Notes on Not Ready to Swallow Oblivion
Sep. 28th, 2018 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
somethingdarkerPoking at Not Ready to Swallow Oblivion again made me think about the ways the characters surprised me and continue to surprise me. These are things that just kind of came together in the depths of my mind and then didn't surface until I got to the right point for them to go into the text.
Since this isn't a fic that has gotten comments or has had a lot of in progress discussion with other people, I want to write down the things I currently know about the characters. Well, think I know about the characters. Usually, I just save my discussions with other people as notes in case I need the reminders. That hasn't been an option for this monster of a story.
The series started with me wondering how Warren could be a villain given what we have in canon. My first attempt was writing it from Warren's POV, and that produced "Stealing What Little I Can" which really wasn't Warren being a villain. I'm very happy with that story and glad I wrote it, but the process of doing so told me that I couldn't start with Warren.
So I started with Layla and her friends locked inside the girls' locker room at Sky High right after Homecoming. The locker room came from me thinking about my own high school and how difficult it would be to find a place to imprison people. Our locker rooms only had one door (I'm sure that's not up to current fire code standards). There was a small office, four toilet stalls, a shower room about half as big as most of the classrooms, and the changing/locker area. I'm assuming that Sky High's space is a bit bigger. I don't remember how the ducts/ventilation worked, so I made that up entirely.
I'm not 100% sure why Warren went with the girls' locker room. It may actually have been because he thought it wouldn't smell as bad. I went with it because I could handwave Magenta and Layla finding supplies for dealing with at least one period each without having to ask Warren for that.
Chances are good that Warren's minions were using the boys' locker room for showering up until they managed to build something else. Which kind of makes nonsense of the idea that Boomer's booze would still be there three years after Homecoming, but why not?
At any rate, I wrote Layla's POV in "Intent on Its Angles" first. I wrote the Warren chapter that comes before it in the posted story after I'd written all the rest of the story. When I started, I thought that Layla's chapter would be all I needed and that it would be 2-3K words.
So... About that...
Some of what I wrote for Layla, I moved into Magenta's chapter and Ethan's. I also wrote a lot of stuff that I deleted, enough that I have a dedicated document for those paragraphs. I mined some of that later on, but most of it was noodling rather than story.
I wrote Magenta next and then Ethan. I wrote Zach because I didn't want to try to write every moment of the escape. I felt that he was the one of the sidekick quartet that I understood least well. Will having a chapter was an afterthought because I could tell that I needed to wrap things up somehow.
Warren got the seventh chapter because I didn't want to discard what I'd written even though it was mostly noodling intended to figure out Warren's mother and her powers. I wanted to be quite clear that the way she used her powers was abusive to Warren. I also wanted to give some hints as to why misusing a power like that would be so tempting while raising a child.
Then, I got enough feedback to know that I had to write Warren and what happened at Homecoming as the first chapter. That worked better than I thought it would. I think it was mainly that I'd pulled together enough details about how this version of Warren worked to feel confident writing him.
Then "Would Feed on Ashes" happened. After that, I kept jotting things down with the intention of getting them out of my head and then finding that I couldn't stop. I have two other spin offs from this that I've managed to stop writing. I'm avoiding opening the documents for fear of getting swallowed again.
The things to remember about these characters is that they all lie to themselves and to each other, that they all misinterpret things about each other, and that they change as time passes. Each of them is right and wrong about a different set of things regarding each of the others.
Also, my understanding of the characters changed. Sometimes things I thought were true turned out to be things they were misreading about each other or lying to themselves about. Some things about the characters happened because I wanted to see how having different backgrounds, personalities, and apparent options would affect them, going forward. What would they give up? What would they keep? What lines would they cross or not? How would they view everything that had happened? Would that change over time?
There’s a reason that these stories are very light on the plot and heavy on the characters. I kept wanting to see who these people would become if I reached into the story and tweaked something. The main thing I found was that the mix of the central five characters was actually pretty damned toxic. Adding other people after the escape attempt failed had some-- limited-- potential to make things better, and I think that ending contact with Warren was a huge help for the quartet in "Intent on Its Angles."
Major POV characters:
Ethan - Sky High canon looks like it happens in a place very like our world. A history of superpowers ought to change things like the Atlantic slave trade radically, but that would make a world that's more different from ours than what the movie showed. So, in writing Ethan, I assumed historical chattel slavery and the civil rights movement and systemic racism. That made his reaction to being a prisoner and to what Warren wanted from them different because he understood the cost on a very fundamental and practical level. That's also why he's the only one to betray Warren by talking to people opposing him. None of the others could have done it.
Years of doing that, though, have left Ethan pretty cold blooded by the time of "You Cannot Fold a Flood." He has an ethical center, but he's also weighing the cost and benefit of every decision. When he crosses a moral/ethical line, he knows it and has decided that doing it is worth the cost.
For some reason, all versions of Ethan that I write are history geeks. Sky High: A History must not exist. If it did, he'd have read it six times the summer before freshman year.
Layla - At the beginning, Layla has academic knowledge of how things can go wrong for her and her friends while they're prisoners. Her father, being the sort of person he is, explained all about Stockholm Syndrome. She's very determined to do her best, but she really doesn't understand it in her bones, not the way Ethan does.
I suspect that other supers with powers that involve manipulating things outside of themselves could expand their powers the way that Layla does. It's just not a thing that they're taught to do or encouraged to do. I'm pretty sure that pushing boundaries like that is actively discouraged instead and that any records of it having happened got thoroughly buried. Canon seems to put powers into neat little boxes. Canon also shows a certain suppression of creativity around powers; there's nothing at all in what we see that's about figuring out ideas for things the sidekicks can do with their powers. Almost as if doing that might lead in an undesirable direction…
The Layla in “Intent on Its Angles” will probably still end up doing many of the experiments that the Laylas in the darker branches do, but she’ll have people to talk to about them, and she won’t be working under the same pressure. It’s just that she knows now that she can do a lot more than she always thought she could.
Layla in the darker branches is more difficult to pin down. She has a vast range of powers when she kills Warren’s mother but is also aware that she’s lost her own moral center. She wants it back, and the only way she knows to find it is to not be able to do the things she can do and is learning to do. Her progress tends to be three steps forward then two steps back then a lot of rationalization that wouldn’t necessarily sound sane to anyone else if she said it out loud. Her father is right when he realizes that she’s confusing not using power with not having it. He doesn’t articulate the fact that, out of the quintet, Layla is the only one who doesn’t realize that she could give Warren orders and have him bow. If she admitted that, she’d have to take responsibility for her power, for her decisions, for her murders.
She was always, in the darker branches, going to end up trying to take over the world. After all, have you seen who’s currently running it? She’s just lost some parts of herself along the way that she’d have been better off holding onto. She and her friends are probably going to win, especially if she can give them more power, and that will be better for some people, possibly most people. But…
Layla’s not corrupt, but she’s sure as hell fucked up, and look at who she’s depending on for rationality and stability. Not a set to inspire great confidence. The best I can say is that none of them want to hurt anyone unnecessarily. Their definition of ‘necessary’ just might be broken.
Magenta - I wanted one of my four initial characters to come from a background that had already involved learning that the world could be cruel. I didn’t want to pile that onto Ethan because, well, why on earth would he be the one coming out of foster care? If he hadn’t been the only black character, maybe, but he is. Layla’s family situation was set, and Zach’s parents being friends with Will’s parents is pretty strongly implied by canon.
Magenta hasn’t been abused by any of her foster parents, but she hasn’t had stability in that direction. Her expectations before starting Sky High were low. She’s the only character for whom being in Hero Support opened options instead of closing them. She’s the only one of the sidekicks who could do the things she does because she starts from a different spot than they do. She’s already lived at other people’s whim and already survived having her choices limited. Losing the things she hoped for hurts, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter her reality.
Because of her background, Magenta can keep Warren from reaching the parts of her that she considers most vulnerable. She still ends up attached to him-- He gets his psychological hooks in deep, but she channels everything through being pissed off at him rather than letting her anger hide beneath a facade of affection the way the other three do. Warren’s power over her and her friends isn’t something that changes her view of the world. She doesn’t need to break herself over that.
Magenta doesn’t think that what Warren did to her is worse than what he did to the others because she ends with more of what she started with than they do. Warren hurt her, but Warren didn’t surprise her particularly. Magenta understands Warren better than she understands Zach or Layla or Ethan, and she understands the three of them pretty well. She’s still wrong about a number of things.
Magenta’s view of the world is extremely pragmatic and focused. She deals with now and prioritizes the people she cares about. She has ethics, but they’re pretty thoroughly buried because they’re a handle on her that an enemy (or Warren) might use. She’s not invested in being either cruel or kind.
