I’ve never liked children. They’re a nuisance to everyone around them, and I believe the only reason society as a whole has put up with them is because they pity these small, crying people. Why else would people willingly co-exist with children throwing tantrums in public? Due to this society-wide pity, I’ve grown used to expecting, and even tolerating children in the world.
Out of all the areas that I expected children to be at, my lab was not one of them. The day the child showed up, I was expecting a nice, peaceful night alone. I had even bought a taco into the lab to eat before I began my work, paid in cash as always. I entered the room, and didn’t even need to turn on the light before I heard the sound of a chair falling over. It made this large clattering sound, like an airplane crashing into a road, and ruining any chances of going unnoticed just as much.
There was a small stretch of silence after the crash. On my part, I was wondering how much of a mess it would be to handle the intruder directly, and if it was worth the trouble. On the intruder’s part, it seemed to be taking its time to choose a response, which ended up being a loud swear word in Punjabi- which was said in the pitch of either someone using a voice changer, or a child who hadn’t even reached puberty yet.
I flicked the light switch.
Standing in the middle of my lab like a rat in the kitchen was a child no older than 10, frozen in a comedic position mid-jump. One leg on the ground, the other frozen mid-air while wobbling. She had dark curly hair cut into an ugly bob, and two wide black eyes staring at me with curiosity. She was wearing a cheesy Superman shirt, and the print of him was so faded that you couldn’t make out his face. It was oversized, and covered most of her green shorts. Her sports shoes were practically falling apart. The right one didn’t even have proper laces, just some sort of neon yellow string.
Since the child had decided to freeze herself for whatever reason. I was able to afford to take a quick glance around my lab. The steel cabinets’ padlocks were intact. My tools were in their toolbox. The photovoltaic mixture was still in the fridge. Everything was untouched. My tools were expensive, so I was glad that the child didn’t break into my lab for thievery.
I turned my attention back to the child, who had unfrozen during my brief look-around, and was now slowly, as if going slow-mo in an action movie, seeming to try and creep away. Just because she hadn’t stolen anything yet, it didn’t guarantee she wasn’t going to come back in the future.
“If you run now, I will ravage the Internet and social media sites everywhere in this state, find your parents, and show up at your house to personally tell them their child has been trespassing on private property.”
The child froze in the middle of its slow-mo creeping, and stared at me with less fear than I would have liked.
“Private property? It’s basically a rat den from the outside!”
The child started waving its hands around, wildly gesturing as if personally offended by me.
“How was I supposed to know there’s-”
It dramatically gestured to the ceiling.
“Some sort of top secret lab here???? What are you doing here? Wearing some fishy face mask and sunglasses like a drug dealer too!”
“This is my lab.”
I didn’t legally own the property, but the child didn’t need to know that. Its face was now stuck in a frown, and I was a little worried it would realise my lack of legal standing, and use that as leverage over me.
“How did you even bypass the locks?”
“As long as I want to, I can get inside anywhere in the world. I could sneak into a supervillain’s liar, and the idiot wouldn’t even realise I was there.”
I was reconsidering my general stance on not punching arrogant children as it spoke. Despite my personal irritation, there was a problem with it entering my lab. I was lucky it had been some child, rather than a genuine problem. A professional thief would have been far messier, especially if it had fled before I arrived. I considered my options.
“Try again the following week.”
“…huh?”
“I want to observe the flaws in my security system. Leave now, I’ll do a more in-depth search of my locks and how you managed to infiltrate. If you can successfully enter tomorrow you can…do whatever it is you wish to do here.”
The child, to its credit, did have the bravery to return the following week. Then the next. And the next. I found out each way she entered, fixed the flaw, yet she’d find some way to break in again. She’d have this smug smirk on her face, and would call me an old man who couldn’t even keep a child out of his own house.
The child’s name was Aaraya. She was 10 years old, studied in a public school, and had been short-circuiting any electronic locks I was using. She wanted to be a hero. She liked my lab- which I’ll admit was rather spacious. I let her practice fighting in the testing area. Aaraya was horrible at it, to the point where I just had to step in and point out the mistakes.
The day I taught her to throw a proper punch, she gave me this big, wide smile. I wondered if it hurt to have a smile that stretched across your face like that. The next week, I asked her why she seemed so happy on that night.
She gave me this incredulous look, as if I was asking her why the Earth was round, and said it was ‘obviously’ because it meant that whether I knew it or not, I had seen potential in her. Why else would I have given pointers?
I could have corrected her. I could have told her that after years of seeing what real heroes fought like, her pathetic attempts genuinely seemed almost like a mockery. I didn’t help her out of some faith that this arrogant, squirrely child would become a hero.
