Professor Why's Academy for Extraordinary Youngsters

Intro to Heroics

               Our world is full of extraordinary people. I truly believe that. When a grocery store worker takes the Black Friday shift for another coworker, even though it's hard, that's special. That's significant. When a firefighter runs into a house for the family cat even though everyone is outside, that's extraordinary. These people can change the world, and have changed the world since the very beginning of humanity.

There's a newer career choice, however, that takes those extraordinary people with extraordinary gifts and pushes them to be greater than themselves. Superheroes. These people tend to work with local police to deal with various problems that normal people are having. Think of them as the SWAT team if the SWAT team is one person and in their spare time, they get cats out of trees for little kids.

Many people exist in this world with extraordinary gifts. Maybe they fell in a vat of nuclear waste, or got struck by lightning while licking a supercomputer, or ate a genetically modified chicken, got bit by a vampire... I donno. The kind of thing that can really screw up a person's DNA. If a person comes out of that stronger and not the typical deformed mangled mess of a human being that would naturally arise from such an event, they have an obligation to people. They live in a world of little beautiful glass people and little happy ceramic buildings, and they need to protect them from the other kids that would knock those little buildings over.

The biggest good guy on the block, and the entire continent of North America, for that matter, is an immigrant fellow publicly known as "Galactic Mask". Pretty standard backstory. His planet blew up, or collapsed, or whatever, so he was jettisoned over to earth to live with the inferior beings that live here. His superpowers include flight, super strength, laser eyes, telekinesis, and being a purple squid creature that only vaguely resembles a human. The red eyes, sharp teeth, and spiky tentacles were a nightmare for him when he was in school, but he grew up to love and respect the people that he lived with, and decided to be a good guy saving balloons from flying into the sky and stopping bank robberies.

They say that the more public you are, the more likely you are to find opposition. In Galactic Mask's case, there was a hefty form of opposition in the form of a sea of villains. They say that for every super powered individual doing good, there are three or four that are criminals to some degree. Some do petty stuff like steal from stores or break air traffic laws, and some are like our number one most wanted criminal, Burgundy Skid Mark.

Galactic Mask is a good guy. He never takes breaks, donates to charity, and flies out to California when it catches fire on a bi-annual basis to help limit the spread. Burgundy Skid mark wanted a rise out of him. He built an entire persona out of being annoying. For a seemingly normal man in a mechanized suit, he has no fear. It started out as a few shockingly public crimes that Galactic Mask stepped in and easily solved, and escalated with each defeat. The mechanized suit got more and more advanced, and the fights became more elaborate and staged each time. Each time though, Galactic Mask would win, Burgundy Skid Mark would go to some maximum-security jail, he'd break out in under a week to no one's surprise, and they'd be back at it fighting again in a month or so.

At first, Galactic Mask saw his rival as a nuisance. He would defeat him as quickly as possible. Then Galactic Mask started seeing him as a challenge. News crews would arrive early to catch Burgundy Skid Mark's opening monologue, and to see the fight firsthand. Collateral damage was basically a non-issue after the two worked it out well enough. Eventually, Galactic Mask began to respond in turn with equally snappy dialogue, and the two would duke it out to the amusement of onlookers.

Burgundy Skid Mark was always having fun. He started putting a xxl tee shirt on his robot suit reading "BDSM" in big letters just to make uncomfortable parents have a difficult talk with their children. The thing that changed visibly for the audience was Galactic Mask's face. It shifted from a neutral expression in the first few fights, to an intense grimace, to eventually a kind of smile. There was a level of fun in these fights that was palpable for viewers below, who would applaud and cheer at Galactic Mask's successes, and boo and hiss when Burgundy Skid Mark began to gain the upper hand.

That is the heroism I grew up on. Heroes were there to protect the people, and villains were there to threaten heroes. More than anything, I dreamed of becoming one of those heroes, who gets to don a cape and confront a larger than life villain while everyone watches in awe and amazement. This is the story of how I became that person.

My hero name is Flare, you may know me from the recent broadcasts of my fights against evil, but since this fame and success is kind of new to me, I thought it might be nice to go back and look at how it all began, on a train to a small town in Alaska where a very unusual school was looking for very extraordinary people.