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After the metahuman emergence of 2012, things did not turn out quite as comicbooky as some people expected. However, there was one guy who managed to pull it off, spandex, cape, secret identity and all.
Of course people were curious, for varying reasons, but the few times people tried to ask about the start of his “career”, he refused to answer, refering to the wave of accident-suicides of hopefuls. The trigger for that had been people who had discovered their powers making their “origin stories” public, a good deal of which involved life-threatening experiences – flight first manifested when a parachute wouldn’t open, or phasing in an accident that left the car looking like an accordion, you get the idea.
It was a perfectly noble pretext for someone who didn’t want to admit to a past of having turned his room into a coccoon, with movies, comics, and games providing escapism that ended up shaping his gift.

His first impression was that of being hungover. Headache, nausea, and a marked gap in his memories… He was cold an in an awkward position, so he tried to fix that and discovered the handcuffs. As he tried to orient himself, he found that he lay on uneven ground, rocks and pebbles, slick with moisture. The staticky sound he had thought were part of the headaches actually came from outside his head. He was in a dimly lit half-dome, dark rock in his back, arced, white walls that seemed to be moving slightly in themselves in front, as well as another huddled figure who seemed to be watching him. He got a vague impression of a teenage girl in too big men’s clothes, barefoot.

Pushing himself up a little, awkwardly, he croacked, “What… Where?”

“About ten metres downriver from the start of the rapids,” came the reply, matter-of-factly.

It took him a few seconds until he fully understood she meant on the ground of the river. When the realisation hit him, it brought with it some shreds of the day before. There had been a metahuman emergence, some elemental cluster, and things had gone terribly wrong when trying to make contact, and –

“I shot you.” He remembered her face when she was hit. Should have been dead. Then her body had turned to water and, carried by momentum, splattered all over him.

“Yes.” Her cold tone peeled away away some of his shock. He understood an unspoken “you should keep that in mind” in the pause following. “You can make up for that. Tell me where my friends are now.”

He did not even know.