You may feel like just a regular person — but in a science-fictional world, that usually means you're extra-special. Are you the Slayer? The One? The Last Starfighter? Take our quiz and find out for sure. It is your Destiny!
1> Are you having really weird dreams every night? Like, not just the usual "naked in the middle of a field of soup dumplings" kind of dream, or the "operating heavy machinery with instructions in cuneiforms" dream. But a dream that's both weird and heavily symbolic — like, there are a million onions, but the onions all have a shape, a mystical symbol thingy, or maybe just a kind of oniony aura of evil to them. Do your dreams include dolls? (Bonus points for creepy porcelain figures as advertised in the back of Euthanasia Digest.) How about weird religious imagery? Creepy little children? Some historical atrocity, like a brothel fire or the mass disemboweling of an entire monastery? Also, give yourself 100 points if your dreams actually have title cards or captions in them.
2> Are you a social outcast? Does nobody understand you? Can you, indeed, never catch a break? Do all your attempts to be cool blow up in your face, because the cool kids are always messing up your game, dousing your theoretically awesome moves in a river of frozen sugary drinks and jock-itch medication? Also, do your parents seem so ridiculously uncool that you can't imagine how they came to have you, and there must be a supernatural/supersciencey explanation for how much cooler than your parents you are? Are authority figures constantly trying to tell you things?
3> Give yourself one point for every time someone comes up to you on the street, points at you, gibbers something inarticulate, and runs away. Do you have stalkers, who seem to know stuff about you that they couldn't possibly have known (unless they're on Facebook or something?) Do random people have explanations for random stuff in your life that totally make sense, and completely explain away the world's failure to recognize your incredible rockitude up until now? Do the utterances of homeless people take on a weird significance when you parse them later?
4> How many robot/clone duplicates of yourself have you come across lately? Add up the number and divide it by the number of slaps your boyfriend/girlfriend gave you over your doppelganger's lascivious behavior. Do you often find yourself waking up in the morning with no memory of stuff that people claim you did the night before — with no rational explanation other than a duplicate of yourself, sent to replace you while you're off being savioury? (Or there's also the shit-tons of whiskey you quaffed, or the black-outs. But no, it's probably the alien doppelganger.)
5> Does the most attractive person (of the gender you're interested in) inexplicably want to date you? This is a major sign. Attractive people have a radar for chosen ones. It goes along with being good-looking, it comes from access to good skin care or something. The more out of your league this person is, the awesomer the superpowers you are certain to start manifesting, at any moment. (Don't worry if this one's not happening yet. If the attractive person of your choice hasn't come around yet, it's just because they're scared of their attraction to you.)
6> Is there a blurry black-and-white photo/drawing from history that sort of looks like you? If you squint, like, really hard. Just ignore all the water damage that makes the eyes look like tex-mex veggie burgers. It's totally a picture of you. Squint harder. That person in the picture's got your hair, if you did it in an old-timey hairstyle. Okay, stop squinting, it's making you look like a psychotic Lhasa Apso.
7> Do you hear weird voices? Or see spooky shit? That nobody else notices? You keep glimpsing shit out of the corner of your eye, like the walls are really shower curtains behind which hide a soaking wet, stark naked menace that threatens to consume us all. Extra points if you hallucinate people standing there in broad daylight, that nobody else can see, and they seem to be telling you something really important in dyslexic sign language. Major, almost unlimited points if you see signs that this reality isn't really real, and you're the only one who can see the evil, putrefying reality in which we're all slaves and the evil overlords are using us for food and sex and amusement. Give yourself as many points as you like if you're the only one who can see that we're all meatwhores.
8> Is technology responding to you weirdly? Does your car stereo keep playing weirdly chosen songs, or cutting out, in ways that spell out a message to you? Does your broken old television keep blasting static that you can see blobby shapes in? Are video games talking to you personally? Or your cellphone, does it have cryptic messages? Best of all, is there a tiny holographic lady coming out of one of your appliances, telling you that only you can save her? Come to think of it, do people on internet forums seem to be passing you secret messages? Are you seeing weird messages, addressed to your personally, in this article or other articles on io9? Give yourself a bunch of points — you are clearly here to save us.
9> Have you achieved weird feats that nobody could explain, but which nobody else witnessed? This is really the 1000-point question. It's certainly possible to be the Chosen One without possessing superpowers, if you have the key to something or a particular skillset. But most of the time, the crux of the "chosen savior" thing is having some awesome, unique powers. Go ahead and admit it — have you noticed your hands glowing weirdly when you're alone? Did you stick your tongue in a light socket and it didn't really hurt that bad after a few minutes? Did you see through a wall? Have you kind of levitated, or at least fallen more slowly than usual? Don't panic if you haven't fully developed your powers — often you have to start slow, and chances are you're still waiting for the older mentor figure who'll explain how to maximize your potential, before getting slaughtered in front of you.
10> Are you the only one who knows that certain people need to be killed? Or rather, they're not actually people, they're things. Because the voices told you. Or the dreams. Or maybe your doppelganger left you a clue. It doesn't matter — the main thing is, your destiny is to battle ultimate evil and, you know, fight the last stars. You can't start your heroic destiny until you cross the threshold into adventure, though — and the way you do that is by slaying your first monster. It could be your high-school gym teacher, or that kid who keeps picking his nose in your line of sight whenever you're trying to say something serious. Just remember, if you flinch from your destiny, you'll never achieve your true greatness — you didn't choose to be chosen, but being chosen means you have to choose. If that last sentence made sense to you, then you're ready to start killing people the monsters in our midst. Go to it!