Powers Of Four - Pt. 1

Powers Of Four

A 16-part superhero story

By Devin McTaggart

Part One

Act One, Scene I – Autumn 2025

“You ready, Ben?” Teri’s chipper voice said to me over the phone. Anyone who looked at her would’ve only seen a twenty-something blonde model, and not someone capable of powering Manhattan for a few hours if she had to, but I knew better.

“It’s time,” I told her from my office high in a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles. “I’ve served my watch, and it’s time to let somebody else put on the tights and do the rough stuff for a bit.” I’d done pretty well for myself over the last couple of decades, and had a private corner office for a large trading firm, where nobody paid attention to my hours, as long as the money kept rolling in. And the view was spectacular.

“No doubt, it’s time,” she giggled. “You don’t get a choice about that. But you’re dodging the question of whether or not you’re actually ready to retire. When I was talking to Stonerider last year, he said wanted to be using his powers right up until the end.”

“Well, that’s Kenny for you,” I told her. “Guy never wanted to give up on anything, and hated being told he was wrong. Still does, even without his damn powers. Last I heard, he was still hanging around the Hangout, trying to coach the newbies through their first few years.”

“Part of that’s probably him trying to pick up new superhero trim,” she laughed from her office in Hong Kong. “I swear, he hit on anything with tits and a cape.”

“You going to be okay being SparkSlinger without me?” I asked her. “We had some pretty good team-ups.”

“Both on and off the field, but you know, the off the field ones don’t have to stop just because you’re going to be going civilian,” she purred. “I’d like it if I kept a friendly fuckbuddy in California, if just for the cheap sleeping space.”

“If you can stomach sharing a bed with a civvy, I won’t kick you out of mine,” I told her with a laugh.

“Any idea how soon it’s coming?”

“C’mon Teri, you know as much as I do. It’s autumn. Sometime in autumn. That means sometime between September 22nd and December 21st. I don’t know anything more specific than you do. Hell, it could’ve happened a week ago.”

“Did it?”

“I would’ve told you if it had.”

“Did you talk to anybody before you about what it’s like?”

“’Course I did,” I sighed, sitting back down in my incredibly expensive leather chair. “You know we all do. It’s a conversation I think each of us has at least half a dozen times with some of the people before us, the ones who’ll still talk about it, anyway.”

I could hear her drinking on the other end of the line, and I would’ve bet anything I was a very expensive scotch. “Yeah, most retirees want to completely disappear from the scene, and I get that. I might do that myself. It might be too hard being around people who’re still special when that bit of you is gone.”

“You’ll still be special, even when you aren’t SparkSlinger anymore, Teri.”

“You say that now, but you haven’t lost anything yet. We’ll see what happens when you do. You may sing a different song then.”  

            The hardest thing about being a superhero was the letting go part. Not knowing when to let go – we had that covered from the moment we donned a costume and put on a mantle – but learning how to let it all go, to feel comfortable with putting down the cap and the cowl, accepting that your watch had come to an end and it was time to get back to the day-to-day living you’d put on hold when The Calling had hit you.

            Sixteen years, give or take a few months. That’s what you get. That’s what we all get.

            You’ve probably heard of me, the superhero me, anyway.

            I’m transcribing this all to be found and read after my death, but my real name is Ben Balthazar. You probably know me better as The Gap.

            I’d graduated college in the spring of 2009 with a degree in international finance, and had decided to take a year off between college and going to work, just to see the world. I’d spent the summer in Africa, travelling and seeing the sights. I had moved to Europe for the autumn, and was spending a couple of weeks in London when The Calling came for me on October 15th, 2009, early during the season.

            Because I have the power to create small teleportation portals, when I use my power it sort of looks like there are parts of me missing, and because I was down in the London Underground, the British press nicknamed me The Gap. (I also sort of indirectly became the target of a lawsuit about whether or not a superhero and a store could share the same name. I hadn’t chosen the name, but I also didn’t like the idea of some corporate overlord telling me I couldn’t use it for something entirely different than what they were using it for.)

