#my next book idea will be a list of crappy superpowers

[swagrum76]

I once tried to write a book about Bill Nye the Science Guy turning evil and killing all of humanity. I even gave him a little backstory, and that backstory was basically that he worked for the Nazis in WW2, got shoved in front of a landmine, stayed at a doctors office for a few weeks due to ptsd, and then went home. (his home was ravaged by war so he checked the mailbox and there was a job application for an acting career in there.)

This is basically all I typed in it: [warning - mildly disturbing content. I wanted bill to gradually grow more and more insane until he snaps.]

­ The Billpocalypse

Chapter 1: Where It All Started Bill Nye served for Nazi Germany as a soldier during World War Two. He was often insulted and made fun of due to his clumsiness in the war, and as a result, someone named Carl decided to take advantage of that. Carl's plan took action on July, 6th, 1938, and he intentionally shoved Bill into a minefield during the German invasion of Poland. Surprisingly, the landmine did not blow any of Bill’s limbs apart, and he just was shoved up into the air like a ragdoll. He then fell onto the ground and his consciousness faded away. A few years after the incident, Bill regained his consciousness and woke up on a white hospital bed. After this happened, something snapped inside of him. He lived peacefully at the hospital until the war ended. After that period, Bill's main doctor, who was a stern German man named Patrick Robotnick, gave him one last psychological evaluation. It concluded, and Bill was allowed to go home. After 4 weeks of sitting in an airplane, he arrived at his brick house, but something was disturbingly wrong. All his family members were dead and his house was nothing but a pathetic little pile of rubble.He decided to at least check the red mailbox in front of his house to see if it had anything in it. To his surprise, it contained an envelope containing a white slip of paper. This white slip of paper contained a job offer that only required a five minute conversation. Having nothing to lose at this point, he said “that sounds like a great idea!” and took it. The job was for an acting position at a science tv show, and that show would be called Bill Nye the Science Guy. He ran as quickly as he could to talk to the location of his soon-to-be workplace, and he arrived at a parking lot next to a building which had an appearance similar to a Waffle House if it had red on it instead of yellow. He entered, chatted with the people there, and got the job.

Chapter 2 - Bill's First Work DayBill's first work day was hard. The pay was miserable and his boss constantly yelled at him all the time, even when he did nothing wrong. He worked at a boring old wooden desk and filed paperwork for 10 hours. It was weird. There was no stage, or any of that. Have I been given the wrong job?, Bill thought in frustration. After his shift ended, he asked his boss, who's name was Dave, for a raise. In response, Dave yelled at him with "Are you crazy or something??? You were a Nazi in World War Two! I ain't giving you shit!" Upon hearing this response, Bill Nye grabbed a red pen from the top of his desk, held it like a knife, and ran over to confront Dave. He then stated the following "Listen here sir, it's not right to judge someone based on their past! So you either give me a raise or die! Like my master in the war, I have a short fuse!". In response, Dave laughed at him and said "Are you seriously going to try to murder me with that pen? HAHAHAHAHAHA! Stupid Nazi scum!". Bill could hold his anger no longer. He punched Dave as hard as he could. Then he forcefully opened Dave's mouth and shoved the red pen deep inside his throat. Dave, of course, didn't like this very much, and he died from blood loss. A pool of crimson emerged from under Dave’s body, and got all over the tiled floor. Bill quickly fled the scene after this incident, and he would run deep into the woods, where he would find a old abandoned log cabin.

