It was a Monday. I had a splitting headache. I was hungover. I had slept terribly. I was waking up earlier than I had in years. And I was probably the most powerful man in the solar system.
I tried not to think about it too much. I didn’t want it, and I didn’t want to want it. This was the last vestige of restraint I had. Because yes, obviously there were aspects of this that could be a ton of fun. Obviously it was tempting to ask Captain Stratosphere to make a giant dick out of clouds, or use a confiscated Del-Varri space cruiser to throw a party on Jupiter. But once I started… God who knows where I’d go? And this wasn’t a toy. Oh sweet Jesus it wasn’t a toy. I wasn’t some thoughtless burn-it-to-the-ground college freshman, yeah? We needed capes. They saved thousands of people every day. They didn’t need my mess.
I’m not saying I had to take my job seriously. God no. I was just saying it would be better for me to ignore it. I would be a useless figurehead CEO who maintained a family brand, nodded through mandatory meetings, and turned on a computer in the morning.
Didn’t trust myself to go further than that. I wished the others on the Board could see that. We were on the same side. The Anti-Percy side. It was a big club, and its founder did not get enough credit.
Oh dear. I mean, the fact that I could literally call the President — who would pick up — and say ‘Yo, make gay marriage legal across the land this instant or we’re going to start charging quintuple for disaster prevention’ and it might actually work? Wait. Gay marriage was already legal, right? Yeah. Yeah I think it has been for a while. That’s pretty cool.
Percy, no.
Cool your fucking jets buddy.
I really should get Sebi to smack me on the nose with a rolled up newspaper whenever I have thoughts like this.
Never mind, that would probably just get me hard.
Busy news day this morning. All about me, and for once, I wasn’t too happy about that.
I tried to ignore what the news was saying about me. No that’s an obvious lie. Of course I looked. I was almost late for work because of how much time I spent looking at what those neurotic typists were saying about me. I still was late for work, but it wasn't because of that.
A Wake-Up Call to Utopia’s Unchecked Power.
China Has Anti-Nepotism Laws, Shouldn’t We?
Yes, Utopia Just Handed the Keys to the World to a Man Who Can’t Legally Drive.
‘No One Expected This’, Utopia Staff In Disarray After Surprise Succession.
Who is Percy Domino? All About the Controversial New Choice for Utopia CEO.
Meet America’s Youngest, Wildest, and Hottest President.
Correcting the Record: No, Utopia is Not a Shadow Government, and You Don’t Need to Worry About Its New CEO.
Utopia is America’s First Regency. Here Comes Our Boy King.
The Hot Mess Who’s Going to Be Protecting You From Aliens.
Ascendant Chairman is ‘Brilliant’, ‘Authentic’, ‘Deeply Familiar with the Cause’, Say Utopia Insiders.
Five-Minute Rundown: What Does the Chairman of Utopia Actually Do?
Um, Can We Talk About How Sexy Our New Dystopian Overlord Is?
Congress: Do the Right Thing. It’s Time To Break Up Utopia.
Global Security Giant’s New Chairman Once Crashed Ferrari Into Historic Church.
The TMZ article did compile a list of all the famous women I had fucked, though, which was honestly going to be really helpful if I ever needed a list of people to contact in case I got an STD. And it was a nice trophy collection. I had forgotten some of these. Amanda Delgada in 2020? Damn, Percy. Good for you. Wish I remembered that one.
They missed a spot, though. Near the end. Or maybe they just knew better. Thank God.
Yes, I was still in Ironheart. It was just going to be faster getting to Utopia Tower in New York from there, and the robots were unbelievably convenient. I wasn’t going to stay here though. Not long term. Absolutely not. I’d figure something out soon.
I showered and had the robots dress me in the outfit that Sophie had picked out for me. I probably should have eaten something. Did a line for a little energy boost, of course.
For maybe the first time, I was trying to minimize the amount of attention I would draw to myself. That took some strategy. As we had discussed last night, we had to walk a line between “trying too hard” and “not trying enough”.
I wasn't going to show up stumbling with bed head and a half buttoned leopard print shirt, white Capri pants, and sandals. That would worry people, which meant they’d be watching me closely. Turn them on too.
