The Impossibles Pt. 02

Bryant DeWitt sat down, with a thump, onto the rooftop of some nameless office building and considered that maybe passing out would be the best choice. At the beginning of the day, if he had been told that he would meet Lady Luck? That would have been shocking enough that he would have called it the weirdest thing of the year. Then he had gotten superpowers. That was literally life changing levels of shocking.

Now?

Now this was just getting ridiculous.

The entire DeWitt family surrounded him, looking concerned. The fact that they were all either in or formerly had been in the costumes of some of the more notable heroes of Century City was quite possibly the most ridiculous thing yet.

Dad grinned as he knelt beside Bryant. "I know it's a bit of a shock. But, uh, well, we had a family discussion, and decided it'd be better you learn this way."

"Better than how I learned," Rachel said, her voice wry.

"H-How did you learn?" Bryant asked.

Rachel's looked aside. "Uh. I... tried to fist fight Dad."

Dad chuckled. "Tried, being the operative word." He smirked, slightly.

"C-Can you put on pants, Dad?" Bryant asked, looking up at the sky. Dad blinked, then focused and clothing shimmered onto his body - he was wearing a symsuit too, it seemed. Bryant felt his own symbiotic, shapeshifting superhero outfit quiver in response to Dad suddenly being clothed, as if the two symsuits could feel one another.

"Sorry," Dad said, chuckling.

"Being the King of the Forest, it requires a lot of public nudity," Mom said, smiling. She was still mostly dressed in her Lady Luck outfit, with only the domino mask being off allowing Bryant to tell she was Mom. The effect was deeply, deeply surreal. It was like... she was his mom, but, also, she was still Lady Luck. Which made the fact that Bryant had spent what felt like most of his years aged fourteen to yesterday jerking off two or three times a day to her pinup poster deeply, deeply... deeply awkward.

"H-How long have you all been superheroes?" Bryant asked.

"Well, two years for me," Mom said. "Ever since I hit that leprechaun with an SUV."

Bryant blinked.

"But, well, the nice thing about being the luckiest girl in the world is... well, luck is a bit infectious," Mom said, shrugging. "A year later, your father was on a hike and stumbled on the antler crown of the King of the Forest. By putting it on, he was crowned king of the fae, and became the half-brother of Baron Beast."

"And Barbs?" Bryant asked, looking at his wheelchair bound sister. The car crash that had put her in said wheelchair had been three months ago. "How did you get hit by a car, if we're so lucky."

Barbs shrugged. "I'd be happy to be hit by six cars for this!" she giggled. "Turned out, being stuck in physical recovery was exactly what I needed to hit the DT." She wheeled herself forward and backwards in a little victory jiggle.

"You... hit the..." Bryant blinked a few times. The Determination Threshold had been well studied, ever since World War 2. The more famous people who had hit the Threshold were genetically unexceptional, and totally undetectable as being different by magic or advanced technology. Even psychics had a hard time picking up humans or aliens that had hit the DT. But it still kicked them from being human to being something more.

"Yup!" Barbs grinned. "And, like most people, I kept it to myself and did the logical thing. I built an increasing army of remote piloted robot bodies and named myself Starfleet." She giggled. "What else would an N-3 power intelligence do?"

Bryant slowly tilted his head back. "Right." He said. "So... Dad became a hero, and Mom didn't know, and you became a hero, and neither Dad and Mom knew, and Mom was a hero, and none of us knew and... and..." He looked at Rachel. "And you've been Corvi? Corvi Magpie?"

"Yup!" Rachel said, grinning. "I was just lucky enough to be near to the Dark Lord." She held up her hand, showing off the glinting Ring of Ultimate Darkness that shimmered on her finger, despite her currently being in her all too human identity. She wiggled her fingers again and the ring vanished with a twinkle. "Then it was just a matter of borrowing it."

Bryant didn't know a whole lot about Corvi Magpie, beyond the fact she was a magic user. But he did know the Dark Lord.

"You stole the Ring of Ultimate Darkness off the Dark Lord's finger?" He whispered.

