A Minor Awakening
12 June 2020
In a nondescript room of an ordinary hospital, a young male teenager's unmoving form can be seen laying upon a bed.
Unremarkable in any visible manner, the room he inhabited was empty of any other person save for himself. The only audible sound in the room came from the constant beeping of a heart monitor nearby and the muted noises of the passing hospital workers in the corridor outside the door to the room.
Many other hospital rooms, not only in this one hospital, feature similar scenarios. Countless others, of all ages, lost in an unbreakable slumber.
A normal day with nothing exciting happening, passing by with no discoveries in researching the odd occurrence of widespread comas across the world.
Until today. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________
At the top of a certain mountain, a certain immortal is playing a game on his custom-made magical quantum supercomputer connected to the internet through an enchanted intelligent satellite created for the purpose of ensuring the concept of 'lag' does not exist for its great master.
At this time, all around the world, millions of flares of inconsistent power levels bloomed at the same time.
The supernatural senses of the man atop the mountain caught the unexpected surge of foreign and varied supernatural energies, surprising him from his light concentration on his entertainment.
A small frown appeared on his face, his eyebrows slightly furrowing.
An undesirable event had occurred.
He sighed.
The world was going to become a bit more chaotic than normal for awhile.
Even though he knew it wasn't going to be, he made a small wish, anyway:
Please, my online entertainment, be spared from the coming mess! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Meanwhile, as the mountain hermit turned back to his game, the rest of the world was in turmoil.
Why?
Because eleven days and eleven hours since falling into a coma had passed, and a rather large number of those patients had woken from their slumber.
Explosively, that is.
All over the world, formerly coma patients suddenly begin waking up one after another, each one immediately instinctively lashing out at their surroundings! Superhuman strength broke through everything nearby, elemental abilities trashed entire rooms, mayhem spread through each and every hospital any incident occurred within!
No one had prepared for this kind of event.
Casualties appeared with the unexpected attack reaching nearby people. Casualties rose from the chaos that followed.
Local authorities scrambled to get a hold of the situation, as the newly awakened patients were caught in a blind panic attacking everything around them.
Of course, once the awakeners recovered from their initial panic-induced outburst, peacekeeping was much easier to attend to.
Roughly an hour passes from the first incident began before the majority of the abrupt chaos has calmed down.
Eventually, reports of the situation make way to government officials.
Calculated damages, listed casualties, investigation reports, compared to the main subject, these were thrown to the side immediately.
Superpowers!
Abilities beyond the reach of mundane humanity were present in all the mysterious incidents that sprung up that day.
The impossible existence of such a thing overturned everything everyone knew about the universe, humanity's grasp of the laws governing reality never proven so lacking and ignorant!
The knee-jerk reaction of suppressing the information from leaking, arresting these anomalies, and shoving them into hidden laboratories to be thoroughly dissected and researched couldn't be done for every individual, either. There were too many of them for the media suppression to successfully be done.
Of course, some powerful countries and wealthy influential characters couldn't resist the temptation of possibly discovering the secrets of superpowers. A few high-value looking targets were selected and quietly sedated and kidnapped to be taken in for experimentation.
However, just because those government leaders could no longer hide the news of superpowered individuals, that didn't mean they couldn't order law enforcement to publicly take those people in for questioning with various excuses.
. . .
As officials attempt to understand the awakened further, social media and news reports on the emergence of superpowers on a global scale spreads to the rest of the world.
Questions on the validity of the topic, complaints about the consequences of such incidents, conspiracy theories to explain the origins of this weirdness, forums and blogs exploded with all kinds of comments mere minutes after the news came out.
For a time, the internet became a messy place.
Two days pass before barely acceptable reports of the government's investigation results make their way to the public.
Awakeners.
The label for those who have fallen into a coma, only to later awaken with supernatural abilities of unknown origin.
The various powers awakeners possess are varied and unpredictable. Too many different abilities and different energies, the research groups responsible for studying awakeners could only catalog them all into generalized categories such as physical-based powers, element-based powers, and unique powers that don't fit into the other two.
The strength of each awakener was apparently different from each other, as well, so a need to designate a grade to more easily identify differences in each awakener was also needed. A simple grading system of F, E, D, C, B, A, and S was introduced with the weakest as F grade. Currently, however, the strongest awakener publicly announced was only ranked at D grade.
Whether an awakener can grow stronger or not hasn't been discovered, yet.
Awakeners didn't just stop emerging, either. During the two days before the official reports were made public, although the waking superhumans weren't as many as the first wave of incidents, some more hospital patients marked as potential awakeners also recovered from their comas.
Of course, it was only after another three days before anyone figured out the awakeners that awoke later were of a different breed from those who awoke roughly eleven days after falling into a coma.
They remembered.
20 June 2020, the world learns a truth: Awakeners lived a second life, in a separate world!
Although the various worlds each awakener lived in were a curiosity, the more important fact brought to light by them was the origins of some of the superpowers displayed by awakeners.
Qi.
Magic.
Blood.
Spiritual power.
Psychic abilities.
Pure physical might and skill taken to supernatural levels.
Some awakeners even lived in a futuristic world and had the chance to see advanced technology beyond what modern sciences could comprehend.
From the mouths of these awakeners, they could even continue to grow stronger if they had access to the resources necessary for their supernatural abilities. The only problem with this, of course, was the fact that there was no supernatural energies like qi or mana on Earth. Whether there was an alternative method to cultivate further wasn't said, but some well read individuals who heard this could think of a few 'evil' methods available within some of the different cultivation systems.
This fact, combined with the confirmation that even the 'late' awakeners didn't reach a power level beyond D grade, made the world feel both relieved and curious. With awakeners not having enough strength to directly challenge modern firearms, public security can be basically said to be stable with no way for awakeners to take over the world.
On the other hand, everyone following the topic of awakener power levels wondered if there was no way for any truly dangerous power levels to be gained upon awakening.
. . .
And whether or not there was even a chance for them to become extraordinary without any supernatural energy to 'awaken' with.