Last week on the Worm subreddit, ughzubat recently started what he hopes to be a tradition of weekly writing prompts. One of last Monday's was as follows: "[Y]ou're a young, low-powered native to the post-apocalypse that Dauntless & Co wake up to once the time bubble ends. You have to show the relics from the Age of Heroes the way of the new world. I decided to write that one, and then decided to polish and expand the fragment and put it here. If people like it, I might continue it.
EDIT: I'm definitely continuing this. Also, while looking up Dauntless's birth name, I discovered that Velocity was not, in fact, in the time bubble; instead, it was someone named Jotun, presumably either a vigilante or villain since his birth name wasn't put on the memorial. The previous chapter has been adjusted to compensate.
Now I basically have an OC to create. ...Whoo?
Cynthia Hodge looked over the old ruins. Millennia ago, it had been a city called The Bay. The historians said it was home to some of the greatest of the first capes—Marquis and the Allfather, Lung or Dragon, whichever one almost beat up an Endbringer, the Keeper before she was the Keeper. Cynthia paid a lot more attention to history after she triggered, but there were enough disasters over these past centuries—including one that happened in Cynthia's grandparents' life—to make it difficult to find the information she looked for. There were plenty of legends, though if the histories were accurate, the legends weren't. Common knowledge told you of a cape named Dragon, who was the world's best tinker and had a mechanical suit that got more powerful the longer a fight went on; it turned out that this was a combination of two capes, one of who had a name that meant "dragon".
Legends told you many things, some of them trustworthy. One legend which seemed trustworthy was that the land around the old city had been lowered by Golden Dawn—no one could deny that it was a lot lower than the surrounding land. Another was that the entire city had been cursed by Marquis when heroes kidnapped his daughters; histories ancient and recent did show a series of terrible events befalling the area. Aside from the Gimbal Gate, its tower, and the small town around it, The Bay had been abandoned since before living memory, and even Nebroc Town on the other side had more than its share of misfortune. But the most credible local legend was that when an Endbringer attacked The Bay, it trapped three of the world's most promising heroes, Bay residents, in a bubble. Cynthia and many, many others saw the bubble; it was considered a holy site by saw the bubble, and saw that lately, the dust and flower petals within had been speeding up. She wondered if the bubble would collapse soon, releasing the heroes.
It might be worth checking the bubble again, just to be safe.
Cynthia headed down to the Bubble Shrine, where the three heroes lay. She tried to remember what she knew of them. The legends called them Fearlessness, Endurance, and Purity, but histories identified the first of those as Dauntless. Which meant basically the same thing as Fearless, so that's probably what happened. He supposedly had the potential to be the greatest hero on Earth before being trapped in the time-bubble. The others were almost unknown, aside from the scarce legends and questionable mythologies. Of course, it wasn't wise to talk about the myths like that to some people...and among them were many locals.
The bubble and the shrine around was open to the public. The area was crowded with people watching the bubble, and it wasn't hard to see why. The dust, grit, and flower petals within were clearing, falling to the ground, only slightly slowed near the edges and almost visibly nearer the now-visible forms of the three heroes. The first (and only woman) was maybe six feet tall, with long, unkempt, platinum blonde hair and what looked like medieval armor made of ice and metal, carrying an axe. Another wore white-and-gold armor, carrying a spear and a shield. His spear, shoes, and the outer rim of the shield looked like they were made of some kind of energy. Both of them had paler skin than anyone Cynthia had ever seen, except for the occasional aberrant, but the third was paler still, with literally white skin. He wore archaic-looking clothes; aside from maybe the glowing one, they didn't look like what Cynthia thought people in the Age of Heroes would. They also didn't seem to be moving...yet?
Cynthia heard a lot of people arguing about who was who. Most people thought the whitest man was Purity, but some said the armored one was him, and no one agreed on who looked most like Endurance or Fearlessness. There were religious people, too, who revered the three as holy men. They brought their own arguments into it, making the whole thing even less pleasant.
Cynthia left, and headed back to her village. The Bay area wasn't heavily populated—there hadn't been a lot of people all along the coast for decades, actually, but the Bay was supposed to be cursed, so people wanted to settle other places first. There were a few villages around, including several aberrant camps for people who couldn't fit in except with other misfits. Some of them were little better than bandits, but Cynthia's village had a few powerful people who held them off.
One of them was Will Jackson, who had a neat motion-nullifying field that protected him from harm, basically letting him hit people with his big rusty axe with impunity until they left the village alone. Emmanuel was his son, and one of Cynthia's closest friends. He only had a kinda boring telekinetic field, which also gave people in the area a bit of sense of what was around them, a sort of weak danger sense. Still, he was a good kid, even if he wouldn't be a great warrior like his dad without a lot of work.
The Jacksons were the first people she told about the bubble speeding up. They didn't really believe it, but decided they'd see in the morning. Cynthia told the rest of her village, too; they didn't care that much. The Bubble Shrine devotees would be in an uproar about it, and same with the Keeper's Children since the three were from the Age of Heroes and lived where the first Keeper did, but Cynthia and everyone else in her village followed the Old God.
That evening, Emmanuel went to Cynthia's house and dared her to go to the Bubble Shrine tonight. She took the dare, and the two of them sneaked out of the village and down the road to the Bay. They reached the Bubble Shrine not long after the sun set, and convinced the devotees there to let them in, though he warned them that they probably wouldn't see anything, because there were a lot of people there.
Cynthia and Emmanuel tried to push their way through the crowd, but failed. Luckily for them, a siren went off. Cynthia and Emmanuel knew what it meant—there was someone raiding the town. Most of the devotees were young enough to be among the town's militia, so they left, leaving just a few old men and women, plus the adolescents from out of town. With the Shrine empty, Cynthia could clearly see the three figures within moving. She watched them for a few minutes, realizing they were running. Running from what?
Whether because the bubble was weaker at the edges or because it was losing its hold on time within (or both?), the three were moving more quickly. As they moved out of the areas of the bubble more choked by dust and the like, Cynthia realized that they didn't look heroic or valiant or anything so much as they looked scared and confused. Sounds of fighting came from without. Finally, the heroes were moving at normal speed, leaving the bubble. They looked around, confused.
"Which of you is which?" Cynthia blurted out. "I mean, what are your names?"
The three looked at her, the white one seeming almost angry, the others just confused. The glowing one asked something in gibberish, but no one answered. The woman asked the armored one a question, and he nodded. The two of them went outside, while the white one stayed.