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xx48.10.26 / 23:46 / Tuesday

I've started this journal because I intend to become the greatest superhero in the world and I thought that probably people would want to read about how I got there. I'm aware that this may SOUND arrogant, but I feel I'm justified in my ambition for the following reasons:

My powers are empirically awesome.

I've been in training since before I could walk.

My family is VERY supportive.

Honestly, I don't see anyone else stepping up to the mark.

Really, it's not like I have much competition. I watch the news almost every evening and how many superheroes do I see? NONE! And how many hero-solvable problems do I see? TONS!

But maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I should begin with an introduction. My name is Charlotte Powers. I'm fifteen years and five months old, and I have long red hair like my mum and sparkly hazel eyes like my dad. My hobbies include rocking out on the guitar, training to be a superhero, and vanquishing evil. Well, to be honest I haven't actually vanquished any evil yet, but only because I haven't had the chance to do so. I'm sure once I'm presented with sufficient evil-vanquishing opportunities that it will DEFINITELY become one of my hobbies. Or would it be more of a job than a hobby?

I kind of got side-tracked there again. Maybe a less formal approach to this whole thing would work better, I've never kept a journal before and this is kind of new to me. Since this is supposed to be a record of my rise to superhero glory I should probably put in something about my 'origin', except because I'm 2nd Gen I don't actually have an origin story, except 'my dad got my mum pregnant and nine months later there I was!'. Actually, maybe that's a good place to start, with my parents (and my brother too I guess I suppose my hand is forced etc).

My dad's name is Marcus Powers. His power is super-strength. (Is the bold too much? But he really is SUPER-strong. I think I'll keep it in for now.) He's also really hard to hurt and his aura is super-tough, he says this is a 'necessary secondary power' and that without it he'd break his arm every time he punched a bad guy. He's punched a LOT of bad guys. He was one of the first ever people to manifest powers, when he was just eighteen.

My mum's name is Violetta Powers, but she was born Violetta Spur (she says 'Powers' is an improvement; I agree). Her power is super-agility. She's also very sensible and calm and collected, but at the same time totally impetuous and spontaneous and kind of random. She was one of the VERY first people to manifest powers, when she was just seventeen years old. Because she's one year older than Dad that means she's had powers for two more years than he has, which I think she's secretly a little bit proud of.

My brother's name is Daniel Powers. His power is phase-shifting. He can walk through walls and turn invisible and inaudible. If you're thinking that having a brother that can go invisible must be a pain, you're totally right. I'd only be able to see him if I could phase-shift too...

Except...

I can!

Because, you see, MY powers are super-strength AND super-agility AND phase-shifting! You could say I lucked out when it came to superpowers. Mum and Dad were really surprised (but also really happy and proud) when they realised I could do everything they (and Daniel) (he's a year older than me, by the way) could do.

Well...

Not EVERYTHING. I mean, my powers are ALMOST as good as theirs, I'm NEARLY as strong as Dad—he can lift a couch one-handed, but I need to use both arms to do it. And if you're thinking now 'oh, lifting a couch, that doesn't sound very impressive' just you go and try it and see how far YOU get, and remember also please that it's a really big couch and it's a fancy expensive one too with all steel framing inside and everything. Back now from trying? Sorry you questioned my amazing powers? I thought so.

Anyway, I was talking about me and my family and my powers, like how my super-agility (that bold thing WAS a bit too much, I think I'll stop doing it now) means I can do cool things like running up walls and flipping off and landing perfectly, or even running across water if I'm in the right kind of mood, except compared to Mum I only seem regular awesome instead of SUPER awesome. She can run up a wall, launch herself off it to ANOTHER wall, run along that, grab a handy flagpole, flip herself off and soar through the air to plant her foot squarely in a Virtual Bad Guy's backside. Seriously, I've seen her do exactly that at least twenty times, it's extremely awesome and never gets old.

