It is said by some that human evolution stopped because we made technology to adapt our environment instead of adapting ourselves to suit our environment. The evolutionary stagnation built up over time, and seemingly all at once, perhaps triggered by some unknown force, human evolution took place at an alarming rate.
It wasn’t anything special at first; some children were born with unnatural hair colors, different skin tones or muscle densities, and mental disorders started becoming more common. Everybody had their own ideas as to why this was happening, everything from polution, to poor parenting was to blame.
Then strange things began to occur around some of the children as they grew up. A very small number of children born; a very small number, where born with a brain build just right, or just wrong to give abilities to these children. Some were typical psychic abilities, some where strange, or even nonsensical. The most unusual part was; the children seemed unable to learn any ability other than the one they developed on their own.
That was all ancient history now though, several generations at least. Depending on who you ask, and what they consider to be the true start. Nowadays, nearly a quarter of the population has some sort of ability, statistically speaking most were not strictly unique, and most of the abilities were so obscure or weak that those who have them tended to just live normal lives.
Some of these people though, had incredible powers. As though the world was turning into some sort of comic book, roughly 80 years ago, battles between those who would use their power for evil and those who used them for good caused a centralized organization to rise up in order to protect the people by providing an incentive other than ‘nothing better to do with my powers’ for people to use their abilities to defend the world from those who would threaten it.
The organization became known as the Heroes League. Much like many sports leagues, the Heroes league was made up of divisions that separated the heroes by their skill level and record, awarding pay and rank according to their achievements. One such hero had recently begun his climb on the proverbial ladder recently, his Hero name: Lance.
Lance was one of the few born with a unique power, the power of invincibility; or near invincibility. His mind passively erected a shield around his body starting near infancy, and had never stopped reinforcing it. Through testing, it was found that most powers and forces were unable to penetrate the shield, and when something did, the shield was able to restore it’s self near instantly.
While this made joining the League of Heroes a risk free decision, it also prevented Lance from moving up in ranks for the longest time. While he was unable to be harmed, he was never the target of a criminal’s actions. And while he could not get hurt; that didn’t stop the villain from just fleeing.
That problem was exactly what was going through Lance’s mind as he looked down at his pay stub. He’d fought with some villains nearly every day this week; but he’d only managed to succeed in stopping them once. As such, his rank, 197 class C fell to 203.
Lance let out an irritated sigh, while there was no official punishment for poor performance, he knew he was going to get a hard time from everybody over dropping six ranks. He already long since stopped receiving any cheers when he arrived to help, most of the time it seemed that everybody was immediately disappointed that he was the one to show up.
Walking away from the stub pickup counter, he headed over to the front doors, pushing one open before walking down the steps and onto the street. He had to get a big job done this week, or he’d end up falling back down to D rank at this rate. It was a big job that got him up this far in the first place. Was that all he was good for though? Doing one big job once in a blue moon to rank up?
As he heard cries for help in the distance, he got ready to run, hopefully this time he’d manage to take some villains down.