Chapter 1
"Well, could've been worse... Bleh—"
I couldn't hold it back. A geyser of water burst from my mouth, coating the mirror, the wall behind it, and — just for variety — a decent patch of the ceiling. My pants looked like I'd pissed myself.
"For the love of—"
"Hermi." My own name made me flinch. There was something deeply strange about hearing it and knowing it was mine… and yet not mine. I swallowed a thick wad of spit and tried to take a slow, deep breath. That only triggered another wave, and this time the water didn't just come from my mouth — it seeped out everywhere, soaking through the wetsuit from the inside.
"Sweetheart, are you all right?"
A sweet, elderly voice drifted up from the first floor.
"Yeah, I just… got a little wet." Another attempt at breathing, another spray across the mirror. "Everything's fine, Grandma…"
The memories came crashing back. I barely managed to keep my face out of the stream this time — at least it was just water. I steadied myself and let the recollections settle into place.
The woman who had just spoken was my grandmother. Miss Elizabeth Herby — mother of Heinrich Herbert, grandmother of Herman Herbert. A small woman with a full head of silver-white hair that curled into loose ringlets. She wore large, round glasses with thick lenses, and almost always dressed in a plain, heavy wool sweater with no patterns or prints.
Images from childhood drifted through my mind. Memories of this kind, gentle woman who had taken me in after my parents died. Little Herman standing in the front row at the cemetery, clutching her dry, calloused hand like it was the only solid thing left in the world. Her quiet voice keeping him together, coaxing back the tears and the flood that wanted to pour from every pore.
The classic misery of modern-day Earth, where every other day some new mage, alien, hero, or villain tears a hole in someone's life. People die constantly, and stories like Herman's number in the hundreds — if not the thousands. Though most of them don't end even half as well as his did.
Not that Herman deserved the credit for that. That belonged to Elizabeth Herby. *Grandma.* I simply couldn't call her anything else — even trying made my tongue feel heavy and wrong.
Losing her son and daughter-in-law had gutted her. But the woman didn't collapse. She grabbed life by the throat, wrestled a full insurance payout out of the company to rebuild the house after the accident, and then — alone, aging, and exhausted — set about raising a grandson with profoundly difficult abilities.
And *difficult* was putting it gently.
Do you have any idea how much money disappears on dry towels and toilet paper when the kid touching them turns everything into a soggy, useless wad?
In the twenty years they'd lived together, the floors and baseboards had been replaced thirty-seven times — just in Herman's memory. Wallpaper didn't stand a chance anywhere in the house; most rooms had tile or moisture-resistant coating instead. The rugs that had been in Grandma's family for generations were ruined inside of a month.
But Elizabeth Herby loved her grandson. Deeply, fiercely, and without condition. She forgave him more than most people could have managed, and she pushed herself well beyond what her age and health allowed in order to help him.
The rest of the world wasn't nearly so forgiving.
A boy who couldn't control his abilities, living with his grandmother and twenty cats, with no money for new clothes or gadgets or any of the things that make a kid feel like he belongs — that kind of boy becomes an outcast fast. Everything that came in went straight back out, spent on repairs after Herman's latest incident, or on cat food. So new things, normal things, passed him right by.
Then puberty hit, and with it came a stutter and a fear of… well, everything. The kid flinched at his own shadow. Germophobia, claustrophobia, agoraphobia — or whatever the fear of crowds is called. A full bouquet of phobias, wrapped around a core of social anxiety.
The result: a scrawny, beaten-down wretch with a bowl cut, twig arms, and zero confidence. Oh, and he was a redhead. And because he had absolutely no control over his abilities, he couldn't leave the house without a wetsuit.
"Did I just… not buy a ticket when they were handing out decent lives?" I muttered, raking a hand through my wet hair. "Or did someone crank the social difficulty up to Dark Souls?"
I went to spin on my heel and pace — an old habit from my previous life — and nearly ate the floor. My head swam.
"God… Bleh."
I dropped to my knees, palms flat against the floor, staring at the puddle spreading beneath me. The rage and frustration that had been simmering all week finally crested. I had no idea how Herman had lived like this for twenty years. Whatever patience the guy had, he must've inherited it directly from Grandma — because I was already losing mine.
