#I love sensory’s extensive use of parentheses tho

[its-your-mind]

You lean in the doorway of the Heroic Records Room and wait for the yelling, shoving, and acid explosions (seriously, Acidosis? showering acid down on the heads of your fellow fledgeling heroes does not seem like the best way to attract the interest of a mainstream hero) to die down. You’re tired - it’s been a long day already, what with the Secret Identity Significations, and the Introduction of the Initiates (you and your classmates) and the Accreditation of Heroic Adepts (off into the real world - and godspeed to them), and the and the Feast of Fortitude (Fantine in the kitchen outdid herself), and the Appreciation Applause for the Application of Alliteration (okay, that one’s not real, but like… they totally would). All day, all the eyes (including the x-ray vision ones, and the laser ones, and the alien ones, and the floating ones) were on you. Well, you and your classmates. You were barely able to sneak away for your own personal Brief Break to the Bathroom, and that two minutes and fifty-seven second period was the only time you’ve had away from the watchers all day (you’re pretty sure you were alone in there, anyway. Who knows. Maybe one of the members of Invisible Interplanetary Insiders be nasty).

Even now, with the peanut gallery removed so that the Initiated can make their decisions in peace, you’re not quite without observers. Leader Longinus stands behind you in the hallway, watching with a small smile as two of your classmates argue which of them would be a better trainee under The Facemaker. Obviously it’s Mask. You know it’s Mask. Mask knows it’s Mask. Leader Longinus probably knows it’s Mask. The only one here who doesn’t appears to be Shimmer, who keeps saying something about how “obfuscation is kind of like illusions, which is basically what The Facemaker does, so it could be either Shimmer or Mask, really, and why doesn’t Mask just let Shimmer have this? He would appreciate it soooo much, ya know? Like, he’d name his firstborn after them or something.” You’re pretty sure he hasn’t paused for breath for an entire minute, and he’s still going.

Mask just stands there and raises an eyebrow at him, and then continues to raise it, and keeps raising it until it’s floating almost entirely off and above their otherwise unmoving face.

You hear a slight cough from behind you, and you throw a quick sight over your shoulder and see Leader Longinus hiding a smile behind his gloved fist.

Your own smirk fades back to a blank mask (haha) as Shimmer and Mask reach an accord (Mask promises not to request The Facemaker on their Patron Petition Paper. Something about the way they said that seems awfully specific, so you throw a curious sight over their shoulder as they lean over their Petition to start writing - ahhh okay. Got it. Mask is literally writing a note to The Facemaker, apologizing for Shimmer’s Petition, asking if The Facemaker could find someone else for him. No mention of their own request at all. You pull the sight back. Damn. Seems like The Facemaker already reached out to Mask, and made an offer they were willing to accept. Cool. Great. Good for them. Fuck, you should have spent more time making connections on whatever the superhero equivalent is to LinkedIn instead of playing Smash until 3am) and you bond a sight and listen and throw them around the room.

Acidosis has dissolved her acid (a good decision on her part - they still whisper about what the record keepers did to the firestarter back in ‘05. The story changes depending on who’s telling it (and who they’re telling) but the most plausible version you’ve heard is that the fire-bug got a bit too excited while holding a file and accidentally singed their fingerprints into the edge. They disappeared overnight and none of their classmates have seen them since) and is asking Doppelgänger whether he thinks Chem Cloud or Sciem would be a better fit for her. Both of Doppelgänger take the heroes’ info sheets out of her hands and he begins to read them over.

Wellington is at the next file cabinet over, muttering curses under her breath as she tries to discreetly fan- dry a sheaf of papers that seem to have suffered a similar fate to roughly every paper assignment Wellington turned in this semester. (You know from personal experience that even if she does get those papers dry, they’ll be irrevocably crinkly and wavy for the rest of time. Sorry, record-keepers. Maybe next time have an assistant come in to help the sentient atmospheric water generator with her file searching? Or, no, based on what happened with the firestarter, maybe you should make sure to take the time tonight to tell Wellington how much you appreciate her just in case she gets replaced by like… an awl tonight.)

