99. Sky High

Title: Sky High
Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Family
Year: 2005

Summary: The story describes the beginning of the freshman year for Will Stronghold at Sky High School, a school for young superheroes that floats in the sky. Will's parents pose as suburban real-estate agents Steve and Josie Stronghold, but they are really The Commander and Jetstream , the two most famous and powerful superheroes. The Commander has superhuman strength, and Jetstream is able to fly. Will's best friend is Layla, a pretty supergirl who can manipulate plant life.

The students at Sky High include Speed, a bully who can run faster than the human eye can see; Lash , a bully who can stretch his body; Penny, a cheerleader who can make copies of herself; and Warren Peace, the brooding, fire-throwing son of a supervillain and a superhero, who are currently at war. Warren's father was sent to prison by the Commander, and will be released after his third life. As the school year begins, Will is the only student who has not yet developed any superpowers. Students with great powers are taught to be heroes, while less capable youngsters are designated as "hero support" and derisively referred to as "sidekicks". The abilities of the sidekicks include melting, glowing, and turning into a guinea pig. Will is put into the sidekick program due to his lack of powers, and Layla is made a sidekick after she protests the two tiered schooling by refusing to demonstrate her powers.

At the end of Will's first day at Sky High, the Commander shows him the Stronghold family's underground control center, the Secret Sanctum, which holds souvenirs from past battles. One souvenir is a weapon called a "Pacifier", which the Commander took from his arch-enemy, a supervillain named Royal Pain, fifteen years ago. Another is the eyeball of a robot the Commander recently defeated. As the Commander and Will chat, Royal Pain remotely spies on them through a camera hidden in the eyeball.

Will initially makes friends with the sidekicks, but he is transferred to the Hero program after his latent super-strength emerges during a fight with Warren. He also attracts the attention of Gwen Grayson, a beautiful "technopath" who controls machines with her mind. Will makes a date with Layla to prove he still likes her, but he forgets about it and has dinner with Gwen and his parents, so Layla tries to make him jealous by getting Warren to go with her to the Sky High homecoming dance.

On the day before the dance, Gwen tricks Will into throwing a party at his house, and Speed steals the Pacifier when she seduces Will into showing her the Secret Sanctum. She also convinces Layla that Will no longer likes her, but Will rejects Gwen's snobbishness and refuses to go to the dance with her, even though his parents have promised to attend as honorary guests. After his parents leave for the dance, Will reads the Commander's school yearbook, which contains a photograph of a girl who looks just like Gwen. When he sees a picture of the girl holding a pacifier, he guesses that the girl is Royal Pain and Gwen is her daughter, sees that the Pacifier is missing, and concludes that Gwen must be avenging herself on the Commander for defeating her mother. Will contacts the Sky High bus driver, who rushes him to the dance.

Meanwhile, Gwen reveals to the dance participants that she is Royal Pain herself, who was formally a brilliant schoolgirl who invented the pacifier, but despite that and her powers, she was underestimated by the school and therefore made a sidekick. Outraged, she hatched a plan to destroy Sky High and replace it with her own school for supervillains, with the intention of turning everyone into babies with the Pacifier and raising them into villains. Only Warren and the sidekicks escape.

When Will arrives at school, he apologizes to Layla and teams up with Warren and the sidekicks to defeat Gwen, Speed, Lash, and Penny. He discovers he has also inherited his mother's flying ability when Gwen throws him off Sky High's floating platform, and he helps to hold the school in the air as the sidekicks reactivate its sabotaged antigravity device. The babies are returned to their original state, Will and Layla kiss, and the dance resumes while Royal Pain and her gang are held in the detention room. Afterward, the villains are sent to prison, Warren becomes Will's best friend, Layla becomes Will's girlfriend, and the bus driver becomes a superhero after falling into a vat of toxic waste.