Battle Scars

I have lovely purple splotches all over my skin. I've been taking pictures for posterity, since one of them seems to be developing into the shape of the Virgin Mary. Well, the Virgin Mary as envisioned by Mr. Potato Head. But it's still a cool bruise. And on second thought, those pictures are mostly for me. They're in a place that posterity doesn't need to see.
I'm glad to say, I'm taking my injuries like a champion, and not whining incessantly. It does suck that the cold packs are useless, though. I need to invest in a topical numbing gel or something. One of the hidden downsides to cryogenesis.
The ringing in my ears has changed pitch. Not sure what that means. I've been tinkering with my sister's electric keyboard, and if I could actually tell the keys apart, I'd know exactly which note was playing constantly in my head. As it is, it's the third highest black key. Very annoying.
Firecracker got stalked by some intrepid reporter, who managed to capture a few awkward moments on camera before he blasted away. It's hard to avoid the news clips, though I really don't want to see his face anymore. There's a betting pool on how long before he gets unmasked. I find that kind of speculation really morbid, but I'm guessing not long. He doesn't have the brains or the cunning to keep a secret like that. He's just some jerk with flamethrower fists. Of course, if anybody on the beach got a good look at him, he'd be busted even quicker. I didn't see his face, and I'm not sharing any other identifying details. Yuck.

Why Things Exploded

You know the saddest part about last night? The laser-wielding sharks are the ones who stuck around to rescue people. Firecracker lit out of there after the explosion. I don't know if he ever got his pants back. The sharks are the ones who pinpointed the injured people in the water and on the beach, and hovered over them until the rescue crews arrived. It turns out that Waverider lost track of his son for fifteen minutes, and sent out sharks with face-recognition software to find him. The kid turned up a few minutes after the explosion. When your dad's a pioneer in the field of surveillance technology, I guess you have to go to great lengths to get a little privacy to make out with your boyfriend. I'm shocked he managed to slip the tracers for so long, honestly. I guess it helps that he was on dry land.
Firecracker is in the doghouse. He blew up the pier, wrecked every car parked next to the beach, ripped up the sidewalk and street, knocked over a ridiculous amount of palm trees, blasted most of the beach all over the street, capsized eight boats and oh yes injured a number of innocent bystanders, among them your friendly neighborhood cryogenetic. And nobody can find him to give him the bill, though a very angry Waverider is looking. And all because he never bothered getting on friendly terms with the local supers, or even reading the basic government info packets. I mean, seriously. If it's mechanical and looks like an aquatic creature in this part of Florida, it belongs to Waverider. Taylor's got a great story about scuba diving and taking pictures of the lobsters migrating, except one of them started taking pictures of her.
I've been marinating my bruises in the pool all day. The pool is icy cold after several hours of me splashing around, which is just as well, since I don't particularly want my sister's company right now. She's been mumbling just to annoy me. I know she's mumbling, since I can hear everyone else over the ringing in my ears, but she takes an unwholesome pleasure in mocking me. I can't imagine why.

