Chapter Text
Look, I don’t know how I got these powers or how my destiny, or whatever, got entangled with my best friends. I wish I hadn’t got these powers, honestly they’re a pain. My names Alley, and my best friends name is Eira. The only people who know about our powers are me, her, and her hippy parents. We met when we were seven, six years ago, her parents hate me, but they trust me. Unlike Eira, I’m not afraid to use my powers, especially when they would be used for self defence, we don’t live in a very safe city. A few months ago a “superhero” became popping up around at night, the news showed some video tapes of the masked hero and he seems to actually have powers, like us! To bad I don’t buy it. Eira and her parents immediately fell for everything he was doing, her parents even joined a stupid fan club! I’m not quite as easily won over, I didn’t trust Eria fully until last year, that's how hard I am to win over.
Me and Eira have done some speculating about how and why our powers popped up. No, we’re not aliens, no toxic chemicals, no lab experiments gone wrong, and not miraculously born with it. I’m a orphan, I had a happy family, no they didn’t die, at least that's not why I ended up here. I think it would have been better if they did die right away. One weird day, I was seven and this was just before I met Eira, they decided they just didn’t want to have a kid anymore, apparently they didn’t get the memo that it’s not something can just decide at the drop of a hat. They did the whole “oh, you’re going to this real nice place and you’re going to stay there for awhile! It will be fun! Like a sleepover!” gag, and I foolishly believed them, they were my parents after all. By the time the lady working there showed me my new bed, I realized they weren’t coming back, I didn’t even get a goodbye, they literally dropped me off at the curb and sped off down the road to their new, happy, kid free lifes. Then a few months later, just when I was starting to accept my new life, there was a fire. It was the biggest fire inside the city that has ever happened, and my parents had started it. The cops said that they were flicking cigerette buds on to the carpet like a couple of idiots, and it caught fire. They both died in that fire, a good captain always goes down with their ship, right? So, now ontop of being abandoned by my parents, the two idiots went and got themselves killed over some stupid cigarette buds. A few days later, I got my powers. I’ve always had a fascination with fire, how it moved and danced in the moonlight, it could be a prayer answered for warmth, or it could end lives of the innocent. Although all the trust I had formed with my parents had been shattered, I still broke down in a crying mess when I heard what had happened. I wished I could go back in time and force the fire away. I guess I got my wish. I can’t go back in time, but I can do quite a few tricks with fire. I can make it so my whole body catches fire, I can control already made fire, and I’m immune to burns.
Eira Is a different story. Her parents are loving and protective, she’s their only child. Unfortunately, her problems don’t concern her parents, all her problems, are her. Eira has terrible social anxiety, and I’m not talking shy, like to the extreme. She’s tried many different medications to calm her nerves, but none of them seem to help. When someone even looks at her she’ll shut down, she has played dead on the sidewalk because someone complimented her, it sounds funny at first, but it can get really bad. If you want to make friends with her you have to be prepared to be friends with me, because I talk for her. I know her personality like the back of my hand, I know what she would say or answer, so I save her the pain of talking, she’s fine with it. If you’re a stranger, she won’t talk to you until she is very comfortable and trusts you, that could be anywhere from a month to a year. Before we met, she was seven, she had no friends and was extremely isolated. Imagine whenever you or someone else talks you feel a stab of the worst feeling you’ll ever feel in the very depths of your soul. Eventually, talking only to your parents gets really lonely, you’re always lonely even when your surrounded by people. Eira became sad and gloomy, maybe even depressed. She wanted isolation, but not the lonely kind of isolation, the peaceful kind of isolation. What's the ultimate peaceful isolation place? Superman's fortress of solitude of course! And what is his fortress of solitude made of? Ding, ding, ding, ice! She told me she wanted to make a kind of ice bubble around her, like the fortress of solitude, she wanted to block out the world, the crowds, the noise, and the stabby feeling in her gut when she’s in public. Her favorite season has always been winter, it’s the least energetic season, the season of solitude, she likes to call it. So, that's when she got her powers, yep, she turned into Elsa the ice queen. Frost breath is my personal favorite, she can enclose things in a big ice cube just by touching it. Our powers is how we became friends, something we could bond over. Other then her and her parents no one knows about my powers, you could imagine their faces when they found out Eira had powers. Eira can’t do as many tricks as me, we think it could be one of three things. One, she never uses her powers, so she is just to scared to do the things that she actually can do. Two, our powers kinda grow as we use them and add on more tricks we can do, so since she never uses her powers they don’t have the opportunity to grow. Three, her powers simply have more limitations than mine.
