Chapter Text
Once, two ancient beings, wormlike and spiraling, slipped into a universe of rainbow light.
Within that universe, they tried to find planets with life, where they could spread the shards within them to the lifeforms that inhabited those planets, where they could watch and wait for those shards to fuel conflict and growth and creativity until they reached maturity and could be harvested from those lifeforms.
However, this universe of rainbow light was no such place, and instead of worlds to fertilize, they eventually found a strange black creature. Its eyes were a blank white color, and its chest and waist were covered in bony, beige armor. It had one black arm, and one white arm, each with a matching spiral pattern wrapped around the forearm. Plumes of flickering black flames erupted from the back of each forearm and from its head. A yellow sphere sat on its “forehead”, a red one on the left side of its chest, and a blue one at the middle of its waist.
When the creature sensed the ancient beings in its world of rainbow light, it looked at them and let out a long, low sound like the cry of a whale, then promptly raised its right hand.
A sphere of energy with yellow lightning cracking around it formed over its palm, and in an instant, the sphere flew into one of the beings and seared its flesh.
These ancient beings had worm-like bodies so vast that they could seem to stretch into infinity, and yet this creature was powerful enough to sear and scar their flesh, to make them feel an emotion that humans would recognize as indignant anger. As they struck back, “anger” turned into “confusion” when the wounds they took would not heal as quickly as they were supposed to. That “confusion” became “fear” as the creature turned its arms into sharp drills to pierce through the white-hot beams of light that the beings shot at it, cutting deeper and more lethal wounds into their flesh. Their own attacks against this creature, though somewhat effective, seemed not to faze it as much as they should have; any time it lost an arm or a limb, the creature would regenerate it and retaliate with more lightning or another thrust from a drill arm. Its dogged, single-minded persistence in attacking the wormlike beings would eventually prove to be in its favor due to its frightening effectiveness against them.
So, the ancient beings fled, unwilling to let this creature wound them any further. Everything about the universe of rainbow light was wrong to them to begin with, and the ferocity of the creature only made things more confusing. On top of that, since the creature was the only lifeform there, the beings' purpose couldn't be fulfilled, and the entire endeavor was pointless.
Though they departed that strange universe, the creature they faced there did not forget them, and did not forget its hatred of them.
Because the creature did not forget its hatred, it reached its mind out whenever it could, piercing the wall of its universe to see what was beyond. It wanted to find those ancient beings. It wanted to fight, and fight, and keep on fighting them until it could kill them.
There were many times when the creature got a flash, a feeling of its enemies, and when that flash came through, it would emerge from its rainbow world of light in search of them, entering some new, strange place and attempting to find them.
Every time it then failed to find its enemies in that place, it would return to its world, and wait once again.
Eventually, one such flash made the creature emerge on a planet called Earth Bet.
The creature arrived in an empty school hallway where no students roamed, in front of a locker that a human would say had a “pungent” smell. After a moment of waiting, the creature realized that the source of the flash it was tracking trailed away into another world. Without hesitation, the creature shifted toward that world, determined to catch its quarry.
In doing so, it left an opening behind.
The second world the creature found itself in was a barren wasteland, shrouded in the darkness of the night. Stars twinkled in the sky overhead, and the creature found itself standing in front of a large, crystalline structure composed of other crystals that were folding and unfolding in silence.
The creature raised its hands. Its arms changed into drills crackling with lightning and set upon the crystalline structure with a violent lunge, aiming to pierce the heart of the crystalline structure in a single, angry blow. When the drill hit it and began to bite down into the its surface, the crystalline structure immediately lit up, and the creature began to feel its limbs twitch and tremble as if it were losing control of itself.
Back on Earth Bet, within the locker near where the creature had left its hole, a young woman twitched and screamed as the strange vision she was having was interrupted by a flash of pain and rainbow-colored light.
Despite the strange feeling in its limbs, the creature kept pushing, ignoring the glowing cracks slowly working across its body, and the crystalline structure grew brighter even as it fractured from the lightning playing across its surface and the drills digging deeper into it. On Earth Bet, the girl’s screams only intensified as the struggle continued.
Then, the tipping point came.
The creatures’ drills penetrated the very core of the crystalline structure, and without further ado, the structure shattered into fragments so small that they appeared to be sparkling motes of light. Shortly after that, the creature’s body was rocked by a set of spasms, and the cracks in its body spread out like a spiderweb before it too exploded in a corona of rainbow energy, mixing with the fragments before engulfing and destroying the alternate world that the crystalline structure once lived in.
On Earth Bet, the young woman’s voice reached a shrieking crescendo as her vision filled with rainbow light. The hole left by the creature in front of the locker where she was trapped pulsed briefly, and then, a beam of rainbow light burst out of the hole, punching through the ceiling of the school.
Right after that, a dome of rainbow light exploded outward from the hole, forcing the hole to close while the dome itself grew and rippled out across the area for miles.
The school, being at the epicenter of this strange phenomenon, got the worst effects. Lockers, clocks, and blackboards fell over, ripped from the walls. Shelving collapsed. Tables were flipped and splintered against the cracking walls. Portions of the roof imploded, dropping onto students and staff alike, while the linoleum underfoot popped up like the ground had been punched from below.
Outside of the school, what little grass there was flew into the air, and the few remaining trees were halfway uprooted. Cracks spread throughout the parking lot, cars were overturned, windows shattered, lampposts fell with gigantic screeches, and traffic lights swayed from the force.
And though the dome of light’s physical effects didn’t spread too much farther from the epicenter, another, more troubling effect, did.
Earth Bet was home to a particular type of human being, mixed in with the regular population—a group of humans that had lived through horrendous, life-shattering experiences and gained superpowers as a result.
Parahumans.
And unknown to a large population of both humans and parahumans, parahumans received their power from crystalline structures, shards of the ancient wormlike beings that the creature had been hunting for in the first place—shards exactly like the one the creature had just destroyed.
The destroyed shard, which at one time would have gained the appellation “Queen Administrator”, had been in the process of linking itself to the young woman trapped in the locker when the creature attacked it. The shard was geared toward “control”, and had been attempting to do just that to the creature even as it was linked to the young woman. Because the shard was destroyed precisely at the moment it established a connection to the creature while maintaining its link with the young woman, all the power that the shard nearly usurped from the creature flowed into her from the collapsing bond between the shard and her mind, along with the remnants of the shard itself. A gigantic reservoir of rainbow light surged into the young woman, sending powerful, strobing ripples across her body over and over again, and a connection, small and thin for the moment, to the creature’s world of rainbow light.
That power flooding that young woman and expanding over the city of Brockton Bay was also pure anathema to parahuman powers.
Every parahuman caught in the bubble of rainbow light immediately had their powers shut down, albeit without causing them harm. Those closest to the epicenter were the ones most severely affected—though they managed not to pass out, their powers immediately deactivated and stayed that way for several hours, giving them a violent headache on top of that. Though the effect and visibility of the dome itself lessened with distance, the epicenter was visible for miles around and the power-dampening effects were still felt by anyone that they applied to, even if it was only briefly.
All the while, as chaos spread across Brockton Bay in the wake of the rainbow dome and the screams of the injured echoed in the hallways of the school, the young woman now carrying that power within her body lay insensate in the locker where she’d been trapped, her right arm twitching and thrumming with the beginnings of a story that would change all of Earth Bet forever.
And in the blank world where the creature and that young woman’s Shard dueled to their last, something new, linked to the young woman, the world of rainbow light, and free of the Queen Adminstrator’s shackles, began to stir.
A Queen Crystal.