“Bro you got a star birthmark on you somewhere?” Sketchy Kev badgered me as I used the fact that the machine needed to be moved to a safe location as an excuse to delay the inevitable.

“No,” I grunted, waving him away so I could finish the turn over the - now rubble strewn - aisle we were in.

I seriously hoped to god that I didn’t get stuck on any of it, but knowing my abysmal luck, that’s exactly what would happen.

…actually, Luck was a stat and I had ten in it, which, if my other stats were anything to go by, was effectively ‘peak human’. Did that mean I was significantly more lucky than the average person? Wouldn’t my power have to bend all of reality around me for that to be the case? The scope of it was-

“My guy, you stand rushed me just now. I saw you do that shit,” Kevin said with much more focus and alacrity than I was honestly expecting from a man who I had never encountered sober in two years of knowing him.

Annoyingly, he was now yelling this at me from a safe distance away down the aisle, which meant it was loud enough for other people to hear it too.

Which, you know, wasn’t ideal.

I swiftly swung the forklift through the brief turn without doing half as much spot checking as I should have, hit the lever for the forks so hard they practically slammed into the ground in front of me, then hopped off the machine to stomp up to the too loud stoner.

“Kev- quiet the fuck down, man!” I hissed at him, grabbing both his shoulders in my hands. He tried to chortle and shrug me off, but surprisingly for both of us, my grip might as well have been iron clad compared to his attempts to resist.

I could see the exact moment Kevin's addled mind realized he was pissing off a metahuman with no known affiliation or history.

It wasn’t like it was illegal to be an unattached metahuman, it’s just that in practice, no one ever did so. It was a lot like what Detective White had told me that morning. As a member of the general public, there were basically just two kinds of Meta.

Ultra League heroes, and psychopaths.

And Kev really had no way of knowing which category I fell into.

Sighing and abruptly letting go of him, I pinched the bridge of my nose in irritation at the unintended threat.

I seriously just wanted him to shut up and sit still for a second to talk to him. That was all.

“Kev, man, I literally just got powers yesterday, and I would really appreciate it if you could not out me in public right after I saved your life,” I tried, not managing to keep nearly as much of my irritation out of my voice as I wanted. He seemed to get the message though, because he jolted at my statement, then immediately began leaning away from me and spinning on the spot to scan the area around us.

“Ooooh, shit. Yeah, sorry man. Forgot we were at work, to be honest,” Kev apologized when he finished his spin and ended up facing me again.

We stood in silence for a few more seconds, and I was just about to try and work out what I should say next when the intercom for the entire building kicked in with a crackle overhead.

“Can Nicholas please come to the office, that’s Nicholas to the office,” it buzzed, my superiors obviously not happy with the private communication that had (so far) failed to make me manifest in the correct location instantaneously.

Retail was like that sometimes.

“I gotta go, just, seriously don’t tell anyone Kev. Please, don’t fuck me,” I insisted one last time before stepping around him, taking one last grouchy look at all the broken stone I was going to have to write off and clean up later.

Assuming I had a job later, which I really hoped was the case.

“Bro, come on. I got you. Yo, when are you off? You open?” He asked, twisting around to follow after me as I headed towards the manager's office in the rear of the building - instead of moving to try and clean up the mess he’d caused.

Because of course he did.

“Yes,” I said through a mask of professional courtesy that was probably the only thing stopping me from sprinting away from the air headed man.

“Dope. You still bus everywhere? I’ll grab coffee and give you a ride home,” he stated out of nowhere, nodding swiftly to himself and then promptly disengaging to help a customer who had been lingering patiently in a nearby aisle, obviously waiting for us to finish speaking so he could ask a question.

It was such a smooth way of locking me into that ride without giving me the opportunity to reject him that it was almost uncanny, which was the best way to describe Sketchy Kevin sometimes.

