World Savers Wanted™
Here is the next in the series of brief excerpts from Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets. If you would like to read the full adventure then please follow the link.
World Savers Wanted™ can be found at http://www.worldsaverswanted.hero and is a listed company created by a twelve-year-old boy called Mulvey Cavell, who saw a gap in the market for matching superheroes looking for things to do with things that needed doing by superheroes.
Mulvey realised that for every superhero being summoned by an enormous searchlight whenever they were needed, there would be many other equally deserving superheroes that didn’t have such a high-profile and therefore probably needed a helping hand when it came to finding suitable things to do.
Mulvey also understood that not all superheroes wanted to try and save the world. Some were just happy doing things like opening supermarkets, posing for photographs or putting on action displays at garden fetes.
Working from his bedroom, Mulvey built the website and devised the marketing campaign. Things were slow to begin with but once the mass exodus from HeroVerse™ started, World Savers Wanted™ began to get very busy – so busy, in fact, that Mulvey Cavell became a multi-millionaire at thirteen and retired from public life.
World Savers Wanted™ works on the same principles as any other online agency. You complete an online questionnaire, upload a current image of yourself and pay an annual membership fee.
Once your application is processed, World Savers Wanted™ will seek to match your profile with the most appropriate tasks contained in its vast and ever-increasing database.
A similar principle applies if you have some work for a superhero to do. Once the registration process is complete, you are free to upload your superhero task request. Your task request is offered to the most appropriate superheroes and they then choose to accept the task or not.
Feedback is given on the completion of each task, whether successful or otherwise, and as you gain more and more positive feedback, so you become eligible to receive more and more difficult task requests. In this way the system always hopes to match the right hero to the right task.
World Savers Wanted™ allows you to define your choice of tasks by selecting from a drop-down menu. Falcon Boy had ambitiously registered himself and Bewilder Bird in the ‘Heroic Duo Seeking to Save the World’ section but as you can imagine, they hadn’t yet accumulated enough positive feedback to be eligible for that category. Not that Falcon Boy was in any way perturbed.
‘Ambition is one of the many things that I wish to be known for,’ said Falcon Boy ambitiously to his friend. ‘Without ambition, you have no real desire to do things,’ he concluded grandly.
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Introducing Bacharach McCarthy
Bacharach McCarthy also lived a lonely life. He was tall and athletic-looking, capable of lifting heavy things, and took a keen interest in how the world worked but none of these attributes ever made a real difference to his adult life.
Bacharach left school and went to work for a small manufacturing company that produced the world-famous Universal Drain Righter©. This handy-sounding device is a small twist of metal that you attach to any antipodean plughole to re-right the direction that the water swirls as you empty a bath.
For eight hours a day and six hours of overtime on Saturday, Bacharach McCarthy placed a piece of metal into a groove, pressed a large red button and then laid the now twisted metal onto a conveyor belt for packing.
In all this time, he spoke to no one. And no one spoke to him. But when the shifts were over, Bacharach raced home, wolfed down a pot of noodles, logged onto HeroVerse™ and turned once more into Bewilder Bird.
Online, Bacharach felt completely free and was able to express himself in ways that he couldn’t in reality. He could behave in any way that he wanted to, but still he chose to be as silent in HeroVerse™ as he was in real life. He just preferred it this way.
If you want to find out more Bacharach McCarthy then please feel free to click here.
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HeroVerse™ – ‘YOU are what YOU want to be’
In the original iteration of HeroVerse™, members were given full access to an unlimited range of superpowers, and as you can imagine it wasn’t long before everyone you met could:
fly, bend time to their will, cause impossibly heavy objects to float like feathers, shoot bright green lasers from their eyes, feel no shame, breathe underwater, talk to animals, think big, walk through walls, control thunderstorms, unite warring insects and cause them to fight for them, understand the true meaning of things simply by touching them, survive extreme drops in temperature, compartmentalise, blend into any kind of scenery, dupe people with a supernatural sleight of hand, be visually and vectorally versatile, breathe in a vacuum, correlate, hover hawk-like, cause the molecules of their body to become gaseous, hop really high, invert algorithms, disregard emotional stimuli, shoot sheets of flame from a wooden pole, discover the poetry evident in everyday objects, swordfight with a custom-made walking stick, reanimate corpses, make their skin as hard as steel, speak the language of electrical circuits, adopt the abandoned, repel, wrestle the unruly, self-propagate at an alarming rate, lie to both themselves and others, self-edit the past, shake their head to stop things happening, predict the future (but those that chose this superpower never saw what was coming, coming), raise the temperature of things with their breath, change colour at will, out-process the fastest microprocessor, argue at great length, make great strides, write long lists, inhale aeroplanes and helicopters, force people to dance uncontrollably, wonder aloud, forge documents convincingly, never die, motivate defeated soldiers, magnetically attract, run incredibly fast, animate the inanimate, memorise extremely long combinations of numbers, exaggerate to co(s)mic effect, plan accordingly, know things worth knowing, stop speeding vehicles dead in their tracks with the flat of their hand, de-fraud, desire the undesirable, have the fastest wheelchair in the universe, spit a long way, imitate, seize the day, echo, stare at the Sun, mimic, use their finger as a USB key, pay no mind to things, run incredibly far, short-circuit, do a speedy whirl, expertly ventriloquise, touch the sky, create a whirlwind with a flick of their wrist, become a machine, or a centaur, see the good in everyone, stretch themselves incredibly thin, dominate whole nations through sheer force of will, stand very still for very long, completely disregard local sensations, act unbidden but wholly appropriately, transmute and alchemise, proffer expert advice when required, and summarise long lists like this one.
What superpower would you choose? Let me know?
For more on HeroVerse™ follow the link.
BARNABY TAYLOR: Curiosity is Currency 