Captain Storm (2020 NaNoWriMo Practice)
[Ahead of an inevitably bumbling NaNoWriMo attempt, I'm writing a bunch of short stories to improve my fiction-writing efficiency. They're quickly written and largely unedited, so please leave vicious critique in the comments. This was written on October 7th, 2020.]
Captain Storm was one of the first. His ability to accelerate particles around his hands, once under proper control, meant he could blast high velocity air in any direction just by pointing. Of course he was going to try to use it to fly. After his second successful attempt sent him flying into his neighbor’s house, the cat was out of the bag. Superheroes were real.
The next Supe to hit public consciousness was @Stronch_Dude, a fifteen-year-old who announced his presence with a TikTok account where he used his elastic limbs to slap people’s groceries out of their hands at his local Walmart. His seven-foot forearm, some scattered grapes, and a very confused old man dominated the news cycle for a week.
After that, Supes flew out of the woodwork. Healing factors, prehensile hair, taser fingers, night vision, bioluminescence, chameleon skin. Vegas had betting pools up within a week as to what powers would emerge next. Fakes and frauds trying to ride the trend and tip the pot flooded the internet, and in the midst of this noise and the phonies it took a moment for the disappointment to be recognized: all the cool powers weren’t happening.
Teleportation? Nope. Neither telepathy, neither telekinesis. No laser eyes or frost breath. No hulks. The media clamored to interview one man who claimed to be able to read his wife’s mind, but it turned out he was just a good listener. Super-strength did show up, but the limitations of the human body and its brittle bones made it tricky to use more than once.
So that left Captain Storm as the only person in the world who could fly.
And he used that to full advantage.
Rodger McFrug - his real name - was the kind of man who would lead the chants at a college football game and sign up for a third round of karaoke while everyone else in the bar was trying to close out for the night. Once the limelight hit him, he stayed with it wherever it went. The moment new Supes were in the news more than he was, he bought a slow-motion camera, rented a mansion in Bel-air, and started a stunt-centric YouTube channel.
Thumbnails of exaggerated facial expressions and the words PRANKED or TOO FAR in bold red font, leading to videos of odds and ends launched toward unsuspecting bystanders, flooded into people’s recommendations. As his fame grew, he made the rounds on morning and late-night TV alike, released an experimental rap album to much embarrassment, and won back the public heart with a decent run on The Bachelor. He was a media darling.
So it was only a matter of time before things got political.
BIG THANKS to MAJOR SUPER HERO @TheWick for helping #MAINTAINLAWANDORDER against RIOTERS in NEW ORLEANS this weekend! Other Supes take note!
The Wick, who’s sole power was that he could set things on fire only as long as he was already touching actual fire, had made a big splash. Early congressional mandates banned Individuals with Extraordinary Abilities from using their abilities on other people without consent. It was a quick, somewhat redundant attempt to prevent powers from being abused. Wick was the first person to truly put that ban to the test. At a protest in New Orleans, Wick – son of a New Orleans police officer – grabbed a burning flag from the hands of a protestor and used it to spread a wall of flame over the crowd, causing those who were not injured to flee in a panicked stampede.
The DA refused to prosecute. The DOJ made it clear they had no intention of enforcing congressional policy on the case. The precedent was set. Supes were free to fight.
The most famous Supes tried to stay out of it. Remain impartial. Those that were using their powers for activism or awareness encouraged their fellow Supes to remain peaceful. But for Captain Storm, there was a new limelight to be had. Never much of a reactionary, he pivoted his social media presence to be all about social revolution. Claims that he didn’t really believe in the movement were soon swept away by viral videos of Captain Storm, Activist slapping tear gas canisters out of the air and sending them hurtling back toward the staunch wall of Kevlar-clad figures that had launched them.
He led a tidal wave.
Supes came out on both sides, and none of the Normies could do anything about it – nor did most of them really want to. The protesters would take any edge they could to hold their ground, and the various forces of the establishment were more than used to allowing supposedly unaffiliated counter-protestors to clear the streets for them. It used to be biker gangs and skinheads, but nobody was going to complain if a few supes stepped in instead. Encounters grew more tense with each passing day, and then The Batter joined the National Guard.
The Batter had superstrength. Well, his arm had superstrength. His already fairly muscular frame was made paltry by his colossal right arm. His career as a Supe consisted mainly of spectacle boxing and UFC matches, until his tour of various fighting-related podcasts and radio shows brought him close to certain reactionary thought leaders who shared those circles. When The Wick made his stand and came out unopposed, The Batter was inspired – and encouraged – to follow suite.
Government forces tasked with quelling protests had grown bolder, and were no longer content to merely appear impartial while counter-protesters of whatever convenient form was available did the dirty work. Thus The Batter was recruited into the National Guard, and placed on the front lines of whatever protest rumor had it the strongest Supes would be defending.
He clashed with Captain Storm in, of all places, Ohio. In downtown Cleveland, on an overcast Thursday afternoon, on the fortieth day of protests for something most people had forgotten the specifics of due to simple exhaustion, Captain Storm flew out of the sky to help raise morale.
The Batter, thanks to a mole on Captain Storm’s social media team, was waiting for him.
It was a shockingly anticlimactic moment. People there at the time weren’t even sure what had happened. A speck fell out of the clouds, appeared to bounce off the ground, and then rocketed back into the sky. Shaky handheld footage flooded the internet for hours until a documentary filmmaker who had snuck behind police lines finally released her footage.
The Batter had known precisely where Captain Storm was planning to land in order for photographers to capture the moment, and was braced at the spot, shielded from view by a wall of Normie officers. That evening, on every screen in the nation, shaky handheld camera footage in the muted, filtered greys of a Cleveland fall showed the hulk-armed figure eyeing the sky. Before viewers can even see the flying man emerging from the top of frame, The Batter was lunging his massive fist upward.
For precisely twelve frames, the body of Captain Storm is seen for the last time. It crumples over The Batter’s fist, promptly reverses direction, and flies up and out of frame once more.
The amount of force exerted by The Batter isn’t precisely known. As mentioned before, due to the physical limitations of the human body, proper Superstrength tends to be something of a one-time deal. The punch delt by The Batter that rainy Thursday in Cleveland shattered every bone in his oversized arm. By the time he arrived at a hospital, amputation was the only option.
As for Captain Storm, a careful analysis of the footage seemed to suggest that his body departed the punch at approximately 20 km/s. Earth’s escape velocity is 11. It was a cloudy day, so nobody got a visual, and air resistance might have slowed him down, but all good bookies had odds on Captain Storm being in space. Even if he had survived the punch, with no air to push, he wouldn’t be making the trip back.
The first man to fly would fly forevermore.
Three weeks later the Governor of Ohio was forced to resign after he was recorded at a benefit dinner saying “At least now we have more astronauts than New York again.”
I really like the political angle. So much of world history can now be told in tweets, and that's a little weird, but it makes for a good writing device here. There's a tinge of Douglas Adams-esque wit on the back end of some of your descriptions, and the overarching plot is awesome, but I feel it's less than focused on its characters. I want to have an emotional reaction to the first biased superheroes (I haven't watched the boys on amazon prime, but I'm betting it's similar) and I feel like if you had a third party observing or documenting the hubbub, it could be really effective
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