Stewart92
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The One Percent (Original slightly corp/superhero idea)
🕑 Added 2025-03-25 16:51:59 +0000 UTCHey guys, keeping my word to show im active! This bug hit me after the usual melting pot of reading hero stories. Thought I see if I could create a neat hook! First chapter is open to all but if popular they;ll be posted somewhere?
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“Not even fresh,” the flashy man said, cape fluttering as he dropped the cup with the name ‘Capture Cassidy’ scrawled like an afterthought. The cup landed in a trashcan and the man walked on without looking back.
The noise of coffee sloshing in the non-liquid recycling garbage can was just the terrible cherry on this day. A quiet slap of insult, sticky and echoing.
Jules didn’t sigh, even if her spine curled slightly inward from the weight of everything unsaid. She gave the smallest nod and tugged her company-standard track jacket tighter, the zip snagging halfway up. Another minor flaw, another quiet defeat. The stitching under her arm was beginning to fray again, chafing just enough to remind her she was still here.
“Sorry, Captain Cascade,” she muttered, voice low enough to drown in the fluorescent buzz above. The tracksuit she wore wasn’t even personalized, just Trainee-42, printed where a name should be. The sort of uniform that told people you were part of the company in theory, not in reality. London’s 12th most popular hero company, to be precise. A title worn like a joke no one laughed at anymore.
She scooped up the discarded cup from the trash herself. The liquid inside had soaked through the cardboard already, warm and sticky on her fingertips. It joined the ever-growing scent trail of her shift: burnt sugar, floor wax, cheap caffeine. She didn’t even bother wiping her hands.
There were a dozen more trash cans to empty before long.
Cascade had already vanished through the chrome-plated doors at the end of the hallway, no doubt on his way to another PR shoot disguised as a mission.
Cameras loved his powers. His team always walked in perfect triangle formation, every step choreographed. He left behind wet footprints from his rain boots, each one gleaming in the hallway light.
Even as she watched, they were already drying.
Jules crouched down beside the trash can. Someone had dropped a crumpled training pamphlet behind it. She smoothed it out on her knee without thinking.
It fought her fingers and nearly tore where the coffee stain had dried, the cheap texture obvious as she unfolded the mass-reproduced propaganda. The paper still smelled faintly of toner and floor polish, like it had soaked up every cleaning cycle this floor had ever endured.
“Everyone has potential. Find your edge.”
The ink had bled slightly from the spill, but the message still held. Jules paused, staring at the words.
Then she stood up and threw it away.
Jules wasn’t listed on the team roster. Not officially. Her name was misspelled on her lanyard, and no one had fixed it in six months. She had asked. Once.
Her request was logged somewhere below a top-ranking hero’s lunch order and promptly ignored. Maybe she should have phrased it like a sandwich.
She gave it a look.
'Jewels Gap.'
The sticker was peeling now. Every week, she re-pressed the corners to keep it on. Every week, it peeled again. The loop had become a ritual. It felt like the kind of error too small to be intentional, but too persistent to be an accident.
It was the name that bugged her the most, however. She wasn’t some pretty rock.
Her boots squeaked as she shifted her weight. Even that felt too loud here, echoing through corridors lined with success stories and branded posters. Her reflection flickered in the polished wall, faint and distorted.
The hall looked more like a spacecraft hangar than office space, like they were waiting for a shuttle that never arrived.
“You’re still dry, so Cascade must be in a good mood,” came a voice.
Jules turned. Affie stood a few paces away, resting one shoulder against the vending machine like she belonged there. Her uniform declared her Number 3 in bright orange letters. The stitching was clean. Her gloves fit. Her boots matched. Everything about her posture said she knew exactly where she stood.
Affie popped a grape candy into her mouth and didn’t offer the bag. “He dumped mine straight on the carpet. Something about humidity ambiance. Guess today’s your lucky shift.”
“Not on the good carpet?” Jules winced.
Affie merely rolled the candy with her tongue and grinned. “Of course the good carpet.”
Jules recalled somewhere, maybe from the break room, maybe muttered over a clipboard, the carpet in this chrome and metal building wasn’t just for comfort. It was intentional. Expensive. The kind of flooring you invited guests to marvel at, or filmed a promo video across.
She’d only seen it once. Deep maroon, soft without being plush. The kind of fabric that drank in boot prints and held them for hours. No intern was allowed near it unless they were cleaning it. Cascade must have tracked water across the entire thing a dozen times.
It was carpets that completed a room, tastefully chosen by someone with a degree in color theory or, more likely, a power that let them visualize emotional balance.