"And other things!" she said, cheerfully.

"She picked her name, we didn't give it to her, she's proud of filching this stuff," Barbs said, rolling her eyes.

"Magpies are cute and corvids are smart and stealing to the evil and giving to myself so I might deliver the righteous beat downs required is just common sense," Rachel said, sounding utterly without shame. She lifted her nose. "Besides, I've only been corrupted to evil, like, for one week."

Bryant blinked again.

"So, I found out about your father, then your father found out about Rachel, Rachel discovered Barbs, and then, we all had to discuss what to do with... well... you. Since you're, you know, you weren't..." Mom blushed and shrugged. "See, superheroes operate on different rules."

"Right," Bryant said, slowly.

"No, I mean, like, okay, so..." Mom clasped her hands together. "It... how did..."

"Mom, let me," Barbs said, cheerfully. She flicked her wheelchair's armrest open, revealing a high tech array of gizmos and devices built into the otherwise normal chair. She tapped a few buttons and a glowing hologram projected up and out of the armrest, creating a tiny figure of... well, Bryant. "Okay, this is you, as a normal human being."

Bryant frowned slightly. His hologram had him looking a bit derpy.

"Fleet," Dad said, his voice soft.

Barbs snickered, then tapped a few buttons. "Sorry, Dad." The hologram now looked a bit more like how Bryant looked when he saw himself in the mirror. Save it had been, well. Mirrored. "Now, you have your average human body, your normal human muscles, and your human consciousness - a kind of quantum foam suspended in a bio-neural lattice that you call the brain. You lose the quantum cohesion, the brain is useless. Lose the brain, the quantum cohesion goes away. Basic soul dynamics, you learned this in high school, right?"

Right, Bryant thought, though his teacher had talked slower, used simpler words, and had still somehow been harder to understand.

"Now!" Barbs said, then tapped a button and a hologram of Lady Luck - the domino mask on, in her classic victory pose. "This is Mom! But if we look at her with a quantum spectralometer, we see... this!"

A haze of shimmering sparkles appeared around her.

"This is the meta that is in metahuman!" She pointed at the sparkles. "The quantum foam that is human consciousness has been expanded to surround her body, sustained by whatever archetype is used to grant you your powers. This is what we call willpower! If someone tries to, say, blast you with a body transformation ray, or read your mind, or tell your future, or teleport you into space, that willpower can be focused to block it, even subconsciously. All metahumans have this, even those that just passed the DT."

"So, if we told a normal human about our secret ID," Mom said. "Then any telepath could yank it out of your brain several orders of magnitude more easily than they could if you're a metahuman. And even that... still made it a close run thing."

"Since there aren't that many telepaths," Dad added.

"And there are lots of heroic telepaths on counter-scanning duty," Rachel added.

Bryant blushed and smiled. "Guys. It's okay. I get it." He held up his hands, sighing slightly. "I'd rather be lied too than to put any of you in danger." He paused. "Wait, shit does this mean I can't tell Melissa?"

"Probably not," Mom said, a bit sympathetically.

"Not unless she's secretly a superhero," Barbs said, grinning cheerfully as she shut her hologram down with a flick of her thumb. "Or supervillain."

"It's fine either way," Rachel said, her voice dry. "Anything you do in your superhero costume doesn't count."

"Do not listen to your sister, everything counts, it counts a lot!" Mom said, hurriedly, holding her palms up, her cheeks darkening slightly. "Well, okay, some things don't count. Like, it's kind of a complicated moral calculus, but-"

"Mom, I think I can handle it," Bryant said, slowly standing up, his knees still feeling weak. "I can handle just, uh... like, you know, most boyfriend, girlfriend pairings these days, we have the conversation about safe identities and stuff." He nodded. "Usually as a 'just in case' kind of thing."

"See, back in my day, we called that the mask deal," Dad said, grinning as he put his hands on his hips. "Still, ready to head to the Impossimansion?"

"Sure, I- we have a what?"

