Chapter 2

Lincoln Loud was ten years old when he started to notice that he was different. There was something about him that wasn't really wrong, per se, just...different. For one thing, whenever he felt really strong negative emotions (fear, anger, sadness, etc.), electric appliances went haywire. He had once asked his parents about his birth story for a class project at school, and while fairly believable, the story they told him about being delivered in the back seat of the President's limousine by the First Lady (and subsequently ushered into the house by the Secret Service) had noticeable holes that left him with more questions than answers. His faith in his parents was restored when his older sisters all told similar stories of how he came into their lives.

Lincoln faintly remembered chewing through the vacuum cleaner's power cord when he was a toddler. It had been plugged in at the time, and his mother had been using it. Rather than severely hurting him, Lincoln remembered getting a pleasurable sensation out of the electric jolt, like his body had absorbed it.

The agreement between the United States government and the Plumbers had been in place since before he was born, and the neighbor in the house behind the Louds was a friendly, mild-mannered Transylian, one of the Fankenstein-esque inhabitants of the distant planet Anur Transyl. Because of this, whenever Lincoln's emotions got the better of him and caused the electricity in the house to go screwy, the Louds assumed that either he or the house was being affected by very low levels of Corrodium radiation.

"Elder male sibling, I require your assistance with an experiment." Lincoln, now close to his twelfth birthday, was pulled from his musings by the voice of his younger sister Lisa, who at only four and a half was almost as smart as Albert Einstein.

"Okay, Lisa. I'll be right there," Lincoln told her. Lincoln had been described by some of the people who knew him as "the last true family man." He loved lending a hand with anything his sisters or parents might need help with, and at one point they had to force him to stop before he burned himself out. After all, being the middle child of eleven was no easy task. Lincoln followed Lisa's voice up the stairs to the bedroom/laboratory that she shared with Lily, the youngest of the Loud children at one and a half years. "Alright, what did you need help with?" he asked.

"I wish to measure precisely how much electricity from an external source the human body can tolerate without losing consciousness," Lisa explained. "Rest assured that you will be resuscitated should any of your vital organs cease to properly function."

To any other person, the prospect of taking part in such an experiment would have been frightening. However, Lincoln had been around Lisa long enough to know that she always, always kept her word. Therefore, he was able to calmly remove his shirt and allow Lisa to apply adhesive electrodes to his arms, chest, and neck. These would serve the dual purpose of administering the electric charges as well as monitoring his vitals.

"Alright, that should do it," Lisa stated, stepping back to admire her handiwork before walking over to the computer the electrodes were plugged in to. "Now, brace yourself for the initial jolt. I will be starting at a voltage level that would typically be quite painful," the bespectacled girl advised.

Lincoln nodded in affirmation, then tensed his body for the painful shock as Lisa typed a command sequence into her keyboard. To his surprise, the shock never came. Instead, a pleasurable, tingling warmth spread across his torso from the points where the electrodes were attached to his skin.

"Wow. That actually feels kinda good," he said, causing Lisa's eyebrows to raise.

"You find it to be pleasurable?" she asked in amazement.

"Yeah. I don't know how or why," Lincoln replied. "It almost feels like a warm bubble bath." Lisa promptly turned back to her computer and twisted a knob slightly, increasing the amount of electricity flowing into Lincoln's body as his white hair stood on end. The sensation he felt transitioned from warm to hot, but not uncomfortably so. In addition, his senses sharpened slightly and he began to feel more alert; something akin to taking a power nap while waiting for an espresso shot to kick in.

Then all of a sudden, the warm feeling vanished but the alertness remained. Lincoln blinked in surprise, then looked over at Lisa, who was frantically typing on her keyboard.

"Hey, why'd you stop?" he asked when she walked over to detach the electrodes from his body.

"Lincoln, do you have any idea how much electricity I was using?!" she yelled, and he shook his head in puzzlement. Lisa took a few deep breaths to regain her composure, then calmly clarified herself. "According to my computer, the amount of electricity pulsing through your body would have stopped the heart of a grown man long before now." She held out a small paper cup, like the kind used with a fast-food restaurant's condiment dispensers. "There must be something in your genome that allowed you to tolerate such a vast amount of electricity. Would you be so kind as to spit in this cup?"

Lincoln did as she asked, then reached for his shirt. The moment he touched the article of clothing, the fabric burst into flames. Upon hearing his startled yelp, Lisa looked up from her computer. Her eyes widened, and she grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall, spraying the flaming shirt with it. Lincoln looked down at his hands and noticed blue flashes flickering between his fingers.

"Holy smokes! I can't just tolerate electricity; I can absorb it!" Lincoln realized out loud. He looked around the room and spotted an abomination of wires and metal plates in one corner. "Hey, Lisa, is that a valuable piece of equipment?" he asked, pointing to the object in question.

"It's one of my failed inventions due to an insufficient power source, so absolutely not. Why do you ask?" Rather than replying, Lincoln stretched out his arms. He closed his eyes and concentrated. When he opened them, tendrils of lightning flew from his fingers and struck the device, which came to life with a low hum. The wires retracted into the shell, and the plates reconfigured themselves, revealing the device to be some sort of robot with a single wheel in place of legs and an LCD screen for a face. Lisa stared slack-jawed as FriendBot was revived right in front of her and zipped joyfully around the room.

"Fascinating..." she said, then remembered the task at hand and shook herself out of the trance. "You may go about your own business, Lincoln. I will have the results of the DNA test in two to three days." Only one thing was on Lincoln's mind as he went to his own room and picked up a comic book to read: from that point on, things would never be the same.

And he was right.