            This probably isn’t news to you, because superhero fandom is at an all-time high, but as it turns out, as obvious as it is to those of us in The Capes Brigade, there was and is a natural rhythm to how new heroes come, and old heroes go.

            For example, we know that there’s only ever 64 heroes on the scene at any one point. Sure, it can look like 65 now and again, but that’s mostly just marketing and international timing confusions.

            64.

Exactly.

            It’s been like this for almost 250 years now. While the history is a little spotty, the first superhero on record was in 1770. A Dutch settler named Hans Van Vissier arrived in New York City in January of that year, and a few months later, the first superhero of record, The Phantom Pikeman appeared as well. (You can guess what The Phantom Pikeman’s real name was, can’t you? Good.) After that, they grew at the consistent rate of one a season. For a while.

            Then, in 1786, the Phantom Pikeman disappeared, never to return. But Hans Van Vissier lived until 1832. He was just never the Phantom Pikeman again.

            “You still out working emergencies?” Teri asked.

            “Of course I am,” I told her. “Just because I could stop being The Gap doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do my job while I still am. And besides, the one thing everybody’s said about getting depowered is that it doesn’t happen suddenly – you have half an hour or whatever to adjust, feel it draining away from you. So if you feel it start to slip, you can dip out.”

            “I have to admit, that’s admirable,” she said. “During my farewell season, I think I may be too scared to go out and do the work.”

            “And that’s okay too, Teri,” I told her. “I mean, you can fly and I can’t, so I can imagine the fear of that starting to give out on you being more of a headfuck than you want to tangle with.”

            “It’s not really flying, so much as it is spark propulsion, but yeah, I get it, being groundlocked certainly doesn’t bring with it as much risk.”

            “Oh, I don’t know… could you imagine my powers suddenly went away and I was mid-gap? Best case scenario, I get a rough haircut. Worst case, I’d get sliced in half, which wouldn’t be fun for anyone.”

            “You’re right, I’m suddenly very glad that there’s a ‘powering down’ phase instead of just a hard drop right into the civilian life.”

            Being a superhero had been a strange life, but I wouldn’t have given it up for the world. But here’s the thing, I’m coming up on forty, and like Indy says, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage, and I’ve put more than my fair share of miles on these years. Thank God supervillains are just a work of fiction, and that we’re just dealing with disasters, mistakes and common, everyday criminals, because let me tell you, we’ve already got more than enough work on our plate most weeks without there being people dead set on world domination.

            My power set’s particularly good with rescues, so I often find myself helping firefighters and first responders, because I can make my gaps big enough to fit people through them, and hold them open for about four minutes if I’m really concentrating.

I’d wished I’d been around on 9/11, because I could’ve gotten many of the people out of the Twin Towers before they collapsed, but alas, that was half a generation of superheroes before my time, and there weren’t any teleporters in the pool then. So the heroes of the day did what they could, although we still ended up losing both of the towers anyway, even though Inertia was able to stop the second plane from crashing into the second tower. There was simply too much damage to the foundation, and while we lost six hundred people that day, it’s commonly understood that if heroes hadn’t been around, it would’ve been much worse.

There are, given or take, a little more than a thousand powers available to superheroes, if the historians are to be believed. I’ve seen The Big List before, and am amazed at how granular they get, because the differences between some of them seems incredibly minute.

Let me give you an example.

There’s apparently over twenty variations on what a telepath is – the sub-categories get into how people can or can’t interact with other people’s thoughts. Some telepaths can’t read, but they ‘push’ ideas into other people’s minds. Some can’t affect other people’s minds at all, but can affect ‘moods,’ although to my way of thinking, that should be considered more of an empath than a telepath, but hey, I’m just an armchair amateur at studying powers.

I was out in Nevada in early October helping clear out a trapped mining crew when I stopped to give an interview. I didn’t do a lot of them, but I figured it was going to be my last chance, so why not, right? It would be something I could look back at later in life and remind myself of all the good I’d done when I’d been a hero.

“Hey there, folks,” I said, stepping out of a gap next to them with the last of the miners. “I think that’s the last of everyone, right, Bill?”

