body hair who ended the American Patriot’s reign of bank-robbing terror by punching him so hard, authorities found his jawbone three miles away in a tree outside an orphanage. Thankfully, the children of the orphanage had been on a trip to the zoo and did not see the jawbone before it was removed. Nick thought that if he’d found a random jawbone, it’d mess him up for life.
Primate Girl was somewhat celebrated for her actions; unfortunately, it was still the forties, and public opinion was that a woman’s place was in the home, caring for her family. Primate Girl, much to Nick’s glee, publicly announced she would retire immediately and marry the first man who could beat her in an arm wrestling contest. Seventeen men volunteered. By the end, Primate Girl remained unmarried, and the men were treated at area hospitals for injuries sustained while attempting to prove their masculinity.
From there, more and more Extraordinaries appeared. Oh, they were still rare, and most cities never had one. But they were emboldened by Primate Girl’s actions and began exhibiting their powers, mostly in the name of truth and justice. Regardless of what feats they were capable of, they all had one thing in common: They always hid their identities, which made it next to impossible for scientists to get their hands on them for study. There’d been a call in the late sixties and early seventies to require Extraordinaries to reveal their true identities to the public and submit for testing, but it’d died before gaining much traction. Hippie protests had seen to that. Extraordinaries were so few and far between that they inspired awe rather than fear, for the most part.
Even Pyro Storm had his own groupies. And it wasn’t like he’d actually done anything too evil. Aside from being Shadow Star’s archnemesis, the worst thing he’d done was somehow make all the traffic lights in Nova City turn green at once, causing thousands of fender benders and a complete gridlock in the streets that lasted for seventeen hours. Granted, he’d used that time to try to steal priceless artwork from the Nova City Fine Art Museum, but his attempt had been foiled by Shadow Star, so everything was fine. At least, that was what Rebecca Firestone had reported.
And it wasn’t like they were the only Extraordinaries in the world. There was a man in Berlin who could shoot ice from his eyes. There was one in Portland, Oregon, who was capable of creating portals that could take him easily from one side of the city to the other. There was one in Tallahassee who had the skin of an alligator, though there were some people who thought it was a rather aggressive fungus. There was a nonbinary Extraordinary in Tokyo who could create fireworks with their mind, and another in New Zealand who controlled herds of sheep with a single thought, which she displayed proudly.
So maybe they weren’t exactly like the comic books Nick read, but that was okay. He didn’t need them to be. The Sheep Herder was good for the economy, apparently. Which, while not exactly glamorous, was still pretty cool.
But Nick didn’t want to be just pretty cool. If he was going to be an Extraordinary, then he was going to be the best one that ever lived. Which brought him back to his list and finding out how to become Extraordinary in the first place. Origin stories needed to be organic. In a lot of the comics he’d read, heroes were put into impossible situations that led to them gaining their powers. He just needed to find a way to be in the right place at the right time.
The internet, for one of the first times in his life, failed him in that regard. There were too many theories, and none of them seemed to be based in any kind of reality. Most seemed to be stuck on the idea that Extraordinaries were born and not made. If that were the case, Nick was screwed even before he got started. And since that wouldn’t do, he chose not to believe it. Besides, it smacked of pure-blood bullshit, and Nick wasn’t here for that at all. Anyone could do anything, so long as they put their minds to it. Or so he hoped.
No one really knew where Shadow Star or Pyro Storm had come from when they appeared roughly two years earlier. They were unique in that their powers seemed to be stronger than others before