Chapter 10

The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully. Melissa returned late at night, cradling Amy in her arms. The youngest VanDyne wasn’t injured or hurt in any way, but she had run around full-steam for so long, by the time she dragged her lead-like body back to the truck, she had immediately passed out. According to Melissa, Amy had received two commendations from various supervisors at the response tent and earned a letter of recommendation from the Department of Metahuman Affairs itself.

Of course, the DMA’s note was both sterile and peppered with subtle hints that Amy should strongly consider a career in the Department, but it was still an official letter bearing the mayor’s office’s stamp of approval. It was like winning a trophy; most people wouldn’t care what it came from, only that she got one.

By the time Sunday evening rolled around, Tiff was mostly feeling like herself again…if she could actually remember what it felt like to be a normal teenager. Somehow, taking that hit by a dodgeball last Tuesday felt like a lifetime ago. But the shock of Awakening, getting Assessed, and finding out she was a Supervillain was wearing off. She wasn’t even that nervous about going to Homeroom in the morning and having to keep it a secret.

After all, people had more important things to gossip about.

“Did you hear? A Rift opened up at The Walk in Santa Ronda!”

Tiff rolled her eyes as she listened to the excited chatter in the hallways of Setma High. As she made her way to her locker, the noisy conversations seemed even louder. Seriously, were some people brain-dead? Everybody who had a phone heard about the Rift. It was on the EAS! Some of her peers were dumb, but nobody lived under a rock that big. Tiff was sure one didn’t exist.

Talk about the Rift occupied everybody’s attention. It was all she could hear as she put her stuff into her locker. From which heroes showed up (it wasn’t just Touchdown), to what their powers were, to what their costumes looked like, to how form-fitting they were, and the exact definition of their abs and if they were single.

Tiff narrowed her eyes and stared at a couple of girls leaning so close together it looked like they were both trying to squeeze into a single locker. Sadly, somebody had brought up a ranking of all the heroes they heard were present, and, of course, Tiff’s mom was on the list. Now, she couldn’t hear anybody talk about anybody who’d been spotted at the Rift on Friday without thinking of her mom, and it just got weird.

She mentally forgave the girls because they were talking about Young Justice, which sent several representatives from Anaheim in the afternoon, once school was out, to smile, shake hands, and look good for the press. By that time, The Walk had transformed from a ravaged war zone to something much more tv-friendly. Yes, people were hurt (and a few had died), but those were all in the initial defense of the monster attack. Most Citizens had been evacuated safely, and enough debris had been cleared away that the shopping center didn’t look like an earthquake had leveled everything. Tiff saw some pictures on the news Sunday night, and not a single pile of rubble remained. Plenty of stores had plywood boards covering where windows used to be, but otherwise, reconstruction was progressing rapidly.

In fact, it almost seemed to be getting fixed too quickly, and it was starting to irk Tiff. She knew super-powered construction crews could come in and fix the damage done by Rifts in what felt like the blink of an eye, but she never considered the effect that might have on a casual observer. Half of these students hadn’t seen The Walk at all during the event, and they’d never know the depths of emotions she felt in her brief stay there. They wouldn’t see the despair on some people’s faces, survivors who lost something or someone precious, or maybe didn’t have anything to go back to. They wouldn’t feel the exhaustion all those workers strained themselves under as they loaded literal tons of rock and rubble into wheelbarrows and dump trucks so they could have a chance at reaching people before it became too late.

They also wouldn’t know the war of emotions raging inside Tiff at the thought of a careless, cold-hearted System offering quests to people to both fix things…and make things worse.

Determined to shake off her bad mood, Tiff checked her schedule, grabbed the books she’d need for Homeroom and first period, and stormed to class before her expression could draw anybody’s attention.

​

She wasn’t the first to arrive, and she wasn’t the last. Tiff was always in the middle: inoffensive and invisible. She spared a glance at the four boys who always showed up early and felt herself frown. Not because they did anything to upset her, but she realized she knew nothing about them. Despite sitting in the same Homeroom together for years, they were just faces in a crowd. Less than that, actually, since Tiff couldn’t pick them out of a lineup if her life depended on it.

In the past, she would have called them “nerds.”

Was that…true?

Tiff was starting to suspect that it wasn’t. Why had she thought it was? Was it because they were the first people to arrive in her classroom, so they must have liked studying and were therefore more nerdy? Looking at the boys, Tiff wasn’t sure how she’d ever come to that conclusion. Nothing about them screamed nerd in the traditional sense: not their clothing, not their bearing, not what they were talking about. At least from what Tiff could hear.

