Chapter Text
The sounds of the gala below filtered their way to the roof, the material of the building and its skylights turning it into a low background noise by the time it reached my position. Light bled from the rooftop windows into the night sky, twinkling against the scattered snowflakes that had started to fall. Thankfully, the weather wasn’t supposed to get any worse than this tonight.
Not that it meant very much, it was absolutely freezing out. Plus, as usual for this sort of thing, I was the one stuck on the roof until it was time to go home which meant that I wasn’t going to be getting warmer any time soon. I could stand it, though; one of the many perks of being a superhuman was that it was borderline impossible for me to get frostbite or anything. The worst that normal cold could do was make me uncomfortable, which it was doing a very good job of to be fair, but I was at least used to that.
Inside would have been way more uncomfortable, in the social way. Which I was much less used to, and would have been a thousand times worse.
Through the nearest skylight, I could see the rest of the hero trainees in position below, their stupid costumes sticking out like sore thumbs from the fancy clothes of the party guests. They were all smiles as the guests showered them with attention, distracting them from keeping an eye on things like they were supposed to be doing.
It was a low-risk event filled with wealthy people, so the older trainees like me were the ones asked to protect it; it would be great exposure, we could make connections and find a sponsor. There was only a little chance that we’d get shot or lit on fire or who knows what. A little trauma is worth the chance to whore ourselves out to the highest bidder, right?
I dug my hands deeper into my pockets, trying to fight the chill. Yeah, so clearly the whole “hero” thing wasn’t really for me. I was here because I didn’t really have a choice, orphaned supers like me were put in the hero program by default once they were old enough. A five-year program from ages eight to thirteen. I guess the government decided that if they had to take care of us, they’d treat us like an investment and try to turn us into something that would eventually help society.
I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I turned thirteen in a little over half a year. The expectation was that I’d take the hero exams, and then find an adult hero to become a sidekick at least until I turned eighteen. But none of us actually expected me to do that. I didn’t bother with a costume - they looked ridiculous, and I was always hidden somewhere anyway - and I didn’t have a real hero name either.
I could have just dropped out, as long as Birman agreed that I wasn’t hero material. And he definitely agreed. That would have made things simpler and easier, no more late-night guard duty in the freezing cold, watching a bunch of other trainee heroes do their best impressions of puppies in the window of a pet shop.
Oh my god pay attention! You’re supposed to be the actual future heroes, so why am I the one that’s actually keeping an eye out like one? The more I realized that I was the only one taking the job seriously, the more I actually kind of wished that something would happen. That would teach them to pay attention.
Yeah, I definitely wasn’t hero material. I didn’t even really know why I was getting annoyed, it’s not like them being idiots affected me all that much.
Besides, Birman was very obviously keeping an eye on things, despite the constant stream of tipsy partygoers trying to make conversation with him. He was a massive asshole, but he at least took his job as a hero seriously. But it was hard to look past the asshole part.
He trained the others to be heroes well enough, but like I said earlier, he and I agreed that I wasn’t cut out for hero work. So instead of teaching me anything, he spent most of his time either ignoring me or trying to make me miserable enough to drop out. Which completely backfired on him, since all that did was make me stay in the program just out of spite.
Honestly, knowing me being around was probably making him as miserable as I was kinda made staying in this stupid program worth it. Probably.
I snapped out of my thoughts at the sound of a scream from below, and focused on the situation. One of the guests was flat on his back, a rifle on the floor next to him, with Birman standing over him. Yeah, Birman was keeping an eye out alright, and super speed was a bad power to try to pull a gun on.
But, the issue was that he wasn’t the only thug in the room. There must have been a dozen of them, all armed just as heavily, and with plenty pointing their weapons at other guests. Crap, how had this happened? There was no way they carried those guns in with them, they were too big. Someone on the event staff must have brought them in and left them where these guys could find them.
Even Birman wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to take them all out. If he tried, they’d start shooting, and people would get hurt. I’m sure there was a way that he and the trainees in the room could handle the situation, but he wasn’t going to. It was going to become my problem.
My phone buzzed, and I didn’t have to look at it to know it was the signal from Birman, triggered by pressing a button on his utility belt that was too fast for the human eye to see. Time to humiliate myself, I guess.
I moved from the skylight to the air intake vent, a huge metal box on the roof that was responsible for all the fresh air that would flow into the main room. And, well, soon to be not-so-fresh air. I stripped off my coat, the cold air biting into my skin as my tank top left very little to protect me from it. Of course, the actually awful part came next.