But showing up looking fantastic in a perfect suit and tie and a fresh haircut ready to take on the day wasn't a good idea either. This would also be jarring. It would look like I was treating the job like a job. The people who desperately wanted a return to the status quo might see this as a sign of ambition. The people who wanted to believe in me might see this as a sign that they can put some expectations on me. And I hated expectations.
Ultimately, we went with a nice suit but no tie, two top buttons unbuttoned on the shirt, and relatively cheap $2000 dress shoes.
Red sunglasses stayed on, obviously.
I might've looked a little too good, but that was always going to be a Domino sibling problem.
It was a short commute. Like a short commute. I almost wished it were longer, even if this was very convenient for how often I’d probably be scrambling out of bed trying to be 15 minutes late instead of 30.
Here’s what it consisted of: flying the Unibird to the neighborhood’s warp gate, where it would spit me out right into Manhattan. Couldn’t have taken more than two minutes.
My stomach lurched when I flew through the portal. One of her portals.
I’d avoided teleporting for the better part of a decade, and I had to get used to the sensation again.
She could see through them. We knew this.
Shit.
I took a swig of my bourbon flask as soon as I passed through. I’d take a Klonopin as soon as I got to the office. Just preferred not to pop pills in the air.
There we were.
The Manhattan skyline.
The center of the empire.
Welcome to your new life, Percy.
When I thought about the creation of Utopia, it seemed less a story about Dad’s genius than one about how everyone else before him was really fucking stupid. But I suppose that might’ve been what marked the greatest geniuses. As Joan said at the funeral, it was hard for us youngsters to imagine the world before it.
Basically, as far as I understand it, Dad’s big idea was that being a superhero should be a job. Yeah. Apparently, before that people would literally just do it for free, often illegally, while working a normal job and lying to everyone in their lives about it.
What?
That must’ve been back when they were still putting cocaine in Coca-Cola.
It was like hearing that someone, someone who wasn’t even that old, had invented the idea of hospitals, and before that medical treatment came from strange men in masks, who are not getting paid to operate on you.
The foundations of public safety were just running on vibes and the goodwill of our neighbors.
So that’s what Utopia did. We took care of capes. We paid them, trained them, equipped them, told them where to go, organized them, represented them, and when it was needed, disciplined them.
A job so ludicrously important that it was hard to imagine it started existing in 1988.
A few other competing cape houses emerged following Utopia’s example, but they all collapsed or were bought out eventually.
By the end of the 90s, when me and my sister came along, Utopia employed half of the capes in the United States, and Dirk Domino was understood to be a world leader at the scale of the G20 countries.
By the time we were learning to read, a virtual monopoly on superhero activity, employed over a thousand capes, and it was an oft-repeated joke that my father, not any elected world leader, was the most powerful political figure on Earth.
And then at some point along the way it stopped sounding like a joke.
Everyone knew we were the first people you called when human life was ever in any serious danger. That the biggest threats to peace were the ones no one else could even try to stop.
We were the Earth’s diplomatic envoy to alien civilizations and foreign realms. When necessary, its military.
And when parents reassured their frightened children at night, it was not by evoking images of a police siren or even an angel’s wings, but a cape streaking through the sky.
It was … I don’t know. I don’t know what to say about it. I didn’t wish for change. I didn’t dream of rebellion. I just wanted it to all be happening far away from me. Even the word “we” left a nasty taste when it left my mouth.
Don’t ask me man. I just run the place.
Better yet don’t look at me.
Fat fucking chance. Everyone was looking at me.
For the next, what, five years — was it really five years? — I would have my every move watched by monitors who would know my dick was hard before I even did.
Hope they enjoyed the view.
Speaking of the view.
Utopia Tower was the tallest building in New York City, though that might have been cheating considering the upper half was floating. A standard silver-polished skyscraper on the bottom, its top half, hovering fifty feet above on antigrav panels, was equal parts flying saucer and Greco-Roman temple, a globular disc of smooth, rounded surfaces intercut by several terraces lined with rows of mighty neoclassical columns. Those were our Hollywood Walk of Fame. When you were important enough, as a cape, you got a column.
Dad didn’t have a column. No, Spartacus, and the founding members of the original Covenant — Lady Liberty II, American Dream, Joan Voyage, Dragon Kick, St. Catherine, and Silhouette — had thirty foot tall marble statues lining the uppermost terrace. The entire silver-and-blue structure was surrounded by a Saturn-ring that bore a giant UTOPIA in block letters, lit up and rotating around the building at all times.
