Jeff Edmonds was grateful for the undersized school chair at his desk in the sadly un-air-conditioned Croston Community Hall. After three weeks battling the Kingfisher Road fires, he was glad of any chance to get off his feet. His afternoon was shaping up to be a lot of paperwork around volunteer shifts and chopper fuel receipts, but that was fine by him. He wasn’t in a hurry to go back out there. Give him an afternoon of tedium and a night of restless sleep and he’d be right as rain.
Ha. Rain.
There was a commotion outside. A team returning, he guessed, until the door swung open to reveal Kerry Angel, the Kiwi lass who’d come over a week ago, leading an odd-looking fellow. He was nineteen or twenty at the most, film star handsome, dressed from head to toe in what looked like spandex, brightly coloured and form fitting and, Jeff had to admit, remarkably flattering. The boy had some muscle on him. Kerry apologised for the interruption, but Jeff was not one to turn down some entertainment. “Who’s your friend, Kerry? Is the circus in town?”
The boy spoke. “Call me Bronze Adonis, sir. I’m here to deal with the fire.”
Jeff hadn’t realised he still had enough left in the tank for a real belly laugh, but he surprised himself. The laugh turned at length into a coughing fit, and when he’d finished doubling over he was about to tell Kerry to take the young idiot away when he found himself abruptly wondering why the hand in front of his face was casting a shadow in the gloomy hall.
The boy was shining. His skin was searchlight-bright, and his eyes were blazing green, and he was standing on thin air a metre off the floor. It was hard to tell in the glare, but he looked… sheepish.
“As I said, sir. I’m here to help.”
…
Jeff had heard rumours of strange goings-on down in Melbourne, with celebrity twenty-somethings doing magic tricks on the Instatwits and Facetubes, but it wasn’t until Bronze Adonis had done his thing with the Kingfisher Road fire that he paid the rumours any mind at all. The boy let him in on the secret: his real name was Kevin Zwierski, and he was what they were calling an Extra. His particular superpower revolved around energy: moving it, channelling it, absorbing it. He flew by some sort of magnetism, and the thing he did to the fire turned the entire fire front to cold ash and made it snow over the formerly doomed township of Croston. The media descended upon the town like magpies on a Canberra cyclist, but by then Zwierski was gone, up to Whalley in south Queensland to perform more miracles.
Jeff Edmonds was suddenly and gloriously out of a job, at least for the moment. On leave, officially, but having half a minute to scratch your arse felt like long-term unemployment compared to recent months. He didn’t quite know what to do with himself, but he suspected it might involve some cold beer and a bit of a lie down.
…
Nobody was sure, Jeff learned, quite how many Extras there were. The best-known ones had their own channels with some serious monetisation potential: Bronze Adonis, Anny Cray-Cray, Snowgirl, the Doctor, the Bucket, the Leopard, Max Anarchy, Mr Bubbles. Their powers were all over the shop, from Kevin’s tricks with energy to the Bucket’s bottomless portable holes. But behind the flashy first-rank Extras, there trailed a long tail of the barely super: Chronic Clare who could give people temporary arthritis, the Wombat with his unusually tough and hairy hide, the sixteen-year-old Captain WonderSuper who could bounce along like a moon astronaut, floating ten metres up and drifting down like a feather. They were nothing special, but they had their channels and their followers and their dreams.
Bronze Adonis, meanwhile, spent two astonishing weeks travelling from fire to fire around eastern Australia, slurping up the energy of the flames, leaving a dusting of snow, and pausing only briefly for selfies and autographs before moving on to the next. After Kingfisher Road and Whalley, he continued up the Queensland coast as far as Princess Adelaide Bay, then zigzagged back down to the disastrous New South Wales hinterland and the megafire west of Chepstow. By this stage he had attracted quite the entourage of Australian and international media, groupies and hangers on. Even on television Jeff could see he was growing less comfortable, not more, with the situation he found himself in, but despite that insight he was surprised one Tuesday evening when he stepped out of the shower to find the legendary Bronze Adonis in his living room, sitting on his couch and shaking.
He was wearing the same bright spandex costume he always wore, though up close Jeff could see it was sooty and a little tattered around the seams, and smelled powerfully of charred landscape. It was the smell Jeff noticed first, even before he saw the young man sitting there, but he had thought it one of those nasal hallucinations, like a sudden memory of an old boyfriend’s sweat from the sight of a forgotten piece of gym equipment.
Jeff sat down gingerly beside the boy, wrapping his dressing gown firmly around himself. Some kind of comforting seemed to be in order, so he put his arms around the boy’s shoulders in what he hoped was a manly and not too threatening way. Attractive he was, sure, but also a third of Jeff’s age and really, really not on the radar, in so many ways. Kevin leant into Jeff and began to weep – or rather, to weep audibly, since it looked like the silent version of weeping had been going on for a while. At length he calmed down. Jeff rummaged in the dressing gown’s pocket and handed him a handkerchief, scrunched like it had been through the wash like that, so at least it would be clean. “Thank you,” Kevin said.
“Now what’s all this about?” Jeff had been expecting a quiet evening of baked beans and Norwegian detectives, so this was all still a bit off-kilter. Kevin took a deep breath.
…
Kevin Zwierski had been Bronze Adonis for six months, ever since an event that he wasn’t allowed to talk about, but which Jeff gathered was slightly embarrassing. Fell into a vat of radioactive chemicals while blackout drunk, perhaps? No idea, and the boy wasn’t forthcoming. He had done what most Extras did: videoed himself doing miraculous things, stuck the videos on the interwebs, and watched the advertising dollars trickle in. He was no Max Anarchy or Snowgirl, but he had a sizeable following and there were sponsors knocking on his DMs.
