Chapter 2: Mmm, strawberries!

This time I awakened my powers much earlier, and I did it in a meaningful way. It's not just about my powers, though; my life as a whole is much more meaningful now. As for my superpowers. It was enough to think about why, in my past life as Mark Grayson, it came so late. The answer was surprisingly simple: I didn't have the push I needed to make it happen. I had waited for it, dreamed about it, thought about what I would do when I got superpowers - there was really no question, I always knew I would be a hero, like my father - but never did anything to bring that moment closer.

I mean, I have two childhoods to compare. And I can clearly see that my childhood as Mark Grayson was too... rosy or something. Hell, I'd never even fought until that fateful day when I decided to stand up for Scott - and by the way, I did it because I hoped the fight would be a trigger... and I was right, because that night it was.

And in my father's homeland of Viltrum, such a peaceful and serene childhood was hardly the norm. A race of conquerors, a militarized empire that holds entire galaxies in its steel fist, a cult of force above all else-it's highly doubtful that with such ideology, the Vitrumites raise their children to be the pampered flowers I was before graduation.

This time I tried to talk my mother - and it was quite exhausting, annoying, and difficult - into getting me into a sports section. I was fourteen at the time, and I was crushingly defeated in my confrontation with my mother's prejudices. She even had some arguments about it, saying that if I could get my powers, it wouldn't make sense, and if not, it wouldn't be necessary, and that my background automatically gave me an unfair advantage over ordinary people, so I couldn't go into sports. I couldn't tell her that I needed sports just to give my body a stressful workout and provoke an earlier maturation, and therefore have more time to prepare for the battle with my father.

In general, the section didn't work out, so I started training on my own. Even here my mom wasn't thrilled, but she wouldn't forbid my son to go jogging and work out in the yard. I bribed my parents to buy good and expensive half-marathon shoes with a pleasant cushioning during running, a waterproof sports player and a child's pear, and started daily exercises. My mother was demonstratively against it and was unhappy and pressed her lips, but she did not forbid me to do self-development, and my father just looked at all this with mixed feelings... seriously, the hell knows what is going on in the head of this alien!

It turned out that even without a full awakening of the viltrumite... um, bloodline, I guess you could call it that, I had a significant advantage over humans. It seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary or so conspicuous - not even the bottom line of the supers we had enough of on the planet - but to run over ten kilometers every morning and then be able to do half an hour of push-ups, pull-ups, and punching a pear as a rest? And all this at the age of fourteen. And I've never been sick, no colds, no flu, nothing. The only time I ever got a fever was when I was teething.

The training worked even faster and better than I dared to hope: at fourteen I was practically an ordinary kid - who had never been sick - and by sixteen I was already descending to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, visiting the local extremophiles to train and test my body's abilities. The very awakening of my abilities happened during a run three months after I started training. I always ended my run with acceleration, when my lungs are already burning from lack of oxygen and my muscles are at their limit from fatigue, but you, instead of slowing down and stopping, on the contrary, accelerate more and more. Back in my past human life, I always ran the last kilometer or so this way - everything depended on the music, for it drives me during my workouts - and this love of music and running has been passed on to the new me in full force. There are songs to which I just can't stop, and there are songs to which I can't help but speed up, squeezing every last drop out of me.

That time I was finishing my early run as usual - about six in the morning, when there are still no cars and everyone is asleep - and was out at the finish line and tearing my veins out to Goya no Machiawase when it finally happened.

First of all, all the accumulated fatigue had disappeared, as if my muscles had finally woken up from their long sleep and started working at full force and there wasn't just that grueling ten-kilometer run in twenty minutes.

Secondly, the neighbor's house began to approach too fast, dangerously fast. Not for me, of course, for the house. Fortunately, my reaction speed and my thinking did not lag behind my strength, I even had time to think about the fact that if I tried to slow down, I would leave traces on the asphalt, and so I did not do that, but just jumped up. The familiar feeling of falling into the sky picked me up and carried me upward. And when I say falling into the sky, it is not a beautiful metaphor, as one might think; on the contrary, it is a very accurate description of the process. It was as if my body's center of gravity had shifted slightly outside my body and began to pull me toward itself with a force many times greater than earth's gravity. That's exactly what I felt, even though I knew it was a load of nonsense. In fact, I cannot really have such mass... Moreover, I can change the direction of this gravitation in a flash with my thoughts, I decide for myself in what position my body will be in space and, in fact, I could walk on the ceiling all day comfortably for myself, if I had such a desire! The last time I was Mark Grayson, I didn't think much of it-I took it for granted: the Viltrumites can fly, and so can I, for I am one of them. But the other part of me that understood, scientifically speaking, how difficult it was to overcome Earth's gravity was hysterical. It's one thing to create lift and use it to take off, like Atomic Eva does with her altered-air jets, and it's quite another, like me, to simply ignore Earth's gravity--it takes energy comparable to the gravitational pull of our planet!

"That can't happen!" screamed the rational part of me, the part that was in a former life an astrophysicist and astronaut. "Such energy can't be hidden in such a tiny volume without consequences!"

And yet there it is, the fundamental force of the universe that can stop even light and time, as if it had no effect on me at all. And so I felt invulnerable!

