My Life As A Super Hero/Villain - Prologue

Living in a world full of Superheroes and Supervillains sounds like something that many would cut off somebody else’s right arm and left leg to witness let alone be a part of. For others, it is fun to think and read about, but a terrifying nightmare that they dread might someday happen.

For me, it is just the world I was born into, and later, died into. Then again was reborn into. Then died. Then lived. Rinse and repeat that a few hundred times and you’ll get the idea.

Fifty years ago, roughly, was when the first of the supers arrived. One day, the world was merrily spinning around, orbiting a nearby star like a love struck puppy stuck in that annoying middle adolescent stage, you know the one, love of afar but a total nerd up close. Trying to get close, but utterly ignored. The next, that world suddenly got a bitch slap from out of nowhere, and when it looked up, every other planet was laughing at it without a perpetrator in sight.

Our world had been experiencing one of the longest periods of peace it had every experienced. No world wars, no rinky dink little shitshow of a backwater town suddenly deciding that it has the balls to enter into a quest for world domination, like that complete dick, Haldorf Thitler. God, that guy was a complete and utter bellend.

No, the world was not in need of saving. Yet, for no explainable reason, Heroes and Villains start to appear from seemingly nowhere.

The first of the Heroes named himself “Wonder Boy”. I know right. Complete and utter douche. He was near sixty (or so he claimed in an interview he showed up in, but that is later, or maybe earlier, whatever, he was near sixty looking so that is what I am sticking with,…. Shut up), and he couldn’t come up with a better name than Wonder Boy. Not Wonder Guy, or Uberman, or even Incredibly Handsome Yet A Complete Moron Dude, but Wonder BOY. Bet you can tell how the story goes, and guess what, not completely off the mark. Just nearly entirely.

Because what he lacked in naming skills, he more than made up with the ability bore you to death. It’s a wonder he wasn’t reclassified as the lamest Supervillain, ever. And that actually turned out to be his main power; the power to bore the opposition from wantonly killing and destroying to nearly comatose within about 53 seconds. Kind of specific, I know, but there was an actual study done to find out how long he had to talk to someone, before that completely passed out from boredom, sometimes they even cried as they finally escaped Wonder Boy’s monotonic monologue. Turns out, monologuing is not just for the Villains, anyone can use it. Although if you decide to give it a whirl, make sure your opponents don’t have duct tape, monologuing’s kryptonite.

Back to the story. Nobody knows why Wonder Boy showed up out of the blue. Nobody knows his real identity, not that anybody of importance really cares. Maybe his stalkers cared, but they are so totally lame that they are not even worth mentioning. In fact, forget I mentioned the stalkers. What stalkers, I don’t know what your even talking about. For all of the following Heroes/Villains, keeping your identity was really quite easy.

They all gave off this, aura, which shielded them from being identified. Unless that came out in public stating that their name is Joseph Kennally and that their Hero persona is Wonder Boy, nobody would be able to connect them, even with a side by side photo comparison. When you looked at them in person, all you could see was the persona they were wearing. You couldn’t later describe a single characteristic of their face or identifying marks, but a soon as somebody mentioned their alter ego, their appearance would be instantly recognisable. You could visualise the difference between Apocas and Celestus, but if you tried to describe the differences, suddenly your mental image would become blurred and distorted.

And when someone would take a picture of our miraculous Nobs (because the only reasons Heroes exist is to combat and defeat the Villains, and the Villains only exist to prove that the Heroes and incompetent buffoons, if they would all just piss off, the world would get on fine without them. We would probably send them off with a ‘Fuck off and never come back you bunch of twats’ celebration), the photo or video would come out with a generic face bearing no similarities whatsoever to the Super in question, but would have their alter names printed across their foreheads.

