“Today marked the third day of the conflict between Whirlpool and Backspin,” the news reporter said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Neither Super seems willing to back down yet as they vie for dominance over Cove City.” Her voice was calm and even throughout the story as if this was a weather report, and in many ways it was. Supers just happened, and there wasn’t much anyone could do about them. Just like the weather, sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad, and the best anyone could really do about it was try and carry their proverbial umbrellas when it looked like rain.

Whirlpool had shown up in Cove City three years ago, drowned the previous Super who had been there, and been mostly unchallenged ever since which was quite a long while by Super standards. Most Supers either got bored or got chased out after a few months to a year. They were always looking for the next city over, a bigger one, or just something new. Of course, the bigger cities attracted the more powerful Supers. As far as size went, Cove City was a modest, medium sized city that enjoyed a half decent tourist trade.

Some Supers lorded over their cities like tyrants while others were content just to have their name plastered next to the city’s ‘Welcome’ signs. Whirlpool was mostly a hands-off sort of Super. He liked surfing and the waves near Cove City were pretty good. Sometimes he got upset with a boat that was blocking his view or something, but he only ever shifted the currents and moved them. He never actually hurt any of the people in Cove City. Even now during his battle with Backspin he had insisted they fight away from the city. This had cost him easy access to the ocean but also meant fewer civilian casualties.

All of this had been discussed, at length, by Toby’s parents. Toby, being only eleven, wasn’t brought into those conversations very often. That didn’t mean he wasn’t interested. He was very interested, in fact, but he never knew quite what to say that would really add anything to the conversation. He could sort of remember what it had been like before Whirlpool came to Cove City. The previous Super, a brutal, subhuman monster called Crusher, took a simple pleasure in going around and, well, crushing things. Usually, cars or buildings were the target but if people got in its way they tended to get crushed as well. The only saving grace was that Crusher wasn’t particularly fast and so most weeks it only crushed a few vehicles or buildings and Cove City was able to carry on, more or less, like normal.

“Maybe they’ll wipe each other out,” Toby’s dad said hopefully.

“Hmm, yeah,” Toby’s mom said with heavy sarcasm. “Then we’d be free to be picked off by whatever upstarts there are out there who haven’t fancied a go at Whirlpool.”

Toby’s parents rarely agreed on the issue of Supers. If it were up to his dad, all the Supers would be rounded up and executed. Good or bad, helpful or rampaging, it didn’t matter to him. They all had to go. His mom was more pragmatic about things. She liked how calm life had been with Whirlpool around and figured if he could hang around for a few more years then she was fine with that.

When Toby was younger, he’d asked his parents why they didn’t just move after their car had been crushed during the night.

“Everywhere has a Super to deal with,” his dad had said.

“And jobs don’t like to hire people who tend to jump ship at the first sign of a bad Super,” his mom added.

So Toby watched the nightly news and wondered how much longer Whirlpool and Backspin would keep at it, smashing each other around. Every Super had inhuman strength and healed incredibly fast, but then they each also had a smattering of unique powers. Whirlpool, of course, controlled water, but he could also control currents in the air to a certain extent, and some people suspected he had some limited flight abilities since many of his leaps didn’t exactly follow the normal rules, altered air currents or not.

Backspin had only one other power but it was a doozy. He could alter the rotational momentum of any object within a range of around one hundred feet. That might not sound incredible at first, but he had found ways to make it incredible. Bullets, for example, rotated very quickly for stability and so he could curve them wherever he wanted. He could throw a rock, and suddenly it would be spinning faster than a tornado and explode like a grenade under the stress. He could even effect how Whirlpool was moving if he got close enough.

The news moved on to some local high school sports team and Toby left the room. His parents continued their discussion, now focusing on whether or not Whirlpool deserved to live based on the fact that he hadn’t used his powers to save anyone since taking over Cove City.

It was a cool evening outside and Toby liked sitting on the back porch and watch the stars come out. Traffic was the usual grumbling background noise, intermixed with occasional sounds of neighbors talking, kids playing, or dogs barking. There wasn’t much, really, that was different this evening than the ones before. People were certainly more on edge with the potential change in resident Super, but life carried on regardless. Toby’s family lived on the far side of the city, nearer to where Whiplash and Backspin were fighting and every once in a while he could even see them rising up above the skyline, silhouetted against the evening sky.

