Faster is also the first of a series that will follow Sparrow’s journey in that world, continuing with the story Stronger.
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The creators of classic and contemporary superhero fiction—including visionaries like Neil Gaiman and Christopher Nolan—do more than illuminate new worlds. They illuminate ours. I hope I can do the same.
Welcome to my world. Welcome to the Labyrinth.
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To Sacrifice A King
By Will Swardstrom
As professional sidekick to The Universal Hero, Jesse was ready to quit most days.
Jesse loved his job, but hated his boss. The man was a douchebag on his best days, and would never have been anyone’s first choice to save them from peril. But, he was a superhero. His abilities were unmatched in the Tri-State, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t the most hated good guy out there.
As sidekick, Jesse was forced to take whatever nickname his wise and powerful hero bestowed upon him.
For the last three months, Jesse had gone by the name Uranus.
The Universal Hero thought he was hilarious. Jesse knew he was a jerk.
At the bottom of the ladder when it came to sidekick gigs, Jesse could hold out hope for one thing—his chance to get superpowers of his own.
That’s what he was hoping for today as he slowly suited up for a mission. He didn’t get to share a locker room with The Universal Hero; he had his own “sidekick dressing room,” otherwise known as the lair’s custodial closet. Not that he wanted to share a locker room with his assigned hero. Jesse even hated the moniker—The Universal Hero. Was he the hero for the entire Universe? No…just the Tri-State.
Usually when they were out of the public eye, Jesse just referred to his boss as Larry. No “Universal Hero” stuff at the lair. His mother didn’t put The Universal Hero on his birth certificate, after all. It wasn’t like he was born with abilities. Maybe born a jerk, but not with abilities.
For superheroes, there were basically two ways to get your abilities or motivation to fight crime. Jesse was already out of the running for the first—a tragic childhood. He was human, so he was unable to draw upon the powers of an alien race before he was sent here by his dying father. And unfortunately for Jesse’s superhero status, his parents were still very much alive. Santa Claus came every Christmas, the Tooth Fairy every time a tooth came loose, and the Easter Bunny arrived with a basket every year, filled to the brim with chocolate. Tragic backstory was a lost cause, unless he could go back in time.
Yeah, Jesse’s parents were great, but at times he almost wished they had been gunned down in a dark alley by a psychopath so he could have a purer motivation to fight crime in the Tri-State.
Jesse made a mental note to call his mother and wish her a happy birthday after the mission. Check that—after he would risk his life for Larry. He knew that’s how the mission would end. It almost always did. There was a good chance he’d lose a finger (or something much worse). The best part about having Larry for a boss, though, was he could at least count on the jerk to get him out of harm’s way when the going got too tough.
That was one good thing Larry had going for him. He could be counted on to save the life of his sidekick. As much as Jesse despised his boss, he knew he would come home at the end of the day. He might be battered and bruised, but a stop at The Healing Touch (aka Phyllis Scotch, a 47-year-old former physician’s assistant) put everything back where it was supposed to go. That was the nice thing about being a sidekick, Jesse supposed—for every downside, there was an upside as well.
Which leads to the second way to become a superhero—a transformative event later in life.
For Larry, that event came as he was sitting on the can in a nasty stall in the back of Guido’s Bar on a Thursday night in New Boston.
++++++++
Jesse was one of the few people who knew how Larry received his powers. The idiot confided in him one night after getting drunk at the lair. It was during times like that when Jesse knew The Universal Hero bit was a front. That Larry was just a con artist masking himself as a superhero. He wasn’t evil by any stretch, but why he was chosen to receive his powers, Jesse would never know.
Larry Malcolm Phillips (his pre-hero moniker) was 20 years old and had just dropped out of college. Not really dropped out so much as kicked out after plagiarizing two separate essays for a political science class. Regardless of the semantics, Larry was a young man without a place in the world.
