Rising Star

The Internet is a great place to confess things. Nobody knows your name or face. You can say what you want and nobody knows it's true. And if you say something stupid, or don't want to admit something, you never have to face it again. The Internet is very easy to avoid.
I haven't even started up my computer for close to a week. It started off with a crummy little cold (no extra special symptoms, but it looks like I don't have any super resistance to disease) and then there was a family movie night and then stuff. It's easy to find excuses to not log on. But I might as well say this, since I need to think it out and there's no way I'm writing it in a diary people could find. This is as close as I can get to anonymity to protect everyone involved.
There's a new super in Key Largo. He's going by St. Elmo, and he got a sliver of air time in the local news for leading a couple boats to shore during a storm. So far, it looks like he can fly and make green fire. Crackly, electric green fire that doesn't melt things. You see where I'm going with this. I know who he is. There is an awfully short list of suspects who attend my school, live in the room directly above mine, and come from Key Largo. I'm not friends with this guy or anything. But I know his name.
This puts me in a peculiar position. I can bust this guy. If he ever does something stupid while wearing his green cloak, I can make him answer for it in the real world. It would be wrong to out him, of course. It would piss him off, make the super community see me as a dangerous snitch, and put the media microscope on supers attending my school. He's nobody important. His powers don't look awfully dangerous. There is absolutely no reason to share his identity with anybody at all. But I could. I don't want to be someone's watchdog. I don't want to judge him; I don't think I have the right to. What do you do when you've stumbled onto another person's secret? This might be how Dani feels. If she knows. I don't know if she knows, and it's really awful to depend on someone's goodwill or obliviousness to keep a very important secret.
Do I let him know that he got caught? He was being awfully sloppy, letting the green fire reach all the way to my room. But I've made messes with my powers practice before. The guy's gotta learn how to deal with it on his own. Besides, he might see it as a threat. Blackmail or something.
Do I pretend it never happened? That might be for the best. But if he starts getting twitchy around me, I might have to tell him that I know. Besides, I might be missing out on a great resource. We could help each other out. Alibis, tips, costume help. But what if he wants to blackmail me? I need to talk to his friends and the people he's dated. No way am I going to risk this without knowing more about him.

That Funny Taste

Still on a boil water restriction. You know that saying that a watched pot never boils? This might just be me being paranoid, but I think it takes longer for water to boil when I'm around. Is that possible? No, it's just me being paranoid. My cryogenesis can't reach all the way across the kitchen. I'm jumpy around water when other people are around. It's the easiest way to get caught out.
I wonder if this happens to other cryogenetics. I mean, there's no big book of superpowers. There have been a handful of studies, but they're all science gibberish and mostly focused on how much damage we can do to bystanders. There's no cryogenetic support group. I can talk to Myke about superhuman stuff, but I can't ask him if stuff suddenly tastes like peppermint for no reason. Even if I ask another cryogenetic, I probably wouldn't get answers. It's not like we all have the same origin or power level, and some have secondary powers so that really throws off the equation. If something goes wrong with my powers, I don't know if I would even know. For all I know, the peppermint thing is a side effect of a lump of ice building in my brain like a tumor. Or something. I've sworn off all homemade frozen goods for a while. Just in case.

