Years in the past, but not many...

  Jordan, Blink, and Maggie pile into the cab behind me, squeezing in, knees bumping. Man, I really fuck this ankle up a lot, huh?

  The driver-a slightly bewildered Indian guy who has probably seen some weird shit driving this late but not this weird-gives me a look in the rearview mirror, eyebrows raised.

  I point a finger forward.

  "Anywhere but here."

  We pull off just as the windows of the warehouse burst outward, glass raining down, the whole structure shuddering like it's about to collapse inward on itself.

  Then, as we round the corner, leaving the warehouse behind-

  We hear it.

  Not a single blast, not a mushroom cloud, not a single fireball, but a chain reaction, one after the other, rapid fire, a rolling thunder of chemical ignitions, each setting off the next.

  The street lights up behind us, shadows flickering against the cab windows as the heat chases our tail. The taxi driver looks like he's about to shit himself. Jordan laughs, and I feel it too, bubbling up from inside me like nervous vomit. It doesn't take more than a couple of seconds before the four of us are laughing crazy, even the taxi driver nervously chuckling along, clearly unsure whether or not he just got made the accessory to a crime.

  "Alright, buddy," Jordan starts between giggles. "I'll tip you extra if you're willing to take us to Collingswood, wait like twenty minutes with us, and then drive us back. No, wait, no bridge. You got a favorite cheesesteak spot in South?"

  The driver, thickly accented, stares at Jordan in the rear-view mirror. "It's two AM, sir. Nothing's open that isn't a convenience store."

  "Yeah, that's fine. Just take us to South Street, wait twenty minutes, and then you can drive us back. Like I said, I'll tip you a ton. Like, here, here's forty bucks right now," Jordan answers, shaky hands reaching under their re-asserted cloak and pulling out two crisp, slightly wrinkly twenty dollar bills. They pass it through the little taxi window thing while Philadelphia becomes a slow blur around us.

  The driver, just as shaky if not moreso, grabs the bills and tucks them into his cupholder. Finally, I let out the breath I've been holding, and the pain in my ankle rushes back to me. "You've got it, boss," he says, rounding the corner at a streetlight.

  For a second, I can swear that I see Soot on a nearby rooftop, staring down at us - but I blink, and she's gone. Already, I hear fire engine screams, ambulances, police sirens, headed their way towards this chemical explosion in North Philly.

  Twenty minutes later, we're at a 24-hour McDonald's on South Street, shoes kicked off under the table, costumes half-on. Jordan and I already changed in the bathroom, but Blink and Maggie are still in their outfits, just with the masks off and a sweater thrown over top.

  "So," Jordan says, unwrapping their third cheeseburger with the mechanical precision of someone who's practiced this exact motion hundreds of times, "you think anyone else is going to connect this particular explosion to the four of us?"

  I shrug, gingerly stretching my ankle under the table. "I'm not worried about it. I'm feeling the win. But hey, guess this means I'm telling this whole story, right? For the new kids."

  "Oh shit." Blink's eyes widen. "Really? The whole thing? From the beginning?"

  "We've got the time," I say, glancing at the camera "and you know I'm a sucker for a captive audience."

  Jordan smirks. "Toss me another barbecue sauce and I'll let you monologue for thirty minutes."

  "Deal," I say, flicking the sauce packet across the table. "Let's start at the beginning, when my life went from completely normal to extremely weird in about half a second."

  "Who are you talking to?" Maggie asks. She looks around, worried. "Who did you just wink at?" I ignore her.

  So, I'm Sam Small, Philadelphia's own Bloodhound. It turns out there's like six other Bloodhounds in the USA alone, but I'm the only one in Philly, so suck it.

  I got my powers when I was 14 - this was back in August 2023, maybe a year and nine months ago. Basically, I was out fishing with my Pop-Pop Moe - he's my grandfather - and I fell off the boat. Except I wasn't just "fell off the boat," I got caught under the boat. And the propeller? It got me.

  "Ouch," Blink says, wincing. "I still can't believe how fast you healed from that."