While Wellington is dealing with the unfortunate consequence of hygroscopy, Altered Ant is holding four different heroic resumes in four of xyr claws, considering them one at a time. A quick zoom and focus shows what you had suspected - all four are alien heroes. Makes sense. Work with what you know, you know? You’re excited to see what kind of shenanigans xe can get up to once xe’s out in the human world. You hope xe gets to eat xyr fill of “the good tacos” (the only thing xe’ll call Taco Bell). Xe’ll fit right in there.

You finish your out-of-body circuit of the room. Now that there’s no more acid flying, and it doesn’t seem like any punches and/or mind-bending-illusions are going to get thrown around any time soon, there’s nothing stopping you from walking in yourself and grabbing some files. Instead, you keep leaning in the doorframe, arms crossed, considering your options.

It’s not like you didn’t know today was coming. It’s part of the Academy, obviously, a really big part, but it’s also kind of tradition for the more powerful students to figure out who they plan to pick before they walk into this room. Take Mask, for example. They clearly already had something worked out with The Facemaker - the Patron Petition is just a formality for them. You yourself have been approached by a few Adepts, and even some of the higher classes of hero (like, heroes with household names. One time Wraith and Biterbat stopped you outside your dorm bathroom at 2am. You were halfway through brushing your teeth and were running back to grab your face wash that you had forgotten in your bunk, so you had like, toothpaste foam dripping down your face like a rabid possum, and then two of the most famous heroes in the world were like “yo we heard how dope you were tell us more” and you had a TOOTHBRUSH hanging out of your mouth and you can throw your SENSES you can’t throw your fucking VOICE and it was TWO IN THE GODDAMN MORNING DO YOU FUCKING MIND, WORLD-FAMOUS SUPERHUMAN DUO? Anyway you had been late to Civilian Heroes class the next day because you overslept), have made some subtle indications they’d “be interested in working with you some time.” It makes sense to you. You’re pretty well-rounded, as far as generic superhuman qualities go, but there’s a lot of high-profile supers who would love to have someone with a more subtle, more long-distance skillset at their beck and call. None of them will come out and say it, of course (well, that’s not quite true, but King Krusher has the same number of brain cells as she has conventionally spelled words in her Secret Identity, so when she came up to you at last year’s Adept Appreciation Affair and said “Hey, you. Sensing… person. You graduate next year, yeah? You should ask me to be your mentor. I wanna use you to scope out villain layers so I can go in and kill all the bad guys faster,” you didn’t really bother to add that to your mental tally of mentorship offers) but you know that a lot of the heroes just see the training program as an opportunity to pick up a helpful tool to use in their crimefighting for a year or so. If the kid happens to pick up some knowledge about how to hero, great! If not, ah well. They’ll figure it out. Maybe. Or else maybe the hero can convince them to stay on long-term as a Sidekick, get a forever-tool.

Fuck that noise, though. You’re not here to be anyone’s Sidekick. A lifetime of following orders, not making your own decisions, living in someone else’s shadow, having to make your uniform match their color palate? Absolutely not, no thank you. You saved up for years to pay a super seamstress to make a suit to your specs (and you are so proud of it - full-bodied and as skintight as possible while still leaving room for a fuckton of little pockets and holsters for weapons and whatever hard candy is on sale at the store this week, colored a dark kinda blurry gray (like a cloudy sky on an almost-rainy day), made with a durable material and a texture that makes it look like the colors shift slightly when you move and disrupt your outline, and a matching mask/helmet that snaps down over just the top of your face to leave your mouth and nose clear (mouth for eating hard candy, nose for sense throwing (you were surprised how many poisons you were able to learn to recognize the smell of)) with the helmet covering just the front half of your head so it can keep your curls pushed back and out of your face without crushing them flat against your skull. You are really proud of that helmet. You were not interested in coming up with a new haircare and style routine once you hit the super-scene) and you are not going to give up that suit for anything, and besides, none of them actually gave a shit about you anyways, just what your power could do for them, so no way would you give up a piece of your personal hard-won freedom, especially not to an entitled hero with more super-fans than they have super-sense, and—

“Sensory?”

You start, and instinctively throw your sight out in a full 360-view around where you’re standing, only to pull it back almost immediately as you turn, a bit sheepish, to face Leader Longinus. “Sir?”