The years with Warren limited Magenta in a lot of ways. She didn’t let herself be distracted by hobbies or outside interests. She put all she had into managing Warren and keeping Barron Battle at the right distance from Sky High. After “You Cannot Fold a Flood,” she suddenly has options again. Ethan, Layla, and Zach need managing so that they don’t damage themselves or the kids, but they’re less dangerous that way than Warren was, and she doesn’t need a screen of anger between herself and them.
I think she knew that Warren had chosen not to act against Layla. She may have influenced Warren on that. She was certainly in a position to make sure that he didn’t find other supportive connections and doing that would be in character for her. If Warren stopped needing the four of them, they were all going to suffer because most of what they had came from their influence over Warren. Ethan and Layla wouldn’t leave the kids, and Warren wouldn’t let the kids go, so all the paths forward required either keeping Warren or killing him and his father and a lot of other people.
She wasn’t going to let herself care either way. Now that Layla has stepped out of the shadows, Magenta can let her compassion emerge. It was always there. She just didn’t let it change anything she did before.
Magenta absolutely would have set off that bomb if she’d had a chance soon after their escape failed. She’d probably have jumped off the edge of the island right when she asked Warren to let her, too. I don’t think that lasted, but that would have let her reclaim some agency and release her anger at the universe for screwing her over. She wasn’t actually angry at Warren right then. She was simply trapped.
I think she also had the clearest idea of how living as Warren’s sidekicks was going to play out. She could do it. She just didn’t want to have to.
Warren - Warren can kind of be summed up by a comment from Karios which was something about Warren obviously having choices and consistently choosing the worst option. He starts out completely unwilling to risk himself or even to inconvenience himself beyond a certain point. That changes over time, but he remains a pretty fundamentally terrible person. The fact that him being the way he is comes from him having been abused explains but doesn’t excuse it.
I think that Warren was and is simply desperate not to be alone. He wants to survive but not being alone is his second absolute priority. Protecting the Homecoming kids is tertiary. He’d say it was his first priority all the way through, but it’s a lie. He probably believes it. He believes a lot of things about himself and about the world that aren’t true.
His priorities about the kids come through in the earliest stories because there are things he won’t do to protect them from his parents. There are things he also can’t do, but there are a lot of things he could do and doesn’t. He’s completely capable of coming up with a plan to protect them that could work.
He also really could have sent the other four home after a day or two if it had been about keeping them safe instead of just keeping them.
He didn’t 100% understand the long term price that the sidekick quartet will end up paying, not at the beginning, but he quite likely would have gone ahead with what he had chosen to do even if he did understand. He doesn’t really start regretting anything until he begins to realize what Layla could do.
His love is, as Magenta puts it, a shitty, stalkery thing. It’s as close to real as he’s ever going to get or give in terms of loving peers rather than children. Warren considers it real because he desperately wants to have that.
Zach - Zach was the character I felt least comfortable writing which is saying a lot since I had serious reservations about writing Ethan and Warren. I simply wasn’t sure how to find an interesting angle, a way that he was unique. I finally found him picking up pieces after the escape in “Intent on Its Angles” and grasping desperately for survival in “Would Feed on Ashes.” He’s the one of the four who was most helpless and least prepared for what happened to them. In canon, he’s incredibly (and over-the-top) self-confident about his power and his value as a person. I chose to take that as being at least half real. Some of it was bravado, of course, but not all of it.
I didn’t realize how badly damaged Zach was until I wrote “You Cannot Fold a Flood.” Even in “Locked with a Twisted Key,” I didn’t quite see how deep it went. Zach knows what happened to him. He saw it happen. He just put it aside, buried it deep because it wasn’t safe to be angry or to hate Warren. I had kind of edged around the idea in Zach’s chapter of “Intent on Its Angles,” but I hadn’t fully grasped it-- In that chapter, Zach thought that Warren didn’t want the parts of Zach that Zach valued most. That didn’t come up in the next few fics, so I thought maybe Zach had been wrong, but I think he was right.
He’s just not getting those parts of himself back. They weren’t the only good parts of him or the parts that defined him for the other sidekicks, but they all had to do with things he hoped for. Warren took as many hopes from Zach as he did from Magenta. It’s just that Zach had never known, never realized on a visceral level, that he could lose those things.
Layla and Ethan (for very different reasons) didn’t have the same sorts of hopes to lose, so they didn’t notice. Magenta may have noticed, but it wasn’t something she could do anything about. From her point of view, Zach had to play the hand he’d been dealt. Short of killing them all, she couldn’t do anything to change it.
I have some vague ideas that Zach’s glowing might edge sideways into some other power that none of them recognize because they haven’t encountered the right circumstances yet. Possibly something about interdimensional gates? Time travel (since I keep having characters mention that it might help)? Who knows? Certainly not me.
I think, though, that being the only one whose powers didn’t evolve hurt Zach, too. He felt like he’d failed. He may have realized, eventually, that the organizational things he does in the darker branches are a kind of superpower in as much as none of the others could manage them. Running a place that size with absolutely everything having to be imported is a huge deal and not something that most people could do well.
He’d also spent enough time with Layla’s father to realize that information and education were tools that people without powers could use to level the playing field a little bit, so he’s the one who spent time learning about building bombs and making the buses work and, later, how the island was constructed. That probably is also why he can allude to The Tempest when talking to Windy Endicott. I don’t think he read that before Homecoming.
I’m not sure how observant Zach became as a Jew, but I do think that he went that direction because it was a bit of who he used to be and of his connection to his family that he still had and could build on. In the text, he uses it as a way to measure how far Warren’s protections go which, in turn, means that he was aware before then that anti-Semitism was a thing that he would encounter in life. That didn’t surprise him, and that doesn’t fit entirely with Ethan’s view of Zach as a privileged white boy who’d never had anyone question his value/right to exist. I think that Zach had less insulation that way than Ethan thought while still being really damned vulnerable.
I just also don’t see how you get a world that looks that much like ours without both World Wars. Zach might have been fourteen and fairly self-absorbed, but that’s a bit of history that he wouldn’t forget even if he didn’t have to worry about it abruptly becoming life and death relevant while he was walking down the street.
Minor POV characters:
Jim Williams - I needed one of my initial set of characters to have a fundamental but intellectual understanding of what being the prisoner of a supervillain could mean. Layla’s father seemed like the best bet since we got enough canon to know that he didn’t have powers. Making him the sort of person who would set up support groups and talk to his daughter about risks she might face was an absolute necessity. Making him edge more toward the survivalist side of preparation? I didn’t plan that. I just kind of reached the point of realizing that, from his point of view, the entire human species-- both those with powers and those without-- have been living on top of a supervolcano ever since powers first emerged (whenever that was). He’s just the sort of person who doesn’t stop trying to mitigate a problem through preparation, planning, and communication. He’s also completely not a ‘Fuck you. I’ve got mine’ sort of person. He will turn back to try to help stragglers.
He’s kind of not well adapted for long term survival in the world he lives in, but Will is right when he comments that Mr Williams is more useful for the sort of fight that’s happening, post-Homecoming, than any of the standard superheroes are. Most supers have a small toolkit in terms of how they can respond to fights. Mr Williams knows how to improvise.
It’s kind of like, if you take away Superman’s powers, he’s just a guy, but if you take away Batman’s stuff and even his money, he’s still got his primary tools-- his mind and his body-- and the body is really just a tool for his mind. Superman, de-powered, will keep going and will manage something, eventually, but he’s going to be at a disadvantage relative to people who’ve never had powers but are in the same situation. Batman, stark naked, will already have a list of priorities and contingencies because being clever and paranoid and studying things are all things he’s needed in order to survive.
Jim Williams has never had Bruce Wayne’s resources or physical abilities/training, and Jim’s particular priorities are skewed differently enough that he’s focused on psychological survival and on minimizing losses in the face of a disaster that he hopes won’t come but fears is inevitable. I suspect that a lot of his approach to things gelled after Layla was born, at the point when he suddenly had someone in his life who was more vulnerable than he was. It must have been truly terrifying because he had to have already realized the ways in which he himself was vulnerable (I’m pretty sure that the support group stuff started before Layla came along).
He could have focused entirely on protecting himself and Layla, but he generalized it out. His daughter had a better chance of survival and of happiness if people around her survived. I suspect, too, that some part of him recognized that focusing entirely on Layla would mean that if-- when-- he failed, everything would fall apart.