"Hermi, sweetheart. Could you come downstairs, please? A package arrived!"
"Of course, Grandma. Be right there."
No irony in it. The second I heard her voice, the darkness in my chest lifted a little on its own. I scrambled to my feet, genuinely surprised by how fast I moved, and nearly bolted down the stairs just to be near her. Near the one person who actually… *believed* in me. It was hard to explain. The pull toward the first floor felt almost magnetic.
"Damn it—"
The inside of my palm went slick with moisture, and I went sliding down the banister of the old staircase like a bar of soap on tile. I hit two steps, stumbled, and went down — lucky that only half the flight was left.
"Sweetheart, are you all right?" The hum of an electric motor. A moment later, while I was still pulling myself upright, Grandma rolled out of her room in her motorized wheelchair. "Lord, honey… Did you fall again? I thought you'd been doing better with your abilities lately."
There was no reproach in her voice. Just a worn, gentle sorrow — the kind that came from understanding, better than Herman himself ever had, just how much his gift had taken from him.
"Sorry," I managed. "I got distracted and—"
"Oh, my little dumpling." She rolled closer, and I dropped into a crouch out of old habit — Herman's old habit. The kid had grown to nearly six-foot-three despite the family's short genes, even if he looked like a strong wind could carry him off. "You need to be more careful. And more confident in yourself… otherwise you'll never become a hero. And you'll never find a girlfriend."
That last part was barely above a whisper, but I caught it. Nothing in Herman's memories had ever prepared me for that. My eyebrows climbed toward my hairline.
Grandma was already wheeling herself back toward her room, perfectly serene.
"Dumpling, don't forget the package. That nice young Black man left it on the porch." Her door was nearly shut when I heard the rest, clearly not meant for me. "Such strong hands on that boy… reminds me of Archie and Kevin…"
"Good Lord, Grandma—"
I managed to suppress the fresh jet of water that tried to launch itself from my mouth, settling instead for a wet gurgle in my throat. Or — no, that was the wetsuit. Nearly a liter of water had apparently been sloshing around inside it the whole time.
*No wonder the guy was a stick.*
I wasn't worried about being overheard. Grandma had been complaining about her hearing for years, and the volume at which she watched television was… let's say it would've had the neighbors calling the cops on anyone else.
I hauled the package in from the porch, heaved it over my shoulder, and carried it straight to Grandma's room. Twenty kilograms. Didn't even need to guess — cat food, obviously.
"Oh, sweetheart. That was quick," she said as I came through the door, immediately zeroing in on me. "Impressive! Look at you, so strong. Set it right there. Mr. Pickles is absolutely famished…"
"Yeah, impressive…" I puffed out my cheeks, breathing through my mouth to avoid the smell, and shuffled on locked knees to the far corner of the room. I dumped the food into the battered trough and stepped back as a wave of fur-covered shapes descended on it with complete disregard for my existence. "Grandma, do you need anything else?"
My eyes were starting to sting. Despite the cat flaps installed all over the house, the furry little tyrants had staked a permanent claim on this one room.
"Yes, dumpling. The usual, please." She hadn't taken her eyes off the screen, where something that was clearly not real wrestling was unfolding with great drama.
I didn't have to go far. Grandma kept everything close at hand — mostly out of necessity.
"Here you go. Just the way you like it." My smile was genuine, if slightly lopsided. "Heavy on the whiskey, light on everything else."
"Thank you, dumpling." She waved her thin hand at me without looking up, already fully absorbed in the show.
Per Herman's memories — *my* memories, I supposed, I might as well commit — she'd be completely unreachable for the next half hour. Whiskey and fake wrestling had that effect.
Fine by me. The awkwardness, the phobias, the physical weakness, the general creeping dread — all of it was starting to pile up, and I needed to get back upstairs before—
"Bleh… Damn it."
---
"God, that's disgusting."
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and tilted my head back toward the sky. I was sitting in the backyard, on a plain plastic chair, trying to train my abilities — same as every day. There was progress. Just not the kind you'd write home about.
