I have tossed and turned all night. Sometimes I can’t control when I transform into a tiger and it keeps me up most nights. The sun is finally rising and it is time to get my day started. I get out of bed, stretch, and wipe off all the orange hairs stuck to my pajamas. I think about how glad I am that I can transform from human to cat so that I can have thumbs and don’t have to depend on another human to take care of me. I tried to keep my tiger transformation away from the landlord of my apartment… He eventually found out and said I had to pay the cat fee of $300 extra dollars a month. It is not great, but it is the price I must pay for upsetting the ancient cat gods. I fix my breakfast of chicken and tuna with a cup of chicken broth. Although I can transform back to a human, certain foods upset my stomach as a cat so I have to stick to a carnivorous diet. I look out the window and see the beautiful town of Otisburg but I can hear screaming. I transform into Ultra Tiger and throw on my super suit. I run out my apartment and follow my ears to the scene of screaming citizens. Muggers are a big problem in this town so my job is to take care of them. The mugger sees me coming and runs off. I chase him through the alleys. He throws the trash cans in my way, but with my cat like reflexes I jump over them with no problem. I noticed he was heading to the underground hideout. I curve through to another street and climb up the side of a building to the top. I spot the mugger and pounce down onto him (since cats do I always land on their feet). I took him out and held him down until the police arrived and took him away. Stopping a mugger is hard and takes a lot out of me so I always head back to my place and curl up for a nap for the rest of the day.

Day in the Life of a Superhero – Phantom Hex Edition: 

I woke up panting this morning. I always do whenever I have that dream. What is that dream you ask? Well I kind of have a secret government organization trying to murder me and I always have this reoccurring dream in which they are trying to kill me. It’s not a big deal really, I’ve honestly come to terms with it. I’m sure you’re now wondering why I have my own posse of federal agents after me. Well it all began when I accidentally ran into a bucket of chemicals my company was working on to help cure myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy. That is a big term for a rare condition characterized by reduced body fat and increased muscle size. Basically individuals affected have up to twice the usual amount of muscle mass in their bodies. They also tend to have increased muscle strength.

So back to my story, I ran into this bucket of chemicals and it poured all over me. Of course I took the precautions and ran to the shower to wash myself off, but it was too late. The chemicals had already seeped into my skin and were making their way into my bloodstream. I had become another breed of human.
It took me a while to realize that anything significant had even happened to me. I still looked and felt the same as I did before the accident, but my insides told a different story. I first realized my attainment of this inhuman strength when I accidentally tore my car door off of it’s hinges. Soon I discovered that I was able to pick up and hurl cars the length of a football field and knock over buildings with my bare hands. I mean you name it and I could more than likely do it. So this is where the secret government organization comes into play. They obviously didn’t want a super human roaming the streets. Thus, they set out to murder me. Lucky for me they are unsure of who I am. Pretty much, they had an informant who saw me pick up a car and move it because I wanted to park there that day (casual, I know). The informant was too freaked out to gain any viable information on me, but they know enough to be looking in the correct city in all of the United States. So needless to say, I am a wee paranoid and try to live my daily life under the radar.

Normally when I wake up I make myself some breakfast and down a cup of coffee before heading into work. I work at the same chemical plant where it happened. For some reason they think that I am going to be their tester of new chemicals since I miraculously survived the accident. Of course I don’t test chemicals for them, because that is extremely dangerous, but if they are willing to keep me around knowing my condition – it makes being myself a whole lot easier. So after I finish my normal nine to five job. I return home, eat a quick dinner, and head to my night job.

My night job consists of actually using my abilities for the greater good. I am assuming the agents that are out looking for me go home at five too. Therefore, I feel safe to go wander the streets in search of trouble. I dress like a normal person and do all of my work in secret. For instance, just last week I saved a woman who had gotten her purse taken from her as soon as she had gotten off the subway. I slyly walked by her, assured her I would return with her purse, and then set out in pursuit of the criminal. I don’t have super speed or anything, so nobody ever thinks it is weird to see a woman running down the street. What they don’t know is that I can, and do, lift cars and hurl them at criminals. So to make a long story short – when the criminal turned down an alley way, I picked up this cute punch buggy, threw it directly at him, he passed out, I grabbed the purse, and I returned it to the woman – just as I had promised.

For my superhero writing assignment,  I picked the “A Day in the Life of a Superhero” assignment. I was drawn to the random superhero generator, because I’m still brainstorming for my character dossier, and I wanted to save my best ideas for that.

I went into the generator and selected a) a random name and b) a female superhero. The bio given to me was:

My full story can be found here.

This assignment was pretty difficult for me. I struggled to come up with fresh ideas, especially because I didn’t want it to come out too corny. I got the idea to set the crime scene in a library because I work in the library. From there, the first literary references that came to mind (Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes) were from a class I took last semester on adaptations of classic literature. I found that the superpowers the generator gave me really carried the story, because I had to get creative with how I incorporated them into the story (also, they were the most entertaining part).

I’m not super thrilled, because I’m not a huge fan of my own creative writing, but I think I avoided being too cliche, which was my main goal.  I still cringe a little when I read through it though.