And he did lose Layla. He kept going anyway because she wasn’t the only vulnerable person he wanted to protect. Out of all of these characters, I’ve got the most admiration for Jim, Ron, and Magenta. They all keep on keeping on.
Ron Wilson - When I started writing Will and Ron in the branches where the escape failed, I realized that Ron wouldn’t work as the joke he was in the movie, and I started thinking about what he did with his time when he wasn’t driving a school bus. There are some big gaps built into his work days. He could do pretty much anything. I decided that he studied and took hands-on classes in things like carpentry during school hours. Ron probably had someone from Wayside who mentored him the way that he mentors Will.
Ron’s got to be a good actor. Ron’s got to have a sense of humor and an understanding of how people-- particularly teenagers-- think and react. He’s being truthful when he tells Will that he doesn’t know how to fight. Ron’s been through Sky High’s Hero Support program and probably had to learn a bit then, but he hasn’t used it or tried to find a way to practice/improve during the intervening years. Some of that is that it would have drawn attention from people who might assume he was planning to make a career as an unpowered vigilante, but I think most of it would be him deciding that it wasn’t a practical use of his time. If he has to fight a super hand-to-hand, he’s already completely screwed.
Will - Given that this Will never made it to Sky High during Homecoming, he feels very strongly that he failed his friends, his parents, and his teachers. He’s probably told Ron about how Gwen got the Pacifier, but I doubt he’s told anyone else, and I doubt he’s forgiven himself for it. He probably doesn’t blame himself for the villain breakout because Gwen wasn’t necessary for that to happen, not from any logical angle.
Will, in all branches, is a lot more stable and ethical than his friends. He had to cope with loss and guilt, but he also had help. I think that, even without Ron, there would have been some adult staying with him, possibly not anyone he’d known before. Ron just pushed Will to look more at how to do things that wouldn’t work just by smashing/breaking the problem. Will’s still going to be good at dealing with the sort of Gordian Knot problems that need carefully applied violence, but he’s aware that not all problems can be addressed through force.
Will’s ethics are going to end up nuanced due to the competing pulls on his time. He wants to help his friends, but most of the time, that has to be low priority because there’s not a lot he can do directly. Both Wayside matters and being a superhero fighting supervillains are urgent.
In most branches, however, Will doesn’t hit anything that really forces him to compromise his priorities. He gets hurt pretty badly by losing his friends and his parents and having his world upended, but he doesn’t hit anything that really destroys his sense of integrity. Guilt over the Pacifier probably comes near, but he’s in a position to recover. Will’s not better or psychologically stronger than his friends. He’s not morally superior; he’s just luckier.
The key thing for Will is that he understands that, if he’d been captured at fourteen, too, he’d have ended up with only bad options exactly the way his friends did. He knows that those choices crossing moral/ethical lines don’t make his friends utterly evil, but he also knows that each compromise makes the next one hurt less. He doesn’t blame them, but he also isn’t assuming that removing Warren or getting them off of Sky High will magically change who they are and how they solve problems.
Will has no interest in fame/publicity because he hasn’t forgotten what Ron said about how the two of them were too well known to be able to do a lot of things. Will realized at some point that the chaos meant that neither of them actually were that well known any more. People were falling through new informational cracks. I expect that Will is very careful about hiding his identity when he’s using powers in obvious ways. He probably maintains more than one set of civilian papers and has caches of money/supplies in a number of places all over the world.
Jim Williams would also have had a pretty strong post-Homecoming influence on Will. His ideas about how to survive are different from Ron’s.
Non-POV characters:
Barron Battle - My assumption, based on Steve Stronghold’s reaction to seeing Battle’s yearbook photo, is that Battle was extremely destructive. Canon doesn’t specify his powers, but there’s some indication that powers can be hereditary. Will’s parents expect him to either be superstrong or to fly, after all, and don’t seem to consider that he might end up with some other power. The counter-example is Layla whose mother communicates with animals while Layla works with plants. Those are both ‘nature powers,’ but they’re not at all the same thing in any other way.
At any rate, I think Battle’s powers are fire based and similar to Warren’s. I didn’t really ever state that because I wanted to leave open options in case I needed something else for plot purposes. Possibly Battle has more than one power.
I didn’t see much likelihood that the prison breakout would lead to an abrupt change in who controlled the world, so I knew that Barron Battle wouldn’t suddenly be emperor of anything. If everyone was that scared of him, it had to be either because people assumed he would rule the world or because people couldn’t predict/control him or avoid him. Making him a wandering and impulsive force for destruction made some sense, but I also needed him to have enough buddies and enough brains that he’d be too much trouble to pursue and destroy when everyone else was at war over specific territories.
(The supervillains who escaped prison weren’t all allies; they probably fought with each other as much as with heroes and government and civilians. It’s just that there were a lot of them all at once, too many all at once.)
I figure that most people-- supers and civilians both-- regarded Barron Battle as unstoppable but limited in scope. Fighting him was a lot like trying to fight a tornado rather than taking shelter and waiting for it to pass. He leaves death and property damage in a broader swath than a tornado does, but there’s still stuff and people left behind. Trying to resist him makes the cost higher because it just makes him stay longer. He loves fighting a powerful opponent every bit as much as he loves seeing things blow up.
Battle is a terrible, terrible person. He’s a better parent than Sylvia Peace, but Sylvia was kind of the worst. Battle’s capable of loving people, forming friendships, and returning loyalty for loyalty, and he’s good to those people (up to a point). He doesn’t include many people in his circles of protection. Just working for him isn’t actually all that strong a protection, especially for anyone who doesn’t interact with him directly and regularly.
Gwen, Stitches, and Maureen - My assumption in this AU is that Royal Pain emerged triumphant from Homecoming only to find herself suddenly a minnow in a very large pond. Gwen was reasonably clever, so she survived and did well for herself, but it was disappointing for her and for her foster father. I suspect that her taking up with Barron Battle was a very calculated move to borrow a bit of his power/status and leverage it into something that served her. I also suspect that Maureen was a calculated decision that covered two things-- First, Barron Battle had stayed loyal to Sylvia, the mother of his only known child, and Gwen wanted him loyal to her. Second, Stitches needed a distraction so that he didn’t keep trying to run Gwen’s life.
I see no version of the relationship between Gwen and her foster father that isn’t utterly fucked up. Stitches really has to be an obsessive asshole in order to get Gwen to Homecoming and Royal Pain. Also, Stitches has actually raised a baby. That means he knew how much work even one baby is. There’s zero chance that he didn’t realize that Gwen wouldn’t have resources to care for that many babies. He either didn’t care or had plans for how to make them immediately useful. I suspect the latter given the carseats because getting that many must have cost an arm and a leg and required placing a special order. If the babies weren’t valuable, there wouldn’t be carseats.
I haven’t made many decisions about Maureen apart from her parentage, name, and age. I’m not 100% sure why I added her, but she made sense at the time. People have kids, planned, unplanned. It happens. Making Gwen her mother had more to do with not wanting to create yet another OC, but Gwen and Barron Battle also made some sense to me because she’d find him useful and he’d find her attractive.
I just think that it had to be weird to have twenty four kids all the same age and then just one roughly six years younger. Being an only child isn’t terrible; being one child in a creche isn’t terrible. Combining the two? Not so great for anyone. The Homecoming kids had the weight of numbers to help them view their status as normal and better.
Sylvia Peace - I deliberately changed Warren’s mother’s first name to be different from what I used in my other Sky High stories because I wanted a clear line in my own head. Laurel Peace is a competent parent who actually does have her son’s interests at heart. Sylvia is a hot mess.
In order for her not to have taken over the world before canon, I had to make her fearful and not all that practical. She had to be the sort of person who addresses immediate and obvious problems with an out of proportion response that causes more problems down the line. I think that she realized, at some point, that there were things she didn’t understand how to manage but that she couldn’t bring herself to trust other people to do better unless she had control of them.
And, if she had control of them, they tended not to do better because she was afraid to let them make decisions.
I think she genuinely did love Barron Battle. She probably also loved Warren. She was just selfish and scared and uninterested in working very hard. I just had to make her pretty thoroughly messed up for her not to be able to keep Barron out of prison or even to think about changing her name and moving to a different place. Zach was not wrong that disappearing beyond Jetstream’s ability to track her should have been trivial given Sylvia power set.
Windy Endicott - I realized in the middle of writing Barron Battle’s visit to Sky High, that he couldn’t talk to any of the sidekicks privately. I just couldn’t make it work in any sensible way. I also couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t check up on them to make sure they were what Warren said they were. Warren might be wrong and might be putting himself in danger. So I created Windy. I was very cranky about needing to because it meant coming up with a name and a set of powers. Every power set feels cliched at this point.
