"Okay, this is not good." Those were the words of Nightmare as he arrived home to his apartment. All his adult life, he had dealt with punks and robbers, gang members like Fire and Ice, but never, in his wildest dreams (with one obvious exception) faced a super-powered kid. Fire out of his hands!!! Sure, Grey had been super strong, but all you've got to do for that is lift a lot of weights. That wasn't horribly unusual. But fire out of skin? This was not good at all.
He turned on his Windows '98 and waited while the Internet dialed up. When it came up, he went to Google and put in a search for Fire. It came up with way to many searches, most involving science or camping, so he narrowed it down to 'Fire- want superpowers?' It came up with about 100 hits, the majority involving comic book characters or bogus science that said you can get superpowers by accessing your inner soul. But on the fourth hit page, he found something that shocked him. "Want Superpowers of the elements?" 'Our new drug can give you the powers of fire, ice, wind, wate…'
He eagerly accessed the page, and as he scrolled down to read, a smile grew on his face. "Bingo."
The page talked about a new drug similar to cocaine that was highly addictive and somehow gave the user superpowers. It didn't tell how, and at the moment, John/Nightmare wasn't interested. He offer cost 1,000 bucks for a pound of the stuff, so the person selling the stuff was making a lot of money on it.
John accessed his Hotmail account he used when he didn't want to be known by his name and sent an E-mail to the webmaster asking where he could meet him to get some of the drug.
He took a glance to see if there was any more information about it on the website, but discovered that that was all, and shut down, wondering when his E-mail would be answered.
In a far-off building in San Francisco, in a dark warehouse full of boxes of drugs, a man sat stroking his cat's soft head. He had his computer on, and he noticed an E-mail pop up. Reading it, he smiled. "It won't be long now…"