I didn’t tell her that. I just let her ramble on and on about her future heroism, how she was going to one day be trusted with secret case files, and how I would be the first person after her mother that she’d show her first successful battle to. I thought I hated it when children spoke gibberish about topics I had no interest in, but I didn’t mind listening to this child talk about her dreams.
Aaraya was 14 when she started visiting my lab in the evening, rather than late at night. She turned up at the lab at 3.30pm on a Tuesday, wearing that same Superman shirt, which was no longer oversized for her. Her one shoe with an intact lace looked like it was going to be replaced soon, no doubt with whatever random string she could find. She had more freckles than she did when she was younger, and her skin was more tanned than when she was a child.
Aaraya was carrying this Superman bag. It looked mostly intact, minus the cartoon face, where someone had spilled paint on, so the man of steel’s face was covered with a bright yellow stain.
She declared she’d start visiting me at this time instead of night. I told her how dangerous it was to walk home from school to here, and how much the bag made her an obvious target.
“I’ve been safe coming here for the past 4 years! If anyone wanted to kidnap me, they’d have done it by now. Anyways, if anyone tried, I’d just beat them up first.”
I wish I could have told her about the man I had found when checking out the neighbourhood the other day. He was relatively harmless to me, but he might not have been for her. Superpowers or not, she was still young. But Aaraya wouldn’t have accepted that answer. Children are impossible, even after they’ve started puberty.
So she made it a habit to visit my lab everyday after school. It wasn’t entirely bad. I was able to explore certain aspects of my photovoltaic mixture by teaching her how to control minimal amounts of electricity. She was already skilled at it, but my mixture was still quite volatile. Too much electricity, the sample would generate enough heat to melt the dish. The capacity of electricity needed depended highly on the concentration too.
Aaraya was very frustrated through it all. She once nearly tried to destroy one of my chairs in frustration. I felt the electrons in the air vibrating much faster than they should, and placated her by proposing to teach her the basics of fighting against a villain with superstrength. She was particularly enthusiastic about that. She ended up arriving at my lab at 3.10pm instead of 3.30pm, usually out of breath.
One day, I suggested she could join her school’s football team. That would give her opportunities to learn how to work together with a team, which she would likely do in hero work. There might even be some superpowered children playing, albeit she would likely need to pass a test to be allowed to play with them.
For the first time in a long while, Aaraya was silent. It was 10 minutes before she replied.
“I don’t have good shoes. Also, I don’t want to break bones, twist my ankle, or any of those things that come with playing sports. If I have any latent regeneration superpower, it’s going to have to wait for some unavoidable serious injury before waking up.”
“You’ll be hurt if you work as a hero.”
“Yeah, but I’d have insurance. Plus I’d be the one paying for it, not Mom.”
I would have offered to give her money, if it wasn’t for the fact I needed my funds to last me until my project was perfected. Yet…in comparison, sports shoes and an occasional hospital visit shouldn’t make a sizable dent in my savings. But would she even accept it? Her mother would question where she would have gotten the money to buy new shoes from.
“It’s fine. I can learn ‘nough from you here anyways. Mom thinks that I’m going to the squirrel club after school. The teacher in charge of that club never shows up at parent teacher meeting days, and I just search up squirrel facts on the school computer to tell her.”
Another period of silence. I had questions, but Aaraya seemed deep in thought. I didn’t want to interrupt whatever may be going on in her head.
“Mom is happier when she thinks I’m participating in school stuff. She used to pretend she was fine whenever I showed her some pricey school activity I wanted to do, but she’s horrible at pretending.”
Knowing Aaraya’s mom, she would probably have worked overtime to afford sports shoes. She was a kind woman. Even if I hadn’t seen her in a long time, I was sure that her kindness wouldn’t have changed. She tried her best to hide it from Aaraya. Children always tend to pick up on things they shouldn’t.
What should I say? I was not raised in the same conditions Aaraya was, and I was also nothing like her.
“Is…there anything I can do to help?”
“Nah.”
Aaraya’s gaze drifted to her Superman schoolbag, the one unceremoniously dumped behind a chair. The yellow paint on his face was oddly similar to the yellow of a hazard sign.
“Besides, it’s all my dad’s fault.”
She had never mentioned her father before.
“Your…?”
“Bastard left and doesn’t even pay child support. Just left Mom to raise me and my brother.”
“You. Have a brother?”
Aaraya turned back to me, blinking owlishly.
“Yeah? Xiao Cheng? I mean, I call him by his name, but like, I’ve told you about him before.”
“I just…thought he was a neighbour.”
“You’re a weird old man.”
