Gabriel Protagoras was born in 2008.
I say “born” because Gabriel’s dad Taki (b. 1971) has never really gone public about his origins, whereas even with me Gabriel himself always kept kind of mum about it until the whole Uroth-Khal incident—but already I’m getting ahead of myself!
Presumably Taki found Gabe in some manner of meteor or crashlanded spacecraft whilst backpacking around the Arizona desert and then fabricated whatever papers he needed to naturalize the adoption—perhaps with the assistance of a congenial doctor or lawyer, as the Greek Orthodox Church would have offered Taki an unusually thick social ecology from which to procure such assistance, and failing that his ownership of a diner in Old Town Scottsdale would have ensured access to an affluent clientele that as a Greek he almost certainly wouldn’t have had any reservations about bribing.
But however it happened, the adoption went through in 2008.
And the first decade of Gabe’s life was surprisingly uneventful, with none of his powers manifesting until approximately halfway through his eleventh year on this planet, if Gabe himself is to be believed.
He shared a condo in Scottsdale with his dad, who per Gabe was a splendid father and liked to take him bouldering on Camelback and other local peaks, but also spent most of his time at the diner—All Things!—or on dates with the various ladies who worked there, many of whom were much younger than Taki and consumed substantially more of his disposable income than Gabriel himself, which Gabe insists he never minded.
What matters for our purposes is that Gabriel was chiefly raised by his yaya Chloe, which always struck me as a mildly frivolous name for a woman born in 1948.
Chloe was very insistent that the boy needed a maternal presence around. And Taki for his part was a proud man, and so always framed his mother’s lengthy visits as an annoyance or imposition, but there’s little doubt that without them Gabriel would have turned out even weirder than he actually did.
But as I said: Gabe’s childhood was actually fairly normal all considered.
He did well in school back then. Yaya Chloe always made him do his homework first thing after getting home, and with her he could always focus—though he’d at times grow rather overstimulated by the intense scent of potpourri emanating from yaya herself—and they’d then watch Clone Wars together.
It started to get less normal when Chloe died shortly after his tenth birthday.
That’s when he met Nora Szekeres.
Nora—yes, THAT Nora—was four or five years older than Gabriel depending on the time of year, though if you quantified it decimally the difference would be 4.61 years.
She was tall and blonde and soft, with large breasts—though it wouldn’t be appropriate to describe her body further, as she was only fourteen at the time.
She was a neighbor in the condominium—amusingly, both of her parents had decided separately that they were homosexual shortly after divorcing in 2016—and introduced herself to Taki just a few weeks after Chloe died.
“Your son is acting really weird at school,” she told him—note she was in eighth grade then, and shortly due to matriculate onto high school, while Gabe was still in fourth.
“He really needs someone to babysit him, and show him proper manners.”
Now, Gabriel has never been consistent—not even with me—as to whether he thought Nora a stuck-up virago at first or whether he was elated to have this attractive older woman entering his life out of nowhere like this. But what matters ultimately is that Taki shrugged his shoulders and took Nora entirely at face value, and began to pay her a (frankly outrageous for 2018) babysitting fee of $25 / hour to watch Gabriel after school and instruct him in proper social behavior.
And this, of course, is when Gabe’s powers first started to manifest.
The records diverge as to whether Taki or Nora was the first witness. Years later the former would claim to have known all along, having witnessed Gabriel “sleep-flying” on several occasions throughout his middle childhood, which Gabe has on several occasions very politely called utter nonsense. Miss Szekeres, meanwhile, famously alleged that SHE was the one who helped Gabriel formulate a strategy for disclosing the powers to his father while keeping them under wraps at school, claiming credit for the boy having explored his new talents under a relatively disciplined and bounded container, which Gabriel himself never disputed per se but has always preferred to frame more as a story of masculine self-actualization and precocious courtship.
According to Gabe, the first manifestation of his powers came not in the form of preternatural flight or strength or durability, but rather x-ray vision—deployed as ungallantly as one might expect from an eleven year-old on the oblivious young Szekeres, racking his mind with a guilt the maid wouldn’t know about for years.
It seems even then Gabriel had some gallantry in him.
Hence his discovery of laser vision just a few weeks later whilst very deliberately attempting NOT to stare through Nora’s blouse—a feat Gabe accomplished by glaring as hard as he could at the can of Pepsi in her hand and vaporizing it into a fine mist.
For a few seconds Nora just sat there.
And then she burst out laughing.
“Dude—what the fuck?! Did you seriously just do that?”
Gabriel scratched his head at first, not quite knowing what to say.
And then he beamed at her, immediately finding the situation a lot more convivial.
“You said you were on a diet?”
Nora’s eyes narrowed on him as she bit her lip. “This is…”
Then she sighed and looked at the floor and began playing furiously with her hair, which she’d done frequently in earlier babysitting sessions and Gabe rather enjoyed.
She looked up. “Let’s… both of us just have a time out for a second—okay Gabe?”
She leaned forward into him, and with uncharacteristic solemnity motioned for him to look her straight in the eye. “Because whatever it is that just happened—I want to make sure we’re both prepared for it. You understand, dude?”
Gabriel exhaled sharply.
Then he nodded slowly at her and smiled.