Max Black was pretty much raised by comic books and television; his father was a cop and his mother never had less than two jobs at a time.
Contrary to the cliché, he wasn’t the black nerdy kid with glasses that always gets bullied; he was the high school quarterback who could kick your ass if you said anything funny about Superman’s costume. Since knowing the full Avengers roster by heart didn’t get him a job in Chicago, he moved to New York as soon as he could…most of his heroes lived there. Well, a fictional and highly idealized version of New York, at the very least.
He was almost surprised that the city wasn’t always about to be destroyed by a supervillain or an alien invasion. Even more surprisingly, the fact that an asteroid is about to wipe the city out of the map doesn’t make New York look more real in his eyes.
<Now what?> he asks to the silver eyed eighteen year old Asian girl that’s turned his life upside down in less than an hour.
She’s holding to the spherical rock called the Heart of the Universe as if her life depends on it, mostly because it actually does.
<This thing isn’t working. I think it’s resisting me somehow.>
<So…we’re going to die, right?> Max asks.
<Sorry, I’m really not good at that> Vesta answers, leaving the ground and flying towards the asteroid; there’s a huge boom when she reaches the speed of sound a hundred feet above.
But that’s nothing compared to the deafening explosion of the meteorite; it’s loud enough to shatter windows several miles away.
Max isn’t watching the explosion; he’s covering his eyes from the sand lifted by the first sonic boom. Vesta caused quite a little sandstorm when she kicked off.
<Next time give us a warning shot or something!> Max complains, trying to move the sand.
But the sand isn’t moving. It’s still in the air.
<What the heck is going on? Why is everything so quiet?> he asks, even though he can’t hear his own voice.
Just outside the sandstorm, the picture is clear. And it’s very much like walking through a picture: everything’s perfectly still. Noriko is concentrating on the sphere.
Max waves his hand in front of her eyes: she’s not blinking. She’s not even breathing. A drop of sweat on her forehead is absolutely immobile.
That’s not the weirdest thing: Max’s hand is now made of bright yellow light, like the rest of his body. His mind struggles with the change for the briefest of times.
<I have super-powers! Whoo-hoo!>
As he shouts with all the joy of the world, he looks up. Frozen in time, the asteroid’s explosion is filling the entire sky.
<Crap. The end of the world stuff. Forgot about that.>
Later, Max is lying on the beach with his hands behind his head. It’s impossible to know how much later: it feels like an eternity, but nothing is changing.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here. I probably didn’t stop time; I don’t have problems breathing. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not actually breathing. That rules out super-speed I guess. And how did I get superpowers anyway?”
Max steps up, walking towards Noriko. Actually walking is misleading: he just wills himself in another place and appears there. The drop of sweat on her forehead hasn’t moved.
“Too bad I can’t ask you, little miss genius. Maybe that gizmo can unfreeze time” – he guesses, trying to touch the Heart of the Universe. His hand phases right through it.
“Figures. Maybe it’s for the best, I don’t want that thing to disintegrate me tw…wait a second”.
He pictures a familiar scene again: him pushing Vesta out of harm’s way, the Heart’s death ray disintegrating him, and Vest pulling him back together.
“That’s it! She did something wrong putting me back together, like mixing that thing’s energy with my body or something. That means…”
He looks up. The explosion hasn’t moved.
“That means absolutely nothing. I’m still stuck here. What kind of lame superpower is this?”
Max then wills himself right inside the explosion. Vesta is still there, still frozen in time after punching the asteroid. And her waitress dress doesn’t even have a scratch.
“So you turned into what…energy?” – he wonders. Then something in his mind just connects all the right dots; he snaps is intangible fingers, making no sound.
“Captain Marvel!” – he understands, grabbing a fragment of the meteorite. His hand passes through it at first, but explodes when he wants it to.
<Max? What are you doing up here?> Vesta asks.
<I can turn my body into energy! Like the old Captain Marvel!> he shouts with all the joy in the world, before flying away literally at the speed of light. Turning his body into a laser.
Imagine you live in New York. You hear a loud noise and you look up: the sky’s on fire.
Then you hear a much louder noise, loud enough to drown all the voices in the world, even the noise of the millions of windows shattered.
If you’re not too terrified to keep looking at the sky, you see the most fantastic light show imaginable as a streak of light ricochets between rocks the size of cars to incinerate them, one by one. Finally, if you haven’t completely lost your mind yet, every impossible thing you’ve just seen… the fire, the meteorite, even the fine dust falling to the ground after the laser hit the rocks… everything just disappears in a blue streak of light.
It was quick. Everything happened in less than a minute, when even a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to really understand.
Because what just happened was simply impossible. And this is the night when the world begins to understand that the impossible is now real.
Max flies back to the beach, turning his body into human flesh again. After an eternity, the wind is finally letting the sand fall to the ground.
Noriko Null is standing on the sand, with the Heart of the Universe in her hand and half a smile on her face.
<Told you I was working on it.>
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