Friday: January 7th 2011,
Amy sees an online comment by VoidCowboy about how Vicky is Manpower's daughter, not Flashbang's. Someone makes a joke about how they're all having orgies. Someone else says that it's an attempt to breed stronger capes. She gets incensed. Calls them names. Calls them stupid, says that powers don't work like that. The guy replies with legit sounding research papers that claim it does. That her family has loose morals and are debauched.
Amy actually starts learning more about powers, which she wasn't able to before, because she spent all her free time healing. She calls in sick, just this once, because learning about powers might help her heal better in the long run. She gets messages from the hospital she was scheduled to go to wishing her well and a quick recovery. No recriminations. Which just makes her feel more guilty. She decides to punish herself by not eating the dessert.
She starts cataloging the papers that support her argument and even criticizing the ones given by her opponent. She runs into a forum of people with more theories and gets access to more notes specifically on power inheritance. A part of her snarked that if she put half as much effort into her schoolwork as she did on arguing with strangers on the internet, maybe her mother would actually love her. But Amy's life was depressing enough without self burns, so she shut down that part ruthlessly.
Saturday: January 8th 2011,
Saturdays for Amy were generally spent recovering from the week of school, with four hours of healing after lunch, and homework after getting home. This day however felt like just the continuation of the previous day. She felt tired enough from the late night of web trawling that her excuse of feeling under the weather raised suspicion from her family at meal times, and they disturb her "rest" except for tasting Mark's attempt at Crostinis. It was delicious, for home made food.
For a minute, Amy considered just dropping her self assigned project. But she had already put in too much effort, and the sunk cost fallacy wouldn't let her stop now. So she had gotten back to work.
Amy took in the theories, cross examined them with her own family's powers and then to those of cape families she's encountered in the city. The theories that contradict her own observations are discarded, while those that explained her observations were underlined for further examination.
"Powers passing down genetically" was among the first to go. Twilight's powers were clearly inherited from Darkstar. And while PHO believed that the independents were mother and daughter, Amy had treated them before, and knew that they had no biological relations despite their strong emotional bond. Apart from that, there was Charybdis who triggered after his brother Scylla with very similar powers, and they had claimed to be the first two capes in their families.
So, powers could be inherited by a sibling, or even someone entirely unrelated.
The next to go was the "egg theory" which claimed that once a parahuman had used their power long enough that it was ready to evolve, or 'hatch', they could deliberately pass it on to someone else, by choosing an heir. It was a ridiculous theory and the only reason it was even noted was because its proponents just wouldn't admit that it's wrong. Any cape saying that they couldn't choose their heir was just told that they hadn't had their powers long enough. If they did have the powers for long, their particular power just needed longer than usual. Cases like a parent having two "heirs" in the have two parahuman children was explained as one kid being their heir, while the other kid being previous kid's heir. The reason for this stubbornness was that a while back a popular Thinker had expressed support for this theory.
But Amy doubted that if Carol or Mark had any choice in the matter she would've wanted Vicky to live the parahuman life.
Amy discarded the most other theories, like "you have to eat a cape's hair, freely given" and "the secret Illuminati that controls all capes administer the inheritance".
It's 2 am by this time, and Amy has to sleep.
Sunday: January 9th 2011,
Amy is groggy when she wakes up. It's already 10 a.m. and she's hungry. She checked her phone and found spam from her network operator, some rummy website, and text from Vicky saying that she tried to wake her up, but had to go complete some work for her college classes. Walking downstairs, she found that Carol was gone too. A Saturday didn't mean that she had any free time especially when she had a case.
She went to set out some cereal for herself, checked if Mark had eaten anything, judged from a lack of dirty bowls that he had not, and brought some to his room. She then went to their home gym, consulted the workout routine Aunt Sarah had constructed for her. And then went to take a shower. That gave her plenty of time to think about how she wasted her time last night, but couldn't get the theories out of her head.
There was only one theory that she felt really aligned with her observations. It stated that the greatest factor in power inheritance was exposure to a parahuman in your formative years. Amy was either a first generation cape in that regard, or inherited her powers from whoever she was exposed to before 2000, when she was about 7. It was quite weird though. Amy would have been with her previous caretaker? guardian? parent? for at most 7 years, but stayed with the Dallons for 10 years before she triggered last year. Shouldn't the exposure from the Dallons have affected her powers at least a little.
Amy would admit that she didn't spend as much family time with Carol and Mark as was probably healthy, but it wasn't that much less compared to what Vicky did. This was assuming that she was a second gen cape from her biological side, and not a first gen cape all together.
Was it even possible to trigger as a first gen cape while living with a whole family of capes? It felt to Amy like someone having to apply for welfare from the state while having millionaire relatives.
She felt quite cold despite the warm water from the shower.
Half an hour later, Amy put on her indoor clothes, but couldn't stop her thoughts from wandering. Crystal and Eric had Aunt Sarah's powers, just specialized. Did that mean they weren't as exposed to Uncle Neil as they were to Sarah? Did they just inherit the powers of the first parahuman they got exposed to?
That might be relevant to Amy if one of her original parents was a cape with biology related powers.
Then there's Vicky. Her flight has to be from Carol. Her invincibility could be from Carol's ball form, but Carol doesn't have any force fields. Weird as it is to admit, they might be related to Uncle Neil's close range powers. No, her force fields might really be Uncle Neil's powers, just limited to a very small distance from her body, but in exchange increased in potency. Specialized. Just like Eric and Crystal.
Amy went to check up on Mark, but found that he had gone back to sleep, the cereal left half eaten. Saturdays were usually good days, but the house was more empty than not today. Frowning, she took the bowl back to the kitchen even as something nagged at her.
Could this even count as exposure? She knew that Mark loved them in his own way, but your emotions did get numbed under depression.
Putting her two lines of thought together, Amy realized that it was too much of a coincidence that of all four adult capes in New Wave, Mark was the only one whose powers didn't pass on to any children. If her guess was right, then an important factor for power inheritance could be love.
Huh. That sounded trite even in her own head. But could it be true? Not love perhaps, but affection?
Did Uncle Neil not love his kids? Or did Aunt Sarah just have a much closer relationship with them?
Could Victoria have looked up to Uncle Neil for parental love with both Carol and Mark being more detached parents than the Pelhams?
If so, what about Vicky's Love/Fear aura? Oh right. Dean.
Dean loves her. He must, if his power impacted Vicky's more than even Mark's did.
And by that logic, no one in the family loved her.
Amy decided that she might as well get the best of a day without school or hospital visits and get some more sleep.
Carol woke her up an hour later and checked on her health. Amy assured her that she was well
but Carol insisted that she stay in bed. A part of Amy felt rebellious at being told to stay in, but she was honest enough to admit that she would've chafed if Carol had told her to go out and do some work, or to go see a doctor or anything really. She was just in one of those moods.
Vicky had also returned and Mark was up too. The voices coming from the dining room indicated what a happy family the three Dallons made.
Amy picked up her phone, no more texts. She opened PHO and found that the thread she was arguing on got locked. On one hand she felt like she had wasted so much time and given herself depression, on the other, she was in no mood to argue with anyone.
For a lack of anything better to do, she pulled out her homework and tried to do at least the ones due tomorrow.