Bill, the mine’s foreman, who’d I’d brought out in the last batch, shot me a grateful nod, his skin covered in dust. “Thanks, Gap, as far as I can tell that’s everybody. We certainly appreciate you coming to get us in your twilight season.”

“Gap, Gus Cattle, CNN News. How are you feeling about being in your twilight season?”

The Twilight Season – that was what the general public called a hero’s last season on duty. Over the years, the general populace had learned a lot about superheroes, and they’d learned about our sixteen-year lifecycle, simply by putting together a basic history of heroes. So it was common knowledge that sixteen years after a hero appeared, they would disappear again. They even knew our powers would disappear, thanks to Out Of The Shadows, that goddamn tell-all book that The Presence had written after he retired. Thankfully, he didn’t give away people’s real names, but it was still far more information that had been put in the hands of the public that we didn’t care for.

The Presence’s real name was Clay Cash. He lived in Los Angeles these days, and was the host of a late-night talk show called Midnight’s Presence, but he was holding on by a thread these days. He tried to get as many heroes and ex-heroes on his show as he could, but most of us viewed his book as a cash grab by a guy who’d never been that great of a superhero to begin with, who was trying to coast on what little glory he’d been able to retain after retirement. His people had reached out to me several times and I’d always said no. His Twilight Season had been spring of 2011, so we hadn’t been on the scene for very much of the same time, but what little I’d heard about him from the others was that he was something of an arrogant prick who thought his shit smelled sweeter than most.
            “Trying not to think about it too much,” I told the reporter and his camera crew. It hadn’t been too much of a surprise that the camera crew would be here, and I didn’t mind talking about it, as long as nobody got too personal or revealing about it. “We all have a limited time on the world stage, and I think I’ve done pretty well with my sixteen years. I’ve saved tens of thousands of lives, averted nearly a hundred crises and even got an alleyway named after me in my hometown of Los Angeles. I think I’ve gotten everything I’m due. It’s been a good life. But it’s getting close to lay down my mantle and let someone new take up theirs.”

“Are you going to go public after you’re done, like The Presence did?”

“Y’know, I know a lot of people enjoy watching Mr. Cash on television, but I’ve always preferred Stephen Colbert myself,” I told him. “And I’ve worked very hard to keep my life as The Gap separate from my day-to-day life as someone ordinary and unremarkable. So, no, I don’t think I will. But that’s okay. There are plenty of other heroes out there, and I’m sure some of them will be happy to tell Mr. Cash their stories.”

Part of the problem with Out of the Shadows was that while he’d changed everyone’s names, both real and hero, the power sets were generally described well enough to be identifying characteristics for many specific heroes, and a lot of the stories were rather unflattering of us heroes, talking about the stress many of us were under and how a lot of us tended to express that stress, be it by drinking, sleeping around or occasionally taking it out on common criminals, and that put a black mark on the careers of a bunch of people who didn’t deserve it.

“Have you talked to any other heroes who have sunsetted?”

They preferred to call it ‘sunsetting’ rather than ‘retiring.’ Makes it sound less deadly and less permanent. Oh, sometimes heroes were killed in action, but they referred to those people as ‘fallen heroes,’ and they never died – they just ‘fell.’

“It’s not that big a community, Gus. We tend to meet up here and there and talk about things when we’re powered up, and not all of those relationships wither and die when we sunset, so sure, I’m still in touch with a handful of heroes from yesteryear, and I imagine I’ll keep in touch with a handful of the newer ones once I’m gone.”

“Thanks for stopping for what I’m guessing might be your final interview, Gap. I’m sure all the miners you saved today are very grateful you hadn’t sunsetted yet.”

“That’s what we’re here for, Gus.” I waved my hand to my right and opened a portal and stepped through it into an abandoned deep sea drilling station that I use as a halfway point to anywhere, and let it close behind me. Early on, I’d learned that people could see through my portals, and the last thing I wanted was someone seeing the inside of my office or something because I didn’t hit a waypoint along the way. After closing the portal behind me, I stripped off my costume, changed into my regular clothes, tucked my costume in its storage box, opened another portal back into my office in Los Angeles and stepped into my office, closing the portal behind me.

