I stumbled as I landed, my impromptu armor suddenly feeling like it weighed a thousand pounds. I could feel wetness running down my nose; when I reached up to touch it I saw blood on my hands.

"It's because you have spent the past two years working on control instead of strength," the voice said. "Your powers are like your muscles; there is an upper limit to your power, but it is easy to be unable to reach that limit."

"I couldn't exactly go around juggling cars, could I?" I snapped.

The things in her Dad's basement didn't weigh that much, and if she'd tried lifting the entire house she'd have broken sewer lines and water mains, which would have cost them more money that they didn't have.

Still, her practice had given her the ability to do a lot of things at once, which had helped when it had come to shielding so many people at the same time. Power was an entirely different thing.

"You will need to juggle cars and more than cars if you expect to remain safe," the voice said. "In my prime I was able to lift bridges and even asteroids. I could change the magnetism of the entire planet. My force shield held off a blow from Galactus himself."

"I have no idea who that is," I said tiredly. The armor began dropping off of me, piece by piece, falling to the ground.

"Imagine an Endbringer who eats entire planets," the voice said. "And controls technology beyond the understanding of mortal men."

"Well, I'm not you, and that whole thing was pretty hard on me."

Even the armor had been a problem. I'd had to put it on over my force field because the metal had been blazing hot. I'd been tempted to simply pretend to be one of the victims, but the voice had been convinced that it was important to make a statement.

Sometimes fights could be avoided if the other side knew they could not win. Making them think that was almost as important as actually having the power to back it all up.

The pieces of my armor laying on the ground behind me suddenly crunched together into a ball. The metal school buses were made from was cheap; certainly not something I would prefer for my own armor. However, there were things I could use it for; scrap metal was always useful.

I was walking along my alleyway, the ball I'd crushed the material into floating a few inches off the ground behind me. My feet felt like lead.

"I should have saved the man in the vest," I said.

"He killed himself," the voice said dismissively. "If you'd put a force field around him like I'd suggested then you wouldn't have traumatized the other bus passengers."

"I couldn't be sure my force field was strong enough."

"It gets weaker the farther you stretch it," the voice said. "Had you surrounded the terrorist there would have been no need to use multiple weaker force fields."

"The only training I've had in my force fields was levitating my Dad's twenty pound dumbbells and letting them drop on me from the ceiling," I said defensively. "I didn't even know if I was bulletproof."

The whole dumbbell thing hadn't been easy either. I'd kept imagining the crunch of bones. Dad had worked with Dockworkers injured by falling objects. A twenty pound weight falling from that distance would generate four thousand pounds of pressure.

Reaching my back gate, I stepped inside. I left the ball of metal by the gate; no one ever looked in the back yard and if they did they wouldn't know what to make of it.

Stepping inside my house, I headed for my bedroom. The day had been as emotionally exhausting as it had been physically exhausting.

Why hadn't I saved everyone? The voice of my grandfather had advised against it, but I'd gone against his advice before. Had part of me wanted the man to die?

As I fell backward onto the bed, I could still hear the sounds of the other passengers screaming as they rushed the man in the vest. I'd known what was going to happen, which was why I'd been able to react as quickly as I had.

Was letting someone die by inaction as bad as killing them directly? If it was, then what did that make me?

I fell asleep before I came to any kind of resolution.

It seemed like only moments before I woke to the sound of Dad moving around downstairs. I got up and headed down to see him.

"Taylor?" he asked. The moment he looked at my face his complexion grew pale. "What happened?"

"I let Emma beat me up so I'd finally have proof the school couldn't ignore," I said. I'd told Dad about Emma, even though it hadn't been more than two or three months ago.

He stared at me for a long moment, before saying, "And you are O.K. with that?"

"There's video online," I said. "I'm going to take pictures of my bruises. If they try to cover this up I'll go to the police."

He stared at me for a moment longer, then nodded. "And the other two?"

"Madison is Emma's dog. She was never the worst of them anyway. Sophia's going to be the main problem, I think." I hesitated for a moment before saying, "I can't be sure bit I think she's a Ward."

"What?" he asked.

"Yeah, and if she is that means that the PRT chose to overlook what was happening to me because she was more useful to them."

"I have a hard time believing that's true."

"You should have seen how they were acting today when I was on the bus on my way home," I mumbled.

He froze. "Were you at that bombing site?"

I shrugged. "I was on the bus when it was happening. There wasn't anything else I could do."

