Story the metahuman phenomenon | original story

cuzn

lucid luciel
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Chapter One

Metahuman (n.)
As described by Prof. Robert J. Kumbar (God bless his bygone soul) in his research journal, The Metahuman Phenomenon, the term comprises the prefix “meta-” meaning “beyond” or “transcendent” with the term “human” to refer to mankind as we are familiar. A species of human likeness that—perhaps by evolution or by God—has surpassed humanity in ways one never thought to be possible.

A layman would describe a “metahuman” similarly to how he would describe a comic book superhero in their wondrous and unbelievable supernatural ability.



When she came to, the first thing that she had registered were various noises surrounding her; the incessant wailing of summertime cicadas, the rustle of leaves in the trees, the croaking of a toad in a waterlogged riverbed, the chirping of a sparrow up in an American beech tree. There was a certain vacancy in her mind of which she couldn’t quite place, a dazed nature that brought her to stare up at a pale, early-morning sky for something close to half an hour while she sorted through the haziness of her brain at a leisurely pace.

Certain thoughts echoed through her mind during that time, as she wondered what time it was, how long she’s been here, when she got here and of what means, or even where she was if one had to point it out on a map. When travelling deeper down the road of these individual questions though, her current situation became clear to her like a fog beginning to lift from the forefront of her mind. These small “clarities” came in the form of more questions, none of them which she knew the answers to.

When was the last time she had seen a clock? Has she ever seen a clock? Was this the first time that she’s seen the sky, did she know how to read a map, did she know how to read? Feeling as if she had just awoken for the very first time, she first twitched her fingers and confirmed that she felt no pain in her arms, and then took a deep breath, clenched her toes, and slowly made her way to sitting up from the forest floor. It had become all too clear to her, as she stared up at that pale sky, that she was missing enough of what one would call their “memory” for her to be unsure even of her own name.

However, she hadn’t forgotten everything.

Upon thinking back, there were certain sensations and certain visual keys that were able to be uncovered from her inner consciousness; The first allegro movement of Mozart’s sixteenth piano sonata, in the key of C major, played on a rosewood Blüthner grand piano; The taste of cheesecake and a virgin strawberry daiquiri; The fanciful trills of a violin; The pale glow of a full moon and the smell of evergreen. Out of these fragmented windows into her past, she could only gain one in addition, which appeared to her blurry but still clearly audible in the recesses of her concentration.

The name “Zoe” spoken from dark pink lips.

Was it, perchance, her name? She spared the thought, continued to mull over it as she rose to her feet to take both a look around her and a decent look at herself. She, first of all, was indeed female, and although she was unsure of her exact age in years, the smallness of her chest and the slender, scrawny, knobby limbs could be observed with ease at first glance as signs of adolescent (im)maturity.

She wore primarily white, a white button-up stained from mud and blood, a pleated white skirt, white socks, white shoes. A too-large army green jacket weighed her down with its plumage of beige faux fur trimming the hood, but she made no move to take it off, instead pulling it closer to herself to inhale its scent. Like the rest of her, it carried the musty aroma of the forest. She must have been here all night at the very least, laying on that same spot on the grass without much care or consciousness.

Still quite unsure of herself, she (she supposed she would call herself “Zoe” from now on) began on unsteady legs on a random path through the woods, simply watching the wildlife and natural world around her until she would find herself a true path of direction. This area was, if nothing else, a mountainous territory, where she would be climbing uphill and then downhill and then on an uncomfortable slant, and at one point a mud puddle had slipped her foot, and she came tumbling down with a sudden yelp until she crashed rather unceremoniously into a shrub of tiny waxy circle-leaves and remained for a moment or two.

It was while she was picking twigs from her hair of black, fluffy, wild curls, that she heard quite the strange sound in the near distance, just out of sight around a thicket of trees. Rounding the dense copse, she caught sight of the tail-end of a vehicle driving on a line of asphalt pavement, white metal road guards on either side, and just next to it, a sign about her arm’s length high and two wide.

Zoe slipped and skipped and slid and stepped her way down the rest of the treacherous forest hill, and first looked at the car’s scarlet hind lights as it turned a corner and disappeared, before stepping in front of the sign in hopes of making sense of whatever it said. It was actually quite a beautiful sign, green wood with burgundy edges and golden trim, the words written in the same shade of shiny light gold with images of flowers emblazoned on either side. Welcome to the Historic Village of Warwick, and then underneath it, Inc. 1867.

“War-wick?” She tested the word on her tongue and quickly found that beyond remembering how to read and speak, her voice was horribly hoarse, as if she hadn’t used it in an incredibly long time. Zoe coughed once, twice, attempted to clear it, and then took a breath to try again, this time sounding much less rasped and strained. “Warwick. War… Wick. The war… Of the wicks?”