He stayed at said cabin for a few weeks and found a shotgun in a closet. But he had an unexpected guest after that time had ended, as he heard a loud knock at the door. This knock was scary for him, as he didn't expect any company since the cabin had been abandoned for so long. He cowered in a corner in fear after hearing the knocking. The wooden door flew off of the hinges and fell onto the floor, and a police officer and full riot gear appeared behind it. Bill loaded his gun and fired, but it was no use. The bullets just bounced off the transparent shield that the officer was holding.After this sight, Bill Nye was forcefully handcuffed and violently shoved into a police car. Then everything blacked out for him, as he was transferred to a concrete jail cell. Even the bars of the cell were made of concrete. When he awoke inside of his cell, he saw a buff man in an orange jumpsuit was in there with him. Bill didn’t know the man’s name, nor did he bother to ask, so he just referred to him as “Pablo”. Bill stayed in there for a few months, and voices were starting to speak to him within his head. He felt as if he was a fictional character, and that nothing he did mattered. This insanity, coupled with his time in the war and severe PTSD, led him to constantly punch the walls of the prison. His hands became wounded and bloody, but he didn’t stop punching. Eventually, Bill started punching Pable, but the guards didn’t do anything to stop them from fighting, as they couldn’t even get into the prison because the bars were made of concrete. Bill didn’t care how much pain Pablo was in, nor did he care that he was actively pleading for him to stop. A few minutes of nonstop punching later, Bill was satisfied with what he had done. Pablo was no more, and Pablo couldn’t bother him anymore. Bill then used his bare hands to tear out the arm bones of Pablo’s body. After that was done, Bill used his feet to set the bones in a corner and ripped the sheets off of his bed with his teeth. He had truly gone insane by this point, and to him, nothing was real anymore. With the bedsheets he had obtained earlier, he tied Pablo’s arm bones to each of his wrists via knots, and he began punching the walls again. Bill was actively looking for a way out of his cell, but he thought a weakness in the concrete itself would be the only way out. Unlike a sane person who would have been screaming in pain upon landing a punch on the walls of his cell, Bill was laughing like a madman each time he laid his fist upon the wall. Suddenly, after a few weeks of nonstop punching, Bill saw a crack in the wall appear, so he started kicking it, and then the wall itself crumbled into dust. It occurred so fast that to bystanders, it appeared that God himself erased a wall out of existence. Bill seized the opportunity and ran outside into the open air.

As he approached the streets in front of him, he noted now there were many other people near him. (the prison was near a busy city, ok?)

So he had the idea to run as fast as he could at anyone he laid his eyes on.

[slowly-writing]

The Blink of an Eye

Natasha Romanoff x Daughter!Reader

Word count: 2532

Requested by anon: Can I request a nat x daughter!reader where r is adopted and discovers she has powers but tries to hide it from nat because she doesn’t think she’d be a good avenger? love your writing ♥️

“Y/n, come on!!! We’re gonna be late!” Peter’s voice startles you as you’re brushing your teeth. You glance at your phone and your eyes go wide. If you don’t leave in the next five minutes you’re totally screwed.

“I’m coming!” you yell back, sprinting out of your bathroom. You stumble a bit and somehow end up halfway down the hall. You pause for a second, looking between the bathroom door and the place you’re now standing. It’s a solid five yards but you don’t have time to try and figure out what the hell just happened. You have to get to school.

“Finally. You’re gonna get us detention,” Peter grabs your hand and tugs you to the door.

“It’s really not that big of a deal, Peter,” Wanda is trying to stifle her laugh as the three of you make your way to the garage.

xxxxx

“Romanoff, that was amazing. It may even be a new school record,” your gym teacher tells you as you finish running the mile.

“Wait what? What was my time?” You’ve never been the fastest kid in class. You probably could be, but you hated running so you never really tried. You normally just keep it to an easy jog, or so you thought as you glance over your shoulder and notice you’ve left Peter in the dust. That shouldn’t have happened.

“5:32. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a high schooler run that fast, what’s your secret?” he asks, leaning closer to you as if you wouldn’t want the class to hear you, but they’re all still trying to finish their run at least a hundred yards behind you.

“It must just be all the training I do with my mom and her team,” you say with a shrug and a fake smile. You don’t train with your mom’s team. This doesn’t make sense.