When I created Windy, I was feeling like I had too many onscreen male characters. That’s why I made her female (that’s also why Warren has a baby sister rather than a baby brother). I started with the assumption that she was just a trusted minion and then realized, when she asked how damaged Warren was, that she was Barron Battle’s friend, a person he could trust and who actually cared about Warren because Battle cared. Battle having a friend like that made me feel as if him protecting Warren and his sidekicks, even when it wasn’t strictly convenient, might be more believable.
Windy is the relationship that isn’t necessary for Battle’s career/reputation or driven by sexual attraction or blood connection. Windy’s loyalty and competence signals that Battle’s not 100% unreliable and violent. He’s still a villain and a person the world would be better off without. He’s just more human.
Her having met Warren's father in prison isn't particularly reasonable in any facsimile of our world, but her being in the same supervillain prison actually is. There can't be that many that are equipped to deal with powers on that level. I never needed to know how they became friends and allies, so I'm still not sure. Possibly they went to school together? Possibly friends of friends of friends who just found common interests? Maybe they were part of a string quartet or a rock climbing club together? Who knows?
I'm not sure if Sylvia Peace ever had a chance to put compulsions on Windy. If she did, that would make Windy not figuring out how to kill her make more sense. Then again, Windy's clever, but she's not particularly creative, and Sky High seems to discourage students from diversifying the ways they apply their powers. Zach might be being unfair to Windy in as much as he and his friends spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to kill Sylvia without making it obviously murder.
I don't know if Windy has a long term partner during any part(s) of this series, but I thought that her not being sexually/romantically into men fit well enough as just a detail that Magenta would know. That’s also why I threw in the stuff about Zach being aware of her being sensitive about her ability to glide not being true ability to fly.
Groups:
Ethan's family - I had Ethan's parents divorced with shared custody simply because I had too many families with parents who married and stayed together forever. If I'd been thinking, it probably would have been Zach's parents, but it only occurred to me after I'd written about Zach’s family. I know a lot of people whose marriages have ended in divorce, and many of those folks have kids. Growing up, I knew a lot of kids whose parents had split up. It's a thing that happens as a normal part of life.
With both Zach and Ethan, I added siblings because canon gave me too many only children. (Although I suppose there's nothing to say that Layla doesn't have younger siblings or much older siblings or that Warren doesn't.) I'd known that Ethan had a sibling, but Trish didn't solidify until I realized that I needed a hook for Wayside to connect to Ethan. A sibling made more sense than a parent. Also, more supporting characters means a wider range of responses. Trish escaping Zach's goons made more sense than Naomi managing it. I also liked the idea that Ethan's parents-- someone's parents-- had tried to talk him out of Sky High. I wanted Ethan to have a pretty solid relationship with his parents even though they're not always on good terms.
Zach's family - There's zero in canon that indicates anything about Zach's family apart from him having expected to come into powers. Making his family Jewish just kind of happened. I was aiming for his parents to be definite about being Jewish without being particularly observant. That was partly because I know a lot of families like that and partly because the more observant I made, them the more details I was likely to screw up.
Zach got two younger sisters because I wanted one at the right age that he’d actually remember her being a baby and have been old enough to change diapers and to understand the cloth/disposable arguments. Seven years between him and Naomi is kind of a long time, so I’m assuming that Zach wasn’t planned but Naomi and Sarah were. Zach’s sisters came along at a point when his parents were more secure, financially, but still had to be cautious about budgeting. I kind of suspect that being ready for a second child was a big milestone for the family, something that Zach picked up on without ever analyzing it.
Wayside - Wayside grew out of my attempts to make Ron Wilson a person rather than a joke. Ron, as presented in canon, is possible, but I still find him kind of inexplicable. The pieces don’t go together right. Also, the Sky High universe is a really terrible place for people with small powers and for people with no powers who’re too close to people who have them. No one ever suggests sending Will or Layla, both pegged at Power Placement as having no powers whatsoever, to a normal school, so I assume that kids with superpowered parents have to go to Sky High (or a similar school) for Reasons, probably some sort of legal requirement.
I have zero idea how Wayside will respond to Layla or how Ethan knowing about them but backing Layla will shake out. Wayside isn’t aimed at improving the world or, at least, wasn’t before Homecoming. It’s just a mutual protection thing. The people running it assume that they can’t change anything big about the way things are. Their policies have always been aimed at hiding and avoiding trouble. They don’t extend their mutual aid much beyond their in-group. I don’t think that members of Wayside are fanatics or that they disdain civilians. Pre-Homecoming, Ron’s bit of things-- recruitment and training-- is probably the most organized part. ‘Training’ mainly means helping people learn life skills they haven’t previously had access to and helping them practice not saying things that will out them or even make people suspicious.
Wayside isn’t so much secret as discrete. It’s likely that the civilian governments have noticed that siphoning off of unpowered family members and that various supers know how to find their own unpowered relatives so they can spend family holidays together. The supers just assume that it’s only their relatives doing it, just a few people. The civilian governments really just care about tracking potential dangers. There’s probably the occasional crackdown, and it’s the sort of thing that could torpedo a political career, but it’s more the equivalent of being an undocumented white immigrant to the US from, say, Canada than it is of being black in the pre-Civil War US.
And, after Homecoming, the civilian governments have much more urgent concerns than a bunch of super adjacent people who aren’t doing anything. Some agencies might actually try to recruit from and/or cooperate with Wayside, but that will depend on specific people in those agencies seeing how Wayside might be useful and is more likely to start with seeing individual members as useful.
I think that that insularity chafes on some members of the network and that that will combine with Will and Jim Williams and Ron to push for change. Of course, pushing for change means Wayside is more likely to conflict with the emerging Sky High contingent. That conflict becomes more likely the longer Layla (all four of them, really, but mostly Layla) remains isolated because there’s more time for Wayside to forge connections to other groups.
I still think Layla and company in “You Cannot Fold a Flood” will win because of the terrifying levels of power. They’re just going to have to negotiate at least as much as they dictate. Most of the things that Layla’s likely to dictate have to do with not murdering people and treating the planet better in terms of things like waste disposal and storage. It’s simply that her response to people who do things that displease her is likely to be brutal. Somewhere along the line, she got the idea that killing people gets results.
The Homecoming Kids at Sky High - I really didn’t want to try to figure out which canonical characters Warren kept or to make up new characters. Ethan, Layla, Magenta, Warren, and Zach actually do think of them as individuals. I just couldn’t juggle that many people without adding tens of thousands of words. Right now, all of the branches end short of the point when they’re going to be asserting their opinions in ways that might actually make the canonical characters pay attention. There is likely going to be a disconnect, in most branches, between the ethics the kids have been taught is right and the things their foster parents actually do. Without figuring out who each child is, I can’t guess how they’ll react, either individually or as a group.
I thought that shuffling the baby names made a lot of sense, both as something Warren could do to hide Josie and as something that would let each kid grow up without being strangled by who they used to be. The kids will likely be able to figure it out once they come into powers because they’ll be able to look at who was at Homecoming and what those people could do. I suspect that none of the sidekicks asked Warren to tell them who was who or tried to research identities. They could certainly have identified some of the kids, but I think that at least one of the four would have understood that knowing would put the kids in cages.
The kids have been raised to be family to each other and to work as a team. Some of them may end up going their own way for one reason or another, but a lot of them will stick together and act with a shared agenda.
The Homecoming Kids that Royal Pain Took - I suspect that only some of these kids get happy endings. The ones Wayside found probably did better. I never figured out exactly what Gwen and company did to take care of all of those babies-- hundreds of them. That’s a lot of diapers and formula and immunizations and…
Any of these kids who survived will have been isolated from the others, so they’re not the same sort of cohort/team threat that the kids who grew up on Sky High are. The world is full of small teams of supers and of solo supers. They’re not going to matter much in terms of absolute numbers.
Sky High - I’ve made the assumption that Sky High is not the only high school that trains supers. It’s far too small, even if supers are a fraction of 1% of the world population. I could see it being regional-- say all of the midwestern US? Some of this is that so many of the kids live close enough to each other for group homework. Canon doesn’t indicate that this particular town/city is special in that regard.
I’m handwaving the tininess of the group at Power Placement. There had to be multiple sessions or multiple days of testing. I understand why the movie wouldn’t bother setting that up; it’s the same reason that Harry Potter’s first year at Hogwarts has less than a dozen Gryffindores-- The story doesn’t have room for more named characters.
