Chapter 2

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.