Monday, 7:40, pouring, and you're late. You look up and say "Stop." For the first time in history, the rain listens.

From that morning, everything you say comes true. You fly to work, tell a whole plaza to forget you, and every face goes blank. Except one.

0:00 Monday. Seven forty. Pouring.

0:50 A woman with a sketchbook

1:27 Day two

2:50 Day five

4:05 This job is killing me

5:14 Sorry I yelled at you

5:57 Her name is Iris

6:43 Day twenty-nine

7:24 Day thirty

8:27 Smiling up at the big screen

9:27 She takes your hand

Sources:

- Tidwell, Pfeifer, Mehl et al. (2025). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; reported in "Do women talk more than men? It might depend on their age", University of Arizona News. https://news.arizona.edu/news/do-women-talk-more-men-it-might-depend-their-age

- UC Santa Cruz (1994). "UC Santa Cruz Psychologist Says Sarcasm, Metaphor, Slang, And Other Forms Of Figurative Speech Reveal The Poetic Way The Mind Works" (on Pollio, Barlow, Fine & Pollio, Psychology and the Poetics of Growth, 1977; an estimate). https://news.ucsc.edu/?p=58937

- Hyden, A. R. (2023). The Long History of the Figurative "Literally". Mental Floss (quoting Merriam-Webster on its 1909 dictionary). https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/famous-writers-used-literally-figuratively

- Bjorvatn, B., Grønli, J. & Pallesen, S. (2010). Prevalence of different parasomnias in the general population. Sleep Medicine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21093361/

- Vitevitch et al. (2026). The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America; reported in "Lip reading study finds one-third of English words look alike when spoken", Earth.com. https://www.earth.com/science/lip-reading-study-finds-one-third-of-english-words-look-alike-when-spoken/

- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (2021). What Is American Sign Language (ASL)? https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/american-sign-language

- Feinstein, J. S., Adolphs, R., Damasio, A. & Tranel, D. (2011). The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear. Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.042 ; Yong, E. (2010). Meet the woman without fear. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/meet-the-woman-without-fear

What-if parts are our own extrapolation, labelled in the sources: the power, the city and its people are made up; "a whole city of S.M.s", a city where nobody can feel fear, is our extrapolation from Feinstein et al., not a finding.

#whatif #animation #superpower