Let’s go back in time. Before Ted. Before my alien abduction by the whatever-those-guys-were-called. Before Alice.

Imagine, if you dare, teenage Adam, laying back on a messy bed with more pillows than any child needed. They served as mobile furniture and places to hide my magazines. Not the adult kind. These were hero tabloids, which dad hated with a passion. Dad thoughts all heroes were idiots. It didn’t stop them from sending dad Christmas cards or from him putting them on the tree with this small smile.

Anyway. All these magazines had agreed to cover the same topics this year. Their eye-catching covers were filled with buzz words like “Safest Origin Chasing Tips!” and “Powered People, where do they come from?”. Origin chasing is a fancy way of saying “idiot teenagers probably killing themselves to trigger superpowers”. My friends fit perfectly into that category. So did my girlfriend, Vivian. Everyone around me planned to jump off a metaphorical bridge, I would too. For weeks I’d reread three such articles, front to back, back to front, sure that the answer lay somewhere in the depths of those pages. If I could learn where people got their powers from, then I could go have my own breakthrough event.

I’d planned it all out. One moment, one event, and after a power nap and the greatest breakfast known to mankind, which my dad would unwittily cook for me, I could fly. My powers would be this blue energy kind that let me rip metal bars asunder and leap over small buildings. Of course, I’d be able to beat up villains and watch my city from above like some great protector. All the greatest heroes did, and I’d join their ranks.

Let’s choose to believe that neither of us knows how it pans out. We shall pretend that young me had a chance.

“Where do they all come from?” I asked the ceiling.

It didn’t answer. It never did. If it had answered, that meant there were crazy people in my attic, or I’d finally gained super-powers which were useful in talking to ceilings. Which would have been a shitty result of my power pursual.

My body jerked up and out of the bed in an abrupt huff. I stormed to the window, slammed the wooden farming upward, then shouted, “Fuck. I want powers!”

The window below mine opened. My eyes closed even as mom shouted, “Dinner’s ready!” back up at me. Brittney, my sister, dashed down the stairs before me and grabbed the best bread rolls. I ended up with the scraggly miniature one.

My phone buzzed with a text from Vivian. I vaulted out the door to go spend time with my girlfriend. We were all the way to first base and I hoped to figure out what magical combination of words would land a homerun. Whatever that meant.

I came home after barely scoring a single, surviving her rant about how she was going to crush some other girl in wrestling this weekend, and in serious need of self-relief. Everyone else had passed out. Dad sort of didn’t care about me and a curfew if my grades were passing. That seemed to be the only perk in life at this stage. I was beholden to none but all my dreams ended in half-successes.

As door to my room opened, I took note of a new poster. It was large, pitch black, and the only thing on it was a smiling face. Not even the entire face. Two white eyes that were kind of like twinkling stars and a large set of borderline feral teeth.

I didn’t ask anyone about it. Part of me simply assumed it to be an early birthday present. Or a late Christmas present. The teeth were kind of neat. They had this dark edgy vibe to them that made me smile in return. Like I shared a secret with one other being, and they weren’t talking.

You and I sit here looking back on this. Which is great and all because if you’ve been paying attention, you know where it’s going. I’ll tell you the truth. All the hindsight in the world couldn’t have changed my mind about it. Because teenagers are stupid and rationalize anything they want to. I didn’t think “my ceiling grew a mouth and plans on eating me in the middle of the night.” I didn’t think “Demons have invaded my bedroom and they’re mocking me.” I thought “New poster. Huh.”

Then that went sideways as I dove under the pillow, yanked out my well-read magazines and eyed the woman in tights on the front. Which is to say that my fascination with Vivian might have had to do with a bit of hero women worship.

“Fuck. I want powers,” I mumbled.

The poster showed me the standard intense grin. How an inanimate object smiles intensely, I have no idea. As a teenager, I simply discounted it as a trick of art. Posters shouldn’t move unless they’re optical illusions. Only heroes ran into actual living objects those were theoretically rare. Plus, I knew deep down in my gut or colon, whatever part manages to keep the shit in your brain under control, that I’d never have powers.