It was at this topmost canopy of garish grandeur where I exited the portal and parked the Unibird.
As I landed, I was greeted by about fifty Utopian Knights who saluted me from their power suits. More paramilitary pageantry. This was going to be every day of my life now, I supposed. The Knights were our most formalized and streamlined team, mostly ex military guys, operating my dad’s mechs. More serving as our police and security guards than capes. They were actually much more disciplined and better-trained than our superheroes; that’s why they were allowed to kill people. Most of them operated MK1 and MK2 SWORD units, which were originally made for this purpose before Dad decided to take several of them home to arm our security detail. That was fine. They only cost $15 million apiece. Some of the higher ranking Knights operated the much larger and sexier MK3 SWORDs, which came with jet propulsion.
Their Captain, and Utopia’s head of security, whose identity I only learned this morning, had a Special Class EAGLE unit custom made for him, which had orbital combat capabilities and a very romantic coating of red white and blue armor.
He wasn’t wearing it though. Just his amorphous flight suit that made him look deceptively small.
Maximus Liberty.
I could tell that he was giving me the most half-hearted salute his terminally honorable brain could muster without self-destructing.
We just nodded at each other stiffly. Neither of us wanted to speak.
No one corrected his form.
Maximus Liberty looked exactly how you’d expect a guy named “Maximus Liberty” to look. Six foot two, built like a quarterback, neat blonde hair a little longer on the top than the sides, a tall pointed nose, burning blue-green eyes, and a superhero’s million-dollar jawline. Everything about him felt like you were being punched in the face. Even his handsome face and chiseled body weren’t actually nice to look at; instead they felt aggressive, like threats. There were few people I could imagine would be less happy to see me the day I walked into my new office than him. But I supposed I might find out the answer to that within the next half hour.
I was his boss now. I was Maximus Liberty’s boss. Jesus Christ. That’s one thing we agreed on at this moment, how stupid this whole arrangement was. The difference was that I couldn’t admit that out loud, and that I also thought it was kind of funny.
He knew me before I was me, really. I can’t say the same for him, because he’s always been him.
We all knew each other, of course. The second generation cape kids, children of Utopia, all sectioned off into the same schools and neighborhoods and events, an aristocracy of warriors and priest-kings who wore and washed the capes and couldn’t bring themselves to spend too much time around those normal folks who didn’t understand “the Cause”, as insiders called hero work.
If we were an aristocracy, the Liberty family were the Kennedys, or the Windsors. Children of American Dream and the second Lady Liberty, both of whom had tenures leading the original Covenant. Now most respectable scholarly voices in the Cause would tell you that Lady Liberty II was actually the greatest superhero in American history, and I would tend to agree. Sure, American Dream might have been a little stronger, but she had the spirit, to not just vanquish evil and save lives but to create more heroes in her wake through sheer inspiration. Plus there are no credible theories that Lady Liberty’s overuse of her powers may have doomed the entire world. But we’re not supposed to talk about that.
Anyway, everyone could agree it was one of them or the other. And then they reproduced.
And their kids had the power, ego, and tragedy to show for it. If they thought they were gods, how exactly would you argue with that?
They were the closest thing America has ever had to a royal house. They were doctrinally infallible. They were maybe the most powerful family in the universe. They were the last one that would ever send me a Christmas card. They were a clan of pampered orphans who worshipped their mother as a god so they wouldn’t have to grieve her as a woman — it was kind of adorable actually.
They terrified me. It was the sanest thing about me.
And waiting for me on the top floor, with a seat on the Covenant, was a Liberty I wanted to see even less than Maximus.
I got a text from Lila just as I was entering Utopia Tower.
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Good luck on ur first day! Don’t fuck this up
I smiled a little. It would be good to have at least one person who appreciated me around here.
I wrote back:
Should we kiss in front of everyone when I address the Covenant to make them uncomfortable?
LMAO yes
Wait no absolutely not
wtf is wrong wit u??
we r defending the EARTH you freak!
be so serious
I snorted.
That’s fair but I can still grab your ass when you give me a hug right?
Yeah that’s fine.
