Some Kind of Hero

Chapter 1

Anya Melendez ran her fingers through her hair in an attempt to straighten it out as she entered the secret base of the Alpha Team, the superhero team she'd been a member of for over three years. She knew she probably smelled a little like sex, but there wasn't much she could do about that at the moment.

She walked into the base's living room to find the rest of her team seemingly waiting for her. Charlie Bates/Sidewinder - the team leader - was sitting on a recliner facing the room she was coming from. Thalia McLean/Artemis wasn't actually in the living room and was instead standing at the kitchen counter beyond it, and Martin Weiss/Frost and Derek Jenkins/Lancelot were sitting on one of the two couches facing Anya.

Charlie was a white man in his mid-30s. He stood 6'1" and had brown eyes and short dirty blond hair. Despite only being the oldest member of the team by a year, he had proven to be a natural leader as well as a fair one. He could be stern at times, but he was never outright mean, and he apologized if he thought he'd crossed a line with any of them. His power - air manipulation - had led him to originally take the name Airbender, but he had changed it to Sidewinder in the interest of not telegraphing his abilities to his enemies.

Thalia McLean was exactly 30 years and one week old and had gray eyes and long black hair in cornrows. At 5'9", she stood two inches taller than Anya. Despite being half-white woman with a Korean grandmother on her mother's side and a Cherokee grandmother on her father's side, Thalia had been born with physical features suggesting a heritage with little to no caucasian ancestry. Her proficiency with weapons bordered on the supernatural, and she specialized in archery and bladed weapons. Despite the cool efficiency with which she could fight, she also had a bit of a temper, something she had been working on for years with moderate success.

The shortest member of the team at 5'5", Martin Weiss was an Austrian-American man in his early 30s with light blue eyes and short black hair. He came from a family whose superpower inheritence was abnormally high. Not all of Martin's powered relatives shared his snow manipulation abilities, but they all had something similar - ice manipulation, water manipulation, temperature manipulation, even the ability to create golems out of ice and/or snow. He was slow to anger, but when something did piss him off, he wasn't one to keep it to himself, even slipping into his native German when sufficiently enraged.

The youngest member of the team at 24, Derek Jenkins was a 5'10" white man with green eyes and short brown hair. His superpower was a purely defensive one - the ability to form armor out of virtually any material without having to worry about its weight.

Anya herself was a 25 year-old woman of Spanish descent with green eyes and shoulder-length strawberry blond hair. Her superpower was reactive adaptation, and her superhero name was Conquistador.

"Is this an intervention?" Anya asked. "Because I'm not an alcoholic or anything like that."

Charlie sighed. "Sit down, Anya."

Anya sat down in the second recliner, her suspicion increasing. As a general rule, the team addressed each other by their hero names and not their real names, even in their own base. It was the same reason they wore domino masks - masks that covered the area around their eyes - at all times.

"You could call it an intervention." Martin said, folding his hands. "We're doing it because we care about you, it's just not because of an addiction or anything like that."

Charlie leaned forward. "We just have a few questions. Answer them honestly and we won't have any problems."

"Madre de dios." Anya mumbled. "Okay, wha-"

"How long have you been fucking Kronos?" Thalia asked, cutting her off.

Anya blinked. "First off all, don't interrupt me." She said, doing a good job of hiding the fact that she was wondering how they knew.