Okay, wow, I don’t know where to start with this. Man, this is going to sound weird to you, but my name is Owen, Owen Langster. I have superpowers. This all started on October 12, 2015, in Orlando. Here it goes….
This was when I had just started 10th grade, and I was super terrified. Even though I had a few friends, this was still very scary. I had just woken up and gone into the bathroom, when I heard my mother call up the stairs; “Come on down, sweetie! I made waffles!”
“Coming!”, I called back. Then I looked in the mirror and cringed. My jet-black hair was all over the place, and my green eyes were bloodshot from waking up so early. I was only wearing boxers, so you could see my scrawny body in the clear. I stomped back into my room and sluggishly got a shirt, shorts, and shoes on. Even before I hit the bottom step, I could smell the scrumptious waffles in the waffle maker. I came to the table and started to chow down on my pile of waffles.
Maple syrup all over my face, I asked, “Can Quentin come over for a sleepover tonight?”
“Sure, Owen. Just check with Quentin’s parents first, okay?”
“Thanks, Mom!”, I said as I finished up my waffles. I yelled back, “See ya tonight!”, as I walked out the door.
“Dude! That’s awesome! Can’t wait to come”, Quentin said as we walked down 15th Street. Quentin was one of my only two friends at Hinton High. He was always optimistic, and not to mention, very smart. He had brown hair and brown eyes, just like his mom. I always played Overwatch and Battlefield 1 with him. We finally got to school and my other friend, Jenna, was waiting for us.
“Come on guys! We must get to first period! Mr. Barden is gonna kill us!” she said. We ran into his class right as the bell started ringing.
“Okay, everybody, are you guys ready for the test?”, Mr. Barden asked the class in that monotonous voice of his. He was probably the oldest teacher here. He was 45, with thinning short hair and a bald spot that Quentin and I used to make fun of. His beady-eye glasses gave us a close-up of his tired eyes. As he walked down the perfect aisles to hand out the test, he said to me, “Try to do better this time, Langster.”
“Yes, sir”, I said back. I put my name at the top of the test in my usually terrible handwriting and looked at the first question: What is the setting of a story comprised of? I could barely read it due to my dyslexia. The answers were hopeless, so I just guessed all the way through the test. As usual, Quentin finished in the first twenty minutes of class, and the other kids were staring holes into his back as he made his way up the aisle. I could swear I heard him playing games on his laptop until the end of the class period. The bell rang, and the whole class gave a sigh of relief. I raced toward my locker to get to second period, because second period was the best period; Mrs. Yalosia’s class. Jenna, Quentin, and I sped into her class and sat down. Everyone else piled in after us. We sat in our seats, Quentin to the left, Jenna on the right.
“Class, it’s time for some reviewing!”, Mrs. Yalosia told the class. Everyone cheered. Her reviews were the best. They were always so crazy, but awesome at the same time. 45 minutes later the class got out and we went through the rest of our periods (that were not that important) and school got out. Quentin said he needed to go pack for our sleepover, and walked home, so I started to walk home.
After a few blocks, I thought that I had heard footsteps behind me. Then, I heard a scratchy voice behind me, “Hey, where do you think you’re going!” Oh, goodness, it was Thomas Marden. Tommy, as he was called, and his gang always picked on kids my age. “Well lookie what we have here! Owen Langster!” I felt a tug on the scruff of my neck, and was dragged into a side alley. Then they proceeded to beat the crap out of me, and I tried to curl up into a ball and endure the pain.
“Alright, who’s idea was it to beat up Owen!?”, Mrs. Yalosia’s voice resonated in the alley. “Get out of here, Thomas! You, too, Jackson, Jensen!” The bullies ran away back to their houses. The young teacher helped me up.
“Thanks, Mrs. Yalosia”, I said. I observed the damage on my body. My shirt was ripped at the sleeve, probably when Jensen, who was called J.J. by his ‘friends’, tried to rip it off. I had bruises all over, and my lip was cut from when Jackson punched me. “I’d better be getting home.”
