Dan the Hero, Part I

It seemed like it was a comic book-thing, when news of the guy appeared to the world, a person with powers far beyond man, who could pick up a bus, give it a hurl. Who’s skin was so dense that no bullet could every really put the man’s life at risk, that he could go and jump for two miles, but not fly, it seemed that he had limits. He could run fourteen hundred miles in a mere hour, made his own sonic booms, so much friction that his clothes just burned off, NASA had to make him a special suit. And like the heroes of the printed page, he did seem to be a very nice guy, made no moves to rule, helped people in need, most of the culture thought him pretty cool. There was no great origin story, though, it seemed one day the hero just appeared, people made up tales to explain all this, the normal theories of wonder or fear. Had he been sent from an alien world, and just happened to look like human kind? Did the sun grant him his massive powers, was he a deity personified? Had this man been cooked up deep in a lab, and then escaped to go blaze his own way? Did we have the tech to even do that? ‘The government does,’some people did say. Or maybe this was just evolution, a mutation that had just now emerged? Maybe he was a glimpse of things to come, a sign of how the species was to turn? Now it did little good asking the man, he had no answer, and just gave a shrug, whenever folks asked how he’d grown so strong he said, “Don’t know, and I don’t care that much.” The guy didn’t even have some great name, no ‘Power-cross,’ ‘Bruiser,’ or ‘Hero Man,’ whenever you asked what he called himself, he would just say, “My parents named me Dan.” Dan the Hero, was what he did become, or just ‘The Hero,’ for those in a rush, since unlike the comics, he was alone, there were none whom with he might get mixed up. Day after day, stories piled up, he stopped a crime, saved a life on the street, he kept a reactor from melting down, then dragged a sinking ship out of the sea. Who he was really, nobody much knew, he kept his last-name secret from us all, that part in comics he paid in full, wouldn’t expose his family to a fall. The people loved him, but as time went on, in the echelons of the state and press, some folks came to find him a bit annoying, a bit ‘too good’ for a world that’s a mess... CONTINUES IN PART II.