How To Be a Super-Villain {an origin story}

1 • Have a Tragic Back-Story

• not edited •

          I wake up in the dark, ears deafened by an alarm and eyes blinded by thick smoke. Panic seizes my heart, and I'm tempted to stay in bed and hide in the sheets, as if they'll protect me from whatever is happening, like how they had protected me from the monsters. My blankets never did do a good job protecting me from the monsters, so I figured my best chance at survival right now is to get downstairs and see what the hell is going on.

The smoke isn't thick enough yet to fill up my bedroom, so I still have space to crawl without choking, but I grab a towel lying on the floor anyway and drench it with water from the water bottle on my bedside table. I cover my nose and mouth with the wet towel and step out the open door, into the hallway. Red and orange fire climbs up the walls and stairs, wrapping around the banister and threatening to eat away the structure of the house.

Heart thumping in alarm, I look up at the sprinklers, which are not doing their jobs, and then look back down at the stairwell in front of me. It was like a staircase down to hell. The fire has already ravaged the picture frames hung on the wall, and the Christmas decorations on the wooden banister are all decimated to ashes. Going down there is suicide. I'll have to find another way out of this wreck.

Just as I turn to run back to my room, I hear a scream over the piercing fire alarm. "Help me!"

My mother.

My heart rate accelerates and I glance over my shoulder, back down at the staircase, which is quickly disintegrating. "Help me!" my mother cries again, and I grit my teeth before turning back to the stairs and leaping down into the fiery pits of hell.

While running down the steps, I try throwing up a telekinetic force shield to block out the flames, but my telekinetic powers have only just developed a year ago, and are barely strong enough to shake a leaf. The flames lick at my skin, but I'm running fast enough that they don't climb on and burn my flesh.

I follow my mother's wails and burst into the family room on the first floor. I halt at the open doorway and my heart lurches when I see the state of the room and the person inside it. The low-slung couches have been reduced to scraps of metal and fabric, and the TV hung on the wall is sparking with electricity, threatening to blow the whole place up. The wallpaper is peeling and being eaten by the ivy-like flames, and the the huge, gold chandelier dripping with diamonds in the center of the ceiling looks like it's either going to melt and collapse, or break off with the ceiling - and collapse.

And then there's my mother. She's crumpled in a heap in the middle of the small room, right below the close-to-collapsing chandelier, which is much bigger than her thin and short frame. The fire on the floor has already started nibbling at her long, white, silk nightgown, and is slowly climbing up and devouring her feet. My mother isn't doing anything to stop it, too. Instead of trying to bat at the fire with her feeble hands, or even trying to move away, she's curled in a fetal position with her head clutched in her bejeweled hands.

"Help me!" she screams again, eyes squeezed shut and face twisted into a painful grimace.

Her call breaks me out of my stunned stupor and I rip the towel away from my face. "Mother," I respond. At the sound of my voice, her eyes snap open and dart back and forth frantically until they latch onto mine. The whites in her big blue eyes are colored red by the smoke, making her look even crazier than normal, and I flinch when a lick of flame wraps around her ankle and she screams.

Her pain-filled shriek pierces my eardrums and my heart, and I step forward, ignoring the fire between us, and reach out a hand. "Mother," I say again, this time louder and more commandingly, "grab my hand."