Starblaydia
13-07-2007, 00:25
(Too much X-Men, Wild Cards, Heroes etc has led me to this - a work of fiction within Starblaydia; itself a work of total imagination. One of many Starblaydi comic books, if you will, without all the pictures - Star)
So What Do You Do?
This is the question that gets asked more than any other around here. Everyone wants to know everyone else’s talents. Whenever the new kid arrives, you can count on the fingers of one hand how long it’ll take, in minutes, for them to be asked that question.
So what do you do?
Depending on the kid, it depends on the answer – like most things at any high school. In other places it’d be ‘What music do you like?’ or ‘What team do you support?’ but, oh no, not here, we’re not like that here.
So what do you do?
Some will answer immediately, nice and confident. They’re usually the ones who are confident or, perversely, those who are ultra-lacking in confident and don’t have a better answer than the truth. Ones who don’t answer are either shy, or ashamed, or simply used to guarding their secrets, keeping their abilities close to their chest. Can’t blame them.
C’mon. What can you do?
OK, I know, that’s three times already. I’m still not going to answer you, though. Not yet, anyway. Before I give you a selection of other answers, though, let me explain a little more about this particular high school. We’re pretty normal – we have a football team, go to classes in English, Maths, we have morning assemblies, a cafeteria, detention. The usual. Honest. Then there’s the unusual, the more… individual, tailored, extra-curricular activity-based classes. Which are based around the question, the question that if your fellow students haven’t found the answers to, then the teachers already know the answers to, the reason why you’re at our little school in the first place.
What you can do.
We do incredible things here; let me use my own friends as examples, naming no names just yet, as it can be fairly obvious who’s who anyway. Everything from the brilliant, astounding, incredible and fascinating, to – frankly – the downright incomprehensible, useless and inane. My friends, again, one can photosynthesise – he makes the perfect gardener, though he has a green everything, let alone a green thumb. Fun but essentially useless. Another can punch a hole through a bar of steel twelve inches think because of his increased muscle mass and general all-around super-strength. From energy blasts to spontaneous combustion, not forgetting flight, regeneration and the rest of the ‘cool’ powers that everyone outside of this place would describe as ‘Alpha’.
Alpha, for us, is a different term when it comes to our powers. Take regeneration, for instance. Everyone on the planet, normal or gifted, homo sapiens or homo sapiens mutare, regenerates. Your skin heals, bones re-knit, white blood cells attack infection and disease to repel it and so forth. Just because you have the flesh sloughed from your bones and have it re-grow in a matter of minutes doesn’t mean that’s an Alpha power. That’s maybe a Sigma or Tau-class ability, depending on its speed and effectiveness. Maybe combined with something else you could make it up to Mu or even Lambda status. You do need to now your Greek alphabet, by the way, if you’re going to get along here with classifications. To put it basically: Alpha are phenomenal, deity-like powers, while an omega is perhaps some extra-talented sports star or office-worker who doesn’t know he’s a mutant yet, just skilled at what he does.
Yep, I just said ‘mutant’, back there, in that last paragraph. Call us gifted, call us freaks, genetic offshoots, gods, monsters. Homo sapiens may mean ‘wise man’, but we’re 'mutated wise man', Homo sapiens mutare. We’re all mutants here, from our Headmaster down to even the janitor and school bus drivers. It’s a haven for mutants, a sanctuary from a world that doesn’t understand us, a life that we shouldn’t have to lead. We’re different; some of us so different that we wouldn’t be able to lead normal lives. Even here we can’t lead normal lives, not even day-to-day. Whatever a normal life is.
So what do you do?
That’s right, I talk about everyone else but me. I’m an Omega, before you ask, perhaps up to a Psi if I manage to train myself up to do it properly. I’m a wordsmith. ‘Yeah right’, I hear you yell, decrying my literary style. Did I mention this little effort was totally created, including three complete fully fleshed-out drafts, within my head in about sixty seconds? No, I didn't. How about that my brain is wired up – or rather, mutated up - to process language, particularly written, faster than anyone else on the planet? That for every sentence you can read in a minute, I can do that number in paragraphs? I’ve composed thirty-minute political speeches that have won elections in the time it’s taken for a politician to say ‘Well I think you’ll find the question you’re really asking is…’. My only downside is a complete lack of that oh-so-rare super-speed in my fingertips when it comes to writing them down. That and I get stage fright. Oh, "its" and "it’s" bothers me, too, but I'm just being pedantic now. They call me Lexicon, a nice twist on my actual name - Alex. But now comes the fun question. You know what it’s going to be, unless you’re thinking ‘What cool super-hero name would you use?’.
