I was fleshing this kid out for a long time. He is modeled a little from Brightburn, and Bruce Willis from Unbreakable.
I kind of wanted him to be a reluctant super hero but not really so super. He now has ten times the strength of a normal man, with the ability to go further, but because I love super heros, but thought there needs to be a draw back for someone wielding such powers, and then I thought of Deku from My Hero Academia. He couldn't fully utilize his power at first because it would rip his body up, which is a very nice drawback, having to figure out how do work around limitations, instead of just charging ahead and beating things up thoughtlessly.
But then I thought of Anthony, and how his genetic disorder will eventually kill him. Not right now, of course, he's got a sex crazed girlfriend and a blossoming vixen in his bed. But I thought of a somewhat okay vehicle to drive home the point that he is more than what he is.
The "Steal Marlene and Amber" plot.
But honestly I left it cliche on purpose, because like in Unbreakable, its the real world, not one where men fly in the sky taking down dastardly villains who tie ladies to train tracks and the hero stops the train with the palm of his hand. Hancock also fits into this nicely. But still, I started this story with a "What if?" that nagged me when I was working on updates to my other stories. Now is Anthony invincible, no, but he has a higher pain threshold due to both his muscles being so thick and strong, and the treatments he's endured for years. He has speed, which I wanted to clock at 100 mph, but that was too unrealistic if the fastest man on earth Usain Bolt is clocked at 27.33mph which does not seem so fast, but it is tremendously fast considering it was not a long distance run, but a 100 (300ft) meter run, and he did it from fresh, no starting jog, but standing still burst, its very fast. So Anthony can do 30 mph in those conditions, but long distance running when he "lets go" can be up to 60-65 mph. Yeah not the flash or superman speeds, but for a fifteen year old boy, to cover a distance of 10 miles in a short amount of time is kind of impressive at least.
He has a vertical leap of 14 feet, and and a jump distance of 12 feet ahead of him, from standing still to jump. Running and jumping might put him at 40 feet forward from a starting run to the leap.
On top of being smart, I am not going to make him a super genius, but his greatest power is his bones. They are four times thicker than a normal humans, but combine that with his muscles, he can take a car hitting him at 30 mph without too much damage. But as I said, he is far from invincible, he can be shot, cut, set on fire and stabbed if the person stabbing works a little harder.
The Treatments.
I really do not want to lay out what they do to him in the story, but the long and short of it is that they have to relax his muscles every two weeks to keep his blood flowing properly. And the methods are not gentle at all. They are attempting to train his muscles away from the important veins and arteries so that they are not eventually crushed by them. And to do this they gotta poke, prod and shock them to move them around without cutting him open.
Sorry for the wall of text, I kind of wanted to explain him to you readers, who might wonder what the hell is he.
Also, I need a little help. I asked a couple of people in KB to critique the story to see if I wrote Marlene out like she could be a real girl. The reason I ask this of you my readers is because I can only really write my best from the male perspective, and I have to lean on my wife and other women around me for the female perspective, but they are only a small subsection of the female population, and with Marlene and Amber, I wanted them to go in an entire new direction than my standard "She is innocent, falls in love with MC and grows gradually." No, the direction I wanted to go with them is "Growing up fast, because we might die at any time, so live as hard as we can." So any help with that direction would be most appreciated.