Untitled 1

Title:
Status:  In Progress
Genre:  Science Fiction

Introduction:  A set of disasters has been occurring, each time leaving just one survivor, a child.  The main character goes to help, and soon discovers the child survivors have each developed a super power.  How?  Why?  What happens Next?

Edit History:  5/30 Additions
5/28/18 Complete Rewrite, Perspective Change

Chapter 1:

I was finishing up my sophomore year in college when it all started. The first couple of times, no one really thought anything of it. It was a smaller story, a few seconds mention on the news of a house fire in Harrisburg Pennsylvania. Then, as it happened again and again, people started wondering if they were connected. The fires became longer stories, with star news anchors visiting the scene, and filmed interviews with authorities saying they were not yet prepared to make a statement. There were lots of theories including serial arson, faulty equipment, and even one about experimental testing done in the area, though no one I knew gave this one any credit.

I admit that I didn't pay much attention to it all at this point. It's not that I don't care, no. It's that Fires have always been a sore topic for me. You see, I survived a house fire when I was a girl. Just writing this brings back the memories of the smell of smoke, and the big burly hands of the fireman who stopped to carry me out of the building. I also remember how it wasn't until therapy in middle school that I began to accept that I survived, and to stop blaming myself. I was not able to leave the house when I first woke that night. Even if the one firefighter who stopped to help me would have went on up the stairway instead, and if he was the amount of force needed to get through to save my parents, It doesn't mean I am to blame for their deaths. They chose to put a placard in my window, telling the firefighters that their priority was to rescue me first. It makes me very sad to hear of house fires, so I avoided most of the talk of these.

One day while I was finishing class, my professor, Dr. Reese, asked me to come over to her office. She told me how she was recently asked to help the State with some work, and she managed to talk them into bringing on a few student interns.

“It'll be unpaid, up in Harrisburg, and it will probably last most of the summer, but it will be working in a group foster home. Are you interested?”

“Me,” I never would have anticipated being selected for an internship, not by my favorite professor.

“I remember you said you were interested in working with the foster system. You wrote that beautiful paper on it,” Dr. Reese said.

I knew this internship would help my career a lot. In truth though, I was more nervous at the prospect of making the arrangements to go to Harrisburg than I'd be to get up on stage. Traveling for someone like me is always complicated. It took several lawsuits across the nation, protests, marches, and sit-ins, not by me of course, just to get me a bus ride across town. To travel to another city I needed to find accessible transportation there, make sure I had accessible housing when I got there, and triple check that the foster home was, indeed, wheelchair accessible. I But I wanted the Internship, so I got to work on it all right away.