Boom

Quite a spectacle tonight. I was there. Let me start from the beginning.
I went down to the beach with my family unit to catch the fireworks and browse the stands. I got the coolest set of earrings- hoops with a thread snowflake pattern, except in orange. I shall wear them everywhere. My sister got a hot dog, and hopefully asked them to hold the e coli. She's looking a little green, though that might just be from the rest of the evening. I trusted the frozen foods stalls a bit more, and slurped a lemon slushie. The noise is half the appeal of it, and it wouldn't taste quite as good without my sister's annoyance as garnish. Mmm.
We got ourselves settled on the beach away from the speakers blaring obnoxious patriotic music, and got a prime spot right in front of an obnoxious patriotic asshole. You know the type. The one who wishes he were military, and watches war movies all the time, but is far too undisciplined to actually sign up. He got loud, hollering "Bring the rain!" and other slogans while we still had fifteen minutes to go. I didn't turn around, though my I had a few choice words on the tip of my tongue that could have slagged the sand into molten glass. See, I can be polite. It was dark, and we still had five minutes to go when the commotion started. The sea was thick with boats, and I heard hollering from over the waves. Most of the boats had little greenish lights on them, so I thought for a moment they had lifted out of the water. Then the lasers started. Flying robotic hammerhead sharks with rotating laser turrets on their heads. It took a while to process that. The crowd started running pretty much immediately. I wish I could say I stayed behind to protect someone who had fallen and was being trampled. I wish it were that heroic. I stayed because I wanted to see what was going on, and I thought I could tough it out if necessary. Just like all those other idiots left on the beach.
The hammerheads were still about thirty yards out when the asshole behind me started stripping. I noticed it when his pants landed on my towel and he bolted past me, heading for the water. I got a brief glimpse of something I really wish I hadn't seen, and then he shot out over the water like a jet. Exactly like a jet, in fact. Right down to the blistering streams of fire propelling him. I didn't see his next move, because I was about ten feet away from my previous position, blinking the white hot afterimage out of my eyes and shielding my face from the spray of burning sand he kicked up. Yeah, that's Firecracker. Our hero.
He'd pretty much ruined my night vision, so all I saw were crazy streaks of light every time he maneuvered and blasted a shark blimp, but I heard the boats frantically bumping and roaring to get away. The police boats were whooping, the sharks were making an eerie feedback screech, and Firecracker was bawling "Get some!" as the exploding sharks rippled back soundwaves from the condos for double the ridiculous amount of noise. By this time I had enough sense to retreat under a lifeguard hut, since at least two dozen sharks were out over the beach, using their lasers like catfish use their feelers. They weren't burning anything, though I kept my eyes far away from the lights bouncing off the sand. Blindness, you know.
The other people under the lifeguard hut were predominantly male, young, and the type to surf in a hurricane. I don't surf, but we got along fine, whispering commentary and muffled shrieks as if this were a sporting event. In a way, it was. Firecracker was giving a lot better than he got. The sharks mostly veered away from him, sweeping their lasers over the boats beneath. The details got a bit blurry, since a huge cloud of steam from Firecracker's propulsion billowed up around him. Thankfully, none of the boats were that close to shore.
It was hard to keep track of things between the darkness, the flashing lights, the fire and the sand, but Firecracker veered towards the pier, chasing a shark or something. The pier from which they launch the fireworks. We all realized this at pretty much the same time. My response was on the vulgar end of the spectrum, though nobody seemed to hear it since we were all running as fast as we could over the sand, and didn't stop once we hit the boardwalk. I don't even know where the flying sharks went, because I was setting a new landspeed record.
The explosion was immense. No. There aren't words immense enough to describe what it was. It was ten minutes of fireworks, an entire pier packed full of explosives, rolled into one awful moment. It didn't make a sound, any more than a tidal wave makes things wet. It slammed into me, and I felt it in my rib cage, not my ears. Even as far as I was from the pier, I lost contact with the ground. The next thing I know, I was watching a paramedic mouth words at me as she attacked my eyes with a flashlight. Nothing's broken. Just a little shock and some scrapes and bruises. They don't hurt yet. A little blood came out of my ears, but I'm wearing my new earrings and the hearing is back in one ear, mostly. All fine.
My parents are pissed, but also feeling way guilty, since they lost track of their offspring in the crowd, and I've got just enough bruises to play it up for sympathy. I teared up through their lecture, not because anything they said got through to me. I don't know why. The whole evening, I guess. I've barely spoken a word to them, but I'm spilling my guts now and I don't know why I'm crying again.
Stupid Firecracker.

Broken Prison

Have you been watching the news? I never realized that ice could do that much damage. It's a sobering thought. They'll have to build an entirely new prison, and prisons aren't exactly delicate works of architecture. It's not just broken pipes and frosty windows. The prison doesn't really have right angles any more, just bulging mounds and spires of ice with dark lumps trapped in it. There are no sharp lines in the ice, just irregular wobbles and curves, but it doesn't look funny or harmless or beautiful at all. I've seen those National Geographic pictures of icebergs and shattered rocks, but it always seemed so abstract, so artsy. When you look at something like a broken concrete and iron building, wrenched from its foundations and shattered into jagged boulders slimed over with ice, then cryogenesis stops seeming all winter wonderland pretty. There are people impaled on icicles, or frozen to death, or with blocks of ice in their lungs. There are parts of people everywhere, and the ice is so dirty that there's no way of telling what's grime and what used to be part of a person. The media has been merciless in its coverage. They're still extracting prisoners from the wing that was furthest away from Killer Frost, and they've had to pull a lot of the Midwest pyrokinetics to do it without boiling anyone to death. Even with all the professionals and tools far more sophisticated than hairdryers and screwdrivers, people are coming out minus their faces, fingers and skin.
This is ugly. I got the shivers watching the news feeds. It makes me afraid of what I can do. I would never, ever do something like this. But one day, I might be able to. And nobody is going to have as much confidence in the strength of my principles as I do. Nobody would think my word that I'm a good person would be enough to keep everyone else safe. And I'm not entirely sure I could blame them for that.
When a cryogenetic like me starts seeing eye to eye with people like Angela Slater, it's confusing to everyone's world view. But honestly, superhumans can be terrifying at times. Even when you're one of them.