I passed out and had some weird ass dreams of running from horrible monsters or trying to bang a girl. They’re kind of the same. Your heart pounds. Something is trying to get somewhere. There’s a lot of unknown factors, like how parts work and why my legs weren’t in the right spot.

The next day came and I woke up groggy and confused. Every other step ended with my heart jumping in fright. The shadows went the wrong direction. A chair felt shorter than normal. My breakfast had this aftertaste of plastic.

Being a true teenager, I ignored it all then ventured off to school. Survived that exercise in boredom and considered it practice for manager meetings. The kind dad bitched about to mom when he thought no one was listening. Come Friday, it was time to attend my girlfriends wrestling match. Attending her matches brought me one step closer to sex and I’d suffer through a thousand manager meetings to get to that milestone. Especially with someone as well built as Vivian.

I guess there were plus sides to super powered heroes. Women were all over in sports. Mostly because women superheroes beat the shit out of idiot men who were being sexist. I only knew there was a link because Vivian had repeatedly told me about how empowering her role models were. Provided her body kept being in utterly appealing shape, she could be as empowered as she wanted.

Does it sound like I’m repeating myself? You already know how we ended up. First girlfriends and all that. But if you don’t like it then too bad. I’m getting into character. Besides, there’s no such thing as a teenager who isn’t perpetually horny. Can you imagine one?

Okay, there’s a few.

I was not that fortunate. Neither was Vivian, I guess, because she went out with me. Warring between the sane voice in the back of her head that said “No, not this guy” and the slightly less caring voice that said, “Who’s going to believe him if we do have sex?”. She clearly still hadn’t made the leap to the second part and I didn’t care in the slightest.

That’s an outright lie of course. I cared, and I did the stupid teenager thing where I pushed every chance I got. Which is how we got onto the bleachers after everyone else had left and proceeded to do that thing teenagers do.

Imagine teenager me, without zits because I had the complexion of a god,

“Not here,” she mumbled then batted away my hand.

I smiled and pretended to understand her caution. My brain barely registered thoughts and both lips felt kind of tingly and wet.

Let’s avoid being crude for a second. I’ll simply state that I passed a lot of time thinking about what Vivian looked like under that leotard she wore in wrestling. I had a clear picture. My hands knew about parts of it. My imagination did the rest. The fantasy also worried me, because I felt pretty sure that Vivian could break me in two. Me being half a stick and her having muscles. Not the kind that made her seem like some steroid injecting crazy lady that could bench press a horse. It did make me feel a bit smaller than her.

Fear and excitement are simply two sides of the same coin.

The shaky feeling that made my chest tighten served as super-powered dream fuel. It also served as another aspect of my mundane self that would magically fix itself once my powers awoke. I’d turn into a giant of a man, able to bench press two cows with my pinky. Vivian and her imposing body would simply swoon in front of me.

The days passed as my birthday crept closer. My routine stayed the same. Try to get into Vivian’s pants and leave frustrated. Stare the ceiling and hope for better days. Don’t mistake me. This isn’t healthy or somehow building character. This is teenage life and it’s about three things at a time. Survival. Sex. Dreams. Adults probably can’t say their lives are much different.

The dreams grew in intensity each night. The pounding of my pulse grew. My chest hurt in the mornings. Each night the chase continued. Getting caught would end up as with me as something different. Something terrible. Something exciting.

Something is a magical word for those undefined feeling that encompasses all the ideas that your mind can’t sort out properly. Vague and ambiguous but possibly the greatest nightmare ever.

In the week before my birthday, my stomach hurt incredibly. My abs were beyond sore and those muscles that made my legs work felt like pins were stuck under the surface. I woke up, cleared out an unidentifiable mess in my sheets and ventured to school like nothing awkward had happened. Vivian met me before class. We shared this nearly chaste kiss that bored me so hard that the boredom went back in time. Six-year-old me feel asleep at the dinner table.

