It had been almost a month since I got out of the hospital. School had ended yesterday for the Seniors, we didn't need to take finals anymore. I already knew what college I was going to as well, Iris City University. It was only a couple of hours away in normal traffic, and I could always come and visit.

            Lacey had been undecided for the longest time in high school, but she finally settled on journalism. She was going to take online classes so she could land a job at the Empire City Post. She decided that she wanted to keep investigating, which meant she wasn't going to be giving up her hacking skills anytime soon.

             Archer left school early, said he was traveling around the world before starting college, like many students do. We had both broke things off, thinking along the lines of how long distance relationships never work.

             For some reason I hadn't felt as upset about our breakup. He had been my dream guy, crush, obsession since forever. But I seemed to be wary around him ever since I hit my head in that alley. It was like my subconscious was warning me with big red flashing lights whenever I was with him. So I didn't end up breaking down crying on the floor like in Taylor Swift's White Horse music video, nor did I end up trashing his red pickup truck like in Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats.

             Caine's father, the captain of the police force, was convicted of helping a super achieve destruction. It was one of the new felony's brought about by the super revolution. Basically my father had found incriminating evidence against the captain that showed he had helped Tornado out in some way or another, enough to throw him in jail. My father was promoted to police captain in his place, something that made me proud. All his hard work had finally paid off.

             In Iris City I'd be working at a diner part time, living off of a cop's salary didn't leave much in the way of tuition. Somehow I had a feeling that leaving Empire City was my best bet at forgetting everything, and maybe remembering a few things about a certain weekend.

             I was currently packing my bags for the trip over to my new apartment in Iris City, which were all going to squeezed in my newly fixed, bright green bug sized car. I realized that I wasn't packing as many bags as I expected myself to, most of the essential things I needed had already been pre-shipped ahead of me.

             I picked up the Captain America comic that The Marvel gave me for my birthday. It was still a mystery to me how he had figured it out, since I told no one but Lacey. Maybe he was given exclusive information about Empire City residents.

             I wish I knew what had happened to our city's caped hero, no one had seen him in almost a month.

             The first week of his disappearance we were in denial. Maybe he was just taking a break? The second week was when the newspapers and news stations started to take notice. By the third week the city was in a mass panic. We hadn't been without a super to save the day in quite a long time, we didn't know how to survive without one.

             No new supers had decided to move to our city yet seeing as the threat of Tornado still lingered in everyone's minds. Even though he hadn't been seen in weeks either, people were still suspicious.

             When I finally finished packing my last bag to bring out to the car, I sighed. This place held so many memories that I couldn't believe I was actually leaving it behind me. I looked at the now empty walls and floor and tried not to think of the happy memories they contained. If I start getting attached now, I'd never get to Iris City.

             I walked down the stairs and was about to open the door, when my father called me into the living room. I was surprised, he was almost never home during the day, especially since he was the police captain now.

             "Yeah, dad?" I ask quizzically, moving a pillow so I could sit next to him on the couch, "I need to me on the road soon or I'll hit the morning rush."

             "I have something to tell you before you leave, something that I should've told you a long time ago" He sighs and messes with his fingers, a sign that he was nervous.

             "Okay, you know you can tell me anything dad." I say, trying to hide the jumpiness that went through my body when I thought I'd be late for something and that I needed to hurry up.

             He seemed to start talking multiple times, but kept stopping as if he didn't know how to start the conversation. I tried to avoid looking at my watch, or my phone, for the time.

             It was when I started to bounce my leg up and down in a jittery motion when he finally found a way to start, "When your mother died I was set to the task of closing her accounts, paying her bills, settling her affairs, all the things with insurance companies."

             Now that caught my attention. My leg stopped bouncing and all the jitteriness disappeared from my body.

             My dad was not the emotional kind, except for special occasions like mom's funeral or when we had the occasional fight. He used to say that he was titanium and mom was the fire that could melt is rock hard exterior.

             Dad never talked about mom. It was almost an unspoken rule in our house to never talk about her because every time we did, dad would get emotional and either send me up to my room in a sudden burst of anger, or cry into my shoulder like I was the adult and he the child.

             The first time I can remember asking him where mom had gone - being a very immature six year old I hadn't quite realized that I wouldn't ever be seeing her again - he had yelled at me, "She's not coming back! She's dead!" and I had run up to my room, scared of his raw tone of voice. This had been around a week after her death, a week after the battle, so he had just turned to drinking to drown out his grief.

             The next time I asked he broke down in tears right in front of me, which also surprised the six year old me. I had never seen him cry like this, not even at mom's funeral. At her funeral thin tears poured down his face, barely enough to be noticeable.

