Overview

The morning Max's powers arrived, he was thinking about cereal. Not destiny. Not greatness. Not the long arc of heroic potential bending toward its inevitable expression. Cereal. Specifically whether there was enough milk left or whether he was going to have to eat it dry again, which was a deeply uninspiring way to start a day that was, unbeknownst to him, about to become significantly more complicated. His hands glowed. Then the wall was gone. Max is fourteen years old, spectacularly uncoordinated in the specific way of someone whose body has recently changed sizes without consulting him, and now in possession of superpowers so enormous, so enthusiastic, and so completely indifferent to what he actually wants them to do that the city's junkyards have become his primary training facility. Also condemned garages. Also that empty lot on Meridian Street that nobody owns and everybody avoids. Anywhere, essentially, that is already broken enough that one more explosion is a rounding error. The powers themselves are impressive, in the way that a storm is impressive - vast, unpredictable, occasionally beautiful, and genuinely terrible if you're standing in the wrong place when they decide to do something. Max has learned this the hard way. Max has learned most things the hard way. He falls over his own feet with the frequency of someone who has accepted this as a personality trait and is working with it. What Max has not learned - yet - is that the powers and the self-doubt are the same problem. That every time he flinches from his own potential, the energy surges wrong. That control isn't something you achieve through effort alone. It's something that comes, eventually, from deciding you're worth controlling it for. He's working on that part. His best friend is Rick. Rick has no powers. This is stated clearly and upfront because Rick would want you to know he has no powers and is here anyway, which he considers - correctly - to be the more impressive fact. What Rick has instead is an absolutely unshakeable belief in the heroic pose, a collection of motivational speeches assembled from every action movie he has ever seen, and the specific quality of friendship that doesn't calculate whether you deserve it before showing up. Rick shows up. Every junkyard session, every misfire, every time Max's powers do something that requires a fire extinguisher and an apology - Rick is there, striking a pose, saying something encouraging, occasionally falling into a puddle. Rick is, by every measurable standard, a terrible superhero. He is also, by every standard that actually matters, exactly what Max needs. Then there's the girl. She is sarcastic in the precise, surgical way of someone who sees things clearly and has decided that softening the delivery would be doing you a disservices. Together - in junkyards and garages and places where the ground is already scorched - the three of them are attempting something that has no official training manual: turning a fourteen-year-old catastrophe into something that might, on a good day, under the right conditions, with sufficient warning to nearby property owners, resemble a hero. The villain, Dr. Gloom, is doing his best to complicate this. Dr. Gloom arrives in an ill-fitting purple cape and a crooked mask and carries a weapon that is - there is no diplomatic way to say this - a rubber duck fused with a toaster. It squeaks. He presses the button for emphasis during monologues. His master plan is detailed and ambitious and somewhat undermined by the squeaking. He is, in the tradition of great comedy villains, absolutely convinced of his own menace and completely unaware of how he reads from the outside. He is not, ultimately, the real challenge. Max didn't ask for any of this. But then, the best things usually arrive uninvited. Right before breakfast. When you were just thinking about cereal.

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