Blu Jay-a Flash Vigilante Origin Story

Road Trip to Central City

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"Time! Time doesn't pass. The passage of time is an illusion, and life is the magician. Because life only lets you see one day at a time. You remember being alive yesterday, you hope you're going to be alive tomorrow, so it feels like you're travelling from one to the other."  The television show played in the background of Amina Scott's packed car that drove out of the city. The clear azure sky showed no cloud in sight, where anything from an airplane to a bird could be easily pointed out in the corner of your eye. The highway was almost as clear as the sky, because Amina felt as if she was the only person on the road as she passed mountains and lush forests with no sign of life nearby. She was driving from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Central City, a 14 hour drive for her new job as an intern studying the effects of meta-human mutations in their DNA and how different circumstances caused different mutations at Mercury Labs. She wouldn't have the job without the help of the Central City mayor's program to educate and help the meta-human citizens. As the car zoomed past the trees of Pennsylvania, Amina was excited to start a new chapter in her life as a full-fledged adult who could make a difference in the world. She remembered when the particle accelerator exploded, it made national news and it almost started a national emergency. She was deep in her thoughts, not listening anymore to the Doctor Who episode that was playing on her phone. Trees waned away, and fields began to surface into view.
    After an hour of passing luscious green corn and soybean fields, she turned off her Doctor Who and switched on the radio. She was surprised that in such a vacant area the radio signals were clear and crisp. Settling on "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, Amina then concentrated on the road. She had 11 hours left, and didn't realize how far Central City really was until her appreciation of the open road was no longer appreciation and more annoyed of the same view. As if jinxing herself, she wondered aloud, "Could this road trip get any better?" As if Fate itself were listening, when the last word escaped her lips, she spotted a small object flying in the corner of her vision. Bored out of her mind and having not seen a car pass by for 20 minutes, she turned her head for just a second to see if the thing in the sky was a bird or a plane.
    But the flying object wasn't either, she didn't know what it was but it looked as if it was streaking across the sky. She blinked for a moment, perhaps it was just a smudge from her window and attempted to clean her side window with her elbow as her right held steady the wheel. When she pulled back, she looked back out again and saw that it was still there. The yellow-blue streak grew larger, and a piercing shriek like a missile got louder when it got closer. Amina turned her radio dial down, as if to double check that the loud noise wasn't coming from the radio. It was definitely coming from the streak.
    Although she wasn't a physics major, she had taken a physics class before and figured that at the speed and trajectory she was going, with the direction and velocity that the streak was traveling, she would be in close proximity to it! A thrilling shiver traveled down her spine, and decided that if she didn't take the opportunity to take pictures or see the thing from the atmosphere heading towards a field by route 70, she would never have the same opportunity. So, she decided that she would pursue that flying streak even if it was space garbage.
    Nobody was close, she saw a barn in the distance but nothing else except farming fields. The radio was off, if she had left it on she would have heard the garble of the radio caused by that strange meteorite. As the car chased after the meteorite with the woman in the driver's seat at midday, adrenaline creeped up into her veins. Amina was chasing after her dreams, parallel to this falling rock. Excitement rose, and as the screaming streak made contact with the ground, the collision created an ocean wave of sound. A supersonic boom shook everything in a mile radius, the field of corn almost obliterated. When Amina caught up with the fallen object, the whole field around her was black, dead, and scattered on the ground. It was just like all of those sci-fi movies she had seen, crop circles, alien starships spreading death to plants wherever it landed.
    The once upright corn stalks were flattened by whatever had just landed there. Parking the car quickly, Amina leapt out with her phone in hand and through the ruined corn fields. One simple decision of following what she thought was space trash or a small broken off part of an airplane led her to something almost out of a comic book.