Sometimes The World Sucks

This Thanksgiving, I will give thanks that I am no longer in a class with Amie. Unfortunately, Thanksgiving is a ways off, and I've still got to endure one more class with her before exam week starts. Wow, can she derail class discussions. How can you turn an overview of the themes in Kafka's Metamorphosis into a discussion of druids? How? I was there, and I still don't understand the process. And then I had to ditch my lunch plans to talk to the professor about essay topics, which I didn't get to do in class because Miss Motor Mouth was doing her "I'm really thinking hard and might have an epiphany any minute" face, and the professor bought in to it and actually spent thirty minutes trying to untangle her thought processes.
I ripped the knees out of another pair of jeans. Between them, my eight pairs of jeans have nine patches. One pair is basically patched from shin to mid-thigh. This is not good. I tried to sew a patch on to the latest rip, but quit after the second time I stabbed the needle into my flesh right above the thumbnail. Crap like that is why I don't lend out my sewing kit. It's seen more blood than a surgeon's scalpel.
Velocity got out of intensive care today. Her handlers released a brief clip of her propped up in bed, but they're still keeping the media circus away from her. God, it's heartbreaking. Her face doesn't even look like her face. The clean new costume she's wearing makes it even worse somehow.
There was something in the news about Vector again. He was posing with a firefighter and wearing a shit-eating grin. I didn't bother reading the headline.

Grudging Praise

I might have to take back some of the stuff I said about Vector. Not all of it, but some. He's showing a surprising level of tact in his interviews with the press recently. Even though he's an ego-driven blowhard, I don't think this is the way he wanted to one-up Velocity. He's doing a lot better with the solar vampire thing than I expected, but he can't really play it up for the press like he usually does, because that would look like kicking the competition while she's down. It's easier for me to find Vector's admirable traits when he's not constantly trying to point them out to everyone. He might actually be a decent guy under all the macho posturing. For all his criticism of Velocity, he's got to respect her, since he did model himself on her, right down to the exact same flight capacities in his exoskeleton, and even the color scheme. He's got one hell of a chip on his shoulder about powers elitism, but I guess it is pretty hard for a metatech to hold his own among supers, and he has worked damned hard to get where he is.
Vector's most redeeming feature among his many, many flaws is that he's serious about helping people. No matter how much he cashes in on his moment of glory (Vector Cola? Seriously?), he's still willing to put in time on the unglamorous and hard work. It's not all kitten-rescuing photo ops, despite what his spin doctors would like you to think. He's taken on the Goorillas five times. Nobody else wants to do it even once.
It looks like Vector might be stuck in South Carolina for a while, since Warbird is still missing. Not even the government telepaths can find him. Come to think of it, has anyone seen him since The Paradox? Crap, I think he's a time traveler. That would explain the retro-futuristic plane, and his 60-year career. I really hope he didn't get caught up in The Paradox.
It's hard to believe in a benevolent, fair universe when things like The Paradox can happen. The Paradox didn't differentiate between the timeline-wreckers and the 9-to-5 precogs. It shut them down or made them disappear regardless of whether they made a difference in the course of history, or even wanted to. And it wasn't just outed precogs and professional time travelers that were getting killed. It was anyone who ever accidentally walked through a temporal vortex, or had one vision, even in a dream. They weren't even all supers, just people in the wrong place at the wrong time. I still don't know why Jack disappeared. I don't know what happened to him to make The Paradox take him away. It's terrifying, to think that the world is that arbitrary.

