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Charlotte, it has been 19,204,147 seconds since your last entry.

xx49.07.16 | 19:24 | Wednesday

Oh. My. Goodness. I had to use Opal's calculator to even figure out how long that is—222 days! (Daniel loves measuring things in seconds, do NOT ask me why.) I mean, I knew I hadn't written an entry in a while, but I had no idea it was that long. Has it really been seven whole months since I was in Emerald Hill? That seems so wrong. I have been pretty busy ... but I guess that's not really an excuse. Or maybe it is. I originally meant for this journal to be a record of my rise to superhero glory, but one thing's for sure, there hasn't been a lot of glory lately.

Basically, we're losing. Big time. The supervillains just have such an enormous head start on us. Hard to even know how to catch up. Dad says that's one of the downsides of being a hero, 'villains act, heroes react', which means basically that they're the ones creating these villainous schemes and all we can do is try to stop them. I understand his point but still. Unfair. We've found like fifty places like Emerald Hill, all with the same story—I mean, they didn't all have someone like poor little Alice doing the mood/mind control thing, you wouldn't even BELIEVE some of the gross stuff we've found. One of them had all of these rats tied together by their tails and they were all screaming, I've had about a dozen nightmares about that. That's when we find anything at all, most of the time we're too late and all that's left is ... well. Bodies. Or people with their brains turned into mush. That's 'Segregation'. They take the ones who qualify for Advanced Self-Improvement and they kill or lobotomise the rest.

...

Sorry, I just had to go beat up a bunch of Virtual Bad Guys to calm myself down. Mum and Dad are away so I don't have any fighty powers but actually I'm starting to prefer it that way. I have to get used to not having super-strength and super-agility, I can't rely on having ANY powers. Power Mimicry is a pretty good promotion, but it means I have to stay sharp. Daniel's been helping me do some tests to figure out its limitations, apparently the more powers I'm copying at once the weaker each power will be, and the more I'm exposed to a certain power the more 'comfortable' my aura will get, and even some stuff about how 'close' I feel to the person I'm copying from—really it's pretty complicated, I don't understand half the stuff he goes on about. Probably I should try to focus and get things straight for myself. Here we go:

My promotion allows me to mimic the abilities of others. I have to be within quite a close range, around twenty metres, to be able to do this. Once I've copied their ability, I'll keep it for as long as I stay within twenty metres of that person, but if I move away from them it'll only stay with me for forty-seven minutes (well, unless I've been in copying range for ages—like a week or more—then I get to keep it for longer, we haven't really been able to test that properly, though, Daniel just intuited it from the fact that I didn't seem to lose Mum and Dad's powers when they took their trips away). Daniel made a little app for Opal, a countdown clock, so I can activate that once I'm 'away'—I can even put in the name of the person I'm copying from and there are little icons for each different power, it's kind of cute actually. Whoops, that counts as unfocused, let me try again:

If I copy Dad's super-strength power and nobody else's, I have around 80% of his ability. We did a bunch of tests to get that number, it took hours. If I copy Dad's super-strength and Mum's super-agility, then my super-strength goes down to about 70%. Super-agility isn't so easy to test but Daniel says it's probably about the same. If I'm also copying his phase-shifting, all of my powers go down to about 65%. Apparently the reduction of strength isn't linear.

Phew. Enough about that, I'm starting to get a headache. I'll talk about something else, aside from depressing supervillain plans we know nothing about and brain-hurty power stuff, because I actually have a reason for writing in this journal again. It's because I'm excited and I don't really have anyone to share that excitement with—C2 is coming to visit! I haven't seen her for MONTHS, after all the unpleasantness in Emerald Hill—oh. Right, I haven't written about that.

Well, basically? People are pretty awful. I never realised this before but non-supers have this weird inferiority complex. Did I write about going to the party?

...

