Heroes wear Capes

Chapter 2 - Heroes suck Major

"Heroes don't exist. And if they did, I wouldn't be one of them."

~ Brodi Ashton

Being the son of Paul Rossi, Trevor had a pretty good life. He was probably the single richest twenty year old in Kingdom City, and he didn't even have to do much to achieve it.

His father was the source of the family fortune, so all Trevor had to do was exist and he automatically got a portion of it. Trevor didn't know all of the ins and outs about Rossi Corp, but he did know that most of what the business put out was only for show. Rossi Corp didn't make its money through its many subsidiaries and business ventures, but rather through a fickle operation known as illegally selling arms and drugs to the city's most prominent gangs.

You see, Trevor's father had built his empire so quickly by supplying Kingdom City's less fortunate with the weapons they needed to take back their city from the notorious superheroes who got in their way. Without Rossi Corp, most every big city in the country would probably have almost no criminal activity left with all the so-called superheroes spreading fear of retribution. Rossi Corp was the reason the non-super criminals could fight back against the new wave of superheroes that came in every couple of years.

It was a simple business transaction. Supply and demand if you will.

With the influx of superheroes in the recent decade, Trevor understood the necessity of his father's business. The so called heroes thought they had a right to squash the small business man just because they had unnatural abilities. Like, shooting arrows and punching through walls shouldn't make you the alpha supreme.

Of course, the Rossi family opinion wasn't a particularly unpopular one. The recent third party of the Remedists that had sprung up during the past election had actually almost won. They were an offshoot of the Republicans whose main platform was the regulation of the growing dangerous super population. With them in control, supers would no longer be allowed to run rampant through the streets, ignorantly using their powers while dressed in brightly colored spandex suits that made the heroes look more like clowns than protectors of their cities.

It was too bad that the candidate for the Remedist Party, Richard Head, had dropped out suddenly months before Election Day had even occurred. The general public had been agreed that he probably would've won if he hadn't dropped.

But Richard Head did raise a lot of good questions that needed to be answered. Like, how could the public trust superheroes if most turned out to be idiot teenagers?

(The portion of superheroes who were young adults was astounding, and that was only out of the few whose identities were public knowledge through one way or another. Imagine how many more heroes were high schoolers that the public didn't know about.)

Out of the few business ventures Rossi Corp attempted that weren't for the good of the low faring citizens of Kingdom City and cities like it, many were arguably not good for the super population. Like the time Rossi Corp attempted to buy out Hermes Enterprises, the fashion empire who basically made every suit for every superhero and super villain ever. Or maybe you could count that time Rossi Corp tried to buy the restaurant franchise Super Burger to run it to the ground, but Carlton Laboratories got there first to save it.

(Which, let's be honest, was not fair. The entire world knew that Chase Carlton, the 'ex-CEO', was in charge of the company. Chase Carlton, as in the Blue Archer. In Trevor's opinion, the fact that the company was associated with an arrow slinging vigilante gave it a huge unfair advantage.)

Seeing as Rossi Corp had a long known history of rivalry with the superheroes, it was okay to assume that any association with Carlton Laboratories was unwanted and unwarranted. This was why Trevor was very mad when he woke up that morning to the news that Carlton Laboratories were seriously considering a takeover of Rossi Corp.