Over the next few days you have more of what you can only describe as glitches. Random bursts of speed when you run that put you on the opposite side of the room faster than any human should be able to move. Now that you know what to look for you can see the world blur by you as you run. It doesn’t happen all the time and you have no idea how to explain it. People don’t just magically obtain superpowers. In your experience it was usually with the assistance of hydra, and the occasional radioactive spider but you haven’t gotten any bug bites recently and you don’t like the option that leaves you with.

Your memory of life before being adopted is hazy at best, a few flashes of people whose relation to you you can’t place and some doctors offices. A four year old found alone half a mile outside of a recently destroyed hydra base is nothing too suspicious. It was in a crowded community full of individuals who got caught in unfortunate circumstances. It wasn’t rare to find people living on the streets but when Natasha found you all alone she knew she couldn’t just leave you there. It seemed innocent enough at the time, but if you find out you came from within that hydra base? Well they might not see it as a coincidence anymore. Besides in your opinion, you’d be a crappy superhero so it’s better if nobody finds out. Yeah, you’ll just hide it. That’ll work.

xxxxx

It did not work.

Every day that passed you found it harder and harder to keep your secret. It seemed your powers, if you could even call them that, just kept getting stronger. And let’s just say you weren’t getting the hang of them anytime soon.

“Y/n, dinner!” you hear your mom call from down the hall and you jump up from your desk, you’ve been starving recently, maybe it has something to do with the new powers. You run for the kitchen, momentarily forgetting how bad of an idea that is. You see Clint walking in front of you and you panic. The world starts moving in slow motion as you realize you can’t stop. You turn a bit so you’ll miss him, digging your heels into the floor to try and slow down. It isn’t very effective and rather than you stopping yourself, you stop when you slam into Tony’s bookshelf, knocking it and all the books to the floor as you skid across the common room with them.

“Oh my god!” Tony yells, jumping several feet in the air at the noise

“Y/n are you okay?” your mom asks as she quickly makes her way over to you. You pull the books off your chest and sit up, smiling sheepishly at the group of avengers standing in front of you.

“Yeah. I just uh...tripped. Sorry about your books Tony. I’ll clean them up,” you wince as you look at the mess you caused.

“We don’t care about the books-”

“I care about the books!” Tony cuts in and Steve rolls his eyes before continuing.

“We care about you,” he finishes with a pointed look at Tony who nods.

“Oh uh, yeah. We care about you more. But I also like the books…” he trails off quietly.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I guess I’m clumsy,” you say with a shrug, pushing yourself up and stacking the books out of the walkway. Your mom looks at you and you can tell she doesn’t quite believe you, but she lets it go for now.

This isn’t gonna work for much longer.

xxxxx

“Y/n wake up! We have to go!” you wake up to Tony’s screaming and you jolt upright. The first thing you notice is there’s a haze of smoke throughout the room and it’s really warm.

“What’s happening?” you ask, wiping your eyes and trying to make sense of what’s happening.

“There was an explosion in the lab. The fire suppression system is down and the whole place went up, it's spreading and we need to get everyone out now,” he pulls you up from the couch and starts leading you out of the compound. As you’re both hunched under a cloud of smoke you can’t help but think for the hundreth time how stupid the floor plans of this building are. Tony wanted his lab close to the living quarters so he could get there quickly when he got inspiration in the middle of the night. You’ve lost count of how many times his lab accidents have woken you up at 3am and now your room is about to go up in a cloud of smoke.

“Thank God,” you mumble to yourself as you get outside. Glancing around you see Clint, Steve, and Bucky all doubled over on the lawn.

“You guys good?” Clint calls over.

“Yeah, you? Where’s everyone else?” you get nervous seeing less than half of the residents outside.

“Peter’s at home. Wanda, Sam, and Thor are on a mission. Banner’s still out of town, right?” Steve lists off and your blood runs cold.

“Where’s mom?”

“She’s not with you guys?” Bucky asks and you turn to Tony who shakes his head.