But let's start from the beginning.
It had been just over a week since my… rebirth. Reawakening. Hell if I knew the right word. Since I became Herman Herby — beloved dumpling and neighborhood pariah. Maybe not the whole neighborhood, but definitely the block.
The local 7-Eleven wouldn't even let me inside anymore. They brought my purchases out to the curb, and the owner would stop by in the evenings to collect payment from Grandma and share a glass of whiskey with her.
Right. They'd stopped trusting Herman with paper money years ago. Coins only — and the iron kind, at that. He'd accumulated a pile of them in his room that I wasn't entirely sure was a metaphor. Around a thousand dollars in loose change, probably. Gifts, spare change from jobs, odd earnings. Herman had been too embarrassed to carry that much metal around in his pockets, and too afraid of getting mugged, so it had just sat there.
I was planning to spend it on real food and actual clothes. If I managed to get my abilities under control, maybe a gym membership. Or at least a pool pass. Being almost two meters tall and weighing sixty kilos was its own kind of problem.
But that plan had stalled at step one: the abilities.
And there were several of them. Like any super — which is what they called heroes, villains, freaks, monsters, and all the other variations of enhanced humanity these days.
Herman Herby. *I.* I might as well get used to saying that.
I could generate water from any part of my body and control it. And when I say *any part* — I mean that absolutely literally.
The first time explosive watery diarrhea hit me… I thought I was going to die. It was so violent it scared every cat in the house. At one point, I genuinely thought I might be achieving liftoff from the toilet seat. Horrifying doesn't begin to cover it.
In a darker corner of my mind, I noted that this particular ability set might make Herman an exceptional — *no. No, we're not finishing that thought.* The fact that it kept circling back was disturbing enough. I really hoped the guy hadn't been harboring anything he hadn't examined too closely, because that would've been an unpleasant discovery on top of everything else.
Back to the point.
Beyond water control and water generation, I could breathe underwater without any difficulty. And like any super, I had enhanced physical characteristics — which, given the way I looked, came as a genuine shock. Staring at myself in the mirror sometimes felt like looking at someone who'd spent several years making very poor life choices.
But that twenty-kilogram bag of cat food? No real trouble. The groceries I'd been carrying in one trip, easy. There was strain, sure, but not the kind that worried me. It left room for hope.
All I had to do was get into reasonable shape, learn how to throw a punch, and bring the abilities under control—
"Bleh…"
Just picturing the amount of work, money, and time that would take sent a spike of fear through me, and my body helpfully responded by depositing half a liter onto the lawn.
The lawn, I should mention, was spectacular. Lush, green, almost aggressively healthy. Between Herman's years of involuntary irrigation and my week of deliberate practice, this patch of grass had received more water than most botanical gardens. I was more surprised there wasn't a swamp.
"Dumpling! Bring in the laundry from the line!"
"Of course, Grandma."
I gave my knees a couple of pats and pushed myself to my feet.
Housework was something Herman had genuinely mastered. Everything except Grandma's personal room was his responsibility, and he kept it meticulously clean — which wasn't even that hard for someone who could manipulate water. He'd developed real competence there, a reliable routine, maybe even the beginnings of self-discipline.
So how had everything else gone so sideways?
Yesterday I got chased up a tree by a *chicken.* A chicken. It wasn't until I realized I was clinging to a branch with both hands, knuckles white, that I understood what had happened. The neighbor — Mrs. Pagetti — had brought fresh eggs over as an apology. At least that saved me a few dollars.
After I pulled the laundry in and delivered Grandma her drink, I settled into my room and stared at the walls.
Waterproof posters of superheroes. All of them waterproof, naturally.
It was a day off. No work until Monday, when I had a job interview at the nearby water park — which, honestly, felt like the universe having a laugh at my expense. So here I was, surrendering to pure idleness after a day of what could generously be called training.
The training wasn't going well.
The good news: I wasn't doing any worse than Herman. I had full control over water that had already left my body. A few small tricks, mostly the kind you'd see at a children's birthday party.
And that was more or less it.
