P O W E R F U L

By Jordan Zy Leddy

 PROLOGUE

The press stood on the steps that previously belonged to the Lincoln Memorial. The stairs were all that was left, after all, since a vortex had sucked the Nation’s monument into oblivion. But soon, all their questions could be answered and they’d have someone to blame.

“There he is!” Cried an Asian television reporter, she was in the middle of a sentence, to her audience through a camera for her news channel, when she exclaimed and pointed into the sky. Everyone around her turned and looked as a spherical shape made out of metal flew towards them at high speed.
The shape stopped above the top step and started to morph, the metal became like liquid mercury and became a makeshift stage for the man inside.
The crowd shoved towards him, yelling all sorts of questions towards him simultaneously. The man held his hands up to silence the crowd; he wore his form fitting suit with his signature navy blue and silver grey colors. The press members hushed and waited for his statement.

“Greetings, forgive me, but I just flew in from Seattle and, boy, are my arms tired!” The man was, as he always tried to be optimistic, to make people laugh. The crowd was still silent with a few groans, but the glares the man got were deafening. The man stopped smiling and decided to give up the jokes for the day, “I know that all of you are distraught at this loss, I am, too. Many of you may suspect my colleague, Dark Sun, stole this monument, perhaps even that he is The Antagonist serial killer who had slain the other Powers. And the evidence points towards him nearly 100%, but...” he paused to make sure dramatic effect could be absorbed by the hundreds in front of him, and the millions of watchers and listeners from across the country, “but, I have reason to believe that Dark Sun didn’t commit this crime.”

The crowd burst into more yelling and questions slinging. The man put his finger to his lips, and the people obeyed his gesture. “Please cooperate with me, let me finish before you ask questions or assume anything. I’ll take questions later, but this information must be delivered carefully. I know Dark Sun personally, and I’m not trying to protect him, but he would never go evil or do this to us. I have a reason to believe that an Antagonist is behind this, and the superhero killings, he is much more powerful than all of us...”

“Get off the stage! You just want to save your friends; we all know they’re guilty!”

“Yeah he’s in on it, too, they’re all criminals all of them!”

The Man, Titanious, merely shook his head in disappointment. His friends didn’t believe him, even those closest to him who shared super abilities expressed doubt, and now the whole public wouldn’t trust him.

The stage the man stood upon morphed back into its egg-shaped cocoon and flew away just as the mob of reporters stormed up to him. Titanious knew he was alone.