Free The Games of Supervillainy (The Supervillainy Saga Book 2) by C. T. Phipps

from her.
    Mandy looked at me. “My family is a ticking time bomb of heart-disease, diabetes, Alzheimers, and Parkinsons. Yours also has quite a few problems.”
    “Medicine is very good at treating those thanks to the efforts of Red Crescent, Red Cross, and the rest of the Parahuman-Medics.” They were superheroes who didn't fight crime and God bless them for it.
    Mandy picked up her fork again and tapped the waffles a few times. “There's also the fact your sister is a born superhuman and your niece. My uncle was a born superhuman. He could see into microscopic spectrums. That means we both have the recessive super-gene.”
    I stared at her. “You're superphobic?”
    “No!” Mandy said, opening her mouth in horror. “I mean, any children of ours who inherit such powers would be subject to discrimination and have to go to—”
    I stared at her, not at all pleased at the way she was choosing to handle this. “Given I grew up with plenty of children who had superpowers and were glad to be alive, including close family, you should probably just admit you don't want to have kids.”
    Mandy looked down, a guilty expression on her face. “No, I don't.”
    “Is it because you don't want to go through the process?” I asked, hoping that was the case. “If so, there are countless children out there who need homes of a multitude of races.”
    I'd actually been hoping to adopt at least one or two children in addition to any she wanted to have. Hopefully, super-ones. I had experience with super-children thanks to my kid sister and babysitting my niece. There was a lot I could do to help them through the worst of their adjustment period.
    “Children, are just...not my thing,” Mandy said, shrugging. “I'm just not the mothering type.”
    I was silent after that.
    “Is this a problem?” Mandy asked, looking at me. I could tell she was worried our marriage would suffer.
    If not disintegrate.
    “No,” I said, lying. “It's not a big deal at all. I'll just move on.”
    And I did.
    But I would still sometimes dream of a family of my own.
    “ I see ,” Cloak said, his voice in my mind as those memories faded away. “ How mundane .”
    “Yeah,” I said, feeling myself slowly wake up.
    It was time to face the Ice Cream Man.

Chapter Seven
Where I Meet Falconcrest City’s Newest Hero
     
    Waking up, my head hurting like someone had hit it with a hammer repeatedly, I contemplated how knock-out gas could affect someone intangible.  “Okay, that's complete horse-shit. I was intangible, there's no way that gas should have entered my lungs. It should have just passed through.”
    “Are you questioning the rules of magic with science ?” Cloak asked, sounding like he’d been down this road before.
    “ It's not a question of magic versus science. It’s a simple fact of logic.”
    “ Then how do you breathe when you're tangible ?” Cloak pointed out.
    Thinking about that, I frowned. “You suck.”
    “ This is partially my fault, I admit,” Cloak said. “ I was the Nightwalker for eighty years. That gave villains a very long time to field test their various means of getting past my various powers. Gas was one of my more well-known vulnerabilities .”
    “ So, because you were one of the world's best superheroes, I'm shit out of luck ?” I thought back at him.
    “ No one ever said being a superhero was easy.”
    “Thankfully, I’m not a superhero.”
    “So you keep insisting.”
    It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the spotlight being shined on me. I had a headache and it only took me a second to realize why, I was suspended upside down. All of the blood in my body had probably rushed to my head an hour ago. Furthermore, my hands were tied behind my back. 
    On the stage in front of us was some sort of weird high-tech pylon with a crystal that seemed out of place in the opera house. It was plugged into the stage electrical grid and making all sorts of weird noises.
    “ An M-Wave suppression field