Gym Times are Fun Times

Most powers tended to be, one way or another, good. They were useful. Which made sense. People who had powers that uniquivocally sucked tended not to reproduce, and something something evolution, right? Jude wasn't entirely sure, but the whole thing sounded about right in his head, even if he wasn't sure how valid it was here. That was how it had worked back at home, with every generation getting that much more powerful than the one before it.

Jude let himself relaxed a bit as Leeroy went out of his way to calm his fears. Alright. He could deal with all this, couldn't he? It wasn't that bad - just a surprise. And he was willing to talk. He seemed interested. He wasn't shutting down or telling Jude to move on or anything.

But his question caught Jude off guard, and his eyes widened slightly as his brain turned over, trying to process for a moment before it finally caught.

"Oh! Oh, these?" He gestured up to the metal on his face, the bits running down his neck. "No. Not him. That was an explosion, but it wasn't one of his." He supposed Leeroy was probably familiar with what explosion scars looked like, and... well, that was the kind of patterning Jude had. It was more obvious with his shirt off, but even just his neck let most people take a pretty good guess.

"I almost never saw him explode," Jude admitted. "His radius was too high. Any time he did, the property damage would be massive even if we'd evacuated ahead of time. It was a weapon of last resort, so most of the time he just fought normally." Or not at all, in a lot of cases.

Leeroy was wrong on both accounts. He had harmed people unintentionally, and Jude's injuries were from someone he trusted.

But that was neither here nor there.

"It's fine," Jude said. "I ask a lot of invasive questions myself, so I can't be bothered if other people do the same to me. I'm... pretty close to an open book, honestly. I had a lot of bad experiences with keeping secrets, and I prefer being open about things. It's less trouble."

He listened to what Leeroy had to say about the upper limits of his power, and he nodded briefly.

"His was a bit different. It seemed like... well, every time he went off, it got a bit stronger. It kept building on itself. So it started to become a big thing of... of not letting him go off at all. But it was any time he went unconscious, so that meant he had to stay conscious, and that was a whole mess. Before they figured out how it worked they were trying to keep setting him off under the idea that the power would build up if he didn't, but that was the exact opposite of how it actually worked."

It was a mess, to say the least. A completely counter-intuitive power, one that worked the exact opposite of the way you'd think it would.

"He could do... his power was just... It was really powerful, in the end."

He'd expected, at some point in the conversation, that he would ask. How could he not? Jude had mentioned the existence of a person whose powers were a lot like his own. Of course he'd want to know what happened to him, and Jude shook his head.

"I'm not sure if you heard about the whole... Halcyon City evacuation thing. A bunch of us came over from an alternate dimension. That worlds was being consumed by... giant monsters known as the Gultha. The biggest of them was literally taking bites out of the planet. It wasn't much more than a giant maw in the sky, but it was so powerful that... well, no one was getting away."

Jude paused, shifting a bit. It wasn't uncomfortable--he'd talked about it enough--but it also wasn't something that he ever got used to really explaining.

How did you explain something like that?

"They evacuated some of us. And then they did a last stand. They threw everything they had at it. In the end, DeadManSwitch chose to sacrifice themselves. No one knew what would happen if they died, but if they didn't do anything, everyone was going to die."

Jude grimaced. He hadn't seen it, but it was still there, writ large on his memory, something huge and significant.

"He tore a hole in reality. He didn't kill the Gultha and stop it from destroying the earth, huge parts of it simply ceased to exist. Him killing it let everyone else evacuate to Manta Carlos. He bought us time."

Jude didn't have many possessions. Some clothes. His notebooks for school. Some of the only actual posessions he had were small glass statues produced by Erione. They were lifelike, made exactly in the image of the person, and one of them--sitting atop a mostly empty bookshelf--was DeadManSwitch.

It was the closest thing to a memorial he was ever likely to have.

Jude didn't quite sit, but he did stand not far from where he was, nodding.

"I was lucky," Jude admitted. "When I first came over, I came with my friends. That's already more than most people get. Most people come alone, with nothing. I came with people I was close to, and then I got doubly lucky. I had more people join me from my world. When I first arrived I thought arriving from another dimension would be unique, but really it's... almost painfully common. Ours was just a larger scale than most."

He paused for a moment, looking Leeroy over. He looked normal, but that didn't mean much of anything, did it?

"You aren't from an alternate dimension, are you...?" The way he'd said it had implied... something. Either that or really trying circumstances.

Just like the other Angelo, then. He'd come to the island as a teenager and grown up there. They had similar enough histories that Jude had a general idea of what he was dealing with, and he nodded along as he listened.

"Sometimes that's better," Jude said, even if he couldn't really agree. He had a perfect memory. He knew what was going on his own head. The details stayed as sharp as ever, even if he had to prune through to keep the emotions from overwhelming him. "It means you never forget the good parts either. Important people who are gone still keep living because you remember them. And you learn from the lessons. If you forget, you just repeat yourself."

Great, he sounded like a fortune cookie.

"I guess I just... learned to keep moving forward. If I don't, I'll just shut down." He suspected everyone would. You just had to keep moving. You had to focus on the good things. On his dad being there. On his friends. Not on the billions who had died.

He'd been lucky.