He was simultaneously barely intellectually present, and as savvy as any loan shark when he cared to spend more than half a second thinking about something. It was half the reason management kept him around. Even inebriated, he was more useful than seventy percent of the employees here.

And given that he nearly just got himself killed, that was saying kind of a lot; though if that was about the store or Kevin himself, I was unsure.

I could just ditch him at the end of my shift - go out the back or stay late like I had to for my current quest objective anyway…

But something told me Kevin would very quickly start telling people things I didn't want him to if I left him to his own devices for too long.

No, I figured it was better that I humour him for a bit.

That decision in mind -depressing as it was to think about - I made my way to the office, and promptly entered the room.

The office was the size of a shoebox. It had one frontal area that the door led to that had two computers in it, one next to the door and one on the opposite wall, with barely enough space for two people to sit in front of each. A narrow hallway continued past these two computers and terminated in a dead end, where a minifridge was haphazardly placed.

Two only slightly larger offices branched off from the hallway, making the entire thing essentially three very small computer rooms.

I say all this because, with the addition of me, there were something like five people in that front room, meaning it was packed like a sardine can. It looked like basically all three members of upper management were here, including Mario, as well as his boss, the manager for the entire location.

And all four of them were as far as they could politely get from the last person who had been waiting for me:

Breakdown.

Unlike the last time I’d encountered her directly - which was while I was in the middle of a blind panic, really - this time I had a moment to appreciate how form fitting her costume was before the sensation of dread washed over.

It was the most insane thing, too.

I was doing my best to keep my casual scan of her outfit, well, casual. You know. Not creepy.

This was made notably hard by the fact that - like literally every superhero whose power wasn’t explicitly ‘being large’ - Breakdown was in noticeably good shape, and her outfit was basically just a long sleeved unitard made of a slightly thicker than normal material.

Probably some kind of Smith fabric.

The blended purples of her outfit were only broken up by the golden symbol on her chest - a stylized hazard symbol.

Maybe I spent too long staring at that. Maybe I was being weird and creepy and she noticed. Maybe I just stood there like an idiot for too long.

But when I finished my top to bottom scan of her and finally landed on her face, shadowed by her voluminous hood, I felt it. A shudder down my spine, accompanied by the instant recognition that if I fought her, I would die.

End of story.

At about the same time as I had this realization, she smirked at me. Like she knew.

“Nicholas, this is - ah, Breakdown. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. She’s with the league, and wanted to ask you some questions about yesterday's break in. You- ah, you talked a bit with the criminal and-“ My boss' boss' boss nammered at me nervously.

I literally never saw the guy unless he wanted to yell at someone for something, so I hardly remembered his face at all. He was clearly unsure of what to do in this situation too, because he looked almost relieved when Breakdown cut him off with a voice that was oddly soft and gentle sounding for someone whose demeanor practically screamed brutalism.

“I’d like to talk to him alone if that’s alright with you. Interviews are supposed to be private. You can make a request with the league if you suspect anything improper might have occurred, or I can arrange a meeting with him for another time now that he’s in front of me,” she told the assembled managers, who all paused to look at each other as though each of them expected the others to know the correct response.

Now, I’m not new to being called into my manager's office. Not because I’m a known troublemaker or anything - sometimes a manager just has a chip on his shoulder, and you have no choice but to deal with it.

And the first thing I learned about that was that you should never go into a meeting alone with someone who has more power than you.

If a manager has no witnesses to say they did it, and they really want to screw you, they will - no questions asked.

Since I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, and knew heroes had a code of conduct that protected me from overt violence - I did something stupid.

Or maybe it was very smart. Who knows. I did have twelve intelligence and twelve wisdom, after all.

“I’d actually prefer if they stay? I should have representation from the store, right?” I asked somewhat meekly, turning to the assembled management team who had transitioned to trying to figure out if that actually was the case.

I could tell none of them wanted to do it, but they just as obviously were so shackled by corporate bullshit that they probably didn’t think they had a choice.

