It's amazing what passes through your mind sometimes. As I sit on my knees feeling the pain of my dislocated right shoulder and broken forearm I remember the last time I felt pain like this. The day I went through the transformation process.

It hurts. They didn't know that at first, though in hindsight it should have been obvious. The first test subject died from the pain before they figured it out. The second went mad before they were able to get the pain and anesthesia levels right. Even then you feel it and it's still the worse pain you've ever felt in your life. The process causes your bones to re-knit themselves so that they become stronger. Your muscles are restructured as millions of new fibers are created and your skin is reworked so that it's denser and virtually impenetrable. In essence every cell in your body is transformed. In minutes.

All this passes through my mind in an instant. Even now the memory is still enough to make me catch my breath. Which the titan of a man in front of me apparently took as a sign of pain or weakness because he started laughing. Frankly it's rather annoying.

I raise my head and look at titan boy. He's at least 8 feet tall and built like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. I have no way of knowing if was like that before or if the process did this to him. Either way, he's big. The process is also what gives us our powers. Every person is different so we never know what we will end up with. Some powers are, for lack of a better way of saying it, useless. Having the ability to grow plants well doesn't really help. Powers can range anywhere from telekinesis to super speed, although not on the level of the Flash, to a super genius. And everything in between. I was gifted with telekinesis. A rather strong form of it too. Where as most have trouble moving anything larger than a mid-sized SUV, I can bring down buildings. I've mentioned that the process reengineers every cell and makes us stronger and our skin denser. Anything short of an armor piercing shell will basically bounce off. It hurts like hell, but only for a second. It's the equivalent of being smacked with a ruler for normals.

With that said, physics is still physics. If I hit him with something big enough, and with enough momentum, it won't stop him, but might put him down long enough to get away. Instinctively I reach out and grab whats left of the side of a 7 story building behind me. He sees the wall start to shake, places his hands on his hips and starts laughing even louder. Not exactly the response I expected but he's starting to piss me off so I don't bother restraining myself and fling it at him with everything I've got.

The impact is tremendous, I feel it from where I'm sitting several hundred yards away. It's enough that a couple unstable structures near us start to collapse and fall into themselves in response. I head the crackling and tinkling of small stones falling back to earth after the impact sent them skyward. I struggle to stand, when a tremor shakes the area and knocks me back on my ass. Trouble is it doesn't feel like a normal tremor, nor does it come at the right time. There was too much time after the impact for the two to be related.

That's when I realize the cracking sounds I heard earlier weren't stones. Now that the dust has settled I see him kneeling on the ground with his left fist on the ground. He has caused the tremor by pounding the earth. And he has a forcefield surrounding him. That's new.

He grins and picks up the burnt out remains of a car next to him and heaves it at me. Can't dodge with my arm and shoulder so I push myself up and over using my gift, somersaulting badly over the car. I land wrong causing pain to flair in my shoulder and wrench my ankle. No damage is done but it puts me off balance long enough for him to uproot a light pole and swing at me. I can't recover in time and the impact throws me across the street. When I land the impact shatters my headset, however my only thoughts are that I'm glad he doesn't play for the Yankees and that he's left handed.

He launches himself into the air directly at me. It's one hell of a leap, but based on the display so far nothing for someone with his strength. As he's in the air I realize where we are and using my power grab him in mid air and slam him into a concrete building in the center of the street. It's the building where the Red Line goes back underground so I put everything I have into forcing him as far down as I can and piling debris on top.

It won't hold him forever but should long enough for me to get away.

I go north, planning to cross over the Charles at the museum heading for the Garden where our HQ is set up. They need to know that the game has changed.

© 2011, anthony. All rights reserved.

We buried my father today. A man considered by many as the brightest mind that ever lived. Others called him the harbinger of doom. Apparently that's the way it works with men who are super geniuses. If his death had been natural I might not hate the sunshine and cool breezes blowing around me as I stand here on the balcony overlooking the graveyard where his body now lies.

My girlfriend is with me and has been trying to console me all afternoon. Unfortunately this is one of those situations where unless you've experienced it, you can't even begin to understand what it's like. She kept reminding me that her father was killed when she was 12, and while that is true, her father wasn't killed by a terrorist organization that was created specifically to destroy his work. She can't understand that because of his work in genetics and biology, and because of the powers he gave me and others like me, he was targeted from the beginning.

I don't blame her. I can't. Of the 10 billion people living on this planet and the moon only 15, the ones dad chose for the Ichabod project, would even begin to have an idea of what it felt like. Of those, only five had a parent in the project. Then of course only I was lucky enough to have the man that started it all, the man that discovered how to give ordinary people what amounted to super powers, as a father.

Right now she is in the other room trying to absorb everything I told her. In this case I can imagine what she is going through. I went through something similar 5 years ago when dad told me all about the Ichabod idea. He told me about how he had worked out how to alter a persons physiology and biochemistry to give them super human abilities.

He had gotten FDA approval to begin testing on humans, and wanted to know if I would be willing to be part of the trials.

That's when everything went to hell. A group calling themselves 'The Asgard' broke into the lab in Boston, stole all the serum and notes and research and blew up the lab. Injuring my dad in the process. They began to experiment on themselves. No one is sure where their scientist came from, or if they even had one, but suddenly they began to acquire abilities that were unstable and dangerous. Well, more dangerous. Especially in their hands.

Dad went into self-imposed exile to recover from his injuries. The worst of which was a shattered spine which left him unable to walk. 'Very Professor X' I always said, teasing him about it. At least it made him smile.

When he recovered to the point he could work again he dedicated himself to developing a serum that would counter the original drug, holding himself responsible for all the death and damaged caused by Asgard.

Then a year ago they changed course. Some said that the leadership within Asgard changed, that there had been a coup of some kind and that was why the change of philosophy. Others said it was because they had found out about dad's little fail safe. That those given the treatment became sterile and could not produce offspring. He had said it was to prevent the powers from getting out of control and evolving into god knew what.

Either way they went from committing crimes like theft and extortion to terrorizing the general population. I'm convinced that they did it intentionally, knowing dad would do something and it would bring him out of exile.

And they were right. He came out of seclusion and, with the help of the government, formed the super-human group he dubbed 'League'. He kind of named it after the 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen', but also, as a private joke, because the training part of the program would be called 'The Minors'. He did love his baseball.

Because I was his son I was recruited to join. Training was brutal. Not only did we get training in using our powers but we went through the standard Marine basic training. Only it was accelerated because no one felt we had a lot of time to figure it out.

We held our own the first time we face Asgard. No one died and no one got seriously injured. However in retaliation they attacked and leveled Atlanta. Sherman would have been proud, and probably a little embarrassed. That was six months ago. They are still searching for missing people. They announced a couple weeks ago that they were targeting Boston next since that was where it all began and where League had setup it's headquarters.

When the announcement hit the news dad jumped on a plane from LA, where he had been working to setup a west coast division, and headed back to Boston. They attacked his plane somewhere over Kansas and brought it down. They pulled my father from the plane, tortured him for fun then finished the job they started back when they first attacked the lab. I'm told he died quickly once they decided to kill him. Small consultation.

Steph came out after a couple hours and is standing next to me. We stay like that, neither of us talking for several minutes until the sirens starting going off, announcing Asgards arrival in Boston, and my signal that it was time to met the rest of the team.

I really wish it wasn't such a nice day.

© 2011, anthony. All rights reserved.