NOTE: The Casting Call for this story has now closed. Please check the forum link above to see the results of the casting call! 

Who really looks at a tree?
 

Aside from the odd botanist and the logging industry, how many times have their bark-covered trunks been examined for anything unusual or strange? Trees cover thirty percent of the planets land mass – just about 4 billion hectares. They're everywhere that people are, and have been called “the lungs of the planet” by conservationists.
 

They harbor birds, rodents and insects. They provide nourishment and shelter for uncounted life forms, and have done so for longer than we can fathom.
 

And they provide something else...
 

Deep underground, systems that had been dormant for millenia began to awaken. Power raced through conduits of spun fiber-carbon, relays flickered open as the hibernation protocols shut down, passive sensors hidden just under the bark of a thousand thousand trees signaling that the time had finally come, that the mission set forth by beings yet to be born was now to be initiated, that the genome was at long last ready.
 

It took six months.
 

Six months for what lay buried twenty-seven miles below the city streets of Harmony, New Mexico to come fully online and aware.

Six months for the particle-cloud to be readied and transmitted, washing over Harmony's unsuspecting populace like a tide, released unseen into the atmosphere by the trees and forever altering humanities genetic coastline.
 

Fifteen years for the genetic modifications to manifest. For the first of the Newmans to appear.
 

Will they be ready? Will the world?

 

Welcome to Z.E.N.! Your characters will be the first heroes that the world has ever known, a world much like our own with an internet, iPhones, and a U.S. Economy and political system both stagnate and cantankerous.

 

It's also a world where men (and some woman) wear suits, ties and sometimes fedoras – and where woman (and some men) wouldn't dream of going out in public unless they could pass the June Cleaver style check. A world where cars are mostly boxes on wheels, and the architecture retains the clean lines of the 1930's.

 

Doctor's still make house calls, and milk and papers are delivered to your doorstep every morning whilst scientists work feverishly to synthesize human DNA and understand the deepest mysteries of Dark Matter and Quantum Physics.

 

And then there's you... The New Men, or Newmans, as you'll eventually be called. People with astounding abilities that set them aside from their fellows, lifting them up several rungs on the evolutionary ladder.

 

Called together by the thing that made them, forged into a team to combat others like themselves who choose to use their gifts for their own selfish (or mad) ends. Proud American men and women who understand that with great power comes great responsibility. The world will never be the same!