The war of the wicks. Something about that sounded a bit off. Her brows furrowed as she continued to read the sign again and again, taking into account the word ‘village’ as if it dictated the size of the nearest township, but she was still very much occupied with her word-play as she began in the direction that she assumed the village was in. The war of the wicks, the war of the wicks, the bell that it jingled was terribly tiny, but had rung just loud enough to catch her attention. Something about it was incorrect.

Wicks, wicks. Wicks, wanks, wonks, wrocks… Worlds. A bright grin stretched across her cracked and dry lips just then, as a new memory flooded into her like a tidal wave of information and history. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells! She had read it once- read it twice- and then listened to an online recording of an old nineteen thirty-eight radio broadcast of the same name and plot, performed by a certain Orson Welles and—

“The Columbia Broadcasting system and it’s affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells.”
The sound of antique radio static filled her ears, followed by a sonorous orchestral interlude, and then the smell of a fireplace and the resumption of the same gentleman’s voice.
“Ladies and gentleman, the director of the Mercury Theater and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles.”


And then, another man’s deeper voice, mysterious, enigmatic. Zoe felt the red velvet pillow that she sat on, could smell the sweetness of hot chocolate with nutmeg, cinnamon, whipped cream, and marshmallows, could feel the warmth of the mug held in her brown hands.

“We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s, and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence—”

And then she was back in the forest, on the roadside, wandering aimlessly as cicadas cried out and the sky grew from a pale gray to a bright blue with the oncoming morning hours. She was heading into Warwick, right, and she had remembered a time when she had read a book and listened to a radio drama of it afterwards. Right.

It had taken only minutes for her to find herself at the entrance to a township, a “main street” of sorts where cars and people were plenty, shops lined both sides of the road and the entire town seemed to be waking up from the previous night’s slumber. As she walked past windows and adverts for stores and restaurants, she was given quite a few strange looks by others on the sidewalk, a nervous glance from a mother, a shocked stare from an older man. It left Zoe wondering if she truly looked that hideous, and with sudden curiosity and a slight hint of worry, she paused her aimless wandering to peer into the window of a clothing store, where she could see her reflection properly in the newly-scrubbed glass pane.

While the rest of her features looked normal, if not a bit scuffed and unkempt, it was her face that struck her as immediately unnatural, for her eyes were a striking cerise pink in color, and along her face were rough scabs that were beginning to peel to reveal whitish scars trailing deep through brown skin. In particular, two curved upwards at the corners of her mouth, and tracked into her cheeks to create a malformed and permanent smile, as if someone had taken a razor to her face and had made her visage into a canvas for their sickening art display.

Her fingertips tentatively traced along the white line, and yet no memory of where they had originated or whose hands had crafted them returned to her. All that she knew was that she wasn’t the one to bring such a permanent feature upon herself, and there was an amount of shame that rose when she realized that, compared to the other people walking past, she was so very unnatural that she practically looked inhuman, monstrous. She was frightening.


Zoe spent the rest of that morning in a similar type of listlessness, studying every little thing around her and learning many things both by observation and by experimentation, perhaps for the very first time.

Of the new facts that she had gained about society, she perceived “money” being used in exchange for snacks at a convenience store, but upon trying to use a small dime that she had found abandoned on the sidewalk to “buy” a bag of “chips”, she was very crossly told by the man working at the front counter that she didn’t have enough. It was then that she realized that the amount of money was also quite important, and so she moved on.

From that moment, she couldn’t help but notice how many places there were that took money in exchange for things like clothing, food items, toys, or anything else that may be of interest to the wealthy customer. In a little park where children ran and played on various brightly-colored equipment, there was a clock atop a large dark metal pole, where she looked up at the strange numerals printed on it, and could thus make no sense of the “x”s and “i”s and “v”s, so she rather hastily moved on.

It was at the stroke of noon, when the church bells rang and the township was at its peak of activity that she felt the pangs of hunger at her stomach and the subsequent weakness weighing her every step, and in some small hope that someone might take pity on her and donate a meal for the single dime that she had, Zoe found herself standing in front of a white wooden church with two bright scarlet front doors, labelled as the “Christ Episcopical” with a high pointed roof and a very beautiful garden of flowers and ivies decorating the front. She didn’t know about any Christ, and certainly hadn’t ever heard the word “Episcopical”, but some part of her mind knew that churches were generally a fairly important place to some people, a sacred place. It was this bit of knowledge that made her worry about tracking mud inside, and so before entering, Zoe slipped off her shoes and rather carelessly left them outside as she opened the door and stepped into the building.

The lights were off, but the door was unlocked, and light streamed in through one wall of narrow, tall, ornate stained glass windows in multicolored scintillating light. A soft red carpet went from the door straight ahead, through rows and rows of wooden benches, up to a raised altar where the wood was polished and a beautiful lectern stood in dark mahogany, the symbol of a shining “t” hanging on the wall behind it. There was only one other person inside, a boy sitting alone close to the front, with raven black hair and wearing a simple dark t-shirt.

