Chapter 1

My mother taught me to never harshly judge a drug addict. When she found out she was pregnant with me she gave up heroin immediately. What must’ve been nine painful months later out popped me with no signs of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, withdrawal in a newborn infant. However withdrawal did finally take its toll on her and she passed away two weeks after I was born.

My dad never trusted the state. He always said the government was always stirring up tensions between the races to turn us against one another. It keeps us destructive and angry and trusting primarily the government. Naturally when he and his friends were discussing this in a Baltimore garage a nosey customer decided to report them. He got fired, then found a new job, but that same customer saw him there too. Things went downhill from there until eventually he had to run out of town leaving me in an orphanage.

This was well before I was old enough to remember anything, but the head of the orphanage, for the real person's safety we'll call him Jim, was a friend of my parents when they were young. Whenever I had to cry at night he would stay up and tell me a story of their childhood shenanigans together. One time, he referred to a story I had never heard before. Turns out he’d gotten lost in the past after I’d fallen asleep. We both cracked up that night and I forgot what I was even sad about.

As a child, my parent's courage was a model for me. Being a superhero became my ambition. My first opportunity came with the government tests for psychic abilities, or the Evolutionary Standard Exam, the genetic disposition test for natural born superpowers. You can tell by the age of seven if a child is going to be psychic. None of us were, but I remember a week after failing that test my particularly lazy friend named Nolly was asked why he didn’t clean his room he simply answered; “But, you said last week I couldn’t read minds.”

The ESE didn’t fare much better for me. There were a few people with the disposition. Once the gene was detected they were ushered off to the camp never to come back. Unfortunately, that included my one friend in the orphanage Nolly.

So, I wasn’t a natural born hero. There were other ways to become a HypeEx. Before I reached twelve, I’d gotten on a solid exercise routine. Being healthy, strong, and high in stamina is vital for any hero regardless of power. That being said, it was not enough. To register as a cape you still needed an actual power.

There were two known ways to earn powers. The first was to invent a gadget useful for taking down super men. When I was old enough, I tried shop class. My soldering and welding skills were greatly beneficial later in life but bore no direct fruit towards my biggest goal. While my skills had developed to break and reshape metal objects as big as a car hood to small as a microchip, I for the life of me, couldn’t think of a weapon or tool that was cheap enough for me to maintain on my own. I did get an eighth of the way through an exo-suit, before I ran out of resources for it. Looking back, if I truly cared about that suit, I would’ve found a way to finish it with recycled materials and a lot of extra time with the forge. I still have the piece somewhere.

The other is to learn Magic. If you’re ever trying to learn magic to become a HypeEx, I beg you, never use the library, or at least not the BCPL. First book on the arcane I came across, Vampiric Magic For Humans, was supposedly a guide to gain the powers of a vampire without becoming undead. Luckily Sister Rose, a nun who worked with the orphanage, decided my request for a live, fat, and hungry cat merited investigation. She made me quit my pursuit due to its unholy nature. Rereading it years later, for reminiscent reasons I assure you dear reader, the book was definitely instructions to become a vampire disguised as a way around it. After the “raid” I was too scared to pick up another book of arcana. With that my journey met its end. There were no other options as far as I could see. Let me tell you having your dreams, not crushed, but cut short when you know how close you were to achieving them, is just one of the worst feelings. Like having a tight, constipated feeling in your heart.