  "That's the thing - I didn't know I was healing that fast. I was just happy to be alive."

  Anyway, after I got out of the hospital, I had these neat little shark teeth. And I could sense blood. Pretty gross, right? But useful in some situations.

  I had to get a license for my powers - a JLUMA, Juvenile License to Utilize Metahuman Abilities. This cop named Officer Gold interviewed me about my abilities, basically assessed whether I was a risk to society. Which... in hindsight, maybe, depending who you ask?

  "You're not a risk," Jordan says, reaching over to steal one of my fries. "You're a hazard. There's a difference."

  I flip them off and continue.

  So, a couple weeks after I got my license, this lady named Liberty Belle - she was - is - was a pretty big deal superhero in Philly - she showed up at my house (more or less) and wanted to recruit me to join this team called the Young Defenders. They were, like, the junior version of the Delaware Valley Defenders, Philly's main superhero team.

  Clarification; First, she found me playing basketball, and my blood sense discovered her secret lethal internal injuries. Then, she told me that she wanted to make sure to train the next generation of capes before she kicked the bucket.

  "Are you okay, Sam?" Maggie asks, reaching over to wipe my eyes with a napkin.

  "Fine!" I mumble. "Let me keep going,"

  I joined the Young Defenders - me, Gale, Puppeteer, Blink here, Crossroads, Gossamer, Playback, Rampart. We trained together. I nearly killed myself trying to prove I belonged by doing this insane obstacle course. Gossamer gave me my name and my first costume.

  My first patrol, I helped take down this guy called Mudslide at a Walgreens. And then I met this asshole calling themselves "Safeguard."

  Jordan rolls their eyes. "Rude."

  "Jordan here," I gesture with a fry, "was my nemesis for about twenty-four hours. They had these space-warping powers, could make distances longer or shorter."

  "I still regret not calling myself 'Non-Euclidean Person,'" Jordan says wistfully. "Also, the fuck you mean 'had'?"

  "Nobody would have known what that meant," I tell them.

  "The smart ones would."

  So anyway, I figured out Safeguard went to my high school. I confronted them, and then instead of, like, a superhero-supervillain fight, they suggested we stage fights to get famous. I thought that was pretty weird, but I didn't have much time to think about it because while we were trying to do our fake staged fight, we witnessed a murder.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  We were scouting locations for one of our fake confrontations, and we stumbled on three members of this criminal organization called the Kingdom of Keys - Mr. Nothing, Mr. Polygraph, and our old pal Mudslide, who they trussed up with one of their big-shot lawyers and got out of jail. They were using this abandoned factory for some sort of initiation rite, and we saw them force Mudslide to bury some poor guy alive.

  They spotted us, and we had to fight our way out. I got shot. Jordan got concussed. But we survived, and I discovered I had a third power - rapid healing.

  "Almost died, though," Blink points out.

  "Details," I wave dismissively. "Isn't that our whole career? Almost dying?"

  "I don't know if that's healthy," Maggie mutters.

  "Shush, I'm building to the good parts."

  The next few months were busy. Pop-Pop Moe gave me some wisdom at a Rosh Hashanah dinner. I shared my powers with my best friends. The Young Defenders were rallied to face off with a gang called the Philly Phreaks, so named because all of them had really gross, visually apparent mutations. I mean, like, that doesn't make them bad people. It's the murderousness that makes them bad. Anyway, they had this kid they called Deathgirl - she could copy other people's powers, but stronger, and she was their "secret weapon". One of them - Spindle - double-crossed them because he was tired of a life of crime, started dating Jordan, and then got adopted.

  "We're still dating!" Jordan points out.

  Jordan and I started working together, investigating the Kingdom. We raided their nightclub hangout - the Crescent - and identified some of their leadership. This lady called Dr. Xenograft with her weird hybrid animals, Mrs. Heartstopper who could stop your heart with a touch (well, like fifteen seconds of touch), and Mr. T-Rex who could, you guessed it, turn into a fucking dinosaur.

