Super Powers Universe, The

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By legionxp

The first four paragraphs are background. The story jumps between two different scenes. Part two is written, if you want more, just ask. I hope this formats ok

Enter the Super Powers Universe, which is just like ours except for The Event that happened during the summer after our narrator’s (Frank’s) senior year of high school. A cosmic wave hit the Earth, exposing most of North America to a strange green light that lasted for about 30 seconds.

This cosmic wave disrupted power grids all over North America and caused earthquakes, fires, and natural disasters. There were riots as people panicked. The cosmic wave also killed the weak and infirm who were outside at the time and exposed to it. It took six months for things to kind of get back to normal, but no one realized that the world had been changed forever. In the United States, the government employed military patrols to keep riots in check, repealing the laws that protected people from that sort of thing. A few of the males who were strong were changed, given powers and strength beyond anything they could imagine. Power and strength that would grow as they grew, but the secret to that will be revealed later.

As time passes, random acts of destruction that plague the nation are blamed on “rioters”. There are stories of young men with powers, but those are regarded as a myth, like UFOs. Most people who see the powerful males in action are killed or taken away by the government, however stories do surface and the people whisper about them.

Now, five years later after this event, our narrator having just graduated from college and landed a job near his home town, runs into a high school classmate in the gym who is working as a personal trainer, but is so much more….

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I entered the gym, ready for a good workout. When I saw Rex, he was huge, the guy was always big, but he had definitely been hitting the gym these past five years. Rex was training some middle aged dude, but he spotted me and walked right over.

“Yo, Frank,” Rex’s voice projected throughout the place, which was packed with folks. Everyone was into working out and taking personal defense classes since The Event, even some old people, although there weren’t that many of them. Most folks stayed inside at night, because it was safer.

“How have you been?” Rex asked. He was still a nice guy after all these years.

Rex was 23 years old, about 6’ very handsome, with a sharp jaw line, perfect teeth, piercing green eyes, and dark brown hair. He was also incredibly built, his muscles bulged under his tight sleeveless t-shirt. I checked out the upper arms first. The bicep and triceps looked like someone had taken two bricks, stuck them together, and inserted them under Rex’s smooth, tan skin. His forearms looked like there were softballs just below his elbows. Forearms like that meant the grip of those hands with their long, strong fingers could really inflict some crushing power. His shoulders were broad and wide, the distance between the two boulders was at least two feet. When he stood in front of you and talked, all you saw was his stone carved muscular body, lean and hard. The hugeness of his body blocked my view of anything else. His chest was wide and thick, his pecs were the size of two soccer balls and pressed against his shirt so tightly that his nipples were visible. The bottoms of his pecs stuck out from his torso by about three inches, creating an overhang above his abs. His quads and hamstrings were shaped like two giant hams, with calves to match. Nothing was moving this dude if he didn’t want to be moved.

He told me he was a personal trainer and would give me a special rate if I wanted some pointers (I wasn’t known for playing a lot of sports in high school, but I had taken to working out) and I said sure. It was hard to get a trainer with them being in such demand. Plus, Rex gave me that tingle in my head.

The tingle was a strange thing indeed and it started after the Event, maybe a month or two afterwards, sometimes when I saw a muscular dude, my head would tingle a little bit, like when your leg falls asleep, but not quite as intense. Anyways, it felt good.

The night of the Event was burned into my mind forever, I left the party and went home a bit early, as I closed my window shade at 1:03 AM, the night sky exploded with green light and I fell to the floor and woke up three weeks later…

>1:00 A.M. over a quiet dirt road in South Fork, Idaho, a small farming town. The country road is lined with farms that are spaced out about a mile apart.

SHHHHBOOOOM! A sonic boom interrupts the quiet night. A huge muscle man emerges from the clouds and flies down from the sky, a big grin on his face. He is looking to have some fun tonight.

Standing 6’5” with black hair and piercing blue eyes and wearing only gym shorts which conform to the contour of his body, our mysterious stranger is a sight to behold. His 25 inch upper arms are thick with protruding veins. His forearms are hard muscle and as large as his giant calves. He’s 27, but he hasn’t physically aged since he got these powers 5 years ago.