Then there's Daniel and his phase-shifting. He can go proper invisible, I can just go half-invisible. You can still kind of see me and you can still kind of hear me, I taped myself once to see what it's like, my voice goes all weird and spooky and cool. Also I quite often end up falling through the floor—'walking through walls' is kind of like a side-power to being able to go out-of-phase, except 'walls' and 'floors' are pretty similar from a 'physics' point of view. Remembering to keep your feet 'solid' while they're on the ground and 'not solid' when they're going through something takes a lot of practice and concentration. It's also pretty tiring and I can only do it for a few minutes before I get puffed out, phase-shifting kind of makes it hard to breathe properly. Daniel's better at it than me, I have to admit—by which I mean that not only are his phase-powers stronger than mine, he's also better at controlling them. Also since I never go properly out-of-phase it always feels really sticky and weird whenever I walk through something, or just put my hand through a table, and Mum always warns me that if I accidentally leave my out-of-phase state while I'm halfway through something I won't just get stuck, I'll cause an atomic explosion—but that's never happened before, so I'm not so worried about it. Daniel says that's a secondary power of phase-shifting, like a 'safety feature', so that even if you tried you couldn't turn it off and cause those bothersome ol' atomic explosions. Then he usually puts his hand through my head or something because he knows I HATE that. He's like that, all superior and snarky and more 'villain' than 'hero' really, except behind all that snarkiness he's pretty much just a big softy and he's super-smart too, and so supportive of me becoming the greatest superhero in the world even though he doesn't really understand my ambition, really I couldn't ask for a better brother argh argh ARGH this STUPID curse.

I suppose I should tell you (actually I don't really have any choice) that I'm also cursed—or half-cursed anyway—to always tell the truth. Or to be honest, or anyway to not lie. There's a specific wording on the stupid thing—here we go, Mum's got it framed in the big lounge, 'To let truth's light shine ever bright', apparently curses have to rhyme and also be extremely cheesy. What happened is when Mum was pregnant with me she and Dad were fighting this techno-magic-cursey guy called The Enlightener, and before they defeated him he managed to put that curse on Mum. So, she can't lie, and I can only half-lie. Like, if she ate the last slice of cake and anyone even MENTIONED cake she'd have to confess, but I'd only have to if I was asked directly. Except sometimes I find myself confessing stuff that I really don't want to, it's kind of an inconsistent half-curse except for how annoying it is, that part of it is EXTREMELY consistent. It's even worse for Mum because she's got the full-strength version, Daniel and I both learned REALLY early to think REALLY hard before asking her anything, there have been a lot of Embarrassments.

So anyway, there you go. My family and our powers. I'm sure by now you're starting to understand why I'm so confident about becoming the greatest superhero in the world. I've never heard of ANYONE with as many powers as me, and neither have my parents—and they were VERY involved with the superhero community in EVERY age, from the Golden Age to the Chrome Age right through to the Plastic Age. Nobody they knew in ANY of those ages even had TWO powers, and I have three! Also, it's VERY rare that I inherited powers from my parents, usually that hardly ever happens. 'Inheriting' my brother's power as well is kind of weird, I guess, but he was around while Mum was pregnant with me so maybe that has something to do with it—and actually that isn't without precedent, siblings getting the same power I mean, look at the Spark Brothers for a semi-famous example, or Spic and Span the 'dust devils', they were brother and sister. As for me getting Mum and Dad's powers too, we all figure it could be something to do with the truth curse, that somehow it gave me an extra 'boost'—or 'promotion' to use the technical term—while I was still in the womb. Really, though, it doesn't matter how I ended up with three powers instead of just one. I don't question fate and I don't take destiny lightly; I've been given these gifts and it's my responsibility to use them for good, no matter how—or why—I got them.

I do have one problem, though. You can probably guess what it is. My superhero name. I don't have one yet. No matter how hard I try, I can't come up with anything appropriately awesome. It has to be perfect. The wrong name could end my superhero career before it even begins—and really, if you don't have a cool name, what's the point of being a superhero at all? I'll need an amazing costume too, but that kind of follows on from the name and is something I can worry about later. Anyway, back to names. Names names names. So important, right? When he first started out, Dad was Muscleman (gross I know), then he changed it to Brick (not much better) then after he met Mum he changed it to Forte (marginal improvement). Mum was Acrogirl when she started out ("It was a simpler time!" she protests), but then she changed it to Silhouette after she got this special suit that only shows her as (you guessed it) a silhouette. It actually looks really cool, when she stands still she's all dark purple and midnight blue, she can do all these poses that make her really hard to see even when you're looking right at her, and when she does her super-agility thing while wearing it she looks AWESOME. Daniel's already picked his name, too. 'Shifter'. Not even 'The Shifter', just 'Shifter'. Curse this honesty curse but that's a really cool superhero name, don't you think? So that leaves me, The Nameless One. It's HARD when you don't just have one defining power, you know? Daniel says because of my name I could be 'Charlatan' (or 'Charlottan', 'haha') but that's pretty negative for a superhero. Maybe if I was a supervillain but even then, no—it's not as if I TRICK people. He also suggested 'CharLotta Powers' and 'Superhero CharLottery'. I'm not even going to dignify those with a sneer. I suppose I still have a few years before I have to pick but even so it's something I think about a lot. ('A Charlotte' I can hear Daniel saying, he LOVES that kind of stupid joke, if you can even call it a 'joke'.)

