A Terrible No Good Day

Arcadia had a faraday cage erected around the entire school, which completely blocked cell phone use. No signals got in, and no signals got out. What that was intended to achieve was keep all students focused on their work during school hours. It was the traditional argument really. Work hard and play hard. When you were at school, you were at school. And that meant doing work and focusing on your studies. Of course it didn't exactly work like that. It might have kept people from texting and getting on the internet on their phones, but there were plenty of phone apps that let you distract yourself with games and so on that didn't require an active connection to anything at all.

What it also did, was make the day seem torturously slow. When you were the child of Carol Dallon, academic non-exceptionalism was the enemy. Good enough wasn't good enough. You needed to be great. And as the unpowered member of the family, when she actually remembered to think of him, that meant he had to be even better than his sisters. And what that meant, was that he had to study up on everything 3 months ahead of time. When the class was covering basic statistics, he had already started covering logarithms at home, whether that was with Crystal helping as tutor, his mother occasionally taking the chance to tutor him herself, or just him being sat at the table with books and binders and what not all over the place.

All of that to say, going to Arcadia was boring. Academically, there was nothing that attending school actually did for him. He wasn't some prodigy or genius, but he had the pressure to succeed coming from the overwhelming figure of his mother. He was effectively home schooled at this point, everything he learned, he did so at home. Arcadia was just for double checking he remembered it all.

What then was the purpose of even attending high school? Well ostensibly you could argue that maybe it was to socialise. To get to know people, to learn how to interact with people and communicate. High School playground politics was the practice grounds for the office politics that many people would end up **** into after their eventual graduation. There was one problem with all of that though, and her name was Victoria Dallon. Vicky was a social butterfly, but that almost made her a black hole. She drew in every person she met, absorbing them like a vortex into her orbit. If he met someone, talked to someone, Vicky was there. Any friend of his would also become a friend of Vicky, and then it was only a matter of time before they much preferred Vicky to the boring old James Dallon. And then he had no friend at all.

It was a little less miserable for Amy, though not entirely. She was a Cape herself, so there was something to her to keep people interested. But she was also almost always at Vicky's side, a part of her orbit. So any friend of Vicky's was a friend of Amy's, though not all of them could handle Amy's acerbic nature. Still, it let Amy have the appearance of having friends.

Throughout the day, his hand kept twitching, kept demanding he draw his pen and do something with his new power. It was frustrating. He had this power, and yet everything seemed to be exactly the same. It meant nothing. And yes that was probably for the best, but it still felt frustrating. Vicky and Amy didn't need to do anything with their power to get popular. It was probably a bit of a fantasy to think that just having a power would change anything, and to think that he didn't need to do anything with it.

But nothing had changed, except now he was getting frustrated at his own power for the temptation it now represented. For its ability to just make things not matter. His thoughts turned to Crystal, his favourite cousin. The genuine care she'd shown him just that morning. How pathetic was he that he had been spiralling into villainy within his own head, and one chat with Crystal, one member of his family showing genuine care and affection, and suddenly his mind was twisted around. Did he have that low opinion of himself? Or was he just that **** for affection that a simple show of care was enough to twist him around someone else's words?

Being inside his own head was a depressing, and honestly fucking atrocious experience, and unfortunately it was the only place he had to be.

The moment school was over, he was practically sprinting to Brockton University. Running like a dog to the whistle of his owner.

A Hebert. A single name for an office practically buried by time, and yet somehow it reflected the most thrill and happiness he'd felt in ages. With the exception of his power. Pushing open the office door revealed a small space. Desk. Blocky computer that was definitely over a decade out of date, possibly even older. Probably didn't even run Windows XP. He didn't even know what came before XP, but this thing was old enough to know. There were a few pens and stuff about, some files stacked up. Overall the place was almost spartan, everything covered in dust except for the places where Crystal had obviously cleared it away when she came in. The only hint at the personality at whoever had used this desk was a single framed photograph on the desk, showing a smiling woman, a taller man with his own sly smile, and a young girl squeezed between them both, looking about 3 or 4 years old. They looked happy enough, though it provided no clue to their identities.

With nothing else to find around the sparsely decorated office, he slumped down into the beanbag Crystal had set up here, and determined himself to wait for her.

An hour ticked by without sign of her. He checked his phone several times, seeing nothing, and mostly just set himself to keeping up with his studying. He needed to keep himself 3 months ahead after all. Always three months ahead. Needed to prove he was worth anything in a house filled with superhumans.

By the end of the second hour he had enough. That was when the phone was out and he was onto PHO and scrolling through discussion threads. A vs thread comparing Glory Girl to some other flying brick in Idaho was amusing enough, with how many people were screeching at each other in full caps about feats and so on until a mod eventually locked the thread. There was a thread about some new cape in Brockton Bay sighted going out with the E88, so apparently the Nazi's had been recruiting again. Yay.

And then he scrolled by the news threads, and saw a mention of New Wave showing up to a publicity event over on the boardwork. Specifically the Pelham half of New Wave. The thread had been active for over an hour, with people chatting about it, some people complaining about them doing publicity stuff instead of kicking the assess of gangers, others talking about how cool Laserdream was, or memeing about Photon Mom, his aunt's unofficial second cape name that she absolutely hated.

All of the time he was scrolling, he couldn't hold back the frustration, and more importantly the anger that was brewing inside his heart. Crystal had ditched him to go to some photo op. One that had probably been planned weeks in advance. Had she been sincere at all in meeting him, or had she just been pulling a prank at her cousin's expense?

Those sorts of thoughts would never have crossed his mind in a normal scenario. Crystal wasn't the type. The reasonable explanation would be she had forgotten and ended up double booked. But as the frustration swelled, such a reasonable explanation was further from his mind than the Nazis were from having a point. He scooped up his things into his bag, and stormed back to the bus stop. And as he boarded and made his way home, his mind just kept running in circles, his thoughts echoing around inside his head, and by the time he got home, it was all reaching a fever pitch.

He noted the car missing from the drive as he stomped up the driveway, meaning his mother wasn't home. The door was unlocked, opened and slammed behind him, his shoes kicked off uncaring of the tongue lashing Carol would give him for it later.

Stalking to his room had him run right into Amy.

"What's got your panties in a twist?" She asked, her tongue like oil to his enflamed emotions. "Vicky has to use those too you know?"

His hand twitched towards his pen.