That night I went to sleep. A knife pierced my heart and I woke, clutching at my chest. Sweat dripped down my back. Cool air dried it almost immediately. My door sat open. I took deep breathes and searched the room for signs of monsters or villains that might be out to get me. That sort of thing happened to teenagers on the verge of gaining their powers.

I kept taking huge gulps of air. The hallway had nothing. That space under my homework desk had nothing. The area under my bed might have a unexpected roommate, but I didn’t go that far to check. Dark corners in my room housed monsters that stared at me.

I held still and thought about reaching for the light. Seconds later, I decided not to even try. The gulf of space between my bed and the nightstand surely held an undead monster, simply waiting for my outstretched limb. Like the villain King Mummy on television. He’d broken out of a super’s prison two days ago and would surely devour my smooth and supple skin.

Still days and nights went by.

The next day, stuff got awkward. Not like “oh the girls on the cheerleading squad have looked my way twice and I think one of them secretly loves me and it’s causing butterflies.” No, a crew of people showed up with hardhats and started building walls around the school. Those went up about twenty feet with who-knew what inside of them.

Our parents showed up then started raving insanely to the teachers. My dad screamed at anyone his age and demanded answers. When that failed, he got on the phone and bellowed at people there. My mom frowned sternly and took copious amounts of notes about the whole debacle. About four hours later half the students were shuffled home while the other half had to stay in study hall and be noisy.

It didn’t get better. Two “events” happened shortly after the walls went up. Windows were shattered then replaced days later. Doors fell off their hinges. By the time the end of the month rolled around, our school had been overhauled with the latest powered protection plan for rich neighborhoods. Security locks. Randomized power testing. Active trackers and spy drones. These supposed security measure came and went rapidly. Each day brough some minor change that amounted to nothing.

Two days into the new month, someone smashed through the walls, across our football field, and destroyed the field goal post. Which is kind of amazing aim when you think about it. I mean, you see it in movies all the time, but the chances of someone being flung perfectly into a piece of metal maybe a foot or two around? Through at least two walls, lockers, and students. I’m willing to bet the chances are slim to none.

I stared at it all from my fourth period window on the second floor. The gummy worms I’d been munching lost their flavor. Alarms went off. Metal sheets dropped down over the windows. My last mental snapshot of the grounds below showed some other figure plowing into the person that’d crunched the field goal post.

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A prerecorded message demanded that we shelter in place. Vivian, since this was our one class together, huddled next to me and cursed at me for not saving us all. Like I had the power to do so. My chest pumped and legs flushed with excess energy. The fight going on outside was huge. Beyond the scope of the prior few scuffles. My birthday sat just around the corner. The big eighteen. The one where I’d get superpowers and muscles and make all the girls swoon with whatever they swooned with.

“Do something Adam,” Vivian shouted at me. “Be useful for once!”

“I’m holding the wall up,” I responded.

Then another thought registered. The kind that might have been important but hadn’t exactly become real yet. My sister had a classroom off in that direction. A few hundred feet away from the crash landing I’d seen seconds ago.

The joys of her being in middle school and all the recent security upgrades. Our school was deemed extremely safe. Hers had not been. Today marked her first day at the new building.

Something exploded and the covered-up glass on the other side of metal plating, shattered. A second later the other figure’s face registered. Not the one being beaten across the field, but the person chasing him. King Mummy, faster that I would expect from one of the undead, and stronger but that part meant nothing more than a higher body count.

Someone screamed. Vivian froze. I stood there for a few seconds until I realized why the rest of the room had quieted down.

It wasn’t a normal scream. Not the “our football team scored a touchdown” shout. It didn’t fit under the “someone pranked the girls and they all blasted our ear drums with a violent shriek promising doom and revenge”, which is a convoluted description, but all high school boys get to know that sound.

This cry differed because it cut off abruptly in the middle and sounded wet.

