Author: Lucien

It’s called “The Tour,” and only a handful know how grueling, how exhausting, and how heartbreaking it can be. The Tour is the two-year average of most heroes who hit the streets before injury or PTSD or burnout bring their careers to a sudden halt. The ones who get back on the horse are the tried and true superheroes who see such stumbles as part of the trade. This isn’t a shortcut to fame, for them, but a calling to help the world. Many more are looking for their 15 minutes of fame to launch endorsement and book deals or acting careers, and they’re usually the ones who retire within their first two years, if an injury or death doesn’t force them out of the game.

It’s Friday night and the tourist trade on Canal Street is brisk. It’s hard to see what’s happening along this section of Chinatown as the crowds ply the stalls and simple storefronts that sell a variety of knockoff merchandise, but D’Mystify has a sharp eye. She’s a Charlie-class hero with limited prescience. She can follow a person’s actions along a limited timeline.

D’MYSTIFY: I can’t see the future like some folks can, but I get flashes and images. Bitch of a thing, though, I’m my own worst enemy. I get involved, I change the outcome. I jump in too early, my visions aren’t admissible in court.

HERO BEAT: Right. The Stranger Witness Rule. A separate, state-sectioned body has to confirm your vision.

Tonight, however, D’Mystify’s watching people of interest, plotting their trajectory as they move through the crowd and trying to figure out where they’ll end up in the next hour.

D’MYSTIFY: Whatever you want—shoes, purses, jackets, lids, you name the brand… down there, they’ll misspell it and sell it.

HERO BEAT: You’re going after counterfeiters?

D’MYSTIFY: I’m going after the warehouses that supply the stores. They got them hidden all over the place here and they see the cops coming a mile away.

Two years ago, D’Mystify crawled into New York-Presbyterian, bleeding from several gunshot wounds that left her near death. It wasn’t the first time she’d been injured during the Tour either. She’d been stabbed, blasted, and beaten before, but this was the first time that she nearly died since her trigger event.

HERO BEAT: So you carry a gun now?

D’MYSTIFY: And body armor. Wouldn’t you? I used to worry about how the armor would look under my costume. I couldn’t afford that expensive carbon-nanotube shit. I thought looking bulky would spoil my chances for my “big break.” I was so damn naïve.

HERO BEAT: How did it change you?

D’MYSTIFY: [Laughs, but without humor] Getting shot? Almost dying? What do you think? I felt like an idiot. When I first got my powers, I thought I was made, I mean set up for the life. I was going to move to New York, Hero Central, I was going put in my two years on the street, and turn that into a book deal. Such nonsense.

HERO BEAT: It took you seven months to recover.

D’MYSTIFY: You know, that wasn’t even the worst part. No, the worse part was being treated like a joke. I made all the talk-shows that week. Nobody talked about the good I’d done for the community or the people I saved. No. They laughed at me because if I could see the future, how come I didn’t predict getting shot? That’s what made them laugh.

HERO BEAT: Then why still hit the streets?

D’MYSTIFY: Pride, I guess. No, you know, that’s not even true. I guess I felt ashamed. I get these amazing powers to help people and all I do is look for the payday. So, as soon as I could move on my own, I came right back out into the streets, trying to do right by other folks first.

HERO BEAT: You’re now in your second tour?

D’MYSTIFY: I am. I’m still working off what I owe the hospital, though some heroes stepped up and ran one of those Fund Me campaigns to help me with the day to day? God bless ‘em, I’ll tell you. My apartment is a gift from a patron who’ll remain anonymous, but she knows who she is, and I get the odd job now and then, but, forget insurance. No company wants to give me coverage. And a social life? You’re looking at my night out right here. But it feels good. It feels right, you know?

HERO BEAT: Do you ever see yourself getting shot? I mean, do your powers show you that?

D’MYSTIFY: I always see myself getting shot. It’s always a possible future on any given night, and some days it makes me want to stay in bed all day and eat ice cream. Pralines, if you’re wondering.

HERO BEAT: How do you do it, then? How do you swallow that fear and come out here night after night?

D’MYSTIFY: By taking it one night at a time. That’s all any of us can do.

Suddenly, D’Mystify spots something that piques her interest. She smiles at me and shrugs, as if to say “interview’s over.” She’s gone a moment later, shadowing her lead along the rooftops.

The photographs are iconic of the 20^th Century, as indelible as the flaming crash of the Hindenburg, and a defiant Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in the ring. The grainy black and white photos on D-Day, June 6^th, 1944 show Nazi-Kicker and The Honor protecting U.S., British, and Canadian soldiers from machine gun nests; or the battle between The Union Sentinel and Winterkrieg in the middle of Utah Beach. The Invasion of Normandy also spawned two more metahumans including a British soldier who would die an hour after his trigger event.

Flash forward a little under 20 years later, on a rainy Friday in November of 1963, when another image would come to mark the era: The Union Sentinel racing to shield President John F. Kennedy in his motorcade seconds before both men fall to the assassin’s bullets.

This valiant act would trigger the beginning of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and the launch of his social reforms that would come include urban renewal, environmental beautification, conservation, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, and perhaps more importantly for metahumans, the abolition of the National Powers Act on the eve of Vietnam War.

The National Powers Act, a reminted version of the War Powers Act, had placed metahumans under governmental control and authority since WWII. At the time, registered metahumans were required to undergo training at the War College to instill them with “proper values” and “responsible power use,” but the War College’s real purpose was to bootcamp metas and prepare them for eventual battles with Russian and Chinese metahumans in theaters of combat.

