It started with a migraine. A young man seated in the back of Mrs. Barnes's 12th grade Language Arts class cried out in pain. He'd suffered stoically through the first hours of the day, hiding behind dark glasses and discretely squeezing a stress-ball into a tense blue raisin. "My eyes," he cried in a small voice. He staggered out of his chair, supporting himself with his desk. "Missus Barnes, I need to- oh god."

Mrs. Barnes swept towards him while his classmates gaped and laughed. "Look into my eyes," she urged. With great effort, he wrenched his weeping eyes open.

The universe came flooding in.

A roaring sea of twisting fractals and human time-snakes shimmered in ultra-white, every color and no color at once. Everything Summers saw, he understood, and as his Being swelled his memories zipped past like ants beneath an airplane. Summers cried. The tissue between his eye-sockets had already eroded with his eyeballs and tear ducts. Ultra-white fluid dropped from a space beyond his eyes, and boiled in the heat of reality. The other students began to babble riddles in alien tongues.

Then fell a hush. For a moment, everything froze. With the agonizing crack of a crystal glacier splitting, the sea of visions parted. A chairbound man sat glowing in the fissure- for a moment, he was the fissure, and Summers caught glimpse of the God's full being, with a man's essence as marbling. In this moment the all-seeing boy felt great love, but also great sorrow and hate. These last slipped away, as his name did before, the man's beneficent face looming large.

"Scott." The man's voice echoed, and Scott Summers' mortal mind breached to the surface. Still, it struggled against the winds of the superconscious. "I, like you, am host to a cosmic intelligence. I am here to guide you."

"Where am I? What's happening?"

"You are in your school. Your teacher has looked into your eyes, and seen her death, and it is now. Your frontal lobe has become a portal into The Source. You will survive this, and go on to become one of the most powerful people in the universe."

"Missus… Missus…"

"Barnes."

"oh god."

"There's something else. I must help you emerge from this place, quickly. First, lift your shirt over your head and concentrate."

"I can't even feel my body…"

The fissure warped and quaked. A silver-haired man held out his hands, and crystal data began to flood over the chairbound god's flickering apparition. The silver-haired man spoke with a voice rich, distant and sorrowful. "My boy…"

The chairbound man's presence flared like a clean blue flame. "Scott. Your arms are Scott Summers' arms. But you must move them with Takion'sgrace. Swallow this world."

Scott remembered his body, and shuddered. Primordial light slid into his meat and fluids. Bringing part of this enormity into his fragile frame felt like returning to a bed soaked in cold piss. As if through thick rubber gloves he tore off his sleeve and wrapped it around his eyes and forehead.

Slowly, the present filtered the light of The Source. Purity gave way to cowering students, wailing sirens, and his Language Arts teacher's horrified corpse. Her eyes had turned to ash and her every blood vessel had burst at once. His shirtsleeve rustled against his face, turned golden and dense by Takion's power. His entire body was trembling.

The police sirens' volume plateaued. Heavy footsteps approached. A few students became brave enough to flee, only to be ordered down by men in black armored gear. Scott's eyes burned with power, but he could not kill again. Time froze. The chairbound god floated before him, aloft in blue light.

"To me, New God Takion."

Scott Summers stepped forward, and through.