1 Chapter 1 - Silas

What do you do when you wake up to your younger brother shouting for you to get up, your mom screaming something you can't make out, and your father's voice echoing for everyone to stay calm? You start to ask questions, or at least you should.

I failed to do so. Instead, I elected to stare at my sibling as his skin glowed. I thought for sure I was dreaming. He turned away from my gaze and slammed the door behind him.

"What the h-" I started before another screech from Mom cut me off. Finally coming to my senses, I rolled out of bed in nothing but my loose t-shirt and shorts and walked to my door. Swinging it open, I was greeted by another, significantly louder shriek. Something was really getting to Mom.

When she emerged from her room, I could see what. Her hair was entirely white, her skin as pale as snow. She looked like some albino animal, except for her now silver eyes. As she walked down the hall towards me, I could feel the temperature drop. Then I heard Dad behind me, his commanding voice seemed to echo within the small hallway.

"Honey, we need to calm down," Dad boomed. From his tone, it sounded like he was trying to whisper, but to my ears, his voice was a deafening blast of sound. The deep vibrations shook me to my bones.

"Would somebody please tell me what is going on?!" I cried once I was able to barely even hear myself. Glancing from my father's worried look to my mother's pale blue eyes, and finally, to my brother's scared, dim glow, I knew the answer to what I had just asked. Nobody could possibly tell me what was going on, because none of them knew either.

I raced down the steps, away from my deafening father and freezing mother. I stumbled my way through the living room to our entryway, searching blindly for the doorknob I had grasped thousands of times before. I twisted it, and it seized against the motion. It was locked, of course. I turned the lock and the bolt above it, then opened the door. Pushing my way out of the clear screen door in front of me, I stepped into chaos.

As I watched, one neighbor's house was burning, another was already in ruins, and several younger kids were running down the street, crying. One of the children was cracking the street with every step he took.

I watched blankly as the world around me fell farther into disarray, and I would stand by as it continued for the next six years. It started with looting and robbery, then attacking government buildings within a single week. As they always said, power corrupts. A year had passed after what we came to call the Evolution, and the world's entire social structure was gone. The Evolution gave men and women absolute power. Just one year later, order decided to present itself in a new form. Superheroes.

Clearly inspired by the fantasy worlds created before the Evolution, superheroes began popping up all across the globe. Those with less remarkable talents flocked to their protection, creating cities and governments. The world began to rebuild but on the backs of those few that hadn't evolved. They were soon named basics, and some would say that basics and the evolved lived peacefully together, but lies are still lies, no matter how good they sound. While these cities protected those that they could, some more effectively than others, they were built off strong preying on the weak.

I moved to one of those cities when I was fourteen, three years after the Evolution. My family had taken to the trend at that time of giving themselves a power-based alias. My mother's cold powers and my father's sonic powers gave them very original names, courtesy of myself and my brother. Subzero and Decibel were quite the team, though they really stopped caring for me, and started embracing my brother, now called Fluorescent, I only now understand.

I decided I needed to find my own way elsewhere when they became leaders under the guardian hero of our home city recreated. I found Sol City, the territory of High Solis, despite the ever-continuing power struggle with her archnemesis. In Sol City, I found a decent school, an abandoned apartment to stay in that had running water and electricity for some reason, and even a way to get my own money and food. It was a sort of job with one of the true heroes, the man that owned one of the few restaurants in town.

Life was fine for some time. I was going into what would be my last year of school and had hidden my secret from most of my classmates, but none of my teachers. I walked in a world full of the Evolved, but I wasn't one of them. In the Evolution, it was estimated that seventy-five percent of the world gained some varying degrees of special power. That left the other twenty-five to be the basics. Me? I, Silas Tylers, am as Basic as they come.

"You really don't understand what it's like," I found myself saying to Kaitlynn Mendez almost six years after that terrifying day. Kaity was pretty much my best friend, or as close as a Basic and an Evolved could be to friends. She was a low level Evolved with the power to run an electric current through materials that would normally dampen them. She had given herself the alias Conductor, which I found rather clever.

"But my power is almost completely useless. I might as well be basic," she argued. She did have a point, but she didn't understand the social part that came with being powerless. The "shame" of being a basic.

"You go ahead and tell me when you start having the street merchants gauge prices for you because of that 'useless' power of yours" I mumbled.

"What was that?" Kaity teased, "It almost sounded like you were complaining. I thought you never did that. Oh, wait. You always do that."

"Oh, be quiet, Kaity Cat," I said, playing along. It would have been an enjoyable rest of the way home, talking with Kaity, but of course, we were interrupted. The building in front of us seemed to shake for a moment, and the ground vibrated. It seemed as though our whole world was a child's snow globe before the building collapsed outward into the street. We turned our backs in unison as the wave of dust hit. It stung my eyes as I tried to close them fast enough, and I heard Kaity fall next to me. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was a dense brown fog that settled around the area. This had to be a feud between two middle tier Evolved.

I recognized one of them as one of High Solis's lower level captains, Richter. He was, no doubt, who had collapsed the building and caused the shaking. I couldn't tell who the other Evolved was. I could only catch glimpses in the dust cloud.

"Fog of War," Kaity said as she scrambled to her feet, "That's the evolved that's been going from city to city trying to take out mid-level Evolved. He's able to manipulate particles in the air, hence the name and the fog." She coughed from dust in her lungs, but it looked like she'd be alright.

I was glad Kaity, the resident Supers nerd of our school, happened to be my friend. She was pretty good at identifying well known evolved, as well as analyzing their powers. She had taken the time to learn the common rating system and how to apply it.

Apparently, she was only rated at 0.3 on the standard scale. What most people didn't know was that she had even developed her own scale that didn't just account for powers. It accounted for creativity, experience, brains, and physical strength. She had once told me I rated a 0.2 on her scale, instead of a zero.

"Let's get out of here,"

Kaity and I would have made it out without either Evolved noticing our presence, but Fog (as I had decided to call him) had different plans. When we reached the edge of the cloud to step out, the particles formed into a solid wall. There wouldn't be any getting out as long as Richter and Fog were still fighting.

I got home late that night thanks to the delay. The fight had lasted longer than I had expected it to, with Fog coming out victorious. His layer of dust settled quickly when his opponent lay on the ground, broken and unmoving. It wasn't a cheery thought that a traveling villain had proven himself effective in Sol City. The rest of our walk went uninterrupted. I stopped on my doorstep, wondering why Kaity had come all the way with me when she lived on the other side of town in her dad's house.

"Well, I guess this is it." I didn't say anything about the fight we had just witnessed, it was such a normal occurrence. I caught Kaity's gaze and noticed something in it I didn't recognize. I held her stare for a few seconds longer than needed as neither of us said anything, until finally she shifted her eyes to the ground. I elected to look the other direction and glanced to the thickening clouds.

"I- I should go…" she mumbled. I wondered as I stared at the sky whether or not she would get caught in any rain on her way home. I sat on the three front steps as she turned and stepped away. Her long, dark hair swayed in the increasing winds. She glanced over her shoulder as she walked briskly away and I waved. I only watched her leave for a few moments before I turned back to my door, the slightest tug at the back of my mind told me that everything that was right in my life was about to go wrong.