A night out with a few cold beers was called for, but his budget took him to a dive bar on the outskirts of New Boston. The beer was cheap but plentiful for a down-on-his-luck college dropout. After a few beers, Larry paid a visit to the restroom.
“I was just sitting there on the can, doing my business, you know what I mean?” Larry asked Jesse. The sidekick just nodded, hoping Larry would get on with the tale. “All of a sudden, BAM! The wall behind me shattered into a million pieces. I was knocked off the toilet. At first I thought it was the nachos I’d eaten. But then, I was suddenly aware.”
The hero paused, seemingly for effect. In spite of his telling Jesse there were few others to hear this story, there was a certain flair to the narrative.
“Aware of what? What do you mean?” Just a few weeks into his job of sidekick, Jesse was still naive. He so desperately wanted to have superpowers of his own that he looked for any angle he could to develop them.
“Aware…of everything. I probably had five beers already that night, but suddenly I felt as if I had just woken up from a 500-year nap. I was clear-headed and strong,” Larry said, just grinning, waiting for Jesse to ask the follow-up.
“What do you mean, ‘strong’?”
Larry just laughed. “I mean when I went to wipe my butt, I ripped the toilet paper holder right off the wall. Holy smokes, Jesse! That was messed up!”
“So what’d you do next?”
“I did what any other normal person would do…I jumped off a building,” Larry said nonchalantly.
“You did what?”
“Oh yeah. I’d read enough stories and seen enough videos on YouTube to know in order to really test your powers, you had to do something bold. Something dramatic. Something crazy,” Larry said, whispering the last line. “So, I went to the roof of the Great Pines Apartment Complex downtown and stepped off.”
“And that’s when you found out you could fly?”
“Nope,” Larry said with a chuckle. “That’s when I found out I could heal myself in a hurry. Luckily the building is only five stories high, so the landing wasn’t too bad. I guess my flying powers hadn’t quite kicked in yet, but I managed to not kill myself, only breaking both of my femurs. Hurt like hell. I woke up the next morning at Good Samaritan Hospital, but felt just fine. I was in a full-body cast from my waist down, but I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with me. It took a couple hours for them to do another x-ray, but when they did, I knew the night before wasn’t a fluke. I knew I was special.”
“So what was it? What caused your abilities?” Jesse asked.
“Heck if I know. One minute I’m taking a dump—the next I’m destroying the back half of Guido’s Bar. I didn’t have any injuries or anything, but that was the moment. For sure,” Larry said, then downed an entire bottle of tequila right before he fell asleep right on his recliner.
(That was another thing—after developing his powers, Larry had to drink about four times as much alcohol to reach the same level of inebriation that the rest of the human race does. At least, that’s what he told Jesse when Larry consumed case after case of beer.)
Larry never brought up his origin story again and Jesse never asked. Frankly, Jesse wasn’t sure if Larry even remembered telling him, and didn’t want to be on the bad side of the ridiculously-powerful, but insanely immature superhero.
It was as if Larry’s maturation had halted the moment he was dumping a load on the toilet that night. He had enough virtue to side with the good guys, but the line between good and moronic was fairly slim sometimes for The Universal Hero.
++++++++
In spite of all the hazing he endured and injuries he’d sustained while in the line of duty for the Tri-State, Jesse knew there was hope for him. If nothing else, Larry’s story gave him a glimmer of hope. If a doofus like him could be granted superpowers, than Jesse had to stand a better chance as well, right?
Not that Jesse wanted just any superpower. Sometimes he just had to laugh when he heard about some of the superheroes patrolling the planet. He made a list one time, just to amuse himself:
Burly Bear: able to spontaneously stop or grow hair anywhere on his body with a single thought. (Jesse wasn’t so sure what this power was good for, but the Bear lived in the Yukon. Not a lot of villains terrorizing Canadian territories.)
Slims: able to communicate with earthworms. (Again, Jesse had trouble figuring out how this would be useful taking down a villain like Carcinogen, but apparently the dude had the best yard in all of North America.)