“See you next week, then”, she called back as she walked back to the school. Fifteen minutes later, I dragged myself into the house and sat down on the couch, waiting to tell my mother what happened when she got home. To while time away, I checked to see if Quentin was on the Xbox, and sure enough, he was on. I plugged my headset in and joined his party.
“Hey, Quentin”, I said into the microphone. I could hear him munching on some Cheetos through the mic.
“Hey. Wanna play some Overwatch? There’s an update”, Quentin told me, and I updated the game right away. We played a bunch of Overwatch, then some Battlefield, then back to Overwatch… you get the pattern. We were on until almost 8:00, then Quentin said he was coming over and had to leave.
“K, see you in 5”, I said, right before he logged off. After 3 minutes, there was a knock on our door, and Quentin was there.
“Are you ready for a night of fun!”, he said as he came through the door. We started by playing video games, then more video games, then more, and so on.
A few hours later…
“What the heck is that light coming from the forest?”, Quentin observed. He was right. There was a light coming from the forest! “Wanna go check it out?”, he asked.
“Sure, but we have to do it quick. My mom is going to be home soon.” We set out into the deep undergrowth, searching for the source of the light.
“Here it is! I finally found it!”, a female voice said in front of us.
“Jenna? What are you doing here?”, I asked as Quentin and I stumbled into a clearing.
“Owen? Quentin? What are you guys doing? I was looking for the source of all that light because it was disturbing my sleep.”
Well, you want to know what the source was? A rock.  More like a pebble. It was glowing with blinding white, purple, and red rays of light. It was so mesmerizing; I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Then, the colors were disturbed, and there was an explosion of light. We all flew backward and almost blacked out. Well, Jenna and Quentin, but not me. I got most of the blast, and just before I fainted, I saw streams of red light being sucked into my body.
“Owen, wake up. Owen!” It sounded like Jenna, her voice a little faint. “Owen!”, she yelled, and everything came into focus. I was laid down on the forest floor, my clothes covered in leaves and dirt. Jenna and Quentin were squatting next to me, both looking particularly shabby.
“What happened?”, I asked, having no memory of what went on.
“You were getting too close to the stone and right before I tried to pull you away, the stone, sort of, exploded. You took the brunt of it, and flew backward into the trees. Jenna and I were shoved back as well, and we both almost passed out. Luckily, we found you, in the back of this clearing. Also, the stone is gone.”
Now I started to remember bits and pieces of what happened. The stone exploded, I flew backwards and, here is something I could not explain, the red streams of light.
“Hey, did you guys see any beams of light going into your body? That happened to me”, I asked.
“Yeah. Mine were green”, Quentin said. Then he added, “It felt like I was being filled with some sort of power.”
“Same here”, Jenna said. “Mine were purple. It also felt kinda weird, too.”
“Well, Quentin and I should be getting back to my house. My mother is gonna kill us for being out so late.”
“See ya later, then?”, asked Jenna, starting to walk back to her house.
“Yep…see ya.”, I called to her. As Quentin and I walked home, we got more tired by the second. When we finally tripped into the door way, we were exhausted.
“Owen? Are you back?”, I heard my mother yelled from her room upstairs.
“Yeah, Mom. We’re back”, I told her as she clunked down the stairs in her PJ’s. she looked super worn out.
“Do you think that I’m gonna yell at you for going out without my permission? I’m not really feeling up to it, so just go to bed.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Langster. We’ll go to bed now. Right, Owen? Owen?” I had raced to the bathroom because I felt something wrong. I shut the door and looked into the mirror. I looked fine, except for one thing; my hand was witching. You might be thinking, well, that might be normal for you, Owen, but it wasn’t just twitching. It was vibrating. At super speeds. Uh-oh, I thought. That stone did do something to me. I came out of the bathroom and beckoned Quentin upstairs.
“What’s going on, Owen? Is something wrong?”, he asked as he put his PJ’s on.
“You know how I said that I feel like the colored lights and everything affected me somehow? Well, guess what? I have super speed.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “No freaking way, bro. I don’t believe you.” At that moment, my hand started to do the thing again.
“You want proof? Here you go! Can you see this?? I have super speed!”