"You could see that blast from everywhere in the city!" he said. "This is exactly why I didn't want you to go out in some kind of costume fighting super villains."

"I wasn't!" I protested. "I was just minding my own business when this guy gets on the bus with a suicide vest. I did what I had to in order to protect myself."

"And you aren't injured?"

"Not from that," I said. I gestured toward my face. "This was all Emma."

"I'm not comfortable with you intentionally letting yourself get hurt," he said. "But if it works I won't complain."

For once he was in agreement with Granpa, which was a little shocking. Dad's moral code was obviously much better than that of a supervillain, even if he claimed to have given it up.

"Did anyone see you?" he asked.

I'd been pretty good at hiding my powers for the past two years. They could be incredibly subtle if I wanted them to.

"Everyone saw me," I admitted. "But I made a costume out of bus parts, and nobody but the passengers got a look at my face."

"That's too many people," he said. "you should have been more careful."

""What else could I have done?" I asked.

"You could have pretended to be one of them," he said. "Pretended you had no idea what was happening."

"Then they'd have my name and address, and it would be even easier to find me," I said. "People tend to trigger young; people as old as the people on the bus usually have it together better. They'd have pinpointed me right away."

"But you didn't trigger," he said.

"They have no way of knowing that.," I said. "Triggering is all they know, so its what they will assume."

"They'll just have to look at where you got on the bus and what students left school from Winslow and they'll figure it out."

"Somebody pulled the fire alarm right before I left," I said. "My bet is that a lot of people left Winslow."

He stared at me. "You didn't."

"Sophia was about to try to beat me up without any witnesses. I'm done being a punching bag if it doesn't serve my purposes."

"Pulling the fire alarm is a crime," he said. "That's a slope you don't want to go down."

"Because of my grandfather?" I asked. "Do you think it's genetic?"

It was something I had secretly wondered about, and it was something that worried me.

"Your mother wasn't a villain," he began.

"She dabbled," I pointed out, "With Lustrum."

"Well, so did her half sister and brother, from what I hear," he said. "But they became heroes in the end. Genetics has nothing to do with why I think you should stay on the straight and narrow."

"Then why?"

"Because if you have a tenth of the power your grandfather had you'll be able to make the world tremble," he said. "Nobody will be able to stop you. That kind of power is alluring. It's easy to start making excuses for doing the things you want to do anyway."

"I'm not like that!" I protested. "I care about people!"

"Will you always?" he asked. "I worry about you. You have people like Blackwell and those kids treat you like they have, and nobody seems to stand up for you, and it would get pretty easy to start thinking that there aren't any good people. If there aren't any good people, then why not take advantage of the bad ones?"

I stared at him and opened my mouth to refute what he was saying, but I couldn't think of anything to say. I'd left the piece of the helmet from my grandfather upstairs, so he wasn't helping either. I doubted that his attitude toward this discussion would have been helpful anyway.

Trusting authority was already difficult for me for obvious reasons.

"You need a touchstone," he said. "Something to keep you grounded and human. Without it... it's be easy to get as bitter and frustrated as your grandfather, and the next thing you know you are trying to turn everyone in New York into monkeys,"

"You read that in a comic book," I said, scowling. "I'm sure granddad never did anything like that."

I'd ask him, of course, and if it turned out that he had done anything as monumentally stupid as that I'd make fun of him.

He shrugged, then said, "I'm getting ready to make dinner. Get washed up. You have an early morning tomorrow."


"I attacked a US Military base for missiles," the voice said. "It was possibly a little ambitious for a career debut."

"What else?"

"I created an asteroid satellite as a base," it said. "I conquered a nation in South America... I am not sure if it exists here. I mutated a group of men in the Savage Land... that is a place on my world where dinosaurs still exist due to the intervention of... never mind."

The one thing about my grandfather's avatar was that if asked it had no problem bragging about it's exploits in the past.

Asking was my way of determining just how bad he had been.

"Mutated them how?" I asked.

"I gave them the gift of powers in return for their service to me. They were from a primitive culture so they were easy to manipulate."

The voice would tell amusing stories about how his daughter married a robot and somehow managed to have children and then he would say things like that.

Perhaps sensing my disapproval, the voice changed subjects. "Why are we bothering with this?"

The sun was hot and I was sitting in a metal folding chair. I was sitting in the shade behind a table on which were set several examples of my art.

I'd been practicing precision with my powers for two years, and part of that had been pressing and twisting metal and glass together into pleasing shapes. While I didn't yet have any real power over glass, I could form metal around existing pieces in artistically pleasing ways.

