Bathroom Monologue: Edgar Seterra

One of the unsung heroes of the day the Uranians came for us. He was at the crater on Third Street when it happened. Well, it wasn’t a crater at the time. It was a Recruitment Station, and he was getting his physical when the ship landed on all of them.

Now Edgar Seterra was not your new-fangled superhero with an I.Q. of one-point-five-billion or radioactive biceps. He had what you’d call a “less desirable power set,” and survived the UFO crash by turning into a pool of slightly tepid water.

By the time he gathered his pool-self up, the Uranians had disembarked from the craft with one of those hydrogen bombs that you really don’t want in a heartland city. All the greater heroes were skyward, preoccupied with the proper invasion force. Stopping these specific cosmic hooligans was up to him, but how was Edgar Seterra to know which way the Uranians had gone with their bomb? A feral sense of smell? A spiderific sense?

No, for you see those powers were taken, and Edgar Seterra did not possess any abilities patented to American icons. Instead he used the less-popular ability to recall what all the elderly women in the vicinity had smelled recently. You might call this a useless ability, and his fiancé had done just that on multiple occasions, yet Uranian B.O. is quite distinctive and led him to a warehouse on John Calvin Klein Drive.

Please mind that Edgar Seterra was not the sort of superhero who breaks the sound barrier on foot or could bean three Nazis with one bouncing shield. The dear boy arrived at the warehouse on John Calvin Klein Drive with little more than a rifle and some plus-sized fatigues, up against three suicidal extraterrestrials. People in the neighborhood called it quite a sight.

He managed to empty his entire rifle magazine into the brick wall to their left while they trained sights on his forehead. The anxiety simultaneously activated three useless superpowers: one that caused all dogwoods in the area to thicken their sap slightly, one causing all cesium to decay by drastically greater half-life, and the last causing him to sprout a second heart. This last would have come in very handy if they had not aimed for his head; each and all of these he would gladly have traded to turn laserproof for just a few seconds, as I reckon just about anyone would.

Well it turns out that a person’s powers do not only have to be of use to him. They can be of disuse to evildoers. For instance, did you know Uranian laser pistols use mildly depleted cesium cartridges? Well they didn’t either, which is why the Uranians were so confused with Edgar Seterra continuing to have a head. For a moment, he thought continuing to have that head was a superpower.

But that head was a good one. By the time the Uranians realized their cesium cartridges were duds, Edgar stormed their position and subdued them through some good old-fashion American pugilism.

Not five minutes later, his left hand turned into a psychic dove and he chased its intuition across town to stop another Uranian incursion – this one tampering with the water supply. He curtailed no less than seven heinous plots that day.

You still don’t hear much about him. U-Day was all about our burly men of steel, and our lightning lasses zapping rockets out of the sky. They deserve press for their heroism, yet Uranians did get by them, and when it came to chasing aliens across our sidewalks, through our warehouses and broadcast towers? That was Ed Seterra.