When I first met Gideon March, she looked like any six-year old. She wouldn’t make eye contact, instead looking at her feet like she’d found them for the first time as she kicked them back and forth on the sofa. You knew she was listening, though, by the way she smiled and looked at you out of the corners of her eyes. And sometimes, just sometimes, you’d catch a flicker of her power as her pupils narrowed into cat-like slits. I was told she could see pheromones, much like her mother Storm Tiger, and both friends and family were dreading the day her father’s explosive powers manifested. He isn’t called Volatile without reason.
Not all prodigies take after both parents, but many do. They are also the least understood and the best kept secret among the superhero community, perhaps more so than one’s own secret identity. Many heroes who are parents to prodigies are terrified of the public scrutiny their children might receive, or the threat posed by the metas they’ve arrested. Gideon March is no exception. While Gideon is famous thanks to the paparazzi who captured photos of her and her slitted eyes last year, both Storm Tiger and Volatile want their daughter to have a well-adjusted childhood.
The first official prodigy was Trevor Endicott, son of British WWII hero Hooded Crow and the German-born Gewrum who defected to the Allies in the middle of the war. Trevor inherited his mother’s shapeshifting abilities and reputedly went on to work for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) as a spy. There’s very little information about Trevor’s life except for some pieces in The Times about “the lad with superpowers.” The Times called him “a prodigy” and the name stuck for all powered offspring.
Because an active Crisis Gene (CG-1) is a recessive gene, a single metahuman parent will rarely pass on his or her abilities to their children. Both parents must be metahuman for a prodigy to be born and exhibit powers. At what age that child shows powers is another matter, and seems to range anywhere from five years to the onset of puberty. Beyond that, it’s unlikely the child of two metahumans will generate abilities, and it has happened that a prodigy develops no powers at all.
Unfortunately, there are so few prodigies out there and meta-parents are so protective of their children that there’s no studies to establish any sort of baseline. It also means that prodigies have become a goldmine of inaccuracies and conspiracy theorists. The most popular of the latter, and the most sexist and troubling in my opinion, is the belief that women who trigger are “artificially inseminated by multiple meta donors to act as superbaby factories to create as many metahumans as it takes to eventually replace humanity.” If you think this assertion just comes from the lunatic fringe, then you’d have to include Congressman Wheeler of Oregon and Chief Judge Madison of the Maryland Court of Appeals in that list. Not only have they unabashedly stated their beliefs on the matter, but they’ve gone so far as to suggest that metahumans can’t marry or have children for “the sanctity of the human gene pool.”
Other people worry about metahuman children for a simpler and perhaps more practical reason. The ability to control their powers, especially with the onset of puberty. Although never officially verified, there are stories within the industry of prodigies undergoing power fluxes and even power shifts during the hormonal turbulence of puberty. It’s no secret that some prodigies end up refining on their parent’s powers or pushing them further. Trevor Endicott was said to be able to take on different human appearances, while his mother was restricted to animal forms.
That said, many metahumans home-school their children and a few even use tutors with powers. Despite a wish to “normalize” their children, metahumans are afraid of accidents or their children getting into fights.
“Prodigy or not, they are still children,” Storm Tiger told me once. “They learn by making mistakes.” It’s those mistakes that terrify parents into thinking metahumans should never have children, and that thinking that forces powered parents to home-school their children.
Regardless, current estimates put the number of prodigies at around 45 worldwide and there rumors that some countries encourage metas to marry one another and have multiple children through incentives like stipends, homes, and state support. The world has yet to see, however, what happens when two prodigies marry and have children of their own. Will it be the beginning of superpowered dynasties? Will it distill power into more powerful metahumans? Nobody knows because as it stands now, we barely understand what being a prodigy actually means, much less what happens to their DNA when they’re steeped in powers from nearly the time of their foundation years.