The world didn’t know what to make of their appearance, and as you could probably imagine, the world got a little bit concerned. At first anyway. Imagine, out of nowhere, above a national monument, between one blink of the eyes and the next, there appeared a man, hovering 50 feet in the air. He is wearing sandals, beige shorts, a Hawaiian shirty and sunglasses. Completely normal, except for the flying bit he is trying to modestly pull off. And the fact that it is in the middle of winter. When the average temperature is slightly below freezing. And it’s night time. Weeelllll, alright, it’s about half three in the afternoon, but for winter, it’s practically midnight, for all the sun could care. Lazy bastard.

Anyway, the people in the vicinity of this floating man just keep on going about their business, because nobody really looks up, and if even if they did, they would be complaining about the horribly grey and overcast sky. And if they did conveniently look in the floating man’s direction, they would most like just ignore him, thinking that at worst, he was just a gimmick for some advertising agency or company.

And for the floating man, who has nearly bursting to announce his presence to the world at large, or maybe the plaza he is floating above at this particular moment, being ignore like this is making him understandably a little disappointed. Maybe a little annoyed. Alright, increasing vexed, even edging into being incredibly pissed off.

Deciding to take action to announce himself, he breathes in deeply, extends his arms to either side, puffs up his chest and sucks in his slightly overhanging beer gut, and speaks out in a booming baritone for everyone to hear, “Dear citizens, fear me not, for I am Wonder Boy”.

Unfortunately for the lamely self-named ‘Wonder Boy’, still nobody is paying him any attention. It’s not that he can’t be heard over the lightly pattering rain, and slightly strengthening wind, but that for some strange and highly coincidental reason out of control of storytellers control, but everybody is wearing earphones, listening to music, the news with updated weather reports (turns out he appeared over Trafalgar Square in London, Great Britain, and as everybody knows, the Brits are strangely obsessed with the weather, almost like they have a weird fetish or something) or just because they are anti-social misfits and they don’t want anybody to speak to them till they have found somewhere to warm up in, then maybe, nope they are still deciding that today is really crap and they want to get their morning coffee.

Wonderboy is a bit confused at still being ignored. Here He is, a floating God among insects, yet they still couldn’t give a shit. Well, fuck this for a load of old cobblers, ‘I’ll just go somewhere else where they can appreciate my greatness. Hmmm, where to go? Oh, I know, America, New York. Those Plebs are easily impressed, plus I’m British, and as everyone knows, the Americans gals love the British guys, although why on earth they voted to leave the common wealth and set up their own government in a different land is still a bit of a puzzle. They love all things British, including the monarchy, which they voted to get rid of and the posh accent. Bonkers. Oh well, that’s just part of their charm.’

(Side note; the countries are a bit different here, with a slightly different history, but that is expected for a completely made up advanced simulation you call your universe, whilst mine is totally the original).

Having made what he ultimately thought of as the correct decision, after all he is Wonderboy, he hunched up his body, braced his feet in mid-air, launched himself up and forward, whilst striking the classic Superman pose. And as you can probably imagine, nobody gave a toss, or even noticed.

To cut a long and incredibly boring story short, Wonderboy arrived in New York, wow’ed the natives, and got his own reality Tv show entitled ‘Never Fear For Wonderboy Is Here’ . Yeah, I get a headache and violently sick whenever I see it on the box.

Turns out that Wonderboy is the Vanguard for the change that is about to come to our fair world. The big guys up top, the ones who created the earth, the universe and everything, in apparently “EIGHT DAYS” (please see attached an incredibly sarcastic and caustic tone attached, be careful not to get any in your eyes or ears, or they will fall out and off, and not necessarily in that order), had decided that we had got a bit too big for our britches. The big guys, or as they will be referred to from here on out as ‘Ultimate Nobs, or UN for short’, created life on our planet for the entertainment factor. Yeah, the UN can get bored like everyone else. Annnnyway, the UN likes a bit of the blood sports every now and then, with a pit of pillaging on the side, covered in a sauce of black plague. But, we had gotten to the stage where we had done away with killing each other as a national pastime, and instead moved onto not giving a shit what the other countries did. And it worked out pretty well.

