Work-in-progress - "Paragon" (Patreon)

Today's excerpt comes from a superhero project I've been playing around with as an outlet for my ongoing, complicated feelings about the superhero genre and what roles it can serve in our Current Political Moment (TM).

This is all zero draft, incredibly rough form, so there will be typos, etc. But I hope it's an interesting peek behind the curtain for you! This excerpt comes from the second chapter, just after our hero rescues some people from a burning building. I've got about 8K words so far, but I'm not sure I'll end up taking this all the way into becoming a novel.

As is often the case, I have way more projects vying for my attention than I can reasonably work on at one time. So if you're really interested in this one and/or seeing me return to the supers genre, let me know int he comments below!

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Hours later, feeling woozy and his suit reeking of smoke, Dan checked the angles before climbing inside his apartment. Gnosis had enchanted the doors and windows of the building to make it easier for the three of them to come and go without notice. People just didn’t look up around their building, didn’t bother to take the leap from “a person in a super suit just climbed in the window” to “who lives here and how can I profit from knowing that they’re a superhero?”

Dan closed the window, drew the curtains, then collapsed on the messy chair. The “I’m bleeding but I need to sit down before I can do anything about it” chair, the “I desperately need a shower but that can wait just a second” chair. They picked up a new one every few weeks from toss-aways on the street, since the messy chairs accumulated blood, ichor, and assorted smells faster than seemed possible.

“Hey,” said Arielle from the kitchen. Their apartment had an almost living-room-sized living room, a small open kitchen, and the bedrooms off in the back. It wasn’t the smallest place he’d lived in since coming to the five, but it was smaller than the one-bedroom he’d lived in his years as an upperclassman in college.

Arielle “Rigger” Butler wore her gray-on-black suit without the mask, holding a glass of water in one hand and a plate with deli meats in the other. Arielle had medium-brown skin, piercing eyes, and wore her thin dreads up and back to keep them out of her face. Arielle was a gadgeteer and her power was, from what Dan could tell, the willpower to train harder than anyone he’d ever met. She hit the gym hard, hit the books hard, was a social worker and handywoman in their apartment to get them a break on rent. She was intense at work but relished spare moments to relax: the wind-down period after patrols, the meals after victories, and when the building’s residents staved off a buyout by MaxCorp through six weeks of sustained protest.

Ari handed Dan the water as he breathed slow, focusing his power on strengthening his lungs to filter out the smoke. “Thanks. May need to hit the O2 here in a minute.”

“Of course.” Ari pulled over a chair from the small dining area to sit with Dan. She offered the plate of food to share. “Sorry I couldn’t make it up for the fire. There’s a new alliance between some of the Alt-Right gangs, they were harassing a protest at the downtown ICE office.”

“How’d it go?”

“Strangely, none of those courageous heroes of the West wanted to rumble with a little black lady and her big toys.”

Ari was shorter than Dan, but not by much. And she was both in better shape and carried far more weaponry. Dan was a bruiser, while Ari rolled with a deceptively spacious utility belt and an array of pockets built into her suit.

“How were the cops?”

“Okay. Ish. They weren’t obvious in their support of the red hats, at least.”

For a large, liberal city, the police were frustratingly regressive. Some said it was because they were tired of being upstaged by the capes. 

“Or maybe they’re just racist,” Ari would offer. 

“Do you have parts to spare to make me a rebreather? Taking breaks to clear my lungs nearly got some folks killed. I can’t have that on my conscience.”

“So you’ll put it on mine if I can’t make it?” Ari asked. But with a smile.

“Of course not. Sorry. It was just too close out there. I still feel like I’m flailing. But not like I have the spare time to train more, or like anyone has answers for what’s going on with my powers.”

“Not for lack of trying,” said Gnosis, floating down the hallway from the bedrooms. “But I am not remotely close to giving up.” Sam “Gnosis” Johnston, the third superheroic housemate, was the shortest and slimmest of the three, white skin pale from even less time in the sun than Dan and his office life day job. Sam's power lay in magic rather than machinery or whatever gave Dan his abilities. Sam's costume was grandiose, with brocaded robes in brightly contrasting colors. At home, they stuck with robes, but far simpler. This one was soft pink and well-loved, hem not quite touching the floor as they arced over to the couch to join the conversation. “Delving into the realms of the hidden has given me many questions but few answers regarding your powers. Without dedicated time to journey with you, work will continue to be slow.”

“I just don’t know when we can take the time off,” Dane said. “The red hats are on the move, we’re just starting hurricane season, and half of the Watchers are still missing after the Ydaer Realignment.”

“The CityCapes forum is full of people posting away messages and not-so-veiled complaints about burnout. It’s everywhere. Ever since the Sam Scion rolled into office…” Ari said.

