It was funny how fast time could go. One day Jinny was an innocent, exuberant 5 year old girl. Now she was 9 – different in some ways, but the same at her core. Ever energetic, ever curious. She was getting stronger and smarter by the day, and had begun to ask questions that didn’t have satisfactory answers. How did her uncle and her parents meet? What was with all the locked rooms and weapons? Why did he disappear on so many “business trips”, and why wasn’t she allowed to call him when he was?

Her room had graduated from pink to purple sometime in the last year. While she’d gone to many schools, she did not have very many friends. Somehow she felt disconnected from other children, like there was a rift there that she could never cross. It wasn’t her powers; she’d met other kids with superpowers in school, but even then they seemed something closer to normal than she felt.

Her natural skills were beginning to shine through, aside from her rigorous training. The child who would take apart anything she could reach had become a girl who could put things together with ease. Slade encouraged this mechanical prowess, buying her models and machines to explore, destroy and rebuild. There were also some advanced books on her shelf, most of them math related. She was up to algebra now, and planned to start calculus by the time she was 12.


At the current time, she was in the basement training room, working off some spare energy. Slade and Jinny had both found that if she didn’t do something physical during the day, she tended to get mildly hyperactive and unable to focus. So she attacked the training dummy with fervor, her strikes light, but swift and deadly accurate. When Slade found her, she did not stop in her rhythm, but she did smile warmly.

“Hi Uncle Slade! What’s up?”