Sure, everywhere has experiences with a bit of crime every now and then (after all, the police have to justify their jobs somehow), but that is usually just a case of a one too many beers, or vodka’s if that is how you do, and getting in an barnie over who can piss the farthest, or which of them has the best boobs, or moobs as the case may be. In short, not a whole lot of trouble.

But as I was saying, the UN had gotten over the wonder that is world peace, and thought of mixing it up. So they gave us Wonderboy. Really, they must have been totally legless to have come up with that limp ass plan. He was to be the announcer of all that would come next. And it was a doosie.

Every three to fifteen days, a new super would appear in the world. Some of them would be heroes to fight the villains that would try to upset the world order. They would be our ‘Saviours’ (cue the sarcasm and caustic tone again), whilst the villains would have the 9-5 job of trying to cause as much mayhem, trouble and downright littering as possible. Got to love the unions. Wouldn’t want to interrupt the villain’s home life or anything.

And sure, three days later arrives, perhaps the ultimate nemesis of Wonderboy, ‘Bad Boy’. Luckily for us, Badboy appeared to only be in his late teens, a bit more of an appropriate pseudonym. When Badboy showed up this time over Chicago, he actually put on a bit of a show. Announced that he was here to ‘Show us all a good time’. A bit more entertaining the Wonderboy I will admit, but still an utter prat. Fortunately, or more appropriately, unfortunately, more heroes and villains started to show up acting more the part that they were playing.

And for the first 10 years or so, all we knew about these supers was that every so often they would show up, commence battle/evil and cunning plans/tv hosting, have a bit of me time, then go at it again. Sometimes they would kill each other, sometimes something else went wrong and they blew themselves up. I can tell you, when you get some brains in your mouth from wide eyed, jaw dropping amazement, sushi will forever be erased from your mind. *Shudder*

Then one day out of the blue, a normal non-super super turned up. Turns out, these supers are not some weird alien lifeform from beyond our current level of understanding, but ZOMBIES!!! Maybe not quite, maybe, but not that far from the truth. To qualify to become a cape crusader, you must first DIE! Yes really, you need to pop your clogs. Then you kick Old Scratch right in the bollocks, then you leg it. If you make it, you become a super. If you don’t, well, I don’t personally know, but I do know that if someone had smacked me in the codgers, I wouldn’t be best please, that is assuming the Mr Grimm does indeed have some danglies.

The human to super conversion happens on a close to 10,000 to 1 rate, so if you are thinking of taking a chance to end up with fancy schmansy powers, keep in mind that your rate of success is roughly 0.01%. Personally, I wouldn’t have taken the chance, not that I had a choice, as I am not that great at cross country running. And I’m not that brave.

Luckily, the part about kicking the meat and two veg of the big D himself, is not true, although it would have made for a hilarious tv series if it had aired.

We are not too sure how the process occurs, but from gathered accounts of those involved, the UN makes a personal visit to those lucky bastards, has a rather involved what, about what nobody really remembers any specifics, and if the UN likes what it hears, or maybe rolls a greater the 15 with a D16 dice, the sod gets a good dose of the whammy, and hey presto, a new super is born, reborn, resurrected, bugger it, I’m just going to use the word, ZOMBIEFIED!!!

So if you are of the lazy disposition, let me some up with a few bullet points, and I can get on with the story.

Wonderboy was the first Superhero, but is a complete bellend because he couldn’t come up with a better name. The Brits couldn’t give a toss, and he buggered off to America. Badboy was the first Supervillain to show, although he exists more to annoy Wonderboy rather than anything else. Additional; he is still an Utter Pratt This crap all happened around 50 years ago, by the Ultimate Nobs, or UN for short. We had achieved world peace, but the UN bollocks that right up for us because they got ‘Bored’. The supers are hard to identity Chaos ensues.