Apparently not. Um, well, it wasn't as much fun as I expected it to be. It kind of came out somehow that I was a super and after that people got kind of weird. And then C2 tried to defend me and admitted to being a super too and then people got weird, even her friends. Actually, especially her friends. Apparently mundanes get uncomfortable about supers—of course I knew that, everyone knows about The Event, but I thought maybe people might have calmed down a bit, that maybe people might have grown up and become a little more comfortable with the idea that some people are just better. Or superior. Not like THAT, just … if one person has the power to fly and another person has no power at all you have to view the flying guy as just higher tier, don't you? Anyway, we're heroes, not villains, we PROTECT ordinary people, that's just how it works! They should be, I don't know, I mean heroes don't do it for the gratitude, that's not what it's about, but this weirdness and hostility ... I just don't understand it.

Anyway. Things got kind of tough for C2 and her parents, they actually moved out of town a few weeks after that party. They went to Knight City in NoZo (that's where Emerald Hill turned out to be, near the Dead Mountains), because there's a girl's school there that C2 wanted to attend. Blackbird Academy. I looked it up and it seems kind of 'tough', I mean it's where a lot of military families send their girls if they want them to be soldiers or something, but C2 chose it and she seems happy so I guess that's the important thing. Her parents are doing well anyway, her dad got a job in Knight City really easily, he's some kind of analyst or consultant or business guy or something, I don't know, but their house is much nicer. Well, it's an apartment now. But it's better than the house they had in Emerald Hill. Kind of. I mean it doesn't have a back yard but it's much tidier. C2 sent me lots of pictures. We talk every day through emails and stuff but it'll be SO good to see her again in person, I can't WAIT. Mum and Dad are bringing her, she said she's really looking forward to travelling in Mum's spaceship. Personally I'd be happy if I never had to get into that thing again, I mean it LOOKS cool but when you're actually out there in space it's just, ugh, just terrifying. I know I live on the moon but at least there's a sky here, even if it's fake, and a sun, even if that's fake too, and jungles, which aren't fake except they couldn't exist up here if it wasn't for a bunch of artificial stuff so I don't know, you tell me.

What else do I have to report ... Mum and Dad are off investigating a lot, but to be honest (and I don't have much of a choice what with my can't-lie-curse and all) they're not doing a very good job of it. I can't really put too much blame on them, though, it's not like we've got any leads. Even stuff like the NeoTerra trucks in Emerald Hill turned out to be a dead-end, turns out they were just stolen. Yep. Daniel and me are up here on monitoring duty, trying to find supervillain plots before they hatch but it's just really boring and difficult. The scanner goes soooooo slow and when you get a POI (that's 'Point Of Interest' but POI is way more funner to say) you have to flick to the 'real' map (not the radiation map) and do all this cross-referencing and stuff, I mean the computer takes care of most of it but it's just so boring and repetitive and BORING. We never even find anything until it's too late, and mostly it's not even our scanning that gets that, it's Gaia's Compass system or a report from one of our allies—although none of them are really doing much. They're all as 'careful' (read: hopelessly over-cautious) as Mum and Dad. And I say 'all' but actually there are only a couple of them down there, most of the 1st Gens are in hiding or adopting Public Identities. Envy Death is a LAWYER now, can you believe? Litigation! I mean ... okay, actually that kind of fits her really well and I bet her power—stirring up negative emotions—is pretty helpful for that, especially if she's subtle about it. Envy was actually a supervillain but she switched sides like a week before The Event. Not that it made any difference, I mean all of the surviving supers just pretty much went into hiding and the whole big hero/villain conflict never came to anything ... I'm letting myself ramble again, I should try to control that. I guess because I haven't journalled for a while a bunch of stuff got pent up and ir's coming out in weird ways. What was I even talking about?

...

Right! C2's coming! In like just a week, once her break starts, she's going to be here for almost a month, oh, I can't wait. I want her here NOW, I bet she'd make even monitoring duty more fun.

Speaking of which, it's almost seven-thirty, time for me to get to work. Sigh. I just bet I won't find ANYTHING, we're doing the Sparkling Islands and the oceans around them (you know, in case of underwater bases). What's going to happen THERE? The Sparkling Islands are (is?) the most peaceful place (places?) in the world, I doubt supervillains would even know they exist.