I am getting really sick of pretending I’m not evil. Day in and day out I have to act like I’m not the new super villain that has been robbing banks, kidnapping families, and killing superheros. No, I Nadia Silva of the average size city of Nebel am a normal 19 year old freshman of Atlas University. But, that’s not true. I need to stop lying to myself about how I’m a victim of circumstance. The Masters and I both know that I wasn't the only one failing that class. They could have picked any schmuck out there to do their bidding, but they picked me. Or so I thought. But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you're going to understand my side of the story, you need to have the whole thing.
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The bus is an awful place and whomever thought it was a good mode of transportation is a giant ass. I mean it’s full of unhappy people who sit squished next to each other. The bus driver is either an angry man/woman who is fed up with the job, an overly cheery new person who has yet to discover the angry cesspool of sweat, sickness and tears of young adults who can’t afford a car or car insurance, and my favorite driver of all, the poor soul that has finally realised that their job is just an under glorified bulk taxi driver and is secretly looking for a new job but can’t find one and the reality of being a bus diver forever is setting in. Unfortunately for me though, this driver was still on the cheery first week phase of the job and wanted to talk about everything from rainbows to trash.
“Ya’know what I love about this city? It’s never boring here. There is always some kind of villain doing something wrong and just when you think all hope is lost and the villain is finally gonna win... BAM!” The driver whose name tag read Hubert yelled this so loud half the bus nearly jumped out of their and caused the once sleeping baby to wake up and start crying. Hubert either didn’t care or didn’t hear over the sound of her own blabbing and kept speaking.
“A Hero and their sidekick burst in and deal with the dirty scumbag and save the day!” She could barely hold in her excitement and raised both hands into the air with a large grin on her face as she turned and faced me. Now the entire bus was panicking, people started screaming obscenities and a few of the younger college kids called out for their mommies. The man holding the baby was trying to keep calm so the baby wouldn’t pick up on his and everyone's panic, but it was useless and the baby screamed louder. The father cringed while the other passengers covered their ears and he tried to calm the baby. He seemed very good at it as if he’d been doing this for awhile, I guess he was either a Mr. Mom or single father doing what he could because he couldn’t get a sitter that he could trust with his precious bundle of joy. Or he was a kidnapper and was trying not to draw attention to himself, one can never be to sure.
The driver was looking at me and acting like we were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. I sat there, right behind her, looking into her amber eyes in shock. She couldn’t have been any older than me. Maybe even younger. Her messy white hair (probably dyed) was a stark contrast to her her golden-brown skin. Her pale blue uniform was also wrinkled and worn like it had belonged to the previous person,which is gross by the way, and the makeup she wore was smudged as if she had tried to get it off but gave up in the middle of doing so.
The eyeliner that had once graced her face to give her cat eyes was now smudged and blended with her smokey eyeshadow to make her look like a crazed raccoon. The coverup and blush looked to have been washed away by tears, but her bubblegum pink lipstick was perfectly intact, which I thought was strange. In fact, I was suspicious of her even being a bus driver. No matter how crappy a bus company could be, there is no way they would let a new driver wear the uniform of someone else. Right?
“Hubert” looked like she had knocked out the previous driver and hijacked the bus. But that’s a weird thing to do, what would one accomplish from hijacking a bus mostly filled with soon to be college students? The possibilities filled my mind. Maybe it was something like that movie Speed, we need to keep a high speed or we all blow up. What is the point of that? No one seems to want to give college students jobs what makes anyone think that a city with a bad villain problem would pay any amount of money to save us, so that theory is off the table. They couldn’t possibly be taking us to some disclosed location to brainwash us into doing their dirty work, I don’t think it would work out so well for them. College students could probably be hypnotised or brainwashed as easily as the next person, but we do have a tendency to be smartasses and take things too seriously. Our orders might be something such as “Get rid of the hero” meaning to kill them, but we would just let them go, which is in fact getting rid of them. So, not brainwashing unless the person is desperate and extremely specific.
Not-Hubert seemed to know what I was thinking and frowned at me her nose scrunching up like an upset child.
“ I know you think I’m a villain, but you’re wrong. But I know you know that already because I can see the wheels turning in your head, because what would I have to gain out of this? Nothing really. I just wanted to see you in real life.”
Excuse me? What the actual fuck does that mean?
She turned back around and started driving again. I didn’t notice that the people on the bus had quieted down since I was lost in my thoughts, but the sudden absence of the crying baby was deafening. I tore my eyes from her and looked around the bus to see that everyone was acting as if nothing had happened and they weren’t just all screaming for their mommies. The man holding the baby was quietly muttering something with an adoring smile on his face like he had been before the driver stopped driving.
Okay. This is definitely weird. How can these people act like nothing happened when something definitely happened. I turned back to the driver and I was just about to ask what her real name was but I was stopped in my tracks. “Hubert” was gone and in her place was an older man who was much larger and filled out the old and worn blue uniform. He had very little black hair on top of his small square head.
Are you the real Hubert?
Maybe gas was leaking into the bus and I was hallucinating, but wouldn’t other people be hallucinating too?
Maybe those mushrooms in my omelette were funky...no Martha would never allow anything like that to happen in her restaurant. It was one of the few places that villains and heroes alike didn’t occupy. It was peaceful and rare in this city. That also meant drug and alcohol free. The only other safe place was the university.
I decided to just roll with it, if everyone else is fine then I am too. I’m not a lemming, I won’t just blindly follow others, but if doing the same as others means I won’t be strapped into a straight jacket, then be prepared to forget this face because I’m great at blending in.
