part 2: the week of the rain

It was early summer when the pod appeared, no one knows if it came from underwater or it crashed and landed randomly at that specific latitude and longitude but it was a mess from the beginning…with the authorities setting up barricades; several bomb squads and scientist cliques were sent to investigate The Pod to no avail. 

Brute force was also used to try to gain entry to The Pod, but it would not budge. The material used to manufacture The Pod is so hard that no one managed to scrap even a tiny amount of sample to do further lab testings. The government even contemplated explosion but a fierce public outcry prevented it from happening(though some Podders —— worshippers of The Pod —— argued that The Pod was probably bombproof so it would not have mattered anyway).

Due to fear of “contamination”, Rursee was closed for water sport “until further notice;” to the vehemence of that demographic. The management company was somehow allowed to organise viewings of The Pod and the queue that emerged was longer than The Queue¹. 

The curious people who were present when That Man materialised got their money’s worth. The whole spectacle took less than two minutes; from when they (gender-neutral pronoun) appeared and later seemingly vanished. All media outlets failed to record where the stream of steam ended … so we could only conclude that That Man either disappeared into thin air or went to somewhere else in The Solar System. 

The curious people who were present scrambled to hide from the downpour that happened immediately afterwards and a little drama ensued that was likely quite entertaining to the people who could not secure a ticket and were watching the livestream at the comfort of their homes. It was another circus on the Internet. 

At the 72nd hour of The Rainfall, the environmentalists were rejoicing because it suggested that the future could be a little greener than expected. No flash floods happened, and after the initial heavy pour, the rain was more like a slightly heavy drizzle, which was not that repulsive to most people. 

People started having superpowers by the end of the first day of The Rainfall —— the curious people who were closest to The Pod seem to be the first ones who demonstrated superhuman capabilities, though no one could know for sure. It appeared as if not all of the documented superpowers surfaced at the same time, with levitation being the first and thus “most ancient” superpower; though no one could know for sure. It is rumoured that over a hundred superpowers existed, though no one could know for sure; but I think that some people defined the term “superpower” too loosely —— having an unusual skill does not equate the possession of a superpower, which, in my opinion, should at least be useful in a certain way. Super Maggots² is not a thing.

Even after being enhanced by supernatural potency, we were nevertheless Homo sapiens, and we will always have the innate desire to belong. To something. To somewhere. To someone. To a Gang maybe?  

Enter the Internet, where like-minded people who are not located in each other’s vicinity can still find each other. Interestingly, none of the superpowers recorded in the Superkraftkodex (SKK³) could interfere with the human-made Internet, putting weight to the theory that superpowers are really “super-natural” powers. So the Internet remained unfazed in the midst of this mess and functioned normally. 

Early on, someone started the SKK for reasons unbeknown to us. At first, everyone thought that everyone else has a different superpower but the founder of superkraftkodex.de⁴ quickly realised that that was not the case and the website transformed into a statistics website. You could learn about how common your superpower is, and in updated versions of the site you could even find a map to see the distribution of the superpower in the country.  

And after a while, it started. People looking for their own Gang…and that did not always entail something good. Some people teamed up to commit crimes using the combined strength of their superpowers. However, there were also innocent ones like those who kind of started support groups to cope with their newfound mutual power. Some just wanted to connect with their “supernatural relatives”, as they called it. 

I tried to look for other people who also did not have any “supernatural family” —— meaning that we were the lone wolves with our superpowers.

1. the queue of mourners who waited to file past the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II (Source: Wikipedia) ↩︎
2. https://www.ign.com/lists/100-best-superpowers/99 ↩︎
3. not to be confused with Slowakische Krone ↩︎
4. unregistered domain name ↩︎

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to be continued…