“I was there too, so…maybe I might know something?” Mario offered eventually, shifting to stand closer to me.

Breakdown frowned - I think, anyway. It was hard to tell with the hood and mask and all - Then she clicked her tongue once before answering.

“That can work. Could I ask everyone else to give me the room, please?” She asked in a casually dismissive way that had the rest of the management team swiftly scurrying past me in an attempt to escape their own offices at this woman's command.

I had no idea how she did it. I was positive that anyone else doing the same thing would have gotten in trouble for even trying a stunt like that.

I mean… this was Canada. Breakdown had no authority to demand anyone here do much of anything except maybe demand I talk to her in relation to the crime.

And yet here we were.

“Can I sit down here or..?” I asked when a few seconds had passed after everyone else had left and Mario and I were just standing ominously in a loose triangle with Breakdown as the final point.

“Yes. I just had some questions,” she began swiftly, stepping to the side so I could reach one of the two chairs in the room and orienting to continue staring at me the entire time I was moving. She completely ignored Mario, acknowledging his presence only by shifting her cape out of his way when he moved to follow me.

It was… creepy.

I tried to imagine what I’d do if she used her power on me and, again, found it inhumanly difficult to think about anything but just dying. It wasn’t just my common sense telling me to be afraid of the relatively more experienced meta with the extremely lethal power, it was like an outside force was making me scared.

‘Is it like when you see a high level enemy in a game and instead of a level the game just shows a skull?’ I thought to myself, instead of lingering overly long on how uncomfortable it was to have something make me feel afraid.

The feeling was only really present when I spared a thought towards fighting or resisting her and I felt like I could probably ignore it if I had to…

Even if I’d definitely freaking die in that scenario.

So I sat down to wait, and resolved just to not give her a reason to kill me.

That was easy enough right?

***

Point of View: Breakdown

She was going to kill him.

What the hell kind of stunt was this? She wanted to ask some very simple questions, and he had gone and made a shit show of things.

For one thing, she wasn’t supposed to be here. Adrenaline having a personal skill that let him go toe to toe with her in melee had skyrocketed his priority status, and she’d annoyed Guildmaster one too many times for nepotism to shield her from being removed from dealing with him. As it was, she was on dungeon duty starting tomorrow and it was the absolutely last thing she wanted to be doing when Adrenaline was still out there being a damn nuisance.

She’d come here to sound out the meta that had mysteriously been present yesterday, and had found it trivially easy to both find him, and to ‘commandeer’ all the security cam footage of him getting his ass kicked in the parking lot. It wasn’t legal, at least not for her - the league had its own methods of hiding people's identities - but people rarely argued with her when she just acted like she was doing something official, which was how she’d found herself here.

Watching security footage had made it really obvious that this Nicholas guy was both incredibly new, and incredibly weak. By the time Adrenaline had nearly killed him, she doubted he’d even spent a single stat point.

She didn’t know his class or his aspect, but that didn’t really matter.

She wanted to go after Adrenaline, and given she was officially forbidden from doing so, she needed help that wasn’t part of the league to do it.

A rare independent hero could be useful for that.

So her main itinerary for today had been to make sure he wasn’t a villain, delay his inevitable joining of the league so he could help her, and then, finally, to give him some tips no independent was ever likely to get in exchange for agreeing to help her.

She thought it was a fair trade, if nothing else.

The snag had been the other guy that had remained behind. He didn’t have powers, that much was obvious from his portly physique. That meant she would have to use doublespeak. Talk around the true nature of powers.

Niagara was the first, and the last time the general public had been made aware of the system, and the lively tourist destination now had a colossal concrete wall built around it.

Naturally, this made the conversation she was about to have frustratingly vague, especially because she also wasn’t sure if this guy just assumed having his manager here would prevent her from outing him as a metahuman or not.

Annoyingly, it pretty much did.

