Just For One Day

Prologue

Picture the world. Round, like a blue and green marble in a cosmic giant's favorite set, spinning like a celestial top, orbiting around the sun like a fat child around the candy aisle. On it live some 10 quintillion insects, 9,500 species of reptiles, 10,000 species of birds, and approximately 5,400 species of mammals. This includes humans, who number around seven billion, a population rapidly expanding at a seemingly exponential rate. Most of them are completely ordinary people. These individuals have ordinary jobs, ordinary children, ordinary spouses, and ordinary lives. Some of them would protest at the idea that they can be generalized as such, and perhaps they are correct, for everyone is different and unique, in their own way.

But some people are more unique than others.

Genetic mutation is a fact of life, a driving force of the process of evolution; as essential to living as food, or water, or a quick jog on the treadmill every now and then. Through this have arisen such interesting characteristics as wings, scales, and opposable thumbs, without which it would be much more difficult to change the channel on the television without getting up. These evolved traits can be as simple as hair or as complex as compound eyes, and some can be truly remarkable.

For example, there is the case of Benny Holt, who shortly after being delivered gave his mother and the doctor a terrible fright when he suddenly ceased crying, rose off of the bed and into the air, and spent the next hour zooming around the ceiling before a stepladder and baseball glove could be procured. Then there is Amelia Dillings, who discovered when she fell into the family pool at the age of six that she did not drown, but instead sprouted gills and webbing between her toes. Or Buster Farmington, able to play the piano, cello, and violin all at the same time by way of his three pairs of arms. He made quite good money renting himself out as a one man classical trio and is one of the only people to have ever simultaneously drunk a glass of water, juggled three balls, and tied his sneakers, all while having a thumb war with a friend.

It is estimated that ten percent of the human population has a mutation such as these, an extraordinary, seemingly inexplicable ability that gives them the power to fly, or throw fireballs, or shatter glass simply by shouting. Most forms of the mutation do not lend such glamorous powers, however. It is only a small percentage of the already small portion of metahumans, as they have come to be known, who possess powers that could be called weaponizable, or at least practical for superheroing. The average metahuman has the ability to, say, speak to birds telepathically, or turn their skin a lovely shade of blue, or do a flawless Winston Churchill impression (it is in contention whether this last ability is, in fact, a superpower, however entertaining it may be at parties).

It is unknown to scientists how these mutations function, or why they arose in the first place. There is a school of thought that holds that these genetic anomalies represent a touch of the divine; as if the creator of the world itself had personally implanted a bit of magic within the human genome. If this is true it would also speak volumes about the divine's sense of humor, seeing as there is a documented case of a woman who could control butter by singing snatches of music from Der Ring Des Nibelungen. However, there are also people who believe that the president of America is secretly a lizardman who wears a human disguise, so what are you gonna do?

And as for the metahumans who most consider to be more fortunate in terms of abilities, strong as a stampede of elephants and devastating as a tsunami, who walk the earth as gods among men and burn the chapters of their lives into the pages of history with white hot laser vision...

Well. We shall see about them.