had been excited when I figured this one out would be an understatement as well as a lie. It had been incredibly underwhelming to realise that I had the power of tagging.

That being said, I had taken to using that power to pass the time. From what I’d figured out in the months since manifesting, the change in colour was permanent. I could also will things to return to their normal colour. This worked for anything my skin touched, and included my skin. At the moment I was flexing my power by idly drawing faces on the back of my hand, erasing them, and starting again.

The door opened and I registered someone walking in. Probably one of the kids staying in the ward judging by the height. That’s all I noticed. I was more focused on the kid’s movie more than my hand sketches. There was some drama unfolding between an unreasonably smart baby and his bigger brother involving a pacifier. It was the climax of the episode and I was as invested as I was ever going to be.

“Are you Michael?” The kid asked.

Annoyed at the interruption, I glanced up and did a double take. The girl must have been around thirteen, going by the height. She was wearing a well fitted combat jacket with three empty utility belts around the waist. Her hands were covered in a tight fitting membrane that had a sheen to them, the light reflecting at strange angles. She had cargo pants that were tucked into her boots, which came up to just under the knees. She had a helmet that covered everything from her cheekbones up. It was a smooth and solid material that swept back and came to three soft points at the back. Her straight blonde hair was left free to drop down below her shoulders. I could see a scar curving up her cheek and under the mask.

There were no holes for the eyes. Instead, there were what appeared to be orbs of white light shining from where the eyes should be. Her head was following me as I moved, so she could clearly still see somehow. There were more, smaller orbs of yellow dotted around on the helm. The entire ensemble was a deep green colour that faded into orange in places. There was a repeating pattern of subtly darker green squares within squares making an optical illusion that spanned across the entire costume.

This girl was clearly a hero. I covered the half drawn face on the back of my hand and willed it back to skin colour.

“Who wants to know?” I tested the waters. I wasn’t entirely familiar with the hero population of this city yet.

She seemed taken aback. “Oh, um. Me. I’m Lucidity. I’m a Sentry.”

Right. The Sentinels had a junior subdivision known as the Sentry. They worked the same jobs, but there was an important distinction between the two organisations: age. People of all sorts got powers. That meant people of all ages could manifest. The Sentry was a team made up solely from under eighteen heroes. If I was to try and become a Sentinel, I’d have to be a Sentry first because of my age.

If...

“And why is a Sentry visiting?” I asked. This was the closest I’d been to another person with powers. Lucidity didn’t know about mine but something still felt weird, I wasn’t sure how to act.

“A person told a person told me you could use some cheering up.” She told me matter of factly as she came closer. She paused to check the clipboard with my general information. “Just, um... Just seeing what you have.”

“I don’t see why I’d need cheering up. I have this adult baby to keep me company.” I gestured at the screen.

“That’s not it.” Lucidity shook her head as she put the clipboard back down. “I, um, I heard about why you were admitted here.”

Any warmth on my face froze.

She continued. “You probably don’t want to hear this from a twelve year old, but I’ve been there. The situations where there’s no way out, it’s painful, and there’s nothing you can do. When everything is just so unfair it doesn’t even make sense. But at the end of it we’re both here, now.

“It sucks, I know that. What I do is use it as motivation to make it never happen again, and failing that, to have the ability to do more the next time. Because I’m still here, and I’ve chosen to be a hero.”

Lucidity gave a sheepish smile. “That’s um, where we differ I guess.”

I stayed quiet. She definitely had a unique perspective on things.

“I thought you were thirteen.” I said at length. “I’d expect that kind of speech from a thirty year old.”

Lucidity brightened. “You did? I’m not thirteen though!”

“It’s all that heroic maturity. That was some seriously motivational stuff there.”

“I’m early twelve. Like, I have another eleven months before I’m thirteen. I’m twelve and one month.”

A bittersweet smile was showing unbidden on my face. Then it faltered. Something about what Lucidity had said had struck a chord, and her words repeated themselves in my head. Lucidity noticed and became visibly nervous, though she kept the smile going. Her’s was a good outlook. It kept her going. It could keep me going if I adopted it.

If...

I made a decision.

“Hey…” I couldn’t figure out the right order of words. So I stopped talking to figure out what exactly I wanted to say.

“What is it?” Lucidity looked like she’d just accomplished something and celebrated it, and then started second guessing herself. “Do you want to go flying? That’s something I usually do when I come around here. I can get us some hoverboards.”

I blinked. Hoverboards sounded cool, actually. “No, I’m just wondering what your story is. Y’know, from the beginning.”