Another late start to the day, I am pretty tired from the last day of my work training today, so this will also likely be a pretty quick one.
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Prompt: A superhero loses their powers and needs to find a way to get them back before the bad guy destroys the city.
Genre: Superhero
Source: 50+ Flash Fiction Prompts To Inspire You 🖊️ | Imagine Forest
Time Spent: 35 minutes
Word Count: 1216
Prompt: A superhero loses their powers and needs to find a way to get them back before the bad guy destroys the city.
Kori Calida aka The Channeler crawled her way onto the banks of the river, coughing up water and trying to catch her breath. She had no idea what just happened, she had come to stop her Nemesis, Dr. Lightning, from powering up some new Death Ray to take over Wonder City, when suddenly she had found herself without her powers.
Kori had discovered at the age of 3, when she first put her hand on the stove when her mother was not looking, that she could absorb large amounts of energy, without harm, for a short period of time. As she got older, and practiced in secret, the amount of energy she could store and for how long, and what she could do with it upon release, had expanded greatly. She could even use it to heal herself and increase her strength and speed for brief periods. She had become the Superheroine The Channeler after she had graduated from college, when she first publicly used her powers to put out a small house fire.
Dr. Lightning had pulled out a strange device, and instead of absorbing or emitting energy, she felt her own energy drawn out of her. From there, she was not sure how she had ended up in the river. She did know two things for certain, after absorbing energy from her, she had clearly seen the device catch fire, so hopefully it could not be used again, and she had very little time to stop her Nemesis, a few hours maybe, before the Death Ray was fully setup.
Kori had made a great degree of study of her own powers and had chosen a biology major in college for the same reason (and was currently in a PhD program, it helped to be able to light a fire and give herself an energy boost). She had isolated a few markers in her DNA that might explain her powers, and strange organelles in her cells, as well as protein structures that encased her nervous system, that seemed to be the key to her abilities. She had isolated both and had samples in her lab.
Changing her Channeler costume enough to not be recognized, she hurried quickly towards her lab. She wished more than once that she could just get a boost of energy and speed herself up, and also heal herself because it felt like her body had been battered all over the place. She also wished she had time to properly do tests on herself to see what her condition truly was. Her only hope was to try and adapt the organelle and DNA data she had stored into a retrovirus, and hope it took effect quickly enough to save the city and its citizens. That was assuming it did anything at all, or that it would make her very sick in the process.
Kori the scientist was screaming and shouting in her head that this was terrible science and extremely risky, but The Channeler part of her felt that she had no choice, and the Kori that was just herself agreed. Finally, she reached her lab and began working. The materials that were needed were already on hand and it took her only a few hours to put the retrovirus together, it helped that being a Saturday there was no one around to question what she was doing.
After injecting herself with the syringe full of the retrovirus, she began idly wandering around and straightening up the lab area. It was to her shock that when she moved on to clean up her colleague and lab partners desk, that she found a device that looked awfully similar to whatever took her powers away.
“I had a feeling that it was you,” said a voice behind her, and her lab partner Dustin walked in from an adjoining room. He was a handsome man with slightly wild hair and a rough beard, about her age and several inches taller than her. His head was uncovered but the rest of him wore the black rubber, electric safety suit that Dr. Lightning always wore. He regarded her for a long moment with his light green, almost yellow eyes. “I do have to thank you for leaving your data and samples out, it helped a lot in developing the device that took your powers away. And then I waited to see whether you would show up. I hadn’t planned to reveal myself, but I seemed to have forgotten the first version of the device on my table.”
Kori recovered herself, “Dustin, what are you doing? You are a brilliant scientist, and have been a great lab partner to me. Why do all of this?”
Dustin shrugged, “well, I could go on some long, elaborate story about being bullied and underappreciated, but I think the real truth is that I was just bored, and tired of all the red tape and bureaucracy of doing science responsibly. Honestly, I don’t even hold anything against you and I don’t think I would actually know what to do with the city if I took it over, I have been basically done everything to see if I can.”
Kori felt a little ill on hearing this, but began to realize that it was not what she was hearing, though that was also unsettling, but something internal, and she was starting to feel, much less than before, the energy around her. Her powers were starting to come back.
Dustin, perhaps noticing her facial expression, sighed and said, “I suppose it is about time to fight again.”
Kori raised an eyebrow and said, “well, I have to stop you from using your Death Ray.”
Dustin waved a hand dismissively, “eh, that didn’t do anything, and that was my 10th attempt of making it work. I think it is time to go back to the drawing board with my calculations, and perhaps even my hypothesis. I destroyed it.”
“Then I guess it is time for you to go to jail for the crimes you have committed.”
“Some robbery, theft of intellectual property, and threats to take over the city? Some injuries and no deaths? We both know that with some of the machines I have designed that I would probably end up working for the government. Also, don’t worry, I threw away the device that i used to absorb your powers. Burned out anyway and damn near blew up, and if my calculations are correct, your retrovirus, very good and impressively quick work by the way, only sped up the recovery of your power, you would have had them back in a day or two anyway..”
Kori could see his point on that, “so, what then?”
Dustin smiled and said, “how about we both get out of these uncomfortable, and now unnecessary with each other, costumes and go have a cup of coffee and talk about what we are working on, I am getting rather bored of this whole ‘supervillain’ thing anyway.”
Kori stared at him for a long moment. It seemed like a trap, or an unwise day, but she should probably eat something soon, energy she could recover easily, but her abilities also burned through nutrients pretty quickly, and that she could only get from food. “Why not, its been a long day.”
Back to having fun with these, and also putting too much time and thought into them, but I digress.
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I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day; you get the chance to do or experience something creative, and I’ll catch you all on the next one!
– Jon
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