My high school had about 600 kids, total, and it was small compared to my daughter’s high school which 400-ish per grade. I’m assuming that Sky High was bigger than my school because the building looks bigger and because of the number of school buses that seem to be involved. Ron’s estimate about how many people attended Homecoming still leaves most of the student population home for the night.
Since this isn't a fic that has gotten comments or has had a lot of in progress discussion with other people, I want to write down the things I currently know about the characters. Well, think I know about the characters. Usually, I just save my discussions with other people as notes in case I need the reminders. That hasn't been an option for this monster of a story.
The series started with me wondering how Warren could be a villain given what we have in canon. My first attempt was writing it from Warren's POV, and that produced "Stealing What Little I Can" which really wasn't Warren being a villain. I'm very happy with that story and glad I wrote it, but the process of doing so told me that I couldn't start with Warren.
So I started with Layla and her friends locked inside the girls' locker room at Sky High right after Homecoming. The locker room came from me thinking about my own high school and how difficult it would be to find a place to imprison people. Our locker rooms only had one door (I'm sure that's not up to current fire code standards). There was a small office, four toilet stalls, a shower room about half as big as most of the classrooms, and the changing/locker area. I'm assuming that Sky High's space is a bit bigger. I don't remember how the ducts/ventilation worked, so I made that up entirely.
I'm not 100% sure why Warren went with the girls' locker room. It may actually have been because he thought it wouldn't smell as bad. I went with it because I could handwave Magenta and Layla finding supplies for dealing with at least one period each without having to ask Warren for that.
Chances are good that Warren's minions were using the boys' locker room for showering up until they managed to build something else. Which kind of makes nonsense of the idea that Boomer's booze would still be there three years after Homecoming, but why not?
At any rate, I wrote Layla's POV in "Intent on Its Angles" first. I wrote the Warren chapter that comes before it in the posted story after I'd written all the rest of the story. When I started, I thought that Layla's chapter would be all I needed and that it would be 2-3K words.
So... About that...
Some of what I wrote for Layla, I moved into Magenta's chapter and Ethan's. I also wrote a lot of stuff that I deleted, enough that I have a dedicated document for those paragraphs. I mined some of that later on, but most of it was noodling rather than story.
I wrote Magenta next and then Ethan. I wrote Zach because I didn't want to try to write every moment of the escape. I felt that he was the one of the sidekick quartet that I understood least well. Will having a chapter was an afterthought because I could tell that I needed to wrap things up somehow.
Warren got the seventh chapter because I didn't want to discard what I'd written even though it was mostly noodling intended to figure out Warren's mother and her powers. I wanted to be quite clear that the way she used her powers was abusive to Warren. I also wanted to give some hints as to why misusing a power like that would be so tempting while raising a child.
Then, I got enough feedback to know that I had to write Warren and what happened at Homecoming as the first chapter. That worked better than I thought it would. I think it was mainly that I'd pulled together enough details about how this version of Warren worked to feel confident writing him.
Then "Would Feed on Ashes" happened. After that, I kept jotting things down with the intention of getting them out of my head and then finding that I couldn't stop. I have two other spin offs from this that I've managed to stop writing. I'm avoiding opening the documents for fear of getting swallowed again.
The things to remember about these characters is that they all lie to themselves and to each other, that they all misinterpret things about each other, and that they change as time passes. Each of them is right and wrong about a different set of things regarding each of the others.
Also, my understanding of the characters changed. Sometimes things I thought were true turned out to be things they were misreading about each other or lying to themselves about. Some things about the characters happened because I wanted to see how having different backgrounds, personalities, and apparent options would affect them, going forward. What would they give up? What would they keep? What lines would they cross or not? How would they view everything that had happened? Would that change over time?
There’s a reason that these stories are very light on the plot and heavy on the characters. I kept wanting to see who these people would become if I reached into the story and tweaked something. The main thing I found was that the mix of the central five characters was actually pretty damned toxic. Adding other people after the escape attempt failed had some-- limited-- potential to make things better, and I think that ending contact with Warren was a huge help for the quartet in "Intent on Its Angles."
Major POV characters:
Ethan - Sky High canon looks like it happens in a place very like our world. A history of superpowers ought to change things like the Atlantic slave trade radically, but that would make a world that's more different from ours than what the movie showed. So, in writing Ethan, I assumed historical chattel slavery and the civil rights movement and systemic racism. That made his reaction to being a prisoner and to what Warren wanted from them different because he understood the cost on a very fundamental and practical level. That's also why he's the only one to betray Warren by talking to people opposing him. None of the others could have done it.
Years of doing that, though, have left Ethan pretty cold blooded by the time of "You Cannot Fold a Flood." He has an ethical center, but he's also weighing the cost and benefit of every decision. When he crosses a moral/ethical line, he knows it and has decided that doing it is worth the cost.
For some reason, all versions of Ethan that I write are history geeks. Sky High: A History must not exist. If it did, he'd have read it six times the summer before freshman year.
Layla - At the beginning, Layla has academic knowledge of how things can go wrong for her and her friends while they're prisoners. Her father, being the sort of person he is, explained all about Stockholm Syndrome. She's very determined to do her best, but she really doesn't understand it in her bones, not the way Ethan does.
I suspect that other supers with powers that involve manipulating things outside of themselves could expand their powers the way that Layla does. It's just not a thing that they're taught to do or encouraged to do. I'm pretty sure that pushing boundaries like that is actively discouraged instead and that any records of it having happened got thoroughly buried. Canon seems to put powers into neat little boxes. Canon also shows a certain suppression of creativity around powers; there's nothing at all in what we see that's about figuring out ideas for things the sidekicks can do with their powers. Almost as if doing that might lead in an undesirable direction…
The Layla in “Intent on Its Angles” will probably still end up doing many of the experiments that the Laylas in the darker branches do, but she’ll have people to talk to about them, and she won’t be working under the same pressure. It’s just that she knows now that she can do a lot more than she always thought she could.
Layla in the darker branches is more difficult to pin down. She has a vast range of powers when she kills Warren’s mother but is also aware that she’s lost her own moral center. She wants it back, and the only way she knows to find it is to not be able to do the things she can do and is learning to do. Her progress tends to be three steps forward then two steps back then a lot of rationalization that wouldn’t necessarily sound sane to anyone else if she said it out loud. Her father is right when he realizes that she’s confusing not using power with not having it. He doesn’t articulate the fact that, out of the quintet, Layla is the only one who doesn’t realize that she could give Warren orders and have him bow. If she admitted that, she’d have to take responsibility for her power, for her decisions, for her murders.
She was always, in the darker branches, going to end up trying to take over the world. After all, have you seen who’s currently running it? She’s just lost some parts of herself along the way that she’d have been better off holding onto. She and her friends are probably going to win, especially if she can give them more power, and that will be better for some people, possibly most people. But…
Layla’s not corrupt, but she’s sure as hell fucked up, and look at who she’s depending on for rationality and stability. Not a set to inspire great confidence. The best I can say is that none of them want to hurt anyone unnecessarily. Their definition of ‘necessary’ just might be broken.
Magenta - I wanted one of my four initial characters to come from a background that had already involved learning that the world could be cruel. I didn’t want to pile that onto Ethan because, well, why on earth would he be the one coming out of foster care? If he hadn’t been the only black character, maybe, but he is. Layla’s family situation was set, and Zach’s parents being friends with Will’s parents is pretty strongly implied by canon.
Magenta hasn’t been abused by any of her foster parents, but she hasn’t had stability in that direction. Her expectations before starting Sky High were low. She’s the only character for whom being in Hero Support opened options instead of closing them. She’s the only one of the sidekicks who could do the things she does because she starts from a different spot than they do. She’s already lived at other people’s whim and already survived having her choices limited. Losing the things she hoped for hurts, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter her reality.
Because of her background, Magenta can keep Warren from reaching the parts of her that she considers most vulnerable. She still ends up attached to him-- He gets his psychological hooks in deep, but she channels everything through being pissed off at him rather than letting her anger hide beneath a facade of affection the way the other three do. Warren’s power over her and her friends isn’t something that changes her view of the world. She doesn’t need to break herself over that.
Magenta doesn’t think that what Warren did to her is worse than what he did to the others because she ends with more of what she started with than they do. Warren hurt her, but Warren didn’t surprise her particularly. Magenta understands Warren better than she understands Zach or Layla or Ethan, and she understands the three of them pretty well. She’s still wrong about a number of things.
Magenta’s view of the world is extremely pragmatic and focused. She deals with now and prioritizes the people she cares about. She has ethics, but they’re pretty thoroughly buried because they’re a handle on her that an enemy (or Warren) might use. She’s not invested in being either cruel or kind.