My secretary, Jasmine, stepped into my office with a smile. “Looks like everything went okay, boss?” Of course she knew my secret. She’d been one of the first people I’d saved very early in my career, her and her husband, who had gotten trapped when a tunnel collapsed around them. Since then, she’d been my executive assistant, and kept my secret, although her husband knew as well.

Secret identities tended to be one of those things you didn’t have to worry about as much as superheroes in comics, because we didn’t have supervillains to worry about. We still mostly kept our identities quiet, but it wasn’t the kind of thing where we worked very hard at it.

“Yep, nothing to worry about,” I told her. “Got everyone out without any troubles.”

“Feeling the drain yet?”

“Not yet, but hey, there’s two whole months it could happen, so nice to just enjoy things while I can, you know?” I used a quick portal to make my hand reach across the room to grab a bottle of scotch that I keep on the shelf, pulling it through and back to me from my space behind my desk. “Sooner or later, it’ll be gone and that’ll be that.”

“Can I ask you a question, Ben?”

“Sure thing.”

“What happened back when KickFlipper died?”

I slowly moved to sit down in my chair, more of slumped really, as I shook my head. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. Well, uh, I expect there’s something more specific you’re asking me about other than how he died, which was pretty well covered in the news.”

“Yeah, I mean, stray bullet and nobody around with a skillset to stop it, or to heal him,” she said, sitting down on one of my couches. “That much has been covered. But I mean, what happened in terms of keeping the number the same? Who was the most recent hero back then?”

“SparkSlinger,” I told her. “She’d been a hero for less than a month in the spring of 2023 when KickFlipper died. She said a new replacement for him sprung up immediately, which was Pexx, and she had to go give him the speech and the thing right away, and Pexx apparently had to find Skitterz, or rather, the person who became Skitterz, the speedster. I think Pexx was supposed to be the summer of ’23, but with the death of KickFlipper, there was a void to be filled and the process sped up.”

“What’s ‘the thing’?”

I clicked my tongue with a little smile. “Now that I can’t tell you, as it’s a secret part of the superhero society.”

“C’mon, boss, surely you can tell me.”

“I can’t, and don’t call me Shirley.” I said with a laugh. “Sorry, Jas, there are a few things that are very much off limits talking about, and this is one of them, as is the location of The Hangout.”

“I don’t think you know the location of The Hangout.”

I nodded. “You’re right – I don’t. But I do know how to get there, and I have lifetime access to it, and I can’t tell you how, nor can I take you there.”

“Perks of the job, I guess.”

“Yep.”

“Well, let me know when you feel yourself sunsetting, so I can turn off all the alerts that hit you on your phone.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

And, y’know, that’s about where I expected my story was going to end. It felt like a good time to lay things down. I’d done a big hero rescue scene, and I knew the sunsetting was coming, and I’d accepted it. I’d had a good run, and it felt like it was appropriate closing note.

But, see, here’s the thing about being a hero – it’s a life full of constant surprises.

October rolled into November and I still had my powers, and I wasn’t even feeling a weakening. I hadn’t officially retired yet, but I felt like if I went out and did any heroics, I’d be taking a risk, and the last thing I wanted to do was drag someone down with me because I’d tried to keep going past my shelf life. So, I only poked into things I could solve quickly, and I never stuck around to do interviews or talk to people, because I knew I was living on borrowed time, and that pretty quickly, my powers were just going to give out.

And then December rolled around, and I was still here, still powered, still able to do all the things I’d always been able to do. What was even stranger? I didn’t feel like I was getting weaker; I felt like I was getting stronger.

Making portals had always taken a little bit out of me. The further away it was, the more of my internal energy it felt like it took. The longer I kept it open, the more energy it took. But now? I’d gapped from Los Angeles to Tokyo on a lark in mid-December, and I didn’t feel so much as a little bit winded. I took in a couple of concerts with my friend Niwashi, better known to western audiences as The Gardener, and told him how strange it was that I was in December and still feeling powered up. He told me to enjoy the ride for as long as I could, and reminded me that I had a very hard end date, if nothing else – December 21st.

