Thrillseekers

Author notes

WillPower

Crash Platypus

on Nov. 9, 2011

WILLPOWER
Sarah Zane Willis
16
A privileged girl from a privileged home, Sarah Z. Willis ("Zane" to her friends) was a shy and unimposing child.
She
expressed herself through art and poetry. A good bit of it was rather
dark. She had "concerned" parents. A psychologist, and a college
professor who are worried about her black clothes and "antisocial ways".
In
truth, she was just shy. Another suburban girl who liked the color
black and bad poetry. There was nothing really wrong with that. Try
telling that to all the do-gooder adults who made it their business to
"help" the "troubled girl".
It was they, with their constant
pestering who drove her to truly seek out a "bad crowd" in school. If
only to justify their annoyance. Her wardrobe became even more extreme,
as did her aversion to most social contact.
Then came the day that
she began seeing things out of the corner of her eye. Objects would
twitch and move of their own accord. Convinced that there was a ghost in
her home, she told her parents, which only caused them to worry about
her more. She was assigned to a therapist.
(Which, considering the alternative: Her parents wanting, reluctantly to have her committed, wasn't so bad.).
She
explains her travails to her therapist, Dr. Charlotte Murphy, week
after week, and, aside from the "ghost" problem, her doctor saw her as
nothing but a normal teen girl. One week, after her usual therapy
session, she was loath to go straight home to her parents' tender loving care.
She took the long way around. Wandering through downtown Liberty City,
she window shopped for clothing and listened to the music eminating from
the record shop. It was just after she grabbed a hotdog from a corner
stand that she noticed the smoke in the distance. Thick, black smoke
rising from the west side… close to her home. She dropped her hotdog
and ran. It wasn't far. She could already hear the sirens of the fire
trucks rising in the distance. She just wanted to make sure that her
parents were safe. It was then that she heard the explosion that rocked
the downtown area. It came from across town. The east. She had no idea
what it was, but she noted that the fire sirens had gone silent. To the
west, she could see that the smoke had grown thicker. So much so, that
the orange glow of a blazing inferno could be seen reflected in the
smoke itself, and it did look to be coming from the outskirts of her own
suburban neighborhood.
She ran until her lungs burned and her
legs ached. She wanted to go faster. The harder she ran, the more she
seemed to be slowing down. He head was swimming. Sounds, voices all
around her seemed to amplify and distort. Her head pounded. Before she
knew it, she found herself rising from the ground. She felt a warm
sheath around her. Was her ghost helping her fly? It didn't matter. As
she rose above the rooftops at the edge of town she saw it. The blaze
wasn't her own home, but it was that of a nearby apartment building.
There were people trapped on the 8th floor. The entire lobby was a
hellish inferno, and it didn't take an architect to know that these
older buildings here on the edge of the historical district wouldn't be
able to hold up under such conditions.
Instantly forgetting her own
problems, she tried to make herself lower her flight path. The invisible
force obeyed her. If this was all the doings of some kind of ghost,
then it could read her mind. She swooped in, and flew through one of the
few open windows that wasn't ablaze. In her mind she shouted commands,
like: "Open door", "Tear down Wall", and "Remove Window" in order to
reach the imperiled victims of the fire, and whatever force was doing
all this reacted in perfect sync, as though she was using her own hands.
Just
as she thought, no fire trucks were going to arrive on the scene. She
flew the people to safety using the strange force, and got the last ones
out only seconds before the building collapsed and was eaten by flame.
She
felt that it would be a bad idea to stick around and answer questions,
so, she took off into the sky. She was close to home, heck, she could
literally see her house from there, but anyone watching would probably
track her straight there. She instead, flew back into the city, and set
down behind the library. She ducked in for a drink of water, a trip to
the bathroom, and then plopped herself down in the reference section.
"What
the hell just happened?", she asked herself mentally. She didn't know
what to make of any of the things that had happened in the last hour.
"You
must be really confused", a voice said, seemingly coming from nowhere.
Confused was the least of her emotions at that moment. She looked
around. None of the people in the library seemed to be looking at her or
saying anything, but she could hear the voice as clear as day.
"Don't be frightened", the voice said, "Look to your left. All the way down the aisle."
Doing
as she was told, Sarah saw her. A very beautiful young woman, who
didn't look quite right. Though she was sitting, she looked rather tall.
She was dressed in an all white pantsuit with a black, wide-collared
blouse and a pair of black leather gloves.
"Nod if you can hear me", the mysterious woman said.
Sarah nodded.
"Good.
What you are experiencing is called telepathy. YOU are it's source. I
know that for a while now, you've been thinking that there was some
supernatural origin to the weird things that have been going on with
you, but, I assure you, it's more scientific than anything."
"How do I know you're not a ghost or something?", Sarah whispered, still not grasping that this conversation was taking place in her head.
"Hey,
kiddo, whatever you wanna believe. I just think that knowing the truth
makes your powers easier to control. If you wanna place 'em all on the
shoulders of some imaginary boogen, then that's your biz. By the way, My
name is 'Delphi'. You, I presume, are Sarah Zane Willis? Just 'Zane' to your friends, eh? I'd like to be your friend, Zane."
Sarah
let out an audible yelp. It seemed to echo through the quiet library,
but in truth, the few who even heard it barely paid it notice. Zane got
up from her seat and went over to the table of the white-clad beauty.