“You are a child that broke into an abandoned warehouse, in a district that has been considered cursed by locals. When you got caught, you were not ashamed nor ran away, but even came back. I could have killed you for your organs.”
“Eh. I would’ve kicked you in your nuts, then your old man bones would have rotted away and you’d be on the floor crying ‘bout your lower back pain as I ran away to safety.”
“It’s completely normal to have lower back pain at my age.”
“Old man.”
“That is not as much of an insult as you think it is.”
“Old man.”
“Stop it. Would you like to see my newest creation with the photovoltaic mixture? I’ve discovered a way to keep it stable within a gauntlet-type device.”
Aaraya was always excited to see my new inventions. I never showed her the main project, but it was interesting making smaller gadgets for her to use. They grew bigger over time, and they went from just little toys to possible support gear. I taught her some of the basics, just so she could maintain the gear by herself.
Aaraya was 19 when we were walking back to the lab from the hardware store. We bought some supplies, in cash of course. It was evening. The sun was setting, and it painted the skies in beautiful orange and red hues.
She was talking to me about life updates, as she usually did. How her dormmates were, which lecturer in college she hated, and how A2700 Legality and Heroism was a course with far too little credits for how difficult it was. Aaraya was accepted into a college for novice heroes about a year ago. Full ride scholarship.
Although, that scholarship required her to maintain her grades. They kept a close watch on that, so she visited me less often. Only on the weekends. I’d try to help her with homework and point out inaccuracies in the material they teach.
I didn’t train her to fight anymore. She had experienced instructors at school, and I had taught her enough of the basics. Now it was up to her to develop her own style.
Aaraya had grown since we first met. She kept her curls in a short ponytail, and the freckles on her face had only multiplied over the years. A sudden growth spurt hit her when she was 17, and she was now as tall as I was, a fact she gloated over. She wore this black tactical jacket now, one that the college assigned to her. It was designed to protect against most attacks, and was her new favourite article of clothing. She was wearing sports shoes. They were in good condition, but she had at some point replaced the shoelaces with neon coloured ones.
She abruptly stopped walking and fell silent. She was staring at the crater in the side of the building we were walking past. When she spoke, it was in a voice rather uncharacteristic of her- a small voice, a little shaky.
“What if I can’t fight supervillains?”
She was still looking at that crater. It must be the insecurities teenagers experience. She was a rookie. I thought her hubris might have lasted forever, but it seemed like she was finally growing out of it.
“You’ve trained. You’re competent. Just because you lack real fighting experience, doesn’t mean you always will. Progress takes time. I could have completed my main photovoltaic project years ago, but rushing it would have been a failure.”
It felt odd being the one telling her she was competent, after years of hearing her dreams of becoming a world-class hero.
“I’m not talking about beating up like, normal criminals. I could beat their butts in seconds. I mean real supervillains. The type that were the reason they were even called that to begin with. Like this one.”
She gestured to a half-torn out poster on the side of the building. Years of weathering had done it no favours, and it was almost completely faded. The figure’s pose was vaguely discernible, a caped figure balling his hand into a fist. The face had long worn off, but his cape looked a lot like Superman’s.
“We had this costume workshop on Tuesday. There were a ton of choices, but I just knew I didn’t want the cape. It’s stupid. Wearing a cape won’t make me anything like my dad. But what if it’s just as stupid as thinking I could beat him?”
Aaraya spun back around. Her voice cracked, and I saw tears in the corner of her eyes.
“I don’t have super endurance or super strength. That didn’t get passed down to me. All I get is his electricity manipulation. He can do what I can do, and even more. I could get punched once, and boom! Dead. The photovoltaic gauntlets have been a huge help, but they can only help so much.”
Her voice started shaking more. I didn’t know what to do.
“They still haven’t found him, and I’m scared he’s going to come back for Mom. She’s dealt with enough from him. He’s stronger and more experienced, and has my superpower. I’ve read all the newspapers, even talked to the lecturers ‘bout what he was like. I’m nowhere close to what he was. If I can’t even protect people from supervillains like my dad, can I even be a real superhero?”
She was crying.
For the first time since I met her, Aaraya was crying like a child. Tears poured from her eyes, she sounded like she was struggling not to fully burst out wailing, and was gripping her arm so tight I was worried. She was acting exactly like a child, but for some reason, I didn’t hate her for that.
I don’t know what I was thinking. It might have been nothing, because my body acted faster than my mind. The next thing I knew, I had pulled her into a hug, and she was crying into my jacket. Then I started saying things the moment they occurred, and it was as if I was the one rambling to her.
