Professor Why's Academy for Extraordinary Youngsters

Heroics 101: Screaming very loudly for inspirational effect

New New Mexico, Alaska itself doesn't have a lot going on. There's a small neighborhood with a few actual houses, and a few more made of shipping containers because apparently if you buy enough cargo you have to buy the container with it. The big attractions for someone like me were the League of Heroes headquarters situated just outside of town, and crucially for me a recently opened school for training new superheroes, Professor Why's Academy for Extraordinary Youngsters. I didn't know much about the professor himself. Rumor has it he got the money to start the school from a rich uncle or something, but the school apparently staffed multiple professional superheroes, and I was absolutely going to pass the entrance examination I knew nothing about and get into the school I knew nearly nothing about, and nobody was going to stop me. I had a pamphlet, a backpack full of red hair dye and superhero paraphernalia, a Hawaiian shirt with a picture of a road flare emblazoned on the back because the company didn't understand my directions, and a dream.

My first impression of the school wasn't necessarily positive. The building itself was constructed mostly out of wood with no windows, next to a pretty standard school gymnasium. It looked like it couldn't hold more than 20-30 students in the whole school, so my odds of having upwards of 50 women interested in me like I expected were out the window. The second impression was better though. In front of the school was a pretty large crowd, and my second favorite superhero, Bearbot 3000.

Naturally, I ran up ready to introduce myself to the Ursine Machine himself, full of hope and dreams and deadly screams as he was, but I was blocked off by a huge crowd of prospective students. These heroes of tomorrow were stifling my opportunity to get an autograph, and I would have none of it! I was about to go Mario on everyone's heads, when a hand reached out and stopped me.

"Don't make a fool of yourself." Said the buzzkill. I turned around to see a tall, lanky kid with dark hair and thick glasses.

"Make a fool of myself? I don't know what you're talking about. I'm Flare, soon to be the greatest hero of all time." I said, proud of myself.

"You're wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, long socks, and flip flops in the middle of Alaska, and it's pretty obvious that you dye your hair that ridiculous shade of red. You're already towing the line."

I didn't have a witty response to that. My outfit was going to be the center of future fashion, but he couldn't have possibly known that. While today I don't condone undue violence, I opted to use force rather than persuasion in this case. I shoved the guy to the ground, and without crying, continued my futile quest to the front of the line.

There's a tier list of superhero success. We mostly gauge it by how big the hero's rogue gallery is, or in layman terms how many villains want to off him. Bearbot came in literally second internationally, which is super impressive for an apparently normal human. Number one, though, was leagues above anyone else. Galactic Mask was an actual alien sent to earth when his planet and the next 3 better options were all destroyed, forcing him into a life on earth. As a kid he was bullied for being bald, purple, and spiky, but he grew up and decided to defend the people of earth from all kinds of evil. It's really moving, especially considering how awesome he would have been as a corn farmer. Galactic Mask can shoot mask beams from his bright red eyes, he can use his flexible squid like tentacles to fly at great speeds, and he can punch clean through a lead pipe, which he did on public access tv to demonstrate the dangers of lead poisoning. What a hero.

The line started to thin out, and I pushed forwards through the crowd of potential superheroes. Some of them were pretty human, but every now and then a superpower really transforms a person. I saw a girl with a plant for head and a walking suit of armor. Poor saps. I wonder what kind of radioactive creature bit them. After a heave, several shoves, and using glasses guy's face as a springboard, I reached the front only to discover why the crowd had thinned to the point that I could push through a few people to begin with. Up front was a sign reading "On break", scrawled in crayon on a sign. If Bearbot was one thing, it was definitely on brand. For a robot with guns and explosives, Bearbot was shockingly kid-friendly. Not that any of this mattered, since Bearbot was away from the counter he was manning, leaving a pile of papers. On closer inspection, these were a pile of applications, with like a 10 page liability waiver attached to the bottom. Superhero schools teach combat and surviving perilous situations, so honestly 10 pages is pretty low for how gigantic it could have been.