The kitchen, once a beacon of culinary mediocrity, now resembled a battlefield after a popcorn grenade had detonated. Wyatt, aka Reverb, the city's reluctant teenage superhero, stood amidst the carnage, a single, perfectly formed kernel balanced precariously on his fingertip. He stared at it with the profound disappointment of a man who had just discovered the Earth was, in fact, flat after all.
"Right," he muttered, surveying the buttery shrapnel embedded in the ceiling, "maybe I should have started with a lower wattage."
His initial plan – a cunning one, in his defense – had involved absorbing the excess energy from the microwave (a known energy hog, according to his highly scientific research, which mainly involved Googling "can microwaves explode?") and channeling it directly into the popcorn kernels. He'd envisioned a perfectly popped bowl, a testament to his genius and a delicious reward for a hard day of avoiding homework. Instead, he'd created a buttery supernova, a testament to his impulsiveness and a delicious mess for his mother to discover.
Speaking of mothers, the tell-tale creak of the stairs heralded the imminent arrival of his, a woman whose patience could only be described as "finite." He briefly considered using his powers to teleport out of the kitchen, but that would involve actually understanding how his powers worked, a concept as foreign to him as a vegetable that didn't taste like cardboard.
Instead, he opted for the classic tactic of "strategic retreat," which in layman's terms meant "running away like a small child chased by a particularly grumpy badger." He vaulted over the sofa (narrowly missing a precarious stack of comic books), burst through the front door, and found himself face-to-face with his neighbor, tú, who, by some cruel twist of fate, was watering petunias.
He opened his mouth to explain, to weave a tale of scientific experimentation gone awry, of noble intentions and unforeseen consequences. But the words caught in his throat, replaced by a single, desperate plea:
"Help."