***

Stepping through a portal torn through the fabric of space time by magic felt like something that was going to be deeply weird three times, then instantly normal and utterly taken for granted by time four. That was Bryant's guess based on how casual his sister Rachel seemed as she zipped the space-hole shut behind herself with a snap of her fingers, even as she closed a grimorie that had a large Property of M. Spellweaver on a white sticker stuck to the upper left hand corner of the back cover. The whole family, each of them in their costumes - which, for KOTF, meant going completely pantsless again - stood before a large mansion built in the fancier, hillside part of Century City, with a view overlooking the glittering gird of the city, shining in the gathering twilight.

"So," Dad said, cheerfully. "We-"

"Wait, before we go anywhere, how the f... rick," Bryant corrected hurriedly at Mom's frowning expression. Seeing a momly judgmental look from behind the domino mask of Lady Luck remained surreal. "... how the frick do you get away without wearing pants?"

"Well, I judge whether I can get away with it, and when I can't, I do this," Dad said, grinning. He held up his hand, showing Bryant his left hand. Since Dad was in his full KOTF form, he was currently both incredibly tall and incredibly broad, and this carried through to his palm, which looked wide enough to entirely encompass Mom's waist. His ring finger had two rings. One was the glittering wedding ring that he and Lady Luck had been sporting since they had announced that they were a married pair a year ago - and Bryant wondered about the delay between the two of them getting powers, the two of them announcing they were married, and everything that happened between.

But then he looked again.

The second ring was flush with Dad's brown furred hand, and it was nearly the exact same color as his skin.

"Is that your entire symsuit!?" Bryant asked.

"That it is," Dad said. The subliminal flash of movement that was all symsuits needed to change their shapes flowed along his wrist and when it was done, he looked... almost exactly the same, save that he was now a full on ken doll between his legs. It looked rather natural, considering he was a big anthropomorphic buck, as if one might expect them to have an entirely concealed crotch thanks to the fur and all. Bryant shook his head slowly.

"... as I was saying," Mom said.

"Dad was saying it," Rachel muttered.

"Don't interrupt, Corvi," Dad said.

"Wait," Bryant said, holding up his hand. "When we're in super outfits, should I, like, think of you as Dad, or KOTF?"

"You can think of me as Dad," Dad said, grinning. "But I recommend thinking of your sisters as Starfleet and Corvi Magpie right now. You want to be good at saying the right name in the right situations."

Bryant nodded.

"As I was saying!" Mom said. "When your father and I decided to go public with being married using the Impossible surname, our comic sales went up, like, way more than we expected. I was already in the top sellers for some reason..." She shrugged, two of her many reasons heaving slightly with the motion of her shoulders. "But it turns out, adding in the romance subplot and bringing in the Wyld Fae drama really hooked a huge amount of teen girl readership. End result, we were raking in more money than even three children's college funds could eat up. Well. Two." She shot a bemused look at Starfleet, who grinned and flared her thruster vanes.

"Technically, I do still need money. For gadgets." She said, wiggling the artfully sculpted eyebrows her robotic body sported.

"So, we invested in the Impossible Mansion! Impossimansion!" Mom said, gesturing to the large, three story home. It wasn't actually a mansion. Mansions were an order of magnitude larger. But in the modern real estate housing situation in the post Mecha-Roosevelt economy, it was still pretty far away from anything a Gen Moon could possibly hope to get their hands on. So. Mansion was fine by Bryant.

"W-wait, you get the money from those comics?" she asked.

"Technically, we get a stipend based on the United Nations Metahuman Advisor Board, which runs the United Comics Company. UCC sends editors to work with us, and we get royalties for the comics, and some input into the storylines that get into the comics and how we modify events that happen for pop consumption," Dad said, his rumbling amused.

"... right..." Bryant said, still dazed. "You know. I knew about the MHAB, but, like. I never really thought about how it worked."

"Well, yeah," Starfleet said, flying up to the front door with a pair of blue-white contrails left behind by her shoulder mounted agrav engines. She turned to face them. "It's boring as heck!"