The years with Warren limited Magenta in a lot of ways. She didn’t let herself be distracted by hobbies or outside interests. She put all she had into managing Warren and keeping Barron Battle at the right distance from Sky High. After “You Cannot Fold a Flood,” she suddenly has options again. Ethan, Layla, and Zach need managing so that they don’t damage themselves or the kids, but they’re less dangerous that way than Warren was, and she doesn’t need a screen of anger between herself and them.
I think she knew that Warren had chosen not to act against Layla. She may have influenced Warren on that. She was certainly in a position to make sure that he didn’t find other supportive connections and doing that would be in character for her. If Warren stopped needing the four of them, they were all going to suffer because most of what they had came from their influence over Warren. Ethan and Layla wouldn’t leave the kids, and Warren wouldn’t let the kids go, so all the paths forward required either keeping Warren or killing him and his father and a lot of other people.
She wasn’t going to let herself care either way. Now that Layla has stepped out of the shadows, Magenta can let her compassion emerge. It was always there. She just didn’t let it change anything she did before.
Magenta absolutely would have set off that bomb if she’d had a chance soon after their escape failed. She’d probably have jumped off the edge of the island right when she asked Warren to let her, too. I don’t think that lasted, but that would have let her reclaim some agency and release her anger at the universe for screwing her over. She wasn’t actually angry at Warren right then. She was simply trapped.
I think she also had the clearest idea of how living as Warren’s sidekicks was going to play out. She could do it. She just didn’t want to have to.
Warren - Warren can kind of be summed up by a comment from Karios which was something about Warren obviously having choices and consistently choosing the worst option. He starts out completely unwilling to risk himself or even to inconvenience himself beyond a certain point. That changes over time, but he remains a pretty fundamentally terrible person. The fact that him being the way he is comes from him having been abused explains but doesn’t excuse it.
I think that Warren was and is simply desperate not to be alone. He wants to survive but not being alone is his second absolute priority. Protecting the Homecoming kids is tertiary. He’d say it was his first priority all the way through, but it’s a lie. He probably believes it. He believes a lot of things about himself and about the world that aren’t true.
His priorities about the kids come through in the earliest stories because there are things he won’t do to protect them from his parents. There are things he also can’t do, but there are a lot of things he could do and doesn’t. He’s completely capable of coming up with a plan to protect them that could work.
He also really could have sent the other four home after a day or two if it had been about keeping them safe instead of just keeping them.
He didn’t 100% understand the long term price that the sidekick quartet will end up paying, not at the beginning, but he quite likely would have gone ahead with what he had chosen to do even if he did understand. He doesn’t really start regretting anything until he begins to realize what Layla could do.
His love is, as Magenta puts it, a shitty, stalkery thing. It’s as close to real as he’s ever going to get or give in terms of loving peers rather than children. Warren considers it real because he desperately wants to have that.
Zach - Zach was the character I felt least comfortable writing which is saying a lot since I had serious reservations about writing Ethan and Warren. I simply wasn’t sure how to find an interesting angle, a way that he was unique. I finally found him picking up pieces after the escape in “Intent on Its Angles” and grasping desperately for survival in “Would Feed on Ashes.” He’s the one of the four who was most helpless and least prepared for what happened to them. In canon, he’s incredibly (and over-the-top) self-confident about his power and his value as a person. I chose to take that as being at least half real. Some of it was bravado, of course, but not all of it.
I didn’t realize how badly damaged Zach was until I wrote “You Cannot Fold a Flood.” Even in “Locked with a Twisted Key,” I didn’t quite see how deep it went. Zach knows what happened to him. He saw it happen. He just put it aside, buried it deep because it wasn’t safe to be angry or to hate Warren. I had kind of edged around the idea in Zach’s chapter of “Intent on Its Angles,” but I hadn’t fully grasped it-- In that chapter, Zach thought that Warren didn’t want the parts of Zach that Zach valued most. That didn’t come up in the next few fics, so I thought maybe Zach had been wrong, but I think he was right.
He’s just not getting those parts of himself back. They weren’t the only good parts of him or the parts that defined him for the other sidekicks, but they all had to do with things he hoped for. Warren took as many hopes from Zach as he did from Magenta. It’s just that Zach had never known, never realized on a visceral level, that he could lose those things.
Layla and Ethan (for very different reasons) didn’t have the same sorts of hopes to lose, so they didn’t notice. Magenta may have noticed, but it wasn’t something she could do anything about. From her point of view, Zach had to play the hand he’d been dealt. Short of killing them all, she couldn’t do anything to change it.
I have some vague ideas that Zach’s glowing might edge sideways into some other power that none of them recognize because they haven’t encountered the right circumstances yet. Possibly something about interdimensional gates? Time travel (since I keep having characters mention that it might help)? Who knows? Certainly not me.
I think, though, that being the only one whose powers didn’t evolve hurt Zach, too. He felt like he’d failed. He may have realized, eventually, that the organizational things he does in the darker branches are a kind of superpower in as much as none of the others could manage them. Running a place that size with absolutely everything having to be imported is a huge deal and not something that most people could do well.
He’d also spent enough time with Layla’s father to realize that information and education were tools that people without powers could use to level the playing field a little bit, so he’s the one who spent time learning about building bombs and making the buses work and, later, how the island was constructed. That probably is also why he can allude to The Tempest when talking to Windy Endicott. I don’t think he read that before Homecoming.
I’m not sure how observant Zach became as a Jew, but I do think that he went that direction because it was a bit of who he used to be and of his connection to his family that he still had and could build on. In the text, he uses it as a way to measure how far Warren’s protections go which, in turn, means that he was aware before then that anti-Semitism was a thing that he would encounter in life. That didn’t surprise him, and that doesn’t fit entirely with Ethan’s view of Zach as a privileged white boy who’d never had anyone question his value/right to exist. I think that Zach had less insulation that way than Ethan thought while still being really damned vulnerable.
I just also don’t see how you get a world that looks that much like ours without both World Wars. Zach might have been fourteen and fairly self-absorbed, but that’s a bit of history that he wouldn’t forget even if he didn’t have to worry about it abruptly becoming life and death relevant while he was walking down the street.
Minor POV characters:
Jim Williams - I needed one of my initial set of characters to have a fundamental but intellectual understanding of what being the prisoner of a supervillain could mean. Layla’s father seemed like the best bet since we got enough canon to know that he didn’t have powers. Making him the sort of person who would set up support groups and talk to his daughter about risks she might face was an absolute necessity. Making him edge more toward the survivalist side of preparation? I didn’t plan that. I just kind of reached the point of realizing that, from his point of view, the entire human species-- both those with powers and those without-- have been living on top of a supervolcano ever since powers first emerged (whenever that was). He’s just the sort of person who doesn’t stop trying to mitigate a problem through preparation, planning, and communication. He’s also completely not a ‘Fuck you. I’ve got mine’ sort of person. He will turn back to try to help stragglers.
He’s kind of not well adapted for long term survival in the world he lives in, but Will is right when he comments that Mr Williams is more useful for the sort of fight that’s happening, post-Homecoming, than any of the standard superheroes are. Most supers have a small toolkit in terms of how they can respond to fights. Mr Williams knows how to improvise.
It’s kind of like, if you take away Superman’s powers, he’s just a guy, but if you take away Batman’s stuff and even his money, he’s still got his primary tools-- his mind and his body-- and the body is really just a tool for his mind. Superman, de-powered, will keep going and will manage something, eventually, but he’s going to be at a disadvantage relative to people who’ve never had powers but are in the same situation. Batman, stark naked, will already have a list of priorities and contingencies because being clever and paranoid and studying things are all things he’s needed in order to survive.
Jim Williams has never had Bruce Wayne’s resources or physical abilities/training, and Jim’s particular priorities are skewed differently enough that he’s focused on psychological survival and on minimizing losses in the face of a disaster that he hopes won’t come but fears is inevitable. I suspect that a lot of his approach to things gelled after Layla was born, at the point when he suddenly had someone in his life who was more vulnerable than he was. It must have been truly terrifying because he had to have already realized the ways in which he himself was vulnerable (I’m pretty sure that the support group stuff started before Layla came along).
He could have focused entirely on protecting himself and Layla, but he generalized it out. His daughter had a better chance of survival and of happiness if people around her survived. I suspect, too, that some part of him recognized that focusing entirely on Layla would mean that if-- when-- he failed, everything would fall apart.
And he did lose Layla. He kept going anyway because she wasn’t the only vulnerable person he wanted to protect. Out of all of these characters, I’ve got the most admiration for Jim, Ron, and Magenta. They all keep on keeping on.
