Road Mage: Chapter One

[Koldun he/him]

Chapter 1

People like to be angry. This is obvious when you look at history. People fought in wars because they were angry, but, ironically, outside of war, there is little to be truly angry about. So, people came up with little things that annoyed them, and announced that these things enraged them. Politics, the rich and famous, a waiter getting an order wrong, people were always finding reasons to be angry. Out of all places to be angry however, the road was the most popular. It was obvious why, on the road, you were in your car, a shell of metal and glass to protect you from being punched in the face for screaming at the driver in front of you. Plus, it helped that there were a ton of little annoyances there too. Slow drivers, being cut off, stopped for no reason other than how you looked and what you drove, long waits for the light to change, flat tires, the list goes on and on. So, it was unsurprising that when anger started to give people superpowers, most of the people who got them were driving at the time.

The car drove through the road, a black line cutting through a square of gold grain. It was noon, on a chilly autumn, and the sun shone only faintly through the thick barrier of clouds, a wall between ground and endless sky. On a piece of ground that had been paved to allow people to ride in small metal canisters to work for many hours in big concrete canisters, one of these canisters, these cars, they were called, carried two passengers, who were both looking for a single person. This made sense, as it gave them a reason to be riding together, and for them to carry the looks of grim determination that they did. One of them tapped her fingers on the dashboard, her hand movements unimpeded by the large piece of glass wound around her hand with the wires that once attached it to the front of one of the canisters. It had been part of a pair, once, but the woman had enough trouble with just the one. The driver, a short but bulky man in his mid 30s, did not carry any such accessories on him, but he would periodically look in the mirror to make sure the thing he had stored in the back seat was still there. The passenger did the same, but her being a mere passenger allowed her to turn her head completely, to see that both her and the driver’s objects were still there. If one did not know their true natures, it would be easy to call the people paranoid. Of course, one would be quickly corrected once one noticed the objects shift in their places, the metal rods that allowed them to be carried positioning themselves so as to be parallel to the seat back, the objects themselves atop the poles, bobbing like the heads of passengers trying to get a look of the road ahead. Noticing this, the two passengers fluidly waved their hands in a circular motion, and the objects stilled. The car would carry on its journey, and it would be two whole hours until it would finally encounter a bump in the road.

Potholes. Spots of eroded ground that, when driven on, giving the driver a brief uncomfortable sensation of being shaken. The car bounces on the spot, and soon enough, the pothole is gone and the shaking is only a discomforting memory. Of course, when people started getting the superpowers from instances of rage, potholes started to change. The fits of rage that gave people their spectacular abilities usually resulted with an equally spectacular display of power. Whenever potholes were the cause for that emotional burst, they were, changed to say the last. The rage they inspired within people gave them the ability to express their frustrations in physical form, in this case, turning potholes into portals to another world.

The bump in the road ended up shaking their canister quite a bit, and soon enough, the passenger noticed that one side of the car hadn’t stopped shaking. “Stop the car.” It stopped with a press of the brakes. The door opened, and as the sun shone from a clear blue sky, the passenger proceeded to kick a wheel. Sure enough, the black glossy sheen of the tire slipped off of it, becoming a mass of inky black tendrils that shot out, and ensnared around the passenger’s ankle. This was enough to make her angry, which was evidenced through how the piece of glass wound round her palm began to glow with a dull blue light, and as she positioned her hand to point palm first at her once burgundy, now black boot, the light seemed to lift from the surface of the glass, becoming an arrow-like line that shot through the distance between her hand and boot and made a solid impact with the slimy being, turning it a fluorescent blue for the few brief moments that it was alive, until it wasn’t, and the colors faded from it, turning it gray, as it fluid form suddenly became a dust, that was tossed off her shoe with a shake of the foot. She went about getting a pot and a dustpan from the trunk, where she scraped the substance into the pan, clearly labelled, “Roadkiller Dust.” Covering the top of the pan with a lid, she placed it back into a tub filled with ice water, closed the trunk, and got back into the car, slamming the door shut. “If we get any more of those things on the way, you’re going out. Those things feel disgusting.” The driver simply smiled and nodded, and they drove off. There would be no more bumps that day. The next one would be tomorrow, and it would surpass the slime in levels of danger. Slime that I may add, slowly crawls into your AC unit and fills your lungs with a toxic substance that slowly makes you brain dead, all while the being slowly bonds with you until you’re a mindless husk used as a host body for a being from an eldritch dimension. So yeah, their next bump wouldn’t be one solved with a mere laser shot. It would be solved with my help. I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Tom. The driver and passenger is my brother in law and sister, respectively. I’m the one they’re looking for. Tomorrow, they’ll find both me, and a heap of a lot of trouble. My name is Tom Ederharty Lemen, and I’m the Road Mage.

 

Any feedback is appreciated

[Dragon314 he/him]

Loved it. 

[Cosmere Savant]

This is a really interesting idea keep it up!

[Koldun he/him]

Thanks! Here's an alternate first paragraph, based on some feedback I got.

Rage is a fuel. It fuels our minds, our bodies, our souls. It drives us, much like the gasoline we fill up our automobiles with, to do things we may not be able to otherwise. So I will restate my first sentence. Rage is rocket fuel. It is explosive, it is powerful, and it is dangerous. And a lot of the time, this fuel is poured into a minivan during a morning commute. But if ignited, say by an engine designed to do just that, your sensible car will explode. That is why they don’t usually fill minivans with rocket fuel, and instead use them with rocket engines, which takes the explosion, and points it in a certain direction. That, right there, is the greatest way to explain how the Rage works. It is basic human anger, turned into something more powerful, and pointed in whatever caused you to get angry in the first place. There is a reason for why I used a minivan in my explanation. In reality, it was the minivan’s driver doing the exploding.