Origins, Issue 1

## **Hypothetical City**

Joeljo Kirby, Prince of the Future, sat astride his hoversteed and surveyed the ancient past of his kingdom.  Well, what would become his kingdom, once his father died.  He enjoyed a sandwich made with real tomatoes as he reviewed the familiar geography.  The river was in largely the same place, though the ocean's shoreline was much further out.  Skyscrapers now stood where royal geodome would loom.  The artificial islands were entirely absent, though he'd been sure that their construction would begin near this point in the timeline.

It was a beautiful summer's day.  Sunlight glittered off of hundreds of thousands of windows below.

"Hypothetical City."

He tasted the words on his tongue.  The seat of the empire that would soon be his.  He tried to remember what that boring old learndroid had told him about its history.  Established in 1995 by somebody-or-other as their vision of what a future city should look like.  Only twenty years later, where Joeljo now sat, it was a bustling city, major center for manufacturing and trade, and most importantly, the highest concentration of superpowered individuals on a global scale.  The good stuff would be starting soon and he wanted to be a part of it.

Finished with his sandwich, he dropped his lunch bag in the bay.  It was time to see what things were like, are like, in Hypothetical City, year 2015.  He descended, wind flowing through his golden locks, grinning from the sheer ecstasy of his imminent adventures.  This would be a glorious day!

Speed Freak paused the movie he was streaming to answer his phone.  It was the police commissioner.  That was strange.  The commissioner didn't usually call him.  She usually called more charismatic members of the Hypotheticals.  Confused and surprised that she would contact him personally on his day off, he pressed "accept."

"Hello?"

"Speed Freak?  It's Commissioner Dreyfus."  She spoke quickly and crisply.  He was almost envious.  He always had to concentrate on not slurring things together.  "Dr. Coldbeam is robbing a bank on 8th and Riverfront.  Looks like something went sideways and he's taken hostages.  I know you have history with him.  Would you-?"

"Yesyes, of course."  He was always interrupting people.  He knew he shouldn't, but it was always so long to wait.  "I'll be right there."

"Thank-" was as far as she got before he hung up.  In a flash, he wiped the powder from his hot chips off on his shirt, put on his shoes and athletic goggles, and made his way down the stairs.  The banisters had been reinforced so that he could drag himself down them by hand so that he wouldn't have to wait for gravity to take him down each step.

As he sped out the door, he happened to catch a glimpse of his reflection in the polished glass doors of their headquarters.  Even in a split second, no details escaped his notice: not his thinning hair, not the stubble on his chin, not the extra pounds that the years had packed onto his frame, not the cheap and easy to replace athletic wear he used in place of a costume ever since he'd outgrown his most recent one.  One of the first great heroes of Hypothetical City, he was now a disgrace by appearance alone.

He pounded his way down the street, nimbly avoiding traffic and pedestrians.  He had run through these streets hundreds of times and knew just the bank.  It would take him forty-seven seconds to reach it from headquarters if nothing major distracted him on the way there.

He enjoyed people watching.  True that at this pace, it was closer to viewing still photographs, but this did not bother him in the slightest.  Snapshots into the lives of the citizens he protected.  He knew that he got to see them like none of the others did.  He was there and gone again before they noticed.  He felt nothing but profound respect and affection for them, even if he was not as popular as he had once been.  They were his people and he would continue to do whatever he could to keep them safe.

Forty-seven seconds to reach the bank, just as he expected.  As he turned into the final stretch, he could already tell that forty-seven seconds had been too long.  Two gaping holes in the side of the bank expelled dust and smoke.  The police officers were still reeling from the event.  He estimated himself at four seconds too slow.

He stopped near a sergeant with a megaphone.  "Whathappened?"

Terrance Lovelace watched from the alley as a superhero he didn't recognize dropped off an unconscious Dr. Coldbeam on the stairs leading up to the police station.  It looked as though the hero had tied the man up with his own winter coat.  As the hero flew away again, Terrance saw Dr. Coldbeam's freeze gun bounce down the stairs.  When asked later, he would never be sure what possessed him to take it.  Whatever had been going through his head, that was the decision that

Speed Freak had just finished evacuating the injured citizens from the bank when the mystery hero returned to the scene of the crime. He was still half a child, lean and well-muscled with something of a boy band look to him.  He was wearing a jeans and a denim jacket over a white t-shirt.  He had an ironed-on logo he had clearly printed at home on the front.  It looked like some kind of sheep's head.  The kind with curly horns.

He hovered just above their heads and in a booming baritone declared, "There's no need to thank me."

Everyone stared in stunned silence for a several seconds before Speed Freak piped up.  "Areyou fucking kidding me?"

The kid looked like somebody had slapped him.  "What?"

"Get yourass down here!"

This was clearly not going the way he had planned.  He was barely keeping his composure.  "I saved the day and this is how you treat me?  Do you know who I am?!"

"Some dipshit who just got a bunch of people Oh no you don't!"

The sheep kid was already flying away, fed up with what he incorrectly imagined as unfair treatment.  He was fast, Speed Freak had to give him that, but not as fast as the man with the word in his name.  Speed Freak leapt, a decision he had plenty of time to regret as he sped toward the youth.

He had no idea what powers this kid had up his sleeves.  Speed Freak was almost certainly faster, but he had no idea whether or not his super strength would be enough to match that of a hero who smashed through a bank with apparent ease, nor if his durability would be up to the task if it wasn't.  After landing on the hero's back and being flung to the earth, he would learn that the answers were no and yes, respectively.

