Do you know what it's like going from ordinary boy to superhero? There's no one emotion to describe it. I was in awe because I had astounding command over light. I was scared because now I had the heavy weight of responsibility for humanity on my shoulders. I was nostalgic because obtaining superpowers reminded me of my weekends when I would play outside, pretending I was a ninja or a pirate who had eaten a Cursed Fruit after watching Toonami.

But overall, I didn't feel that different. I could do the craziest stuff, but it wasn't like I had a third arm growing out my back. Well, not me, but just standing, walking, pissing, I felt like Grant Peart, the ordinary boy.

Of course, the moment I entered my first battle, I was anything but ordinary.

I was late showing up, since the Karraker didn't wait on superheroes to be made. Spatial tears were opening up all over the planet and at random. Most that were detected opened up over the ocean, so the Karraker it dumped out wound up drowning, thankfully. There were even a few instances of aquatic Karraker plopping on dry land and dying right there.

We weren't that fortunate to have the land Karraker splash in water and water Karraker to get beached in Kansas, though. What was even unluckier was that some of the tears didn't zip up after a few minutes or seconds. Some stayed wide open for hours, days. There was one even open for a full week before it decided to shut up, Karraker pouring in all the while.

Put simply, Karraker were coming in, and until the PhDs found out a way to shut them back out, it was a constant struggle to seek them out and destroy them.

*

I'll never forget my first battle. How could I ever? I saw the news footage and received some wickedly brief training before my deployment, but none of that prepares a person for the reality, and what I saw—the very first thing—was nothing covered in basic training.

It was a monstrosity. Taller than any building in the city. (Not my hometown. Austin or maybe Dallas.) I saw it before I saw any skyscrapers, and I watched from the helicopter, stupefied, as we drew closer and I got a good look at it.

It—

Like I said, it was a monstrosity. This towering, multi-legged...thing stomping around downtown, tipping over buildings just by brushing up against them. It kinda looked like the Scarabs from Halo, except sprung from a kid's worst nightmares. Fighting those things were the best parts of Halo 2 and 3, but taking on bad guys is doable in a video game because you have multiple lives and you can't feel bullets or grenades. Plus, in a video game, you have a predefined set of actions you have to take to defeat a boss. Looking at that thing, I didn't have the first clue what I would do. Dummies were easy-to-kill targets, but that thing? Would I even be able to touch that thing?

Only one way to find out, I thought.

I had the pilot drop me off on a rooftop, and I began charging up my Solar Beam, though I hadn't named it that yet at the time. Movies always love depicting dramatic action sequences with overcast or thunderstorms to “set the mood,” but for that battle, it was bright and sunny. I even had a passing thought about how the weather was too nice for what was going on. That cloudless sky, I think, is part of the reason why my charge was so powerful. That and my desperation to kill that Lovecraftian Scarab.

My attack exploded from the palm of my hand. Ever play Pokémon Colosseum and/or XD Gale of Darkness and use Hyper Beam or Solar Beam? Know how those attacks animate? That's basically what I did, except I cranked it up to 111. My blast was much wider and much taller than I was. Much, much taller and wider. It could obliterate a mountain and leave nothing but a plateau of its base. And that Scarab took that head-on.

The shriek it let out was like something not of this world. Which it technically was, but it scared me almost as much as my own power. I stood there in awe as that thing collapsed. All the life taken out of it, and it tipped over and crashed onto the district below, smoking.

“Wha—What the hell...?”

Superheroes often did some pretty gnarly stuff, but it wasn't every day that they whipped out a super laser and killed a city-sized abomination without so much as breaking a sweat. Well, I had broken a sweat. Broken out into a cold sweat. I just kept standing there like, Seriously, what the hell? I can't remember what exactly was wrong with me. My skull was filled with about 20,000 different thoughts, and they were all bouncing back and forth and here and there. Wasn't until another Karraker from another part of town roared that I came to and got to work blasting the other invaders to bits. Summoning down pillars of light to incinerate them. Even though there wasn't a cloud in the sky that day, I made it rain.

*

The tides turned after I showed up. Not to brag and say I'm all that and a bag of chips. But the eggheads back at the lab got really good at creating superpowers, so the last batch of heroes were some of their best. We became known as Humanity's Force. And Humanity's Best. And the Übermensch (which wasn't that representative, since half our ranks were women). And the Supreme League. Personally, I called us the Elite Four. Until a fifth joined our mix and ruined that theme. Thanks, asshole.

