"How the fuck do I kill a superhuman?"
Aldrich thought as he looked at the stars. Since he was without a home, he enjoyed the full view of the sky and the less than premium air of human waste.
It had been seven years since I arrived on this planet. You see, my parents were in the middle of a nasty divorce, and my mom's lawyer, a woman by the name #@#$@^%, no relation, well, she was one hell of a lawyer.
So my dad kept threatening to put me on a rocket and blast me off into space if my mom didn't back off. Nobody believed he'd really do that to his own son.
I mean, in my species, every once in a while you'd hear about custody battles where a parent would unalive their own blood as a way of harming the other person, but obviously something that horrific is very rare.
But on the day of the mediation, no one could find my father or me. And my mom's attorney asked my dad attorney a guy named {!!!!!} ,again, no relation, she asked {!!!!!} where the hell is my father.
You see, everyone agreed to meet on time. My father insisted on like 8 in the morning or 10, makes no difference, don't know why I even mentioned this part.
So anyway, they were all standing on the driveway in front of the house, and everyone is wondering where my father is. And then they hear someone shout, "Hey, you dumb bitch." Sorry for the language, but I have a really good memory and that's what he said.
And they all look up, and standing on the balcony is my dad, and he is holding this remote control thingy. And he says, "Hey, you dumb bitch, you can have the house and the car, but you can't have the fucking baby," and he presses a button on the remote control thingy, and a goddamn rocket lifts off from the roof with me inside.
Throwing me on this planet with technology so backward they couldn't even detect the rocket signal made me spend an entire two years wandering around. Of course, the first contact with the natives wasn't pretty.
The native species don't know of alien life. Thankfully, we know that if a species is this backward, you shapeshift and mimic their appearance until rescue teams pick you up. Survival 101.
Seven years later, I've lost all hope of rescue. This planet seems engineered specifically to hinder my life cycle at every possible turn. My species can integrate the DNA of slain foes into our own, gaining their powers and abilities.
There are very few species in the universe that we can't apply that to, and at first I thought humans were one. It turns out it was just that they were powerless, until I learned of supes or superhumans.
But the problem is I'm currently as weak as any human on this street, so how exactly do I kill one?
It's like what humans call the snowball effect. Once it starts rolling it gets bigger. But how do I get it rolling.
I tried going after a supe once but humans have cameras on every corner and an inexplicable need to film everything they see.
All this thinking is making me hungry.
I walked across the street into a shop called Bryman Audio-Visual and looked at the scrawny guy through the glass.
He saw me immediately.
He attempted the classic human avoidance technique. Suddenly very interested in something behind the counter. Reorganizing things that didn't need reorganizing. Checking his phone twice in four seconds.
I waited. I literally have nothing else to do.
He sighed the sigh of a man who has made peace with his own weakness and came outside.
I've learned that humans have this interesting malfunction where if something looks sufficiently pathetic standing outside their establishment they physically cannot ignore it. Something in their biological coding forces intervention.
I am not pathetic.
But this body is hungry.
Hughie POV :
Oh god. Not again.
It's the kid.
Hughie Campbell was not a complicated man. He liked superheroes. He liked his comics. He liked his girlfriend Robin. He liked normal things.
This kid was not normal.
It started three weeks ago. Hughie noticed the kid lying in the alley sprawled and looking at the sky and he wasn't sure what he was looking at exactly.
The kid had this face that he couldn't quite pin down, not quite a boy, not quite a girl and the right side of their face was a mess of scarring, light red against pale skin.
Hughie looked at it for probably too long before he caught himself and felt immediately guilty about it.
So he felt pity and gave him some change and some food he wanted to give him his homelander action figure but that was too much.
The next day. Hughie had been reorganizing the display when he looked up and nearly had a cardiac event because there was a child's face pressed completely flat against the glass. Just. Watching him. Like a very small, very intense gargoyle.
Hughie had done what any reasonable person would do.
He gave him five dollars and some of his lunch and hoped that would be the end of it.
It was not the end of it.
The kid came back the next day.
And the day after that.
And every single day since.
He was now fifteen sandwiches and seventy-five dollars into this "relationship," and the gargoyle was currently back at the glass, fogging up the display.
The kid wasn't even holding a sign. He was just being weird for the sake of being weird.
Hughie grabbed the bag he'd prepared this morning and went out of the store.
The kid took the bag without a word and sat on the curb. Hughie, feeling the weight of his own spinelessness, sat down next to him.
Hughie cleared his throat "Hey so....I just... I want you to know I can't keep doing this every day. It's not that I don't want to help, it's just... I make thirteen dollars an hour. Thirteen. I have rent, and Robin's birthday is coming up, and I'm not saying the sandwiches are the problem, it's more the... the principle of the thing. You know?"
The kid finished the last sandwich, folded the bag and kept holding it. He looked at Hughie.
"I get it. It's time I relocate anyway."
Hughie jumped, nearly falling off the curb. "Wait. You can talk?"
"Of course I can talk."
"This whole time?"
"Yes."
"Then why didn't you say anything?"
"I didn't feel like it." he said "Also, you were getting pretty pathetic just now. crying about a couple of sandwiches, It was embarrassing for both of us."
Hughie's mouth hung open, but the protest died in his throat. Before he could find his voice, the kid just turned and started walking away. There was no wave or thank you
"Hey wait, before you go." He held up a hand and went back inside. He rummaged around behind the counter for a minute then came back out onto the sidewalk.
He held out a piece of cardboard. On it, in human letters:
"???????????????????????????????????????????????????????."
Aldrich looked at the sign.
Then looked at Hughie.
Then looked at the sign again.
"You'll get more that way." Hughie said, a little defensively. "People respond to it. It's just how it works."
Then he walked away without another word.
Hughie stood on the sidewalk watching them go.
Aldrich POV :
The scrawny native meant well, but his means was as limited as his hourly wage.