“No, I just grabbed the kid and got out. I figured those with military grade training could look out for each other!” Tony yells and you run through your moms schedule. You can hear them arguing about whose responsibility it was to look for her as you realize it’s Wednesday. It’s laundry day meaning she was here, and it’s the afternoon so she’s probably folding it in her room. God, you were ten feet from her and you didn’t notice.

“She’s in her room.”

“Tony suit up and get her!” Clint yells, he sounds almost as desperate as you feel.

“My suit is in the lab, send one of the super soldiers in!” Tony screams back. You can feel the heat from the fire and you don’t even want to think about what it’s like inside the building right now.

“We don’t have time for this! I’ll go,” you step forward but Bucky grabs your arm.

“We’re not letting you go in there. You’ll die!” He yells and you rip your arm out of his grasp.

“If I don’t my mom dies!” With that you take off, at a normal speed at first, but quickly speeding up until you’re a blur. You stumble a few times, running into walls and fallen support beams scattered through the walkway. You haven’t quite got the hang of this yet. Every time you hit something you can feel your clothes start to burn and char, the heat making it all the way down to your skin. You ignore the pain and keep running, you need to get to your mom. After a few more mishaps and no more than three seconds you’ve made it to your moms bedroom. When you look around you see her coughing and trying to pull a fallen dresser off her leg, but she can’t quite get the leverage. Her eyes widen when she sees you.

“What are you doing? Get out of here!” she yells, desperate to keep you safe.

“I’m here to help, push on three,” you tell her, grabbing the dresser and counting down. After struggling for a few seconds you get it off of her. “Is your leg okay?”

“I’m fine, you need to go. I’ll catch up, just run,” she tells you as you help her up but you’re not leaving her.

“This is gonna be really weird, I’ll explain it later. I’m gonna pick you up,” you wrap her arm around your shoulder and reach down to lift her.

“What’s going on. What are you-” you cut her off.

“Mom! Just trust me. And you might want to close your eyes.” you pause for a moment, taking a deep breath before taking off. There’s so much adrenaline surging through you you barely feel like you’re trying. Despite the seeming lack of effort on your part you weave your way out of the building quickly, stumbling towards the assembled group and setting your mom down.

“What the hell just happened?” Tony is the first to break the silence and you cough a few times, trying to get in a breath that no longer wants to enter your lungs.

“Is-is everyone out?” you stutter out. Your vision is starting to tunnel and you're not sure why.

“Yes. Everyone is out. Now tell us what the hell is going on!” To anyone else your mom may sound mad, but you recognize that tone of voice. She’s worried. You want to reassure her but standing is getting harder by the second.

“I’m really fast,” is all you manage to get out before your knees buckle and your vision goes dark.

xxxxx

“You couldn’t have picked another part of the compound to destroy? Our med wing is a lot comfier,” you say as you’re opening your eyes, you can hear Tony whispering to someone so you know he’ll hear you.

“So sorry to inconvenience you, your highness,” he teases back and you smile, pushing yourself and surveying the room of worried gazes.

“By the looks on your faces I’m going to assume my secret’s out?” you ask and they all nod, varying degrees of annoyance, anger, and concern appearing as you try to lighten the mood. “Great. What’s the damage?”

“You have some burns that are healing way faster than they should. You were pretty malnourished. We think whatever your powers are make you require more food. How long have you known?” your mom asks and you look at your hands. She has her face set in an emotionless mask and even after all these years you can’t tell what that look means, and that worries you.

“A month or so,” you tell her and she sighs.

“What’s the first time you remember something happening?” Bruce’s voice is gentle, ever the calm one in the storm and you replay the memories of appearing in different places in your head, trying to remember the first one.

“Five weeks ago. I was late for school and running down the hall and it was like a glitch. I blinked and I was on the opposite end. I just brushed it off as being tired or something,” you explain with a shrug.

“When you crushed everyone in the mile, that was this? Coach has been trying to get us to explain your training routine for weeks. I guess we’ll have to tell him it won’t help,” Peter says and you chuckle.