The door opened and Bryant, despite himself, rushed up inside of the mansion - and blinked as he found that he was standing in a sparse wooden corridor, without even an armoire or escritoire or other fancy name for small collection of drawers and a place to put your car keys down so you could then forget you put the car keys there. Bryant stepped forward and peered into what looked like it should have been a dining room. Rather than a big fancy looking banquet hall table and lots of equally fancy, comfy chairs, there were two folding chairs, a folding table, and a hot plate that looked like it cost thirty bucks.

"... what!?" Bryant asked.

"Well, the mansion was expensive," Dad said, rubbing the back of his neck. "And we weren't really living here, since we were still trying to figure out if we were going to tell you about our IDs, and move here, or if you were going to get powers..."

"Also, you have no idea how expensive danger rooms and N-grade supercomputers are," Mom added, walking over to what was clearly a cloakroom. She flicked a hidden switch and the wall behind her opened, revealing a secret, gleaming grav-shaft. "They're down here!"

Bryant laughed, his grin growing wider. "So, uh, are we going to move in here? All of us?"

"That's the question!" Dad said. "Do you want to be Corvi Magpie Impossible and Starfleet Impossible and..." He paused. "What is your super name, anyway?"

"What are your powers?" Starfleet asked. "I'd scan you but Mom says it's rude."

"Thanks," Bryant said. "And, uh. I can manipulate observable patterns of matter and energy." He grinned, slightly. "The doctor at the facility said I could basically do anything."

"That's my boy!" Dad laughed, slapping his back with a broad palm, while Mom pumped her fists.

"I mean... I have internal replicators and a warp drive, but, you know, that's cool too!" Starfleet said, even as Corvi snickered and leaned in.

"Starfleet was used to being the Swiss army knife," she said. "Now she's jeaaaaaaalous."

"I'm not jealous!" Starfleet said. "I'm glad Bryant can do anything." She hesitated. "Does make it hard to pick a name though."

"Omni-Man!" Corvi said. "Cestus Pax! Progenitor!"

"Those are all terrible," Starfleet said.

"Matter Lad?" Dad asked. "Well, you'd have to be Matter Lad V."

"There were four matter lads?" Bryant asked, his eyebrows shooting up.

"Yeah, one from 1980 to 1992, and then the rest were in 1993, 1994 and 1995 to 1996." Dad shook his head, slightly. He sighed. "Matter Lad I was the best, though. If you ask me."

"Sure, whatever you say, Granddad," Corvi said, sticking her tongue out at him.

Bryant gulped. "So, um, what happened to Matter Lad one through four?" he asked. "Like..."

"They died," Dad said, looking a bit sad.

"Yeah, I mean, after they came back," Bryant said. Mom bit her lip. Even his sisters looked withdrawn, Corvi wincing and Starfleet's thruster vanes folding shut behind her, her body drooping down somewhat in the air. "They, uh, they came back, right?"

"Right, we have a lot to get through," Mom said. "Come on."

The whole family walked - well, walked and floated, in Starfleets case - to the living room. Mom sat down on the couch, while patting the space next to her. The idea of sitting next to his mom was normally totally... like. Bryant would avoid it because it'd mean that she was going to kiss his cheek, or coo and call him a 'precious widdle baby', which was insane he was eighteen, he was basically an adult. But...

But...

She was also Lady Luck.

The stupendously attractive woman in a skintight red and white outfit who he had been imagining fucking since he had been... he frowned. Wait, she had gotten her powers two years ago, and he was eighteen, and he had lusted after her since he was fourteen-

"So!" Mom said, tugging him down to sit beside her - which forced the issue. He felt his thigh and hers press together, while Mom looked into his eyes, her domino mask covering her face but not her eyes. "... superheroing is... not exactly what most people think. It's not really like the comic books, nor what you see in public." She sighed, softly. "Secret identities and legacy heroes make it easy for the public to accept that a lot of heroes retired. But the truth is... that... most of them are dead. Permanently so."

Bryant opened his mouth, then closed it. "B-But what about, like, Legacy II, he died twice!"