However, if it were not for the memory of a past life, this experience - the first independent flight - could have been much more painful, even dangerous. I remember how frightened I was the first time I realized that I did not know how to stop my fall into space. How I swallowed more and more of the air that was discharging as I went up into the stratosphere, and how I finally passed out and began to fall back down. I would have survived such a fall for sure, but the neighbors would have been in trouble if I had not woken up in time to take off again.

This time nothing like that happened. I already had experience flying, including in outer space, so I had no problem taking control of the flight and getting back before anyone noticed the flying boy in the sky. It's not that this would be a huge sensation - there are all kinds of supernatural creatures in the world, including children - Eva is already wearing her pink suit and playing superhero, and she is my age, but her father is not planning to take over Earth, just waiting for the child to wake up.

After checking that my jump hadn't left any marks on the pavement, I returned home. The strong smell of pancakes wafted up my nose from my doorstep-my mom was already making breakfast, she always got up soon after I did... I think she even started getting up a little earlier than usual to chat with me right after my run. And in general, about a month after they started, she stopped giving me such disapproving looks and put up with my new hobby.

"Good morning, Mom," I say, pretending to breathe heavily. "Mmm, pancakes?

"Morning, son," Debbie said from behind the stove, and with a sympathetic look at me, added. "It's not working, is it?"

"Alas..." I hung my head and lied.

"Don't get so upset about it." She comforted me, and then added. "Maybe it was for the best."

I rinsed my hands in the sink and took the burnt pancake, which I had noticed when I entered the kitchen, off the table.

"Hey!" Debbie was indignant, but when she saw that my prey was a defective pancake, she calmed down a little.

She had a thing about it. She wouldn't let anyone eat until it was all done and she set the utensils and called everyone to the table. This was especially true of pancakes and all kinds of pastries, which were cooked in batches and spread their sweet aroma throughout the house.

"Even if you're young and healthy, you shouldn't make such a mess of your liver," Mom grumbled.

"Then maybe at least a shocked liver will help me awaken my superpowers," I grinned and crunched on a hard piece of fried dough.

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I threw the completely charred black edge in the trash anyway-I wasn't exactly chopped up.

"How was that?" Debbie grinned.

"I don't know yet, maybe one more."

"Go!" She waved her spatula in my direction.

I threw my sweaty clothes in the laundry bucket, got under the shower and turned on the hot water, which was no longer scalding at all.

So, awakening my powers was only the first and easiest part; now I had to practice keeping this secret from everyone, especially from my father. After all, if he finds out that I already have my powers and starts to act prematurely, things will only get worse. I need time to prepare.

Yes, hiding your superpowers from your family when your father is the strongest hero on the planet is a rather non-trivial task. I have a significant advantage over my father: Nolan is always busy saving lives all over the world, and is constantly in the media spotlight. But most importantly, I remember when his adventures as Omni Man turned into long disappearances, which my mother and I attributed to trips to gather material before writing the next book. And some of them dragged on for months--one time he disappeared into another dimension for six months, unfortunately, that was before I was ten, and I couldn't make any use of it.

But that's going to change now. I have a few years of head start before I graduate, so I can be better than the old me. Besides, it's worth preparing in case it's still not enough. Maybe the Defenders wouldn't be so helpless if they were prepared for my father's attack. But I don't want to tell my story to everyone, either...

After I finished my morning routine and cleaned up, I returned to the kitchen. My father was still gone-even the Omni Man needs a good night's sleep sometime-and my mother was panting over a jar of strawberry jam, holding it between her knees and trying to overcome the lid with a kitchen towel. She looked amused, and as soon as she saw me she stopped her fiddling.

"I'll have to wait for your father," He put the unruly strawberries back on the table. "It's about time he got up, the agent should be here today."

"Let me," I took the jar and, pretending to feel some resistance as I did so, twisted the lid.

"Oh, you got your superpowers, son!" Suddenly my father's voice came from behind me, and my heart immediately went in my heels.

How did he know? Did he see me flying? Damn, how badly that happened! What am I supposed to do now?!

"Nolan!" Mom's indignant cry interrupted my panicked thoughts.

"Very funny, father," I understood the joke and hastened to reply. "Do you want to hurt me? Well, well..."

"They'll be here soon, son. Any day now." I've heard that a thousand times in my past life. And each time, Nolan himself believed it less and less. Even now... fourteen years old is pretty late, based on what my father had told me before. His stories suggested that ten or thirteen was the age at which most Viltrumites awaken to their powers. Of course, you can't believe everything my father said, but it didn't seem to make sense for him to lie about it.

"Sit down to breakfast!" Mom interrupted the side conversations by pouring coffee for my father, black for me, and green tea for myself - how can you eat pancakes with the latter?

"Okay, okay, as you say, honey," capitulated to his wife formidable alien conqueror ... damn, how strange it all is, even knowing what my father is capable of, I still can not finally believe that all this, our whole life, our family - just a lie and a sham.

"That's right, like I say," Mom went into dictator-mode. "And I say no talking about superpowers and superheroes at the table!"

"Mmmm, strawberries and pancakes. Love you, honey!" Dad pulled Mom to him and kissed her.

They're a little out of line, of course, flirting in front of their child, but I'm not a boy anymore, either, to be outraged by something like that.

We sat down to breakfast like a normal, happy family... is there any chance that it will stay that way from now on... that our Viltrumite heritage won't destroy this family?

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