When Heroes Rise

Bella

A/N- Hey, um, this is RRRREEEEAAAALLLLYYYY long, shoo... work with me here. The good news is, there are some action scenes!!! Yay!!! Now read.

My feet trudged on the pavement on my way to school. Rose and I always walk together, talking about random things because, at the moment, the only interesting thing about our lives was the hero part, and we couldn't talk about that randomly on our way to school at 5 in the morning. The only people out on the streets at this time in New York were people with no lives (such as high school students) and listen to your every word. Today, though, Rose was oddly quiet. Every once in a while I'd try to make conversation, and she'd just give me a short answer and go back to thinking.

School had been going on for about a month now, and i'd introduced Rose to my friends, the hero ones. And I had also begun to make new friends, who, strangely enough, mostly had powers. I know, weird, but we supers need to stick together, right? They each had weird pasts, running away from their country, probably like I had. I could tell they didn't know much about the super world. I was sure they were unaware that I knew about their powers. I hadn't even told Rose about it, at least not yet.

I had a few classes with each of them. There was English with Angel, Angie(new), Emily(old) and Kirsten(new). After was Chemistry with Rose(kinda new), Will(old) and Wren(new). Then Gym with Nathan(old), Nina(old) and Addison(new). And Italian with Kirsten, Fawn(new) and Kalea(kind of new), which wasn't fair because Fawn is Italian. The last one with friends was Calculus, with Nathan, Will, Alexander(old), Vin (old), Spencer(old), Nina and Emily.

When the bell rang signaling the end of school, I walked out of class and went to my locker. Slinging my backpack over my shoulder, I turned to see Nina behind me. I jumped, startled.

"Whoa!" I said. "You scared me!"

"Sorry." Nina said. "We're gonna go to Masks. You wanna come?"

"Who's going?"

"Me, obviously, Em, Nate, Vin, Will, Spencer and Alex. Possibly you and Rose."

"You in?" I turned to Rose, who had come up behind me.

"For what?" She asked. "I don't know what Masks is."

"Bella, you haven't shown her yet?"

I looked down. "I was going to give her a hero tour this weekend."

Nina sighed and rolled her eyes playfully, looking at Rose like, What are we going to do with her. "Well, now you have to come." She grabbed Rose's hand and pulled her along.

I followed them downstairs to Vin's locker. His locker was almost exactly between all of ours, so it was the place we all met. Across the hall was Emily and Nina's lockers, they were twins. Em was just closing her locker and making her way across the hall. Alex, Vin, Will, Spencer and Nathan were already there. We stood in a cluster as Emily joined us.

"Are we all here?" She asked.

"Yep!" Alex replied.

"Let's go" Vin said. We turned and walked out of the building, taking a left and walking a few blocks to La Café.

"Ummm, I've been to La Café before." Rose said, confused. "This is hardly new"

Em smirked and opened the door. "Oh, I think you'll change your mind."

We all walked to the back of the restaurant. Rose looked a bit skeptic, but she couldn't leave because I was on her left side and Emily was on her right. Nina was ahead of her, and the boys were behind us discussing the latest news in the hero world. Nina got to the end of the hallway, to a door most people would think was just a supply closet. The weird thing about it, though, was the handle. Instead of a usual lock, there was a keypad. Nina typed in the code, 7225, and the door slid open. Behind the door was a staircase dimly lit by neon lights that said MASKS over and over again. Our weird little parade walked down the steps, Rose gaping in awe.