Jay Ess: An Unordinary Hero

Jay Ess: An Unordinary Hero Prologue & Chapter 1

Prologue

What if I told you that the world in which we all live is a lie? What if I told you that the media with which we entertain ourselves is far closer to reality than you could imagine? What if I told you that superheroes are real? Would you think me crazy? Would you want to know more? Would you ask me how I know? Would you believe me if I told you that the reason that I know all of this because I am a superhero?

Perhaps referring to myself as a superhero is a bit of a stretching of the truth, an exaggeration if you will. It is true that I have done some pretty heroic things. Conversely it is also true that I have done some things that could be considered quite the opposite of heroic.

I found out along the way that if you employ too much hubris that you tend to attract too much attention to yourself. It was imperative that I gave myself a false name, lest the enemies I made along the way find me with ease while I slept or was on the toilet, you get the picture. Who wants to die with their pants around their ankles and sitting on the can? Not this guy.

At first as I was thinking of names, I wanted to have one that could inspire fear or foreboding in those that I would face, like any good name would. Unfortunately for me all I could come up with at first were the names that our keepers had made up to entertain us. Given the scope of my powers though, I always wanted to take the title and name The Jedi Skywalker. Given the popularity of the movies that it came from, it would definitely give people pause, but it would also allow our keepers to find me faster. Mind you, I came to understand how different I was from most of my peers at the age of five when I was having a temper tantrum and caused the family car to sail across the street, so I did not have a lot of fake naming imagination back then. The long and the short of it is I just decided to go by initials, those being J.S.. Eventually the people that were awake enough to understand who and what I am shortened it to J., so yeah. That is my super scary hero name, Jay. I guess in retrospect that it is no less unalarming as my birth name of Sam.

I am going to dispel some false truths about what the world calls superheroes. Everyone on the planet knows who Superman is, even if they do not know his backstory or the scope of his powers. What they do know is he really cannot die. He is not the only one blessed with super human gifts that is believed immortal though, and that is the false truth we must quash from the jump. Heroes can and do die. I have been in this game for over forty years now and I have seen many a hero fall. No, it does not take a super villain to do it, nor some supreme being. I have yet to meet the kind of superhero that is bulletproof.

There I go though, getting ahead of myself. We are going to start this story the right way, from that fateful day of my temper tantrum, through my childhood to now. Follow me if you will down the proverbial rabbit hole and let's see if I can wake your mind as well.

Chapter 1

Welcome to my childhood. I was born in the year nineteen eighty-three, or was I? I know, there I go being coy. My parents were Dwight and Jackie Page. Yes those are their real names, I am not changing them to protect anyone's identity. They were never what I would call a happy couple, but they tried. I was their third and final child. They had two kids before me, both girls. Being the only boy was odd and got odder after they divorced. My two sisters were six and three years older than me and named Lucy and McKenna. Ken as I called her was the nicest to me, probably because we were closer in age than Lucy and me.

My dad was a mountain of a man, standing just over six foot five. He had a head of jet black hair that was so thick it almost looked like it was fake. He was so broad at the shoulders that he barely fit through doorways. As mom always said, her voice oozing affection, he was as strong as an ox and just as smart. While I cannot speak about his intelligence, he was undoubtedly strong. Dad was super, or meta, or whatever term makes you feel most comfortable using. His mind was not strong enough to understand this fact though, so he lived his life like most of the world, asleep. I divided up the world into two kinds of people, those that did not know the truth I called sleepers and those that did I called walkers. No, that is not a Walking Dead reference. I came up with those names well before that book series was ever thought of.