I had a few tasks to do right as I got in. A lot of things to sign. Probably more documents and screens than I’d signed in the last two years put together. Then using my DNA to turn on the Hundred Hands — the massive computer apparatus deep on the 9th floor that dad used to coordinate Utopia operations with a bewildering combination of analog controls and neutral interface. Being shown my office — Dad’s old office, which I was in no hurry to change. People wouldn’t like that. I’d look ambitious.
Actually, I should get my own office. This felt wrong. I’m Chairman now. I can do that.
Sebi had another body at Utopia Tower and had been synchronized to the building’s operating system as well, where she would serve as the Chairman’s Executive Assistant. That was a small comfort, honestly. At least it was a familiar face, even if not belonging to a real person.
Heh. “Real person”. Her and me both.
I had hoped the shuffle of monotonous busy-work would last much longer than it did, honestly. I was in absolutely no hurry to get to my real task of the day. Addressing the Covenant.
The Covenant was Utopia’s high command. The ten greatest superheroes in America, or at least the ten most optimal superheroes to call the greatest in America at a given time. That wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. Just an observation.
To start, a seat on the Covenant came with a starting salary of $30 million, not including bonuses and raises within standard market practices. That was even more than Sophie and I could draw out of our trust funds every year before Dad passed. Covenant members automatically outranked any other heroes on the chain of command, including regional Captains, and could give orders with the weight of the Chairman’s when the chain of command was disrupted. With all that came the responsibility of being essentially on call 24/7, mandated to show up within two hours of being called at any given time to any location on the planet. They were the ones that were sent after big problems.
It sounded like a miserable job.
“Hey Sebi,” I said, “can you get me a quantum harness before I go address the Covenant?”
“I fail to see the correlation of this request. For what would you require it, Master Percy?”
“In case she tries to throw me into space as soon as she sees me.”
“There is no data that indicates L-”
“Don’t say her name don’t say her name.”
“There is no data that indicates the hero you are referring to is prone to such outbursts. In fact, her Professionalism Index has been among the highest in the Covenant for the past 6 years.”
“Well this is a bit of an unprecedented circumstance.”
“Furthermore, our data suggests that her abilities have developed past the point of a quantum harness being an effective countermeasure were she to be designated as a threat.”
Oh. Great. Yeah, yeah that didn’t surprise me. You could tell me she was able to pull the dead back out of Heaven now and I’d go “Yeah that tracks. Now could you please bring my dad back so you never have to look at me again?”
The Covenant convened in Liberation Hall, at the very top floor of Utopia tower. A grand rotunda that overlooked the entire city and, if needed, the entire world. It was a command center, conference room, and marble cathedral rolled into one. The Chairman’s chair more closely resembled a throne. Ten floating chairs, two of which were specifically fitted for their massive occupants, sat around a white and gold disc-table carved with a map of the world. The walls were a perfect circle of glass, always filtering in sunlight at the most optimal angles for both visibility and, once I got my hands on it, aesthetic flair. The windows could be converted into monitor screens at any time, with just a word to Sebi, and show us sights from any of our 52,000 cameras and 68 satellites. There were doves living at the top of the dome, symbols of peace that added an ambience of majesty, which Ildorian the Feathered Prince had specifically told not to shit indoors.
You can’t be serious, was my first thought upon entering.
Oh yeah, I was totally going to fit in here just great.
Utopia’s greatest heroes stood at attention and flashed me the two-fingered salute of the Cause as a disc got under me and floated me directly to my seat.
Even for me, that felt lazy.
Here we go.
“Good morning. As you must be aware, following the unfortunate passing of my father, I have been chosen to succeed him as Chairman.”
Okay, that’s good. Just say nothing, Percy. Talk like a language model.
“It is an awesome responsibility I have been given, and I am aware I will not be able to be the man he was, but I will ensure that you all, the real center of Utopia, not I, have everything you need to continue serving the Cause-”
Ew.
“- with the strength, courage, and diligence you have shown time and time again. I am truly humbled to be addressing you all right now. Vivat Utopia.”
“Vivat Utopia!” the room echoed back to me with ten times the vigor.
“Now let us establish quorum.”
Lila ran up and gave me a tight hug that I didn’t know how badly I needed.
No, I didn’t squeeze her ass. Time and place for everything. We were being unprofessional enough.
“Hey Sex Machine.”
“Oh my god it’s going to be so fun to have you here. Sorry it had to happen this way though. Hope you’ve been okay.”