Sure, one kid had a pocket monsters t-shirt, but that was trendy, not something anybody would look down on. Not a single one of them even wore glasses.

Tiff must have stared too long, because one of the boys suddenly turned her way and they locked eyes. In the past, Tiff might have quickly ducked down or averted her gaze. Now, she just…nodded. The boy, surprised, nodded back. Their transactionary greeting taken care of, the boy went back to his friends and Tiff turned away.

It all felt so…normal.

Tiff felt herself grow increasingly detached as her classmates trickled in. Like she was living somebody else’s life, watching through eyes that were no longer hers. Now that she Awakened…was she really one of them? She, too, had a label…one that said she most definitely wasn’t.

But then it hit her like a sack of bricks: everybody else in this class was Awakened, too. In fact, she was the last. And as her teacher, Mr. Hendricks, entered, his eyes fell on her and they lit up. Tiff let out a little sigh and slowly nodded.

Yes, it was finally time to get to work.

​

“Oh boy, do I have some exciting news to share with everyone today!” Mr. Hendricks gleefully rubbed his hands together as he stood behind his desk at the front of the room. The rest of the class greeted him with as much enthusiasm as they could muster on a chilly Monday morning in the middle of September. Which is to say, it could be measured in tsp rather than tbsp. Not that half of them knew what either of those was, except the kids in the cooking club. And even then, to most of them, it was less of a unit of measurement and more of a sound used to summon a cat.

Mr. Hendricks nodded in satisfaction as the cheer of yaaaaaaaay washed over his ears like the sound of mooing cattle.

“Today, as I am sure you all have been looking forward to with bated breath…we can finally start…Introductions to Powers and System Startup!!”

It took several moments for Mr. Hendricks’ words to sink in. Most of the kids’ brains tuned his words out and natively translated them into blah blah blah homework blah blah blah…but nobody, not even the most checked-out delinquent, could ignore PISS.

The class erupted with chatter, and he let them have their small moment of disruption as he was given the sound he wished for originally, even if he knew he’d never get it. A few of the more clever students put the clues together and turned in their seats to stare at Tiff. She met each of them in the eyes and gave them a cool stare. Eventually, Mr. Hendricks tapped the whiteboard with a stick and got everyone’s attention.

“Yes, yes…Miss VanDyne has graciously decided to join the rest of us. Now! Jokes aside…yes, we all get it, she was last, drop it. Everyone goes through Awakening; it’s not a race. Now that everyone has access to the System, we can finally start going over some of the topics that would be pointless to try without it! And we’re going to start by pulling it up!”

Tiff smirked as everyone around her groaned. They were likely thinking that, now that IPSS was finally starting, they would jump right into the meat and potatoes of the System. That might mean quests, that might mean Classes…it might even mean navigating the Greyscale. Tiff was sure that some knucklehead out there probably thought that they’d walk down to the gym where, somehow, one of the coaches had a spare Rift stuffed into a locker so they could practice delving.

Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen, though Tiff might have looked at Rifts with slightly rosier glasses last week than she did now. Every now and again, the image of a giant pillbug crept into her brain when she started daydreaming, making her break out in a cold sweat.

But surprisingly few students connected the class name to their initial lesson. It was, after all, called Introduction to Powers and System Startup. Emphasis on startup. It was a matter of fact that more than half the kids in the class had pestered their parents or older siblings into showing them how to summon their stats, as evidenced by several plain blue screens popping up over desks as kids showed off to their neighbors.

A few kids either didn’t know how or had never tried, so they were scrunching their faces up like they had a bad case of constipation as their neighbors tried to coach them in various ways. As Tiff listened, she was curious to hear how genuine her classmates were in trying to get those less fortunate students up to speed. She imagined much more bullying and laughter, but the teasing never came.

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Mr. Hendricks posted a DMA-approved guideline on the whiteboard, likely written by experts who studied the System, but it read like an End User License Agreement. Next to it, he jotted down a cheatsheet of tips and one-liners that might have sounded corny out of context, but in Tiff’s newly acquired state of revelation, were quite insightful.

After finishing up there, he began moving through the seats, coaching and helping as much as he could, which, as Tiff knew from her experience with Victoria, wasn’t much. After about 15 minutes of practice, where most of the students had grown bored and tried sinking into low conversations without realizing they weren’t sneaky at all, Mr. Hendricks began asking students to demonstrate proficiency.

Tiff frowned. Her last name started with a V, so her seat was in the back corner of the room. Being one of the last people on the roster, she had ample time to observe everyone else. Most kids, in their excitement, revealed their entire status. Some of them did so proudly, some did so with a little bit of flair- though never as much or as pretty as Victoria’s. More than one student was bragging to their neighbor, flipping their screens around or displaying “System acrobatics” as they twirled blue boxes around in the air. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a single student besides Tiff who Awakened as anything other than a Citizen.