So that's pretty much who I am and where I come from. Oh, speaking of that, I should probably tell you that I live in a secret base inside a volcano. My bedroom has a really nice view over heaps and heaps of jungle. I'm not sure WHICH jungle, exactly, since Mum and Dad are EXTREMELY secretive about some stuff, including 'which country we actually live in'. I guess it doesn't matter so much, but I don't understand why they don't just tell me. Would it be the end of the world if they did? I don't think so.

Anyway. 'Seclusion' (that's what the base is called, personally I don't much care for the name but Mum and Dad like it and probably it has some really deep and powerful meaning for them) is pretty cool as far as secret volcano bases go. It's really big and has lots of different rooms for different stuff, like a couple of lounges, an entertainment room, even stuff like a conference room (hardly EVER used), a partially-automated farm (we have pigs and chickens and cows and sheep and they are all delicious) and an indoor swimming pool and gymnasium (also hardly ever used, for reasons I'll explain in a minute). My room is nice, it's big and tall and has all my stuff in it, but it's not my favourite room. My FAVOURITE room is the training room. It's the room that's furthest back into the volcano itself, really deep inside, and it's huge, almost big enough to put the whole rest of the house inside. It's like a big cube and all the walls and floor and ceiling glow with these blue lines, and you can program it to become HEAPS of different training environments. It uses 'Hard Light Holograms'. I don't understand how they work but it feels pretty real. You can also make it create people, usually Virtual Bad Guys to practise fighting against, but sometimes I do stuff like make a stage for myself and put a bunch of people in front of it for when I'm practising guitar. The training room doesn't do 'sound' very well so the people don't actually cheer or anything, they just kind of stand there smiling or waving their arms or jumping up and down or whatever 'idle behaviour' I set them to, so it's actually a little bit creepy sometimes, but better than just sitting in my room, right? Anyway, I spend a LOT of time in the training room, learning how to use my powers to their full potential. Even though I've never been in an ACTUAL fight or an ACTUAL life-or-death situation, I feel very confident that when I eventually do go adventuring and get into trouble, I'll be able to handle myself. Besides, I have super-toughness as a secondary power to my super-strength, I can get tossed around a bit without getting seriously hurt.

So, that's pretty much 'me' as I am now. You're all caught up! Which means that I can talk about 'now' stuff and what I'm planning. You see, like I talked about before, the world NEEDS heroes. Mum and Dad have their own opinions of course but I can see what it's like out there, there's stuff that needs doing and I'm the girl to do it! I think they're too old-fashioned and conservative, and maybe just a little bit scared? I mean they're not COWARDS, definitely not, they did HEAPS of crazy-awesome stuff back when they were adventuring, I bet they haven't even told me half of what they got up to, really. But they've been living in Seclusion (oh my goodness I just got that) for like fifteen years now, I think that they're too comfortable here. I mean, YES it's got everything we need, YES it's a great secret base, but secret bases are where you're meant to go BACK to, not where you're supposed to STAY. You go out, you fight evil, you make the world a better place for all and then you return to your awesome secret base for a well-deserved rest, right? That's how it should go. That's how it WILL go, once I convince them that I'm ready to be a superhero, a REAL superhero doing REAL superhero stuff.

Except it's actually gotten really late while I've been writing all this, so maybe I'll just go to sleep now and talk to them tomorrow. Even Greatest Superheroes need their rest, right?

Tomorrow, my story begins!