Quote:
The city is looking for heroes! Not super heroes, but the everyday heroes that live in Destiny City. City Council has asked for nominations for these heroes that deserve a little extra recognition for making the city a better place. Posters have been hung in a few prominent locations around the city, searching for “The People’s Heroes”. The posters are quite clear: anyone can be nominated for any reason whatsoever, they don't need to have performed a heroic deed by any stretch of the imagination--all they need to be is a hero to the person nominating them. The nominations aren’t competitive by any standards; participants are asked to fill out a small form either online or in person. Nominations are collected and are televised nightly on a local news channel for the duration of the event; the notes of recognition are also delivered to the nominees when applicable. Do you fill out a nomination, or are you the recipient of one? Are you watching the news for anyone familiar that you might know?
"If you want to recommend a hero, please submit noiminations to--"
The TV snapped off, and the woman sdagged, scowling as she unconciously rubbweed her arm. She supposed asking that trhe pricint she was in as a child to be nominated, they were ordinary. Siv withjered miserably, and walked away from the TV room to walk for her room, with a deflated, quiet walk. She walked to her room and opened her latest scientific magazine, catching a photo of a happy family from it, and sat on her bed, eyes tearing up.
"Baaah." Siv frowned and flopped back on the bed, holding the singed photo and shut her eyes, grimacing in disgust before sighing, looking up, and asighing.
"Does it have to be living?" She snarled. Her eyes fell on her laptop, cxonsidering the form again before looking back at the cieling. "Would anyone else nominate you after what happened?"
She'd onlyu been ten. The local power station had been putting out strangew signals, as oddities often seemed to happen in the city, and the surges concerned her parents enough that her father, an elecytrical wengineer, and her mother, a technitian for the electric company, had gone to look. She didn't forget hearing the police when they came to the house.
Her parents had been found sagged over the electrical equipment with wires shreddded, mental rent, and their bodies eerily pristine in death, save the expressions. But they'd stablized the station long enough for the company to divert flow from the grid for a power outage. To prevent a surge so nasty there could have been fires. The story had been like so many of DC's unexplained events, and Siv? Her current mom -- the Courcels - had adopted her outright. She was one of those older children, the kind foster programs struggled to home if she wasn't an angel, but she'd met their eldest and they were close so fast it made sense. And normally Siv didn't think about her old life. But she still didn't forget. She threw herself into stuidies and science, almost to her detriment, and Siv was ever keen to learnm. It was perhaps this drive that molded her present.
And here the City asked for heroes.
Siv frowned, looking down. The woman shifted her weight, and re-stowed the photo, flopping on her back and staring up ast the cieling of her bedroom, expression boring past stucco and insulatiuon to seem like they bored into the sky at the very stars.
"Only living people." Siv repeated.
So whoii? Who could she nominate? Her mom? Dad? Sisters? Their cousin, also adopted away because their aunt and uncle were complete bullshit? No, Ally was an obvious.. Siv frowned, and sighed, trying to figure out just what she might be missing. There were a lot of heroes -- front line, super heroes, and the like, and the market,.. nightly, was oversaturated in altruistic do gooders and well wishers sincing praises of the policemen, firemen, paramedics, 911 operators. Individuals were tooted left, right, and center, proud faces painting screens and streaming services like sentinels of Truth, Justuice, and the AMERICAN WAY.
Siv sighed, shaking her head.
"Someone living." Well nobody nominated the everyman, the common Joe or Josephine. She saw a lot of teachers, and the like, but...
This city put up with a lot of bullshit. That stuck in her mind. People put up with so much bullshit it was becoming normal. The faces lost forever. The parents opf children presumed dead, the families tsaking in people with frankly no sort of papers or documentation. The people trying just to get along and to live, as happily as DC allowed. The normal people doing nothing speciual, but, they were.
The city wasn't abandoned, people lived and carried on as well as ever. Yeah.
Slowly, she rose, moving to begin to type at her desk, huddling over her laptop as the words released themselves. They fell from her fingers in waves up[on waves, espouising the importance and quiet determination her nomination was right. And why not? The City was spreading goodwill-- why not this? The woman grinned, and typed rapidly as she focused, before sighing, hitting print when at last, she was satisfied by hrert words, and read over the form with a thin, proud grin. This. This was a masterpiece, and she stoodf behind it.
The following daym Suiv spoent a silent two minutes, leaving an enveloipe with her form simply labled 'Nomination' and left before it was opened, but inside lie the nomination for every citizen, everyu Joe or Josephinwe, just trying to do the right thing day to day.
It wasn't easy in DC, after all.
