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I’ve been thinking.
The key to being a successful super-hero is to not generate any ill will from potential super-baddies during the transformation process.
Pissing-off potential super-baddies during your transformation will inevitably lead to a super-hero life full of conflict with your nemesis. When you should be out ridding the streets of crime your time will instead be entirely consumed with the latest revenge caper your super-baddie nemesis has devised to get back at you, almost certainly for some perceived slight visited upon him while you were pre-occupied with the process of super-hero transformation.
Perhaps his girlfriend made a move on you just as you and your potential super-baddie arch-enemy were experimenting with a new process of super-cooling some isotope thing that created a deadly radiation cloud.
The cloud will transform you into a super-hero, but leave your more fiendishly-minded friend horribly scarred and tormented because he stayed late and worked on his own (despite health and safety concerns) just to try to prove to his ex-girlfriend that he was as good as you.
Whatever happens, or how it happens, you can bet it’s going to leave you blessed with super-powers and your ex-friend disfigured and wearing a mask of some sort. Almost certainly not a nice mask either, but one that is horribly symbolic of the failed friendship, experiment, whatever: just know he’ll be pissed off and looking to get back at you.
To guard against this, I’m going to take a good look at my friends and create a bit of distance from anyone who may be my mortal-enemy in the making.
Take Jerry. Jerry and me get on really well at the moment, but sometimes he’s all angry with me for no good reason. I think it’s because of his father. His father owns a big chemical plant in Scunthorpe (you see where this is going) and expects Jerry to get involved at some point. But Jerry wants a more simple life, one free of fatherly-expectations, one where he could just have a regular job, like mine.
I bet if we get involved in some chemical-related cock-up, I’ll get the super-powers and he’ll get the face full of acid that’ll trigger latent family-based psychotic tendencies that his father has put to good use as a businessman.
I think I’ll give old Jerry a wide berth for a while.
Another mate, Kevin, works the line making cooked-chilled convenience food and is thus exposed to many strange chemical and machines.
Imagine this scenario: I give him a top tip for the horses, which he stakes all his savings on (he doesn’t do things by halves). While watching the race at work, he gets over excited. His horse loses. Kevin, raging by now as I think he might, loses his balance and falls into a vat of Mediterranean sun-blush tomato sauce. I dive in, ever fearless, and we are both pulled from the vat covered in reconstituted tomato paste. Now as I went into the vat with a noble cause on my mind, I’ll come out a super-hero. But Kev went in thinking about the horse that has just lost, and the muppet who gave him the tip, i.e. me.
Before you know it I won’t be able to leave the house without Kevin, probably wearing a horse mask, or dressed like the Devil’s jockey, planning and scheming up some wacky and satisfyingly symbolic revenge. Perhaps he’ll try to make me into pasta sauce with added horse. Who knows how his now fiendishly warped mind will work?
So just in case I’m about to be transformed into a super-hero I’m going to stick to one simple Jesus-like rule that should make my life as an immortal much more simple: do unto others as if they have the potential to become a pain-in-the-neck all-powerful super-baddie.
Either that or I’ll have a sex change. For some reason, lady super-heroes rarely piss off anyone during their transformation process.