I put on a bored facade and gazed out of the window. The city might have been beautiful if weren’t for the recent battle between Master What's-his-face and The Crazy Judo Chick. I never cared enough to get the real names and it’s really hard to tell who's the bad guy and who is the good guy. Half the time the villain is just robbing a bank then a hero pops up and makes things worse for everyone by throwing the villain around in a cocky show of strength, setting buildings and trees on fire because they missed their target, and idiots who can’t control their powers and ended up blowing up a hospital. Oh yes, it’s happened before. It’s not like it’s completely their fault, the villain helps destroy stuff, I mean they started it. I just think heroes could tone it down a bit with the showing off. Then people might actually think of this place as a good option and not “that one city that can’t control its citizens”.
The next building to come into my line of view was the main building of Atlas University. That was where all of the offices were held, so if you had a problem with anything that was the building to seek. Of course the dorms were all the way on the other side of campus so if there were an emergency you might get stuck waiting for someone to run the whole half-mile to the offices, get someone's attention and run all the way back with help in tow. It wasn’t a great system but since there was an unspoken rule that made it off limits to heroes and villains there never really was an emergency. But not all people get unspoken rules, there is always that one jerk-off who breaks unspoken rules and gets away with it because hey, it's not a real rule written down anywhere right? So what is stopping anyone from breaking it? All it takes is one fuck up and everyone at uni is screwed.
The bus slowed to a snails crawl as it came upon the bus stop. An old woman with a walker waddled past us and sat down on the bench hidden within the plastic cover of the stop. Ever so slowly the bus stopped just before the blue sign and I was finally able to stand up. I grabbed my small bag, I knew it was mine because of the color. It isn’t red or orange and it isn’t quite a mix of both.
If I had to be specific I would say it is the color of a burning sunrise. Yes, it is exactly the color of a fire and the color of the sunrise mixing in harmony. The bag didn’t hold much, which was fine since I didn’t have much. My parents nearly disowned me for coming to this city, but at least they paid for me to get here.
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“We are very uncomfortable with you going to this college sweety, but your father and I have decided that you should follow your dreams and we are willing to fund the trip and the first year.” My mother crackled through the screen. She lives in Nebraska in the middle of nowhere so her wifi sucks. Not that mines any better I’m currently staked out in a van across the street from a coffee shop that kicked me out because I refused to buy something to use the internet.
“Mom I promise I’ll be fine besides it will be closer to you and we can visit anytime right?” I remind her while holding the cardboard cutout of a library behind me. If she knew I was currently hiding out in a van I’d never be able to go to university in America.
“I know you’ll be closer to me, but I think you might be safer in Maine with your father and there are much better colleges there for you too.” Tears glistened in her blue eyes and her voice became heavy with emotion.
“I just don’t want a repeat of what happened with your brother. If the same thing happened to you I don't know what will happen.” By now Niagara falls was pouring from her face at the memory of my brother. I was surprised she even mentioned that I had a brother considering my family hates to acknowledge what happened to him.
“Mom… I’ll be fine. I promise.”
She let out a heavy sigh and nodded approving of my promise as she wiped tears from her face. “If anything happens I want you to come straight to me okay?” Her voice was strained and raspy.
Getting my father to agree was much easier.
“How can you expect me to pay for this? How can you willingly put your life in danger like this and expect me to be okay with it?!” He threw his hands in the air and tears formed in his grey eyes. He broke down sooner than I thought he would and he was getting louder. So loud the dogs next door started barking.
“Shut up you damn dog! I am having a conversation with my little girl here!” He walked toward me and rested his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye tears still streaming down his angular face.
“Yer 19 now which means your an adult now so I guess you can do whatever you want in a sense so I can’t stop you from doing what you want. What I can do though is pay for your first year and that is about it. I wish I could do more for you but that is all I can do for now.” Breaking his normally stoic personality he hugged me and cried a bit more.
“The minute something goes cock-up you go straight to your mother's alright? I want no hesitation to do that.” He mumbled pulling away and wiping tears from his face.
“Don’t worry dad, I’ll be perfectly safe. Promise.”
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I really need to stop making promises like that. I thought stepping off of the bus clutching my bag close to me. In a place like this there was no real safe place. Lost in my thoughts I didn’t realise someone was in front of me and rammed right into what felt like a wall. If it weren’t for my wonderful balance I would have fallen right on my ass on the first day of uni. The wall I had run into turned around to show a huge nerd. Huge nerd as in super tall dude with lean muscles wearing a pi shirt the numbers 3.14 in large print that kept going all the way around and up his shirt.
I started to apologize when someone bumped into me from behind pushing me into monster nerd. I whipped around to see familiar white hair and amber eyes. Not-Hubert!
“You should be more careful Nadia Silva. You might get hurt if you're not careful.” She whispered just before disappearing into the crowd that had formed behind me. What the crap? Did that really just happen? I turned back around to finish my apologies to the person in front of me.
“Was she a friend of yours?” He looked down to make eye contact with me. Holy crap I wasn't hallucinating?
"Um.. no I just met her, I don't really know her that well."
I was shocked that she was real and even more shocked that she knew my name. Then again this place is full of supers, so it really isn't that surprising. I sighed knowing my thoughts were right. I looked back up at holy crap is that who I think it is?! Recognition flashed through his dark eyes.
"Nadia? Is it really you?"
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