Jules remembered hearing that someone in Design had a power that let them "read saturation like mood swings." It sounded fake, but the posters did get weirder every season.
The hallway around them vibrated faintly with the buzz of distant elevators. Somewhere, a burst of static suggested another PR shoot in motion. Affie pulled out another candy. Still didn’t offer one.
“So,” she said, eyes flicking toward Jules’ still-wet fingertips, “you sticking it out again this week, or are you finally ghosting the schedule like Vane did?”
Jules blinked. “They ghosted?”
“Hard. Wiped their name off the intake board and everything.”
“Oh.” Jules looked down at her hands. The grape scent in the air was starting to make her feel light-headed. “No. I’m still here.”
Affie held up another candy, twirling it between two fingers before popping it into her mouth. Jules didn’t know if it was habit or if the sugar helped her stomach or something else entirely. She vaguely remembered someone mentioning it once during drills. Something about blood chemistry.
Jules didn’t know every trainee’s power offhand, but Affie’s was hard to forget. Vibration generation, strong enough to disrupt barriers or destabilize terrain. A powerful ability, but unstable. Affie could throw off the resonance of a reinforced wall, but if she overused it, she got dizzy, lost balance. Something about her blood sugar crashing or a clotting imbalance. She always carried candy.
“I knew you’d stick around,” Affie said eventually, voice softer now. “You didn’t walk in here like you were the shit. That’s usually a good sign.”
It was a compliment, Jules knew. Maybe not a warm one, but honest. That was better, in some ways.
She nodded once, unsure how else to respond.
“I mean, you got a real head here,” Affie continued, tapping the side of her own temple. “That’s rare. Most people think powers are everything, but they flame out fast. No patience. You don’t look fast. You look... hard to get rid of.”
Jules blinked. “Thanks?”
Affie shrugged and leaned back against the vending machine. “It’s a compliment. Don’t overthink it.”
She paused, tapping one finger against her cheek as she rolled the candy around in her mouth, considering something unspoken. Then, almost as if the silence had grown too still, she added:
“The grapes were good this time.”
It might’ve been a joke. Jules wasn’t sure. Affie popped another into her mouth without hesitation, and the scent hit stronger now, syrupy and artificial, clinging to the recycled air. Jules breathed through her mouth, just slightly.
She didn’t know how Affie could stomach it. Maybe she was used to the taste. Maybe the sugar coated something inside her system that Jules didn’t have to worry about. Or maybe it was just easier to stay distracted.
Jules didn’t know. But she knew that if she smelled grape again anytime this week, she’d hurl.
Affie didn’t seem to notice her flinch, or maybe she did and didn’t care. She was digging into the bag again, casually, like her tongue knew the rhythm better than her brain did.
“With Vane gone,” Affie said between chews, “it does mean you only have one person left to beat before you’re in the top ten.”
Jules winced.
Her number, 42, wasn’t her rank. It was her intake number. The order she’d signed up in. That was it. The only reason she still wore it was because no one had bothered to give her anything else.
She had started as Entrée Forty-Two, one of dozens filed in on that recruitment week. She hadn’t stood out. She hadn’t sparkled. She hadn’t even scored high on the team-building sims.
But she’d shown up.
Week after week. Shift after shift. No call-outs. No training failures. No major mistakes. No major anything, really.
And with Vane gone, her quiet stats had crept higher by default.
The internal system only saw hours logged, complaints avoided, and mission attendance marked in neat, silent columns. It didn’t rank on style. It didn’t care who got thanked or filmed. It didn’t notice smiles or poses or branded color palettes.
It just tracked numbers.
It was the opposite of the beast that was the Hero Ratings.
That thing ran on drama. On quotes shouted into collapsing rooftops. On stylish rescues and crowd-ready charm. The kind of system where a single flashy save could send a nobody into trending territory. Jules didn’t trend. She barely got logged.
Now she was in striking range of the top ten, and it didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like forgetting to leave. Like standing in an elevator that never hit the lobby.
There hadn’t been a decision behind it. She’d just kept clocking in. Filling in the silence. Doing the work no one else wanted to claim.
“Such joy,” she muttered.
Affie gave her a sidelong look, candy still in her cheek.
“You could celebrate,” she offered, voice casual.
Jules tilted her head like the suggestion didn’t quite fit. A celebration felt like a reaction. And she didn’t have one of those ready.
“I did,” Jules said. “By almost vomiting from grapes.”
Affie gave a faint smile, just the corner of her mouth. It wasn’t teasing. It wasn’t sympathy either. More like quiet agreement. A shared truth neither of them felt like saying out loud.