“Are you going to go in? It’s getting late, and I would like to get these “sent out,” as it were, before active heroes begin their nightly patrol routes.” He gives you a winning smile and places his hands on your shoulders. “I’m sure you’ve already got a plan up there in that smart head of yours,” he says, using the hands on your shoulders to turn you to face the room (which does result in one of his rubbery arms being briefly wrapped across your sternum before he lets you go, kind of like a momentary hostage situation, but like, if the hostage-taker was a congenial white guy in his 60s whose entire body had the same physical properties as one of those sticky-hand toys you can get as a prize in exchange for like ten tickets at the arcade. Having a giant sticky stretchy hand across your chest for several seconds is not an experience you are interested in repeating). He taps one shoulder a few times, presumably in a matter meant to reassure. “Go on in, and at least start flipping through some files.”

He gives you a little push (less sticky stretchy hand feelings on that one) and you sigh and walk into the room. As you walk in, you throw some sight upwards to the ceiling so you’ve got a view of the whole space from above (a precaution you’ve started taking whenever Acidosis is in the room. You are not interested in your classmates’ repeat reviews of your rainbow-polka-dot-patterned boxer-briefs). You walk towards the wall of filing cabinets and open the drawer marked Iapetus - Kendo Kenny, take a second to wonder what Kendo Kenny could possibly have done to piss off the Identity Interface to earn that Secret Identity, and pull it open.

You flip idly through the files, not really paying attention or looking at any of them in particular. It’s not like you plan to make any decision today, anyways. Through the sight you’ve got from the ceiling, you keep an eye out for any stray corrosive substances heading in the general direction of your thighs and/or ass. As your gaze passes around the room from above, you spot something… slightly off about the cabinet you’re currently flipping through, and your hands freeze on the files. You wouldn’t have noticed without the bird’s eye view, but it seems like the cabinet is leaning slightly to the right, so that its top edge is resting against the cabinet beside it. None of the other cabinets in the row are leaning, including the cabinet being leaned upon. Curious (and a little bit concerned the record-keepers will notice this and blame you as the last person who touched this cabinet - you do not want to disappear in a freak shredder incident) you move your sight down and closer to see if you can figure out what’s causing the (Slightly) Leaning Tower of Filing Cabinet. Just for shits and giggles, you throw another bit of sight behind the row of filing cabinets, and a third straight in front of you into the slight space between the cabinets.

There’s nothing above or behind the cabinet, but lodged in between… is that a file? Just… loose? Not filed in its proper place? Slightly panicked, you throw a sight out the nearest window four floors above to check for… nope, no giant apes, or alien invaders, or super-volcano eruptions, or idiot politicians tweeting the nuclear launch codes. The world is not ending. You pull back your sight, wincing from the strain of such a long-distance, fast-paced sense throw.

So.

A lost file, and yet the world remains as it was… neither are all the record keepers dead in a sudden world flood, nor are they in here right now, Patron Petitions be damned, correcting this egregious breach of archiving law. This must have been back here for a long-ass time, huh? Well, fuck. Now you absolutely need to know what it is.

You throw a series of small touches into the space and feel around the file, trying to see how it’s wedged in, how far down it’s gotten, and whether or not all the contents will slide out as soon as you even shift the cabinet even a millimeter.

After a lot of thrown poking and prodding, some shifting of cabinets, and a bit of help from Leader Longinus’s very easily flattened arms (you had to reassure him multiple times that no, you had not been the one to put the file back there, you had just found it, and you had no idea how it had gotten there in the first place, and really the record-keepers would probably actually be happy to have it back so this might make them slightly less likely to disappear either of you in the future if you accidentally misfiled the hero London Eyes under the London Eels group), you hold the file triumphantly in your grasp. By this point, everyone else has realized that something is going on, and they’ve all gathered around to look at what you’ve found.

The file label itself is gone (probably lost forever between those cabinets) but it seems like the important paperwork is still in there. You open to the first page, a standard fact sheet with a picture paper-clipped in front of it.

Name: Dani Padix

Date of birth: July 19, 1986

Alias (Secret Identity): Hidden Hacker

Powers: Remote infiltration of digitized information systems (online networks and in-house networks), immediate access to any password-protected device or account, personal network connector

Status: Alive, Inactive

Current location: Unknown

Known associates: None

Known activity: None

Notes: The Hidden Hacker had an incredibly successful career working as support to many more well-known supers. They were forced into hiding when it was revealed that they had been slowly dismantling a known criminal enterprise through small intrusions into their network activity.