Speed Freak tracked the boy by foot.  He was faster by enough to be able to keep mostly out of sight, ducking behind this and that, without falling too far behind.  This kid needed to learn some things about costumed life before anybody else got hurt.

After nearly freezing his hand off the first time he used the freeze ray, Terrance went home and put on his winter gloves before investigating further.  He tried taking out the screws and looking at how it worked, but he couldn't make heads or tails of the internal components.  His limited electrical training led him to believe that Dr. Coldbeam had to be a mad genius to design something that looked so convincingly like a useless mess of wires.  Terrance couldn't even find a power source.  He

Speed Freak was waiting patiently at the kid's kitchen table.  The boy was getting some juice from the refrigerator and had not yet noticed him.  Speed Freak decided to break the ice.

"Ready to talk?" he asked.

The boy dropped the jug of juice, which began spilling all over the floor.

"How did you get in here?!" the kid demanded, flying over with impressive speed and trying to grab a fistful of Speed Freak's tank top.  Speed Freak stepped almost casually out of reach.

"I slipped in behind you when you opened the door tocome in."

"What the fuck do you want?"

"We needto talk."

"Get out of my house!"

"You injured seventeen people today."

"Shut the fuck up!  Stop talking to me!  Get out!"

The boy continued to try and get his hands on Speed Freak and the more experienced hero continued not to let him.  The boy had a great deal of power, more than most could ever hope to have, but he had no finesse, no training.  After the kid began accidentally smashing furniture in his rage, Speed Freak decided that it was time to go on the offensive.  He slapped the kid about thirty times in the time it took the youth to blink.

"Stop," Speed Freak told him.

"No!" the boy spat.

Speed Freak sighed a fast-motion sigh.  "Then you are under arrest."

The teenager stopped then, clearly conflicted.  He muscles tensed and untensed as a war raged within him.  "What do you mean?"

"Do you know who I am?" Speed Freak asked, calmly.

"Some cocky, tubby motherfu-"

"I'mSpeedFreak.  One of the Hypotheticals."

The boy's eyes went to the floor.  "Oh, shit."

"Right.  Back at the bank, you caused millions of dollars in preventable property damage and injured seventeen civilians."

"I saved the day, though!"

"You charged into a situation you didn't understand and could have gotten yourself and others killed."

"But I didn't!"

"No, you got lucky.  But Dr. Coldbeam didn't hurt anybody.  You did."

All of the fight went out of the kid then.  He began shaking and sat himself down in one of the remaining kitchen chairs.

Speed Freak too pity on him.  "So, what's with the sheep?"

"Huh?" It took a moment for the hero's question to register.  "Oh, I'm calling myself Ares, like the god of war."

"So what's with the sheep?"

"He's Ares."

"Like from the zodiac?"

"Yeah."

"Those aren't spelled the same, kid."

"Oh."

Speed Freak put his hand on Ares' shoulder.  "Turn yourself in.  Admit to what happened today."

"I can't do that!"  And in that moment, Ares was in the air again.  Fortunately, this time, he did not leave.

"Untrained heroes make mistakes, b-"

"I'm not going to let them send me to jail just because I was trying to help!  That's not fair!"

"Will you shut up!" the elder hero barked.  "I'mtryingtohelpyoubutyouhavetoletmesaythings!"

Speed Freak took a deep breath in and out.

"Sorry," he said, continuing.  "I will provide you with a character witness.  We can probably convince the judge to give you community service as a superhero, during which you are to be properly trained."

"But everybody will know me as a fuck-up."

"Everybody knows me as the fat one because, hey, I can run around the planet in 24 hours, and have, without breaking a sweat so the calories are kind of hard for me to burn off.  Shit happens.  That's life.  You'll do better from here on out and make people forget all about this."

"Will they really?"

"No.  But do the right thing anyway."

Ares nodded as a tear rolled down his cheek.  Together, they made their way back to bank to help with the clean-up and face the music.

"Gimme your wallARRRGH!" the mugger screamed.

Terrance was tense.  He could not deny that.  He had just used superscience to freeze a man's hand to the wall of a building.  The lady he was attempting to hold up ran for this.  Terrance approached his victim, freeze gun at the ready, and got an idea.

"Gimme your wallet," he told the mugger, almost a whisper.

"What?"

"Gimme your wallet," he repeated.  "Or I'll freeze your balls off."

The mugger was quick about it, to be certain.  Terrance has bills to pay, just the same as anybody else.  Why not rob the robbers?  Clean up the streets and make some money at the same time.

As he left the man there, stuck fast to the brick fascade, he told him to spread the word.  "If anybody's messing around in this area, they're gonna get messed with by Freeze Ray.

Joeljo stood over the smoldering halves of the purse snatcher, basking glow in a job well-done.  He powered down his plasma sword, still a bit confused as to why the woman he had so valiently saved ran screaming, but it mattered not.  He had slain a criminal.  That made him rightious.

This was a strange and backward time, but the Prince of the Future found himself becoming rather fond of it.  He decided to stay, for a while at least.  Epic battles, fame, and good fortune lay ahead!

A behemoth hauling vehicle approached him on the road.  It let loose a sustained, deafening wail.  The Prince of the Future glared at it.  Did this fool not know who he was?!

At just the moment that Joeljo would have been pulverized, the safeguards in his temporal modulator kicked in and sent him back to his home time.

Joeljo ripped the temporal modulator from his belt in anger and smashed it upon the floor.  It would take weeks for the learndroid to put it back together for him.  No matter.  He would return to 2015 the moment he could.  He could hardly wait.  Destiny was calling.