“Before we start,” she began, tentatively using her media voice - or as Atomic once put it, her ‘kind of creepy asmr’ voice.

“I can make time to meet you privately, while you are less busy." - She offered, as pleasantly as her annoyance would allow.

“No, I’m good. I’m happy to help,” Nicholas said with an extremely fake looking smile on his face that told her he knew exactly what he was doing.

“If there’s anything the police missed, I was right there to the end,” the manager added somewhat proudly.

‘I’m going to kill him,’ she raged internally, locking her gaze on Nicholas and focusing on picking her next words very carefully.

She hated doublespeak.

…maybe she would skip the build advice for today after all.

***

Point of View: Nicholas

‘Why is she glaring at me? What did I do? Oh shit, oh fuck, oh shit,’ I wailed internally, even as I forced my customer service mask on to obscure my abject terror.

“As you may know, there were actually two metahumans here yesterday besides myself,” Breakdown began.

I noted that there was a roughness to her voice that she had lacked before, and I couldn’t tell if that was her being more or less casual.

More so, at the mention of a second metahuman, I had to very strongly resist the urge to peek at Mario to see if he was looking at me.

“I was never told! Is… are we trying to locate this other guy or girl?” He asked, leaning forward with interest.

I could only stare at the man in disbelief. He had so immediately jumped to ‘we’ to describe the situation that I somehow just knew there was a leadership seminar playing on loop in his head right now.

Imagine being paid to go somewhere full of free food and drinks, where all you have to do is listen to someone else talk about being a better boss, and then imagine you somehow manage to come back a worse manager each time.

That pretty much summed up my opinion of Mario in a nutshell. He wasn’t the worst, but he was definitely as far as he could possibly be from helpful.

I set that aside and stayed focused on Breakdown as she answered him.

“Yes, but he is not currently under investigation,” she said, staring straight at me as she did so with an almost unblinking stare.

The emphasis in that statement had been very clear.

‘Don’t fuck around’

And even if I wasn’t planning oin it before, I definitely wasn’t now.

“Er, then why mention him? I’m sorry, I’m just trying to understand what you need from Nicholas here,” Mario said smoothly, drawing attention back to himself and even sort of defending me. If he noticed the way Breakdown had kind of been ignoring him, he gave no sign of it as he spoke either. He just blithely plugged along.

I mentally revised my opinion of him slightly upward at that.

“Nicholas was in the parking lot with injuries when I arrived, so we believe he must have seen this metahuman. We were hoping he could provide us with any information he might have… conveniently forgotten,” she said delicately.

There were actually laws about this. A civilian couldn’t be forced to unmask someone and the courts rarely ever tried. If a villain ever found out who had outed them, it would be almost trivially easy to get even. You could argue that witness protection could work, but given the cops handled that, and they weren’t legally allowed to field any meta’s of their own and well…

The few recorded cases of it happening were helpfully covered in almost all highschool civics courses, and that’s as much as I’ll say about that.

“I’d… rather not,” I said, straining to maintain a conciliatory tone. Years of pretending I cared what my boss had to say about much of anything served me well here, because she nodded at me like she had expected I would say that, and wasn’t altogether that put out by it.

Or rather, wasn’t as put out by it as she already had been, which still seemed like quite a lot to yours truly.

“I understand. But I had to try. I just hope that Flathead shows up to talk to me before I have to declare him an accomplice,” Breakdown said in an airy way. The sudden shift in tone was jarring, and it stuck out to me - but my conscious mind never connected it with anything. It just… made me anxious.

More anxious.

I squinted at her back as she abruptly stood to leave, leaving Mario almost as confused as I was as she abruptly just… exited the conversation.

This was where my big stupid mouth got me into trouble, unfortunately, because something about what she said simply bothered me enough to speak out of turn for a second.

“Sorry, Flathead?” I asked incredulously, and she paused to look at me over her shoulder.

“Yeah, bad guys don’t get to name themselves,” She said, then turned back around, presumably because she could see in my face that I was going to say more.

