In a dusty, forgotten city a few hundred miles from anywhere important, a very unsightly man was pulling himself out of bed and beginning to stagger around his very untidy apartment. The apartment wasn't entirely unlike the one that Aisling had lived in with her companions; it too sported few furnishings, had walls that were mostly decorated with water stains, and smelled very badly of stagnant, stale air.
The man who had just risen from the musty bed in the corner of the room moved around the miserable space in a fairly business-like way, turning on the lamps in the same order as he did every day before stepping into the tiled area that served as a kitchen. He looked at the clock that hung in the kitchen area—it was seven fifty-four. He was up early.
The man opened the refrigerator and stared into it for a few moments. He already knew what he wanted to eat, but he cast his eyes over all of the contents anyway. There was a drawer of raw vegetables, another of fruit, one jar each of peanut butter, marrow mite, cream cheese, mayonnaise, raspberry jam, and margarine, a half-empty carton of orange juice, a paper package of sliced ham, and a carton of eggs. The man picked up the jar of jam and pulled two eggs from the carton, then nudged the door closed with his foot.
After scrambling the eggs with quite a bit of salt and smearing some jam on the single remaining bagel from the breadbox on the counter, he ate his breakfast, not bothering to sit down. After he had swallowed the last bit of undesirably-stale bagel, he began to wander aimlessly around his small apartment. As he wandered, he rubbed his left shoulder with his right hand. Through his thin cotton shirt, he could feel the familiar ridges and bumps of the reddish scar tissue that adorned his skin. He meandered from corner to corner, zigzagged across the deplorably ratty carpet, and ended up sitting on his bed, still massaging his shoulder vigorously. After a while he moved up to his neck, which was also covered in dark pink scars. He winced at the familiar pain that came from agitating the sensitive skin, and gradually moved from his neck to his left cheek, and then from his cheek to his nearly hairless scalp. What hair he had was on the right side of his head, and most of that had fallen out, due to stress, he supposed. He rubbed his fingers over his scalp, tracing the irregularities of the elevated skin. As he did so, he felt glad, as he always did, that his landlord didn't care about the fact that he had covered the bathroom mirror, along with all of the other reflective surfaces in the apartment, with soap.
The man looked at the clock again. It was eight sixteen—time to start getting ready for work.
He stopped rubbing his skin, slid off the bed, and made his way toward his tiny bathroom. He glanced at the soap-coated mirror, satisfied by the fact that he couldn't see any reflection in it. As long as he couldn't see himself, and was fairly sure that other people couldn't either, he felt relatively secure.
After showering and dressing, he looked at his clock—eight thirty-one, not quite time to leave. He began to pace around the flat again, this time rubbing the spot where his left eye had once been. The incident that had left him with the masses of scar tissue had also deprived him of his eye, which was now sealed over with grotesque folds of lumpy, dark pink flesh.
He stopped in front of the television and considered turning it on, but decided not to. The only program he watched consistently was the national news, and that was only to see if they had found any new superheroes to interview. He knew that if he missed one, the networks would replay it incessantly for a few days, as they always did. Since most people liked to watch the footage about the supers, the networks literally tried to milk the segments for all of their worth. There was one channel that still occasionally played the interviews that Frozone, Elastigirl, and Mr. Incredible had sat for five years ago, after they and two other unnamed supers had defeated a giant robot, the event that had prompted the government to let all of the nation's heroes resume their glorious work.
Two months after those interviews, one of the unnamed supers who had helped to defeat the rogue robot had begun to perform hero work under the name of "Ultraviolet" and the tutelage of Mr. Incredible. She had sat for multiple interviews, one for every major news network it seemed, and had been a hype for about four months. The excitement over her appearance had declined speedily when another young super had come onto the scene, this one being named Gigadash and having Elastigirl as a mentor. The hype over Gigadash had lasted about the same length as the one over Ultraviolet had, because new supers had begun to spring up all over the place, each one with a nifty name and a spiffy costume. He had seen all of their heroic debuts, all of the tapes of their exploits, all of their stage-managed interviews. The supers fascinated him.