"If a metahuman dies, the quantum structure of their consciousness persists for a bit," Starfleet said, nodding. "If someone with the right power set acts quickly, that consciousness can be saved. It can be put into a robot body, it can be sent back in time, it can be sent forward in time, it can be shunted into a nearby universe, it can be sent to a dimension we may think of as heaven or hell or everywhere in between." She looked down at her hands. "... but if that time limit passes, they're just gone. Where, we don't know."

"But I've seen superhero fights!" Bryant said. "I..."

"Oh, oh, oh!" Starfleet said. "We need to show him Mr. Gubbins."

"Yes!" Mom said, clapping her hands. "Mr. Gubbins always communicates the point better than exposition anyway." She stood, dragging Bryant to his feet. The whole family trooped to the closet and rode down the secret elevator, entering into a part of the mansion that was... just as unfinished as the upstairs. It was just instead of opulence, the unfinished part down here was all sleek technological corridors with the wall paneling only half put up, and lots of exposed lighting fixtures, cables, tubes and pipes that needed the final connections managed.

Mom led Bryant through the corridors while Dad and Corvi brought up the rear. Starfleet zipped ahead. The reason why became clear as they entered into a large circular chamber with the dull green-gray shimmer of a holographic projection system, like the unit in Century City High's gymnasium. Though, uh, Bryant was fairly sure this version wasn't ten years old and only able to project polygons and rough approximations of basketball hoops.

"This is Mr. Gubbins!" Mom said, gesturing to a figure that Starfleet was happily putting up on a plasteel mounting. Mr. Gubbins was a human sculpted form of ballistic gelatin, filled with what looked like pig guts and synthetic bones in a rough approximation of the human form. Starfleet smacked Mr. Gubbins on the head.

"We've all met Mr. Gubbins," Corvi said.

"So, this is ballistic gelatin," Mom said.

"I know what ballistic gelatin is," Bryant said, smiling a little shyly. "Mr. Tenopopolis, when he was about to retire, spent the last three months of his class just putting on old reruns of a show called Mythbusters."

"Oh," Mom said, then giggled. "So. You have the ability to manipulate cosmic energy. I want you to use that to blast Mr. Gubbins." She stepped away from the line of fire, while Starfleet zipped through the air overhead and floated down to hover behind Bryant.

Bryant gulped. "Right." He hesitated. Then he lifted his palm. He felt the energies around his fingertips - the strong/weak force, gravitation, the drag of his particles against the Higgs field. Focusing on it felt like he was suddenly seeing a whole new medium that he was able to grab onto, twist, yank, shove around. He stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and picked something that felt fairly energetic. Then he threw it at Mr. Gubbins.

A line of light so bright it was less a color and more a sensation of pain stenciled itself across his vision. A whip-crack blazing hellfire of superheated air blew past his ears, loud enough and hot enough to leave his eyebrows scorching and his ears ringing. And Mr. Gubbin's head was gone. There was no neat stump either, his upper torso had a ragged hole that blew down to his pelvis, leaving smoking, hissing bone exposed and letting a thin line of intestines sloughing down to the ground with a splat. The stand up dummy wobbled, then fell to the floor.

"Hahaha, holy fuck, Bro!" Corvi laughed, rubbing at her eyes.

"Yeah, that's why superhero fights are... kinda... complicated." Mom said, putting her hand on Bryant's shoulder. "In the 1990s, there was a breaking point when it came to power scale and... well... social etiquette. It wasn't the 60s anymore. Not only were powers like that around, but people without powers were using, like, guns. Real guns, designed to kill, not stun-blasts or ice rays. People stopped pontificating and trying to trap one another in death traps, or arrest each other. They started fighting. Like. Really, genuinely, actually fighting."

Dad sighed. "And so, after the 1990s, the survivors all realized things had to change. We had to go back to an older mode."

"And the olds make sure us youngs know it too," Starfleet said, nodding. Her voice was a little grim.

