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Some time later, about 10-15 years (or just nine months) after the Event, people start to notice a few ''strange'' things about at least ''some'' of the children now being born into the world. Their hair and eye color doesn't match that of their parents. Odd powers may start to manifest. [[Psychic Powers|Telekinesis, teleportation, setting fires with their minds]], these things come easier to them than riding a bicycle.
 
Or perhaps... their powers are a lot more subtle in nature. Perhaps the only power they were granted was the ability to see extradimensional Space-Vampires or to pilot a [[Humongous Mecha]] of mysterious origin, and now those children are the only ones who can stand between humanity and an otherworldly threat which has cropped up and is now seeking to bring about [[The End of the World Asas We Know It]].
 
Perhaps...the children ''themselves'' are the threat which seeks to bring about [[The End of the World Asas We Know It]].
 
If all of the children are good, you can expect them to be recruited as soldiers or pilots by a shadowy [[Government Conspiracy|government agency]] which seeks to protect humanity. (At least, that's what they'll ''claim'' to be doing. There's no guarantee that they won't actually try to [[Tyke Bomb|use the children]] in their ''own'' plot to bring about [[The End of the World Asas We Know It]].)
 
If some of the children are good and some are evil, expect them to be [[Child Soldiers|pitted against each other]] at some point. The good children may be recruited by [[The Government]] and placed in a military institution or [[Wizarding School]] where they'll be trained on how to use their powers. Expect the evil children to be recruited by a psycho [[Cult]] Leader, who plans to use them in his plan to, you guessed it, bring about [[The End of the World Asas We Know It]].
 