You idiot.
“Yeah. Yeah it’s good to see you too.”
“Do we all have to hug him?” said a bubbling low inhuman rumble that was at once overwhelming and peaceful.
“I will embrace him if I must,” laughed a booming, earth-shaking thick Germanic warlord’s howl.
“Order,” declared the smooth baritone of a man aging with power and dignity.
Then the relic from another era, draped in medieval finery including a full suit of armor, with a soft and virile cloud of golden-brown hair, held a sword before his head and bowed to me.
“It was an honor to serve your father, Lord Chairman Domino, and I trust it will be an honor to serve his heir just the same.”
I nodded at the beautiful British man. All I could think to do.
Sir Galahad. The Sir Galahad, from King Arthur’s Round Table. Resurrected or cloned or unfrozen — it was always hard to keep track of these things — and brought to the modern day, where he defended the world as he once did Camelot.
One of the greatest warriors in human history, already capable of slaying monsters with just a sword and shield, he was made all the more dangerous by the Special Class ALICORN mech unit Dad has custom-made for him.
His appearance invoked such paradoxical feelings. He was a ridiculous relic, but you respected him so much, but the almost cartoonish amount of respect you felt for him looped around to being funny again.
I had no funny thoughts for the man I addressed next, who sat closest to me, as the leader of the Covenant. For a moment I truly felt like a little boy meeting the President (I assumed that was a big deal for normal people). I just offered him my firmest handshake and said,
“It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”
“On behalf of us all, we are sorry for your loss, Mr. Chairman. We are here however you need us, and trust that Chairman Domino has chosen his successor wisely.”
The Good Neighbor. The greatest hero in Utopia, and probably the most powerful living thing on the planet.
The Good Neighbor, real name Kaslan, as he let his colleagues call him, was a six-foot-five purple-skinned alien with a head resembling a horse’s. His eyes were marbles that shone with cosmic white light, and his mane looked like it was made of comet tails. He wore a very classical cape uniform, blue with swirling star patterns, a great black cape with white inner lining.
Some ten years ago, Kaslan landed on Earth with no memory of where he came from, and for some goddamned reason immediately decided to start helping. His alien physiology granted him power comparable to American Dream and Lady Liberty II, but with greater versatility. He just sort of drifted his way into Utopia, who guided him to more efficiently do what he was already doing, paying him a salary he just threw at charities in its entirety. See, he was a real hero. The cult of the Cause was just his vehicle.
I was almost embarrassed at how serious I felt addressing him here, and thankfully that was yanked out of me by the formal roll call of my dear friend Sex Machine II.
While she would insist that the exact opposite was true, to understand the deal with Delilah Davenport, you first had to understand her father, the first Sex Machine. Lee Davenport was a force of nature. He was so in tune with the spirit of rock n’ roll that it touched him back and granted him phenomenal powers he could manifest through his guitar. He had once even brought a man back from the dead through the sheer power of rock n’ roll, though he never managed to repeat that feat, and insists he had no idea how he did it.
And then when he retired, he passed his guitar down to his daughter. That would be Lila.
Indie music darling, more celebrity than cape, the patron saint of depressed bisexual women everywhere, with smeared mascara, delicate and somewhat exotic features, adorable round cheeks, choppy orange bangs, the faintest of freckles, and small hazel eyes, she wore a figure-hugging tight black top, denim jacket, and flannel skirt, with her guitar slung across her back. To work.
She really shouldn’t be here, and I was so glad she was.
With love, Lila was not nearly as powerful as her father, even her father at 27, and everyone knew that. She wasn’t useless; she was a perfectly capable superhero, I was told. But in the greater roster of Utopia’s heroes, she probably didn’t even crack top 40.
She was on the Covenant because her father was a founding member and currently sat on the Board and she was a fantastic brand ambassador. Though in order to get her seat on the Covenant, she had to agree to call herself Sex Machine II, which she hated, since it significantly diminished the indie outsider vibe she was trying to curate. She was in deep denial of all of this and would get upset with you for suggesting it.
“Up top, little dude! Let’s make some waves together.”
Following Sex Machine II’s formal roll call, I found myself immediately answering to the bubbling resonant voice from earlier and staring down an attempted high-five from a dripping wet hand the size of my entire body. No, not a hand. A three-pronged flipper.