The Tongue: her sense of taste was so heightened that she could taste the air. (This ability was actually more useful than it sounded. Jesse and The Universal Hero came across The Tongue one time as she was tracking a Fertilizer Thief across the Midwest. Nice girl, but weird.)
He had that list taped to the inside of his locker and added to it each time he met or heard of a new super. He laughed almost every time he opened his locker, just thinking of Slims talking to worms or Burly Bear spontaneously growing hair on the soles of his feet.
But…if those guys could get powers of their own, didn’t Jesse deserve some too?
Jesse gave the list one last look before he slammed the door to the locker and walked out, ready to face the day. Ready to face his job as Sidekick to The Universal Hero.
“Hey, Your-A-Nus,” Larry said, really drawing out the name of the seventh planet from the sun. He laughed to himself as Jesse simply gathered all the various tools and accessories he thought they might need.
“Where we headed today?” Jesse asked Larry, pretending he didn’t even hear Larry’s welcome.
“Over on 76th and Grand. Police reported a ‘funny feeling’ when they crossed the street to go to a warehouse in the Industrial District. They decided rather than investigate, they would call The Universal Hero on the Hero-line,” Larry said, speaking of himself in the third person.
“You don’t have to say that. You can just say they called you on your cellphone,” Jesse said. He was feeling a little snarky and went a step further. “And my name is Jesse.”
Larry swung his arm around and gave Jesse’s hair a tussle. The tussle could have easily snapped Jesse’s neck if Larry hadn’t been careful. “I know, man. Just kidding around with you. You know that, right?”
“Right,” Jesse said in an even tone.
An awkward silence hung over the two of them for a moment until Jesse spoke up again.
“So is there anything in particular you think we might need for this ‘funny feeling?’” Jesse asked pointedly.
For a brief moment, Larry seemed to look and analyze all his crime-fighting tools, but Jesse knew his boss was just putting on a show. The man barely knew what half the stuff did until it was handed to him in the heat of battle and Jesse had to shout out instructions on the fly.
“Why don’t you pack that, that, and that,” he said, pointing wildly to a few tools in front of Jesse. “Oh, and one of those bumpy things.”
Larry was already headed out the door by the time Jesse had gathered the actual tools he believed he might need to save his boss’s—and his own—life.
++++++++
It wasn’t as if Jesse hadn’t tried to gain super-powers. More than a few times Jesse had been in a position to acquire powers of his own. Or at least, he thought he had been.
Do you want to know what happens when a radioactive spider bites you?
You get a radioactive spider bite.
After Jesse had willingly put his arm into a science experiment on one mission, he had to be quarantined in an underground bunker for a week with another super-powered hero from Nevada—a dude who went by the name of Geiger Counter. After spending so much time around radioactive waste, Geiger Counter—otherwise known as former CPA Ross Anderson of Carson City—had the ability to absorb radioactivity from people, other living beings, and objects. It wasn’t the worst week of Jesse’s life, but it certainly wasn’t the best, either.
Another time, Jesse stumbled upon one of those hammers straight out of Norse mythology. He’d heard about these before. Only those “worthy” of wielding the hammer would be able to lift it and would then be transformed into a supernatural being from another world.
The only thing Jesse was worthy of on that particular day was a hernia.
One time a few months back, Jesse stumbled out of bed, only to find a glowing green ring next to his nightstand. He thought, This must be it—this must be the moment I am chosen to be Earth’s protector! Jesse slipped the ring on and tried every combination of “secret phrases” to get the stupid thing to work. Ready to quit, Jesse heard some chortling from the next room. Apparently Larry had coated a regular Cracker Jack ring with liquid radium just to see what Jesse would do with it when he discovered it in the morning.
Yep—another week spent with Geiger Counter. Jesse was starting to warm to the radioactive sponge.
“How do you keep ending up in these situations?” GC asked one day as the two of them sat in quarantine playing chess. The board of black and white squares was permanently set up in GC’s laboratory, inviting each and every guest to try their hand at the strategic game.
