Superhero CITY - The Test

Chapter Fifteen (edited)

"Hi Jason." A peppy voice called out to me, breaking my mind from my memories, and I turned my head to look behind. A petite brunette with the most obscenely enthusiastic smile quite literally skipped up to me with her knees almost reaching her chest, before slowing beside me and adopting a more sedate step. "Come sit with me, today?"

I shook my head, smiling to soften the rejection. "You know that I don't like to sit as far forward as you do, Fifi."

"Doesn't mean that you always have to be in the very back row!"

I shook my head again and chuckled lightly at her frustrated huff. "You could keep asking me every Sunday for another four years, and my answer would still be the same. I like where I am."

She stuck her tongue out at me, spun around with a loud "humph" and skipped ahead to a couple of academy students in her year.

Seraphina – Fifi – Drôle was as cheerful as her name suggested. Her mother was Italian and her father French, but she had gotten the classic Irish brogue from her uncle and mother's step-brother.

Fifi was like most of the world, she was born a genetically-normal human. Unlike most average people though, she had the DNA potential to have super-powered children, or in the very rare (almost impossible) case of experiencing extreme trauma manifesting abilities of her own. A level "zero", as they were informally called. But, because she carried the DNA, she also was therefore related to superbeings.

Fifi's grandmother, step-grandfather, and uncle on her mother's side were all level threes; a sidekick and a couple of government workers, in that order. They weren't powerful, or well known, so that she had gotten into Wilde's Academy was a bit of a mystery.

Like most other level zeroes – and no, that's not a derogatory term, it does come before every other number after all – Fifi studied right alongside the rest of us supers. Other than the abilities courses, she had the option to take every one we did. And even though I never said it out loud, I was actually rather jealous of her and the other zeroes. The were able to take the non-combat, more traditional classes such as English, or regular history. If I had elected for a non-hero-specific course this year, then my parents would be notified, and I would have to justify studying it in front of not only them, by the head of whatever department it was, and the principal herself.

Fifi had gotten a scholarship to Wilde's, and she stood out amongst the zeroes like a sore thumb because of it. Everyone else at our school was either dirt poor and from a cringe-worthy bad situation, or from a more than well off family. She lived with her uncle Sean where he was posted an hour's walk from the academy at the local village as the local government advisor for primary education. She had stayed with him since she was seven, and the academy had accepted the scholarship request her parents had sent in when she was born.

Her uncle made enough on his salary to support them both, but not much more. She pulled a couple of shifts at school as a dorm maid on our floor each week to help out, and so save up enough so that she could afford to join one of the junior handling programs after graduation.

My need for control and Chuckie's unhealthy obsession to details kept our room clean enough that the cleaning staff, student help or permanent, rarely needed to do anything in there. So, the only time I really saw Fifi was on the walk to town every Sunday morning.

Her uncle lived on the outer fringes, halfway between my academy and the small school in the town's centre. So she still had to go on for almost half of an hour before we reached our destination.

It wasn't on purpose, but I'd somehow ended up walking past her place just as she was leaving as well almost every week. Sometimes we would walk together, sometimes she would accompany someone else, sometimes so would I. but I didn't mind her beside me when it did happen, she wasn't annoying and pushy like so many other people I knew, and she had been one of the first people to talk to me when I started coming out here each weekend. She was simply a really nice person, and I didn't begrudge her of it.