New York always has the cool things happen. I mean sure, when aliens invaded a few years back and destroyed half the city that was scary as hell, but stuff like that never seems to happen where I'm from. We don't get to see the Avengers. We don't have groups of super powered vigilantes roaming the streets, usually. There was that one time in high school where Tony Stark came through the town accidentally, he got lost on his way to an expo in Chicago. But, Greensborough Michigan was your average small Midwestern town. Close knit community, a few families that have been there forever running the place, their kids being jerks about it, and more churches than seemed reasonable for a town that size. There was a time when I thought it would be cool to have a superhero in the town I lived in. Then the Terrigan Mist happened. Inhumans popped up everywhere, and some people died. One kid in my school got powers, a lot of kids died. So, that really got stuff moving, people started protesting, and then the Avengers had their whole fight. I am a fan of them, so watching them fight wasn't the coolest thing...okay it was. It was really cool. But that happened in a major city. I guess my point is, why are there always super powered people in major cities, but especially New York. Is it just a matter of population density? Are there more people, so just statistically more powered people? Do centers of power in the world attract powered people? I think there is something to be said about the safety of small towns in a world where there are people who can call lightning from the sky and climb up walls, even if they are really cool and keep the world safe from aliens.

I sighed heavily and leaned back in my desk chair. My neighbors were playing music really loudly and screaming. I could hear the clink of bottles as well, though I was guessing that was going to last about a half hour before the RA put a stop to that. Talking about this stuff in college was interesting. I was going to the pretty large state college in Michigan, and as such most of the people I met were not from small towns. In fact most of them didn't even know where I grew up. I was fine with that, I wasn't filled with some pride of being from small rural America, not that I looked down on those who are. I just got sick of telling people where I was from.

The essay I was finishing up was for a class that focused on the history of powered individuals, and their effect on society. There were a few people in class who were very anti-powered folks. Which I totally get, we actually had a girl who grew up in Sokovia in the class, she was not a fan of the Avengers. But that's fine, because most of them were gone. There was apparently a huge fight somewhere, and Iron Man, Captain America, Vision, and most of them were gone. As far as I knew, nobody was really sure where they went, but the world was pretty much safe, kinda. One of the things that we talked about in class in the first few weeks was that the existence of these heroes is what brought out the crazy powered people. Another is that they occupy a certain space in the sort of food chain of the world, and with the Avengers pretty much gone, there were some people who thought that the void left by them would be filled by something, and it was only a matter time before something appeared and changed the world again.

But, I wasn't really concerned about that at the moment, I was thinking about a stupid argument that I used to have with people when I said that I wanted to leave my hometown for the big city. So, here I was, the freshman in college in a world post-Avengers. There was a knock on the door to my dorm room.

"It's open," I called. "You can come in."

A tall guy with dark brown eyes and short curly brown hair opened the door. He was wearing a flannel shirt buttoned up for the most part. " Are you done with the paper?"

I raised an eyebrow. "That's it? That's all you wanted to know?"

He came in and pulled my roommates desk chair up next to my desk. "Well, yeah. Because if you're done we can get everyone together to watch The Last Jedi!"

I sighed and looked at the open document on my computer. It was done, technically. In high school I had this habit of not editing my papers after I wrote them, or having anyone look at them to help. I'd coasted on my talent of writing pretty well. I had promised myself that I wouldn't keep that up once I went to college. That didn't happen. I did a quick read through, gave it the good enough stamp, and sent it into my professor. "Yes," I said happily. "Let's watch the movie."

I followed him out of my room, but didn't make it down the hall. About halfway there I started to feel weird. It was getting really hot, like really hot. I felt myself start to sweat for no reason. Everyone else was wearing heavy clothes, flannels, sweatshirts, stuff like that. I felt like I wanted to strip down to my underwear because it would make me more comfortable. My friend turned around and gave me a quizzical look. "Tom?"

I opened my mouth...and collapsed to the ground.

When I came to I wasn't in a hospital, not one that I really understood. It looked way more high tech than I thought was possible, for the public to see. SHIELD was back, so I guessed that there was a relation there. Why I was in a SHIELD hospital I wasn't quite sure.

Easy, Tom, I told myslef. You just had a weird episode. You're fine.