“I don’t train. Especially after I found this. Running has had some...unfortunate consequences.”

“You mean besides you being in this hospital bed?” your mom asks cooly and you wince.

“I don’t think I’d call saving your life an unfortunate consequence but to each their own I guess. I kinda meant running into book shelves and seeing everything move in slow motion. It’s pretty disorienting,” you explain softly.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Wanda’s voice is gentle. She can feel the stress coming from you and she desperately wants to calm you down.

“How would I even start that conversation? ‘Hey guys remember that random rescue mission where you picked up a civilian? Turns out it wasn’t a civilian. Please don’t arrest me. I swear I’m not trying to infiltrate the top secret government organization you all work for, I was just created in a lab by your enemy whose sole purpose is to destroy you by any means necessary. Haha so fun, anyway what’s for dinner?’ That didn’t seem too appealing.”

“What did you think we were gonna do? We know you y/n,” Steve says and your head snaps up.

“No you don’t! None of us know anything about me anymore! What we do know is what hydra is capable of! Who knows what kind of shit they did. For all I know I have a fail safe set up in my brain to make me do their bidding at the drop of a hat! They’re your greatest enemy, and I’m just some kid you found in an alley. There’s really only one choice here,” you start off yelling but by the end your voice is barely above a whisper.

“You’re right. There is only one choice,” your mom speaks up for the first time in a while and you feel tears collecting in your eyes. “We start running tests. We see what they did to you and we find out if we can reverse it. We find out if you even want to reverse it and then we go from there. Either way you’re not alone. We’ve got you, no matter what.”

As soon as the words are out of her mouth you’re throwing yourself into her arms and holding on for dear life. It feels like the weight of the world has just been lifted off of your shoulders and for the first time in weeks you can finally breathe.

tag list: @rvgrsbrns @rororo06 @prizmix-and-friends @worlds-in-words @im-salt-but-not-salty @5aftermidnight @riotmaximoff

[atopfourthwall]

Hey Linkara, as a Teen Titans fan maybe you can clear something up for me. For the last few years it seems like DC has been pushing Cyborg more and more as a member of the Justice League (being a founding member in the new 52, helping them out in Justice League Doom, being in the Justice League movie coming up). Why is that when he was already a member of the Titans, and why haven't any of the others become Justice League members?

Short answer: too many white people and some of them actually were on the team.

Long answer: A loooot of characters associated with the Justice League, particularly their founding members, were white dudes. The only non-white founding member was Martian Manhunter… which, you know, is kind of different from having someone of a different ethnicity since Martians are not real. It’s a bit of a problem with the Justice League, to the point where even when in the late-90s when there was a decision to re-emphasize “The Big Seven,” AKA the seven most powerful JLA members, it was still pretty much everybody but Martian Manhunter was white.

Now, already some of you may be raising your hands and thinking of prominent black heroes (or many other POC characters) who could have been JLA members in the film and were already in the League before. And you are correct to do so! In fact, I can name a few off the top of my head - Steel, Black Lightning, John Stewart Green Lantern, Vixen, and many, many more. Buuuuuut just going by those four (whom I think of as definitely ones in terms of popularity both inside of comic fans and out), there are some problems.

Now let me be clear here with these “problems.” These are not REAL problems, just the kind of problems that I feel Hollywood and DC would try to use ill-conceived logic to justify their decisions based on past thoughts they’ve given.

Steel: while I doubt that the flop of the Shaq Steel movie would affect the decision to not have him in a movie, it IS possible that that might be going through some minds. More likely is that he would be seen as redundant - while intelligent and an engineer, he’s a character without superpowers closely associated with Superman - so he could be thought of as redundant next to both Batman AND Superman.

Black Lightning: There is a thought process, much like the one associated with making the Black Ranger black - basically the idea of “that’s all their character is about!” It’s bullcrap, but it’s there. However, while that may have been EXTRA logic on top of it, Black Lightning actually has LEGAL issues associated with him, as creator Tony Isabella has said that he was not created under a Work-for-Hire contract and thus HE is the actual legal owner of the character and DC being DC has been kind of crappy about that (although apparently in 2015 they’ve started mending fences).