Even though we were always advertised together, we hardly ever fought together. We were dispatched to different parts of the continent and held down certain swaths of land. The only time we ever did stand together was after the war was over, so we only acted friendly up on stage. A few of us became friends, but otherwise, we didn't keep in touch.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Before the celebrations and medals was the climax of the war, and let me tell you that nobody saw what was coming. Nobody saw the Karraker pouring in like they did, but we got so used to those guys running amuck that nobody entertained the idea that something else could enter our own universe. If you're remembering Elsa's mention of a “Katie Meteor,” you're right on the money.

Officially, it would become known as the KT Meteor, a cute reference to the KT Extinction, the event that wiped out the dinosaurs, but when casual folks got their hands on it, they cutified it even further into the Katie Meteor. That thing was far from cute, however.

I thought the Scarab was huge. That Meteor was unbelievable. But it was believable, because I was staring right at it. Half the world was staring at it. This giant mass of whatever purplish substance it was made out of, about an eighth the size of the Earth, and it was coming down right on us, blazing through the atmosphere. My favorite video game's Majora's Mask, but that didn't mean I had delusions of saving the world from a creepy moon smashing into us. I swear that meteor had a face, too, but I might be making that up. Like said, my favorite game.

“Can you put a ward around the city?” one hero I was teaming up with asked to another.

“Only for a few seconds, but—” That meteor was much larger than the city. It wouldn't do a thing to stop it, and that was assuming his ward could withstand it.

“Dawn, can you shoot it out the sky?”

I told him I could try but that it most likely wouldn't do anything with how huge that thing was. And even if I managed to break it apart, that would give us more meteors to deal with, and I wouldn't be able to charge enough attacks in time.

“Dammit! We can't just stand here with our jaws dragging!” He started looking around and had the idea to start lobbing buildings at it, to try and break it up. He had crazy strength like that.

“Throw me instead,” I said.

He looked at me like I was crazy. “What do you mean throw you?”

“Exactly what you're thinking. I think I can destroy that thing, but...it's gonna take an enormous outburst of power.”

I know I said earlier that being a superhero felt no different to being an ordinary person, but that's not entirely true. There's this feeling inside of me somewhere where I can...basically feel the power within me. The closest comparison I can make is when you're hungry, but I can't point to a part of my body and say that that's where that feeling of power is coming from. It's just something I feel, and it feels like a well of sorts. Know when you're holding a bottle of water and you can feel how much water is in it? It's like that, and I could feel this immense reservoir of power packed away inside me. I couldn't tell you how much was in it aside from saying that, even after a full day of fighting Karraker, I had barely tapped into it. I was going to empty out that well to destroy that meteor.

My plan didn't go over well with the other two heroes, but our options were limited, and my plan was our only option. Reluctantly, the one cast a ward around me to protect me from the wind, and the other picked me up.

“Don't burn up yourself.”

“That's what the ward's for.”

He frowned. Didn't like my answer. But then tossed me at the meteor with all his might.

*

Unfortunately, I can't fly. I can do all this other amazing stuff, but flying's out of the question. Disappointing, but I made due, like when destroying the meteor. I'd been in planes and helicopters and on a heroine's flying surfboard, but that was my first time feeling true flight, like I had my own wings and was soaring into the sky with them.

The reality, of course, was that I wasn't a free creature like a bird, but a torpedo, launched by my own desperate idea at a meteor that would slam into the Earth and quite possibly end all life as we knew it. Maybe some fish would survive. Maybe.

Know the end of The Iron Giant, when the Giant flies up into the sky and sacrifices himself to stop the nuclear missile? Spoilers, by the way. That's basically what I thought I was doing. I cried when I saw that scene as a kid, cried when I saw it as an adult, and cried when I was recreating it.

“This is why I didn't make that promise, Mercedes...” I said to myself as I flew up at the meteor. Those were supposed to be my final words, and nobody would ever know them.

I faced my palms together, making a cage with my fingers, and I turned on the tap on the well.