  "Wait," Maggie interjects, pausing mid-bite of her McFlurry. "He could turn into an actual dinosaur? Like, with scales and everything?"

  "Scales and down," I shrug. "But yeah. And guess what? They followed us home. You've seen him, dude! At the zoo, remember?"

  "Oh, yeah,"

  The Kingdom tracked Jordan and me to my house. Mr. T-Rex and this woman called Mrs. Z - she had weather powers, and remember her because she'll be important later - they attacked my family's home. I convinced my parents to flee, and Jordan went to get help. I stayed behind to fight T-Rex, but when he transformed into an actual dinosaur, it was... bad. He crushed my house, stomped on my foot. I fought hard, bit through his dinosaur hide, but he was kicking my ass until Bulwark showed up.

  My house got completely destroyed. I moved in with Blink and her family.

  "You were a decent roommate," Blink says with a small smile. "Even if you talked in your sleep."

  "I do not talk in my sleep."

  "You absolutely do. Mostly about women."

  Meanwhile, Liberty Belle went missing. Puppeteer had a breakdown from the stress of running the team and got admitted to psychiatric care. And then, on the first night of Hanukkah, Chernobyl showed up in Philly.

  Chernobyl was this Ukrainian guy, a former nuclear engineer. He had an accident that basically turned him into a walking nuclear reactor. He had to wear this mechanical suit to keep from irradiating everything around him. Back in the day, he'd killed Liberty Belle's mentor, Professor Franklin. And Belle had an... extremely intense vendetta against him because of it. Chernobyl was the thing we were all trying to avoid. The worst case scenario.

  Despite explicit orders to help with evacuation, I tracked Belle to an abandoned refinery where she was confronting Chernobyl. I watched their fight, even filmed some of it. Belle was amazing, but she was already weakened from cancer, and Chernobyl was just too strong. When it looked like she was going to lose, I charged in with a makeshift weapon.

  I didn't save her. Chernobyl killed Belle right in front of me. And then he just... left. Told me to stay with her.

  Blink's hand thumps me on the back a couple of times. "There, there. She was our leader too, Sam. Don't beat yourself up over it," she says, pulling me in for a hug.

  The entire superhero community came to mourn Belle. And I inherited all her detective equipment, her notes, her files. She'd left them to me in her will, along with a letter saying she saw special potential in me despite our short time together. Not because I was strong or anything, but just from how stubborn I was about "the truth".

  Sure, I guess.

  I dug into her notes on Chernobyl, ate up his tragic backstory, and rewatched his encounter with Belle over and over again. He said he had a deal with the government. They were letting him operate freely in exchange for his services as a power source, and I think the government was afraid that was about to come out and become public. When federal agents tried to confiscate Belle's notes from me, this Boston superhero named Miasma helped me out - one of Belle's old friends. We formed a covert team called "The Auditors" - me, Jordan, and Connor, aka Spindle, who used to be with the Phreaks. Remember him?

  "Decent name," Jordan nods. "Not great, but decent."

  "I miss him. Funny guy," Maggie mumbles.

  "He's not dead!" Jordan half-heartedly shouts.

  In January 2024, I got attacked again. Aaron McKinley - a guy Jordan and I had beaten before - ambushed me with some of the Phreaks. They tortured me, pulled out my fingernails. But during the torture, I discovered another power - I could grow teeth from anywhere on my body, not just my mouth. I used teeth growing from my wrists to cut myself free, and escaped, but not after making them all look like dogshit and cutting a bunch of cool scars across Aaron's face.

  After recovering, The Auditors tracked Chernobyl to abandoned subway tunnels under Philadelphia. We got ambushed by Kingdom goons, and I ended up facing Chernobyl alone. We fought, and I actually managed to damage his suit, forcing him out of it briefly. But the radiation exposure nearly killed me. I spent weeks in the hospital recovering, but here's the thing - Chernobyl turned himself in afterward. Something I said got through to him.

  "You've never told us exactly what you said to him," Blink says softly.

  I shrug. "Some things stay between me and the bad guys. Makes the legend stronger."