Smack!
Was I supposed to not take him up on that?
Brother Wave was a whale person. But that's honestly a misleading descriptor. Because most people if they hear "whale person" are probably going to imagine some blue person-sized cetacean-headed smooth-skinned bipedal humanoid with maybe a blowhole in their forehead, like a playable race in Dungeons & Dragons. No. This was an entire fucking whale with flexible enough fins that they could approximate bipedal movement and the use of hands.
He came from a hidden civilization of sapient whales deep in the ocean and had come to the “surface world” to serve as something of a goodwill ambassador.
Yeah, it worked. People didn’t kill whales anymore.
Fuck me he was huge. One of the largest capes I had ever seen, and that was saying a lot. He was literally bigger than an elephant.
And yet somehow he had incredible vibes. He had this Hawaiian surfer energy to him, friendly and welcoming and constantly saying words like “bro”, and wearing a battle skirt of seagrass and an enormous seashell necklace.
“Greetings. Yan-Jani is in attendance. Or so you are remembering.”
Yan-Jani kind of freaked me out. To start, I wasn’t sure if she was actually speaking or if that voice emerged from inside my head.
She was a tiny bald South Asian woman who sat levitating, eyes closed, two feet above the seat of her chair, wearing a dark hooded robe, with all her visible skin covered in intersecting lines of purple tattoos that faintly glowed.
Yan-Jani was a devoted student of meditation who went to — what was it a fucking alien martial arts monastery? Who fucking knows with these people? Yeah. Yeah I think that was right. An alien martial arts monastery that existed outside of three dimensional spacetime taught her how to read the flow of the universe at a quantum-entangled subatomic level. And now she was like this.
I think she was one of the capes Dad respected the most actually.
Wasn’t sure why. Wasn’t planning on being involved enough to find it.
“May order find you, Chairman Domino.”
This voice, smooth, commanding, and unmistakably judgmental, came from Anton Antichaos, the last remaining member of the old guard of the Covenant, if technically not a founder as he joined three years later. He was an enigmatic and foreboding old Arabic wizard, decked out in faded, lustre-less bangles and rings older than the United States, his hair and beard black with iconic white stripes. Every thirty seconds or so, everything within ten feet of him, save his maroon cloak that billowed without any wind, went the grainy monochrome of an old photograph, as if his power could barely be contained without bleeding out into the world.
I remembered him. Of course I remembered him.
He was there with us. On that day. By the rocks.
He-
‘Percy what’s happening to me? Percy what’s happening to me?’
Yeah he um-
Skelch. Gwup. Skurp.
PERccUYU
Oh Christ.
Are you cold, little boy?
No.
Oh we just love counting fingers. One one-hundred. Two one-hundred.
No please fuck fuck I can’t-
Oh yes. Oh please don’t smile. Not with so many teeth.
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????-—
He handled it.
Closed it.
I-
I…
I supposed I should be grateful for that.
Right?
“Hail and well met! I presume I have no need of introduction. Let us toast to our new Lord Chairman, and to the memory of our dearly departed Lord Domino!” boomed the primal yet unmistakably jolly thick Germanic growl from before.
A drinking horn the size of a trumpet was slammed on the table, fizzing with mead.
Oh, this one.
Yeah, Dad complained about this one. A lot.
“Boisterous, arrogant, violent, ungovernable, destructive, barbaric yet ruthlessly moral in his impossibly arcane red-and-green philoprogenitive way that makes him impossible to reason with-”
“Dad, aren’t you the boss? If you hate this guy so much, why keep him around? Isn’t it up to you?”
“Well, Percy. It’s because he’s one of the most unbelievably powerful men I have ever had the displeasure of meeting in my over thirty years in the Cause. And besides-
- what kind of asshole fires Santa Claus?”
Kid Klaus. Real name Magnus of House Klaus, Winter’s Growl, Red Reveler, Misery’s Bane, Ringer of the Twelve Bells of War, Tamer of the Unstoppable Horde, He Who Laughs Away the Terror, Defender of the Young and Pure, Prince of the North Pole and Son of Santa Claus. No really. Of course Santa Claus was real. Keep up. Apparently daddy had sent him to the human world as some sort of trial to prepare for his task of spreading holiday cheer when he one day inherited the throne.
God, that sounded way more fun than what my dad left me. Could we trade?
