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“Okay!” Nick exclaimed to no one in particular, seeing as how he was alone in his room at six o’clock in the morning. “Think. Think. First things first. When one decides to become an Extraordinary, one must throw away all they know about their lives in pursuit of their dream.”

And—though he tried not to focus on it too much—when one is being love-stalked (possibly) by the world’s best Extraordinary, one must come up with a plan that ensures the ensuing origin story is for the ages. This part threatened to overtake his thoughts, but since he was certain of his newly formed plan, he only considered the love-stalking for thirteen minutes.

Theproblemwith deciding to have an origin story and becoming an Extraordinary is that there were so many different ideas on how to go about it. This, of course, made Nick immediately overwhelmed, given the enormity of the task.

It didn’t help that he couldn’t talk to his father about this. He didn’t want Dad to worry, especially if Nick ended up needing to do something dangerous in order to become Extraordinary. It wasn’t that he was necessarily concerned about his own well-being, but more so that he didn’t want his plans to be curtailed before they even began. What Dad didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Hopefully.

He pulled out a notebook from his bag and sat on the edge of his bed, toes digging into the carpet. He tapped his pen against the blank page before deciding on the perfect way to begin. He wrote:

IDEAS FOR BECOMING AN EXTRAORDINARY

It was a good start. Nick was impressed with himself. It showed initiative and follow through. He’d set his mind to something, and by god, he was sticking with it! He’d gotten the hard part out of the way and now all he needed to do was fill in the rest. Easy.

“Okay,” he mumbled. “You got this, man. I believe in you. How can you have the best origin story so that Shadow Star doesn’t see you as a liability and instead judges you on yourlay-ability?”

He blushed, because he was still a prude and because puns were the lowest form of humor.

Shadow Star would probably be gentle. And romantic. Like, flowers and junk. Candles. The long ones they got at fancy restaurants in movies. Nick could deal with that. Boys could give boys flowers, right? It wasn’t only for girls. Nick didn’t know for sure. Which meant he had to look it up on his phone. He felt badly for all the generations that had come before him, unable to access queries immediately such as if it was okay for boys to give other boys flowers.

Two minutes later, he was somehow reading a Wikipedia article on the Women’s Cricket World Cup, unsure of how he got there.

“Focus,” he hissed to himself, putting his phone back in his backpack. “If you’re going to commit to this, you need to do it right. Think, Bell.”

It couldn’t be that hard, right? Sure, it wasn’t quite clear on how Extraordinaries got their powers. They made up such a tiny percentage of the population that no one was even really sure where they’d come from. Many believed that Extraordinaries were born, not made, a twist of genomes that was almost like a defect. Others claimed they received their powers through government testing.

The first verifiable Extraordinary was a man in California in 1947, near the dawn of nuclear power. He’d been super strong and had gone by the name of the American Patriot, his costume essentially one gigantic flag of stars and stripes. But, as it turned out, the forties had been filled with misogyny, racism, and homophobia, and the American Patriot had had some terrible ideas about what constituted being an Extraordinary, so much so that he only fought to promote the power of straight white men. He’d lasted as a herofor sixteen days before deciding that a life of crime as a villain paid far more than doing good.

Which led to the reveal of asecondExtraordinary, Primate Girl, a young woman with really large forearms and gorgeous body hair who ended the American Patriot’s reign of bank-robbing terror by punching him so hard, authorities found his jawbone three miles away in a tree outside an orphanage. Thankfully, the children of the orphanage had been on a trip to the zoo and did not see the jawbone before it was removed. Nick thought that if he’d found a random jawbone, it’d mess him up for life.

Primate Girl was somewhat celebrated for her actions; unfortunately, it was still the forties, and public opinion was that a woman’s place was in the home, caring for her family. Primate Girl, much to Nick’s glee, publicly announced she would retire immediately and marry the first man who could beat her in an arm wrestling contest. Seventeen men volunteered. By the end, Primate Girl remained unmarried, and the men were treated at area hospitals for injuries sustained while attempting to prove their masculinity.

From there, more and more Extraordinaries appeared. Oh, they were still rare, and most cities never had one. But they were emboldened by Primate Girl’s actions and began exhibiting their powers, mostly in the name of truth and justice. Regardless of what feats they were capable of, they all had one thing in common: They always hid their identities, which made it next to impossible for scientists to get their hands on them for study. There’d been a call in the late sixties and early seventies to require Extraordinaries to reveal their true identities to the public and submit for testing, but it’d died before gaining much traction. Hippie protests had seen to that. Extraordinaries were so few and far between that they inspired awe rather than fear, for the most part.

