Across the world, one hundred adolescents unexpectedly find themselves in possession of superpowers, running the gamut from conventional to world-breaking to annoyingly limited. But despite the diversity of powers, certain patterns emerge, and as the Children begin to find each other, they realize that the world itself may be in great peril.
Heroes save the world, but will they succeed in being heroes?
Start reading here.
You can find the table of contents here, or check out the story’s page on TV Tropes—it’s under construction, but one nifty feature that it has is a timeline for reading the chapters in chronological order.
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Heroes Save the World 
This is really good so far. Seems like not that many people have jumped on to this yet, but if this continues to be as good as it is now I’m sure that will change. Regardless, you have a watcher in me. Can’t wait to see where this goes.
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Whoops. Meant to post that on the newest chapter. Sorry
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Haha. No problem. Weirdly, I can edit your comment (though I’m not sure what that’d look like, since I don’t want to actually do it) but I can’t change where your comment was posted.
I’m glad that you’re enjoying the story. I post a link on /r/rational when the story updates, and there’s a little bit more activity there.
I’m experimenting a lot here, so any kind of commentary at all will probably be influential.
Thanks again!
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I have not got into this yet but this is about a guy named Simon Martin in Toronto?… I’m Simon Martin… I live in Toronto (Well Mississauga) but you get my point. I’d like to talk some time. Not mad… just interested.
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Well, that sure is weird, if not totally unexpected (I mostly went to lists of “popular first names” and “common last names” for each country). I added some contact info to the sidebar if you want to chat on email or reddit.
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(Feel free not to post this one. If you’d rather carry on quietly reply to my username at gmail.)
Terminologically, the “old” version of the project the narrator is starting from here might get called a “black project” just to imply it is secret rather than a “black op.” That same “black ops” term the public loves carries with it other connotations: covert operations and plausible deniability for things like false flag operations and the like.
If you’re looking for other government buzz-words and acronyms:
The sort of thing being talked about here is slowly turning into an AQ-SAP, as the government frantically scrambles to find powered people, viewing it as an acquisition of important resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_access_program
That kind of project would live outside of the usual governmental reporting channels. At least in the contractor world, normal projects, even “secret” ones still use a lot of shared resources for personnel management, expenses, accounting, etc.
In general nothing in the defense space gets away without an acronym and red tape. E.g. government contract lifecycle accounting and reporting gets done through an Earned Value Management System (EVMS), which provides the process for tracking milestones and funding, and provides a mechanism for adapting those in the presence of changing requirements. This process of which is mandatory for government projects over $70m: http://www.acq.osd.mil/evm/docs/DoD%20EVMSIG.pdf Whereas if you have a project over $20m or so you have to do “some form” of EVMS, ever since Dick Cheney of all people used it to cancel the Navy’s A-12 program back in the day. This sort of thing is great at figuring out if your monolithic $270m RADAR project in the middle of nowhere will run over budget but it is terrible for R&D like projects, which is probably one of the reasons why the government is bad at research.
Going “dark” here might allow the story to work around these sorts of administrative limitations. A program manager would live and breathe boring crap like that as most of their day-to-day existence normally.
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I sent the comment through in case something went wrong with the email. If you don’t have anything in your inbox then let me know and I’ll figure out what went wrong. I don’t want gmail to hiccup and then leave you without any sort of response though. >:]
Thank you again!
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