So what do you do?
So What Do You Do?
This is the question that gets asked more than any other around here. Everyone wants to know everyone else’s talents. Whenever the new kid arrives, you can count on the fingers of one hand how long it’ll take, in minutes, for them to be asked that question.
So what do you do?
Depending on the kid, it depends on the answer – like most things at any high school. In other places it’d be ‘What music do you like?’ or ‘What team do you support?’ but, oh no, not here, we’re not like that here.
So what do you do?
Some will answer immediately, nice and confident. They’re usually the ones who are confident or, perversely, those who are ultra-lacking in confident and don’t have a better answer than the truth. Ones who don’t answer are either shy, or ashamed, or simply used to guarding their secrets, keeping their abilities close to their chest. Can’t blame them.
C’mon. What can you do?
OK, I know, that’s three times already. I’m still not going to answer you, though. Not yet, anyway. Before I give you a selection of other answers, though, let me explain a little more about this particular high school. We’re pretty normal – we have a football team, go to classes in English, Maths, we have morning assemblies, a cafeteria, detention. The usual. Honest. Then there’s the unusual, the more… individual, tailored, extra-curricular activity-based classes. Which are based around the question, the question that if your fellow students haven’t found the answers to, then the teachers already know the answers to, the reason why you’re at our little school in the first place.
What you can do.
We do incredible things here; let me use my own friends as examples, naming no names just yet, as it can be fairly obvious who’s who anyway. Everything from the brilliant, astounding, incredible and fascinating, to – frankly – the downright incomprehensible, useless and inane. My friends, again, one can photosynthesise – he makes the perfect gardener, though he has a green everything, let alone a green thumb. Fun but essentially useless. Another can punch a hole through a bar of steel twelve inches think because of his increased muscle mass and general all-around super-strength. From energy blasts to spontaneous combustion, not forgetting flight, regeneration and the rest of the ‘cool’ powers that everyone outside of this place would describe as ‘Alpha’.
Alpha, for us, is a different term when it comes to our powers. Take regeneration, for instance. Everyone on the planet, normal or gifted, homo sapiens or homo sapiens mutare, regenerates. Your skin heals, bones re-knit, white blood cells attack infection and disease to repel it and so forth. Just because you have the flesh sloughed from your bones and have it re-grow in a matter of minutes doesn’t mean that’s an Alpha power. That’s maybe a Sigma or Tau-class ability, depending on its speed and effectiveness. Maybe combined with something else you could make it up to Mu or even Lambda status. You do need to now your Greek alphabet, by the way, if you’re going to get along here with classifications. To put it basically: Alpha are phenomenal, deity-like powers, while an omega is perhaps some extra-talented sports star or office-worker who doesn’t know he’s a mutant yet, just skilled at what he does.
Yep, I just said ‘mutant’, back there, in that last paragraph. Call us gifted, call us freaks, genetic offshoots, gods, monsters. Homo sapiens may mean ‘wise man’, but we’re 'mutated wise man', Homo sapiens mutare. We’re all mutants here, from our Headmaster down to even the janitor and school bus drivers. It’s a haven for mutants, a sanctuary from a world that doesn’t understand us, a life that we shouldn’t have to lead. We’re different; some of us so different that we wouldn’t be able to lead normal lives. Even here we can’t lead normal lives, not even day-to-day. Whatever a normal life is.
So what do you do?
That’s right, I talk about everyone else but me. I’m an Omega, before you ask, perhaps up to a Psi if I manage to train myself up to do it properly. I’m a wordsmith. ‘Yeah right’, I hear you yell, decrying my literary style. Did I mention this little effort was totally created, including three complete fully fleshed-out drafts, within my head in about sixty seconds? No, I didn't. How about that my brain is wired up – or rather, mutated up - to process language, particularly written, faster than anyone else on the planet? That for every sentence you can read in a minute, I can do that number in paragraphs? I’ve composed thirty-minute political speeches that have won elections in the time it’s taken for a politician to say ‘Well I think you’ll find the question you’re really asking is…’. My only downside is a complete lack of that oh-so-rare super-speed in my fingertips when it comes to writing them down. That and I get stage fright. Oh, "its" and "it’s" bothers me, too, but I'm just being pedantic now. They call me Lexicon, a nice twist on my actual name - Alex. But now comes the fun question. You know what it’s going to be, unless you’re thinking ‘What cool super-hero name would you use?’.
So what do you do?