Even Pyro Storm had his own groupies. And it wasn’t like he’d actually done anythingtooevil. Aside from being Shadow Star’s archnemesis, the worst thing he’d done was somehow make all the traffic lights in Nova City turn green at once, causing thousands of fender benders and a complete gridlock in the streets that lasted for seventeen hours. Granted, he’d used that time to try to stealpriceless artwork from the Nova City Fine Art Museum, but his attempt had been foiled by Shadow Star, so everything was fine. At least, that was what Rebecca Firestone had reported.

And it wasn’t like they were the only Extraordinaries in the world. There was a man in Berlin who could shoot ice from his eyes. There was one in Portland, Oregon, who was capable of creating portals that could take him easily from one side of the city to the other. There was one in Tallahassee who had the skin of an alligator, though there were some people who thought it was a rather aggressive fungus. There was a nonbinary Extraordinary in Tokyo who could create fireworks with their mind, and another in New Zealand who controlled herds of sheep with a single thought, which she displayed proudly.

So maybe they weren’t exactly like the comic books Nick read, but that was okay. He didn’t need them to be. The Sheep Herder was good for the economy, apparently. Which, while not exactly glamorous, was still pretty cool.

But Nick didn’t want to be just pretty cool. If he was going to be an Extraordinary, then he was going to be the best one that ever lived. Which brought him back to his list and finding out how to become Extraordinary in the first place. Origin stories needed to be organic. In a lot of the comics he’d read, heroes were put into impossible situations that led to them gaining their powers. He just needed to find a way to be in the right place at the right time.

The internet, for one of the first times in his life, failed him in that regard. There were too many theories, and none of them seemed to be based in any kind of reality. Most seemed to be stuck on the idea that Extraordinaries were born and not made. If that were the case, Nick was screwed even before he got started. And since that wouldn’t do, he chose not to believe it. Besides, it smacked of pure-blood bullshit, and Nick wasn’t here for that at all. Anyone could do anything, so long as they put their minds to it. Or so he hoped.

No one really knew where Shadow Star or Pyro Storm had come from when they appeared roughly two years earlier. They were unique in that their powers seemed to be stronger than others before them. Nick had never heard of another Extraordinary that couldcontrol shadows like his hero could. And while there had been others with pyrokinesis like Pyro Storm, none had the strength he had. Not only could he actually control fire, he could create it with his mind out of nowhere, which, if it weren’t so rad, would be terrifying.

The Nova City Fire Department had come out against Pyro Storm last year, claiming he had the potential to make their jobs harder, but then everyone had gotten distracted when Shadow Star had saved a bus filled with elderly people on their way to a time-share seminar from crashing into a gas station after the driver fell asleep at the wheel. That had been a good day for the Shadow Star fandom.

But they weren’t the first heroes Nova City had seen, were they? No. Anyone worth their salt knew that Nova City once had its streets protected—in a strange time known as the turn of the twenty-first century—by a different Extraordinary, one who’d gone by the name Guardian. This Extraordinary appeared out of nowhere, their costume sleek and cerulean blue from head to toe. They’d started small, stopping muggings and break-ins with their telekinetic powers before taking on larger tasks, such as diverting the terribly named Men’s Rights Parade so the marchers all ended up falling into the Westfield River. Most hadn’t known what to make of Guardian—no one even knew if they were a man or a woman, given that their costume hid what lay underneath—but they’d cautiously cheered the hero on. Then, for reasons no one could explain, Guardian had disappeared in the early aughts, never to be seen again. Either they’d been killed in their regular lives, or they’d decided Nova City didn’t need saving. It wasn’t until the coming of Shadow Star and Pyro Storm that the city once again had Extraordinaries of its own.

Which, unfortunately, did little to help Nick in his quest. The photographs of Guardian were blurry, out of focus, only catching the hero’s boots or the back of their head, covered in a mask. Guardian had never sat for interviews, had never given grand and exciting speeches about being the savior the city needed. They’d kept their head down, fighting for the forces of good until they didn’t. They were just… gone. Nick didn’t understand how someone couldstopwhen they could move things with the power of their mind.

“What are you doing?”

Nick looked up, startled at the voice. He blinked when he saw he was in the Franklin Street station. He hadn’t even realized he’d left his house. Autopilot was a scary thing, especially for one such as Nick. He had a vague memory of taking his pill and choking down burnt toast, but that was all.

Seth stood in front of him. He was wearing a sweater vest over a collared dress shirt. Instead of a bow tie, today he had a checkered ascot, his curly hair sticking up every which way. If anyone else had worn an ascot in front of Nick, he would have—well, probably not said anything because that would be a dick thing to do. People could dress how they wanted. But they wouldn’t be Seth, that was for damn sure.