The official end of autumn.

If I’m totally honest, Niwashi and I went out drinking, and we got pretty hammered. When I woke up, I think I expected I was going to need to use the Hangout network to get home, because I could always use a Hangout entrance to get to the Hangout, and then use the Hangout itself to get to an exit back in Los Angeles. I hadn’t thought to bring my passport with me, because, hey, why would I? As of late, I was feeling almost invincible, like I was surging, stronger than ever before.

But sure enough, once I sobered up, I was still as strong as I ever was, and my powers hadn’t sunsetted in the night. That said, I was still a bit too hungover to feel comfortable doing transatlantic teleportation, so I decided to use a Hangout entrance.

This video isn’t meant to be seen by anyone until after my death, so I can let you in on how the Hangout works, because I’m pretty sure they’ll have changed it by then. Someone once asked me if there was any easy way to spot superheroes when they were in civilian attire, and I lied and said there wasn’t. But I can tell you this – not everyone who wears an Omega watch is a superhero, but every superhero wears an Omega watch. That’s because they aren’t really Omega watches, but Hangout entrance bands. The ‘watch’ kept time, sure, but it also would guide you to the nearest concealed entrance to the Hangout.

I don’t know where the actual Hangout is located, not specifically, but it’s somewhere deep under one of the oceans. My personal guess is probably somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, but to be honest, it could be under any one of the major oceans on the planet. It’s never been found by a non-superhero, and I doubt it ever will be. Every generation of superheroes has at least one tinkerer, and those people spend all their free time working on Hangout, making it better, stronger, more useful, and harder to find.

The teleporter doors were constructed in the mid-1980s by CompuTastic, one of the smartest heroes ever to live. He, with the help of the other heroes of the day, hid about five thousand doors across the planet, so as long as you’re near a major city, you’re never too far away from Hangout entrance.

I stepped through the concealed door in some Tokyo back alleyway, and into the Hangout, smirking as the lights slowly warmed up to greet my presence. That meant it had been at least a little bit since anyone had entered the Hangout – the lights in the place were all motion activated, so if no one was around, it was kept nice and dark. I wasn’t even in my costume, just plain clothes, jeans and a t-shirt.

Honestly, I had to admit how happy I was that even when I lost my powers, I wasn’t going to lose access to the Hangout. It was like the greatest private clubhouse I’d ever been in. The place was five stories tall, with a movie theater, a swimming pool, meeting rooms, resting rooms, workshops, a library that beat any other on the planet, and the coolest feature of all – the Hall of Heroes.

I headed through the building, watching the lights flick on at my arrival and dim behind me as I passed through the empty hallways and worked my way down to the Hall of Heroes, a shrine to every superhero the society has ever known about. Oh, not all of them were represented in great detail – there were plenty who weren’t more than just a handful of short notes, because they didn’t want a lot about them, but even those people still had plenty of newspaper headlines or news reports about their exploits. The Grave Baron, Ballistico, Lady Airheart… so many heroes on display that have all but been forgotten by the majority of the public at least. That was the hardest part about what we do – knowing that all of it disappears as quickly as it appears.

When I was feeling pensive, I would spend a lot of time down here, flipping through the heroes of history. There were lots of relics and costumes in the archives of the Hall of Heroes, and all of it was just sitting there, waiting for someone to read and digest. For years, I’d been considering trying to make an actual historical saga for the public about the progress of superheroes over the last couple of centuries, or at the very least, making parts of The Phantom Pikeman’s journals public, as he’d said in his will could happen after he’d been dead for a hundred years.

We as the superhero society had so many stories that the general population never knew about, and so many daring escapades we’d had without most of the world even being aware of what we were up to. Hell, we were the only people who knew that there were aliens from other worlds and galaxies living among the general population. (They also contributed to the confusion on why people sometimes thought there were more than sixty-four heroes, because an alien had helped out but not covered it up quite well enough.) We had loads and loads of knowledge the world just wasn’t ready for yet. But the ancient history of superheroes? Maybe it was time that story finally got told.