That all changed with a comment from one @randommychemfan420, real identity unknown, with a question that shook Kevin’s world view. It was simple, somewhat impolite and very badly spelled, but it boiled down to: what are you doing with your life? Like a proton in an atom bomb, it hit Kevin’s brain at the perfect angle. Before that afternoon was over he was walking into the Croston Community Hall and the rest was history.
…
“OK,” said Jeff. “With great power comes great responsibility, and all that movie guff. You’ve done good things this past fortnight. I think your anonymous commenter would be pleased. So why am I seeing you looking like a wallaby in the headlights on TV every night?”
The boy blushed. Saints have mercy, the boy blushed! “Are you watching me every night?”
Jeff got up and busied himself tidying the coffee table. “You’re all over the news, Mr Bronze bloody Adonis. There’s no one this side of the planet Mars who isn’t watching you very closely. And I think that’s what’s bothering you, am I right? Are you finding the attention a little unnerving?”
The boy surprised him. “No, that’s not it. I kind of like the attention. I’m up forty thousand followers on my channel just this week, and I’ve got promising offers from Coca-Cola Amatil and Blue Scope Steel. It’s just that I know a lot of other Extras could be helping too, and none of them are. It’s like they’re waiting for me to fail so they can say I Told You So and guarantee that nobody ever tries to do this again.” He trailed off.
“To do what? Help fight fires? Save lives and property?”
“To be a superhero! A proper one. Not some internet celebrity with corporate logos and a PR flack planning every waking hour. A real hero! Yes, saving lives and homes, but more than that. Saving the world! Making a difference! That’s what I want to do… but it feels like I’m just going to blow it somehow and then nobody will ever try again.”
“I… see.” Jeff sat down on the armchair opposite. This was… odd. Not quite baked beans and Nordic Noir, that’s for sure. Never mind. Kevin might be the first real live super human he’d ever met, but he wasn’t the first idealist who wanted to change the world. Fighting fires attracted people like that, men and women, though always with a practical streak. Pie-in-the-sky idealists didn’t last long, or perhaps their idealism didn’t: not when so much of what they did was subject to budgetary considerations and rich old men’s private agendas. But changing the world? That was always the goal. Change it to a less combustible world, preferably, one once-in-a-century cataclysm at a time.
One at a time. That was the key.
“All right then. So what are you doing? How are you going about your process of saving the world, right now?”
Kevin thought hard. “I’m watching a couple of sites to figure out which fire is the most urgent along my path, then I go in and introduce myself to whoever’s running operations near the main fire front, like I did with you. They tell me which bits they’re worried about, and I go and shift the entropic gradient so that combustion can’t occur. That makes the heat convert up through the spectrum to magnetic force, which dissipates quickly. It usually leaves the place pretty cold if I overdo it. The first time, at your fire, I think I probably snap froze a bunch of trees and animals, so I’ve tried to be a lot more careful since. But the public seems to expect a bit of snow, so I sometimes just follow up by dropping the temperature of the air above me and letting some snowflakes form. Have to keep the public happy!”
“OK, I thought I’d kept up on the sciences since Uni, but half of that made no sense to me and the other half sounded flat-out impossible, so I’ll have to take your word for it. But that’s not what I meant. Apart from the obvious, which is that you’re putting out fires that were previously killing my friends and colleagues at a steady rate and destroying lives across this wide brown fucker of a land, what else are you doing? Fly in, quick intro, magic jiggery-pokery, smile for the cameras, and off you go? That’s it?”
The boy looked downcast. “Pretty much, yes.”
“And what about your camp followers? You must have two hundred people, reporters and fans, following you around. Do you keep them updated? Let them know where to go next? Or do you fly off and let them follow as they may?”
“I don’t really talk to them. Just, you know, photos. The reporters want to interview me but that just feels like it would waste time. I know they changed the rules about media bias after that big mess a few years back, but…”
“You still don’t know which ones to trust? Fair enough.”
Jeff got up again. He looked out the window at the sunset while he thought how to say the next bit. This could be tricky.
“You’re out there, making a difference, saving the world right now. That’s the first thing. Don’t lose sight of that. Even if you have no influence on your publicity-hungry super friends, you’ve already done something genuinely Good. Keep hold of that.”
“OK.” The boy looked unconvinced.
“But you’ve made an error in judgement that I think might cost you if you don’t correct it. If I asked you what your three main powers are, what would you tell me?”
“Umm. I don’t have three. Just one. Extras always only have one power. I can change the way entropy interacts with energy. That makes energy move and change in a bunch of ways, but really it’s just a side effect.”
“Fair enough. Utter nonsense, but fair enough. That’s one of your powers. But you have others. What about those followers of yours – the real life ones in their caravans and motorbikes, and the online ones with their hashtags and DMs. Aren’t they a super power? I certainly don’t have those.”
“I… guess? I don’t know? If they’re my super power, how do I use them to make the world a better place?”
“That, my boy, is the question. So what’s your third super power?”
Kevin sat and thought, saying nothing. That ridiculously gorgeous brow furrowed, his stupidly green and flawless eyes started far away. At length, he said, “can I think about it some more? I feel like I’ve got an idea, but I don’t know.”
“Do you give up?”
“No! I can work it out, I’m sure I can.”
Jeff took the boy’s hand and shook it, firmly. “Exactly!” he crowed. “I couldn’t have put it better myself!”
“Huh?”
“You don’t give up. You won’t give up. You haven’t even taken time to change out of that spandex monstrosity since I saw you two weeks ago. You’re terrified that those frat boys and princesses on the intertubes are going to watch you fail and dance on your grave, but you still won’t surrender. Which means their supposed goal, to see you fall, will never happen. You can’t fall. It’s impossible. ”
Which, in hindsight, would turn out to be a poor choice of phrasing, but this was early days.