Chapter Text
My name is Taylor Hebert, and this... this is my story.
It is long and complicated to tell. So many things happened to me and those around me, that I am sure I will miss things, both important and superfluous, as I tell it. But I shall do my best so you know everything that happened to me.
Stress... it is something common to many places. Work, life, your family... there are many sources for this problem. They can make you feel terrible even though it is not your fault that any of them happened. You drive yourself to try to solve them, only for other things to possibly appear and replace those problems with different ones.
But not every place is like this.
When my story begins, we knew there were about forty-plus parallel Earths. Some were uninhabitable. Others, like Earth Aleph, were almost identical to Earth Bet, my homeworld. A few others were inhabitable but uninhabited – humanity, or some other sentient life, never evolved there.
Everything changed in 1982. That year, Earth Bet saw the appearance of a mysterious being, a golden man floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The being approached England, and when a man asked him for his name, he only said one word.
Scion.
(Or, at least, that's what the man thought the stranger had said)
Since then, many of the parallel Earths began to see that stress could cause other things. People would find themselves in extremely stressful situations, they would black out, and when they came back, they somehow had an organ that could grant them abilities that could be considered superhuman, like in the comic books of old times.
People, naturally, began to work on why they happened. It would take long before the cause was truly understood, but patterns could be seen if you had a careful eye: whatever caused the Trigger, the moment that gave you that power, was somewhat related to what you could do.
Someone who wanted to put a distance between themselves and their self-destructing family could get the power to bend space and make that metaphorical distance a reality.
Someone who wanted to have more time to spend with someone that could die at any moment? Perhaps the idea of freezing time for a while was possible.
Someone left in shock because they had not realized a beloved one was about to kill themselves might, instead, find out that now they could look at a person and learn everything about them with just a thought.
These people, who suffered the worst day of their lives only to come out of the other end wielding abilities that should have been impossible, were called Parahumans – or, for those who wanted to trace a link to comic books, 'capes'. I suppose it was an attempt to express hope that real heroes would appear.
But human nature is varied and unpredictable. And, the same way normal people could be good, bad or anything in-between, so could Parahumans be.
There were those who used their powers to fight crime and help people. They would normally be called 'Heroes'.
Then, there were those who committed crimes and used their power in their own benefit. Those were labelled 'Villains'.
And then, there were the ones who simply wanted to live off what they could do with their power without causing problems. Then, you were a 'Rogue'.
That classification, though... it was simplistic, to be honest.
I have seen people called 'Heroes' that could have easily been the villains in a different story.
I have seen 'Villains' who risked their lives to save people without expecting any reward.
And, when the chips came down and it was time to face danger, 'Rogues' would end up gaining acclaim or scorn as their true natures came out.
But I digress. I wanted to talk about Earth Bet. The planet I was born in, fourteen years after Scion's appearance. Earth Bet, where the most powerful Parahumans were born (and no, it's not out of pride that I say this, but fact – other Earths had Parahumans too, but almost all of them would probably be considered weak compared with the average Earth Bet Parahuman).
My hometown, Brockton Bay, in the eastern coast of the United States of America, was possibly the city with the highest number of Parahumans per capita. I cannot be sure of this, because it was possible that other cities had Parahumans that somehow managed to hide themselves, but as far as the public was concerned that was the truth.
Not that it was a good thing, mind you. It was not just the fights between heroes and villains: a falling economy, multiple Parahuman-led gangs, people leaving for more prosperous possibilities, all of it combined in a city that had once been great, but was slowly dying.
And, what about me?
I lived there. Or, well, did my best to. With my parents and my best friend, it was good.
But then my mother died in a traffic accident.
My father went to pieces, unable to stand losing the woman he had loved for so long.
My best friend betrayed me, left me for someone else and turned into my worst enemy.
Is it any wonder that I Triggered? Or maybe I did not. It is kind of confusing.
But I did become a Parahuman. I had powers unlike any other I saw. I fought to help people, protect them, bring them hope – but sometimes I faced off against the so-called 'heroes' because their actions were so against my morals. I became feared and admired – most of the latter, fortunately.
Like every other Parahuman, my new beginning was the worst day of my life. And, at the same time, it was not. Yes, confusing, but it is the best explanation I have.
But everything I am, everything I did... started in a locker in a waste of space called Winslow High School.