Which I shouldn’t have. By god I shouldn’t I have.

But it was like having a smudge on your glasses, or a popcorn kernel in your teeth. You just couldn’t ignore it.

“Yeah but, Flathead? What about him made you go with that? I mean it should at least be descriptive right? So the public knows what to expect if he shows up somewhere?” I pressed.

Then I froze, as a wide smile spread itself across Breakdown's face that was the exact opposite of comforting. How such a pretty woman could behave in such an overtly off putting way was beyond me, but she managed it. Intimidating too, which I guess was the point.

“Oh, he had the most ridiculous hair,” she said in a joking tone, but with body language that made me feel like she was insulting me to my face - probably because that’s exactly what she was doing.

Again, I opened my mouth to argue about this, but by then my brain had reengaged itself, and I had realized what was happening. And wise man that I wasam, I decided not to play along. Or ah, to stop playing along. Surely one complaint couldn’t be proof positive of anything.

‘Who am I kidding?, I’m screwed,’ I mentally groaned to myself as I hastily cast about for something to say that wouldn’t be incredibly incriminating.

“What, a flat top buzzcut?” I ventured weakly, trying to just… lean into the joke to play things off. Breakdown regarded me calmly for a moment before replying, like she was sizing me up for the first time.

She didn’t seem particularly impressed, which - I mean, fair I guess.

“Sure. Anyway. If he doesn’t show up at the League headquarters soon he’ll probably be in a ton of trouble,” Breakdown continued, her mood obviously vastly improved by my minor slip up.

Okay, major slip up.

“I’m… sure he’ll reach out,” I offered as neutrally as I could. I glanced at Mario to see how he was taking this, and as much as I didn’t really like the guy, he could obviously tell something weird was going on at this point, because he was looking at the both of us like we were aliens.

“Excellent. If you remember any other information that would be helpful, you can ask for me downtown, you know where league HQ is?” Breakdown asked, going back towards the exit.

“Uh… yeah…” I said to her back as she pulled the door open and slipped out of the office.

The only response I got back was a somewhat smug nod, and then the door closed behind her.

I once again had to resist the urge to drop my face into my hands to scream, instead turning back to Mario.

“That was a lot right?” I half joked, just so it wouldn’t look like I was too worried. Well, and also to sound him out. I’d have killed to know what he was thinking right now. I had previously assumed that my identity as a metahuman was open knowledge for management - they were the ones who had access to the security cameras after all. But if even they didn’t know, then I might actually have a shot at this secrecy thing. Except for Breakdown. It was pretty obvious she knew I had powers.

Which… hopefully wouldn’t be a problem as long as I just came clean and told her I wasn’t interested in punching bad guys for a living. Then she’d leave me alone and I could do my quest - which was really just going to work like usual.

I’m a simple creature like that.

“A lot? Nick she barely talked to us,” Mario said with an irritated tone to his voice.

“Yeah but she was intimidating right?” I tried, gesturing helplessly at the door Breakdown had left through. “Her power is disintegrating stuff,” I added pointedly when he didn’t respond immediately, as though Mario didn’t already know that.

“Nick, you think conversations longer than two exchanges are intimidating. Seasonal needs help cleaning something up, go help them,” He said dismissively to me in response, instantly turning his attention inward as though I wasn’t present, and falling into a contemplative state.

Watching a manager think was like seeing a unicorn in the wild, and for the love of me, I couldn’t fathom what the hell he was thinking about.

That concern stuck with me as I made my way back outside to Kevin, who was dutifully - and slowly - shifting broken patio stones into a big black bin on wheels, and I groaned, remembering that I still had him to deal with.

* * *

“So you make those stone dudes, and they punch stuff? Dude, that’s a stand,” Kevin insisted.

“No, it’s not! I don’t even know what that is!” I complained. I watched a bit of anime here or there, but not nearly so much as Kev did.