Quentin stared in amazement. “If that thing affected you, then it should have affected me, too. You know, speaking of that, I’ve been having these weird headaches every few minutes for no apparent reason, and sometimes, I think I see things float. Is that a super power?”
“Telekinesis? That’s moving things with your mind. That might be what your…” Just then, the doorbell rang and we went downstairs and opened the door. Jenna was standing there, looking both excited and terrified.
“Guys, I have…”
“Superpowers?”, finished Quentin. It seemed like he read her mind.
“How did you know what I was thinking of?”, asked Jenna. She looked bewildered. “Did you…no way!”
“Yep, we have super powers too. I kind of want to test them out. Want to go to the forest?”
“Sure!”, Jenna and Quentin said at the same time. “Let’s go!”
We went outside and made our way into the forest. I wanted to test my powers first, to see if I could run like the Flash.
“Okay, who wants to go first? I know that Owen wants to and Jenna… well, I think I’ve already gone! Owen can go next.” I got into a sprinters stance and tried to think of those red beams of light from before. “Dude, what’s…”, he couldn’t finish because I was already gone, in a flash, one might say (hint, hint, wink, wink). I ran all the way to the school and back in about five seconds.
“What were you saying back there, Quentin? Didn’t hear the rest of that.”
“Your eyes, they were like… lightning for a second, just before you ra-” A sound interrupted him. Up in the sky, something was happening. A huge spacey-looking portal appeared, and an ugly thing came out of it.
It looked like one of those alien dudes from the Simpsons, but darker green. It had tons of rows of sharp teeth, and its mouth looked like a black hole. It, or he, I assumed, had millions of tiny beds on strings around its neck, and everyone woke from sleep, including my mother, and were astonished.
“We have to go help them! They might get-” Jenna was cut off by a loud, creepy, scratchy voice that I wished I’d never heard.
“Hello, puny humans! I am Kilongra, the new dictator of this Earth. I was assigned this quadrant by…” Blah, blah, stuff about evil aliens taking over the galaxy and whatnot. That’s about all he said before I interrupted him, saying,” HEY! What right do you have to take our planet, you little wierdo?” Everyone that had come out of their houses recognized us, because of school. “This is our planet, and-”
“We are going to defeat you!”, yelled Jenna. Then, something odd happened to her. Her arms morphed into wings, her legs into talons, and she grew a huge, hooked beak. Her superpower was that she could morph into animals.
“Well, a shape-shifter, I’m impressed!”, Kilongra said with a chuckle. “now, I wonder where you got those powers fro-” Suddenly, a trash bin hit him in the face and he fell to the ground. I looked behind me, and I saw Quentin with his arm out, eyes closed.
“Did it work?”, he asked. Then, he opened his eyes and started to laugh. “That was awesome!!”
Then there was an explosion, and Kilongra was up again. He shot a laser beam at Quentin, and spikes at eagle Jenna. Jenna dodged and started attacking, but I had to run and get Quentin out of the way of the laser.
“Try to force him back into the portal! I yelled to Jenna, who was busy trying to claw Kilongra’s eyes out. The alien whacked her with one of his tentacles, and she went down. Then, the alien turned on Quentin and knocked him away with another beam.
“A speedster, too? Well, this will be fun!”, he said as he dove at me. I dodged and whacked him in the face, and he went to the ground. This had turned into a fistfight. A bunch of his tentacles extended and grabbed me by the arms and legs. I was stuck fast, and there was no escaping his grasp. Then, a desperate idea formed in my head.
If any of you readers have watched the Netflix series The Flash, you would understand what I am going to do. I tried to vibrate quickly, to try and phase through Mr. K’s tentacles. It worked, and then I started to run as fast as I could in a circle, to try and generate electricity behind me (if you watched Season 2 Episode 2 in Flash, you would know what I am trying to do.
“Scared of our own tail, are we?”, Kilongra chuckled. I tried to carry out my plan, and, it, worked. I threw lightning at Kilongra, which hit him back to the portal. I could hear him say, “This is NOT OVER!!!!!!!!!”, as he went back into a random place in the universe.
To Be Continued…