Bryant's hand went to his throat. "But..." he hesitated. "But wait, wait, Baron Beast seemed pretty serious. He had a knife to my throat!"

"He was," Dad said, wryly. "Serious about stealing the Omni-Spark. But you weren't in any real danger, because he knew that if Lady Luck took the kid gloves off, either or both of them would have died. The guns were all loaded with non-lethal stun rounds, the knife was probably a disguised neuro-shock stick. Either that or he was sure he could keep from cutting you."

"That's insane!" Bryant said.

"Well, he is still a megalomaniac villain. He's just one that doesn't want to die!" Dad laughed, shaking his head.

"Okay!" Bryant said, looking back at Mr. Gubbins. "So. Let me make sure I have this. We all have, basically, lethal weapons, except for Mom."

"... ahem..." Mom coughed, then leaned in, whispering. "Do you know what the difference between a man getting a lethal brain aneurysm at twenty one and them getting one at ninety?"

Bryant blinked.

"Luck," Mom said, smiling a little.

"... okay, so, we all have lethal weapons attached to our bodies," Bryant said, his voice growing somewhat tense. "A-And the only thing keeping the bad guys from using their lethal weapons on us is some... barely established social pact?"

Dad nodded, his expression grim. "Which is why it's important for you to understand this, Bryant. No matter what your superhero name is, you will be wearing a cape out there, to protect the Earth from people who think they can overset everything we've worked for and bring back the grim and gritty days and from people who think they can take over everything by using a magical spell, or sentient mind controlling octopi slaves, or dimensional shearing, or anything else they might cook up out there." His muzzle lifted, and his antlers seemed to cast a shade far larger than they should have - adding weight to his words.

Bryant felt like he wanted to sit down and start shaking.

"W-Wow, uh..." He hesitated. "What's the upside to all this?"

"Upside?" Dad laughed. "Bry, you've got superpowers."

"Oh yeah!" Bryant laughed, nervously.

"Not just that, but, well, fighting is basically a tiny amount of what we do anyway," Mom said, nodding. "Maybe... twenty percent."

"Thirty, closer to thirty, I'd say," Dad said.

"That's cause you actively stick your snoot into brawls," Mom said, giggling and walking over to pat her husband on the chest.

"It can be eighty percent, if you pick up a heel!" Corvi added.

"Heel fighting doesn't count," Mom said. "Oh, uh, heels are-"

"A wrestling term, I know," Bryant said. "Are you saying some villains are just faking it?"

"For a cut of the profits for appearing as your recurring nemesis, yes," Mom said. "I have three, Dad has four, Starfleet has already picked up six. Corvi has none..." She frowned. "In part because of how she decided to get powers."

"Stealing is fun and profitable!" Corvi said. "Drop out of school, kids! Don't drink milk! Fuck your mom! And be sure to do loads of drugs!"

"Language!"

"Sorry! Screw your mom!" Corvi said, then started giggling. Bryant, for a single dizzying moment, thought his sister was out loud endorsing incest, until he remembered Mistress Terrific and her running anti-drug PSAs, which Corvi was inverting.

"Mistress Terrific can throw trucks, you better not say that where she can hear it," Starfleet said as she leaned over in the air to speak directly into her sister's ear.

"Heels are one type," Mom said, ticking it off on her finger. "Then you got megalomaniacs - like Baron Beast. They have power, they think the world owes them something, and they're gonna use their power to punch the world into doing what they want. He wants to be the King of the Fae, but that's secondary to showing up my hubby." She caressed Dad's shoulder with a grin. "I think that's mostly why he wants me to marry him."

"Well, there are some other reasons, honey," Dad said, grinning and reaching down under her cape. Mom squeaked and bounced and that was a remarkable thing to see in her skintight outfit. Bryant blushed hard, while Corvi booed from the sideline.

"Gross! Parents are sexless! Don't check into how we came into being! It's unrelated!" she called out.

Mom rolled her eyes and ignored her. "The other kind are politicals - your President Deinhardts, your Megatechts, your Cleopatras, your Cams." She nodded. "People who want to change something in the world and are willing to use their powers to do it. Meglos, you have to fight and move out of a danger area if they're not the kind of person to recognize the balance of power. Politicals, you can talk with. Usually, they want to change the world, not level it."

