THE GREAT FLOOD
On this day, eight years ago, humanity came to know the terrifying power of water.
Fourteen-year-old Hubert planted his foot on the rock, striking the world's most well-known pose of triumph - left hand outstretched to the air, palm faced upwards, while his right hand's knuckles were pressed against his side. For the boy so obsessed with Bruno Pollux, the world's greatest hero, that was the only thing he could think to do after reaching the top of the cliff. The waves softly lapped against the beach far below, receding and then encroaching onto the sand over and over like a tug of war.
The sea's breeze slowly picked up, throwing Hubert's green hair into a right mess. With how long his mother had spent on fixing his hair this morning, it was a bit of a waste. On the beach below the cliff, about a hundred and fifty metres away, he could just barely spot his parents frantically looking around for him. Hubert had a penchant for randomly disappearing, but he never quite understood why his parents panicked as badly as they did every single time. After all, nothing bad had ever happened while he was gone, even during the many times he'd blacked out and woken up in a completely different place. He reckoned he should go down and stop them from worrying sooner or later, though.
When he stood up to go do so, he was knocked back down again. The breeze had turned into a gale, and he hadn't quite anticipated it. A quick second later, he moved to stand up again. A tower of bluish green met Hubert's gaze. In a single moment, everything around him had turned to water. The wave was big and powerful enough to obliterate the cliff he was standing on, and from the moment the water made contact with him, everything had turned to black.
Barring a few of the world's strongest heroes, nobody who had made contact with the surging water on the 17th of September, 2011, survived. Except, for a reason completely unbeknownst to him, Hubert Windsor. Of the eight billion people living on the planet, six billion were estimated to be left directly after the Great Flood. A month later, the world's population counted 4.6 billion people. Of those, over a billion people were displaced from their homes, and every place near a coast or river was completely abandoned. China - the centerpoint of what became known as the 2011 Incident - was the biggest country whose government underwent total collapse, along with most island nations and some coastal nations.
However, the biggest loss to the world by far was none other than Bruno Pollux. Under the moniker of The Gamma, he protected the world for nearly a decade, defeating the 'perfect weapon' Matriarch, along with countless other threats. In trying to prevent the villain Timetearer from bringing about the planet's destruction in China's Xizang region, he lost his life, and prevented her plan from coming to complete fruition. Despite that, the Great Flood was unleashed nonetheless, forever changing the world.
Hubert did not remember what he did after learning what had happened and leaving the hospital. All he recalled is that his grandmother adopted him at some point in the year following. He finished high school about four years ago, and then spent the rest of his days at a dead-end grocery store job. He was fairly certain that that would be the rest of his life. In hindsight, it was somewhat surprising how quickly everything returned to faux normalcy after the incident. After the memorial programming on the television had ended, Hubert had fallen asleep sitting upright on the moist, stained couch of his crummy apartment.
The very next morning, life continued as usual. He only had to work the evening shift today, so he turned the television on again. The entrance exams for the illustrious Stonehearthe University, a training facility that had produced some of the world's most powerful heroes, were to be televised this year. Hubert's dream of attending that place had been crushed when he was about fifteen and realised that his ability was probably to never manifest. The (unreliable) procedure to force it to manifest was far too expensive for somebody like him to afford, and even if it wasn't, the likelihood of it being something useful was still slim.
With envy, his eyes were glued to the screen as Valentine von Preussen threw a card forward from one floating boulder to another, and then jumped into another card. Instantly, he emerged from the card he'd thrown. He climbed up the field of floating boulders quickly, but not as quickly as the boy who shot up like a meteor, a trail of stars and dark blue light following him as he bounced from rock to rock.