“Aaraya. Listen to me. I don’t praise you often, because your ego quite frankly doesn’t need it. It’s true that right now, you are weaker than even the version of him from over years ago. But I’ve seen you grow over the years. The 10-year old child who broke into my lab would be awe-struck by what you’ve become. You’ve always been willing to put in the work, to spend hours training to save people. The college saw that in you, even if you weren’t strong. Your lecturers see that in you.”
If you had told the me from 11 years ago that everything I just said was the truth, he would have said you were lying. Yet it was the truth.
“I see that in you. You will become a great superhero, not because of your powers, but because of who you are. I believe in that, even if you don’t right now. I’ll always believe in you.”
It took awhile for her to respond. A period of silence, before she laughed. This small, joyous laugh like a child.
“Thanks, old man.”
Aaraya pulled away from the hug, but there was now a smile on her face.
She couldn’t have seen it under my mask, but I was smiling too. Not just because she was smiling, but because I knew what she didn’t. That she had long since become a greater person than her father.
Aaraya did become stronger. She was the top student of her first year. She had a small party with her mom to celebrate, and invited me. I declined, much to her dismay. Her second year went stunningly well, and she soon qualified for the final year case, where they would assign her a task.
It was a secret task which she signed an NDA for, so she didn’t tell me, but I knew it was something she was excited for. I knew it from the gleam in her eyes, and the happy bouncing she’s done since young, whenever I brought out a new invention for her to tinker with.
She’s busy with her case, so she only meets me once per month now. Today is that one time per month, and I’m getting the lab ready for her. I had just finished my final touches on my main project today. After all these years, it is finally ready. It was something worth celebrating. I even bought celebratory tacos.
I’m very excited. Tomorrow, I will put my project into action. I’ve dreamed of that day for years to come, but I can put it on pause to celebrate with Aaraya. She’s reaching a milestone in her task tonight too. It’ll guarantee her to pass with flying colours, then she’ll start work as an official superhero. This celebration will be a gift to her too.
I was so excited, I didn’t even notice Aaraya was here till the lights turned off.
She must’ve entered from the main door, next to the main light switch. That was the most heavily fortified area of the building, but she still managed to get through. I had set up the security measures today more intensely than I usually did. A final challenge for her, which I knew she would pass. I wasn’t expecting the front door, but I wasn’t surprised either.
I turn towards the door. It’s still rather dark, and she doesn’t seem to have any plans to turn on the lights. No matter. I can create my own. I take a deep breath, and exhale. It’s the same method I taught Aaraya- breath in to concentrate the energy, exhale to release. You’d be surprised how far fundamentals can be used.
Electricity, white and cackling, burst into light around me. It illuminates most of the room as it spreads throughout the air, like a spiderweb. A cackle of electricity from Aaraya. Hers is a different colour- a vivid yellow that glows softly, rather than harshly.
She seems almost comedically frozen in place. Lighting cackles around the two gauntlets she wears, likely taking little effort due to the generators I made with the photovoltaic mixture. Really, the mechanisms of having to condense the original amplifying function into a smaller device was helpful for my main project.
She’s staring at me, two black eyes staring at me with an unreadable emotion. Her hands are balled up into fists, like preparing for a punch. Balled up in the right form too, so she won’t hurt herself while punching. She’s wearing her black tactical jacket, sports shoes with neon shoelaces, and a Superman shirt. This time, the man’s face is clearly visible, with a smile so wide it looks like it would hurt.
I wonder if that’s what my smile looks like right now.
I thought I hated children, and to some extent, I still do. But I don’t hate Aaraya. Somewhere alongside the years, I realised why people want to take care of children. It’s not because of pity. It’s because of pride. The pride of seeing a child successfully throw a punch after so many failed attempts. The pride of listening to her have all these fabulous, grand dreams. The pride of believing in her.
I don’t know what will happen next. I don’t have any plans to compromise something I’ve dedicated most of my life to. I just know what I know right now. I know that Aaraya is an intelligent girl, who’ll be able to take on any hardships life throws at her. That she’s strong through training, and can defeat any villain that crosses her path. That she’s a great hero, and has surpassed me in every way possible.
I am so proud of her.
There’s a period of silence. I have nothing to say, and don’t want to interrupt whatever was going on in her head. I find it mildly impressive that the college would assign a task like this to a third year student. Maybe they expected that she wouldn’t get this far, but Aaraya had burst through all of their expectations. I just need the final confirmation from her, that she knows without me even having to take off my facemask or sunglasses. I don’t actually know that she’s figured it out, but I believe in her, like I always do.
“Hello, Dad.”
Written By: Hoe Yan
Edited By: Amberlyn
