There were seven of us. Well, to be honest, no one was really quite sure how many of us there were, as the exact number varied as convenient to the plot; but seven is an important number, so there must have been seven.
We were all comic-book style superheroes – that is, we each had one special power, and only one. However, we weren't very heroic (thus making our heroism an informed attribute) because our powers were all utterly useless.
I, Lily Evans, had the power to make myself feel like an idiot, and I couldn't control it very well so I felt like an idiot most of the time. It didn't help matters that I also happened to be an actual idiot. Hewlett Packard was an alarm clock that had the power to turn into a printer. Neither device was particularly useful in our current situation, but to add insult to injury, both of his forms were dysfunctional. Megalapteryx had the power to catch fire when angry. Beanbag was supposed to be able to teleport from one place to another, but instead he could only get stuck in hyperspace; this would be fatal, so he had of course never actually used his power, but thanks to superpowerful genetics he could be sure he'd inherited it from one of his two fathers (who were each married to each other and to two of his four mothers, and his mothers were all married to each other as well). Harry Potter, my alleged son, had the power to invent genetic theories that sounded nice but didn't hold any water. Sally Jones was constantly subjected to mental static that was apparently a dysfunctional version of telepathy (she was the result of badly done genetic engineering experiments). My alter ego Spike Sanders, who sometimes manifested as a physically separate entity, had the power to change whether or not he existed, and he tended to lose control of it when under the influence of strong emotions; that is, he would cease to exist, and that made him even angrier. Mouse, a cat, had the power to materialise pink flying mice that immediately turned into iridescent bubbles and started chowing down on everyone's hair. Did that add up to seven? I lost count, see.
Spike is looking over my shoulder. "That was eight, not seven," he says. "You must have forgotten about me."
"No, I just lost count. I'm an idiot, remember?"
"Oh, yeah. So why don't you use the power of plot to cut it down to seven?"
"I don't have the power of plot. I have the power of idiocy."
"But you made all this up!"
"I did not. Or if I did, I must have forgot about it. Now can we get on with things? This wasn't supposed to be in medias res."
"Boring." Spike goes back to making pencils have pretend sex with each other.
Now, as I was saying, there also wasn't much for us to do in the way of superheroing, which was, of course, fortunate. Every so often a more or less stereotypical villain came along and we pretended to thwart their evil plans, but mostly we just floated in a colourless void. Some said that the colourless void was due to our being part of a work of fiction created by someone who couldn't care less about the scenery and plot, or lacked an imagination – or worse: both – but I always dismissed those rumours as silly conspiracy theories.