"Stings like a Smack" by Joaquín Physalius

Óla senhores e senhoritas, my name is Joaquin, but if you watch the news you may have seen me called "Man o' War". This is because I'm not your regular teenager, I have superpowers, and now I'm going to tell you the story of how I got them.

I was born in Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal, and I grew up there. As children, my friends and I would play together, pretending to be the superheroes we would read about in comic books (I was always Spider-Man), but never did I think that one day I would become one.

We would always play in the warehouses during the day, out of the heat, but at night they were used for parties. At some time or another every warehouse except one was empty and unused, easy pickings for teenagers to descend upon in the dead of night, armed with speakers and strobe lights.

But the one warehouse that was never empty belonged to a company called NEO, or at least that's what all of boxes were stamped with. I had no clue what that word meant, but I would in a few years. Sometimes we'd run among the boxes and try to find ones with the most interesting things inside. My friend once said he saw a giant metal crab being disassembled and put in a crate stamped for Louisiana. Another told us it must have been a family business, as some of the workers there looked identical, like clones.

Sometimes my pai, my dad,would drive my little sister and I to the beach across the river as well. I never had as much fun there as I did in the warehouses but I loved my family and I still enjoyed myself. It was a trip to the beach that changed me forever.

It was a scorching day, the sun beating down on us, heating up the sand beneath our feet so it felt like we were walking on hot coals. My pai sat in the bar, sipping his tonic water and reading his newspaper, so we had to entertain ourselves. The sand was too hot to spend too much time on so sandcastles weren't an option, but the sea was cool and refreshing, a wonderful respite from the unrelenting sun.

I sent my little sister, Liliana, to paddle in the shallow water while I blew up her rubber ring. She was a capable enough swimmer for a young girl but I was her big brother and I had to take care of her.

Once inflated, my sister climbed into the ring and I pushed her out into the glistening, turquoise water, grabbing the ring and kicking my legs to propel us out to sea. I loved swimming, just being around water always put me in a good mood.

However, I could never judge distances. It wasn't long before we were a great way away from the shore. The sun-worshippers seemed like tiny blips on the horizon, but I'm sure that was just my mind playing tricks on me.

Liliana hadn't noticed the great distance, she seemed preoccupied looking at something else. I went to turn us around to go back to shore but she stopped me and pointed out what she was so obsessed with. Pale blue balloon-like objects were floating towards us, the wind keeping them moving. As they drew closer I recognised the crest on the tops like a ship's sail, they were Man o' War jellyfish and my pai had warned me about them.

The keen reader may have noticed a connection here between the jellyfish and the name you hear me called on the news. That is not a coincidence.

I turned us around as quick as I could and started kicking, but the wind was picking up and the air sacs that kept the mass of stinging tentacles afloat were moving towards us, faster and faster. I started panicking, my breathing getting heavy, causing me to run out of breath.

I couldn't handle it any more and we had to stop. We were close enough to the shore to be heard if we shouted so I told Liliana to tell for help, but as soon as I issued my command I felt the first sting. A searing pain shot across my back like I'd just been whipped, I almost threw up it was so bad. But it didn't stop, they just kept stinging my entire body, over and over again. It wasn't long before I passed out, the last noise I heard was the lifeguard's jet ski.

I woke up in the back of an ambulance surrounded by bewildered looking paramedics. Outside I could see my pai in tears, hugging Liliana. I sat up on the stretcher and saw my body was covered in a criss-cross of red welts. Liliana turned to look at me in the ambulance and pointed at me, and in an instant I was getting a hug from my pai.

"They told me you were dead! They told me no-one could survive that amount of stings!" he exclaimed, his voice shaking because he had been so upset.

The paramedics then explained to me what had happened. I was stung repeatedly and pumped full of so much venom that I should have died. But, obviously, I didn't. All I had was an abundance of welts, no swelling of any kind, even though the paramedics expected that too.

This happened several years before I went to The Academy, several years before I knew about my powers. I was only ten then, but six years later I was walking through the warehouse district to visit a friend, and that's when I found out about my gift.

I was just passing the NEO warehouse when it happened. One of the guards there spotted me and shouted at me in a German accent that I shouldn't be there. I told him I was just passing through but he shouted at me again. Then he started to run after me. I panicked and ran too, but he was much more athletic, much faster than me.

Within an instant he had caught up with me and reached out to grab my upper arm. I was only wearing a vest, and as soon as he made contact with my skin he yelled loudly before collapsing from what I can only assume was pain. Three more men came out of the warehouse and chased me, one of them stopping to help his fallen colleague.

The other two never managed to find me, I hid in the maze of crates until well after I heard the screeching siren of an ambulance coming to the aid of the warehouse guard. Once I thought I was in the clear I went straight home, my friend could wait.

For a couple of days I never left the house, but then the day came when I had no choice. There was a loud knock at the door and I was the only one home so I had no choice. I opened the door, the actual door and the door to my new life, to find the man who had grabbed me at the dock. He was a tall, muscular man in a suit with slicked-back brown hair and deep brown eyes.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you," I blurted, almost as frightened as I was when the horde of jellyfish approached me.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he struggled his way through Portuguese with his German accent.

"It was just the other day at the warehouse, I could have sworn it was you."

He took out a notepad and pen from his pocket and made a few notes before assuring me that the man at the warehouse wasn't him, before asking me to accompany him to the hospital. I declined but he insisted it was of great importance and that it wouldn't take too long. He eventually wore me down so I went with him.

At the hospital I was assessed for every little thing the doctors could think of, but to no avail. It wasn't until I was sat on a bed with my shirt off that the doctors realised something. One of them had removed his gloves and patted me on the shoulder before screaming in excruciating pain and collapsing. He was taken and assessed, and had suffered a severe jellyfish sting. Skin samples were then taken from me, and it turned out that my skin was covered with minute nematocysts, which are the same things that cover the tentacles of jellyfish, just like the ones that stung me six years earlier. Essentially, touching me was like grabbing a jellyfish's tentacles.

Further tests showed that my sting wasn't deadly, but just incredibly painful, unless the contact with my skin was prolonged for such a time to fill someone with enough venom to kill them. Venom samples suggested this would be roughly ten seconds. All I could think of was that I would never be able to touch anyone without hurting them. I grew up wanting to Spider-Man, but I ended up as Rogue.

But the German man seemed pleased with the discovery. He kept talking about superpowers and my responsibility to the human race. He offered me a place at a school for people like me where I could work on my powers, hone them. He showed me pictures of a snow covered island with a large wooden house, a cunning guise for the secret facility hidden beneath, which housed a human tree and an old man that could make snow, and a few other students.

I thought about my family, my pai and Liliana. Pai had been so sad when he lost my mãe, my mother, and I didn't want to abandon him too, but the thought of never being able to touch him or Liliana again upset me. I agreed to go with the man, as long as we set off immediately so my family wouldn't try and hug me and get hurt. I would contact them later to tell them where I was.

So we set off from the port that very day, on a magnificent, wooden ship with crisp, white sails. That was the start of my new life, a life of heroes and villains, superpowers and magic. But I could still never feel the warmth of another person's skin pressed against mine, and no amount of saving the world would be worthy recompense for that.