I trained the neural network to generate superhero names, based on the list from this site. I thought the database was going to be way too small, but the network proved me wrong.
Speet Stank
Red Fart
Mister Man
Rad Food
Sapgirl
Woop
Ann Man
Boomss
Boark II
Supperman
Superbore
Slonk
Lid Man
Green Hooter II
Starm Surper
Shartar
Goons
Nana
Rider Farm
Captain In
Redink
Wolver Man
WizlerSupperman!
I’m not sure if he is a good cook, or if his powers increase through eating…
Nana. I guess she’s just this little old granny? Pinching criminals’ ears and lecturing them all the way to jail?
…actually, I might read that. I’d at least pick up Issue 1 to see what was going on.
I totally want comics about a supergrandma now.
Like, superheroes have kids, right? So where are the older generations of people with powers? How does aging affect them when you have them?
Like, say you have telekinesis. Well when you get to be like 80 do you occasionally miss and slam the teacup against the wall because it didn’t quite clear the door frame or something?
I want a story about this, but one where the old superhero (or supervillain!) is still effective despite occasional random aging related weirdness in their power use.
The costume shop ladies don’t age.
Tenebris, Lady of Shadows, does.
It makes for complications. Her powers flicker, the darkness which so gracefully slips in to hide her sometimes faltering, letting the light in, most recently causing her adversary of yesterday evening to get a decent look at her and gasp, “you’re a granny?”
She’d hit him with her handbag, but the damage was done.
“I need a mask,” she tells the shorter, rounder lady as the taller one turns to fish plump donutlike confections out of the sizzling cast-iron skillet.
The other lady’s eyes go wide, her face displaying shock and a slight hint of otherwise well-hidden dismay. Tenebris has never bothered with disguise in her costume design, going entirely for an artful silhouette and trusting her shadows to obscure her identity. “Your powers?” she asks.
“Stutter on occasion. Bastard got a look at me, the silly fucker in the green cape and tights?”
The lady nods. “I’ll have a little word with him next time he comes in. Now, for your costume … “
She brings out the sketchbook in which she and her wife have drawn almost fifty years’ worth of costumes for Tenebris, and Tenebris pages through, remembering. There’s her first one, simple and flowing, and subsequent designs that form a more elegant, tailored shape once Tenebris had gotten up the courage to ask for it; ones with integrated padding and then ones without it once she no longer needed it, her transformation over the years from an amorphous shadow to a specific shape and image. In all of them, her face is uncovered.
She’s always had the shadows to do that.
The taller lady comes over with a plate. “Donuts?” she offers, and Tenebris takes one, biting into it happily.
They spend the next hour or so fussing over mask designs. The costume ladies bring up masks from the basement, a huge assortment, which Tenebris enjoys trying on until she realizes she’s never seen anybody wearing any of these, and the costume shop ladies never break secrecy with any of their customers, so that must mean the people these masks were created for are dead.
Before she can stop herself, she bursts into tears.
Within the space of a moment she’s surrounded on both sides, arms wrapping around her and holding her tight, letting her cry.
It’s long, and ugly, and somewhere in the middle of it she finds words and they come spilling out, telling the ladies how her powers are faltering and her knees are creaking and she’s pretty sure she’s getting arthritis in her fingers and she had trouble remembering an address last week and she’s worried she’ll get Alzheimer’s like her mother did, and how bloody long ago it was that first time she called the shadows to disguise her and they came and she hid inside them while she pissed all over her boss’s car, back then when she could still aim, and she’s getting old and she’s going to die someday and she’s scared.
Eventually she runs out of steam and sits there, an old woman sitting in a huddle with two younger women who’ve been around far longer than she has. It occurs to her to be embarrassed; the pair of them are ageless and, she assumes, deathless as well.
The taller one speaks. “You will live,” she says, “as long as you do. All you get control over is how you live. I don’t know how dying compares to watching people die, but we all do what we can with what we’re given.”
Tenebris draws in a deep breath, looks over the assembled pile of masks, and points. “Make me one like that one.”
When she leaves the shop most of an hour later, there’s a man just coming into the alleyway. He startles when he sets eyes on her, and recognition dawns in her just as it mirrors itself in him. “Hey!” he says. “You’re the—”
She reacts with a speed she’ll crow over later. He doesn’t learn; her handbag thwacks him over the head just the same as it did last time, and she reaches out and grabs him by the ear. “Yes,” she tells him, “yes I am, and if you breathe a word of it to anyone I will hunt you down and drag you to the nearest police station by your ridiculous green tights and watch them make you call your mother—” instinct makes her add that last; he’s definitely that young, and she isn’t sure if he even has a mother but judging by his reaction he does— “and tell her you’ve been mean to old ladies.”
Threat delivered, she whirls and dramatically exits the alley in the broad light of day, hiding a twinge from her knee, and heads back homeward, triumphant and musing over the irony of her superpower juxtaposed with the lines in her head.
Do not go gentle into that good night; rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Superheroes designed by neural network
Published
wupacing 