Bryant frowned, slightly. "Okay, what about the time where Cam Diệp unleashed her army of killer robots on the East Coast?"

"Heel, it was a crossover event," Mom said. "Politicals need money too!"

"Right." Bryant rubbed his palms against his face. "So, uh. I think that's enough brain melting revelations about the world for one evening. Can... can I have a break for a bit?" He smiled, shyly, and when he slid his hands away from his face, he saw that Dad was smiling at him and Mom was nodding.

"Of course, honey," Mom said.

"Tomorrow, we'll start figuring out how to train your powers," Dad said. "We'll get you into this hero business one step at a time."

That was just the question, wasn't it?

How much hero-ing was involved in this shit at all? So far, Bryant wasn't sure he had seen much of it. But no. the comics weren't all lies. And he had seen Mom in action against Baron Beast - she had used her powers to save lives. Both his and the lives of those goons with guns. He tried to imagine, for just a second, what Lady Luck might have looked like if she had been born ten years earlier and hit that leprechaun with her SUV while dressed in... plaid or whatever it was people wore in the 1990s. Chains? He was honestly not sure.

The mental image formed with grisly speed and made him shudder from his head to his toes.

"What should we have for dinner?" Dad asked as, with a flash of green light and a faint smell of leaves and freshly crushed grass, he transformed from his KOTF form to just being Dad. With pants, and everything.

"McDonalds!" Starfleet said, thrusting her hands above her head.

"We're not having McDonalds," Mom said, yanking her mask off.

"McDonalds! McDonalds! McDonalds!" Starfleet chanted, while Corvi took it up as well - the two girls had always been schemers. Always working together to try and steer the family towards what they wanted. Bryant couldn't remember a time where their machinations hadn't been at work, from Disneyland to the one time they had gone to the Moon to that vacation on Xargon, it had always had Barbs and Rachel, conspiring across ages and interests to steer them to some sisterly gestalt.

Mom glowered at them. "We're cooking something in the kitchen," she said.

"Uh, honey, the kitchen still isn't..." Dad muttered.

Bryant grinned. "How about we, like, go to S'eats?"

Everyone looked at him. Mom considered, rubbing her chin.

"S'eats can be a bit rowdy, Bry, are you sure you want to make that be your first cape event?" Dad asked.

"Yeah, you'd need a costume design and name," Starfleet said.

Bryant rubbed the back of his neck, closing his eyes. He let all his name and suit choices tumble through his head - and then picked the one that felt, immediately, correct.

"Nova," he said, his voice soft.

"Why Nova?" Corvi asked, cocking her head so much that her top hat almost fell off.

"Well, firstly," Bryant started, holding his hand up to tick the numbers off.

"Uh, there's eight others Novas, six Supernovas, and two Novas with a Y instead a... V you can't spell it like that!" Starfleet said, her eyes whirring as she focused on something no one else could see - probably some augmented reality HUD. "Noyva? Ny... Nyo... No..."

Bryant remained still for a long moment.

"So, Nova Nine," he said. "Is both alliterative, sounds cool, and you can call me Nova for short. Nova means new star, I'm a new superhero on the block. Next, novas are where gold, heavy elements, and other stuff comes from. Well. Stars make the heavy elements, then go nova and spread them everywhere."

"Actually, that's a super nova, a nova and a super nova are di-" Starfleet started.

"Nova Nine is an awesome name, honey!" Mom said. Firmly. Dad smacked his back with his palm and Bryant...

Nova.

Nova. He tried it in his mind. His imagination started to tick forward. First, he imagined fellow heroes calling him that. Hey Nova. Yo, Nova. He nodded, slowly. Then he imagined something significantly nicer: Girls. Girls at school cheering as he flew by. Woo, Nova! Give me an autograph, Nova. His smile was a little guilty, but, well, it wasn't like his imagination could hurt Melissa.

