#11 Maxwell Higashi

| November 11, 2011 | 0 Comments

Name: Maxwell Higashi

Age: 20

Hometown: Thales, New York

Current Location: Parsons University; Swansea, New York

Occupation: Student (Undergraduate – Electrical Engineering); part-time stork clerk

Biography: Maxwell had a happy childhood. He lived in a suburb and lived in the same house for the first eighteen years of his life. He was hassled a bit for his mixed heritage, but aside from them his community and peers were very accepting. He isn’t overly aggressive, which is part of the reason why he didn’t graduate at the top of his class. His grades were always well above average, though. There was one moment when everyone was really afraid for him during the first year of high school when he seemed like he was scared of his own shadow and one step away from having a complete breakdown. He’s better now. Honestly. Really, Mom, I’m fine.

It was because of the aforementioned near breakdown that everyone was surprised when he decided to go to a school in Upstate New York. Thales is in the South-Western part of the state, whereas Swansea is pretty much Quebec. Or Vermont. Nevertheless, he won that argument with his parents, counsellor, and friends. He just needed out of Suburbia, and Middle-of-Nowhere-Almost-Canada, NY seemed to be the right place to go. So with more than a little worry on everyone’s part, he packed up his clothes and other apparent essentials for college dorm life and hit the road. He tried to bring as little as possible with him, but he still spent over 8 hours squished in the back seat with a ton of crap he didn’t know he needed.

OK, so all this background is boring. Let’s get to the fun stuff.

His dad’s a third-generation Japanese-American, so he doesn’t know Japanese, thank you very much. His mom is sixth generation English and Scottish, fifth-generation French and Irish, and who-knowsth-generation Polish. No one really knows when that got in the gene pool, but it’s there and isn’t leaving. But that’s not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is where she’s from.

Bramley, Illinois.

Where’s that? Never heard of it? I wouldn’t expect you to, since it’s a modern day ghost town now. Sure you might hear about it in history class, but who learns anything in that?

Bramley was a suburban town on the outskirts of Chicago. One of those commuter towns where people just kind of existed. It had some stuff, apparently. A movie theater, strip mall, Chinese restaurant run by Vietnamese people, and houses. Lots of houses. Then one day, Typical Town America exploded.

Not giant fireballs engulfing the town and ash clouds blocking out the sun. A fire started in one of the homes and exploded before it could be put out. A gas leak or something, is what most people were told. No, it wasn’t the fire that was the problem.

It was the gas.

No one knows what the gas was or what it was even doing in that house, and it broke down into harmless, untraceable elements before anyone official or unofficial could look at it. Hell, people only found out years later that it was mutagenic.

Correction: only a small handful of people found it was that. It’ll probably be another generation before the cat’s out of the bag and a bunch of kids start shooting fire from their eyes when they hit puberty (as if it wasn’t tough enough already).

Maxwell isolated no matter where he is, if he’s in Swansea or Thales,  because he’s a part of the first generation.

The first generation of kids to be born with extraordinary powers.

Freshman year sucked.

He’s better now. He’s figured out this weird electrical thing he can do as if he’s the freaking Energizer Bunny. He figures that he might be able to fly if he got it right, but at the moment he’s settled for climbing up walls like Spiderman. He doesn’t exactly shoot thunder from his fingertips, but subtly is so underrated. Why make a big light show of things when you can make them electrocute themselves?

A superhero name, you ask? Hell no. That’s just asking for trouble. Let him graduate first before that happens.

And put that spandex away.

Category: 2011, Superhero

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