Creating statuettes and costume jewelry was easy that way. I could turn and aluminum can and a broken colored glass bottle into several pieces of jewelry.

I sold them relatively cheap, although my prices had gone up as I'd gotten better at my craft.

"Dad's not exactly made of money," I said. "Even if I only make a couple of hundred dollars a show it helps a lot with the bills."

"You should take the money from the criminals of this world instead of struggling for these paltry amounts," the voice said peevishly.

I'd been doing these craft shows once every couple of months for two years. I'd made enough money that thinks weren't as tight as they would have been. We had the money to buy extra clothes or go out to dinner.

It helped that Dad totally approved of this. I think that he was terrified I'd become a villain and even becoming a hero would put me up against Endbringers.

He wanted me to become a rogue and use my powers to help people in tangible ways that didn't involve beating other people up. I could understand why he felt that way; he'd already lost so much and he didn't want to lose me too.

However, I wasn't sure that I would be able to stay away from becoming a hero. It had been my dream after all.

"This is an interesting piece," I heard a woman's voice say.

I put a neutral smile on my face. I noticed that she was talking about the foot tall metal statue I'd made of Sophia running. Her face looked angry and she was wearing her track outfit from school. The detail work was remarkable; some of the best I had ever done.

The thought that I was making money off her likeness would have pissed Sophia off more than anything, which pleased me. For some reason I'd never been willing to make one of Emma, maybe because Emma had always been more painful.

The woman was attractive, with dark hair and an olive skin tone. She had a figure that I was immediately and bitterly envious of. I wondered suddenly if my grandfather, who could mutate tribesmen into having superpowers could give me curves and if it would be humiliating for me to ask.

"It reminds me of someone I know," she said.

I froze.

"A friend?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Not someone I am close with, unfortunately. How much?"

"A hundred and fifty," I said. Before she could say anything I said, "That's reasonable for a statue of this size considering that each one is a one of a kind item, not some mass produced piece of junk from Wal-Mart."

"Did you make it yourself?" she asked.

I nodded.

"It's unusual to see someone so young being so talented," she said. She glanced at my other pieces of art.

I had a sculpture of Scion in flight, as well as sculptures of various students at Winslow in various poses. I had tiny samurai, knights in armor, cowboys on horses. Most weren't as large as the Sophia statue and were correspondingly much cheaper. I also had some necklaces and bracelets with rocks and pieces of glass that I'd thought were pretty.

"No heroes other than Scion?" she asked.

I grimaced. "The Protectorate takes trademark issues very seriously. I had to destroy my stock a year ago so I didn't get sued. Scion doesn't have any lawyers, though, so he's safe."

"Villains don't typically have representatives," she said.

"They have henchmen and fans," I said. "And people would assume that I was endorsing them if I spent all that time to make them."

"How did you get involved in this?" she asked.

"I had a shop teacher that got me interested," I lied. It was a question a lot of customers asked, and one that I got good at either deflecting or lying about. "Everything here is made of recycled metal so it is eco-friendly if that's something you are interested in."

"I'll take it," she said after a moment. She also picked up a couple of pieces of jewelry. "How much are these?"

"Fifteen each," I said. "You can have a third for ten more dollars. I've got a sales tax permit like I'm supposed to, so there is sales tax."

Considering that none of them had actually costed me anything a discount was just more money in the bank

She handed me two hundred dollar bills and a ten, and I handed her back three dollars and some change.

"I haven't seen you around the craft show circuit,' I said. "We mostly get a lot of regulars and some people who are more interested in looking around than buying."

"I didn't even know this was here until recently. I'm glad to have found this."

I hesitated. "Please don't tell the person you think this resembles who did the statue. If we're thinking of the same person she's already kind of touchy."

She smiled. "I promise I won't reveal your secret. I'm Hannah."

"Taylor," I said, smiling, and for once it was genuine.

As the woman left I felt pleased with myself. I was making more money than usual, and it was making me unusually pleased.

"The woman suspects who you really are," the voice said.

I froze, a sudden feeling of anxiety in my gut. Did she work for one of the gangs, or for the Protectorate? Had she just guessed about who I was, or had she been specifically targeting me?

Had I been stupid going to a craft show with metal artwork shortly after debuting as a metal controlling parahuman? I'd been doing it for years without a problem... although no one had known about me before.

The main question was what she was going to do with the information she had just learned.

"You should kill her," the voice said. "Before she tells everyone else."