I really wished he'd stop staring at me. Even if it was only for a couple seconds each time. He sat at that table outside the gas station, sipping the red liquid from his white 22-ounce paper cup through a straw, talking on his phone. He was quite the multi-tasker. He was African American, from what I could tell, and he looked like a completely normal teenager. But I knew he wasn't. Underneath that dark skin was only half of a human heart—

The other half was made of metal. He did a bang-up job of disguising himself, too. He looked thinner than what he really was, and less muscled. Boy, had he let himself go from the last time I'd seen him. Before that day, we'd been fighting alongside one another, constantly working to eventually defeat the red-and-black masked man. We were so close—but then it happened.


"There! Get him!" the African-American boy yelled, and I was happy to lunge for him. But he was too fast. "Oh c'mon! Try harder!"

I shouted, "I am!" and kept attacking and attacking, chanting over and over the mystical words in my special spell. Then the masked man blasted me. I was sent into a black void, and then…

I awakened in bed. It wasn't my usual bed, though. It had pink sheets and a red comforter. What… the… heck. This wasn't where I belonged. I jumped out of bed and realized that I couldn't levitate in the air like I used to. Seeing a large flat-screen TV on the other side of the room, I quickly found the remote and switched it on. What I saw was surprising.

It was me, along with my comrades, fighting the same masked man that had… had what? I didn't even remember. I assumed it was a dream; I had a lot of strange dreams back then. I shook the thought of the dream's reality off… and never thought of it again.


That is, until today. Now I've found one of my comrades, but… Where are the others? The squirrely (sometimes literally) young green boy, the serious and strong former sidekick of, well, whoever it was, and that air-headed alien girl who liked the sidekick boy. Of course, who am I to speak? I'm an alien myself. But, everyone here seems to treat me like a normal human, but how can I be? I mean, now, I do have the physical features of a human (some similar to another former comrade who is… long gone now), but I am so different from them in so many ways! People speak of me behind my back! They say I'm not completely sane, which, in this world, I get from my father, a man who is definitely not sane.

Sometimes, I think of my father as a villain. Sometimes he is evil, in his actions, in his speech, and in his thoughts, and now that I think of it, he is similar to that mysterious masked man I used to battle head-on. Sometimes in my mind, I do have feuds with him, but I never speak up to him. I guess in this world, I'm afraid. In my memories of my younger life in this world, I used to speak up all the time and would get up in front of people and sing and dance. Now, I won't even sing or dance in front of my own family (if I should even call them that; this is a whole other world). I'm so timid, yet, when I'm alone, I am brave. I'm not afraid to battle a dragon or other beast, though they are invisible. But I digress.

In this world, complicated though it is, I am myself, but I'm not myself. Meaning, I'm still the same hero I once was, but the hero inside me is concealed until I dream and return to the life I once knew.

It feels like my companions from my real home are so far away, or are they right beside me every day and I just don't know it.