The New Neighbors

The construction had been going on for three weeks before anyone at Hyperforce noticed it was for them.

Not for them exactly. Next to them. The empty lot beside their headquarters — the one that had been empty for as long as anyone could remember, occupied mostly by weeds and a single shopping cart that had achieved a kind of permanent residency — had been cleared, leveled, and was now host to a building that went up with the speed and confidence of something that had a great deal of money behind it.

Captain Gridlock noticed it first, in the sense that he was the one standing at the window when the banner went up.

"Huh," he said.

Pixel Pop floated over, mid-bite on a breakfast pastry. "What."

"Building next door's got a sign."

She squinted. The banner was enormous, professionally printed, and featured six figures in matching uniforms standing in a formation that suggested a photographer had spent considerable time getting the lighting exactly right.

THE CHAMPION ALLIANCE — PROTECTING THE CITY, ELEVATING THE FUTURE.

Pixel Pop read it twice.

"Okay," she said. "That's a lot of words for 'we're heroes too.'"

"Elevating the future," Gridlock repeated, in the tone of someone testing whether a phrase got worse the more you said it. It did.

Crimson Nova came down the stairs holding a mug of something that smelled aggressively of cinnamon. "What's everyone looking at?"

"New neighbors," Gridlock said.

She looked. She read the banner. Her expression went through several stages — confusion, recognition, and finally something that looked a great deal like dread.

"I know that logo," she said slowly.

"You know them?" Pixel Pop said.

"Everyone knows them. They're the team that did the charity gala last year. The one with the—" Nova made a vague gesture that somehow conveyed an entire evening. "The fireworks. The drone show. The mayor cried."

"The mayor cried at our events too," Pixel Pop pointed out.

"Our mayor cried because Glick's toaster set off the sprinkler system during his speech," Gridlock said.

"...okay, fair."

By that afternoon, the building was finished.

This was, by any reasonable standard, not possible. Buildings took months. Buildings took permits and inspections and the slow accumulation of scaffolding-related arguments with the city. This building had gone from foundation to fully operational glass-and-steel headquarters in under a day, complete with landscaping, a flagpole, and a sign that lit up.

Hyperforce stood on their front steps and looked at it.

"That's not normal," Gridlock said.

"Maybe they have a Glick too," Pixel Pop said.

"Nobody has a Glick," Nova said. "There's only one Glick. That's like — a law of the universe."

As if summoned by the use of his name, the basement door creaked open behind them and Uncle Glick emerged, holding a bagel and what appeared to be a small, humming gyroscope.

He walked past all three of them, opened the front door, looked at the new building for exactly one and a half seconds, said, "Hm. Nice gutters," and went back inside.

The basement door creaked shut.

The three of them stood in silence.

"That's it?" Pixel Pop said. "Nice gutters? There is a fully formed superhero headquarters that materialized in one afternoon next to our house and Glick's only comment is about the gutters?"

"He's mid-project," Nova said, with the weary patience of someone who had learned to read Glick's priorities. "Until the gutters fall on him, they don't exist."

"That's so unhelpful."

"Welcome to Hyperforce."

The Champion Alliance held their grand opening at six o'clock that evening, and the entire street showed up.

Hyperforce watched from their living room window, because their living room window had, through an accident of architecture that nobody had planned and everybody now regretted, an unobstructed view of the Champion Alliance's front steps.

There were news vans. Three of them. There was a red carpet — an actual red carpet, rolled out across the sidewalk with the kind of precision that suggested a team of people whose entire job was rolling out red carpets. There was a banner that said WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD in a font that had clearly been chosen by someone with strong opinions about fonts.

And then the team walked out, and the crowd did the thing crowds did when they were genuinely excited rather than politely interested, which was get loud.

"Oh no," Pixel Pop said, pressing her face against the glass. "Oh no, look at them. Look at their uniforms."

The Champion Alliance wore matching outfits — not matching in the sense of we agreed on a color scheme, but matching in the sense of a team of professional designers spent six months on this and it shows. Sleek. Coordinated. Each member's uniform had individual touches that somehow made them feel more cohesive rather than less, the way a well-designed sports team looked like six different people who all clearly belonged to the same idea.

At the front of the group, waving to the crowd with the easy confidence of someone who had never once in his life worried about whether a room liked him, stood a man in white and gold.

