“Shit,” Zoe said under her breath.
“Shit is right. So, go to the H-Anon meetings, follow the rules, and hopefully, we don’t have to meet this way again. Come on, out you go.”
“Which way are you heading?” Helena asked Sam as they exited the room.
“Back to my home, in northern Centralia. You?”
“In that direction…”
The three of them (four with the “peace officer”) turned down a hallway, where another police officer stood pointing them toward an exit door secured with an electronic buzzer.
“Want to take the trolley together?” Helena asked once they stepped out to the waiting area filled with a wide array of people, from exemplars to non-exemplars, all of whom had some issue that needed to be addressed by the police.
Zoe started to say something, but was caught off guard when Sam readily agreed to Helena’s request.
The woman with tiger ears was also caught off guard by the emotion she felt next—it wasn’t jealousy in the way that she thought it would be; no, it was sadness.
Zoe still wanted to hang out with him.
Chapter Five: Unholy Matrimony
(A chapter written in reverse. Seriously, just go with it… )
“Helena Knight, will you marry me?”
“Oh, Sam.” Helena’s hands were pressed together, her fingers in front of her mouth as she looked down at Sam, who was on one knee, placing a ring on her finger. “Yes, I will. I will marry you!”
They’d been at one of Centralia’s many cosplay cafés for fifteen minutes now, in a space known as the Unholy Matrimony room. People were larping all around them in private rooms, some of their voices coming through the walls.
There was a single attendant at the cosplay café when they entered, a shy woman in a schoolgirl outfit who greeted them by saying, “Hi, my name is Ozella.”
She was clearly older than a schoolgirl, somewhere in her early twenties, with dirty blonde hair in two pigtails tied off with red ribbons, which matched the loosened scarf around her neck, allowing for some cleavage to poke through.
Her midriff was bare too, a good six inches of skin exposed from the bottom of her shirt to the top of her skirt, a dark blue number that had recently been pressed.
She also wore a cute little red backpack.
Ozella’s immediate reaction upon seeing Sam and Helena enter was to jot something down in a notebook, her head bent forward slightly as they approached.
“Just about finished,” she said, avoiding full eye contact with the two. She reached into the desk and handed them a slip of paper with a number on it, indicating the room.
“But you don’t know what we want to roleplay yet,” Sam started to say, his nostrils flaring, sensing not only that the woman standing before them would play a part in his narrative, but that she was incredibly shy.
“Aware. Your room is available,” was all Ozella said, still not making eye contact.
It had been Sam’s idea to visit the cosplay café.
He’d heard about one on 16th Street, a new place with a ton of rooms, and while he and Helena ate dinner, or maybe it was a midnight snack considering it was pretty late, he’d suggested that they visit.
It was a good midnight snack too, considering the company, not that Sam could eat much because of his heightened sense of smell.
Sam had a slider, which was a fancy way to say a subway sandwich, with gooey meatballs, a metric shitton of onions, slivers of green peppers, with puddle of grease already forming on the wax paper.
True to his nature, and the power that Sam now possessed, he wasn’t able to eat it.
“I just can’t,” he said as he looked down at the soggy hoagie. He heard Helena giggle, and he offered her a short smile as he took a bite from her salad.
Of course Helena Knight had a salad.
Helena used to be chubby, so now everything she ate was carefully documented, calculated. The sexy tomboy (if ever there could be such a thing) ate slowly, politely, proper as ever as Sam tried not to breathe through his nostrils.
While they waited for their food, there was a lot of small talk, good small talk too, no awkward moments, an instant connection between the two.
Only once did Sam think about Zoe, wishing she had joined them. But she could be stubborn, and if she had just invited herself…
It hadn’t taken long for Helena and Sam to get to the late-night diner.
Both of them knew the ropes at the police station: get caught impersonating an exemplar, and you have to go to Heroes Anonymous, which was a support group for people without powers who impersonated people with powers.
Both Sam Meeko and Helena Knight had been before, and now, according to the police officer, they had one more strike before they’d get prison time.
This was what they mostly discussed on the way to the diner where Sam would later have a sub that he couldn’t eat.
“I hate the Heroes Anonymous pledge,” Sam said, sticking his hands into his pockets, noticing the stench of ass in the air, which made them think they were probably near a soon-to-be ruptured sewer line.
He had to keep remembering to breathe in through his mouth, and out through his nose.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Everything he smelled carried with it the scent and history of things around him, and instead of going on a last-minute date with Helena, he probably should have gone home and tried to sleep it off, or maybe even gone to a hospital, but that wasn’t Sam’s style.
Sam Meeko was an “in the moment” type of guy, that one friend you could depend on to always be there if you needed someone to hang out with, which was why Sam was quite popular with the people he met.
“So if your power was heightened, what do you think it would be?” he asked Helena as they left the police station, Zoe behind them now.
“Well, I’ve always been good at convincing people of things,” said the famous heiress. “I don’t know if that’s a power, or a learned skill like combat dance.”