Jesse merely shrugged. He didn’t think he should tell Geiger Counter his innermost desires, but he didn’t have to. GC already knew.
“You go looking for it, don’t you?” GC asked, after taking Jesse’s rook with a bishop. “You want this life—the life of a superhero. My life, the life you see every day with your boss. That’s why you can’t stay out of trouble. High risk—high reward. That’s why.”
Jesse looked up from the chessboard and felt every bit of moisture leave his mouth. He couldn’t talk, but nodded at GC. After a couple weeks with the radioactive-powered man, Jesse was convinced GC would keep his secret better than Larry would.
Jesse wanted to get his own superpowers badly, but all the time spent in the infirmary was beginning to wear on his nerves. Worse yet, his motivations were all too clear to Larry. It was like fresh meat for a dog to his boss, who would be unrelenting in his juvenile pranks.
As Jesse and his boss sped towards the scene of today’s crime, he tried to remind himself not to wear his emotions on his sleeve so much. Reaching the intersection of 76th and Grand, Jesse began to have a strange feeling.
“Uh, Larry?” Jesse started.
“Jesse, please. Call me The Universal Hero when we’re out in public. We need to be concerned about public relations, after all,” Larry said, admonishing his sidekick.
“Right, sorry,” Jesse said, not at all apologetic. “Anyway, I just have a bad feeling about this.”
“Nonsense. Whatever is going on, they haven’t met me yet,” Larry said.
Jesse had to hand it to him—the man was extremely confident of his own abilities. Foolhardy, a blowhard, and a royal jerk…but confident.
“Right, sir,” Jesse said, stopping the van just outside the area the police indicated. An object was in the middle of the road, about a quarter-mile ahead. They both got out of the van and stood on the yellow stripe that bisected the avenue. Jesse worked on packing a charcoal-colored backpack packed full of various tools and weapons he typically carried into dangerous situations, but kept an eye on the road ahead of them.
“What is that?” Jesse asked. He knew The Universal Hero had Super Vision and Jesse was well aware he was giving the man an ego boost.
“Hmm…I’m not sure. Let me take a closer look,” Larry said, zooming off closer to the object before Jesse could object.
“That’s not what I…” Jesse started to say, but then wisely shut his mouth, put his head down and jogged after Larry. He made it about 20 feet when he realized two things.
1. He had passed Larry a few seconds earlier.
2. Larry had been absolutely still. Like statue still.
Slowly turning around, Jesse gaped at The Universal Hero, seemingly frozen in the middle of Grand Avenue. His cape, flowing behind his spandex-clad body, was still paused in mid-air as if it had been dipped in a clear lacquer. Jesse had seen a lot in his time as a professional sidekick, but had never seen anything like this.
At the scenes of crimes, Jesse had always been the one to be shot, frozen, bitten, or otherwise incapacitated. Now the tables were turned. Jesse had no idea what to do.
He first waved his hand in front of Larry’s face. His boss’ face didn’t change one bit. In fact, it appeared as though Larry wasn’t even breathing. He placed his hand on Larry’s arm and found the hero’s temperature normal. Not frozen. On a whim, he took Larry’s outstretched right arm and moved it. The appendage moved like the arms and legs of a G.I. Joe figure, with some ease but with a little resistance.
“How do you like that?” Jesse asked Larry after placing the index finger of his boss’ right hand inside the frozen man’s nose.
“JESSE.”
Jesse must’ve jumped backwards five feet, ready to apologize profusely to Larry, but Larry wasn’t moving. He squinted at the unmoving form of his boss, but he hadn’t moved at all since the two men had entered the affected area in the middle of Grand Avenue. So where did that voice come from?
“JESSE,” the voice repeated. “DO YOU HEAR ME?”
“Um…yeah? Who’s talking?” Jesse asked.
The Powers That Be: A Superhero Collection Page 17