After Eira’s parents realized this masked hero had powers like Eira and me, she would send us out every night from eight pm to eleven pm to go on a wild goose chase for this superhero. He doesn’t seem like your everyday cut and dry superhero, he wears a oversized hoodie with a crown on the back, plain blue jeans, a gold plastic party mask, a backpack, and always wears his hood up. You know how everyone thinks it’s incredibly stupid that no one can tell Superman is Clark Kent? Well, I guess it’s more realistic than we think, because with only a small party mask to hide behind, he hasn't been identified yet. So, there we are, two thirteen year old girls wandering around the city every night in hopes to just run into him, and ask for help with our powers, and how to control them better. Mine and Eira’s powers are opposites, so apparently they don’t like each other, I’m one of the very few people who can help comfort Eira when she’s having a attack, but I can’t do much when I can’t get less than 5 feet away from her. Whenever we get less than 5 feet away from each other we both feel nauseous and get a stabbing pain piercing through our whole bodies. It may not be such a big deal, I don’t like physical contact anyway, but imagine your best and only friend is having a mental attack and shutting down, knowing you can help them just by comforting them, but not being able to do more than talking to them. So, we hope if we can get mentored by this mysterious hero, then we can get our powers under control enough to where I can get close enough help her, even for just a minute, when she’s having a attack.
It had been months of going up and down alleyways looking for trouble, so he could come and save us then talk to him ect, ect. Our once fiery hope was completely out. “Let’s just go home!” I complained sitting down on a bench in the park, “no! You may have given up, but I haven’t, where's your optimism?” Eira sat down on the opposite side of the bench pulling the sleeves of her hoodie over her hands and making little balls out of them. “Ha! There’s where you’re wrong! I’m fluent in pessimism and I never was optimistic!” I countered folding my arms over my chest, Eira stared up at the stars for a second in a sort of trance. “You remember the news last night? The video of him helping that crying boy on the doorstep, how do you think he found him? He can’t be just wandering around, he always gets wherever at the exact right moment, how does he do that? It can’t be pure luck, not that many times” Eira still stared at the stars going through deep thought, “what if he has some kind of senses, not just for criminals, but when someone is sad. Heck! He gave that boy a snack and a water bottle from his backpack!” Eira then turned her head towards me, she always makes that face whenever she has a brilliant idea. I nodded for her to go on, and she returned to looking at the dark sky, “so, what if he has a special sense for when someone's in trouble or sad!" She looked excitedly at me. "Whoopty doo, what does that do for us?" I asked sarcastically, rolling my eyes at her, "what does that do for us? What do you mean, what does that do for us! If we just think bad thoughts-" "done and done" I interrupted giving her a sly look. She rolled her eyes and sighed, shaking her head disapprovingly "what I was going to say was, if we just think of bad thoughts and make ourselves sad, than he might sense it, than show up to comfort us!" She threw her arms in the air looking at me for approval of this plan, "fine I'll do it. But I'm not saying I think it's going to work or that it's not incredibly stupid" I grumbled. We closed our eyes and reached into the backs of our minds. I always imagine I keep all of my most terrible, sad, fearful memories in a chest with a sturdy lock. Then, in times like these, I get the key to the chest and unlock it, it burst opens with sad images and scenes from my life, than I just indulge in the misery. I unlock the chest more times a week than I'd like to admit. I squeezed my eyes shut as images rushed through my head, my fingernails dug a little deeper into the park bench, and I began to drown in the misery. A few minutes passed, our eyes were still squeezed shut, the chilly breeze began to wash over me like a heavy wave, not Eira though, because the cold never bothered her anyway. BU BUMP CHINK! I was about ready to give up and head home, when I heard quiet steps coming along the cobblestone path. I opened my eyes and saw a dark figure walking towards us, I immediately started to feel my hands warming up, all I had to do was touch them to give them a third degree burn. The figure moved closer, his stride was long and confident, he swayed slightly back and forth as he walked. He stopped a few feet in front of us, by now Eira's eyes were wide open with wonderment. He rested his hand on his hip, the street light illuminated the bright gold party mask he wore. He flashed a smile so bright you could practically see the old school movie sparkle coming from his teeth. "Hello ladies, I'm The Prince Of The Night, and I've come to rescue you from whatever your sorrows might be"