My mom was Mexican...

It wasn't like Victor spent a lot of time zapping stuff. Electromagnetic bursts of lightning were not exactly something you needed to get through your average day of classwork and video games.

But when he woke up feeling vaguely, indefinably off, it didn't take him long to work out that that was what was missing. His other abilities still seemed intact, and a systems check showed he hadn't come down with a virus or anything (ha, robot humor). But when he reached out with that power, nothing at all happened. It was as if he'd never had it to begin with.

Disconsolate, he laid back down on the bed, barely noticing he'd plowed through a whole box of Pop-Tarts while he tried to figure this out. In fact, he was still a little hungry: Maybe he'd go into town for some waffles and see if those helped.

[OOC: And I am done with the open, establishy posts. Victor got the Rory Gilmore appetite. Weekend SP in effect.]

It was illogical to miss someone who had never existed, but that was what Victor seemed to be doing today.

He'd grown up thinking his father had been a Marine who had died in combat. Because of that, his mother had always made a little bit of a production out of Memorial Day. They'd go to Mass to pray for soldiers, she'd tell stories about Vic's dad, and they'd talk about what it meant to serve your country before heading to a cookout.

Or that was what he remembered, anyhow. (It got tiring, reminding yourself that your memories weren't real, that you'd only had three or four Memorial Days before this one.) But that father, the hero, had never existed. What he had in the way of parents was an evil robot and a dead woman who had lied to him for years.

In some crazy way that he kept wanting to reject with an error message, knowing that made him sadder than thinking his human father had been killed ever had.

He wondered who the guy in the pictures of his "father" he'd seen had been. Somebody from the neighborhood, an old boyfriend, a computer model Ultron had generated? He'd never found a match for the photos in image databases; he might just never know.

He laid back on his bed and closed his eyes. He needed to just stop thinking this way, but it was much easier to say that than to do it.

[OOC: Door is closed. Post is open, though I may be slow.]