It’s not official or anything, but I’m pretty sure I have two super powers. The first one must be terrible, always-active bad luck. I don’t have anything to prove this one, but honestly? The idea that everything wrong with my life is just random chance is too depressing. At least if it’s somehow the fault of some actual thing that makes it easier to swallow.
Especially since my second power is comically awful. It’s absolute bullshit.
Ever superhuman has some sort of power, but the way to activate that power is different for everyone. The lucky ones are the ones who can just activate it as a thought, but they’re in the minority. For a lot of us, there’s a physical action associated with it - lifting up objects with your mind by holding out your hand, spitting fire by... you know, actually spitting or something.
I mention that since my second power, my official power, was only activated by clenching the muscles in my abdomen the exact way you would when using the restroom. Which meant that, consistently, I’d need a change of pants after I used it. It wasn’t a sure thing, I tried to use the bathroom before missions and stuff like that to try to minimize the chance of it happening. But that didn’t always matter, like when you’ve been sitting on a roof for three hours.
That wasn’t even the worst part, though. The worst part was what my power actually is. I can create a cloud of the most disgusting thing you’ve smelled in your entire life. It’s even literally colored green, and can make just about anyone vomit. The only good thing about it is that it’s selective, meaning the only people who actually smell it are the people I want to.
So, yeah, my power is to crap my pants so hard that I can knock out a room full of people. Again - absolute bullshit. So incredibly terrible that it can’t be random chance. There’s a reason Birman and I both agree that I’m not really hero material, and it’s not just my attitude. There’s not really many companies that are rushing to fund a hero whose power is to smell bad.
I started to clench my muscles, and my skin began to give off green vapor. A cloud of it started to form around me, which the intake vent sucked in greedily and began to deliver to the room below. It would take a minute to settle, and I would need to keep up the flow until I got another signal from Birman to cut it off. Which would only come after he and the other trainees has subdued the attackers while they were busy gagging.
Pretty much right then, though, I felt my body letting loose. One of my other precautions was to wear absorbent underwear, the kind that kids my age would normally use for bedwetting. I could feel it getting warm and wet in the front, swelling as it absorbed the side effect of my power and squished against the inside of my jeans. As much as I hated to admit it, considering I’d been standing in the cold for hours at this point, the warmth of peeing my pants almost felt good.
But, unfortunately for me, that wasn’t the end of it. Despite my best efforts, I hadn’t been able to take a dump before I started my watch, and that was now coming back to haunt me. I could feel a mass working its way through me until it finally found its way out, a warm and sticky heaviness pushing into the seat of my underwear. It gave way at first, crinkling as it expanded and filled all the space my jeans would allow.
Thankfully, it wasn’t as big of a mess as it had been in the past. These bedwetting pants weren’t really designed for that, and on a few occasions, I’d ended up with a pair of pants that had visibly taken a beating. Even so, everyone who knew me at this point that it was how my power worked, and the other trainees would be relentless on the way back. I mentioned that I never bothered with a real hero name since I never actually expected to become a real hero once I was was done with training, but my unofficial one might as well have been “Super Skunk” since that was what the others called me.
Finally, I got the second signal buzzing through my phone - the “all clear” from Birman. I eased up, the vent sucking up the last of the vapor swirling off my bare skin. Feeling the heaviness in my pants, I picked my coat back up and quickly put it back on to try to recover some of my fleeting warmth. I walked carefully back to the skylight, trying not to make my later cleanup any harder than it had to be, and looked through the skylight. Green gas had filled the room, but it was already starting to fade away without me still adding to it, revealing a couple puddles of vomit on the floor and a group of restrained criminals.
My phone buzzed a third time. There was no third signal, so it must be an actual message from Birman this time. I tapped in the code to unlock it, navigating to my messages, and seeing three unread from Birman. The first two were the signals, as I’d guessed: emojis for a cloud and a barfing face, followed by a red X. The newest message was the update.
“Police are on their way. ETA 1 hour until partycrashers and guests are out of the building. Stay in position until then.”
God dammit. I knew we wouldn’t be going home right away, we never did after stuff like this happened, but I didn’t think Birman would make me wait to clean up like this. I shifted in place a bit, incredibly aware of the increasingly cold mess in my pants that I’d be stuck with for a while.
At least nobody was around to notice it.