Jake – Strobe
Ironically, the villains were having their own get together at the same time the heroes were playing beer pong. They’d gathered at Kashif and Raphael’s comfortable downstairs duplex apartment across town in a district called Foothill Village. The front door was located in the backyard due to the layout of the house. It opened up immediately on a big square kitchen, floored with white linoleum and lined with brown wood paneled walls. The bedrooms sat on either side of the kitchen, with the bathroom only accessible through Kashif’s room. It was sometimes a pain for Raphael, but they made it work with a minimum of bickering.
The villains were in the big rectangular living room spread out over the two large couches that lined one of the walls. A basketball game was on the big screen TV, on mute for conversations’ sake.
“…rob a bank or something,” Josh was saying.
“Well, sure. I mean, what else is there to do now that we’re all demigods?” Kashif replied with a smile while keeping one eye on the game. The other friends laughed.
“That would make us villains, though, yeah?” Jake said. “Why not be heroes? Save the day, and all that stuff?”
“You want to be a super cop?” Leslie replied, voice dripping with disdain. “You must be kidding.”
“Yeah,” Amanda chimed in with a mean laugh, “let’s go save some cats stuck up in trees! Or maybe crash high school parties and hand out a bunch of underage drinking tickets!”
Everyone laughed. Jake muttered darkly under his breath that he still thought it was a cool idea.
“We could rob a bank though, you know,” Seth said in what was, he hoped, a moderately quiet voice. It was harder to manage these days. “Think about it: one perfect heist, a jet to the Bahamas, we live the vacation life from here on out. All it takes is a little planning, a little pre-heist P.R. work to get our names on the streets.”
“Speaking of names,” Raphael jumped in, “what are our code names going to be?”
“Why?” Seth said. “You already thought of one?”
“Maybe,” Raphael responded with a grin. “Check this out: Reign of Pain!”
The others smiled indulgently, while Kashif snorted and muttered loudly under his breath, “That sounds ridiculous.”
“So what’s your name gonna be then?” Raphael shot back to his older brother, a little stung.
Kashif shrugged. “I dunno. Seriously, who besides you has thought this over?”
Jake’s hand shot into the air, followed slowly by everyone else’s. Kashif rolled his eyes.
“We should go around the circle and announce our names, and by the time we get back to you, Kash, you gotta have something ready,” Seth said. “’K? Mine’s Sonic.”
Jake; “Strobe!”
Amanda; “Hourglass.”
Leslie; “Rockslide.”
“Skinwalker,” Josh announced to approving looks, making him puff his chest out proudly. Everyone then looked at Kashif.
“Good lord,” He said. “I dunno…Heavy Hitter I guess.” Raphael sniggered, but the others seemed to like it.
“Right on,” said Seth. “So, any ideas how we get our name out there? Stir up the boring little anthill that is Salt Lake City? Strike fear into the hearts of so on and so forth?”
“Well,” Amanda began, “remember how Josh was telling us about that couple that seemed to get superpowers at the same time he did in Sun Valley? I was thinking, they’re not part of our group, so maybe they’re gonna be the heroes in this little drama.”
Seth nodded. Josh scratched at the electric blue necklace tattoo that he couldn’t remove, a dark look in his usually carefree eyes.
“Yeah, that’s definitely something to think about if we really are going to rob a bank,” Leslie put in. “I mean, we can take on the cops, a S.W.A.T. team, pretty much any normal crap that gets thrown at us. But what if seven other people who’ve got powers like us show up to, as Jake so aptly put it, save the day? We need to be ready for every possible outcome if we’re going to consider trying to pull this off.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Seth agreed. “Maybe we should start training, see if there’s more to be learned about our powers by using them to the extreme.”
“Or we could just find one of these heroes and kill him. That’d make the others think twice,” Amanda nonchalantly volunteered. The others burst out laughing like she had just told a great joke.
“Seriously though,” Seth went on, miming wiping a tear from one eye. “let’s get together at a park some night this week that fits with everybody’s schedule and spar. Maybe talk about disguises.”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Josh said. “we’ll train and get costumes and get rich and whatever in the future. But for right now, this is supposed to be a party and I think we should play some drinking games. Maybe King’s Cup?”
“How ‘bout Electricity?” Kashif said with a wink, naming a currently popular card game that had been invented for the sole purpose of getting blackout drunk. Josh flipped him off.
Kashif, still laughing, went looking for some cards. While the others grabbed fresh drinks, Jake and Raphael escaped to his bedroom, where Jake pulled out a long, fat joint. Raphael grinned and put Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” album, on his stereo while Jake sparked the joint.