             He explained to me what had happened, what it meant. I liked to think that that was the turning point in my life, when I really started to take life seriously. I was only six, but I can remember that every event or party I was invited to, the guests would comment on how mature and put together I seemed. To them I was just another little girl who hadn't understood the events of that year, but I understood perfectly well.

             So you can imagine my surprise when he continues is talk about my late mother.

             "I was going through her old contacts and receipts when I came across a hospital receipt from when you broke your arm as a kid. It showed the things that they needed to give you, not much, but they did have to give you a blood transplant. You needed type O negative blood. I'm type AB."

             I suppressed a little gasp. I knew basic biology, blood type was determined by the blood type of your parents. If my father was type AB blood, there was no way that I was O, none at all. If dad wasn't my real father, then who was?

             "I did a little more research through your mother's things, her old contacts and friends. I was hoping that somehow someone could tell me who was your real father was. I wasn't angry with her for being unfaithful, I was too sad to be angry. It was the day afterwards when I finally found something in her old journal, a couple meetings with someone she cited as her source for a project in her lab.

             "She had met with him over twenty times in the three months preceding her pregnancy. Knowing her, I knew she had most likely only betrayed me once. She was a soft woman who would never break her vows like that more than once. So I knew that the meetings had been strictly business the first couple meetings, so I did the rational thing and called her old laboratory.

             "It wasn't until I called that I realized that there was one other person who would know who the man was. There was only one person who she told everything to besides me. Lacey's mother, Cassandra Waters."

             That was a surprise to me, I had no idea that Lacey's and mine's mothers knew each other, or that they had been something of best friends.

             "I visited her, not knowing that she was drinking out her sorrows like I had been in the first couple of weeks. I guess the fact that she was drunk, mixed with her inability to keep secrets, was what got her to tell me who she had been meeting with.

             "Now your mother was almost as obsessed with supers as that friend of yours, Lacey. Even when we got married she'd still talk endlessly about supers like The Avenger. It was no wonder that when she finally got to meet one, that she gave in. It seemed that her mystery credible source was none other than The Avenger."

             I watched him look up from his hands, eyes filled with an emotion that I had never seen in him before. He looked like he had been holding the weight of the world on his shoulders, only to get it lifted off when he told me what had most likely been loitering in his mind ever since he found it out.

             I, Arabella Jones, was daughter of none other than a super. But not just any super, The Avenger.

             "I understand if you're mad at me, or, hell, even if you refuse to call me dad anymore, but - "

             "No," I cut him off, "You're still the father who helped me with skinned knees whenever I fell off of my bike. Still the father who helped me with my math homework and still the father who put up with my comic book obsession, even though they are almost extinct. You'll always be my dad, no matter what. That other guy was just a gene donor, he didn't stay around to raise me, did he?"

             My father and I let out an awkward laugh and hugged for what felt like hours. I could tell that even though I had made the decision to move away for college, we would now be closer than ever.

             It was another hour before I finally left. We had sat on the couch, catching up with each other's lives, bonding. It seemed that the news that I wasn't just plain, old, normal Arabella Jones brought us closer together, not farther apart.

             When I finally made it to my car, my phone alerted me to a news break. When Lacey got a hold of my phone a year ago, she got an app that would alert me to any breaking news stories, particularly super activity. Her parents took her phone often, grounding her for hacking into a secure work computer or something similar. 

            I look down and opened the notification. Maybe The Marvel had finally come back to save the day. Or maybe Tornado was back and wreaking havoc around town. Instead of seeing the expected super related news story, I saw something far different:

 Lost billionaire found

 Get the exclusive article here!

                        Chase Carlton is alive. The Empire City resident was found by two fishermen on the coast of one of Japan's many islands three days ago. This is almost two and a half years since he was missing and presumed dead following the crash of their private plane somewhere in the North China Sea.

                        Carlton was a regular tabloid presence and a fixture in the Empire City club scene. Shortly before his disappearance, he was acquitted of assault charges from a highly publicized altercation with the paparazzi.

                       Carlton is the son of Empire City billionaire, Harrison Carlton, who was also on the plane, but now officially confirmed as deceased.

                        In an exclusive interview with one of his nurses we learned that Chase was "being treated by the best and the brightest of Empire City" and "only aloud visitors from immediate family members." We have also learned that Chase is now awake and his mother is visiting with him.

                       Now the one question remains, what happened to Chase while he was missing? What horrors did Chase Carlton endure in the two years that he fell off the radar?

            I couldn't contain my shock. Chase Carlton, multibillionaire playboy, Lacey's secret crush, missing Gold boy of Empire City, and overall rich boy gone bad.

            Chase Carlton was back.

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