  So I'm in the hospital for weeks, getting therapy, taking lithium for newly diagnosed bipolar disorder, doing physical therapy, the works. I met my maternal grandmother Camilla for the first time. My friend Jamila - Gale, one of the Young Defenders - and I were sort of dating at this point, but things were complicated.

  I finally got discharged around my 15th birthday, in late April 2024. The hospital was honestly a little bit of a blur - two months of physical therapy, psychological therapy, and a lot of medications with names I could barely pronounce. But I survived. That's what I do.

  Back at my newly rebuilt home, I got back into training with Gossamer at the DVD headquarters. She taught me boxing, first aid skills, the works. Jordan had renovated the Tacony Music Hall, which they had been squatting in this entire time, into our base of operations, which was pretty sweet. I celebrated Passover with my family, and Jamila even joined us for the Seder.

  "And it's about to be your home, buddy," Jordan thumps me on the back, almost making me swallow an ice cube wrong.

  "I'm good. I live with my parents," I reply.

  Jordan laughs. "Can't relate!"

  But things got complicated when this new drug called "Jump" hit the streets. It gave normal people temporary superpowers. While I was still recovering, we encountered this new villain named Ricochet who had amplified his powers with a nasty little syringe called "Fly" - like Jump, but permanent. Then he took another one to try and stack them, and, uh... folded himself in half? It was nasty. Don't do drugs, kids!

  Then Derek - this guy from my trauma support group who'd been a total jerk the whole time - shows up at my door asking for help. Turns out, he was a werewolf. Is a werewolf. Long story. His friend Elias had taken Fly and transformed into this chimera monster targeting the Independence Blue Cross building, out of revenge for denying his insurance claims (who could blame him? But don't do that either, seriously). We barely managed to stop him, and learned that some bald guy was distributing these power drugs.

  "That was the first time I saw Derek transform," I say, gesturing with a fry. "Not the last time, but definitely the most surprising."

  Jordan, Derek, Spindle and I gathered intel and discovered the power pills were being distributed by a dealer named Sparkplug. We set up a sting operation with this local team called the Tacony Titans - Sundial, Bubble, Compass, Moonshot, and Sandman.

  The sting went sideways when this vigilante called "Miss Mayfly" showed up with smoke bombs and stink gas, creating total chaos. During the fight, Sparkplug got away, but I discovered something shocking - Miss Mayfly was actually my best friend Kate.

  "Wait," Maggie interrupts. "Your best friend from middle school who didn't have powers was secretly a vigilante the whole time?"

  "Yep. And she had a whole team too - Tasha, Lilly, Marcus, and Jenna. All my friends from middle school - and, like, Chapter 3! They were using drones, gadgets, all kinds of stuff."

  We managed to track Sparkplug to his fancy condo in Rittenhouse Square. Derek, in his werewolf form, and I took him down in a brutal fight. I had to use a mixture of Ketamine and Xylazine to sedate him, stuff that Derek used to sedate himself. We captured Sparkplug and I believe he is currently languishing in Daedalus, the super-secure mega-ultra-supermax they use to contain supervillains with dangerous powers.

  But the biggest shock - bigger than Sparkplug's electric powers - came when Kate confronted me at our old basketball court. She'd taken Jump herself, turning her skin to metal. We fought - really fought - while she railed at me for abandoning our friend group, for getting powers, for going to a charter school while she was stuck at Lincoln, and it just let out all these awful, horrific bile that I didn't even know was building. She had become Miss Mayfly to help keep the streets clean while I was in a coma, and from her perspective, here I was throwing that all in her face.

  It was vicious. We'd been friends since kindergarten, and now we were throwing punches, landing blows that should've hospitalized both of us. She felt left behind. I felt misunderstood. We both said things we couldn't take back.

  As the sun started to rise, we finally collapsed from exhaustion, our friendship as battered and broken as our bodies.

  "And you never mentioned this to me?" Jordan asks, eyebrow raised.

  I shrug, avoiding their eyes. "Some wounds don't heal as fast as the physical ones."

  And then, man, it just keeps going!