He lands on the dirt road and bounces his pecs once THOOM! THOOM! His massive pectorals actually make noise when he bounces them! It sounds like Godzilla taking a couple steps. He looks down and smiles at them, he can just see the tips of his toes, his mammoth, beach ball pectorals block the rest of his feet from his view. His bright white teeth glisten in the moonlight. His face is perfect, not a scar, high cheekbones, a firm jaw line, deep set eyes. He looks like a Muscle and Fitness model, which is what he used to be before he got the powers and now he just takes what he wants. His smooth shaved skin is thick and tan, so he looks good when the useless military weapons slam into his invulnerable body. The prominent 8 pack helps too. He has to look good when it’s time to do the killing, when it’s time to reign terror down on the populace. Bringing the pain is his major hobby, he flaunts his powers as much as he can, uses them all the time to terrorize, destroy, and kill.

Of course, he didn’t have all of this muscle and these super powers back in the day, he got more power and strength by killing and absorbing other power dudes like himself. He was a big fish though and the big fish eat the little fish. He started out with powers just like Superman, but those now seemed so simplistic compared to what he could do now. He had increased the order of magnitude of his standard powers by as much as 10 times what he started out with and gained several “non-standard” abilities.

Yes, Hammer, as he now calls himself, is a lawless being. Since The Event, he is all about having fun and gaining even more power. Tonight was going to be no exception, people were going to get pounded.

Hammer strolls down the quiet road and turns towards the farm house that’s about ½ mile back from the street. He sees lights on, somebody is still up. WZZZZ! His pupils glow a bluish color as he uses his enhanced vision which reveals two adults and a teenage daughter and son asleep upstairs and three dudes smoking pot around a bon fire behind the barn which is 15 yards behind and west of the farmhouse. He smiles because they are going to wish they were asleep for this one. Hammer counts seven horses, 24 cows, and numerous pigs and sheep. Hammer puckers his lips.

WOO-WOOO! Lights are flashing and Hammer finds himself caught in a cop car’s spotlight. The cop turns the siren off quickly, so as to not wake the farm folk.

Hammer looks him up and down, he’s a fat, fifty something man. Hammer could kill him 20 times over in the time it takes the fat man to sign off on the radio, get out of the car and raise his weapon.

The cop gets his first good look at Hammer and his jaw drops, he’s a perfect specimen of a human being, hardly any fat on him, muscles protruding all over the place. The cop looks him up and down, slowly. He’s taking in the whole scene: The powerful shoulders that are as big and round as volleyballs; the deep lean valley between the two huge pectorals, so deep he could probably reach his hand in there up to his elbow; the thick neck, that is not so thick that it looks disproportional on this muscle giant, but you’d need a big thick chain to choke this guy, no person’s hands could reach around this monster with its slightly prominent thick veins pumping blood to a brain that processes information at three times the speed of the fastest computer (of course, the cop didn’t know anything about the muscle dude’s brain power); the package, it’s not abnormally large, but it is worth noticing; the oak like quads and hamstrings, this titan could kick a football out of the fucking stadium and probably jump 10 feet in the air. The cop is jealous, but he has the one thing this muscle freak doesn’t have, a gun and, damn it, he’ll use it if he has too.

“Whatcha doing out here this late half naked, boy?” the cop asked sternly. “You on something boy?”

Hammer stood silently, laughing inside and try to figure out how he was going to finish this fat ass. Then he decided he’d do this guy in the old fashioned way.

“You deaf? You on something?” The cop yelled.

“Yes,” replied Hammer in his powerfully deep voice. “A power trip.”

SWOOSH!! Hammer is a blur, he races toward the cop, stops directly in front of the fat man, cocks his cannon of an arm back and THWAMM! Drives his massive fist backed up by his big guns into the cop. SPLOOSH! The punch is so powerful that the cop just disintegrates, his body is blown to microscopic bits. A cloud of blood mist fills the air. When one has the power to obliterate a mountain with one punch, how is a normal human supposed to fair?

Next, he reaches under the car and hoists it over his head with ease. Hammer pushes the car upward and launches it into the sky OOOOOSHH! In moments it’s on its way to crash in California somewhere, compliments of Hammer’s amazing strength.

