BLINDSIDE - Origin

PROLOGUE: THE SNAP OF LIGHT

***

If you were to open up a digital map of northwestern England in the year 2037, your eyes would immediately be glued to three giant, neon dots dominating the night. We’re talking about Liverpool in the west, Manchester in the east, and standing proudly right between them... New Avalon.

These three megacities formed a region known as The Golden Triangle. It’s basically the golden heart of the world’s tech, economy, and cybernetics. Now, New Avalon wasn’t exactly a brand-new city. It had been established since the 1900s, successfully evolving from a classic, soot-covered industrial town into Europe’s number-one hub for quantum optics and AI research. Fancy, right?

But for Valerie Finch, who had just hit her twenty-year milestone in life, living in New Avalon was less about scientific glory and more about a brutal balancing act. You know, trying to survive between stiff, boring college lecture halls and a loud, chaotic tech workshop.

"You’re daydreaming again, Val," Uncle Edward scolded. He didn't even look up from the cybernetic hand he was carefully calibrating on his workbench.

"I am not daydreaming, Uncle. I’m analyzing my professor’s photonics research journal," Valerie countered. She casually adjusted her silver-rimmed glasses, which were slipping down her nose. "His theory is just too stiff. It’s like the academic world is still stuck in 2020 or something."

See, as a fourth-semester student at the University of Camelot (UoC)—which, by the way, is one of the most prestigious tech universities in the entire Golden Triangle—Valerie was famous for two things: being incredibly brilliant, and being an absolute troublemaker. She was lively, bursting with energy, and had a sarcastic sense of humor that could spin a comeback in a millisecond. Honestly, she had all the traits of a classic hero. Smart, vocal against injustice, and cursed with a massive amount of curiosity. A trait that Uncle Edward always called a literal trouble-magnet.

To pay her own tuition at UoC, Valerie worked part-time at Uncle Edward’s high-end hardware modification shop in New Avalon’s commercial district. And nope, this place wasn't some trashy junkyard. Uncle Edward was a highly respected former military engineer. His shop regularly took custom orders from hardcore professionals, including independent hero agencies and mega-corporations like Helios Inc.

"Just don't hack into the faculty’s internal servers too often, Val. The UoC cyber-security team will track you all the way here," Uncle Edward warned, his calm yet firm baritone voice cutting through the noise.

"Oh, chill out, Uncle. My encryption protocol is layered with randomized encryption from the Liverpool servers. They won't find a thing," Valerie smirked, full of ultimate confidence. (Spoiler alert: confidence can be a dangerous thing).

That very afternoon, a logistics container with a shiny gold label from Helios Inc.’s R&D division arrived at the shop. Inside were experimental quantum optical devices that had officially failed military trials in Manchester and were scheduled to be scrapped. As the trusted assistant, Valerie was tasked with doing a quick digital inventory before the stuff got destroyed.

But guess what? At the bottom of that steel container, buried right beneath a pile of quantum refractor lenses, Valerie found a strange, chromium cylindrical tube. It didn't have a standard barcode. Instead, it featured a weak, blinking holographic seal that read: Project Aurora - Photokinetic Refraction Core. Property of Helios R&D, New Avalon Sector.

Naturally, Valerie’s curiosity skyrocketed to a dangerous 100%. Inside that thick polycarbonate tube, a swirling mass of pink and violet-neon plasmoid energy was spinning around like fireworks trapped in a vacuum. It was deadly beautiful.

And Valerie? Well, with her signature reckless nature, she decided she just had to study it a little deeper. Because, oh, what could possibly go wrong?

***

Later that night, New Avalon was getting drenched by a heavy downpour, making the city’s holographic lights reflect a beautiful rainbow across the basement lab windows. Perfect setting for a disaster, right? Valerie locked up the workshop door.

"Just a quick spectrum scan for my UoC thesis material. In and out, three minutes tops," Valerie whispered to herself. Classic famous last words.

She hooked up the Helios cylinder to her own custom-built quantum frequency decoder. Valerie’s master plan was to study how Helios managed to condense light particles (photons) into a plasmoid form that actually had physical mass. Unfortunately, she vastly underestimated the cyber-security systems of 2037. The moment her decoder breached the outermost encryption layer, the internal defense system of Project Aurora flagged it as a sabotage attempt.

WARNING: Unstable Molecular Density. Emergency Core Venting Imminent.

Synthetic voices blaring from her monitor didn't just sound an alarm—it felt like an absolute death sentence. Crimson warning lights flashed across the basement, turning her neatly organized workspace into a strobing, chaotic nightmare.

"Wait, what?! Abort! Cancel command!" Valerie panicked, her fingers flying across the virtual keyboard in a desperate blur, trying to inject an override code she had written for class just last week.

It was like trying to stop a speeding bullet with a flimsy paper shield.

Security protocols designed by Helios Inc. definitely weren't meant to be gentle with intruders. Before her override could even reach the secondary firewall, the chromium cylinder hissed. Automated safety valves at the base of the tube snapped open with a sharp, hydraulic shriek.

High-frequency humming filled the room, so dense and vibrating it made the fillings in her teeth ache. Magenta and violet plasma inside the polycarbonate glass didn't just spin anymore—it expanded, violently thrashing against its enclosure like a caged beast suddenly given an exit.

CRACK!

A hairline fracture spider-webbed across the glass.

Valerie’s academic curiosity completely evaporated, replaced by pure, survival-driven adrenaline. She lunged forward, reaching out to grab the cylinder and throw it into the heavy-duty isolation bin at the corner of the lab.

She was a microsecond too late.

BLAAM!

No sound of burning gunpowder, no black smoke—just a concussive shockwave of pure, unadulterated luminescent energy erupting from the core, swallowing the entire basement in a blinding flash of pink and violet.

Blasted backward by the force of the detonation, Valerie crashed hard into a heavy steel rack, sending boxes of microprocessors and copper wiring raining down around her. Pain, sharp and blinding, seared through every neural pathway in her body, screaming from her spine to her fingertips.

But what happened next defied every single law of physics she had ever studied at UoC.

Plasmoid light didn't just fade into the air. Like an intelligent fluid, it crawled up her arms, seeping directly into her pores. It felt like liquid neon pumping through her veins, burning hot and cold at the same time. She could hear her own heartbeat thumping in her ears, a frantic, digital rhythm echoing the unstable core.

"Uncle Edward..." Valerie tried to choke out a scream, but her voice died in her throat.

Gasping for air, she held her trembling hands up in front of her face to check for burns. Her breath hitched.

Her hands weren't there.

They weren't severed or bleeding; rather, ambient light in the basement was actively bending and wrapping around her skin, refracting perfectly as if she were made of flawless, shadowless glass. She had become entirely transparent. Invisible to the world.

Then, agonizing heat pooling in her chest rushed toward her fingertips, creating a terrifying buildup of pressure that demanded release. Terrified and operating on pure instinct, Valerie snapped her thumb and middle finger together.

SNAP!

A spectacular burst of neon-violet plasmoid energy shot from her fingertips, slamming into the heavy steel laboratory door. It exploded with a concussive flashbang roar. Ten-centimeter-thick iron plating dented instantly, throwing sparks and dying light across the room.

Recoil from the blast, combined with the sheer exhaustion of her newly altered biology, was just too much. Valerie’s vision blurred, neon colors bleeding into black as she collapsed onto the cold concrete floor, swallowed by unconsciousness.