Every morning I wake up at the crack of dawn and head downstairs to my laboratory. Sounds more lush than it really is, I just emptied out an old storage room in my basement. Several years back, the Spanish government the university I was attending and contracted me to do some research for them in Barcelona. So, with little to no information about the project, I packed up my belongings and moved to a new city. Now I’ve done an extensive amount of work trying to create an indestructible super-soldier. On the day I was set to run the first trial of the experiment, something went terribly wrong. There was a massive explosion. I was knocked out for what seemed like days, maybe even weeks. Finally Spanish government officials came to check on me since they had heard any updates about the trial experiment. They were shocked at what they saw. The explosion must have affected something in my DNA because my appearance had completely changed. My skin glistened as if it were made of diamonds and my hair was bright orange and hot to the touch. The officials instructed me to go to the hospital and stay for a few nights while they fixed up my laboratory. At the hospital they informed me that I had gained special powers from the explosion. I now had diamond skin (the ability to transform my skin into a layer of diamond which makes me almost indestructible) as well as pyrokinesis (the power to control and manipulate fire). They did a lot of tests on me to figure out how I changed back and forth from normal human to super human but didn’t notice a pattern in any triggers. So now every day it’s a struggle to do my work because I’ll randomly turn into Diamond Flame without any notice. The more it kept happening, the more I would remove myself from my research. I started getting stronger and more in tune with myself. The Spanish government was getting frustrated with my lack of focus and motivation on the indestructible super-soldier project, so they began checking up on me randomly throughout the week. I finally had the courage to ask them why I was crafting this super-soldier. They admitted that they were fighting human trafficking in the south region of the country and wanted something indestructible to help the poor people who were being sold into sex slavery. I immediately had an idea. I suggested that we slow down the project until we came up with the right equations and formulas for the super-soldier so we didn’t have any other explosions, meanwhile using me in it’s place. Between my diamond indestructible skin and pyrokinesis powers, I would be unstoppable. They agreed after some hesitation. This begins my story as Diamond Flame.

Her name was Diamond Fly… She was once a scientist, but one of her experiments exploded giving her awesome, but unexpected superpowers. When she woke up from the explosion, she was able to turn her skin into diamond and vomit clothe-dissolving liquid.

The diamond skin allowed her to fight anyone and never be destroyed because diamond is the strongest rock created. She vomits cloth-dissolving liquid in order to embarrass and disarm her enemies of their armor, suits, and clothes.

When Diamond Fly wakes up into the morning, she goes into the world to work at her laundry mat job and receives signals on her watch that tell her she has someone to battle. The liquid is often used to embarrass her enemies after they’ve been knocked down because of her strength and don’t know what to do next, but that’s not all it does.

Today, she saved a young girl who was about to give a speech in front of hundreds of people by vomiting on them and removing their first layer of clothes, so that the girl could imagine the audience in their underwear. Diamond Fly’s goal is to help as many people as possible with the couple of talents that she has.

Diamond Fly is me.

A day in the life of me Venus Shadow begins with breakfast, even superheros need the energy of the most important meal of the day. Then after I have my bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich I begin fighting crime with my trusty sidekick, Shade who is a black lab, and the most loyal companion ever. After my home planet Zynophorm exploded due to the evil Spambot I am all alone, except for Shade. Shade and I usually start a day of crime fighting in Copenhagen by hopping from shadow to shadow to transport quickly and check out all the local villains. We start on the South side patrolling the rogue angels territory. I can always tell when someone needs saving from them because when they attack a huge beam of light shines out, and since shadows are my specialty, I notice very quickly, almost as fast as the speed of light. Then once I take care of those guys, I move to the East side where my arch nemesis Spambot resides. He is continuously trying to destroy Earth and all its humanity just like he did to my home planet. I use my secondary power of controlling the icy zero-pressure vacuum of space to put out all of his fiery balls of doom and save Earth, but he always seems to slip away before I can get ahold of him. After Shade and I get through with the Spambot we head home for a hot shower, a home cooked meal, and dessert of course. Every day is a new battle for Shade and I, but we are happy to fight to keep Earth and all its inhabitants safe.

Here is a quick overview of my powers and backstory:

“Using this Superhero Name Generator website to generate a superhero name as well as your powers, write a short story about the day in the life of YOU but as a superhero.”

For my first writing assignment this week, I chose to complete the Day in the Life of a Superhero assignment from the bank. To start, I went to the superhero name generator linked above and generated a random super hero name. From this, I got Morph Shadow and here is my superhero story:

At 9 a.m every morning, the birds of Fredericksville are chirping and the sky is blue. The Morph Shadow theme song plays and she rolls out bed, into a machine that puts my superhero uniform on me, because in reality, those tight leggings the super heroes wear are impossible to get on without help from robotics. After brewing some coffee, Morph Shadow boots up the computer to see if anyone is in need of help on twitter, using #helpmorphshadow. All in Fredericksville seems well BUT WAIT! Janice the super villain seems up to no good!

Morph Shadow begins scrolling through Janice’s twitter feed and discovers that she is plotting her evil plan to mess up the Seniors of UMW’s degree evaluations so they do not graduate on time! Morph Shadow MUST take action as she is a Senior of UMW in disguise, planning on graduating in Spring of 2018. She puts on her mask and flies in the Fall shadows of Fredericksville to Janice’s residence hall Russel.

Once Morph Shadow arrives at Russel, she sneaks into Janice’s room as she left her door unlocked while she was not there. Because Morph Shadow has the ability to hide in the shadows, she hid in the shadow of Janice’s room until her return. Then, she appeared and scared Janice. Morph Shadow picked up Janice with her super powers and flew her to Brompton, to visit President Paino.

Upon arrival, Morph Shadow told of Janice’s evil plan to stop the graduation of 2018. Janice tried to act like the jealous freshman she is, but President Paino did not buy it. Paino banned Janice from living on campus and put her on academic probation, as well as limited her access to technology without being supervised.

Morph Shadow saved the day! Now the Seniors of 2018 will graduate on time (hopefully) and Morph Shadow gets to enjoy her afternoon in bed with Netflix.