The room fell silent. Sam hadn’t even got his powers when the last election happened. The time before felt like yesterday and an eternity ago. Even in supposedly left-leaning cities, hate crimes were up, protests became skirmishes, and failing infrastructure led to more derailments, more sinkholes, and worse. The friction of day-to-day life was higher, like swimming through the humidity of summer but all the time in the little ways that the social order was being torn apart.

“Not like we can be everywhere,” Sam said. “There aren’t enough of us, even with the lifer legacies like Prism and Atlas. And the living legends - Amazon, Protector. They’re ageless, inspiring, and totally out of touch in the 21st century. They think it’s still 1955 and that the biggest things we have to worry about are natural disasters and scheming villains with obvious costumes.”

“Why wouldn’t they? They haven’t lived in the same world with the rest of us for decades. That’s why we have to start taking the lead.”

“For right now, I’m taking the lead in going to bed.” Dan hugged his roommates, threw himself into the shower for a minute, then collapsed in his bed, falling instantly asleep.

***

Dan was snatched from dreamless sleep by his alarm. 7AM came very quickly when you were regularly out until 2. His commute used to be longer, crossing an entire borough to get to work. But that was before he got his powers, before he took on his second job with even worse hours and no pay.

Only the big heroes got sponsorships worth mentioning. 

Twinges of jealousy or possibly back pain accompanied Dan as he put on the day’s slacks and collared shirt. He ran a comb through his hair, which still smelled like smoke.

“I burned my breakfast and had to put out the fire,” his subconscious supplied as soon as he realized people at work might wonder. 

It turned out that one of the skills you had develop as a superhero was coming up with contextually-appropriate lies on your feet.

Ari and Sam were still asleep, so he soft-footed his way around the apartment, grabbing a protein bar for breakfast and stopping for a coffee before getting on the subway. 

He could run and jump along rooftops and get to work in half the time, but there was a good chance he’d get sidetracked by something and even if he didn’t, Dan liked traveling like a normal person sometimes. The legends lost touch with people, keeping themselves apart, above people, like zookeepers. Dan wasn’t a zookeeper. He barely felt like he knew what animal he was. Bad metaphor.

Plus, the subway made for good people watching and rumor-collecting. Most of the riders were commuting like he was, suits and messenger bags, business wear and statement necklaces and purses big enough to hold the heels you change into at work or the gym bag for using the company rec room. A pair of office worker-looking folks stood near him, arrayed around the train car’s central pole. One was tall, white, wearing an expensive suit, and sporting an intolerable smirk. The other two were shorter, one with light brown skin and a newsboy cap, the other white and tanned, sporting a flag pin in a way that usually meant “votes for bigots and claims total ownership of patriotism.” Great crowd. Dan felt tentatively bad for the probably-south asian member of their group. Dan watched them out of the corner of his eye while listening to his commuting mix of relaxing songs in one earbud.

“Can’t wait until the new buildings are up. It’ll cut our commute in half. I’ll never have to set foot in Kingston again,” 

“I grew up in Kingston,” said the one with the cap.

“So you know how much of a shithole it is,” said the third. The smirker threw a fist-bump to the third, and Dan physically restrained his eyes from rolling all the way back into his head.

Cap-wearer changed topics. “Did you guys catch the match last night? Gladiators totally killed it!”

Q-Ball. The other way for a super to make a living. Rather than let supers play in normal sports, they channeled the metahumans into Q-Ball, which was sort of like MMA meets Quiddich.

The cap-wearer’s distraction bid paid off, and the bro-y office workers spent the rest of the trip talking about Q-Ball. Dan noticed the MaxCorp ID badges on their lanyards as they all filed out for their stop. He recognized them thanks to MaxBooks, the megacorp’s expansion into publishing, with a small office down the block from Dan’s. Also, the MaxCorp logo was an obnoxiously orange box with the letters MC on every side.

MaxCorp was everywhere these days. They made phones and tablets and home admin computers, they ran the world’s largest online retailer, and they were moving into bricks and mortar and appliances and probably another half-dozen industries just since last week.

The owner, Theo Max, was the new hotness among tech zillionaires, getting lots of press for his space program, for his feud with the asshole president, and more. Locally, that included his power play to base his new corporate headquarters in Fuhrst, pushing the city to give him a whole neighborhood near Dan’s apartment. It was a big fight and not at all resolved. Or did these guys know more about how it was going than the papers let on? 

The rest of his commute passed in a blur, his focus returning as emerged onto his floor and entered the offices of Metal Phoenix Books. 

Game face, he told himself. Facing down muggers and super-criminals was one thing. But at work, he couldn’t be Paragon. He had to be super all on his own as Dan Douglas.