Adult usage only. May produce NSFW content.
For all of his ten years on earth, Nick’s dearest wish was to become a superhero just like his sister, Dana. His ordinary family want nothing more than an ordinary life for him, but extraordinary circumstances throw those plans into disarray. Nick suddenly finds himself becoming a superhero, but maybe not in the way he had hoped for.
This is a strictly PG story due to the age of the characters involved, and I've needed to exercise some creative license to tie the requested plot points together into a coherent series of events
Nick Miller loved superheroes. In fairness, everyone Nick’s age loved superheroes - anyone who didn’t was boring and dumb - but Nick was one of the few that genuinely aspired to a career of costumed crime-fighting while others aspired to be brain surgeons or astronauts.
His family mostly tried to discourage him, but found it difficult to convince him that superheroes weren’t real, because every effort to do so was tacitly misinterpreted by Nick to include a wink and a nudge because everyone knew real superheroes needed to be kept a secret.
Nick’s older sister did NOT discourage him, much to their relative’s annoyance. Dana had given up a promising life as a banking clerk to pursue a career in both cosplay and martial arts - a life decision that had functionally excommunicated her from the family except on special occasions.
This attempt to shield Nick from outlandish influence proved to be ironically counter-productive, as it lent Dana’s few appearances in Nick’s life a mythological quality and allowed her to lean into her stage persona as the Amazing Danamite whenever they met: Yes, she’d been on lots of adventures since their last meeting. This year she had defeated invading aliens from the Negaverse, but not before fighting off assassins sent by the League of Villains. Nick believed every word of it and pinkie-promised that he would never tell anyone about Dana’s true identity, ever, ever, ever, and in return, for Christmas after his tenth birthday, Dana would begin training him as a real life superhero.
***
It had not gone well.
The training had started off with a lot of promise - Nick’s very first lesson in being a superhero was how to survive. Most kids might have baulked at this - demanding instead to be taught how …
What if athletes could compete in a body perfectly designed for their sport? What if the same athletes had to compete again in a randomly-asssigned body?
In the not-too-distant future, technology has advanced to allow people to experience life in any body of their choosing, then return to their own body after six hours. Athletes compete in body-swapping sports to test their skills, their athletic intelligence, and the genetic limits of the human body.
As usual, the tingling subsided as soon as Zella stepped out of the chamber. She looked down over her new body - well by now, she’d spent so much time in this body, pushing it to its physical limits, the lines were starting to blur between this body and her own. She studied her hands.
“You know what,” she said carefully. “Let’s do the longer fingers.”
“You sure?” asked Nix. “These are the ones I gave you for the time trials yesterday.”
“Yep. I was thinking about it last night. They didn't feel quite right.”
Zella turned on her heels and clicked the door to the chamber open again.
“Zel, this isn’t the time to play around,” her coach, Liza, said sternly from over Nix’s shoulder. “Your career is on the line.”
“I’m sure.” Zella said confidently as she lay down on the chamber’s smooth white bench. “Change the fingers.”
Nix tapped on the projection display in front of him and the chamber’s machinery whirred. Zella felt the familiar pins and needles, but only in her fingers this time. Finally, the whirring stopped and the door’s lock clicked open again.
“Perfect,” Zella said, admiring Nix’s work. “Let’s go.”
As Zella, Nix and Liza wove their way through the smooth, gray halls of the stadium’s interior, Zella took deep breaths to calm her anxiety. There was so much at stake. Sure, she’d been a world champion several times over, but the Olympics was a different thing altogether. Earning a cobalt medal at the centuries-old games, could mean lucrative sponsorships, projector broadcasts around the world, becoming a household name. 2084 was only the third year that body decathlon was recognized as an official olympic event, so there wasn’t much precedent to look to …