"That's their leader," Nova said. "Solaris. I've seen him on magazine covers."

"Magazine covers?" Pixel Pop's voice cracked slightly.

"Multiple magazines," Nova confirmed. "He has a skincare routine that gets discussed in interviews."

Gridlock, who had been silent up to this point, made a small sound that might have been a growl.

Solaris stepped up to a podium — an actual podium, with a microphone, professionally set up — and the crowd quieted with the kind of immediate responsiveness that suggested they'd been told what to do by someone with a clipboard.

"Citizens," Solaris said, and his voice carried with the warm, practiced ease of someone who had given this speech, or speeches very much like it, many times. "We're honored to call this neighborhood home. The Champion Alliance exists for one reason: to be the heroes this city deserves. Professional. Reliable. Always ready."

The crowd cheered.

"We've heard," Solaris continued, with a small smile that managed to be both warm and slightly knowing, "that we have some... interesting neighbors."

The crowd laughed.

Pixel Pop's jaw dropped. "Did he just—"

"We look forward to getting to know them," Solaris said smoothly, and the way he said it somehow made getting to know them sound like a euphemism for something else entirely, though nobody could quite say what. "The city is big enough for all of us. We're sure Hyperforce does... important work."

The pause before important lasted exactly long enough.

The crowd laughed again — not cruelly, just the easy laugh of people who'd heard a joke they understood, and Hyperforce stood at their window watching their entire neighborhood laugh at a joke that was apparently about them, made by a man with a skincare routine, in front of three news vans.

"I hate him," Pixel Pop said.

"We don't know him," Nova said.

"I hate him anyway."

By the next morning, it was everywhere.

The Champion Alliance had, in their first twelve hours of existence in this neighborhood, appeared on the local news (twice), been the subject of a trending topic, and had already — Pixel Pop discovered this with the specific horror of someone scrolling through their phone at breakfast — released merchandise.

"They have a clothing line," she said, staring at her screen. "Action figures. A — Nova, they have a cereal."

"What?"

"CHAMPION CRUNCH. It's got little marshmallow shapes of their logo." Pixel Pop turned the phone around. The cereal box featured all six members of the Champion Alliance in heroic poses, the words NOW WITH 30% MORE VICTORY in the corner.

Gridlock stared at it for a long moment.

"What does victory taste like," he said quietly.

"Probably cinnamon," Nova said.

"This is insane," Pixel Pop said. "They've been here for one day. We've been doing this for—" She paused, doing the math. "I don't actually know how long. A while. And nobody's ever made us a cereal."

"We don't need a cereal," Nova said, though she said it in the tone of someone who was beginning to wonder if they did, in fact, need a cereal.

"The mayor retweeted them," Pixel Pop said, scrolling further. "The mayor follows us and he's never once retweeted anything we've done, including the time we saved the entire city from the 16-bit guy, but THIS he retweets—" She held up the phone. It showed Solaris shaking hands with a small child, both of them smiling at the camera with the kind of synchronized warmth that suggested at least one rehearsal.

"Okay," Nova said, taking the phone away gently. "Okay. Let's not — let's not spiral about cereal."

"I'm not spiraling."

"You're holding the phone very tightly."

Pixel Pop looked down. She was, in fact, holding the phone very tightly.

She put it down.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm totally fine. We're fine. We do good work. The cereal doesn't matter."

A beat.

"Do you think it's a good cereal, though?"

"PIXEL."

Gridlock found Glick in the basement that afternoon, surrounded by what appeared to be the disassembled components of several household appliances and a whiteboard covered in diagrams that made sense to absolutely nobody, including, possibly, Glick.

"Hey," Gridlock said.

"Mm," Glick said, not looking up. He was holding a screwdriver in one hand and what looked like the inside of a microwave in the other.

"You've seen the new building, right? Next door?"

"The gutters."

"Right. The — yes. The gutters. But also the team. The Champion Alliance."

"Mm."

Gridlock waited for more. More did not come.

"They've got a cereal," Gridlock said.

Glick paused. He looked up, genuinely interested for the first time in the conversation. "What kind?"

"I — I don't know, Glick, that's not the point—"

"Because if it's got marshmallows, that's a real commitment. Marshmallows require a whole separate production line." Glick went back to the microwave innards. "Respect, honestly."