"Now, we just need a costume, Starbutt," Corvi said.

Nova rolled his eyes, before focusing on his symsuit. There was a single moment between his imagination settling on the question and the symbiote leaping to his service, flowing along his flesh as it turned from jeans and T-shirt to a skintight spandex. His uniform was a dark black that made his blue skin stand out against it, with golden highlights forming a V-shape along his chest, sweeping over his shoulders and connecting to a golden cape. He left his hands bare, and with a single thought, he added a domino mask on his features.

"Ah, yes, the mask, a vital piece of the costume, otherwise you looked way too much like my dork ass brother," Corvi said, smirking.

"I will have you know, half your friends call me the cute dork," Nova said, with dignity.

"Ew, gross, no, auh!" Corvi put her hands over her ears. "I don't want to know which of my friends have terrible taste. They all tell me anyway."

Mom walked around Nova, nodding as she examined him. "Good color balance, I like the contrast here. But there's just one-" She grabbed onto his cape and yanked. Hard. The cape tore away with a soft click, coming free in her hands and leaving Nova entirely capeless. He spun around to face her, and she beamed at him.

"That's my boy!" she said.

"You only need to see that one Behind the Mask documentary one time," Nova said, chuckling as the cape melted away into thin strands of fabric in Mom's fingers, then turned to dust. He cocked his head. "Wait, so, does the symsuit, like, run out of material?"

"Nah, it's super science," Mom said.

"Mass energy conversion through subspace pockets, using sympathetic linkages to a human's inherent animus, hijacking the omni-signal that we all emit on telethon frequencies," Starfleet said.

"Okay, fine, super science, magic and telepathy," Mom said, corrected.

"Now, do you want to do the honors of bringing us to S'eats?" Dad asked as he focused and, once again, transformed into his KOTF form. He remembered to keep his crotch covered, at least, so there was that. Nova bit his lower lip, thinking as he did so. How would he even do that? He didn't know much about his powers beyond 'manipulate energy and matter.' Well, he could... maybe take his parents and sisters apart and flung their molecules to the S'eat's and reassemble them there. He had managed to rebuild himself, after all. Of course, then, wouldn't they just... die? Would he be killing, then making copies of his parents?

No, wait, humans have measurable souls, which are patterns of energy. Just move those! He thought. But what if you fuck that up.

Nova noticed something, then. Everyone was watching him expectantly, and with a kind of... trust that made the responsibility feel even more weighty. But also, it was like they expected him to... see through some kind of... trick...

He hesitated.

"Oh!" he exclaimed. "I don't need to figure it out. I just have to see how Corvi did it, then copy her! Since she manipulates energy, and I just need to do that."

"Exactly," Dad said, grinning. "A lot of superheroics is just about knowing when and where to steal."

"Oh and yet, when I steal the Mallus Daemonica its oh no, Corvi, it's cursed, any who touch it are doomed to evil!" Corvi said, her voice full of faux dudgeon. But Nova had already turned to her and was focusing. Once again, the fields of energy that he could now manipulate was visible - and despite her grumbling, Corvi waved her hand and spoke a few incantations from her grimorie. Well, from Merlin's grimorie, which she had stolen.

The portal that opened just opened to the far side of the danger room.

But while Nova couldn't see how Corvi's magic worked, he could see the portal and its inner shape, it's geometries of energies and dimensional flux. It was like watching a house being built, without being able to see the cranes, tools or workers. Oddly, it was more useful, since there was nothing getting in the way. He just had to make the same geometry with his-

The portal snapped open before he had almost formed the words. While Corvi's portal was a shimmering swirl of magical energies, Nova's portal cut itself into air like a series of intersecting pie-wedges, both rounded and straight at the same time. They unfurled like a metal flower, revealing a hole that opened up to the glitzy, brightly lit front of the Century City branch of Super-Eats, the superhero restaurant.

Or, as most people called it.

S'eats.

"Whoa," Nova whispered.

Which was when the paparazzi all started to peer in through the portal and snap excited pictures.