Ron Wilson - When I started writing Will and Ron in the branches where the escape failed, I realized that Ron wouldn’t work as the joke he was in the movie, and I started thinking about what he did with his time when he wasn’t driving a school bus. There are some big gaps built into his work days. He could do pretty much anything. I decided that he studied and took hands-on classes in things like carpentry during school hours. Ron probably had someone from Wayside who mentored him the way that he mentors Will.
Ron’s got to be a good actor. Ron’s got to have a sense of humor and an understanding of how people-- particularly teenagers-- think and react. He’s being truthful when he tells Will that he doesn’t know how to fight. Ron’s been through Sky High’s Hero Support program and probably had to learn a bit then, but he hasn’t used it or tried to find a way to practice/improve during the intervening years. Some of that is that it would have drawn attention from people who might assume he was planning to make a career as an unpowered vigilante, but I think most of it would be him deciding that it wasn’t a practical use of his time. If he has to fight a super hand-to-hand, he’s already completely screwed.
Will - Given that this Will never made it to Sky High during Homecoming, he feels very strongly that he failed his friends, his parents, and his teachers. He’s probably told Ron about how Gwen got the Pacifier, but I doubt he’s told anyone else, and I doubt he’s forgiven himself for it. He probably doesn’t blame himself for the villain breakout because Gwen wasn’t necessary for that to happen, not from any logical angle.
Will, in all branches, is a lot more stable and ethical than his friends. He had to cope with loss and guilt, but he also had help. I think that, even without Ron, there would have been some adult staying with him, possibly not anyone he’d known before. Ron just pushed Will to look more at how to do things that wouldn’t work just by smashing/breaking the problem. Will’s still going to be good at dealing with the sort of Gordian Knot problems that need carefully applied violence, but he’s aware that not all problems can be addressed through force.
Will’s ethics are going to end up nuanced due to the competing pulls on his time. He wants to help his friends, but most of the time, that has to be low priority because there’s not a lot he can do directly. Both Wayside matters and being a superhero fighting supervillains are urgent.
In most branches, however, Will doesn’t hit anything that really forces him to compromise his priorities. He gets hurt pretty badly by losing his friends and his parents and having his world upended, but he doesn’t hit anything that really destroys his sense of integrity. Guilt over the Pacifier probably comes near, but he’s in a position to recover. Will’s not better or psychologically stronger than his friends. He’s not morally superior; he’s just luckier.
The key thing for Will is that he understands that, if he’d been captured at fourteen, too, he’d have ended up with only bad options exactly the way his friends did. He knows that those choices crossing moral/ethical lines don’t make his friends utterly evil, but he also knows that each compromise makes the next one hurt less. He doesn’t blame them, but he also isn’t assuming that removing Warren or getting them off of Sky High will magically change who they are and how they solve problems.
Will has no interest in fame/publicity because he hasn’t forgotten what Ron said about how the two of them were too well known to be able to do a lot of things. Will realized at some point that the chaos meant that neither of them actually were that well known any more. People were falling through new informational cracks. I expect that Will is very careful about hiding his identity when he’s using powers in obvious ways. He probably maintains more than one set of civilian papers and has caches of money/supplies in a number of places all over the world.
Jim Williams would also have had a pretty strong post-Homecoming influence on Will. His ideas about how to survive are different from Ron’s.
Non-POV characters:
Barron Battle - My assumption, based on Steve Stronghold’s reaction to seeing Battle’s yearbook photo, is that Battle was extremely destructive. Canon doesn’t specify his powers, but there’s some indication that powers can be hereditary. Will’s parents expect him to either be superstrong or to fly, after all, and don’t seem to consider that he might end up with some other power. The counter-example is Layla whose mother communicates with animals while Layla works with plants. Those are both ‘nature powers,’ but they’re not at all the same thing in any other way.
At any rate, I think Battle’s powers are fire based and similar to Warren’s. I didn’t really ever state that because I wanted to leave open options in case I needed something else for plot purposes. Possibly Battle has more than one power.
I didn’t see much likelihood that the prison breakout would lead to an abrupt change in who controlled the world, so I knew that Barron Battle wouldn’t suddenly be emperor of anything. If everyone was that scared of him, it had to be either because people assumed he would rule the world or because people couldn’t predict/control him or avoid him. Making him a wandering and impulsive force for destruction made some sense, but I also needed him to have enough buddies and enough brains that he’d be too much trouble to pursue and destroy when everyone else was at war over specific territories.
(The supervillains who escaped prison weren’t all allies; they probably fought with each other as much as with heroes and government and civilians. It’s just that there were a lot of them all at once, too many all at once.)
I figure that most people-- supers and civilians both-- regarded Barron Battle as unstoppable but limited in scope. Fighting him was a lot like trying to fight a tornado rather than taking shelter and waiting for it to pass. He leaves death and property damage in a broader swath than a tornado does, but there’s still stuff and people left behind. Trying to resist him makes the cost higher because it just makes him stay longer. He loves fighting a powerful opponent every bit as much as he loves seeing things blow up.
Battle is a terrible, terrible person. He’s a better parent than Sylvia Peace, but Sylvia was kind of the worst. Battle’s capable of loving people, forming friendships, and returning loyalty for loyalty, and he’s good to those people (up to a point). He doesn’t include many people in his circles of protection. Just working for him isn’t actually all that strong a protection, especially for anyone who doesn’t interact with him directly and regularly.
Gwen, Stitches, and Maureen - My assumption in this AU is that Royal Pain emerged triumphant from Homecoming only to find herself suddenly a minnow in a very large pond. Gwen was reasonably clever, so she survived and did well for herself, but it was disappointing for her and for her foster father. I suspect that her taking up with Barron Battle was a very calculated move to borrow a bit of his power/status and leverage it into something that served her. I also suspect that Maureen was a calculated decision that covered two things-- First, Barron Battle had stayed loyal to Sylvia, the mother of his only known child, and Gwen wanted him loyal to her. Second, Stitches needed a distraction so that he didn’t keep trying to run Gwen’s life.
I see no version of the relationship between Gwen and her foster father that isn’t utterly fucked up. Stitches really has to be an obsessive asshole in order to get Gwen to Homecoming and Royal Pain. Also, Stitches has actually raised a baby. That means he knew how much work even one baby is. There’s zero chance that he didn’t realize that Gwen wouldn’t have resources to care for that many babies. He either didn’t care or had plans for how to make them immediately useful. I suspect the latter given the carseats because getting that many must have cost an arm and a leg and required placing a special order. If the babies weren’t valuable, there wouldn’t be carseats.
I haven’t made many decisions about Maureen apart from her parentage, name, and age. I’m not 100% sure why I added her, but she made sense at the time. People have kids, planned, unplanned. It happens. Making Gwen her mother had more to do with not wanting to create yet another OC, but Gwen and Barron Battle also made some sense to me because she’d find him useful and he’d find her attractive.
I just think that it had to be weird to have twenty four kids all the same age and then just one roughly six years younger. Being an only child isn’t terrible; being one child in a creche isn’t terrible. Combining the two? Not so great for anyone. The Homecoming kids had the weight of numbers to help them view their status as normal and better.
Sylvia Peace - I deliberately changed Warren’s mother’s first name to be different from what I used in my other Sky High stories because I wanted a clear line in my own head. Laurel Peace is a competent parent who actually does have her son’s interests at heart. Sylvia is a hot mess.
In order for her not to have taken over the world before canon, I had to make her fearful and not all that practical. She had to be the sort of person who addresses immediate and obvious problems with an out of proportion response that causes more problems down the line. I think that she realized, at some point, that there were things she didn’t understand how to manage but that she couldn’t bring herself to trust other people to do better unless she had control of them.
And, if she had control of them, they tended not to do better because she was afraid to let them make decisions.
I think she genuinely did love Barron Battle. She probably also loved Warren. She was just selfish and scared and uninterested in working very hard. I just had to make her pretty thoroughly messed up for her not to be able to keep Barron out of prison or even to think about changing her name and moving to a different place. Zach was not wrong that disappearing beyond Jetstream’s ability to track her should have been trivial given Sylvia power set.
Windy Endicott - I realized in the middle of writing Barron Battle’s visit to Sky High, that he couldn’t talk to any of the sidekicks privately. I just couldn’t make it work in any sensible way. I also couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t check up on them to make sure they were what Warren said they were. Warren might be wrong and might be putting himself in danger. So I created Windy. I was very cranky about needing to because it meant coming up with a name and a set of powers. Every power set feels cliched at this point.