I think watching anime might actually be Kev’s primary hobby besides smoking - and I suspect selling - weed.

“It’s what you do bro! On god! Look I’ve got a punching bag at home just let me record you punching it with your sta-“ Kev continued, half begging me to let him see my powers at work.

“It’s not a stand!” I insisted.

“How many can you summon?” Kev asked pointedly, pulling to a stop at a red light and turning to stare at me.

It occurred to me I was letting a guy who had bloodshot red eyes drive me home. That… probably wasn’t super smart. But Kev was as close as I had to a friend at work so… I’d just try and keep an eye on the road for him.

“One?” I replied hesitantly - mostly because I was unsure of where he was going with this.

“And all it does is help you hit stuff?” Kev continued.

“Uh… so far?” I replied.

“That shit can evolve? Oh man, that fucking rules. Okay, okay, okay, I’ve got some tactical stuff at home you can use, like, vests and stuff. , Yyou got a mask?” He asked.

He fucking what what the fuck now? I genuinely shuddered to ask why, exactly, Sketchy Kevin - the weird stoner who never seemed to get fired - happened to either need or want tactical body armor and found myself coming up blank for ‘good’ reasons.

“No, because I don’t plan on-“ I snapped back at him, only to be interrupted by the sound of an explosion less than a block away.

Kev slammed the brakes and pulled to the side of the road automatically, making way for any ambulances or speedsters that might be enroute, and then turned to stare at me expectantly. Every other car on the road mirrored him.

“Dude, no. I don’t wanna die.” I headed him off before he could actually say anything.

“Dude! It’s right there! Come on!” He whined at me.

“Absolutely the fuck not!” I barked back, ducking down to see the plume of gray smoke rising into the early evening sky through the car'scars front window.

“Bro I will literally pay you,” Kevin begged.

I rolled my eyes at him, but he quickly began digging around in the little compartment between our seats for something. First, he pulled out a rolled up piece of paper stuffed to the brim with little green nuggets of plant matter. It stunk like a skunk, but he happily deposited its end into his mouth before returning to his search, which quickly produced a small sandwich bag.

A sandwich bag that was full of twenty and fifty dollar bills.

He held it up and shook it in front of me like it was catnip or something.

It was tempting but not that tempting. I didn’t need money that badly.

“Still no,” I told him bluntly, crossing my arms and sinking into my seat to wait out the emergency stop to all nearby traffic. Hell, we were hardly more than a few blocks from my home at this point - I could get out and walk if I had to.

“Come on! I just wanna see!” Kevin insisted.

“N-“ I began, but just then a new pop-up appeared in front of me, courtesy of my power.

Quest: The Stoner & The Super

Description: Escort Kevin to and from the scene of the crime. Do not let Kevin get injured.

Reward: 200 Experience. 638 Dollars. ???

Bonus Objective: Stop the Criminal

Accept / Decline

“-ooookay. You just wanna see what’s going on right?” I demanded, instantly changing my tune.

I couldn’t help it. Even if I never planned on wearing spandex, and never planned on going anywhere near the bonus objective, the sweet siren call of leveling up called to me. It… wasn’t like we’d be the first people to rush towards a crime to try and record the heroes stopping it. Yeah. This was… doable.

Totally.

“Yeh,” was Kevin's brief but easy going response, as a smile lit up his face - and a lighter lit up his blunt.

I spared a thought for the sudden timely arrival of one of these stupid quests everytime I started to feel comfortableto comfortable, but ultimately brushed it off.

My power was being a game character. I guess it only made sense that the game wanted me to play it.

I’d just have to be careful about how I went about doing it. Maybe in… I dunno… ten years when I’m a max level character after grinding all these easier quests, I’d join the league or something.

For now?

For now I was just going to escort my stoner friend to and from a spot a block away, and nothing more.

At least, that’s what I really wanted to happen.

Let a guy dream okay?