I guess there have always been sensitives, people who react in some way to being around glowstones. And from the old stories, it sounds like sometimes just hanging out around glowstones too much will wake up the powers inside of a person, but usually not. Still, it wasn’t too hard for the different governments to figure out that there was some sort of connection between glowstones and supers, since so many sensitives also became supers. Any sensitive out there is going to be a descendant of the Waking Guard, btw.
Chelsea’s dad was doing photography for that first expedition looking at the glowstones scattered around the ice shelf in Antarctica. That’s where the Ancients had been sleeping for so many years. The Great Awakening was sort of their awakening too. The surge of power had been them exploding out of their sleeping place and coming back into the world.
We didn’t know it then, but a couple months later Utah told us that 1 of the top scientists from the Antarctica expedition was a Waking Guardian who was trying to figure out what had happened to the Ancients like, 30-some years ago. (The WG scientist didn’t go down to the site himself, so he wasn’t around when… well, it sounds like an Ancient must have sneaked around the camp and made all the scientists lose interest in the project when they were getting close to hitting the sleeping chambers.)
When this happened tho, when Chelsea’s sister got the glowstone for her birthday, we didn’t know that the Ancients were awake. Or that the Waking Guard was out there, trying to keep track of them (but doing a terrible job, imo). For me and Chelsea, life was just school and training, school and training, with our grades and our social lives going down the toilet.
Then, about a month after it all started, something really bad and big happened.
It was a rainy day. Um, a Thursday not long after the holidays. C&I had the day off because what with our storm affinity (hello? wind and water?), our mentors thought it was a bad idea for us to practice during rain until we really knew what we were doing. So, C&I decided to head down to the Mall of America to chill out and do some shopping. We’d been joking about designing our own superhero costumes, even tho we didn’t think the Waking Guard did the traditional superhero thing.
Before we did any shopping tho Chelsea just had to take me to this particular restaurant that she and her mom liked, just on the edge of downtown. We had to park the car a little bit away so it meant some time outside, but we had both been getting drenched so often lately that a few splashes while we ran around with umbrellas didn’t make much difference. We were just about to pass this particular steel-and-glass building (not quite a skyscraper, but not too shabby either) when I started to feel the wind power waking up inside of me.
I stopped and grabbed at Chelsea, but she was obviously feeling the same thing because she had stopped too. She had the same freaked out oh-no-oh-no-oh-crap look on her face as I probably did, and then my vision started to blur the second before I realized that Chelsea’s eyes were getting darker.
And then there was this rumbling in the sky above us, and in just a couple seconds the clouds had turned darker and thicker than before, like there was a crazy powerful storm on its way. The thing is, we could both feel this energy rush (that we were trying to stop!) and we knew that somehow we were causing the gathering storm. And we both realized that unless something changed really fast, we were going to be responsible for something very, very bad.
After a few seconds of both of us freaking out, C looked even more terrified than before and started saying what was probably every swear word she knew. I told her to try and relax, and she told me that she had just realized that this building was where her sister had her internship.
I thought this meant we needed to get out of here now, but instead Chelsea grabbed her phone and started texting like crazy. Granted, I don’t think either of us was thinking all that clearly just then. I was trying to pull her away (the wind was starting to blow in circles around the 2 of us, and I’m pretty sure the rain was swirling around too, instead of just falling like it was supposed to), but she wouldn’t move until she had sent her sister a message asking her to get home. (It turned out that Brook wasn’t even at work right then, but how were we supposed to know that?)
Once C was done, she finally let me start pulling her away from the building—but it was too late. All this power, too much power, was building up inside of us. Just a few seconds later, boom. From just where I was holding her hand we both felt this electric explosion, and then there was the loudest noise ever, and the next thing we knew we were lying on the ground and the world around us smelled gross like burning hair.
The whole thing felt a lot like throwing up, actually. We knew it was coming a couple seconds before it did, but we couldn’t control it and it was ugly and gross and left us feeling like crap afterwards.
It took us both a couple minutes to feel strong enough to sit up. When we looked at each other we both saw that the other one’s hair was sticking up—not from wind, but from all the static electricity around us. I think the air was buzzing. We both knew exactly how not good this was. So we decided to split up (we were really afraid that if we touched again while there was all this power going on, then there would be more lightning) and both head over to the Petrovskis. C eventually drove there, and I took a cab.
The Petrovskis had never heard of anything like that, and they said that using our combined powers to make lightning was something so advanced and so powerful that they hadn’t even expected to mention it for a couple of years. (So much trouble when people don’t tell each other stuff, you know? That’s pretty much why I’m writing this all down and leaving it with you.) They had no idea why we would suddenly go haywire in the middle of South Minneapolis, but they had a theory. Apparently that sort of thing can happen, when there’s a lot of glowstones around, arranged into a power well. C&I were all like, huh?, and the Petrovskis said that it’s not really anything anyone did very much, but if someone were to use a whole bunch of glowstones to create a big, massive storage container for stray energy and if we happened to be too close, it could make our powers go haywire. But that wasn’t a Waking Guard thing, and they had never heard of normal supers doing it either. It was more the sort of thing the Ancients did in the old stories.
Now it was kind of like a mystery, so C&I started digging up whatever we could on the owners of the building. It started to look more and more like C’s sister’s boss was in charge of the operations around the place, so C started asking Brook some unsuspicious questions to get a better sense of what the lady was like, and pretty soon C even had some photos to show us. Even tho none of us had ever seen an Ancient before, we all agreed that this lady, with creepy-pale skin and these eyes that were darker than any sort of normal, didn’t look 100% human.
We knew we had to start investigating, because whether she was an Ancient or not, she was doing something underground in the middle of our city that was dangerous and needed to be stopped.
(Continue.)