The involuntary expulsions — from every possible exit — still happened constantly. My gut feeling was that it tied directly to the fears and self-doubt I'd inherited along with the memories and the body. And fixing that would mean a real therapist, not one of the predatory charlatans who advertised "super-specialized emotional healing" on lampposts. A real super-licensed professional. Which meant money. Which I didn't have.
Physical training had the same problem. Herman had never established any kind of real exercise habit, which meant I had a clean slate to work with — but proper training took proper nutrition. Real food. Protein. Vitamins. Not the instant noodles and cereal that Herman had been surviving on.
I was genuinely uncertain whether Grandma supplemented her diet beyond the whiskey, or if the cats were sharing.
But the thing I needed most — the thing that felt almost urgent — was decent clothes.
If I'd been walking around with visible muscle under the wetsuit, maybe the outfit would've carried its own confidence. But there was nothing there to project. What I wanted was something made from one of the specialized fabrics designed for supers with fluid-based abilities — the kind that flexed and breathed and didn't trap a liter of water against your skin.
Which cost a *fortune.* More than everything else on the list combined.
"Money, money, goddamn money…"
I muttered it to myself, then shoved off the bed, dropped into a push-up position, and started going. Hard. Burning through the anger and frustration and helplessness the only way available to me.
Thirty reps in, my arms started shaking — I'd pushed the tempo too fast. Then my palms hit the water pooled beneath me, slid sideways, and I face-planted with a crunch that set my teeth on edge.
My first instinct was to drive a fist into the floor. I didn't. Scaring Grandma wasn't going to help anything. Instead, I sat back on my soaked, slipping floor and just… sat there.
It would've been funny, if it weren't almost enough to make me cry. At least the body itself seemed immune to prolonged water exposure — waking up every morning already damp would've been miserable otherwise.
I exhaled — long, slow, heavy.
My enthusiasm for all of this had never been exactly burning. Herman had managed to live his life, after all. He'd adapted. But the longer I lived inside that adaptation, the more the despair crept in. His life, my life — I'd stopped being able to separate them cleanly — and all of it felt like a slow accumulation of small defeats.
My half-lidded gaze drifted across the ceiling, down the walls, and snagged on the poster.
Herman's favorite. Of course it was a superhero. The one he'd wanted to become, lying in bed in the dark, whispering it to himself like a prayer. The dream he'd never quite let go of, even as he buried it under layers of fear and resignation.
I hadn't paid much attention to the room's decor before now. I'd been treating it like a place to sleep. But something shifted in me just then, some quiet internal *click,* and I found myself crossing the room toward the poster before I fully decided to.
I ran my fingertips along the edge of it, carefully, the way you'd touch something fragile.
*Grandma's gift. His fifteenth birthday.*
A large, high-quality print with a signature in the bottom right corner. The emotions in Herman's memory came with it — the weight of all the times he'd looked at this poster after something went wrong. All the times he'd repeated the same words to himself until they held.
In the image, a young man stood grinning in front of a scorched building. His costume was simple, understated — a dark blue mask that covered the upper half of his face, nothing flashy. He stood like someone who'd earned the right to. Around him, police officers, paramedics, and grateful residents crowded close. A girl had left a lipstick print on his cheek.
And behind all of them, rising like a monument, stood a three-meter robot with a blue visor that stared directly into the camera.
"Mecha Man."
A real hero. Not a super. Not a freak or a magic-infused fairy who'd been born with power handed to them. Mecha Man was an ordinary human being who had built himself into something extraordinary through nothing but intelligence and relentless effort.
Herman had been his devoted, sincere fan. Not because of the victories. Not because of the list of enemies defeated or disasters averted. Because of the *spirit* behind it. The discipline. The moral clarity. The refusal to stop.
That was what had kept the beaten-down kid moving. The simple knowledge that an ordinary person could become something more.
"You made it, and so will I…"
My quiet whisper settled into the silence of the room. I pressed my knuckle gently against the wall, eyes closed, head tilting slowly from side to side. For me, Mecha Man had never been a personal hero — but the words I was speaking to his image?
I would've said them just as easily to the boy who had lived in this room before me.
"That's right." I opened my eyes. "You made it. And so will I."