When I created Windy, I was feeling like I had too many onscreen male characters. That’s why I made her female (that’s also why Warren has a baby sister rather than a baby brother). I started with the assumption that she was just a trusted minion and then realized, when she asked how damaged Warren was, that she was Barron Battle’s friend, a person he could trust and who actually cared about Warren because Battle cared. Battle having a friend like that made me feel as if him protecting Warren and his sidekicks, even when it wasn’t strictly convenient, might be more believable.
Windy is the relationship that isn’t necessary for Battle’s career/reputation or driven by sexual attraction or blood connection. Windy’s loyalty and competence signals that Battle’s not 100% unreliable and violent. He’s still a villain and a person the world would be better off without. He’s just more human.
Her having met Warren's father in prison isn't particularly reasonable in any facsimile of our world, but her being in the same supervillain prison actually is. There can't be that many that are equipped to deal with powers on that level. I never needed to know how they became friends and allies, so I'm still not sure. Possibly they went to school together? Possibly friends of friends of friends who just found common interests? Maybe they were part of a string quartet or a rock climbing club together? Who knows?
I'm not sure if Sylvia Peace ever had a chance to put compulsions on Windy. If she did, that would make Windy not figuring out how to kill her make more sense. Then again, Windy's clever, but she's not particularly creative, and Sky High seems to discourage students from diversifying the ways they apply their powers. Zach might be being unfair to Windy in as much as he and his friends spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to kill Sylvia without making it obviously murder.
I don't know if Windy has a long term partner during any part(s) of this series, but I thought that her not being sexually/romantically into men fit well enough as just a detail that Magenta would know. That’s also why I threw in the stuff about Zach being aware of her being sensitive about her ability to glide not being true ability to fly.
Groups:
Ethan's family - I had Ethan's parents divorced with shared custody simply because I had too many families with parents who married and stayed together forever. If I'd been thinking, it probably would have been Zach's parents, but it only occurred to me after I'd written about Zach’s family. I know a lot of people whose marriages have ended in divorce, and many of those folks have kids. Growing up, I knew a lot of kids whose parents had split up. It's a thing that happens as a normal part of life.
With both Zach and Ethan, I added siblings because canon gave me too many only children. (Although I suppose there's nothing to say that Layla doesn't have younger siblings or much older siblings or that Warren doesn't.) I'd known that Ethan had a sibling, but Trish didn't solidify until I realized that I needed a hook for Wayside to connect to Ethan. A sibling made more sense than a parent. Also, more supporting characters means a wider range of responses. Trish escaping Zach's goons made more sense than Naomi managing it. I also liked the idea that Ethan's parents-- someone's parents-- had tried to talk him out of Sky High. I wanted Ethan to have a pretty solid relationship with his parents even though they're not always on good terms.
Zach's family - There's zero in canon that indicates anything about Zach's family apart from him having expected to come into powers. Making his family Jewish just kind of happened. I was aiming for his parents to be definite about being Jewish without being particularly observant. That was partly because I know a lot of families like that and partly because the more observant I made, them the more details I was likely to screw up.
Zach got two younger sisters because I wanted one at the right age that he’d actually remember her being a baby and have been old enough to change diapers and to understand the cloth/disposable arguments. Seven years between him and Naomi is kind of a long time, so I’m assuming that Zach wasn’t planned but Naomi and Sarah were. Zach’s sisters came along at a point when his parents were more secure, financially, but still had to be cautious about budgeting. I kind of suspect that being ready for a second child was a big milestone for the family, something that Zach picked up on without ever analyzing it.
Wayside - Wayside grew out of my attempts to make Ron Wilson a person rather than a joke. Ron, as presented in canon, is possible, but I still find him kind of inexplicable. The pieces don’t go together right. Also, the Sky High universe is a really terrible place for people with small powers and for people with no powers who’re too close to people who have them. No one ever suggests sending Will or Layla, both pegged at Power Placement as having no powers whatsoever, to a normal school, so I assume that kids with superpowered parents have to go to Sky High (or a similar school) for Reasons, probably some sort of legal requirement.
I have zero idea how Wayside will respond to Layla or how Ethan knowing about them but backing Layla will shake out. Wayside isn’t aimed at improving the world or, at least, wasn’t before Homecoming. It’s just a mutual protection thing. The people running it assume that they can’t change anything big about the way things are. Their policies have always been aimed at hiding and avoiding trouble. They don’t extend their mutual aid much beyond their in-group. I don’t think that members of Wayside are fanatics or that they disdain civilians. Pre-Homecoming, Ron’s bit of things-- recruitment and training-- is probably the most organized part. ‘Training’ mainly means helping people learn life skills they haven’t previously had access to and helping them practice not saying things that will out them or even make people suspicious.
Wayside isn’t so much secret as discrete. It’s likely that the civilian governments have noticed that siphoning off of unpowered family members and that various supers know how to find their own unpowered relatives so they can spend family holidays together. The supers just assume that it’s only their relatives doing it, just a few people. The civilian governments really just care about tracking potential dangers. There’s probably the occasional crackdown, and it’s the sort of thing that could torpedo a political career, but it’s more the equivalent of being an undocumented white immigrant to the US from, say, Canada than it is of being black in the pre-Civil War US.
And, after Homecoming, the civilian governments have much more urgent concerns than a bunch of super adjacent people who aren’t doing anything. Some agencies might actually try to recruit from and/or cooperate with Wayside, but that will depend on specific people in those agencies seeing how Wayside might be useful and is more likely to start with seeing individual members as useful.
I think that that insularity chafes on some members of the network and that that will combine with Will and Jim Williams and Ron to push for change. Of course, pushing for change means Wayside is more likely to conflict with the emerging Sky High contingent. That conflict becomes more likely the longer Layla (all four of them, really, but mostly Layla) remains isolated because there’s more time for Wayside to forge connections to other groups.
I still think Layla and company in “You Cannot Fold a Flood” will win because of the terrifying levels of power. They’re just going to have to negotiate at least as much as they dictate. Most of the things that Layla’s likely to dictate have to do with not murdering people and treating the planet better in terms of things like waste disposal and storage. It’s simply that her response to people who do things that displease her is likely to be brutal. Somewhere along the line, she got the idea that killing people gets results.
The Homecoming Kids at Sky High - I really didn’t want to try to figure out which canonical characters Warren kept or to make up new characters. Ethan, Layla, Magenta, Warren, and Zach actually do think of them as individuals. I just couldn’t juggle that many people without adding tens of thousands of words. Right now, all of the branches end short of the point when they’re going to be asserting their opinions in ways that might actually make the canonical characters pay attention. There is likely going to be a disconnect, in most branches, between the ethics the kids have been taught is right and the things their foster parents actually do. Without figuring out who each child is, I can’t guess how they’ll react, either individually or as a group.
I thought that shuffling the baby names made a lot of sense, both as something Warren could do to hide Josie and as something that would let each kid grow up without being strangled by who they used to be. The kids will likely be able to figure it out once they come into powers because they’ll be able to look at who was at Homecoming and what those people could do. I suspect that none of the sidekicks asked Warren to tell them who was who or tried to research identities. They could certainly have identified some of the kids, but I think that at least one of the four would have understood that knowing would put the kids in cages.
The kids have been raised to be family to each other and to work as a team. Some of them may end up going their own way for one reason or another, but a lot of them will stick together and act with a shared agenda.
The Homecoming Kids that Royal Pain Took - I suspect that only some of these kids get happy endings. The ones Wayside found probably did better. I never figured out exactly what Gwen and company did to take care of all of those babies-- hundreds of them. That’s a lot of diapers and formula and immunizations and…
Any of these kids who survived will have been isolated from the others, so they’re not the same sort of cohort/team threat that the kids who grew up on Sky High are. The world is full of small teams of supers and of solo supers. They’re not going to matter much in terms of absolute numbers.
Sky High - I’ve made the assumption that Sky High is not the only high school that trains supers. It’s far too small, even if supers are a fraction of 1% of the world population. I could see it being regional-- say all of the midwestern US? Some of this is that so many of the kids live close enough to each other for group homework. Canon doesn’t indicate that this particular town/city is special in that regard.
I’m handwaving the tininess of the group at Power Placement. There had to be multiple sessions or multiple days of testing. I understand why the movie wouldn’t bother setting that up; it’s the same reason that Harry Potter’s first year at Hogwarts has less than a dozen Gryffindores-- The story doesn’t have room for more named characters.
My high school had about 600 kids, total, and it was small compared to my daughter’s high school which 400-ish per grade. I’m assuming that Sky High was bigger than my school because the building looks bigger and because of the number of school buses that seem to be involved. Ron’s estimate about how many people attended Homecoming still leaves most of the student population home for the night.