"Who ARE you? How do you know me?", Zane demanded in a coarse whisper.
"You
may want to keep this little con-fab of ours in your head, hon. What I
have to tell you is top secret. Even whispering it may put it in the
wrong ears."
'Delphi' went on to tell Zane of her own powers. The
powers of clairvoyance and precognition. At first, Zane disbelieved her.
About ALL of it. Despite the fact that she was having a conversation
telepathically, and, even though she didn't consciously realize it,
could sense, mentally, that Delphi was speaking the truth. Then it hit
her. The reason Delphi seemed "not quite right" when she first noticed
her. She could smell alcohol on her mysterious new friend's breath.
Delphi
continued to tell her how could see the past by touching objects, See
the present through the eyes of others that she'd come in contact with
by concentrating on their whereabouts, and see the future and its' many
threads of probability through water. She also told the young telepath
how the end of the world was near. VERY near. She showed her this in the
running of the library ladies' bathroom sink.
Zane coudn't believe what she was seeing.
Delphi told her of the mad demigod, Ragnarok's previous attempts at world domination.
His
first strike happened years ago in the city of Fort Riker, Missouri,
where he and his augmented metahuman army killed many superheroes. 2 of
the heroes, Class 20 powerhouses Captain Star, and Adam Alpha, would
have eventually gained enough power (Class 25. 'Godlike') to have
stopped him permanently. He succeeded in killing them, along with dozens
of others, which weakened the planets' defenses considerably. (This
also exposes Earth to the possibility of other extraterrestrial and/or
interdimensional attacks that, without Captain Star and Adam Alpha, we
may not be able to fully defend against.)
Ragnarok's second salvo
happened about 4 years later, when he and his generals nearly destroyed
Xailenrath City, Connecticut. The Thrillseekers died in this battle, as
did other metahumans. In many a possible future, Delphi forsaw that,
had they lived, The teen heroes, The Thrillseekers would have grown into
being the most powerful and effective superheroes in history. Given
time, they would even have ended up fostering true and lasting world
peace near the end of their careers.
Ragnarok, having killed them
all, moved on to New York City, where he raised the crashed galactic
warship of the defeated alien hybrid warlord called Tyrannis Max.
Ragnarok was defeated by the combined effort of ALL of New York's
heroes, and even some of its villains, plus military intervention, but
enen then, only just barely, and not before Ragnarok resuscitated and
augmented the already powerful Tyrannis Max, and enthralled him into the
demigod's service.
The clone of Adam Alpha was able to exile
Ragnarok, T-Max and the warship into a pocket dimension, though the
clone had to sacrifice himself to do it.
Zane coudn't believe
what she was seeing. She asked if possibly Delphi's vision was being
distorted by the alcohol she'd obviously been drinking. Delphi laughed.
No. The alcohol was to take the edge off. When one sees the doom of the
world on a fairly regular basis, it begins to take it's toll. The vision
never changes. It remains clear as day, despite what Delphi's 'real
world/here-and-now' perceptions may be. Alcohol simply dulls the fear
and pain of some truly horrific visions.
Changing the subject,
Delphi told Zane that she was an instrument of destiny, created to help
steer the course of history. She was to join a group of superheroes and
help them prepare to stop the looming apocalypse. Unfortunately, she
would be forbidden to tell them about the details, as it would cloud
their judgements, cause dissention in the ranks and one of them to
abandon the rest, and set them on a course of utter failure that could
doom the world.
Someday soon, Ragnarok is slated to escape his pocket
dimensional prison, and return in full force for an all-out invasion of
earth. He, his already extremely dangerous metahuman generals
(Cataclysm, Defcon, Sapphion, Menagerie, Coalmine and Gremlynn), The new
and improved Tyrannis Max, who had been biogenetically reengineered and
brainwashed to serve Ragnarok, as well as the clone of Adam Alpha, who
also had been "reimagined" and enthralled, now calling himself
"Andronicus Omega".
Besides that, Ragnarok now helms Tyrannis Max's
extremely powerful warship which has been upgraded with Ragnarok's own
celestial/supernatural technology, and the band of world-killers have
captured, enslaved and transformed the simple natives of that realm into
a vast army of cyborg killing machines.
Delphi tells Zane that she
and her future team of heroes will have to stop Ragnarok and company
from breaching their way back into this plane of existance.
After
seeing the visions of what Ragnarok will someday do to the planet, Zane
agrees to what Delphi instructs her to do. She and Delphi spend the next
two months discussing plans and events, practicing with what she now
knows are her own powers of telepathy and telekinesis. Zane even
continues to visit her therapist, telling Dr. Murphy everything, and
showing her powers, with the doctor's promise of professional
confidentiality.
(Of course, knowing that the dreadful and fantastic
things that Zane is telling her are all true, she, too seems to have
developed a drinking problem.)
Soon, the day comes, and Zane is right where Delphi instructed her to be:
Just down the street from the Bank of the Midwest during a robbery perpetrated by 3 metahuman monsters.
the
hulking Landshark, geokinetic Seismo and the Canadian fugitive,
Electric Eel had just stolen millions. The only members of the (New)
Thrillseekers (UberWoman, BattleCry and Gazelle)
were en route to engage them. By the time the superhero trio arrived,
they saw a tiny telekine girl in a very gothy home-made costume very
deteminedly holding her own against a tidal wave of dirt and concrete
made by seismo, dodging attacks by Landshark, and the Electric Eel
already unconscious. At the end of the short battle, UberWoman invited
the young girl to be part of the Thrillseekers.
She gladly accepted, just as was Delphi's plan.