Remembering that he still had to prepare his lunch, he went to the refrigerator again and pulled out an assortment of vegetables, as well as the jars of various spreads. He put mayonnaise on some lettuce leaves, cream cheese on the stalks of celery, margarine on the bits of bell pepper, peanut butter on a carrot, and marrow mite on some cucumber, then looked at the clock—eight forty-five, time to leave. He wrapped the pieces of his odd lunch in separate sheets of plastic film and put them in a paper sack. He then collected the wool cap, eye patch, and scarf that he always wore when he went out, so as to hide as many of his shameful marks as possible, and put them on. He then left his apartment, made his way down two flights of steel-grate stairs, and stepped into the cool air outside.
The man had the advantage of working from nine to five, but not in the traditional way; he worked from nine p.m. to five a.m. each night. He passed very few people as he strolled down the dusty streets of the city to the place he worked at, and was grateful for it. Even with the cap, eye patch, and scarf, he still sometimes felt that people could see his deformities. He walked quickly, as the wind was chilling, and it was less than fifteen minutes before he reached his destination, the city's courthouse. He used his small key to let himself into the building through a back door, and locked it again before descending the dank stairwell that led into the basement. He was swallowed in complete darkness by the time he reached the basement, but his fingers instinctively found the lightswitch that activated all of the dim overhead lights.
He walked over to the chute that all of his assignments appeared in, dropped from above by secretaries or lawyers. He picked up the mass of papers and flipped through them. There were requests for documents, questions about legal disputes of the past, inquiries from people who were looking for precedents, and all of the other normal things. After removing his eye patch, scarf, and cap, knowing that there was no one here to see him, he selected a paper at random from the pile, dropped the rest on his desk, and set to work.
As he leafed through the filing cabinets, books, ledgers, and portfolios that the basement contained, looking for this paper or that court sketch or that collection of trial notes, his mind began to wander. He worked silently for hours, thinking about everything from the weather in Canada to the diet of vegetarians. Some time after midnight, his mind drifted back to the subject of superheroes.
A few months ago, he had been sipping tea in a coffee shop before heading to work, and the cover of magazine on the unoccupied table next to him had caught his eye. It had been a popular culture magazine, and had sported an old, black-and-white photograph of Mr. Incredible on its cover. The tagline had read, "Heroes of yesterday, heroes of today, page 21." Interested, he had flipped to the indicated page, and found that the article covered not only page twenty-one, but every page from twenty-one to thirty. There hadn't been much text, though—the article had mostly consisted of pictures. On each of the pages, there were little collages of photographs. Each collage boasted pictures of two separate superheroes, one hero from some past decade, and one hero from the present. The captions and blocks of text that accompanied the pictures explained the vague or vivid similarities that existed between the two heroes of different eras, and even hinted at the idea that the each of the pairs could be parent and child. He had examined all ten of the pages thoroughly, sipping his weak tea. Looking at the article, He had thought that there wasn't really any relation between Psychwave and Miss Interpretation, but he was fairly sure that there was a close familial relation between Mr. Incredible and Gigadash. There was a certain pair of pictures, which were apparently completely unrelated, but which showed the two in almost precisely the same pose, and with eerily similar facial expressions.
Thinking back on that magazine article, he realized that he hadn't seen any proposed descendant for Blazestone, who had always been one of his favorite superheroines. She had had a lot of personality, and a literally fiery nature that he had admired. There also hadn't been any supposed children for Stratogale, but that, of course, made sense; she had only been nineteen when she had died. There hadn't been any for Elastigirl, either, which was kind of disappointing to him, but not so disappointing as the fact that Blazestone seemed to have disappeared entirely. Without her, he had no excuse for writing passionate love notes, and then ripping them up and watching them swirl down the drain of his bathroom sink. It had actually been quite a long time since he had down that for any superheroine, and he smiled a little at the memory.
The man got up from his chair and stretched himself, trying to guess the time. There was no clock in the basement, but he thought that it was probably sometime between one o'clock and three o'clock in the morning. He glanced at the pile of remaining papers, which was very small by that point, and decided to go upstairs to check the time.
He ascended the dank stairwell and felt his way along the wall until he came to the door that led into one of the main offices. He eased it open, and it creaked as he leaned in and flipped the lightswitch. The clock on the desk nearest to him read two fifty-five. The man turned the lights off and eased the door closed again, then went back down to the basement to finish his night's work.
After placing the fruits of his work in their respectively labeled folders, he took the folders upstairs in armfuls and placed them in desk drawers, cabinets, in-boxes, and all of the other places that had been indicated, then checked the time again. Four forty-nine. It was close enough. He switched off all of the lights, replaced the items that served to hide his face, locked the back door with his little key, and started the short walk home.