Eddies in the space-time continuum have ripped you out of your comfy chair and into an alternate universe in which the 7.5 billion inhabitants of earth include 143 people with actual superpowers. Your arrival increases that number to a round 144, for the transition between worlds gives you the abilities of Lightning Lad. You can generate electricity, hurl thunderbolts at will, absorb electricity directed at you (if you’re ready for it) and… that’s it. No flight, no force shields, no magnetism, and a bullet or club will kill you as dead as anybody else. The person you love best in the real world (spouse, parent, child, best friend, whatever) comes with you to this new world, but that person does not gain any super-powers.
Limited though your abilities may seem, they make you one of the most powerful supers on this world. Even so, you are hugely eclipsed by the mightiest of the supers, for that is BOB X— the black, bisexual superhero with superman’s powers, no known weaknesses, and a kid in middle school. You contact Bob, hoping he can help you get home, but sadly neither he nor any of the big brains who work for him have any notion how to do so. For lack of a better idea, you take a job as one of Bob’s support staff; your MacGuyverish savvy and native intelligence have you swiftly moving up the ranks in that little organization. You are not doing super-hero stuff yourself; frankly, Bob doesn’t need sidekicks, and anyway you figure that while it is to your benefit to have his cell phone number, it is best to stay away from the center of any stories about him.
But sadly, this story is about YOU. See, there is a certain psychotic super-genius on this world who decides he wants to use your power for his own sick purposes. Specifically he wants to use you as a living battery to power a suit of technomagic armor that will let him go on a killing spree. No real reason; he is just an evil bastard. To that end, he kidnapped you and your beloved non-super-powered companion and imprisoned you both in the usual death trap. The machinery and said trap is set up to drain your power at a safe rate for the villain while making it impossible for you to exert enough force to blast your way out without also killing your beloved
You are fully conscious and able to move about; after an exhaustive examination, you conclude that the villain did his work well. There is no way you are getting out of here without sacrificing the one you love. Moreover, the power-draining process will kill you within four hours unless you get out. Bob could defeat the villain even in the powered armor and/or bust you out easily, but you happen to know that he is on a space mission that by this time has taken him half a light-day from Earth. If you were free, you could maybe send out an SOS, but best case scenario would have him coming to save the day in three day’s time— and of course you’d have to get out of the death trap first. And in the meantime, the super-villain will massacre Athena only knows how many innocents.
Now let’s be clear about something. This is a super hero world, but not a comic book one. Bob sometimes kills his enemies if they need killing, and those villains never come back from the dead because NOBODY comes back from the dead here. And Bob generally wins his fights because he is the baddest mama-jamma around, not because the editor is on his side. He has at least one dead girlfriend who could testify that he does not always arrive in the nick of time if she weren’t, well, dead. In short, you cannot count on him being a deus ex machina.
And of course, even as all this goes through your head, the super-genius-psycho is in his ersatz IRON MAN armor, and not only will he massacre hundreds of people using it, but his use of it will kill you shoortly.
So here are your choices:
A: Bust out of the death trap while you still have enough juice to do so, both saving your own life and cutting off the villain’s power source (thus saving the day yourself) but also killing the one you love.
2- Hope against hope that Bob somehow arrives in time to handle the menace, even though you yourself helped plan the mission that took him off Earth and you were manning the high-tech monitor that charted him flying too far away to be of any help;
III) Save your beloved’s life by doing nothing, thus both allowing the villain’s rampage and letting the death trap kill you
What is your choice, NY? If you choose to sacrifice the life of the one you love, will he/she be OK with that? If you choose to let the innocents and yourself die, will your beloved agree to THAT?