[In the late afternoon on Wednesday, Oscorp shakes, the massive tower trembling from top to bottom. The thousand windows and the metal foundations sound like the world's loudest glass on a table in an earthquake, a jangling and crystalline juttering. A murmur goes through the crowds on the sidewalk below, at the restaurants down the street, behind the windows of office buildings. It's as if an earthquake is striking only Oscorp. It vibrates, like a lightning rod, waiting for the bolt.
Then, without warning, comes release.
The energy that had been gathering in the tower bursts from it in a pulse that warps and folds the very air it passes through, hissing and crackling. The closer one is to the tower, the harder it hits. Those closest are struck down, dropping or being knocked flat. It behaves like a strong wave striking those already standing waist deep. The pulse rolls on. It looks like a ripple in the air, crackling with energy, and it knocks the breath from the lungs, searing it with hot/cold burning and cutting off any chance to cry out. It electrifies every inch of the body. It roils. It
rewires.
It only takes ten seconds to burst, roll out, and fade like a tide on the shoreline into nothing. Ambulances are at the scene in minutes, and victims are rushed to the hospital. Some of them are sick, but it's hard to say what has come from panic and what might have been brought on by the pulse itself. Some get nosebleeds. Some hit their heads when they fell. Some shiver and shake. Many go into shock, and are rushed into urgent care. But there are no deaths, and while the press are clamoring for a statement from Oscorp, thus far the only sign of life in the building is the police officers occasionally walking in and out from the circle of police cars gathered at the entrance, their lights flashing into the evening. The news updates call it a 'pulse'. Already it begins to be dismissed as an unfortunate industrial accident that, thankfully, has resulted in no lingering side effects. Lawsuits start before night falls and end not long after, dying and falling away into nothing. Lawyers refused to send them, and advise their clients to say nothing to anyone, to admit to no one they were even there.
If some of the hospital's patients are a little...odd, in a way that's difficult to put one's finger on, (the doctors notice as they tend to them - "when I checked the left eye, it was green, but when I checked the right, it was brown. So was the left when I checked it again.") it's nothing conclusive enough to report. No one calls the WHO or the CDC. By the morning, the news reports have faded to a murmur. The buildings are unmarked, and the sidewalk is untouched. No video of the incident survives, and the anchors even begin to imply a kind of psychosis. What proof do any of these people really have? Experts will soon cite it on television as a grand example of mass hysteria.
In the quiet following the storm, though, some of those struck start find themselves becoming...different.]
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