She’d only gotten to class with fifteen minutes to spare, but there were still plenty of seats left at the very back of the room. She set her bag down, placed her laptop onto the little desk mounted on one of the armrests of her seat, and hoped that the screen could serve as a sort of barrier between her and the rest of the world.

The professor was talking to a young man she assumed to be a teacher’s assistant. Soon, that young man called out to her and asked for her name. It was all she could do to stutter through “Emily Wright.” He didn’t comment other than noting it down before moving to the door to take people’s names as they entered.

She hoped that that was as much talking as she would need to do in that class.

Opening a word processor to take notes was easy enough, which left her with some free time.

Somehow she ended up on the front page of WriteIt and, instead of gravitating to pictures of nice animals doing nice animal things, she was staring at a thread that had been bumped to the very top.

You’re a Mask, Now What?

Biting her lower lip, she clicked on the link. There was no harm in looking. The thread had thousands of comments already and it wasn’t like her poking at it would be too strange. She wasn’t being suspicious at all. At least, she hoped.

Most of the post was about contacting the government for help and such, but that sounded a little suspicious to her. There was some good advice though.

Your power will make choices for you. You don’t know what you’ll get, and generally, it will be very weak at first. It will also push you toward a certain kind of morality. You might not be a Hero when you first get your power. There are a lot more levels of morality than you might think. Most people don’t start at the extremes, but somewhere near the middle of the scale. By doing good quests, you can improve your station.

The list goes something like:

Savior

Super Hero

Hero

Do-Gooder

Anti-Hero

Gray

Emily bit her lip. The rest of the information wasn’t all that helpful, but it seemed to point her toward something she could actually do.

Good deeds would help her move away from Villain and toward . . . Gray and so on. She could do that. She had never committed a crime in her entire life. Never cheated, never jaywalked—she even felt guilty when she couldn’t donate a dollar to charity when buying things at the grocery store. Doing perfectly natural things in the privacy of her own room even made her feel bad.