If ''all'' of the children are evil, expect them all to be on the same side and to be [[Creepy Child|damn creepy]]. More often than not, they'll have wicked powers and much higher intelligence than normal humans, meaning that most conventional forms of fighting will have no effect on them. In most cases it will require nothing less than a [[Heroic Sacrifice]] to take them out.
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* ''[[Gilgamesh]]'' features super-powered children born from embryos exposed to [[Applied Phlebotinum]].
* ''[[S-Cry-ed]]'' takes place in a future rocked by a geographical uprising, which has left 1% of the newborn children with the ability to manipulate matter at will and create "Alters", strange creatures that do their bidding. The number rises as the series progresses, evidently a side effect of continued tampering with the power of the other side, which started the whole mess.
* ''[[NeedlessNEEDLESS]]'' takes place after [[World War Three]] in which those born within the "Black Spot" gain superhuman powers.
* ''[[Please Save My Earth]]'' features the reincarnation of a group of alien scientists after they all die when their civilization ends, and focuses on their lives as typical Japanese teenagers.
* ''[[Gundam]]'''s Universal Century [[Alternate Universe|timeline]] has the Newtypes, humans who developed [[Psychic Powers]] as humanity started to live in space colonies instead of the Earth's surface.
* The Diclonius of ''[[Elfen Lied]]'', which can intentionally infect normal humans so their children will inherit the mutation.
* Although drugs were involved, all the powerful psychics in ''[[Akira (Manga)|Akira]]'' are explicitly young people, or awakened to their powers at young age.
* The "Whispered" of ''[[Full Metal Panic]]'' possess a psychic connection with an undefined future, which "whispers" the secrets of "[[Applied Phlebotinum|Black Technology]]" directly into their minds. From time to time that connection can be established between individual Whispered. ''Every'' Whispered was born on December 24, 1981 (1984 in the anime) between 11:50 and 11:53 PM Greenwich Mean Time.
* Children from ''[[Toward the Terra]]'', born naturally on Nazca are all Type Blue and {{spoiler|grow incredibly fast.}} They all share the same slightly sociopathic mentality, which connected with their actions doesn't score them many points with the other Mu.
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== Comicbooks ==
* ''[[Rising Stars]]'' by [[J. Michael Straczynski (Creator)|J Michael Straczynski]], has exactly this premise: "In 1969 in the sleepy midwestern town of Pederson, Illinois, a flash of light in the heavens heralds the coming of the 'Specials', 113 individuals who are blessed with powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men."
* The original explanation for [[Mutants]] (the "Children of the Atom") in ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]'' was as a side-effect of [[I Love Nuclear Power|atomic bomb testing]].
* The premise of ''[[The Umbrella Academy]]'': The same year "Tusslin' Tom" Gurney knocked out the space-squid from Rigel X-9 with a flying atomic elbow "...forty three extraordinary children were born to mostly single women, who had shown no signs of pregnancy, in seemingly random locations around the world." A wealthy entrepreneur tracked down and adopted seven of these children to raised them as a superhero team.
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== Film ==
* Perhaps the first screen media example: 1960's ''[[Village of the Damned (Film)|Village of the Damned]]'', based on [[John Wyndham]]'s novel ''[[The Midwich Cuckoos (Literature)|The Midwich Cuckoos]]''. Followed in 1964 by ''[[Children of the Damned]]'', and then remade, again as ''Village of the Damned'', in 1995.
** Thailand also made a movie version, 1994's ''Blackbirds at Bangpleng'', which uses the same device, but has the children as less [[Always Chaotic Evil|intrinsically evil]].
* [[David Cronenberg]]'s ''[[Scanners]]'' is about a wave o' babies ([[Wave of Babies|not literally]]) with [[Body Horror]]-tastic psychic powers. Revok, one of the children of the original boom, is plotting to start a second one, and then create an army of evil scanners and [[Take Over the World]]. And he probably ''could'' do it. [[Left Hanging|Maybe he does.]]
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== Literature ==
* It only affected a small group but in ''The Girl With The Silver Eyes'' by Willo Davis Roberts, a group of women that tried an experimental fertility drug gave birth to children with silver eyes that had [[Psychic Powers]]. Their powers grew stronger if they worked together and a pair could [[Suggestion|push]] another remotely.
* ''[[The Midwich Cuckoos (Literature)|The Midwich Cuckoos]]'', a 1957 novel by [[John Wyndham]], in which all the women in the village of Midwich simultaneously become pregnant with [[Creepy Child|alien children]] who all shared [[White-Haired Pretty Boy|the same]] [[Uncanny Valley|uncanny appearance]] and had the [[Brainwashed|ability to mentally manipulate people]].
* Wyndham's earlier story ''[[The Chrysalids]]'' is something of the sort from the viewpoint of the children as their telepathic powers emerge.
* In a similar example, Wilmar Shiras's fixup novel ''Children of the Atom'' (first part published 1948; whole novel, 1953) is based on the notion that after an accidental release of [[I Love Nuclear Power|radiation]] at a nuclear power plant, several dozen female employees give birth to [[Mutants]] that are absolutely normal in every way except that all of them have IQs of over 300.
** ...and are they [[Evil Genius|evil]]?
*** The implication was that they're all quite conventional Christians -- except for one or two, and even those Learn Better. (One of the characters says she knows there ''are'' people who don't believe in God, but she can't talk about them because she's been forbidden to use the words "crazy" or "stupid".)
* In Garth Nix's novel ''[[ShadesShade's Children]]'', during "The Change," everyone over the age of 14 suddenly disappeared and the mysterious Overlords appeared from nowhere. Children born during or after the Change had "Change Talents," basically [[Psychic Powers]].
** Those who survived the Change got them too; there are multiple characters (one during the main story and at least one more in flashback) shown to have Change Talents who were definitely born before it.
* Arthur C. Clarke's ''[[Childhoods End]]'' -- sort of. {{spoiler|Aliens show up shortly before a bizarre new generation of humans appears, but they didn't cause it. The human race is [[Evolution Power-Up|evolving on its own]], as others have before, and the aliens are here to make this as painless as possible.}}
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** Except that the whole concept of "non-coding" introns has now had to be re-examined as [[Science Marches On]].
* [[Wild Cards]]; though it's not limited to children, those born carrying the Wild Card virus far outnumber the original overt infectees (especially since most of the original group drew the Black Queen and died).
* The [[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]/[[Star Trek: theThe Next Generation (TV)|Star Trek the Next Generation]] crossover novel ''Planet X'' has a group of [[Human Aliens]] who, at age twenty-two, begin exhibiting destructive powers. They are revealed {{spoiler|to have been genetically engineered as potential [[Super Soldiers]] by aggressive but lazy aliens}}.
** Another [[Star Trek (Franchise)|Star Trek]] TNG novel has a bunch of genetically-enhanced Augments plotting to produce a [[Bizarre Baby Boom]] by infecting normal humans with a virus that rewrites their reproductive DNA to bring the kids up to the Augments' level, thus resulting in a Utopia of perfectly healthy, super-genius Supermen who were neurologically incapable of violence. Since The ST-verse has a strict [[No Transhumanism Allowed]] policy, preventing this was considered a ''happy'' ending.
* Henry Kuttner's 1953 novel ''Mutant'' has the "baldies," bald telepathic humans who were born after a nuclear war and subsequent fallout. Wonder if Stan Lee read it?
** It was a common trope at the time, that one book was just following the already well-established mutant trend of postwar Atomic Age sci-fi. Stan picked it up by osmosis from a large number of sources, particularly "Children of the Atom", seen above.
** Kuttner also has a story called "Absalom" where more and more smarter and smarter children are born every generation. There is a problem with the older generations being envious and afraid.
* The Salman Rushdie novel ''Midnight's Children'' has 1001 Indian children with low-level superpowers. The connecting thread between them all is that they were all born at midnight on the day India gained its independence.
* In ''[[Xanth (Literature)|Xanth]]'', the [[Magic Aa Is Magic A|magical nature of the land]] is such that anyone born there has a magic talent, but no one from [[Muggles|Mundania]] is lucky enough to have one. So a regular occurrence in the history of Xanth was that a Wave of immigrants will come in from Mundania, have kids, usually having married among themselves, and discover that all of their kids have their own magic talents.
* In [[Octavia Butler]]'s ''Earthseed'' books, a drug designed to cure mental degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's winds up giving the kids [[The Empath|"hyper-empathy syndrome"]] which causes them to hallucinate feeling the pain of others.
* Several of F. Paul Wilson's stories or novels feature folk who were born soon after an influx of 'Otherness' into our world. Some are grotesque [[Body Horror]] mutants, while others are only minimally deformed, but possess an inborn attraction to the Otherness that makes them potential sleeper agents for it.
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== Live-Action TV ==
* In ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'', there is a variant: Sam {{spoiler|and a bunch of children from his generation were given Demon blood by [[Big Bad]] Azazel when they were six months old. This gave them a variety of creepy psychic powers when they reached the age of 22--and were intended to be members of Azazel's army in an ill-defined plan. Turns out Sam is supposed to be the vessel for Satan himself, and Azazel's a master of the [[Xanatos Gambit]] for having run his plan without a hitch (even his death really didn't put a dent in it).}}
* In ''[[Fringe]]'', some children (including {{spoiler|Olivia}}) were given a drug (made by {{spoiler|Massive Dynamics}}) back in the early 80s. It was meant to enhance their minds. It worked a little too well in some cases, but it also had some unpleasant side effects on several subjects.
 