The rest of the page is blacked out with marker (not uncommon for these files full of secret and privileged information), but your vision (all of it) has become a bit foggy anyway.

When you look up from the file, Leader Longinus is looking back at you. He smiles slightly at whatever he sees on your face. “Ah. I see. I don’t think it’s too off the mark to say that, if there was a plan coming in here today, it may have just changed.“

You just look back at him. Open your mouth. Close it. Blink a few times. Nod.

He nods back and turns to the group. “Alright, the rest of you all, have you filled out your forms? Good, good, now hand them to me, I’ll get them over to Correspondence and he’ll make sure they get exactly where they need to be as soon as is physically possible.”

Your classmates scatter back to where they had left their forms and one by one hand them to Leader Longinus. A few drops of water splash from Wellington’s hand onto Shimmer’s form, and he immediately begins to complain that The Facemaker won’t accept him if his form is all wet, that’s so gross and unprofessional, and Wellington’s eyes go wide and a little worded as she looks at her own form, corners slightly damp and dripping where she has just placed it in Leader Longinus’s outstretched hand, and then she also demands a new form, and Leader Longinus assures them both that the dampness of their paperwork will have absolutely no effect on the decision of any superheroes, and you’re honestly barely hearing any of this because you’re finishing filling out your own form, staring down at the last question:

Why are you interested in having me as your Mentor hero?

And below it, your answer:

I need your help.

A few hours later, after Leader Longinus has passed on your letters to Correspondence, who did… whatever he does to get things to their intended recipient, you’re lying wide awake in your bunk, staring at the ceiling and listening to Mask’s occasional snores drifting up from the bed below. The things you read in Hidden Hacker’s file are circling through your mind on repeat.

Remote infiltration… forced into hiding… immediate access… criminal enterprise… alive, inactive…

Your phone buzzes where it rests on the bed beside you, and you jump so hard you nearly fall over the railing (you’d think increased sense range would make your startle reflex less strong, but unfortunately yours just gets worse the farther you learn to throw). Frantically flailing your hands around you to find where your phone slipped between your blankets, you throw sight to see the screen before it goes dark again and… what the fuck? When and why did you set a reminder to go off at 2:13am?

Your hand hits your phone. You grab it, fumble with it for a second, and then hold it over your face, squinting up at it to see what drunk-you decided that you needed to be reminded of at some indeterminate time in the future. You blink. Squint at it harder. Open up the reminder to see the full text. Read it. Put your phone down. Pinch your arm. Pick your phone up. Read it again. Okay. Fuck. Well. It is definitely not a message from drunk-you. Even sober-you couldn’t pull a prank like this, and sober-you didn’t set this reminder either. So at least you’ve got that going for you. On the other hand…

TIME SENSITIVE

Reminder - Sat, 2:13am

Hello, Sensory. I must say, it was incredibly surprising to receive your Patron Petition form this evening as I was making dinner. This was partially due to the fact I have been out of contact with the Academy for over a decade now, but primarily because I do not meet the qualifications for Patronage any longer, as much of the work that I do these days is… less heroic than the Academy would traditionally prefer. Nonetheless, I’m not one to stand in the way of talent and ambition, and your request does intrigue me. I’ve added a GPS location to this notification. If you’re still interested, come at 4:30 PM tomorrow. I would suggest coming alone, though as I said, I’m not one to stand in the way of ambition. If you want to see what happens if you choose to bring company, be my guest. If you want to see what happens if you send someone else in your stead, that could be fun too. I know there are a few in your class who play with illusions and disguises. However, I do hope you’ll be there tomorrow yourself, alone. I am excited and intrigued to know what it is that finds you requesting help from a decades-defunct hero. —Hidden Hacker

Upon graduating the academy, each superhero in training is granted the choice of training under a full fledged superhero. If you select their name, they are secretly notified and will come and find you, to see if they want to train you. There’s always a massive rush and squabble over the best names, the recognisable ones, in the records office. When looking through the names, you find one hidden at the back, having slipped out of the case. Its dirty, slightly torn, in elegant old writing, and seemingly long forgotten. Something inside you says that this is the one for you.