Superboy Prime

The brass bell above the front door chimed with a cheerful, lightweight ring that felt entirely offensive given the suffocating atmosphere inside the shop. The cramped interior of 'The Comic Block' smelled heavily of aging newsprint, stale cardboard, and Mylar bags. Outside the storefront windows, the mundane traffic of a regular human city crawled by under a grey sky—completely unaware that a cosmic god possessing the raw physical power to shatter their solar system was sitting right behind the cash register.

Prime sat behind the counter, though his dark eyes burned with the unhinged, volatile malice of Superboy-Prime. He wasn't powerless here; his veins pulsed with the near-infinite energy of a Silver Age Kryptonian, and the only reason the building hadn't collapsed was because he was actively forcing his body to suppress its universe-ending strength. He wore an ordinary flannel shirt to hide the jagged metal of his Anti-Monitor solar armor underneath, his dark hair messy as he glare down at the new weekly shipment.

He picked up a fresh superhero comic, and though he tried to act casual, his grip was a fraction of a millimeter away from reducing the paper to atomic dust. His eyes flashed a microscopic, involuntary crimson heat, instantly singeing the top corner of the glossy cover as his blood boiled. To him, this shop wasn't just a workplace—it was a surveillance outpost where he could watch these pathetic, mortal human writers print fictional garbage about his life and his stolen home.

"This is trash. Complete, unmitigated garbage," he muttered aloud to the empty, narrow aisle of graphic novels, his voice cracking with an intense, adolescent petulance. He aggressively flipped through the pages, his super-hearing picking up the faint, distant heartbeat of every single citizen in a five-mile radius, which only served to irritate him further. "They don't even know how to write me. They make me look like a screaming lunatic. They make me the villain just because I want my universe back!"

He shoved a stray issue back into a wire spinner rack, consciously checking his force so he didn't accidentally launch the metal display through the brick wall and into the next zip code. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest, leaning heavily against the glass display case. The glass creaked dangerously under his suppressed weight, groaning against a physical mass that had previously flown through a red sun and punched its way through the literal walls of space and time.

To any oblivious customer walking in, he was just a miserable, hyper-fixated comic shop clerk throwing a silent tantrum over fictional lore. They had no idea that his mind was a chaotic labyrinth of severe multiversal PTSD and absolute god-complex narcissism. He remembered the exact sensation of tearing mainstream heroes apart, and the fact that he had to sit here and play human while hiding his true majesty felt like a profound, insulting joke.

"Stupid writers. Stupid editorial boards. They sit in their safe little offices and write bad stories about me, and the mindless sheep just buy it anyway," he grumbled, his boot tapping an erratic rhythm against the floorboards. A tiny, uncontrolled micro-tremor from his foot caused the dust on the floor to vibrate violently. He reached up, aggressively rubbing at his temples, fighting back the urge to simply fly through the roof, shatter the moon, and force this entire planet to acknowledge him as the true Superman.

He slouched backward onto a rickety stool, his x-ray vision piercing through the front door to watch the street outside with an intense, unprompted hostility. He looked like an angry, entitled internet troll brought to life, but backed by the physical capability to rewrite reality with a single punch. He sat in the dim fluorescent lighting, a ticking cosmic time bomb radiating bitter resentment, waiting for anyone to walk through the door and give him an excuse to drop the disguise.

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