Power gathered between my palms. Tiny orbs of light orbiting around one another, like binary stars. They were bright as stars, yet I could look at them without trouble. I filled them with more and more power until they emitted beams of light much like the charge for a Luminaire. I always did love the sound effect for that attack, but up there in the sky, with the ward encasing me, there wasn't any sound at all. Or maybe there was sound and it was I wasn't paying attention. My mind was on two things: draining that well and Mercedes. I wanted her face to be the last image that came to mind.

*

There's a video taken on someone's iPhone of the outburst of my full power, and I've seen it over and over again.

It was this huge ball of light hovering in the sky, swallowing the meteor whole. Didn't disintegrate it, didn't blow it away. Just passed through it like a no-clip object in a video game or that scene at the end of Akira when the titular character awakens. Just like the psychic powers in that movie, seeing my own was like seeing something otherworldly. The Karraker were plenty otherworldly, but my own power was, like—How do I put this? Otherworldly to the aliens, even though they come from the same universe.

Seeing my power explode made me think about where it comes from. I mean, did a Facehugger really bite a scientist and turn him into a waterbender? Spiderman has pretty much the same origin story, but—I don't know. I think I'm just overthinking things. Really, how are you supposed to think about something you don't understand because it shouldn't even exist in our universe?

I wondered what Mercedes thought of my power. I tried putting myself in her shoes, but that just reminded me of how much I wanted to see her.

*

I opened my eyes, and I was falling from the sky. The ground was steadily getting closer, and clouds were zooming past me. With how delirious I was, my first thought was that I had died and that what I was seeing was the afterlife, way below me. But then I came to and realized that I had survived my martyrdom. Well, survived for the moment. I was plunging headfirst for the earth and couldn't feel an ounce of power within me. My intention was to drain the well, and that was exactly what I did. Just for kicks, I tried summoning a ball of light, but there was nothing. Not a drop to spare.

I was empty, but I didn't feel empty, not completely. Above me was blue sky and a giant hole in the clouds. No meteor in sight.

Glad that worked, I thought with a smirk. Extremely glad, because if it didn't, that was it. The end of the world.

I rotated my body in the air to try and look for a body of water I could land in so that I could survive my fall.

Oh. Right.

That trick only worked in video games. In reality, water was lethal from the right height. The lab made me tougher than the average Joe, but I'd eat my own shoe if I was tough enough to survive a fall from this height.

This must be some sort of metaphysical metaphor or something, I thought. I flew all the way into the sky, higher than any other superhero had been, and I saved the world from certain destruction. But then my power was gone, and I was just an ordinary person, falling from the height of my achievements. I lived as a superhero and would die an ordinary person.

It was kinda funny in an ironic way. You only saw stuff like that in movies.

What I wouldn't have given to go see a movie with Mercedes. I was rubbing my eyes as tears came up. That well was plenty full.

“Daaaaaawwwwnnn!!”

All of a sudden, I heard a name. My name. I wondered why I was hearing my name from so high up. I still had another minute or two until I hit the ground. I wasn't hearing my name because I had gone crazy, though.

It was that superstrength hero. He had used his strength to kick himself into the air to catch me. His name's Carl, by the way.

My brain couldn't compute what he was doing. I heard him, then I saw him, and he was rushing at me, getting larger and larger, and then he was right there, and then we collided.

Ever get hit by a freight train before? I felt like I had. He slammed into me, but it didn't phase him. “I got you, buddy,” he said on our way down.

It was amazing that he managed to catch me like that in one try, but that amazing credit belonged to Jeffery, the ward generator, who was a mathematician before he enlisted. Crazy shonen stuff right there.

We hit the ground at an angle, far away from the city limits, and Carl dug his heels in to bring us to a stop. Literally dug them in. Dirt and clumps of grass went flying, and he left one long-ass skid mark on the ground. It was just like Sophie's Mystic Arte when she cameos in Tales of Zestiria.

Eventually, we came to a stop, and Carl took a deep breath.

He let me go, and I dropped to the ground. He looked like he wanted to drop, too, but he stood tall and firm.

“Thanks. For saving me.”

He smirked. “You're the one saying thank you?”

“I'm being modest.”

“You all right? Can you stand? No need to be modest.”

“I'd rather lay here until the stars come out. Care to join me?”

He laughed. “Nah, that's all right.”

“I thought you loved stargazing?” I joked.

“I do. But there's no need to tonight. Finally lived my childhood dream. I got to catch a shooting star.”