It would be a nice way to counteract that stupid Out of the Shadows book at the very least, but I’d certainly want to talk it over with some of the newer heroes first, as well as some of the previously sunset heroes who still didn’t mind swinging by the Hangout every now again.

“Oh, thank god, you’re here!” a feminine voice said from behind me. “Have you completely neglected to check your messages for the last month?”

I turned around to see Banshee Belle, one of the most recent superheroes to join the society. She’d gotten her powers in summer of 2024, which meant she had only about 5 of her 64 seasons down, and was still getting a handle on being a superhero. That said, she was ridiculously fit, an Olympic hopeful in diving who’d suffered a debilitating accident in winter of 2023 that would keep her from ever competitively diving again. She was blonde, she was gorgeous, and she absolutely knew it, which was why she’d taken tragedy and was turning it into a career modelling and acting, which she was pretty good at, despite her age of only 23. Most of us called her BB, although a few of the more vulgar and less liked male superheroes called her DD because of her cup size. We’d only met a handful of times, but she’d always seemed nice and friendly enough.

“I’ve been getting ready for the sunsetting, BB,” I told her. “It could hit me at any moment, and I don’t want to be doing anything crazy or strenuous where suddenly losing my powers could get me into any trouble.”

“Everyone says it’s like a cooldown, not a sudden snap off, Gap,” she giggled as she moved across the room towards me. She had the cowl of her costume down, and it almost seemed like the top of her outfit was a little lower than it normally was, like she wanted me to see plenty of her cleavage on display. “But you’ve still got your powers, yeah?”

I made a portal and reached across the room to put a book back on the shelf where I’d taken it from earlier in the night before pulling my hand back, giving her a little shrug and a smile. “Looks like it.”

“Oh thank God, I’m not too late!” The voice seemed to float in the air in my head, but BB didn’t seem to react to it.

“That’s good,” she said to me, stepping in close, as I felt my pulse quicken a little as I could smell the scent of her, cinnamon and honey. “You know, you probably don’t remember, but you saved me when I was younger.”

“Really? I’d have thought I’d have remembered that,” I said to her, even as I felt her hand reaching up to brush along my chest.

“I never really got a chance to say thank you for doing that,” she purred, leaning in press her body against mine.

“You don’t have—”

“Oh, I know, but I want to, Gap,” she said, moving to nibble on my ear. “Heroes go through life so much without people saying thank you. Let me thank you.” Her hand was rubbing against my crotch, and while I like to consider myself a man of principles, it’s very hard to resist a gorgeous woman literally throwing herself at you.

She slid her costume off her shoulders and pushed it down, letting those absolutely gargantuan breasts pop free before she pushed it all the way off, stepping out of it only to drop down to her knees, and she had my cock out before I could get another word off my lips.

Now, you have to understand, the idea of superhero ‘groupies’ is something all of us have been dealing with for quite some time, but it was very rare to have a groupie who was also a superhero. And BB’s power was to use her vocal chords to generate a wave of sound so strong it could incapacitate people, among other things, which meant her sucking me off was a little like having my dick in a loaded gun, but it was clear she didn’t want me thinking about that. She didn’t want me thinking about anything other than the pleasure she was giving me.

 But I must’ve been getting too into it, because she popped her mouth off me and grinned up at me. “Don’t you want more than just me blowing you? ‘Cause you can have it.” She stood up and turned to bend herself over the worktable I’d placed a bunch of books on and dropped her tits on top of them as she looked back over her shoulder at me. “C’mon, you wanna live forever? Let’s celebrate being alive.”

It wasn’t my finest hour, but I think reason and clear-headedness had taken a short jump off a long pier, so I moved in behind that gorgeous heroine, lined my cock up and shoved it deep inside of her trembling pussy as she let out an ecstatic moan, thrusting her ass back into me, bucking her lithe young body into mine. I’d like to say I was steering the ship, but mostly I felt like I was on the back of a bucking bronco, and I was doing my best just not to be thrown off.