A doctor entered the room. She was short, but had friendly eyes. There were dark bags under her eyes, and at the moment she looked like she was at the end of a long shift.

"Ah," she said. In contrast to her tired face her voice was cheery. "You're up, that's great." She started the usual checks, shining a pen light in my eye, taking my blood pressure, stuff like that. "How are you feeling now?"

"Um," I said as she checked my pulse. "Confused. What happened?"

"You fainted," the doctor said curtly. "Is that normal?"

"I have had a history of episodes like this," I said. "But I've been taking medication for a while and that's cut down on them."

"Good good," she muttered. She wrote some stuff down. "Open your mouth." I did and she stuck a thermometer in there pretty unceremoniously. After a second she looked at it and frowned. "I'll be damned."

"What?" I asked. My heart was starting to race. I could feel...something...something inside me. It was building up again. There was a feeling of rising temperature. The same thing that happened right before I passed out before. "What's happening with me?"

"Mr. Tanner," she said. "You're temperature is nearly 200 degrees." I blinked. "That is nearly 90 degrees over fatal." She flashed me a smile, but it vanished quickly. "But here you are."

"That's...insane," I said slowly.

"We will need a blood sample," the doctor said. "To make sure everything is alright." I took a deep breath, needles were not my favorite thing in the world. They were, in fact, close to my least favorite thing in the world. I nodded as she drew my blood. I made sure not to look at the needle. Once she was done she left the room. She didn't say that she would be back soon, she didn't say anything.

The warm feeling didn't go away. Not warm like happy, warm like I was getting too hot. This time, however. I wasn't sweating. I didn't feel light headed or anything like the last time. It almost felt...good. I looked down at my hands. They were normal. My palms looked a little sweaty, or clammy, I honestly don't know the difference. And then I noticed something. There was smoke rising from my fingertips. Not black smoke, like smoke signal smoke, just white smoke. "No, way…"

I waited for a few minutes, but the doctor didn't come back. After sighing, I took my phone out of my pocket and started scrolling through the news. One headline caught my eye.

Powered individuals appearing across the nation, Seemingly no event to act as a catalyst.

We all know that powers don't come from nowhere. They come from tech, or from genetic manipulation. Nobody is born with their powers...right? I read the article quickly, it was just a short report about how across the country there were several instances of teens and young adults manifesting superpowers suddenly. I looked around the room for a moment. The smoke was starting to get into my nose, and it had a pleasant campfire smell for some reason. I scrolled through some more news and finally came upon what looked like an excerpt from a paper written by someone named…

"Charles Xavier," I whispered. "Who...why does that sound familiar?" I decided to take a look at the paper. It was really technical, and even though I was in college I wasn't in a science program. I was studying to be a journalist or an editor or something like that. One thing that I did notice right away was that this guy, Xavier, was really good at writing. His grammar was excellent, the paper was easy enough to read, whether or not you could actually understand what he was trying to say. What I managed to get from it was that during his time in academia, or at some point he didn't say exactly when, Xavier had discovered something he called the X-Gene, or at least theorized that humans had it. People with that gene were born with the potential to have super powers usually manifested during times of stress, but sometimes they would just appear randomly, and usually during adolescence.

"That doesn't make any sense," I muttered to myself. "I'm an adult, and I wasn't under any sort of significant stress." I looked at my hand that wasn't holding the phone. It was normal. The warm feeling that had spread through my body was gone as well. I looked at the door to the room, it was closed. "Fire." Nothing happened. Don't know what I expected if I was being honest. "Okay. Let's try…" I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, there was a small fire in the palm of my hand.

The door opened again. But this time, a bald man in a wheelchair came in. He smiled at me.

"Mr. Tanner, how do you do?" he said.

"Um…" I said a little confused. "Hi, how do you know who I am?"

"The doctor called me," he said. "I have friends in the medical community. With so many of us appearing these days I need to get Ceribro working again."

"That doesn't really help me," I said. I stood up. "If you could please get out of my way I have class."

"Mr. Tanner," Xavier said. "I came here because you have the X-Gene. You are a mutant." That's when my hands lit on fire. "See? There you are."

I looked at my hands. "Holy crap!"