WOO-WOOOO! Another cop car is coming up the road. Hammer is sick of this police bullshit, his eyes lock on to the vehicle and VREEET! Two red beams of heat shoot from his pupils and streak towards the cop car. The two cops inside freak out as Hammer’s intense heat vision blasts into the car. It seconds it’s glowing red hot and finally FOOMPH! Hammer’s heat beams vaporize the car and its occupants in a bright white flash of light. All that remains of the cops and their car is a cloud of smoke which floats on the night time breeze down the country road.

Hammer is primed for action now, he turns back toward his original target, the farm house. He purses his lips, leans his head a few inches forward, and blows out FAWOOOSH! his powerful lungs unleash a wind with the force of 1000 hurricanes, it requires from him the same amount of effort it would require a normal human to blow out a candle, in other words, hardly any effort at all. KERRRRRACKK! KABOOM! The farm house almost instantly explodes in a cloud of debris that, propelled by Hammer’s super breath, races off into the horizon and vanishes in the distance. It’s a precise strike, only the farm house and the animals in the fields behind it are wiped out.

Hammer stops blowing and waits for the three dudes to wander out from behind the barn in their drug induced haze. He also laughs at the flying livestock that was launched at hundreds of miles an hour off into the distance. He had never sent a herd of animals like that flying to their deaths.

The dudes don’t wander anywhere, they are obviously very stoned. VOOMP! Hammer leaps into the air and WHUMF! Lands a 1/2 mile away in the center of the raging bonfire. On impact embers and logs explode in a cloud of fire around him. The three stoners stare stupidly at him, as the flames lick his muscular flesh and dance across his skin.

Hammer steps toward them and out of the fire.

“WHOA!” One dude exclaims as he stares in awe at Hammer’s hugely muscular frame. Hammer grins down at the dudes, reaches his supremely muscular arm out, and holds his open palm over the head of the dude who spoke. Hammer’s palm glows with a dull green light, the dude looks up at it curiously, then FROOOSH! A single pulse of green energy blasts from Hammer’s palm and races from the dude’s head to his feet turning him to ash in the process. The dude doesn’t even have a chance to scream. FOOMPH! In a half a second it’s over and a neat pile of smoking gray ash is all that is left of the poor sap.

Stunned his two stoned buddies attempt escape, one runs into the nearby cornfield and the other heads for the barn. Hammer lets them run, for the moment, he likes a little hide and seek.

VROOOM! BANG! An F-150 driven by one of the dudes races out of the barn, swerving from side to side, due to the condition of the driver but basically stays on a collision course with Hammer, who is totally amused by this. Hammer watches as the truck picks up speed as it drives toward him. KERASH! The F-150 smashes into Hammer’s super physique and its front end splits and wraps around Hammer’s huge muscular body as if Hammer were a big wooden telephone pole.

The impact stuns the driver and Hammer uses his super strong arms to RENNNKT! Tear through the metal wreckage like paper and pry himself loose, crushing and shredding the F-150’s body in the process.

The driver is stunned by the scene, he is even more shocked when Hammer quickly marches toward the truck’s locked door and WREAK! Digs his hands into the metal and WRENNKTT! Tears the door right off and OOOOSH! Flings it into the fields.

The driver is terrified of this muscle giant who is grinning at him, as he cowers against the passenger door paralyzed in fear. His high is totally gone now, this is serious shit.

Hammer bounces his thick and heavy pectorals one time THOOM! THOOM! The dull roar freaks out his victim even more. The sound resonates like thunder in the truck’s passenger compartment. Hammer loves it though, he loves the power, strength, and his incredible huge body. It’s been five years and it’s still as enjoyable and new to him as it was on day one.

Hammer slowly reaches under the truck and UMMMPH! Lifts it from the ground. He positions it and WHRII! Spins it so now he is holding it over his head from beneath on the passenger side. Hammer shakes the truck up WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP! Using his super strength to loosen his victim from his perch. He hears the driver bouncing around inside. Then URRRK! Hammer tilts the driver’s door toward the ground and OOOSH! Thrusts it forward. WOOSH! THUD! The driver shoots out and is rocketed into the ground. He lays there stunned by the force of the impact.