“If you don’t want the glory, why are you here?” Affie asked.
There was no bite to it, no challenge. Just curiosity.
But the way she said glory, like it was still something real, made Jules flinch internally. It was the kind of word that belonged in recruitment ads, not conversations. Like hearing someone say “legend” during a grocery run.
The hallway still smelled like overripe grape and plastic cleaner. Nothing glorious about it.
Jules shrugged. “Can’t someone want the never-ending grind of hero work for... practical reasons?”
She waved toward the nearest wall. A company poster hung there, all glossy bullet points and sharp-edged smiles. Health care. Injury coverage. Pension plans. Guaranteed rent offset. Meal stipends. Vision and dental.
All neatly printed beside a cartoon drawing of a caped figure shaking hands with a glowing CEO.
It was a nice package.
She didn’t care about any of it.
But it made for a good excuse. Something people understood. Something that could be pointed to and nodded at.
Many would want it. Lots did. Trainees with fractured families, student debt, unstable living conditions. People whose powers wouldn’t land them on banners or billboards, but still needed managing. Powers too risky for the public and too weak for fame.
They came for stability. Jules had listened to them talk in the break room, half-finished sentences spoken through coffee and stress. She knew the script by now, how to echo it without drawing attention.
Some just wanted to survive without struggling. It was reasonable. Sensible. Safe.
The system liked that kind of logic.
And none of it had anything to do with why Jules stayed.
She didn’t say that, though.
She let the silence fill the space where honesty might go, watching the poster’s reflection ripple faintly in the polished metal wall. The overhead lights made everything look slightly washed out. Even the faces in the poster seemed tired, like actors on their fifth take.
Affie’s watch buzzed.
She glanced down, then let out a slow breath through her nose. The screen showed a familiar icon pulsing in low cyan—Vaporwave had flagged her for sidekick duty again. The official term, printed on the assignment screen in bold, was “Person Between the Hero and the Masses.”
Jules didn’t see the mission ID, but she didn’t need to. The look Affie gave her said enough.
Same circus. Different day.
Jules caught the faintest roll of her eyes before she slid her sleeve back down, smoothing the cuff out like it mattered. “Guess I’m needed,” Affie muttered, voice flat, like it was a dentist appointment she hadn’t scheduled.
“I hate being a Buffer,” she added, the more official term.
Vaporwave’s patrols weren’t really about catching anyone. They were visual events. Wrapped in glowing neon, always floating an inch above the pavement, trailing synth-heavy backing tracks that auto-synced to any screen within five meters. Local media adjusted in real time to match his color scheme. Purple-pink-blue on everything.
The hero equivalent of a pop-up concert.
Jules had seen the crowds.
They gathered early, sometimes hours before, huddled along sidewalk barriers and leaning out of balconies. Phones ready. Signs glittered. Chants already practiced. Some wore merch. Others just showed up to be part of it.
They cheered like he was saving lives.
They reacted like it meant something.
Jules often wondered if it did, and she was just too herself to ever grasp it. Too quiet. Too skeptical. Too far outside whatever made people believe.
She had tried once. A long time ago. She remembered clapping when someone else clapped, watching the glow-trail of a hero vanish into the sky and trying to feel awe.
It hadn’t stuck.
Now, she just watched.
Jules couldn’t remember the last time she saw a criminal on one of those routes. The timing was too neat. The detours too clean. The angles always camera-friendly. Any real damage, if there ever was any, happened offscreen.
The patrols didn’t usually last long. A loop through the Market Strip. A hover past park fountains. One stop to hand out a balloon or pose with a dog. Maybe two. Enough to be filmed. Enough to trend.
Then Vaporwave would vanish behind his chrome cruiser, signature holograms fading like mist on cue. The music would soften. The crowd would linger. Most walked away smiling.
“Big day,” Jules said.
Affie didn’t blink. “Barely.”
She turned to the vending machine beside them and held her phone up to the scanner. The screen flashed red. The machine beeped, then whined like it had better things to do.
“Can you do it? You have a lucky touch.” Affie held out the phone.
Jules took it without comment. She pressed it against the panel once, and the machine gave a cheerful chime. A branded energy drink dropped into the tray with a thunk. Shimmerstrike: for heroes in motion.
Affie grabbed it and cracked the tab. “Luck powers should exist.”
“Luck powers can’t exist,” Jules said, reciting the phrase like it had been drilled into them during intake week.
It was just fact. Luck wasn’t a measurable trait. The science behind Drifts had debunked it a dozen times over. What looked like probability bending was always something else. Hidden telekinesis. Passive field alteration. Micro-scale emotional shifts that nudged people’s behavior.