To most, this was perfectly reasonable, as this class was designed to teach them how to move past that ground-level entry point.

Tiff didn’t have that problem.

Or rather, her problem was that she did not want anyone else to know what her Class was. Tiff not showing off her screen like everybody else wasn’t too unusual, as not every kid was doing it, but when Mr. Hendricks finally made his way to her desk, he seemed to be making some assumptions.

“Are you having difficulties summoning your screen?” He asked, not unkindly. “I can try to explain the directions again if they aren’t clear.”

“No, I’ve got it,” Tiff said. She made a quick motion, faster than almost everybody else, and brought up a screen. It wasn’t her full screen, barely anything in fact, only listing her name. Her Affinity, her stats, her Skills, and of course her Class were all hidden.

“Huh,” Mr. Hendricks said with a raised eyebrow. “That’s interesting. Just so I cover my bases…do you know how to bring everything else up?”

“Yes,” Tiff nodded sharply.

“Can you show me?”

“I have been told,” Tiff stated as she looked him in the eye, “That, by law, I cannot be forced to reveal my status. As the one responsible for teaching me this, can you confirm?”

It came out perhaps a touch more forceful than Tiff anticipated, and Mr. Hendricks actually stepped back, surprised. He looked at Tiff in shock; she might be quiet, but she was usually a model student who didn’t cause any waves. Tiff realized this and shook her head.

“Sorry. I’m not trying to be rude, I’m just not comfortable showing anybody my stats.”

“That’s…fine,” Mr. Hendricks quickly recovered. He turned to the rest of the class. “Great! We’re going to practice summoning our screens for the next 30 minutes! Everybody should be familiar with bringing it up by the time we’re done here!”

Tiff watched the back of the teacher move away from her as he continued moving around the room. A week ago, this would have been the highlight of her day. It would have been new, fresh, and exciting. Maybe she would have struggled, but so were her classmates, and that was okay, because it was normal and everyone was in this together. But after receiving her Class, getting Assessed, and having a Rift show up in her backyard…this seemed downright mundane. Tiff felt rather numb. So, having already mastered the entry-level summoning tech, she let her attention wander around the room.

Some of her peers were genuinely struggling. Had they not spent the first 15 years of their lives waiting for that singular moment when they could show their status off to the world? To be fair, Tiff hadn’t. She could easily see how somebody might lose interest in the System once they got their Class and realized it wasn’t special. Bringing the System up for personal use was much more intuitive than sharing it with others, and if they didn’t have anything to share, why would they? Or at least that was Tiff’s thought process.

A girl across from Tiff was staring at her hands so hard that her furrowed brows might be able to grow crops. Tiff watched as the girl’s screen flickered to life and fizzled out repeatedly, like an old incandescent lightbulb that wasn’t getting enough electricity. Tiff tilted her head curiously. The girl seemed to understand the basics, so what was the problem? Why wasn’t the screen staying? Was she trying to customize it as Victoria had? Was that why it looked like it crackled with static? Nobody else’s did that, not even Tiff’s.

But, strangely, that wasn’t what drew Tiff’s attention. As embarrassing as it was to admit, Tiff…didn’t actually know the girl’s name. She knew some very superficial things, such as the fact that they shared several classes and that her locker was several rows down in the main hall. Tiff also knew the girl was sporty and tried out for the cheerleading team. Tiff could picture, with surprising detail, the way her blond ponytail bounced as the girl flicked it with one of her natural ticks, since Tiff had sat next to her for several years.

However, for the life of her, Tiff could not remember her name. It was entirely possible she never committed it to memory. Maybe she’d heard it, and the name went in one ear and out the other. And for some reason, now, where it never had before, that bothered Tiff. It felt wrong.

Of course, when somebody is staring at a person for too long, it’s inevitable that the person in question notices. The girl must’ve felt that sixth-sense tingle as her head snapped up. She stared at Tiff, her brows still heavily furrowed as a bead of sweat started forming on her forehead.

“What are you looking at?” She said testily. “Do I have something on my face?”

Her tone was short, clipped, and obviously confrontational. And yet, Tiff felt nothing. Well, nothing from the girl; she certainly did not feel challenged like she might have, once upon a time. Tiff was starting to finally understand that the squiggly feeling worming around in her belly was remorse. She’d thrown this girl squarely into a box, slapped a label on it, and chucked it into the warehouse of other boxes, like the ending to Indiana Jones.