Toby sighed in frustration. It didn’t seem right to him, that so much could be going on and yet nothing seemed to be happening because of it. Supers were just how things were, for as long as Toby could remember any way. In school they sometimes talked about the time before Supers, but what good was that to him now? What did it matter? No one knew why Supers started appearing, but once they started, they never stopped. They weren’t aliens or a new race or anything, just people born with extraordinary powers. Not many Supers had allowed themselves to be studied, but those who had given DNA samples didn’t have anything special there to explain why they could do what they did. It wasn’t hereditary either. Plenty of Supers over the years had tried to form Super families and breed Super children but they had the same low chance of producing a Super as everyone else did.

There was a small pile of rocks on the porch that Toby’s dad always gathered up for him since he knew Toby liked to sit out here and toss them down towards the little targets he’d set up for that purpose. Toby picked up one of the stones and tossed it gently over the railing and watched as it tumbled through the air. It had little spin to it, and the graceful arch it made was clear and predictable. It struck the ground dully just shy of one of the targets. He hadn’t really been aiming at anything when he’d thrown it. He picked up another and, this time aiming for the target, tossed the stone. He watched as it flew up and over the railing, slowed, and then began to fall. Already he could see it wouldn’t hit the mark.

Without hardly any effort, Toby slowed the stone down. He slowed everything down, actually. As the world around him slowed, he could see more and more clearly the outcome of all moving things around him. He didn’t move any faster in this state, he was slowed down as well, but he could command a far greater control over his actions. He picked up another stone, the action seeming to take him several minutes, and then lobbed it at the other stone that was still falling towards the ground. He allowed time to revert to normal and he smiled as the two stones collided, both of them rebounding and then smacking dead center on two of the targets.

With a grimace and a furtive glance around he belatedly checked to make sure no one was looking. No one was, of course. He was alone on his back porch and his parents were inside, still arguing the ethics of Supers. It would be best if he just never used his powers but try as he might he just couldn’t help it. It was like trying not to use your hands. In school he could stretch out time so he could have as long as he needed to work on his assignments since it was only his motion that was slowed, not his thinking. He had other powers as well. He could speed up his perception of time as well, making boring waiting periods pass in moments. And if he touched someone, he could lock them into either a faster or a slower time frame, making life seem to speed by them, or else crawl at an unbearable rate.

He’d always known about his powers just as a person knows they have arms and legs. Sure, it took a while for him to figure out how to work his powers, but he’d had several years now of practice. Some kids at school had been locked in an altered time frame for months now. Nothing too severe or obvious, of course, just enough to punish them for being mean to him. Never quite having enough time to finish their assignments, never seeming to get enough sleep, never able to fully enjoy the moment because, to them, every minute was being shaved down by a few seconds. It would also have the net result of lengthening their overall lives since they would also age slower when compared to other people since they were, essentially, being hurried along through time

Other kids were given the opposite treatment. They sluggishly plodded through time, every hour feeling like an eternity, but unlike Toby they didn’t have the heightened speed of thought. Instead, they could only watch and be frustrated as they struggled to form even the most basic of thoughts. To an outside observer, those kids were just more impatient, more distracted, and slow to respond since they could easily forget what someone had said to them by the time they could respond. Those kids also would age much faster and live much shorter lives. Toby only did that to kids he really didn’t like.

Mostly, though, Toby did try to avoid using his powers. If people found out he was a Super, that would be the end of it. Kid Supers didn’t last very long. Some Super or another would come looking for him, either to recruit him or to take him out before he could become a threat to them. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to grow up to be a Super. There had to be other Supers who chose never to live that lifestyle, right? Supers who found ways to conceal their powers, to still be able to use them but not be seen. Toby was lucky, he figured, since most of his powers weren’t flashy or overly obvious. Still, he figured if someone were to really watch him closely they would figure it out.

There was another power he hadn’t used as much though, and it was a much harder one to hide. He could produce powerful sound waves with his voice that could crush steel. If he used his temporal powers in combination with his vocal sound waves, he could compound the sound waves and then disintegrate matter on a molecular level. The noise was deafening, obviously, and even his Super body ached after the few times he’d tested out the power. His ears somehow were able to shield themselves from the worst of it so he at least didn’t have to worry about that. The first time he’d used it, he had been only three or four years old and he barely remembered it. He’d somehow stumbled onto a wasp nest buried in the backyard and he remembered seeing the angry insects rising up out of the ground. No amount of time slowing would help him against them, so he let out a deafening wail. The wasps were swatted back by the sound waves and when they tried to remount their attack he cried out again, this time with more emphasis and their tiny bodies cracked under the stress. His mother found him shouting down the hole where their nest had been and she’d had to clamp her hands over her ears just to approach him.