Luck didn’t survive testing.
There were lots of neat powers people wished existed. The kind that made games more fun or stories more magical. Clairvoyance. Reality edits. Universal empathy.
None of those held up under scans.
Maybe that was for the best. Some things were more dangerous when they felt simple.
As Affie walked off, humming faintly under her breath, Jules lingered by the vending machine. She stared for a moment at its flickering display, then tapped her own watch with the side of her thumb.
The interface blinked to life in dull white text over a grey background. No colors. No icons. Just a system update in language that hadn’t changed in five years.
‘No summons for today. You are sitting at position ‘1’ in the active queue.
You have been skipped.’
Jules exhaled slowly through her nose.
She really didn’t see the damn point of that last part. It helped no one. It didn’t clarify anything. It didn’t offer guidance or an explanation. Just a soft reminder that she was close,and still overlooked. She tapped the screen once to clear it, but the message stayed for the full five-second display cycle before vanishing.
It was the waiting room version of rejection. Not even a no, just a blink and a delay.
Jules shoved her hands into the pockets of her track jacket. The lining was fraying on the right side. She could feel the torn edge brushing her knuckle, a small snag that had gotten worse this week.
She didn’t fix it.
She walked the corridor until the grey tiles gave way to noise.
The quieter halls cracked open into the community atrium, a space designed for inter-cohort mingling but currently functioning as a fashion riot. Noise surged the moment she stepped in—voices overlapping, shoes squeaking, gear clattering. It was like being hit by a wall of badly synchronized audio.
New heroes, most of them new, darted through the crowd, each one dressed in some variation of what they thought a hero should look like. It was like watching every corner of history, fantasy, and aesthetic clash in a blender.
A knight clanked past in full armor, the metal sharp and real. A cyborg trainee adjusted a shoulder port mid-sentence. Two shadow-bodied Drifters waited patiently for an elevator, wisps of dark smoke drifting from the edges of their forms, next to a man who looked like a stone quarry in a tank top.
Everyone was talking, showing off, laughing too loud.
No one looked at Jules.
Which was fine. Preferred, really.
She moved carefully, keeping to the walls. Her jacket brushed the edge of a large poster featuring Cascade’s latest PR campaign: “Empower. Endure. Evolve.” His face gleamed too white under the hallway lights, like the resolution was too high for human skin.
Jules didn’t slow.
She turned down a narrower hallway, one without signage. The lights here buzzed a little louder. The paint peeled in the corners. This was where the overflow went—trainees not on assignment, not yet dismissed, not quite needed.
Technically, it was the Mission Staging Zone 3, but most just called it the holding pen.
There were chairs here. Scuffed ones. Foldable, mismatched. A coffee machine that only brewed one temperature: scalding. A bulletin board pinned with last month’s announcements and this month’s passive-aggressive warnings about fridge etiquette.
Jules passed a few trainees she didn’t know. Their suits were too clean, still creased from the packaging fold. New. Eager.
She nodded at no one and sat near the wall. The plastic of the chair groaned under her weight like it hadn’t recovered from the last person.
She unwrapped the sandwich from its branded foil, just the word Protein+ printed over and over. It might have been chicken, technically. The texture said otherwise. The taste was mostly bland, with a faint chemical tang like gym chalk soaked in broth.
With slow, careful bites, she watched the new batch settle in. They tested their Drifts at low volume. One boy sparked electricity from his fingertips, tiny arcs dancing over the table edge. Another girl had iron plates across her ribs like half-buried fossils.
Showy. Unrefined. But at least they had something to show.
The company liked to say they maintained a hundred active trainees. That was the official number. It looked good on paper.
Reality hovered closer to forty. Sometimes less.
They dropped off quietly, those who couldn’t keep up. Internally, it was labeled burnout. Publicly, it didn’t exist. Some quit after one mission. Others just stopped logging hours. A few got reassigned to “administrative assistance,” a soft landing that often led nowhere.
And then there were the unlucky ones.
The ones who got paired with a name.
High-profile heroes ran tight operations with looser safety margins. More attention, more pressure. Missions where looking good came before looking twice.
Life-ruining injuries were rare now, with Healing Drifts and company medics on standby. But even with repair, the experience of being broken lingered. Some didn’t return. Others returned changed.
Many wanted the glory.
Very few loved the pain that came with earning it.
This was how her day went.
