"A Flash of Inspiration" by Rodney Gibson

Right, my origin story, let's do this. Quick explanation - I'm the human power supply here, a walking battery. I charge up the generators here every morning, thanks to my powers. Superconductivity, electricity generation and distribution, and a "propensity for puns", as Jonno calls it. I'd say I'm a proficient professional in punnery, and a wonder at word play too.

That's why this has the title it's got, I needed a lightning pun and then I got my "flash of inspiration". It's just any sort of word play, I'm kind of like the comic relief here, and Adam too. Most of the people here have good senses of humour, but Adam and I just had that spark when we met.

Anyway, enough of my bromance, I've got to tell you all about how my life got flipped turned upside down.

Unusually, my story starts at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the town of Wardenclyffe. Nikola Tesla was working on a wireless transmission tower there when he had a sudden realisation. Although he knew he never wanted to marry, he didn't want his brilliance to end with him. He needed a child to carry on his legacy.

There was a little problem though. Poor old Nicky was fifty. He was quite a looker when he was younger, but things weren't what they are now and you couldn't just knock boots with any old stranger. You had to go out courting.

But how could Tesla court when he had no intention of marrying? Money. The main reason he ran out of money on the Wardenclyffe Tower may have been the stock market crash, but some of old JP Morgan's funds were diverted into the hands of a young lady. That lady was my great-grandmother. Yeah, so just to clarify, I'm Nikola Tesla's great-grandson. Pretty awesome, right? It's not really got anything to do with my powers, but I just wanted to tell you. I should also tell you they everything gets even better. I'm getting all tingly just thinking about it, but that's probably static and not the nerves.

My dad, Tesla's grandson, he's a physics teacher. I know, like he could have an alternate career with a direct ancestor like that. And it was in one of his physics classes that my life took a shocking turn.

I was 17 at the time and in one of his high school physics classes. I wasn't actually that interested in physics, but I did it just keep him happy. He's a really great guy, he's the one I get my sense of humour from, and my bright blue eyes. My black hair comes from my mom though. Her ancestors were Croatian immigrants that came over to America in the late nineteenth century, and she's the first member of the family since then to marry someone without a very strong Croatian lineage.

So thanks to his grandpappy, dad has a keen interest in electricity and he likes his students to know that. As such he tends to diverge from the accepted syllabus every now and then just to teach us how to rewire a toaster or build a circuit. He's quite a practical guy, but it's a good thing the curriculum involves electrostatic charge and circuits and stuff, otherwise we'd never get anything we need to done.

So one lesson he brought out a Van der Graaf generator. He loved it, he'd built it himself, and he was ecstatic to show the class. He was almost as proud of that as he was of his musical Tesla coil kit. Every now and then we'd walk into class to hear something from "Star Wars" or "Pirates of the Caribbean", or worst of all was when it was someone's birthday, and he always seemed to know...

It was a miserable kind of day for my life to change forever. We'd had some pretty arid days and now a thunderstorm was brewing. It was a big one, there were pictures of bolts hitting the Golden Gate Bridge on the news. It seemed pretty serious at the time, but I wished I'd know just how serious it would get.

So my dad gathered us around the generator, that he'd placed on the table right next to the long window at the back of the classroom. There were two things he always did with it - getting someone with long hair to touch it so their head would end up looking like a sea anemone, and getting someone to hold their finger close to the person touching the generator's finger so some electricity would pass between them. Put simply, that second bit looked kind of like the finger thing in ET.

After doing those, he tried something new. He went to go fetch a Bunsen burner from the store cupboard, giving me a bit of time to chat with my friend, Alf. He'd been picked to do the ET thing with Vanessa, the head cheerleader, so he was simply alerting me to the fact that he was "obviously in there". I was about to remind him that she was working her way through the entire football team, but dad came before I got a chance.

He hooked up the Bunsen to the gas tap and explained that he'd tried before and managed to start the flame with a spark from his hand while he touched the generator, and he wanted us to give it a go. About five people tried before it worked, but as far as I'm aware ginger Earl is still referred to as "firestarter", which is a lot better than ginger Earl.

Anyway, dad left to put the Bunsen back in the store cupboard and I overheard him starting to have a chat with the science technician. I saw my opportunity to try something new with the generator. I jumped up from my seat and put my hand on the generator before asking who wanted to try a "static kiss". Everyone laughed, but in a split second their faces changed to shock as a bolt of lightning hit the power cable outside the window - the power cable that kept the school juiced up.