He was a massive man, almost seven feet tall and 300 pounds of pure muscle, with long wild white-blonde hair that fell down past his shoulders, icy blue eyes, and a jaw that’s been broken too many times and never fully set in the right position. He was dressed in rich blood red fabrics that somehow looked at once militaristic and cozy, and the pelt of a polar bear hung from his shoulders like a barbarian’s cape. A candy cane-striped battle axe as large as a human being and a dozen times heavier was propped against the wall behind him.
He was also the oldest member of the Covenant, despite his frat boy demeanor. To the tune of about 800 years.
When Kid Klaus first showed up in 2003, they thought he was a villain. Covered a city in ice in the middle of September and smashed several school buildings to pieces. It had taken half the Covenant to put him down. Turns out? He was just responding to the wishes of kids who wanted a snow day and for no more school. He just couldn’t tell which wishes were good and bad.
And no I didn’t memorize that paragraph of a name. That was how he introduced himself. Every. Single. Time.
There were only eight present today actually. Apparently Incarnate was “currently dead, but would probably be back some time this month”, and Skyfall was “putting down a rebellion on Jupiter’s moon, Io”. Sounded like very forgivable absences to me. Hell any of them could have skipped this meeting if they wanted to. I wanted to skip this meeting.
And that just left-
“Good morning, Mr. Chairman.”
her.
I froze.
“Our family sends our sincere condolences for your loss. He was a great man and he’ll be missed.”
Fuck. What?
Perfect fake smile. Even reached her eyes. Perfect media trained fake smile. Who taught her to do that? Did I?
“Right. Yes. Um. Miss Liberty. Thank you.”
Lydia Liberty.
The first girl — woman — I ever, well. All of it.
Dated. Kissed. Took to a dance. Saw naked. Slept with.
Hurt. Left.
Gosh she was beautiful. I’m sorry, I know you’re not supposed to describe women like that first but…
She had gotten so beautiful. Obviously all women are more beautiful at twenty-eight than they are at eighteen. And I had seen her in photos — she was one of the most famous women in the world, I could hardly avoid it. But it was different, up close. I could hardly even look at her.
She looked equal parts princess and starship captain. Her blonde hair was thrown back in a neat ponytail without a strand out of place. Minimal makeup, still looked like she was ready for a photoshoot at all times. Sharp chin, big blue-green eyes, high eyebrows, long graceful neck, high noble forehead, a face constructed of elegant geometric arches. Toned enough that you can see small ripples of muscles through her clothing, not bulky, but sleek, well-honed, though I wasn’t sure if she'd ever done a minute of exercise in her life.
She was dressed in classic Liberty family formalwear — a uniform that looked like something that would be worn by the royal military police if the Carolingian dynasty had still ruled into the 25th century. A gold-buttoned white admiral jacket with all the swirls and epaulets but polished with a sleek space age sensibility. A tasteful half-cape framed in the colors of the American flag fell behind one shoulder.
God damn she was gorgeous.
But it wasn’t just how she looked. It was her poise, her posture. She used to have a slightly gawky way about her, a baby giraffe’s gait, at times, like she thought her body would be smaller. None of that now. She stood upright, dignified, confident, and regal. She carried herself like - like a swan, or a Christmas ornament.
I resisted the urge to kneel.
Lydia Liberty possessed unprecedented powers of teleportation. Which was a polite way of saying spatial distortion. Which itself was a polite way of saying that she punched holes in the cosmos with her mind like you would a pencil through paper.
That’s how it was with that family. They were the only heroes the Cause’s PR machine actually portrayed as weaker than they were.
Lydia teleported. Gulliver ran really fast. Veronica “slowed things down”.
Maximus… man what did we even say for Maximus? Telekinesis? Is that what we were going with? I should probably familiarize myself with this stuff soon, huh?
The public perception of them was akin to the Disney version of a horrific German fairytale. Everything else was a carefully guarded insider secret enforced more by cultural taboo than any real rules. You weren’t really supposed to talk about their powers. Not on any real intellectual level.
Talking about how amazing they were?
How powerful they were?
How heroic?
How perfect their bone structures were?
All very allowed, even encouraged. But we didn’t talk about their powers. We certainly didn’t talk about their late father’s powers, God rest his soul, may he shine with Our Lady.