Routine checks. Asking around if anyone wanted coffee, noting down preferences, half of them wrong on purpose. She’d walk the loop, drop off the drinks, get a shrug from one person and a chew-out from another. One high-ranked trainee said it was lukewarm. Another asked where the oat milk was. One of them just walked off without taking it.
Jules didn’t argue. She logged the receipt.
Affie was gone all day. Likely getting dragged through the Market Loop by the beat-heavy migraine that Vaporwave called a patrol theme. Jules caught a glimpse of it on the internal screens—neon reflections bouncing off water features while drones hovered for coverage.
She didn’t watch long.
It was close to 9pm when she finally clocked out, slipping through the side exit by the storage bay. No crowds. No posters. Just a scuffed hallway and a broken door sensor that beeped twice before letting her through.
The outside air hit like a reset.
Cool. Wet. Thick with the scent of smoke, bus fumes, concrete, and humanity. The kind of air that carried its own weight.
Jules didn’t speak right away.
Then she did.
“Tomorrow,” she said under her breath. “It’ll be tomorrow.”
She tilted her chin up, slowly.
Not to the moon most people looked at—the soft, pale one, high behind layered clouds. That one belonged in lullabies and bedtime stories.
No, her eyes settled higher. Closer. On the second one.
The red moon.
t hovered larger than it had any right to be, its crimson shell mottled in places, shadows like veins curling across its surface. Black patches broke the red, forests of bone-white trees spiraling in every direction. Some wound into tight whorls, others stretched outward like cracked porcelain.
And in the lower quadrant, near the jagged coastline?
A lake.
Dark. Still. Round enough to seem unnatural. It didn’t shimmer or reflect, just sat there, absorbing the sky. It created the illusion of a giant eye, lidless and wide, locked eternally on Earth.
Like it was watching back.
Jules stared.
She didn’t move.
The lake rippled once. Not with tide or storm or collision, a slow, precise shift across the surface, like something beneath had stirred. The bone-tree forests around it responded, bending like reeds, not snapping, not resisting. They bowed.
Then the lake surged.
The ripple became a wave that passed through the forests in widening rings. A visible current of motion spread over the red moon’s terrain, gathering speed and volume. It didn’t whip or roar, it rolled, high and wide, pressing outward like a held breath finally exhaled.
The current curved upward, toward the upper hemisphere, and reached its apex at the boundary of the moon’s atmosphere. There, it collapsed.
A flare. A break. The crimson wind unraveled into vapor, shooting outward like scattered petals. It shimmered in the dark like glass dust catching light, then fell toward Earth in thin, trailing ribbons.
By the time it reached the lower atmosphere, it wasn’t mist anymore.
A breeze brushed Jules’ face, just enough to lift the fringe of her hair. It smelled like wet concrete and fading traffic. The kind of air that felt cleaner than it was.
“I’m coming to you,” she whispered. “Just wait.”
She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t look around. It wasn’t meant for anyone but the thing above her.
The red moon didn’t flicker or pulse or shift. It simply hovered, bloated and still, its dark lake still nestled in the bone-lined valley.
Most people didn’t look at it anymore.
The British called it Tartarus in official documents. A name pulled from myth, meant to categorize the unknowable. Cold. Contained. It showed up in city alerts and weather reports, always followed by “no expected interaction.”
The Americans preferred Lucifer. Flashier. Headline-ready. Sometimes it was capitalized like a brand, sometimes whispered like a threat. It trended online once every few weeks, always attached to shaky footage or grainy telescope captures. There were coffee mugs and conspiracy boards and entire subcultures dedicated to its purpose.
Journals wrote about it in edgy fonts that implied danger. Vlogs gave it backstories. Streamers invented Drifts they claimed were moon-linked. None of it ever stuck for long.
There were many names, but they didn’t hinder conversation. One only needed to point upward. That was enough. Everyone knew which one you meant.
The moon was context.
The pale one was background. This one was a headline.
Jules didn’t use either name.
She just looked at it and called it the moon. Or bastard, depending on how the day had gone. Sometimes both.
Jules simply didn’t see the point of naming something she planned to destroy in the long run.
It felt counter-productive.
Comments
Ethan Barrow
Very interesting, would like to see more. Good hook.
Bakerdea
Love myself a superhero story.
Jonah of the Whale
I do not. Thank you.
Stewart92
Sure, do you mind 1000 words chunks as it comes to me?
Empty Shelf
Interesting. I have so many questions...
Jonah of the Whale
I want to read more of this, and I want to do it now. Please write the hitherto referenced 'more' so I can do so. Thank you. (but obviously you write at your own pace and stuff no pressure)
Lynn Freeman
I'm so curious
WarStrider72
1 percenters?!!
