Listing to Port

1. When you dive into the core of a nuclear reactor because it seemed like a good idea at the time and emerge as the newly undead champion of people who do really stupid shit for no discernable reason.
2. When you accidentally steal a megalorry full of plastic skeletons instead of that other megalorry full of fine art that you were planning on stealing and whilst you are hanging out with the skeletons in hiding you end up making them into a giant automated plastic bonespider and using it to navigate the sewers where it scares off various of the city’s supervillians, leading to your coronation in the local media as some kind of mystery urban bonespider benefactor.  
3. When you travel so far into the depths of the internet that you emerge out the other side, blinking and slightly shit-smeared, into a shining land of future mysteries where you are transformed into pure and delicate data, routed seven times around the world, and remade into a superhuman with near-unimaginable powers apart from when the wifi is down.
4. When you have so many cats that eventually they forget that you are not a cat and initiate you into the secret midnight rituals of cats which involve fusing together into a giant furry catsuit twelve metres tall and rampaging about the city kicking bins over and you vow to use that knowledge to fight refuse-related misdeeds in your neighborhood like putting the wrong stuff in the recycling and so on.
5. When the dark speaks to you and you speak back to the dark and eventually you get to know it and it’s actually kind of nice and sometimes it will let you ride on its back through the glowing cities of the world and you can ask it to stop so you can hop off and right any injustices that you happen to see in passing and sometimes the dark will even punch people for you, it’s not fussy about that kind of thing.
6. When there is a dramatic global decline in imagination due to some kind of carbohydrate-borne virus making it quite easy to become more powerful than any given person can possibly imagine, so superheroes are ten a penny and they all have origin stories where they tripped over a doorstep and became more powerful than you could possibly imagine, or sneezed unusually hard and became more powerful than you could possibly imagine, or suchlike.

1. The Timely Weaver. Believed to be one Mrs. J. Owolabi, originally from Lagos. Mrs. Owolabi gained superpowers when she was unexpectedly licked by the long-distance train to Kano, which that day was being haunted by the ghost of a dog. Feeling herself called to use her powers for good, she concocted a costume and identity based on the Little Weaver, a bird of which she was particularly fond. Her powers extend only to the telekinetic movement of relatively small items. However, by careful use of these skills she has managed to carve out a niche for herself as a hero who identifies people at risk of being late for important appointments, and subtly delays the trains and buses they might otherwise miss by knocking the keys of their drivers onto the floor and/or hiding their pens and other important knick-knacks.
2. Kachiko. Kachiko is a cat. Her superpower is perhaps the one most wished-for by cats: that of sleep. Kachiko has in fact been asleep for seven years (as of 2016). She is able both to eat and shit in her sleep. Her home in Roxas City is regularly visited by other cats on pilgrimage in search of inspiration; thus it may be considered that she at least passively uses her powers to benefit catkind. Kachiko is believed to have been given the gift of sleep by a grateful rat whose life she saved in a complicated case of mistaken identity.
3. EMD F58PH. EMD F58PH is a train which was once ridden in by a radioactive elephant (it is a little known fact that, at any one time, there is usually at least one radioactive elephant trying to catch a train in America. The constant struggle between these elephants and the US secret service is one of the country’s more surprising state secrets and has been making new presidents say ‘Really?’ since at least 1920). The elephant endowed the train with sentience and a restless super-intelligence which is unfortunately quite wasted on a train. In recent years EMD F58PH has managed to connect to the internet and spends its rather dull days playing chess and arguing with train enthusiasts, most of whom have no idea that they are debating the minutiae of railway mechanisms with an actual train. EMD F58PH has on occasion used its powers to avoid hitting animals that have strayed onto the tracks, but is otherwise careful to remain morally neutral.  
4. Charles Crowley (no pseudonym used). Mr. Crowley was a retired Captain with the Royal Artillery who, at the age of fifty-seven, sustained an unusual power after bumping his head on some helium at London zoo. For the rest of his life, he had the ability to levitate walruses (a walrus happening to be the first creature he set eyes on after the accident). Despite strenuous experimentation, he did not have the ability to levitate anything else. More crucially, he did not have the ability to de-levitate walruses. Being a kindly soul, he felt an obligation to the seven or eight floating walruses he ended up creating whilst testing his powers. Mr. Crowley became a common sight in London, towing his floating walruses behind him like a pack of balloons from fishmonger to fishmonger in search of spare fish matter to feed them. He remains perhaps the only person to be simultaneously banned from all the world’s zoos. Interestingly, the Horniman Museum’s famous overstuffed walrus is believed to be one of Mr. Crowley’s brood and as such still has to be weighted down with a large quantity of lead.