This Is Not My Homework

My campus is weathering the storm pretty well. We're a tough crowd. The dining hall, showing a rare sense of humor, is serving chicken soup, which is actually pretty good for a change. Classes go on, even though they are sparsely populated. Amie is coughing so hard that I'm surprised her entire respiratory system hasn't come loose. I'm actually impressed, since she's the mouse-sneeze type who never seems to have bodily functions in public. Rest assured, she does. Despite her racking coughs, she is still taking notes in that perfectly round indecipherable handwriting. I can't tell her letters apart. Class discussion is kind of strained, since pretty much everyone has a sore throat.
I'm technically in good enough shape to do the mountains of catch-up work I need to do, but I'm coddling myself for a bit longer. I don't want a relapse. By which I mean I am a lazy, lazy procrastinator, and blogging is far more fun than reading postmodern drivel. I've been keeping up with the news feeds all day. Vector finally put his money where his mouth is, and is taking over Velocity's job until they can find a long-term replacement. That means he's got a hell of a commute when there's an emergency back at headquarters, but the guy can go supersonic, so I don't feel too bad for him. I guess the rest of the Lightning League can pick up the slack while Vector's picking off the solar vampires in South Carolina. I really hope they can get hold of Warbird fast, though. Baron Dynamo (I forget his real name) gets out on parole pretty soon, and I'd rather have Vector closer to the West Coast, since Shining Citadel has turned into a frigging quarantined ivory tower. I know they can't afford to risk the planet-movers and star-smashers getting a sniffle in case there's an imminent threat of world destruction, but seriously, way to turn your back on us mere mortals.

It's Not The Black Death, People

According to the major news sites, nothing improves a crisis more than a colored map. Florida is orange, whatever that means. Geez, you'd think this is the Ebola Virus the way people are reacting. Nobody's puking blood. This isn't the end of the world or the end of superheroes. Granted, poor Velocity's going to be in traction for about a year, but she'll probably be okay. It could have been a lot worse. Nobody in that building died either, thankfully. I'd send Velocity a get-well card, except she's probably already got a pile of them big enough to wallpaper the hospital three times over, and she probably won't be able to read them until they take her off the morphine anyway. So I'll just send good wishes in her direction, and hope there's a telepath out there who can pass them on. I hope she's going to be okay.
My campus is in full-on panic mode. Which isn't too different from your average Saturday night. I don't think anyone here's gone to the hospital from the flu yet, except for Lydia, and she's a hypochondriac anyway. She's fine. This isn't much worse than the time the dining hall served the beanbird-contaminated snow peas last year and took out half the campus. I have never been more grateful that I don't eat my veggies. People were throwing up things that chirped, for crying out loud.
The president of our school has issued an email, which basically boils down to "This is not a zombie outbreak! Don't shoot infected people on sight! Wash your hands! Take some vitamins!" Wow, really helpful. Every single person I've encountered today told me to stay hydrated and get some rest. Except for Dani, who just breaks into impromptu renditions of Monty Python's 'bring out your dead' skit every time she sees me. Which is every five minutes, since she's my roommate. I'm about to strangle her.
Nobody on my campus has been power-outed that I know of. Except maybe me. I don't know if Dani knows. The ice chips on the carpet were melted by the time she helped me flip the mattress, and I put the sheets through the dryer before she saw them, so maybe I got away with it. But my hair was still wet in the morning, and I'm not sure if there was a noticeable amount of ice left on me by the time I made it to the couch, or if she could even see it in the dark, even though she had to have been really close to put a blanket over me. She doesn't act like she knows. She hasn't made any ice puns or blackmailed me or anything. How can I ask her if she knows without revealing everything if she doesn't? Today I casually mentioned something about trying to break the fever with ice cubes. Yeah, that's plausible. God, I suck at this secret identity thing.

Answering Imaginary Mail

So, it's Saturday and I'm bored. Most of my friends are busy hacking up their lungs, and I'm tethered to the tissue box, so I can't really go anywhere without getting the plague-bearer evil eye. Therefore, in light of recent developments in the chatrooms and the dining-hall gossip, I will perform a civic service and dispel some of the batshit crazy rumors out there by broadcasting my boundless wisdom and invaluable experience as a superhuman with the flu.

Q: OMG are people gonna know I have superpowers if I get sick?
A: Okay, that was a MASSIVE breach of medical protocol on the part of the staff at Merriman General. I don't care if she is a senator's daughter; she has a right to her privacy. So, assuming you're not going to a hospital staffed by chimpanzees, you shouldn't have to worry about your secrets leaking to the press. If your superpowers are physical, like superstrength, the nurses will probably be able to tell, but if they don't change the structure of your body much, you might be able to squeak by unnoticed. But if you go into a hospital with a binary cardiovascular system or wings or something, it's not unreasonable to expect that to show up on your private medical records from now on. And your insurance.

Q: My co-worker is sick. I've always suspected he was a superhuman! This is conclusive proof, right?
A: For the record, the cyborgs are getting hit the worst proportionally, because their immune systems generally suck. However, the baseline humans compose the vast majority of the people getting hospitalized. Supers are just getting the most press right now, since 1) people like Diamante and The Universal Remote generally don't get sick, and 2) an awful lot of us are experiencing fluctuations in our powers. Very visible fluctuations.