Vixen: I think the biggest issue here is just recognition. I think Vixen is great and she’d be a logical addition to a Justice League movie and team, but she’s not well-known outside of comic circles AFAIK. MAYBE as a supporting character from the DCAU, but unlike the next character, she only made a handful of appearances instead of being there from the start.

John Stewart Green Lantern: Now this one just has a ton of really stupid problems associated with it. One is his name, since the name John Stewart nowadays is associated with the Daily Show host, though that can be worked around easily enough. However there is this really dumb thought process, started by Geoff Johns, that Hal Jordan is the “iconic” Green Lantern, AKA the one most people associate with the character and recognize… and of course it’s kind of bullcrap these days. Even if you were a fan of the Superfriends back in the day, most characters didn’t have their civilian identities spoken aloud, so most people would probably just know the NAME Green Lantern as opposed to Hal Jordan, but a bigger issue is that a generation has since grown up NOT with Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, but John Stewart because he was in the Justice League cartoon - there were many anecdotes of people going to the Green Lantern movie and confused why this random white guy was Green Lantern - and bear in mind that even in the DCAU, Kyle Rayner was the Green Lantern before John - he was THAT much more recognizable. That movie is also probably a bit of stigma for people. While I personally liked the movie and didn’t think it was as bad as people seem to make it out to be, the lack of a Green Lantern at all in Justice League implies to me that WB is embarrassed by the film and wants to have people forget about it by not having a Green Lantern at all.

So, this brings us back to Cyborg. Why him, then? Well, for two reasons: one is that Cyborg actually DID have some association with the Justice League on TV - as a part of the final season of the Superfriends (called “The Super Powers Team - Galactic Guardians) in 1985. It’s likely that, with the popularity of the New Teen Titans at the time, he would cross over there. TV is where we get into our next major thing - the Teen Titans cartoon. Wildly popular, and whatever your feelings about Teen Titans Go, the character STILL has prominence in pop culture as a result of that and is recognizable then to both kids and adults (especially to adults who grew up on Teen Titans). He’s a non-white character with a unique skillset and powers and a great character dynamic for pathos and, if Batman v. Superman is any indication, tying him into the story they’re telling involving Apokalips and Darkseid.

And when it comes to DC comics up until the New 52, there was a bit of a thought process that said that the New Teen Titans characters, for the most part, had really elevated themselves and grown up to be the equals of the bigger hitters - Cyborg in particular. The 2003 Geoff Johns-written Teen Titans saw Cyborg taking up a much larger leadership role in the team and to many fans it felt like he had graduated to the big leagues and his placement on the JLA seemed only natural.

And it actually happened, along with several other Titans.

After Blackest Night, a version of the Justice League written by James Robinson was created that starred Dick Grayson (then acting as Batman), Donna Troy, Starfire, AND Cyborg (plus a bunch of other members, but I’m focusing on Titans here). I quite enjoyed it for the brief time I read it, but of course the book ran into some problems for whatever reason (probably editorial mandates) and the book eventually ended right before Flashpoint.

But the fact that the character, in the minds of many fans, had really gotten to the point where he was a natural shoe-in for the Justice League translated itself to both the New 52 AND Hollywood - a black character who was recognizable to the public, lacked any legal issues, and no fans could really deny his character growth put him as one of the greatest DC heroes (we’ll forgive that both the New 52 and the Justice League movie are reset his character growth to square one with no history associated with the Titans).

But yeah, that’s where I think they’re coming from here. I definitely think it’s bullcrap that he’s the ONLY one and there are many other characters who should be given a shot (hell, especially in relation to the brief list I made above in regards to lesser-known chaarcters, recall that Marvel has had tremendous success with pushing characters in movies who are relative unknowns into the spotlight), but this is what I think is going on.