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* In ''[[Mass Effect]]'', biotics (people who can [[Mind Over Matter|manipulate gravity]]) are the result of in-utero exposure to [[Minovsky Physics|Element Zero]]. A couple of spills resulted in most of the early human biotics being concentrated in a few major cities. Eventually, [[Government Conspiracy|Cerberus]] stops relying on accidents to [[Tyke Bomb|create super soldiers]]. Plus Element Zero only works in a small percentage - a majority of the people will go through life with no abnormality at all, and most of the rest end up with brain tumors.
* X-COM: Apocalypse introduces genetic hybrids of humans and the sectoids of the first game. They're some of the best soldiers you can recruit in the game, because of their high level of psi stats and lack of real drawbacks. They have no sinister motives, since the aliens that intended to exploit them were wiped out almost a century earlier, but are still discriminated against by the people and government of Mega-Primus.
* In ''[[UFO After BlankAfterblank|UFO: Aftershock]]'', there are human children who are born with unique abilities, such as psychic powers or the ability to adapt to robotic implants. These children are instantly rejected, giving rise to the Psionic and Cyborg tribes.
 
 
== Webcomics ==
* ''[[FreakangelsFreak Angels]]'' (read it [http://freakangels.com/ here]), though the big end-of-the-world event doesn't happen until they're all 17, apparently. And <s>presumably</s> they caused it. The story takes place six years after the event.
* In the backstory of ''[[Drow TalesDrowtales]]'' it's mentioned that the children of the Dark Elves who went underground [http://www.drowtales.com/mainarchive.php?order=chapters&id=7&overview=1&chibi=1&cover=1&extra=1&page=1&check=1 were changed], losing the color in their hair, having darker skin and discolored mouths due to lack of nutrition. The elves saw this as a sign that they were to go extinct, and by the time the story starts they have all but vanished and been replaced by the titular drow.
 
 
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