While she had gone there in hopes of meeting someone who might give her some food, which Zoe assumed she needed to survive, being in the presence of someone unfamiliar in a relatively private setting caused her to shy away, and without remembering to fully shut the front door behind her, the scrawny girl pulled the hood of her jacket far over her head in an attempt to hide her unsightly appearance, and began quietly to take a seat at one of the benches in the back, on the opposite side of the aisle from him.

Going at first unnoticed by the mystery boy, Zoe observed him from afar, pink eyes wide and unmoving, taking in what little she could see of his appearance from behind—his dark hair, the pale white skin that seemed just a bit pasty, the sliver of a knee that she could see wearing ripped black jeans…

A slight breeze brushed past her, from the open door, and he must have felt it too, since he seemed to come to attention and turn around. Zoe only caught the briefest glance of caramel brown eyes before she hastily lowered her head, a hand pulling her hood further down as if to try and bury herself in its fluffiness and hide from her shame. She was frightening, she knew this, and so when the boy stood to close the door—and likely saw the pair of shoes discarded just outside, because he picked them up shortly after—Zoe could only shrink further into her seat, simply hoping that he would ignore her and move on.

However, unfortunately for her fraying nerves, he didn’t. On the contrary; the boy who was surely quite a bit taller than her approached, her muddy shoes held chastely hooked by his two fingers, and he stopped just to her right to look down at her. Quietly, softly, she heard him murmur, “What’s up with her?”, and she raised her head only slightly as if to acknowledge his looming presence, before she swallowed shallowly and spoke.

“What’s up with you?”

“... What?”

“Y-You just said,” Zoe still didn’t look at him, but felt her shoulders grow tense at the continuation of a conversation that she absolutely didn’t feel aptly prepared for. Having a severe case of no-memory certainly didn’t do her any favors when it came to interacting with other human beings. “What’s up with her? But I don’t know what that means, so I asked you the same thing.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I just heard you say--” When she finally looked up at him, she instinctively froze at the odd look in his eyes, which gleamed a honey-golden color in the very peculiar lighting. He was looking at her with some type of shock, but it was different from the looks of concern and disgust that would cross the faces of the other townspeople. This expression almost seemed like one of awe.

“I didn’t say—” While she heard the boy’s voice all the same, she watched him, and his lips gave no twitch of movement. He only stared at her, unblinking, eyebrows creased and eyes sparkling as he stared into her own. “—anything.”

What on Earth? The common consensus that Zoe’s reached thus far is that humans needed to move their mouths to speak, since it worked the same for her, and it worked the same for everyone else, and so how she was hearing his voice and yet his lips gave no signs of moving… Without much rhyme or reason to it, she found herself frightened, terrified, even, at his unwavering glare, and finding herself helpless and growing evermore panicked, Zoe rose to her feet and crept past him into the aisle, shrinking away, backing off, before she finally turned tail and broke into a sprint out of the building, giving no heed to the way he called after her. Giving no thought to the dirty white shoes left in his possession.

She burst rather clumsily into the township again and took a turn down an alleyway to reach the main shopping street, hoping and praying to disappear in the sparse crowds of people and escape the attention of the tall raven-haired boy that had confounded and intimidated her so. The reason why she felt so unbearably uncomfortable in his brooding presence was still unclear to her, but she initially moved only on instinct to flee from a less-than tranquil situation, and yet her panic only seemed to exemplify as she reached the crowded street of shoppers and passing families.

The amnesiac was suddenly acutely aware of people’s glances towards her, and as if some sort of switch had been flipped, everywhere she looked and everywhere she went, the murmurs and mutters and whispers continued, but no lips moved in accordance with the words spoken. These people spoke of the most mundane things, many of them commenting on her as she passed by, things like “Woah, her face is weird”, or “She looks like a wreck”, and all Zoe could do was keep running until the exhaustion of her limbs was amplified by her starvation, and she crawled her way into seclusion in an alleyway, squished tight in between two wooden crates.

And in that place, at that time, the homeless one pulled her knees close and lowered her head, hands clasped tight over her ears, as she loathed all of the voices that continued to ring and echo endlessly in her mind. In that place, Zoe felt her eyes close and her shoulders relax as sleep’s mercy finally overtook her frail and trembling figure.


Standing just outside of a Christian church, a certain Andrew Williams held a burner flip-phone to his ear, waiting for the other end to pick up. He watched impassively as a group of kids ran down the sidewalk across the street, chasing each other and squealing with laughter, only to be scolded by their parents moments later, fruitlessly.

“Hey.” His voice was low, quiet, in response to hers, who had finally picked up on the other line. “Yeah, I’m fine, I just went for a walk, but…”

“... Yeah.” Andrew took a breath and looked up at the sky, a pair of dirty white hospital-issued slippers held loosely in one hand. “Yeah. I think I found another one.”
 

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