Q: Will I get superpowers if I get sick? Will I lose them?
A: Uh, no. You'll just get sick. The people who appear to spontaneously develop powers are just the ones getting outed. Just look at the list of powers, and you'll see that they have nothing in common. It makes no sense for one disease to be the source of scattered reports of electrogenesis, self-duplication, the ability to turn things invisible (is there a name for that?) and whatever kind of power can implode all the furniture in an apartment without breaking any windows. Not even Zero Serum can give people that range of powers. Similarly, the people 'losing' their powers are just getting sick. Kind of like how baseline humans 'lose' the ability to walk in a straight line when they're running a fever. Except most people aren't going 70mph 20 stories above the ground when they discover they're dizzy. Right now I think being sick is the least of Velocity's worries.

Q: My city is left undefended! Where can I buy a force field generator?
A: Don't be a stupid vigilante. If the superheroes are sick, so are the supervillains. So odds are, the city's going to be pretty quiet for a while, barring a robot invasion or something. Also, we have police officers.

Q: Is the Swine Flu the military's new bioengineered supervirus that got out of control? It's the military, right? Or the CIA. Or the Mexican supervillains. They're trying to kill us all! It's a conspiracy!!!111!
A: No, it probably isn't. May I refer you to El Coyote's press conference, in which he explains why you're an idiot? Why don't you go put your little tinfoil hat back on and go back to writing frothy little rants about how those evil aliens are trying to steal your allegedly superior genetic material to breed a clone army to colonize the Earth?

Q: Are you okay? You aren't going to infect me, are you?
A: I feel like Baron Dynamo after Vector got done smacking him around, but I doubt I'm a walking biohazard anymore.

Q: Do you still have superpowers?
A: Yes, but using them makes me feel nauseated right now. Then again, a lot of things are nauseating me at the moment, including the color of my walls. I'm not going to do party tricks just to prove that I still have powers, since I want to focus on getting better.

Still Alive

For the first time in forever, my skin is actually normal temperature. I don't really know where my frost aura is right now. Maybe it's recharging or something. I wasn't really up to wobbling my way to class, so I am going to be way behind on my reading. Not that going to class would do me much good, since I'm producing so much snot that it has blocked off my EARS. What the hell is that about? Evolution FAIL. How much mucus can the human body produce anyway? I need to call Ectoplasmid and ask for my powers back, because clearly I've somehow stolen hers. Blegh. Whatever I have seems to be working its way around campus. No hospitalization, but a hell of a lot of head colds and puking. The guy living above me throws up every hour on the hour. I have timed that damned flush. ALL NIGHT. If I weren't feeling so rotten, I would have crawled up the stairs and flushed his head down the toilet by now. Yes, I am mean, self-pitying, and callous to the suffering of others right now. I hate the entire damned world and I wish someone would build a doomsday device and put me out of my misery.
Okay, pity party over. Thanks for tuning in.
Now for something completely different, who's been watching the news? I have to admit, I've always had a bit of a crush on El Coyote, but now? I want to bake him a million chocolate chip cookies, tenderly wrap them in sparkly tissue paper, and mail them to Monterrey with a love note in every box. I've been replaying that clip on Youtube all day. What can I say, I'm a sucker for eloquent speeches. Besides being a perfect excuse to listen to his voice, it's a gorgeously structured and flawlessly logical argument (you think he's a lawyer? I'd love to see him in a suit), and it's about damn time someone smacked down all the anti-Mexican hysteria about everyone's favorite flu. 'Mexican flu' indeed. Seriously, some people will use any excuse to justify bigotry. FOX pundits have been stammering about his press release all day. Ten to one they interview Golden Eagle tomorrow in the name of 'a fair and balanced view.'

