To be fair, the loss of my armor… hurt. And not just my pride, which is a cheap and renewable resource I cultivate like a particularly pathetic window-box herb garden. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the gear did its job—it turned a potentially life-ending ice-shrapnel grenade into a merely wallet-ending one. But good Kevlar and ballistic nylon were NOT cheap. The stuff had cost me nearly two grand, plus the countless hours I’d spent hunched over a sewing machine I’d liberated from a dumpster, modifying it to look the part of ‘Firetrap’s’ sinister, flame-retardant couture. I wasn’t made out of money. My financial situation was best described as ‘precariously solvent’, a tightrope walk over a canyon of student debt and ramen noodles.
It wasn’t like I could send an invoice to Glacier Girl for her catastrophic lack of aim. “For services rendered: Taking your botched combo attack to the face. See attached quote for armor replacement.” And it HAD been a screw-up of epic proportions. She’d let fly some kind of combination power—primary cryokinesis mixed with a secondary kinetic gift, I’d guess—that created an exploding ball of ice with the approximate subtlety of a freight train. It had flown the wrong way when I executed a professionally theatrical dodge… right towards a cluster of civilian press and bystanders who were all holding camera phones like they were filming the second coming.
If I hadn’t dissolved it mid-air, atomizing the frozen shrapnel into a harmless, slightly chilly mist, who knows how many people would have been turned into human colanders? More importantly, who knows how many weeks of my life would be needed to pay off the energy debt from reassembling them? I’d hoped to stash my armor during my getaway, for later retrieval and maybe a cheap patch job, but she’d done a real number on it. It was totaled. A complete write-off. But, on the bright side, that was still infinitely better than me being totally trashed. I mean, theoretically I might have been able to reset myself from a puddle of gore, but the energy cost would have put me in a financial and metabolic coma for months, if I lived through it. My power may be unique, but my health insurance is decidedly not.
Hell, even if I COULD bill her for the damages without it leading the BSA straight to my doorstep, it would have been a futile gesture. I’d seen her costume up close… it looked barely better than something homemade from a discount fabric store bolt. She’d probably mortgaged her future merch sales to a publicist just to scrape together my fee. Billing her would be like trying to get blood from a stone, if the stone was also a beautiful, broke superheroine.
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Of course she was gorgeous. Let’s be real, EVERY alpha with a decent PR team ends up gorgeous. It’s part of the unwritten contract. Unless you’re going for the terrifying-lovecraftian-abomination vibe, you get the package deal: world-altering power and cheekbones that could cut glass. She was a solid Class Three, maybe even brushing Four with that power synergy, and I had given her a very solid performance. I am, after all, a professional. I like to think all my performances are solid, the narrative equivalent of a well-built IKEA shelf—impressive until you realize it’s mostly hollow and held together with little wooden pegs.
She’d offered nicely pithy banter with enough fire and ice-based puns to make her a solid media asset to whatever corporate-sponsored hero team would inevitably snatch her up. Ice summoning and a nice, strong kinetic gift. That meant decent defenses and better-than-average offense, all paired with silvery-blonde hair to her waist, a figure that would make a nun reconsider her vows, high cheekbones, and an elfin chin that would cement her in fanboy spank banks for at least a decade. She had that sort of teenaged Taylor Swift look that meshed perfectly with her powerset to create a ‘warm ice queen’ aesthetic, a brand that could easily catapult her to stardom. Me, I had to rely on costuming and a lot of hope to get the ‘villain of the week’ look right. Glacier Girl was a walking theme park ride that only required a white or blue domino mask and a matching leotard. I was the guy selling overpriced churros outside the gates.
I had to admit, I was a little envious. A deep, soul-crushing, why-can’t-I-have-nice-things kind of envy. But I’d made my peace with being a speedbump, a launchpad that got paid to give other alphas the boost they needed. Despite my power's terrifying versatility on paper, I’d never be able to tap into the ether, that extradimensional wellspring everyone else seems to have a direct line to. Which meant I’d never have the sheer, dumb, overwhelming power necessary to be a celebrity. I was running on a pair of AA batteries I had to recharge by eating my body weight in cheap carbs, while everyone else was hooked up to the city's power grid.