I’d never had sex in the Hangout before, and certainly not in the Hall of Heroes, but it was a quiet enough area that I didn’t think anyone would find us, but it was a bit like having sex behind the school gymnasium or whatever, some place reasonably public, where the chance of getting caught wasn’t zero.

When she threw her hair back and it splayed in waves of wheat all over my vision, I felt like maybe this was my last great hurrah, a final send-off like a Viking funeral, and there was something wild and glorious about that.

“Oh shit, he’s really fucking good at this! I think I’m actually going to cum! I wasn’t expecting that! Oh fuck! Oh fuck!”

            And suddenly the voice in my head started matching the one coming out of BB’s mouth, as she started hissing, “Oh fuck! I’m cumming! Fuck fuck fuck!”

            That was all it took to push me over the plateau, as I felt my balls tighten up before I unloaded inside of her as she let out a deeply filthy and appreciative moan of delight, grinding her trembling hips back at me, keeping my cock as buried inside of her as she could get it.

            Eventually, the feverish high passed and she leaned forward, letting my softening shaft slip out from her, as she giggled. “Been backed up for a bit there, Ben?”

            I laughed in return. “Being a superhero doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for a social life,” I told her with a grin, as she reached into the pocket of her costume to pull out some wet wipes, cleaning both of us up. “Thanks. I see you figured out how to get pockets into your costume early on. It takes most people a couple of years before they integrate a pouch or a hidden cache.”

            “Oh, I realized nearly as soon as I became a hero that I needed a place to hide things,” she said as she started to pull her costume back on.

            “Now for the tricky part – getting out of here without him becoming attached. That’s always the hardest thing. Heroes and heroines clinging on to their last bit of glory. GravLad was practically crying when I left him. But at least the Champagne Star took it like a woman.”

            Now that was interesting. GravLad was the hero who’d retired this past summer, and had been replaced with DreamStream, a wind power-based heroine who had taken to heroism like a leaf to the wind. And Champagne Star was the heroine who’d retired before GravLad. Was she making it a point to sleep with every superhero just before they were sunsetted? It was a little weird, but I’d certainly heard of stranger things.

            “Look,” I said to her, “this was nice, but I’m not going to be a superhero much longer, so if you just wanted to give me a final reward, I get that, and I won’t come sniffing around for another taste of the apple, no worries.”

            That seemed to catch her completely off-guard but a few seconds later, she smiled and relaxed. “Thanks Ben, I knew you’d understand.”

            “Whew! Got off lucky! Now to start working on the StopWatcher, and hope he lasts longer than his name implies.”

            Yep, the StopWatcher was the hero name for Jerry Keane, the next hero scheduled to retired after me. Guess she really did have a fetish, I thought to myself as she started walking out of the room.

            But then it hit me.

            I’d read her mind.

            You have to understand, my power of creating teleportation portals? It’s awesome. But it’s my one power. That’s all anyone gets is one power. But now it was starting to look like maybe I had a second? What the hell was going on?

            I cleaned up the space and resolved to think about it over the next few days while I waited for my powers to start fading, thinking maybe it was some end-of-life taster, where a person about to sunset got to try a few other power sets on, just for fun, before they all went away. I hadn’t read anyone saying anything like that in the Hall of Heroes records, but there were centuries worth of entries to read and I’d barely skimmed the surface.

            So I headed back to my office and saw that Jasmine hadn’t gone home for the day yet. As I poked my head out of the office, I said to her, “It’s okay to head home, Jas. I’m probably just going to head out myself.”

            “Okay, boss, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

            “Jesus, he smells like sex and sweat. Good on him, if he’s enjoying hero benefits during his last few days. I just hope whoever she was that she was fun, and she made him feel special. I know he’s nervous about this whole sunsetting thing, but the most important parts of Ben have never been the superpowers.”

            Huh. It worked on Jasmine too, I realized.

            But things really started getting strange a few weeks later.

            When December 22nd rolled around.

            And I still had both powers…