"They're better than us," Gridlock said. It came out flatter than he intended — not angry, just tired, the specific tiredness of saying something out loud that you'd been avoiding saying even to yourself.

Glick didn't look up, but something in his posture changed slightly — a pause in the screwdriver's motion, brief enough that someone who didn't know Glick might not have noticed it.

"Better at what?" Glick said.

"At — this. Being heroes. Look at them. Matching uniforms. Sponsors. They've got a building that finished construction in one day, Glick. They've got publicity photos where everyone's smiling at the same time. We've got—" Gridlock gestured at the basement, at the chaos, at the sentient jam jar that had been sitting on a shelf for two months and had, as far as anyone could tell, developed opinions. "—this."

Glick set down the screwdriver.

He looked at Gridlock for a long moment — actually looked, the way he rarely did, because Glick's attention was usually scattered across fourteen things at once and rarely landed fully on any single one.

"You know what's funny," Glick said. "I've met a lot of teams like that."

"Like the Champion Alliance?"

"Sure. Different names, different decades, different cereals. But the shape's the same. Matching uniforms. Sponsors. Press releases before the press release is even necessary." Glick picked the screwdriver back up, turning it idly. "Good teams, some of them. Capable. Professional."

"So they ARE better than us."

"At looking like heroes? Probably." Glick shrugged. "That's a real skill. I'm not knocking it."

"Then what's the difference?"

Glick was quiet for a moment.

"I'll let you know when something weird happens," he said.

And went back to the microwave.

Gridlock stood there for a moment, waiting for Glick to elaborate.

Glick did not elaborate.

"That's not an answer, Glick."

"It's the answer you're going to get for now," Glick said cheerfully, not looking up. "Go away, I'm busy. The toaster's evolving and I want to be here for it."

That evening, Hyperforce gathered in their living room — which, they had all silently agreed without discussion, now needed new curtains, because the view of the Champion Alliance's glowing, perfectly lit headquarters was simply too much to look at unobstructed.

Nova had made tea. Nobody was drinking it.

"Okay," Pixel Pop said, breaking the silence. "Are we — is this bad? Should we be worried?"

"About what?" Gridlock said.

"About — being replaced. Or made irrelevant. Or—" She gestured vaguely. "I don't know. They're better at the parts of this job that people see. The interviews, the photos, the — the cereal. What if that's actually the important part and we've just been... bad at it the whole time?"

Nova was quiet for a moment.

"We've saved this city," she said slowly. "More than once."

"I know. But did anyone notice? Like — really notice? Or did we just sort of... fix it, and everyone went back to their day, and nobody made us a cereal?"

"I don't think the cereal is the metric, Pixel."

"I KNOW the cereal isn't the metric, Nova, but it's a really VISIBLE metric and right now it's the only one I can think about—"

Gridlock, who had been silent through most of this, set down his mug.

"They challenged us," he said.

Both of them looked at him.

"What?" Nova said.

"Came by an hour ago. While you two were arguing about cereal." He pulled a card out of his pocket — heavy stock, embossed, the Champion Alliance's logo in gold foil. "Solaris dropped this off personally. Very polite. Very—" Gridlock searched for the word. "—smiley."

Nova took the card and read it.

"A friendly interteam exercise — a chance to get to know our new neighbors! Tomorrow, 10 AM, the training facility. We look forward to it. — The Champion Alliance"

"A friendly exercise," Pixel Pop repeated.

"That's what it says."

"They want to test us."

"That's what it is."

Pixel Pop looked at the card. Then at the glowing building next door, visible through the window in all its architecturally precise glory. Then at Nova. Then at Gridlock.

"Are we going to be terrible at this?" she said.

Gridlock thought about it honestly.

"Probably," he said.

"Are we doing it anyway?"

"Obviously."

Pixel Pop nodded slowly, the particular nod of someone steeling themselves for something they already suspected was going to go badly.

From the basement, faintly, came the sound of an explosion, followed by Glick's voice yelling something that might have been "IT WORKED!" or might have been "NOBODY PANIC," it was genuinely difficult to tell which, and possibly both.

The three of them looked toward the basement door.

Then back at each other.

"Ten AM," Nova said.

"Ten AM," Gridlock agreed.

Pixel Pop picked up her tea, looked at it, and drank the whole thing in one go like it might help.

It did not help.