The sudden surge of electricity shorted out the entire school, but not before pumping my body so full of electricity that it launched me across the room and into my dad's desk. In all honesty, I should have died.

But I didn't. I woke up in a hospital bed a couple of days later. The doctors had absolutely no idea how it happened. They said that it seemed like the electricity stopped my heart, but I'd somehow stored some that kickstarted it. My heart seemed a bit erratic and I had a couple of broken ribs from the way I hit the desk but I'd be out soon.

Oh yeah, then the doctors told me the weird thing. Apparently, everybody that touched my skin got a tiny static shock. Well almost everybody. Alf ran to me when I'd been shocked and he touched my neck to check for a pulse. I knocked him out cold, like a zap from a taser. He recovered quickly, but he was still shocked.

So once the doctors thought everything was okay they discharged me. I went back to school as though nothing has ever happened, and it helped that dad had told the class that saw everything to keep shtum. That didn't stop Alf though.

"Dude! You frikkin' died!" he made a point of saying as soon as we were out of earshot of the other students.

"Yeah, pretty cool, right?" I replied. We were walking to the music rooms for lunch. We didn't play instruments but there was always an empty room to chill in.

"You think I don't know that? Then there's the static shocks you gave everyone. It's crazy man."

"Sorry about the whole taser thing by the way."

"No worries, dad's a mall cop so I'l take his and get my own back on you later."

At this point we had to cross open ground. The storm cloud hadn't dissipated in the week since the accident and the ominous shadow constantly loomed overhead, a reminder of how I almost died.

But it was the weirdest storm ever. Still no rain and there hadn't been any lightning since I was put into hospital. At least until now.

The power lines got lucky that time. I didn't. A bolt of lightning struck me directly, but it didn't launch me sideways this time. I dropped onto one knee as the electricity coursed through my body, but then I stood up. Nothing felt wrong. But then lightning struck me for the second time, and then a third. Everyone around was amazed at how many times I was hit, and how I managed to get up each time.

I know now that I was absorbing the electricity, keeping it held within me, but at the time I didn't have a clue. That meant I also had no idea that I absorbed too much I would have to let some out, and that's what happened next.

Alf told me later on that after I got hit by the third bolt he could see blue flashes of lightning run over my body, he could hear them crackle. Then, just as suddenly as the bolts came, I "exploded". I didn't, not literally, but what he meant was that I discharged. It was like a wave of blue lightning sweeping outwards from me in all directions, releasing the energy. Nobody was harmed, but it did short out every electrical appliance for about a kilometre.

The bolts did stop then, and over the next few days the storm overheard disappeared. By the time it did everyone had though up a nickname for me - "Lightning Rod". All they knew was what happened that day, and the day with the Van der Graaf generator, but there was so much more. If I left my hand on any electrical appliance I would feel the electricity running through it, at least until I'd sapped it all. People still got static shocks when they touched me and if I got too close to a radio it would just play white noise.

Then there was the day I got mugged. I can tell you now that it wasn't a pleasant experience, unless you like getting pinned against the wall of an alleyway and threatened with a switchblade. But at least it was a switchblade, otherwise I might not have been here to tell this story.

I learned a while beforehand that when I got very emotional, for any reason, I would get unstable and if be more likely to short out every appliance in the room. So when some guy in sunglasses with a scarf over half of his face presses a knife into my neck hard enough to draw blood, I'm gonna get a little bit antsy. And boy did I give him a shock, in both senses of the word.

Everything was in my favour - the knife and the handle were metal and the guy had fingerless gloves on, so when I felt my hairs standing on end I did nothing to hold it in, I just let him have it.

He was flung against the opposite wall hard enough to loosen his tight grip on the blade, saving my skin. I went over to check if he was still alive by trying to find a pulse in his neck, and that's when I found something new out about the power I had. As my middle- and fore-finger came close to his neck, almost touching, two little sparks shot across the gap like a taser.

So once I'd calmed down I checked again and he was alive, so I left him to get home and practice my newfound power. I did karate so I had a training dummy I could try it on so nobody got hurt, but Alf was willing to let me do it on an actual, conscious human being as long I promised to recharge his phone whenever it ran out and we were away from a charger. I'd only realised I could do that when I noticed my own phone had spent a week since the Van der Graaf incident on no lower than 90% battery, and bearing in mind it was an iPhone and I was 17 that's pretty impressive.