So what changed that one war would see heroes figure prominently and another would be marked by their near absence? That President Johnson choose the eve of the Vietnam War as the moment to rescind the National Powers Act was due less to flagging support for the policy and The Union Sentinel’s sacrifice, and more to do with the Schumacher Principle.

An Austrian-born Jew, Dr. Ernst Schumacher fled his birth country before Nazi occupation in 1938 and went on to pioneer the field of Meta-genetics. In developing his Schumacher Principle, he noted the sharp rise of metahumans during World War II, including the rare Able-Class heroes, and posited that conflicts and wars that featured metahumans actually became catalysts for the emergence of even more metahumans. On a sufficient scale, superpowered individuals could serve as trigger events, events normally reserved for disasters. Dr. Schumacher went on to prove that any modern war fought on foreign soil would actually benefit the local and often put-upon populace with more metas.

Suddenly, the notion of using metas in regional conflicts like South-East Asia and Africa frightened superpowers and juntas alike, for the very people being killed or subjugated were the ones likeliest to develop Able and Baker-class superhumans. The Schumacher Principle was the inadvertent catalyst behind the liberation of metahumans, but it also created the first generation of heroes who were deliberately kept out of war.

The Schumacher Principle carried the unspoken caveat that most large nations like the United States, China, and Russia would carry fewer trigger events for emerging metas because conflicts were rarely fought on their soil. And the metas who did emerge from natural disasters or massive accidents like Chernobyl and Fukishima were generally rated at Baker and Charlie-class (rumors persist of Able-Class metas who were triggered by events post WWII, but that has yet to be proven; The Honor remains the only Able-Class metahuman still accounted for). This meant that the world had a vested interest in ensuring that natural disasters and wars did not escalate, for fear they might give host nations a new type of weapon of mass destruction.

Over half-a-century later, the Schumacher Principle continues to protect many metahumans in North America and Europe from military service. Unfortunately, rumors persist, telling of genetic research to isolate the factors that trigger the Crisis-gene, to create a new breed of manufactured metahumans. Were this to happen, it might well spell the end of the freedoms and liberties enjoyed by today’s breed of superpowered individuals, freedoms earned all those decades ago when The Union Sentinel raced to save the life of an American President.

It was April 27^th, 2011 at the height of the Super Outbreak of storms when over two hundred tornadoes touched down across Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi. It devastated towns and killed 355 people over the course of four days. Four of the tornadoes that spawned that day were F5s, the strongest ranking possible on the Enhanced Fujita scale, and the so-called Super Outbreak became a trigger event for as many as three known metahumans including the most famous one today… Grimsta.

HERO BEAT: Thank you for speaking with us today.

GRIMSTA: Thank you for having me.

HERO BEAT: Many of our readers know the superhero, the movie star, the producer: Grimsta. But tell us about Charles Michael Hope, the man who came before Grimsta.

GRIMSTA: (Laughs) Come on, now, Charles Michael Hope is still here. It’s his heart in here, his kidneys, his bones. Hell, I still have his gallbladder scar.

HERO BEAT: So your remarkable regenerative abilities don’t heal everything.

GRIMSTA: No, they keep me together, but they don’t heal what happened to me before my trigger event. My gallbladder is still gone.

HERO BEAT: So tell us about Charles, in his own words.

GRIMSTA: Well, Charles was an athletic kid from Smithville, Mississippi who went on to play College football as fullback for the University of Alabama Crimson Tide.

HERO BEAT: But you got in on a scholarship for Engineering.

GRIMSTA: Yeah, thanks to my Dad. He owned a construction company in Smithville, and every day after school, if I didn’t have practice, I was doing my homework in his office. Dad had a head for math, and he made sure I did too.

HERO BEAT: Can you tell us about that day?

GRIMSTA: Look, I’ll be honest. There’s nothing in that story that makes sense—nothing in there that’s going to tell you why I deserved to have powers. Trust me, I’ve played that day over and over again in my head and it–it was the Hail Mary of genetics. Over 300 people weren’t so lucky. The tornadoes hit and I—I did something stupid. I was worried about my dad and his phone was dead, so I drove through the damn storms to reach him. I hit Smithville in time to watch it get destroyed, like… nothing I’ve ever seen. Just a column of wind and rage, and when the damn thing was almost on top of me? Boom… my crisis gene triggers just as I’m praying for Jesus to save me.

HERO BEAT: So do you believe it was the Crisis Gene that saved you, or God?

GRIMSTA: A bit of both, maybe. I can’t say. All I know is that I got tossed, what, three miles away by that F5? I hit the ground covered in my aura and my cuts and bruises? Well, those disappeared fast. As I made my way back to what was left of Smithville, I just started helping people.

HERO BEAT: And that’s when the television crew started following you around.

GRIMSTA: Right. I guess we both made each other’s careers that day.

HERO BEAT: Having survived a devastating event like the Super Outbreak, what do you think of Storm Chasers… I mean the fans who jump into danger hoping for their own trigger event.

GRIMSTA: I get it, you know. They see me living this life and they want a piece of it. But it’s not worth it. Behind every one of these trigger events is a real-life tragedy, and you’re at the heart of it, saving lives and powerless to save more. You know, I had a chance to talk to Freedom-X at a charity event out in L.A. when I was just starting. You know what he told me? He said: “God only gave us two hands to keep us humble.” The day I got my powers… I couldn’t save the man who raised me. I couldn’t show him who I’d become. That’s what I’d tell Storm Chasers.