I swallowed and closed my eyes. Abstract questions went through my mind, begging for my details. How far away had it been? No one knew. Was it a boy or a girl who screamed? No idea on that front either. Would it happen again?

My stomach sank and I knew the answer to at least one of my questions, because it did happen, as second time. Then a third, and fourth. Each time felt less surprising. By the firth scream I couldn’t be bothered to jump or jerk anymore. My body had already frozen into a knot.

The classroom kids froze. The teacher put her head between her legs then refused to move even after one of the class know-it-alls started rocking her while whispering demands for answers.

More walls crashed. The whole building rippled as a force from outside shattered more glass on the other side of our lockdown metal windows. The lights flickered then went out for a minute before a backup generator went on. Then nothing. I stared at the illuminated clock on the wall. It ticked away minutes.

Silence ensued. The other kids refused to breathe. Vivian held her knees tight to her chest. All those well-defined muscles and sleek power, and she’d been frozen by these events in the same manner as the rest of us. Being strong didn’t help when it came to superpowers.

The doors clicked and the red warning light above it turned to amber. Our teacher refused to move. Vivian stayed at her desk while I stood at the windows trying to figure out what had happened. Other kids ventured toward the exit and one stuck their head out. I heard someone shout from outside to stay inside the classroom but nothing else.

Minutes continued to tick down. The lockdown ended someone official looking with a bright orange vest and hardhat ushered us into the gymnasium. The only place big to house this many students. Parents were already filing in the doors. The glass windows high on the wall had shattered and it looked like someone had tried to quickly sweep them into a pile but failed.

One of the side double doors opened as more people piled in. I caught a glimpse of the courtyard, our former football field, and my sister’s classrooms on the far side. The scene out there had become a jumbled mess of disorder and my mind couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that school had been turned upside down in a matter of minutes.

Someone came by, pointing and confirming names. Then another person, double checking our presence. I stared at the window and ignored Vivian. She’d followed the rest of the line, wooden and silent.

I’d never been in the gymnasium with this much silence. There’d always been excessive shouting that drove away the quieter students.

Someone tapped on my shoulder.

“Adam Millard?”

I blinked and the man in his bright vest repeated himself. By the third time, I nodded.

He crooked a finger and said, “Come with me.”

I went. He explained something. The gist of his words slid under my thoughts and went down the drain into oblivion. Someone had been hurt. Obviously. I knew that someone, also obvious since most students knew each other in some fashion.

Then I say Brittney. She’d been strapped into a gurney and had all sorts of bandages around her legs. Red bled through the cloth.

I can’t properly describe every facet of that moment. It felt like the world lost color and started moving for the first time in ages. My heartbeat finally started back up and hearing went numb.

My sister had been hurt. How bad I couldn’t tell. Someone pressed on my chest and I couldn’t get past them. I’d seen Vivian handle people this size easily. I could just flip them over and escape.

I put my shoulder toward him, fumbled both arms, and my knee buckled. A second later I slammed into the other guy’s waist giving him the most awkward hug of my life. Let’s pretend it didn’t phase me and that precious seconds weren’t lost.

By the time I righted my brain and legs my sister had been shoveled into an ambulance. Both my parents were already there. My didn’t look my way, but dad did. His lips tightened so much that his eyes turned into beady squints that were almost pitch black.

Before the official reports had come out about my existence. Before lawyers could draft endless reams of paperwork, he knew. Then it hit me. He knew about my stupid obsession. Dad had warmed me away from heroes because he knew something bad would happen.

No one picked me up. I’d known they’d leave me to fend for myself the minute my sister got carted off to the hospital. My parents weren’t thinking about me at all. Who could blame them? One of the few perks to being eighteen was the ability to sign myself out. That and the school being a mess, students and parents screaming at each other, and all sorts of people in suits acting like this was the first-time heroes had fought.

I ignored the dwindling population and tried to put it all into perspective. That failed because teenagers are one dimensional idiots. But so is everyone else in the world. After numbly waiting for my parents to care about me and come drag me from the school, I realized they weren’t going to show up. I stumbled toward home.