The next time was the year before. He’d been playing on the school field when a guy in a van drove up, ran out, and tried to scoop up a couple kids Toby had been playing with. Toby ran at the man and, being as careful as he could to direct the worst of the shout away from his friends, shouted at the man to stop. Everyone on the field heard him shout, but they were mostly far enough away that the volume didn’t seem unnatural. His friends were partially deafened, but they recovered after a few days. The man, on the other hand, collapsed and began bleeding from his ears, nose, and eyes. Everyone assumed he had suffered some kind of stress induced combination of fatal health problems all at once. Bleeding in his brain, heart attack, and ruptured organs among the list of things he heard about later.

That event had shaken him. He’d only meant to stun or possibly knock the man over and give his friends a chance to run away. He didn’t mean to kill him. Try as he might, though, Toby was never able to feel too much guilt over it. He mostly just worried that people would figure out what he’d done and then reveal him as a Super.

The hardest thing to conceal though, was his strength. He was easily stronger than any other normal person he’d ever met, and he was getting stronger every day. It was like he was living in a world of paper buildings and people made of tissues. His lightest touch could break through most things if he wasn’t careful. He avoided most sports, and when he did join in, he had to slow time down to make sure he was only ever using the bare minimum of his strength with every touch or kick or swing or whatever it was he was doing. That made for very slow and very long games that he just didn’t enjoy. There was no real challenge besides that of not killing the other kids he was playing with.

“Toby, dinner!” his mom shouted from inside.

“Coming,” Toby called back.

Before going in though, he noticed out towards the horizon a small flash, marking where Whirlpool and Backspin were still battling. On a whim, Toby slowed down time and studied the horizon. He could just barely make out two figures high in the air, the one seeming to be chasing after the other. He spent what seemed to him like hours, studying the two figures until he was fairly certain that the one lower down was Backspin. Whirlpool had a certain flair to the way he moved and the lower figure didn’t have that. He didn’t know much about Backspin, besides the fact that he’d been recently on the lookout for a newer, larger city to control. Toby liked how things had been going with Whirlpool, though.

Taking careful aim, Toby threw another of his stones at Backspin. It wasn’t just people that Toby could speed up or slow down through time. Objects were also fair game. So as Toby released the stone, he altered time around it so that from everyone else’s perspective, especially Backspin’s, it would be traveling at near the speed of light. Backspin could manipulate rotating objects, but his reaction time was still only as good as any other Super’s, which wasn’t all that different from most normal people.

Time reverted to normal and the distant figure popped like a piñata. Toby turned and walked back inside the house.

“Wash your hands,” his mom said without checking to see if his hands were dirty.

Toby obeyed and washed them in the kitchen sink before sitting down at the table.

“Looks really good,” Toby’s dad said of the meal.

“Team effort,” his mom said with a smile.

They often made dinner together while watching the news. It gave them both something else to focus on whenever the news, or their discussions about the news, grew too heated. The television was still on, the last of the news report just wrapping up as they began eating.

“Breaking news!” the reporter announced and both Toby’s parents turned in their chairs to see what it was. “The battle between Whiplash and Backspin has come to an unexpectedly sudden conclusion as Backspin seems to have been struck by an unknown projectile and died.”

Footage of the event was playing on the screen. The moment Backspin was hit by Toby’s rock the image became pixilated, most certainly edited for broadcast purposes. Regardless, it was clear that Backspin more or less exploded from the impact.

“In a rare statement, Whiplash had this to say following the event.”

The screen cut to Whiplash looking sweaty and, surprisingly to Toby, scared.

“To whatever Super out there decided to end this fight tonight,” Whiplash said, “I respect and recognize you and your strength. I am happy to concede the city to you. I have loved my time in Cove City, I’m thankful you chose to spare me tonight, and I’ll respect your space and leave tonight.”

“NO!” Toby heard himself shouting, though fortunately only at normal volumes.

His parents both spun and stared at him. He hadn’t wanted to scare off Whiplash, he just wanted Backspin to lose. But he had no way of telling Whiplash that, and now Cove City would be left without a Super, meaning everyone who was looking for a nice city to take over would be coming this way.

“…will have to wait and see who this new Super is and how they’ll manage Cove City,” the reporter was wrapping up.

“Well, that’s one dead,” Toby’s dad said with contentment.

“Let’s just hope our new Super isn’t any worse,” his mother remarked and turned off the television.

After that, they ate dinner in relative silence. Toby didn’t even need to alter time to have all the time he needed to worry over the mess he’d just made of things.