“Care to show me something?” Sam stopped for a moment to let a man carrying a box into a bodega pass in front of them. He had sensed back in the holding area that Helena was an expert in combat dance, now he wanted to see her in action.
“Sure.”
Balancing on one foot, Helena slowly lifted the other until her hand was on her knee. Still maintaining perfect balance without wavering, she showed Sam just how high she could reach her foot while balanced on the other, which was well past his chin if he been standing in front of her.
With her hands over her head now, Helena gracefully moved forward, performing a one-armed handstand, her other arm bent at the elbow, Helena maintaining this pose for far longer than Sam thought she would be able to.
Graceful yet again, she bent to the side, her legs coming down, and her body righting itself.
Helena’s breaths were little bit deeper now, and Sam actually made the mistake of inhaling in her direction, this time sensing just how much she had practiced, and the fact that she was trying to show off a little bit.
The woman with short gray hair was a true talent, even more evident as she went to a handstand again and began doing push-ups while vertical, the muscles that Sam could see in her lean body quivering just a little, a determined look on Helena’s face as she bent backward, her feet coming over, so she was now in a half-wheel pose.
She pressed off with the backs of her hands and stood upright. “Do you want to see more?”
Sam’s mouth was still open, some part of the back of his mind thinking about how fun her flexibility would be in the sack.
He canceled that thought for the moment, and they continued on their way to the diner, and from there, to the 16th street cosplay café where they would meet the shy employee in the schoolgirl outfit named Ozella, and get fake engaged.
Chapter Six: The Stat Keeper
(Of course Ozella the stat-keeping schoolgirl is part of this story, and don’t worry, everything will be in chronological order from h
ere on out. Onward!)
Ozella Rose had always been a shy girl, a background lurker, the nerdiest kid in her class, fond of being in the periphery and blending in as best she could.
Even when her body started to develop, and she started to catch the eyes of more of the boys, some of the male teachers too, she simply wore baggy dark clothing, essentially disappearing in the background.
It mostly worked too.
There were advantages that came with being the center of attention, but to Ozella and her unique hobby, it was much easier for her to fade into the background.
At her parents’ home in southern Centralia, Ozella had boxes upon boxes filled with her notebooks. So many in fact that the entire side of her bedroom was covered in these boxes, and while she had cataloged most of them, they were definitely a fire hazard.
Like many born without powers, Ozella wanted a superpower, but she didn’t know exactly what kind of power she would have.
She had noticed that she was able to heal more quickly than the people around her, but she wasn’t able to heal others or anything of the sort. Her regeneration abilities came to her around the age of eleven, during recess.
Since Ozella didn’t really have friends, she was watching other kids play while hanging out with her imaginary friend, a naked girl named Dinah.
As she normally did, Ozella took to the rusty geometric dome at the back of the recess area, hanging upside down for too long while she watched others, eventually losing consciousness.
Even worse, since no one paid attention to her, nobody noticed that she had taken a fall from the top of the geometric dome.
And for a few minutes, Ozella just lay in the pit of sharp rocks on her back, crying, as bruises formed and blood on her elbows trickled onto her school uniform.
Blinking her eyes open again, Ozella caught her imaginary friend Dinah standing over her, the nude, nearly translucent girl looking down at Ozella in despair.
She dropped to her knees next to Ozella and kissed her on the cheek. And it was in that moment that Ozella felt something moving under her skin, the little scrapes on her elbows starting to heal.
By the time she was done healing, the only evidence left that she had hurt herself was a small amount of blood on her school uniform.
Another reason that she wore baggy clothing during her teenage years was the fact that she had become fascinated with her regeneration power, a fascination which led to some self-mutilation.
It didn’t matter what she did to herself, she would heal right up afterward, Dinah always present when she did so and touching Ozella with her mouth in some way, usually through a soft kiss that Ozella could see, but couldn’t feel.
Yet Ozella was still a non-exemplar, mostly because she didn’t report the change in her power, but also because of the fact that Centralian society classified its citizens between the ages of five and ten, and powers didn’t normally appear after that point.
It wasn’t like her regeneration power was exemplar-strong or anything, and she hadn’t really tested it (i.e. jumping from a building or stabbing a vital organ), so Ozella remained classified as a non-exemplar, and still was the day Sam and Helena first encountered her.
Teenage Ozella found it fun playing with sharp objects, feeling the sting when she cut herself, the blood fascinating her.
Dinah encouraged it, her imaginary friend also intrigued by some of the things Ozella would carve into her skin, only to be healed up within minutes once Dinah’s lips met the cut.
But like most children, Ozella eventually grew bored with it, her focus returning to something that she liked to do as a child: taking people’s stats. And around the time she stopped, Dinah stopped coming to her as well.
In her youth, Ozella went to an elementary school at which there were a handful of Class Es, which was the classification given to exemplars with intelligence-based abilities—think super smart super powereds here.
Many of these Class Es liked to play these popular card games with an intricate game system, something that always caught Ozella’s attention.