Hammer then gets a nice, firm grip on the truck’s chassis and KERRRASSSH!! Plows it into the ground to his left. Bits of metal shoot in various directions. The truck is smashed into a twisted pile of wreckage and the force of the impact kicks up a cloud of dirt and creates a crater two feet deep and 20 feet wide in the Earth.

Hammer releases his grip on the now unrecognizable framework of the vehicle. And prepares to deal with the driver, who lays on the ground, staring blankly up at Hammer as he slowly scoots backward in a pathetic attempt at escape.

It’s almost a waste when his victims are too terrified to appreciate his power, Hammer thinks. To die by his mighty hand is a great privilege.

Hammer looks downward at his victim, forms his lips into an “O” shape, and exhales PPFFSTTT! A small swirling ball of pale blue vapor escapes his lips and floats toward his victim who lays on the ground about 20 feet away. The small gas ball quickly expands into a loose spherical cloud that is 10 feet in diameter as it approaches its target. “NO! Please! GOD NO!,” the dude cries out in desperation as the vapor cloud floats toward him and engulfs him. The vapor sucks every bit of heat energy from his body, freezing him to absolute zero, the complete absence of heat, he is dead in a split second. What is impossible for science is not impossible for a super powered muscle god. The vapor cloud dissipates after completing its grim task. The dude is now completely gray in color and absolutely frozen solid.

Hammer puckers his lips and FWOOSH! Targets the dude with a sharp gust of his super breath. KERBASSH! The blast of air slams into the frozen dude like a rocket and his body explodes in a storm of icy snowflake sized bits.

Satisfied with the outcome, Hammer turns toward the cornfield and scans it with his enhanced vision. WZZZZ! The human he’s looking for is passed out about a half mile into the corn field.

SWOOOSH! Hammer rips a path through the corn as he runs to the dude’s location at super speed. Hammer is towering over the dude in the blink of an eye. In his wake he leaves a path of smashed corn and a cloud of dirt, which was kicked up as he ran, hangs over the path he took. Hammer can’t toy with this dude too much, he’s in this shit hole farm town for a reason.

Hammer bends down and grabs the final dude by the neck with one of his massive hands and lifts him a foot off the ground and holds the dude so that they are nose to nose. To Hammer the dude doesn’t really weigh anything at all. HUMP! Hammer shakes the dude and his eyes open slowly and then they explode wide open in fear.

Hammer’s mouth opens and FSSSSTT! A small cloud of thick green vapor escapes his lips and floats over the dude’s head. The dude breaths in the green gas and instantly relaxes as it takes over his mind, putting him in a relaxed state. Hammer gives the dude a friendly grin and sets him back on the ground, Hammer’s mind numbing vapor is a favorite power of his. Hammer’s victim is just chilling out standing in the corn field, not a worry in the world.

Hammer reaches out and clamps his hands on each of the dude’s shoulders. The dude stares at Hammer blankly, Hammer glares at the pitiful fool and smirks at him as KERRAACKK! The sound of snapping bone fills the air as Hammer pushes the guy’s shoulders toward each other, slowly. “AAEIIIII,“ the guy screams into the night sky as the bones in his upper torso snap like twigs into small fragments under the pressure of Hammer’s great strength.

Hammer releases the weakling, whose shoulder blades and rib cage have been reduced to small shards of bone. The mortally wounded dude runs around writhing in horrible pain. Hammer catches the dude with one hand by the head, Hammer’s thumb is positioned at one of the dude’s temples, his index finger at the other. Hammer squeezes KRACKOOSH! The dude’s head explodes like a watermelon hitting the pavement from 20 stories up. The body hits the ground with a hallow thud.

Hammer is pleased, he reaches into the pocket of his shorts and pulls out a couple computer print outs from the South Fork Weekly newspaper’s web site. One article is dated two years ago, the other is from three months ago. Both describe “miracle” rescues by now 24 year old James Cabble. In one James dashed into a house fire and rescued 4 people. “He walked through the flames and there isn’t a scratch on him”, one witness is quoted as saying. In the other, an out of control truck, with its driver asleep at the wheel is stopped. James is the only witness, but two handprints are smashed into the truck’s grill and the cab is compressed up to the windshield. The article states that he is planning to join the town’s police force as a reservist, while also working at the local bowling alley. Yes, it’s time for Hammer to pay James a visit. A visit James will never forget…………. •


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