Blogging My Secrets Away

What are the odds that this blog will inadvertantly reveal my identity to the internet at large? Pretty slim, actually. I fudge dates, names and locations. You really think there's a place called Coral Pines? I'm not linking this site to any personal business, I'm not posting pictures of my cats or my room, and I'm definitely not sticking my real name up here.
I don't think anybody's really invested in figuring out my secrets. If the creepy green flash was some sort of a data download, then I don't have any more secrets, and if it wasn't then I think I'm still under the radar. Either way, this hasn't touched my public life yet. I make a point of not befriending budding investigative journalists, and not blithely confiding in my roommates. If Dani knows or suspects I'm a superhuman, she's polite enough to keep it to herself. I haven't really done anything worth watching yet, and I'm just a low-level cryogenetic who can barely make icicles on her fingers. If I had a valuable/dangerous talent, I would censor myself a bit more carefully, but the odds of anyone ever tracing this back to me are vanishingly small.
Regardless, if I ever make it to the big times, I'm deleting everything I ever wrote here. Celebrity comes with its disadvantages and dangers, and I don't want the media trawling through my posts to find something to throw in my face. Worst case scenario, I wind up important enough to score a tech-savvy nemesis who uses internet mumbo-jumbo to figure out who I am. If I can't get Myke to shut him up/shut him down, I guess I go public then. There are public supers in my town. I could do it. Suck it up, beat the living daylights out of whoever outed me, be a role model to all the little cryogenetics out there (and damn do they need one), do whatever hero business I can do without being bulletproof, and possibly shoot myself in the face after a week of constant public scrutiny, losing friends, worrying about my citizenship and possible military service, hearing classmates whispering about me behind my back, the government sniffing at my public records, media vultures shrieking about supers invading their precious little schools, and my family ... I don't want to think about my family. No, going public is not an option for a long, long time. I don't have as much to lose as some people, but I still want to be in control of my life. I don't want cryogenesis to be the first thing people think of when they hear my name. I don't want to live in a little gated community of supers, I don't want this to change my career, I don't want Killer Frost knocking on my door to cut down the competition. I almost understand why Mind Master tried to erase the memories of everyone in Stockport. Just to live a normal life for a little bit longer.

It's Not The Black Death, People

According to the major news sites, nothing improves a crisis more than a colored map. Florida is orange, whatever that means. Geez, you'd think this is the Ebola Virus the way people are reacting. Nobody's puking blood. This isn't the end of the world or the end of superheroes. Granted, poor Velocity's going to be in traction for about a year, but she'll probably be okay. It could have been a lot worse. Nobody in that building died either, thankfully. I'd send Velocity a get-well card, except she's probably already got a pile of them big enough to wallpaper the hospital three times over, and she probably won't be able to read them until they take her off the morphine anyway. So I'll just send good wishes in her direction, and hope there's a telepath out there who can pass them on. I hope she's going to be okay.
My campus is in full-on panic mode. Which isn't too different from your average Saturday night. I don't think anyone here's gone to the hospital from the flu yet, except for Lydia, and she's a hypochondriac anyway. She's fine. This isn't much worse than the time the dining hall served the beanbird-contaminated snow peas last year and took out half the campus. I have never been more grateful that I don't eat my veggies. People were throwing up things that chirped, for crying out loud.
The president of our school has issued an email, which basically boils down to "This is not a zombie outbreak! Don't shoot infected people on sight! Wash your hands! Take some vitamins!" Wow, really helpful. Every single person I've encountered today told me to stay hydrated and get some rest. Except for Dani, who just breaks into impromptu renditions of Monty Python's 'bring out your dead' skit every time she sees me. Which is every five minutes, since she's my roommate. I'm about to strangle her.
Nobody on my campus has been power-outed that I know of. Except maybe me. I don't know if Dani knows. The ice chips on the carpet were melted by the time she helped me flip the mattress, and I put the sheets through the dryer before she saw them, so maybe I got away with it. But my hair was still wet in the morning, and I'm not sure if there was a noticeable amount of ice left on me by the time I made it to the couch, or if she could even see it in the dark, even though she had to have been really close to put a blanket over me. She doesn't act like she knows. She hasn't made any ice puns or blackmailed me or anything. How can I ask her if she knows without revealing everything if she doesn't? Today I casually mentioned something about trying to break the fever with ice cubes. Yeah, that's plausible. God, I suck at this secret identity thing.

Big Brother is Watching YouTube

Since someone may or may not be monitoring my every action on this computer, I have been having fun with the Internet. I spent some time reading an online copy of the Communist Manifesto, browsed a couple of celebrity-stalker sites, learned how to build a tiny robot, researched the giant squid exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and watched all the Japanese pop music in my YouTube favorites list. Might as well keep Big Brother off balance. Or drive him insane.
I briefly considered using another computer to write and post my blog entries, but really there's no point. It's like buying a reinforced steel door for the barn when the rampaging robot already stomped the entire building flat. Besides, if someone HASN'T figured out all my secrets, I don't want to inadvertently reveal everything by posting from a library computer where anyone can look over my shoulder. Paranoia is so much fun!