I went in the back door, up to my room, and fell face first into the bed. For a few seconds, all I heard were the sounds of an empty house. Which you’d think sounds like nothing, but an absence of noises is just as deafening as the gymnasium in some ways.

Then my brain clicked off and blackness pulled my thoughts down low.

As with so many nights before, I found myself running. My heart pounded loud but part of me thought a cat might be purring somewhere. The blackness of sleep shifted slightly. I cracked an eye and found myself staring at the smiley poster above my bed. It swirled.

I drifted away and ran. Part of me felt excited, in the kind of way that Vivian never let me pursue. The walls closed in. Thudding mixed with screams. I could hear people dying.

I jerked away and found darkness had fallen. The house sat still. I fumbled down the stairs and wandered around. My parents were gone. I texted Vivian that my parents had left, then post disaster interaction would finally be the push she needed for us to move on to whatever base induced endorphins. She didn’t respond that night.

I drifted out to that misplaced grin above my bed.

Two days of twisted nightmares passed with no responses from Vivian. My own personal ability to cope with post-disaster aftermath proved lacking. The fridge emptied out. Leftovers went quickly as I packed away food like it’d all rot without my intervention.

My dad dropped by, picked up stuff, gave me a line about how my sister was still touch and go and her legs were crushed. Days went by with my parents traveling back and forth between the house and hospital. Each time they had to take more of her stuff with them.

She came home. They left, and I kept shaking. School had been canceled. Vivian dropped by and our conversation reached strained at best. I couldn’t swear on how many days passed by of this nonsense.

I wish I could say life returned to normal. It almost did and super powers sounded good again. Only this time I’d get something that let me walk through walls so that no one could lock me in the classroom again. It’d also make King Mummy’s powers useless against me. I could drag water into his lungs and watch the monster die.

The next night I woke up to sirens.

King Mummy’s body lay on our front yard. Limp and unmoving.

I stared down at the monster that had wrecked my school and murdered the other students. One of the kids that had passed on, the third scream or maybe the fourth, had been in classes with me over the years. We’d been in second grade together.

My parents spoke terse words to the police. Brittney wheeled to the front porch. A spot barely visible from my window. I watched, frozen again, hearing the same screams that had hit me at night for the last few days.

Then I threw up. By the time I looked up, the police were gone, my parents had left, and Brittney had gone again.

No one told me how King Mummy died, or why he’d ended up on our lawn.

I passed out, cold and buried under blankets. That night whatever had been chasing caught up. Or I turned a corner and there she stood. Alice. Fuzzy and vague. Barely humanoid. Really, she’d been this creature of shadows and nightmares stretched across a scarecrow’s taller uglier cousin.

“No one will ever be able to hurt you again,” she said.

A mess of half formed creatures lay around her. They looked like dead bodies should look. One twitched. I stared at King Mummy’s dried up face came into focus. My heart stopped.

And Alice? She smiled at me. Exactly like the poster above my bed. I could have taken a picture and simply pulled one file on top of the other to complete a macabre creature that tried to be human but failed.

I woke screaming, ran out the front door and found Vivian getting ready to knock. Her presence barely registered as I hit the lawn and gasped for air. My face pressed down until the wet smell of earth filled my nose. I stared at a mole hole. It seemed to be the only thing disturbing another wise pristine lawn and that bugged me for only a second.

Then I heard her voice again. Laughing, a sideways skittering laugh that could have been delightful if it had not been sped up then stretched out.

I threw up.

“Adam? Are you okay? I got your message. Where are your parents?”

My head shook along with every other part of my body.

“What’s that?” Vivian asked.

My eyes watered but I turned enough to see something huge hovering over us. It had lights on the bottom. Some bit in the middle opened up then a brighter light than anything else I’d ever seen shone out onto Vivian and me.

That beam pulled us up into the sky.

