Quirks Are Gifts

Prologue: How The World Got Quirks

The world war that ended the society and civilization we once knew was back in the year of twenty-twenty-six (2026). China and the United States of America were in a huge disagreement over a treaty which lead to China making the first attack by bombing New York City. The USA, as well as every other member of the NATO Alliance, considered this an act of violence as an armed attack against all members and took action they deemed necessary to assist the United States of America who had been attacked; they bombed China in retaliation. This began World War four with all countries fighting using nuclear weapons, bombs and other human-origin chemical weapons. China had struck up an alliance with Russia due to the collective security treaty organization (CSTO), which was an intergovernmental military alliance in Eurasia consisting of six post-Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. The CSTO had come to the aid of their new-found ally in China. However, since China was also part of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a free trade agreement between the Asia-Pacific nations also came to their allies' aid.

After almost two decades of ongoing nuclear war, China and the USA had come to an agreement creating a new treaty leaving nothing but mass destruction left behind as a reminder of what had once occurred. Every country slowly began to rebuild its society and civilization with little knowledge of how the particles of toxins and chemicals within the air would alter the DNA of babies women had been carrying worldwide. As women around the world began giving birth to children with abnormal abilities, they learned of the contaminated air that had altered the genetics of their children, giving them a quirk, or a gift, as others would say.

As the world became fascinated with the thought and idea of meta-humans living among them. Those who had a passion for science were intrigued as to how and what toxins as well as chemicals were mixed together to create such unique compound that would alter the DNA of a human being, giving them abnormal abilities and powers. A group of scientists had banded together on research, creating the Gift Research Intelligence Program (G.R.I.P) with the goal of replicating and better understanding the abnormalities altered through the children's DNA.

After a couple of years from nuclear warfare, when what was left of civilization was put back together, the organization of G.R.I.P built a facility with a project in work that would allow parents of children who were born with the gift of God to release them over to their program. The staff of the G.R.I.P project had promised those who had left their kids in the care of the facility that while their child was there they would monitor and test the children with the intent of helping them control their abilities as well as better understand the abnormalities within their DNA. The G.R.I.P project quickly obtained nineteen children from various countries where parents had traveled to the facility dropping their children off with hope that the facility could help their child as well as help the world by better understanding these quirks or gifts.

The scientists would continue their research regularly, testing and monitoring each child for years, with very little success in the beginning. However, as some of the children reached their pre-teens and started puberty, their abilities began to develop and improve. After most of the kids had become teenagers and young adults, the facility had created a synthetic drug which they named the G-Serum; a serum that would be injected into the user's bloodstream, allowing their DNA to be physically altered for a certain amount of time, thus granting the user abnormal abilities. The facility continued to develop their G-Serum while taking in more children for research with their project.

The dark, disturbing and hidden secrets of the facility weren't revealed until one day when a young, timid and shy boy named Shyloh Anderson discovered the truth about the G.R.I.P project. Shyloh had been dropped off at the facility only days after he had been born. At first, the staff had thought the dead had left the normal child at their facility, as he showed no signs of having a quirk or a gift from God, but a couple of days after, the facility took Shyloh in and monitored him they instantly became obsessed with Shyloh's quirk. Shyloh had the ability to astral project, he had the power to separate his spirit from his physical body and move around the astral realm as well as the physical world in spirit form. As Shyloh continued to grow up in the facility under the supervision of the staff in-charge of the G.R.I.P project, he struggled with learning how to control his gifts, he would often separate himself from the physical world and explore the astral realm without a thought or care in the world. It wasn't until Shyloh's sixteenth birthday when an astral creature had attacked him as he was exploring the astral realm that he realized his powers could be dangerous. The attack had left wounds that had been sustained in the spirit world on Shyloh's physical body in the real world. This greatly intrigued and interested the scientists of the G.R.I.P project, making Shyloh one of their favorite patients within the facility.

The G.R.I.P project began new experiments that would test each individual's ability in order to determine how complex and how much each gift, as they called it, could do. As the scientists studied each patient through their tests and experiments, the project's research continued to grow as well as interest those who had studied the results. After a consultation between the head of staff at the facility and the head of the research team, they came to an agreement while going over test and experiment results that five specific individuals were to be the main subjects for their project going forward. Unfortunately, the staff of the G.R.I.P project had never planned or expected a new arrival at the facility to begin, placing doubt and concerns into the minds of the children who had grown up there. Little did they know how the new arrival would convince one of their strongest and most complex patients, Shyloh, to use his quirk as a gift to discover the hidden secrets this facility had been built upon.