Sunny and in the High 70s

Really, wunderground.com? Really? Because from where I'm sitting, it's been raining all day. I'm running out of dry clothing because every time I go outside I get soaked to the skin. And admittedly, I'm used to being drenched by cold water, but my entire room is festooned with damp clothing and I'm going to have to dig the ripped pants out of my laundry bag and wear them to class tomorrow because NOTHING IS DRYING. Granted, I wouldn't be up this creek if I hadn't been practicing the ice-up in front of the mirror last night, but then again, I wouldn't been up this creek if Windigo had actually stopped the Living Whirlwind in Texas instead of strengthening it by spinning the WRONG WAY, so I don't see why I should blame MY superpowers instead of hers. The weathermen at wunderground are running around like decapitated chickens, trying to rework their little colorful maps to account for our brand-new cold front. They look fairly sheepish about it too. Their accuracy's been crap ever since Foresight graduated to the big leagues. I understand that precogs are almost prohibitively expensive to keep around full-time these days, especially once they go over a certain power threshold, but seriously, it's nearly hurricane season. There has to be at least one precog working at the weather stations. They can't ALL have gotten shut down by The Paradox last year.
How accurate are those weather predictions anyway? Has anyone ever done the math and measured actual meteorological conditions versus predicted ones? That could be a great math project for one of those human calculator types. Granted, the superhuman community does have a significant atmospheric effect, but you'd think they'd factor that in. They have to have a list of the big wind-and-weather types somewhere, don't they?
In local news, Dani has taken to shuffling around with a box of tissues and a tragic expression until she guilts me into doing stuff for her. I've done a dining hall run (in the rain, of course) to fetch her some delicious, nutritious box of institutional slop. The soup was ice-cold by the time I got it to her, naturally. Even through the Styrofoam cup.

World's Cutest Tragedy

CNN is shocked and horrified that Linda Farrow, a straight-A's Harvard student and president of the Harvard Historical Re-Enactment Society, has gone crazy. Me, not so much. I know how much academic pressure there is at Ivy League schools, and really, everyone lost the right to be shocked at supervillains coming out of Harvard back in the 70's when the Anarchy Society graduated. I am, however, impressed by Ms. Farrow's creativity. I know it's a devastating blow to the Stone Zoo captive breeding program, but you have to admit that it's great for tourism. I bet ticket sales have quadrupled, and maintenance costs are much lower. Imagine what they'll save in habitat alone. I would love to see a herd of pony-sized elephants, and I'm contemplating flying to Massachusetts just to see the tiny tiger. I have no idea how (or what) they're going to feed the anteaters now, though. I guess they could borrow the shrink ray from the evidence lockup and use it on some anthills, though I doubt the ants would still be visible to the naked eye.
I feel really sorry for Farrow's unfortunately-named (ex?)boyfriend Richard Biggers. It's going to be rough going through life at four and a half inches tall. He's too small to even use Barbie furniture. I hope they find a way to reverse that.

No SUPER for you!

I'm sure you've all read the hullabaloo about Angela Slater's latest stroke of genius, but in case you're not tired of hearing about it, here's my $0.02.
I have to agree that the term 'superhuman' has some funny connotations. But using it doesn't mean we think we're innately better than baseline humans. It's not an endorsement of eugenics, world-conquering, George Bernard Shaw or Nietzsche. It just means we are something different, but still human. How do I say this without sounding cliche? Many (dare I say most?) of us have lived as baseline humans at some point. We were raised by baseline humans. We will marry baseline humans and raise baseline human kids. You can't just throw us off the 'human' boat. We're not a different species. We're a minority, a normal variation of humanity, no matter how we got our powers or what we do with them. We don't somehow forfeit our humanity (along with some very important civil rights) just because we can do a few things that you can't. You need to recognize and respect that.
We've been 'superhumans' since the 1940s. It's what we call ourselves, and how we think of ourselves, and how we include ALL of us- the planet-movers, the telepaths, the cryogenetics, the people with the little weird powers that nobody has a name for yet. It's part of our identity, our subculture. And if you're not part of that culture, you don't get to name it. Seriously, human privilege much?
If Ms. Slater would like to call herself an 'original human', she can go right ahead. She can start her own little 'original human' parade, for all I care. I will support a person's right to call herself whatever she wants. If the rest of you supers out there want to be called metahumans, parahumans, post-humans, uberhumans, pinksnorglyhuffalump humans, then go fly your freak flag. But don't tell anyone else they can't fly theirs.

Low Tech Cyborgs

There was an awesome article in the news recently about a Finnish guy who lost a finger and replaced it with a prosthetic containing a USB drive. Living proof that not all cyborgs are packing flamethrowers and crap. And also that they are generally computer geeks. If I were a cyborg, I'd probably wind up breaking myself within the first few days. I don't have a very good track record with complex electronics. I might be able to get away with being one of those old-school steampunk cyborgs, though. That would be all sorts of awesome, especially if I looked anything like Pygmalion, with all the clockwork and neo-classical motifs.
I'm going to have to call bullshit on 'first cyborg', even in the context of 'non-weaponized-or-neuromechanically-integrated cyborg' (hello, pacemakers? cochlear implants?) but it's good to see an everyday cyborg getting press.