All of the little abilities I had were growing, I'd find I had a new one every so often and it was just a little surprise. It was like that time a couple of years ago when I found out I could wiggle my ears, but that wasn't a product of deadly amounts of electricity being jolted through my body.

But tasers and phone chargers are pretty soft compared to a full-on lightning storm. That's the kind of thing I really wanted to do. What's the use in getting zapped every time you go outside in a thunderstorm when you don't have powers you can use for a greater good, even if you do get some pretty cool Lichtenberg figures from it (they're reddish, raised bits of skin that look jagged like a lightning strike and I sometimes get permanent ones from being struck). Needless to say, I was at that point in my life when I needed a purpose. Now I'm sure of a career in renewable energy research when I'm not saving the world, but back then it was more difficult, back then I hadn't powered an entire island.

It was really unexpected, the way I found out about my proper ability. I don't know how I'd kept it hidden away inside me without even myself knowing about it. But one day I woke up with a cold, and it was when I was watching TV that night that I found out.

You know when people ask what other people were doing when they found out that a famous person does and they know exactly what it was. I was just sat on the sofa on a Wednesday night and relaxing after a few hits during a bad lightning storm by watching reruns of "How I Met Your Mother". And it was during an Axe commercial that I sneezed.

I brought my hands up to my face and as I bent over (I'm a fairly explosive sneezer) a bolt of lightning shot out of my hands and straight into the TV, blowing it up. It was over in a flash but I knew exactly what had happened, so I made sure to stock up on medicine.

It didn't happen again until my cold had gone away, and when I was better I was ready to start training. Every day at lunch I'd go with Alf to the roof of the science building (dad encouraged me to train since he was fascinated by my powers, so he let me have the key to the roof) and I'd try and focus as hard as I could. It was tough, but if I charged up enough beforehand from a plug socket I could hit the posts from the football goal. After I did it a few times it got easier, I realised what I had to do, how I had to feel, to do it. Before long I was doing trickshots from under my legs, scorching the field goal.

I even started thinking of going pro with my powers. The outfit I have now is based on a few sketches I made back before I joined the ACES, but I'm no artist so I needed Dean to work his magic.

Then there was the name. I had plenty of trouble with that to start with. "Lighting Rod" was what I started with but then everyone at school would know the identify of San Francisco's masked vigilante. "The Human Taser" made me sound like a crappy amateur wrestler, and so "Stun Gun" was the best I could think of. That was until an idea hit me like a bolt from the blue. A catchy, one-word name like "Flash" or "Electro". I would call myself "Tesla" and the legacy of my great-grandfather would live on.

But before I got out the sewing kit and started making a crotch-strangling spandex costume I got an offer. A letter came from the ACES, I'd never even heard of them but they knew everything about me and my power. Apparently all of the men in my family that they new of had some sort of affinity with electricity but it manifested itself in different ways, and my manifestation was a lot more obvious - a result of it being kicked into overdrive by the Van der Graaf incident.

They wanted me to join them and work on my powers. Apparently I had so much more potential, there were possibilities of me generating my own energy instead of sapping power supplies and creating intense, concentrated balls of lightning.

I told dad and he said I should definitely go for it. He wanted me to use my ability for good and this was my way of doing it. With some persuasion he managed to get mom on board too.

In order to get there I had to get a boat in Virginia. It was pretty awkward, a couple of days' drive, but my older sister lived over there and we hadn't seen her for a while, so now we had two reasons for the road trip. I'm sure she'd love to hear about her brother being a superhero.

So we set off to Virginia in the old family sedan a week earlier than necessary to allow for some socialising. It was a good reminder of why I should go and join the ACES. Spending time with the people I may have to protect in the future gave me a reason to leave them.

Sorry, that got a little bit serious towards the end. I bet you weren't expecting the class clown to be so sentimental. It's just that I've met so many great people here, but I miss the people I've left behind. I'm still in touch with Alf though. Apparently he's heard of a lightning research centre near the village of Kifuka in the Democratic Republic of Congo and he wants to go there after college.

I guess I should I should finish on a joke, just to lighten the mood, and you're probably sick of electricity puns now so I'll try something different. What's the difference between a weasel and a stoat? One is weaselly recognised and the other is stoatally different!