The Class Es would never let her play, of course, but sometimes they would leave their cards behind, and Ozella would steal them and copy them, which was around the time she started writing in her little books.
When she was younger, the things Ozella wrote were relatively straightforward.
She would pick a person, and then classify them, and track them over a set timeframe, expanding upon her initial impressions after she grew more familiar with them. If it was a classmate, she would do it over the course of the year; if it was a family member, she had thicker books for that.
By the time the interest came back around (after her teenage self-mutilating years, after Dinah had disappeared mysteriously), Ozella had years of stat-taking practice, and regardless of her puberty changes or anything else going on in her life, she dove headfirst into improving her stating ability.
Which was exactly what she was doing, six years later, when she first met Sam Meeko and Helena Knight.
Upon first spotting Sam, Ozella flipped through a small, pocket-sized notebook of quick base stats that she called her Book of Templates, stopping at her most used male classifications:
Bland Stan
Cleverness: 3
Charisma: 4
Corruptness: 1
Gullibility: 7
Attractiveness: 4
Kindness: 4
Neediness: 3
Needy Petey
Cleverness: 4
Charisma: 2
Corruptness: 4
Gullibility: 3
Attractiveness: 1
Kindness: 7
Neediness: 10
Chester the Molester
Cleverness: 7
Charisma: 6
Corruptness: 10
Gullibility: 1
Attractiveness: 5
Kindness: 4
Neediness: 6
Muscles Miguel
Cleverness: 1
Charisma: 8
Corruptness: 7
Gullibility: 7
Attractiveness: 7
Kindness: 1
Neediness: 1
Good Guy Dave
Cleverness: 6
Charisma: 7
Corruptness: 2
Gullibility: 6
Attractiveness: 9
Kindness: 8
Neediness: 2
Smarty Arty
Cleverness: 9
Charisma: 4
Corruptness: 5
Gullibility: 1
Attractiveness: 3
Kindness: 2
Neediness: 6
Ozella hated to admit it (mostly because she didn’t like giving guys the top base classification at the start), but Sam was definitely a “Good Guy Dave.”
Definitely. Most definitely. Evident in the way he held himself, his general handsomeness, something genuine behind his honey-colored eyes.
As they approached, she turned her attention to Helena Knight, observing the woman’s chic tomboyish clothing, gray hair, and the way that she held herself, as if she were seconds away from launching into a pirouette.
Ozella quickly scanned her most common classifications for women, looking for the perfect fit.
Tammy Big Tits
Cleverness: 3
Charisma: 6
Corruptness: 9
Gullibility: 2
Attractiveness: 9
Kindness: 3
Neediness: 4
Samantha Lies
Cleverness: 10
Charisma: 8
Corruptness: 9
Gullibility: 1
Attractiveness: 7
Kindness: 2
Neediness: 2
Bitchy Bridget
Cleverness: 7
Charisma: 2
Corruptness: 7
Gullibility: 3
Attractiveness: 4
Kindness: 1
Neediness: 6
Gym Rat Pat
Cleverness:
6
Charisma: 7
Corruptness: 5
Gullibility: 4
Attractiveness: 10
Kindness: 4
Neediness: 5
No Confidence Karen
Cleverness: 4
Charisma: 2
Corruptness: 1
Gullibility: 7
Attractiveness: 6
Kindness: 7
Neediness: 9
Silly Sally
Cleverness: 4
Charisma: 9
Corruptness: 8
Gullibility: 6
Attractiveness: 7
Kindness: 8
Neediness: 6
Definitely a Gym Rat Pat.
And since this was all an elaborate guessing game, Ozella Rose could have never known that she would end up living with the two people that stood before her, being involved intimately with them, even teaming up with them in the future.
All she knew in that moment was that they looked like a perfect pair to send to the cosplay café’s Unholy Matrimony room, because everyone liked a Good Guy Dave, and a Gym Rat Pat was easy to get along with too.
Besides that, it was the only room available.
And so that’s exactly what Ozella did.
She gave Sam and Helena a ticket for the room, and watched them walk away, again referring to her notebook, oblivious to the fact that there was another customer standing in front of her, undressing the pigtailed twenty-year-old in the schoolgirl uniform with his eyes.
Chapter Seven: Heroes Anonymous
(Fast forward, and in a way, rewind.)
“I am not a superpowered individual. I am not an exemplar. I have never had a superpower. I am not a hero, nor will I ever be a hero. I am not a superhero, I am half-powered. I will always be half-powered, I am a non-exemplar. There is nothing about me that is extraordinary. I am not a hero, I am not a superhero. I am half-powered. I will always be half-powered. I am a non-exemplar.”
Yeah, Sam Meeko knew the words, this was, after all, the second time he had received a court order to attend a Heroes Anonymous meeting. The first time had been a little over a year ago, when he was still dating Zoe Goa Ramone, after he’d gone on a little crime-fighting mission with her.
We Could Be Heroes Page 3
