Shaktimaan

She was inspired by the Indian tv show. A superhero, a flying, x-raying, missile-busting, meditating superhero. That's what she wanted when she started working on the project.

The original results were encouraging. With slight self-perpetuating changes to the genome, massive gains could be realized. Super-strength, super-hearing, almost supernatural hearing, the ability to see beyond the visible light spectrum, the ability to hear in the infrasound and the ultrasound. The target could hear noises no one else could, see colors beyond anyone's imagination, see heat signatures from people and objects. They found a subject who they got to advanced stage where they could see the puffs of air emanating from people's behind as they farted.

Unfortunately that's as far as it would go it seemed. The results plateaued out, and other ventures floundered. The outcomes they did have seemed more suitable for circus performers than superheroes, for every superpower came with superdownsides. The strongmen's strength did not scale proportionally to the increase in diet, turning them into more inefficient versions of regular people and not entirely useful for the military where they were seen as the biggest potential. The extrasensory perceptors dealt with a host of emotional and physiological issues for their inability to deal with increased sensory overload, living in a world designed for the less-perceptive. It was not driving towards creating superheroes. It was creating superpatients. The funding would run out quickly when the news got out that the potentials had petered out and there seemed to be no new avenues for extraordinary exploration.

She took the jump. She would become a subject. Desperate times called for desperate measures. The world was in need of a superhero who would fix things, tell people everything was okay and they were there to solve problems. There was no one else it seemed. She would take the burden upon herself. It would also show the funders the faith she had in her research, and that it wasn't as risky as it had been made out by the test subjects. She knew the risks. Completely aware that her life afterwards would be significantly different and difficult after taking in the changes, she decided to move ahead anyway. Because otherwise her life would be difficult and sad anyway. She couldn't just sit and watch her pet project, her life's work disappear into oblivion. People needed to believe in the power of miracles, the human ability to mold nature to its will, to extend control over the elements and its own senses. She would show them that it was not only possible, it was desirable.

That's how it began.