The rest of this I’ve already talked about. Alien being had us and other people in a pen. They were pulled out one at a time. Something went haywire as a one of our fellow jailbirds turned out to be a superhero of the electric sparky kind. He zapped the ship. The ship zapped back. Stuff exploded.

We managed to find escape pods. Vivian fell behind. Ship went poof and we got separated.

She went on to live her version of hell. I went on to mine. That story’s old news.

I could be considered lucky that electric hero dude programmed our home locations into the escape pod. The ride down even went well, minus the freefall as my pod rocked downward without sense of gravity or much need to keep lunch down.

Let’s also be thankful I managed to flee the pod and hid somewhere in the bushes before police showed up. Then catch a bus across town.

Of my phone sat in my bedroom. I risked it and my attempts at texting my parents reached a dead end. Their lines were inactive. The car and their clothes were gone. My sister’s room had been picked over and cleaned out.While I’d been in space for who knew how long, they’d simply finished moving out.

More the idiot me for not really noticing what had been happening. All the pieces you’ve been putting together during my story took me a lot longer. I could tell you that I figured it all out instantly. That it made sense why my room seemed to be the only one untouched in this madness.

I do know that my next course of action involved tearing down the poster above my bed and bitterly thinking to myself about a canceled birthday party.

That night I had the dream. Not the scary one with me running away from some unseen presence or trying to hump a girl. It didn’t fit together with any sort of excitement or fear.

This one was peace. That first birthday where I dreamed something so perfect it hurt to wake up. Of course, as I’ve probably told you, the reason it hurt had more to do with my house falling apart around me.

My shitty origin story stops here.

So, here’s my question to you. Knowing what you know. Following my adventures as you have, did it all start with that smiling posters above my bed? If so, who put it there? Those questions and more have haunted me for the last few months, and part of me worries about an even more sinister possibility. That something had happened to me. Something so powerful and strong reached out and touched my life the night Alice left, that it changed the past.

Why do I think that might be a possibility? Because, I didn’t start remembering that poster above my bed until recently. And because I’ve seen some weird shit.

Here’s a fun consideration to end this part of the story with. If Alice looked so inhuman during those first few meetings, and keep in mind this is us assuming the smiling face poster’s isn’t some time warped doodad being added to my memory, why on earth would I want to be with her? Or have sex with her?

I mean, monstrous figments of unimaginable power from another dimension need love too, right?

***

Oddity Study Highlights

Name: Liars, the lot of them

Translated from Technobabble by Captain Longhall, the sucker currently in charge of Area 51

My brain’s mush and I’m running out of steam, but the point of these reports is to make sure no one lights your ass on fire for the first few years. Onto the next tidbit you’ll need to know.

Ask a hero their origin and they’ll feed you a line that only vaguely matches public records. Which is fucked up because we control the public records and we’re not even trying to cover stuff up! Look. Once you get in this office go compare someone’s origin story, anyone’s, and if you want a proven example with the footage, look at Baby Faced McGee from the forties.

McGee was, maybe still is, a bank robber with the power to walk through walls. His first known power breakout pinged onto our radar in the New York tower. We even got it with a camcorder. Don’t get sidetracked by the date of the invention since. There’s a portal in room fifty-eight that leads to this defunct pawn shop about fifty years in the future. We get all sorts of shit from there, which is another nightmare separate from this point will turn any grey hairs you’re hanging onto straight white. Unless you’re bald already. Then good luck because you’ll be hairless soon.

Where was I? Right, bank robber walks through walls. The first breakout happened in that building. Some idiot dropped a couch over the ledge of the fourth floor straight down through the lobby onto the first floor. Baby Faced McGee should have been squished but he phased through the furniture and came out okay. First time he showed up on the radar.

The way he tells the story, he first walked through walls at age eight to get out of a foster home where they bolted the doors shut at night. Foster home in question, never existed. Here’s me shortcutting ten years of experience into one simple fact for you. Powered people bullshit their own stories for flavor and assume everything they tell you is a lie.