#tachyonic

anyway heres my favorite little superpowered homeschoolers.

your honor, i think they should be my best friends, i think they deserved a beach episode.

The relationship dynamic between Tachyonic and Hephaestus is so funny. The one-sided identity thing adds so many layers that mostly boil down to ridiculousness. It’s enemies-to-grudging-friends where one character comes down WAY harder of both the “grudging” part AND the “friend” part.

For Tori, she’s always know that Tachyonic was Kyle. She figured out his identity literally the day they met, and was reluctantly befriending her dorky neighbor/superhero bodyguard long before Hephaestus ever fought him. She’s able to maintain a firm mental separation between identities and can honestly say that Kyle being Tori’s friend doesn’t mean Tachyonic is Hephaestus’ friend. But she also still doesn’t want Kyle to get hurt. Because even if it took him being held hostage for her to admit it, Kyle is her friend and she would kill for him without hesitation.

So, Hephaestus goes into encounters with the New Science Sentries with a mindset of “achieve my (not very) villainous goal, keep my friends safe, pretend they’re totally not my friends and use something in The Code as an excuse for why I don’t want them to be hurt, don’t get caught.”

Meanwhile, Kyle has none of that context. He has no idea that Hephaestus is Tori (ignoring his suspicions at the end of CR though I can’t wait to see what that does to their dynamic next book). What he knows is that his first meeting with the (suspected) crook the guy breaks his nose and his tech aide, humiliating him. Not to mention apparently keeping him from stopping a slaughter just a couple miles away. Negative first impression is set. Except… every meeting since then he’s been… helping?

When his team was targeted by Alfred Settler, the “villains” evacuated the civilians, spewed some BS about this attack being an insult to their Guild, and fought tooth and nail right alongside Kyle’s friends, risking their lives in the process. When the dimensional nova started, Hephaestus immediately jumped into essentially superhero hero, first with the excuse of testing his new suit, then because the breaches had bounties. Fighting right alongside Tachyonic and the other New Science Sentries several times and showing a shocking amount of concern for the superheroes’ well being.

Eventually the “villainous” first impression is worn down to “that very help ally who gets really annoyed when we distrust him but makes fun of us when we do trust him”.

Which is how we end up with a moment when Hephaestus grumbles to the New Science Sentries something along the lines of, “If I wanted to kill you, I would have already shot you in your constantly exposed backs. Also stop exposing your backs to villains!” And the whole team laughs at his apparent failure to understand the ironic contradiction of his own words.

I love this dynamic. The identity shenanigans have allowed it to be something truly ridiculous. They’re just SO Not On The Same Page TM.