Prelude

It was big news the day we all got “superpowers.” OK, maybe it didn't all happen in one day. Over a period of weeks is probably much more accurate. But all at once, it was news. Girl seen flying in Paducah. Boy walks through flame in Dowagiac. Woman leaps over building to rescue family in rural Kansas. Geeks like myself always assumed it would happen like it does in the comics: Superheroes clustering around New York, L.A. or some Metropolis-like city. But Dunnellon and Two Egg ended up with more Advantaged Humans between the two of them than all of the boroughs combined. Upstate was another story. And that's what made all of this interesting: we all started developing these Advantages at once, and none of the big cities could boast of more than one, while little pitstops up and down the highway were crawling with them.

And there’s no rhyme or reason to what advantages people develop. I’ve tried to study them, track them, understand them. You’d think you’d find these abilities in clusters—fliers here, pyrokenetics there. But they have all developed differently, almost at random, yet all at the same time. I’ve spent countless hours since A-Day (the closest anybody can come to figuring out when all of this started) cataloging, categorizing, interviewing, watching footage, taking DNA samples from myself and others, honing my own abilities in the process, trying to understand what has happened to us.

That’s the other thing. Nobody has a clue what triggered these changes. There was no meteor shower, no solar eclipse, no catastrophic event. Some folks blamed radiation, other folks figured it was a commie plot. Many saw religious ramifications, and yet more looked to genetic engineering of some kind, a sleeper plot in our midst. Even heard one lady in Flatrock blame El Niño. Reporters have dug into it, scientists like myself have poured over the data, public figures have reacted with a mixture of fear and skepticism. Theories abound, but nobody has any hard answers.

So where did we come from? The mystery begins...