Magic Meteor

Asteroids Power Up!

Hego: "It began when we were children. Lady Fate came a-knockin', and she knocked hard."

Kim: "What was that?"

Hego: "A glowing, rainbow-colored comet that gave each of us special powers."

— Kim Possible

A certain type of Applied Phlebotinum in giving powers. Here new superpowers come from above, literally. A meteor falling from the sky gives powers to a person. Either they're hit by it or exposed to it in some way.

For religious imagery, sometimes this meteor is actually Wormwood, a falling star in the Book of Revelation. For a Historical In-Joke, it may be The Tunguska Event.

Compare Thunderbolt Iron, where meteor ore is forged into a weapon. Should not be confused with Colony Drop or Meteor-Summoning Attack, which cover (among other things) conjuring meteorites with magic and dropping them as an attack.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In one manga adaptation of Powerpuff Girls Z, they had to deal with everyone in the City Of Townsville getting powers from a meteor.
• A meteorite is the source of The Medusa Plague from King of Thorn.
• Futari wa Pretty Cure begins with a meteor shower that brings Mepple to Earth. Mipple came the same way a hundred years prior.
• Meteor Strike (a one-shot by Nobuhiro Watsuki who drew Rurouni Kenshin) literally has a boy's head impaled with a meteorite which grants him superhuman powers.
• The Apocalypse Virus in Guilty Crown came from a fragment of a meteor that landed in Japan. The virus immediately infected the first person who touched the rock, who was Ouma Mana.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, the arrows that grant Stands to people struck by them are revealed in Golden Wind to be made from a meteorite that crashed in Greenland circa 50,000 BC.
• The Original Life Fiber in Kill la Kill, which altered a certain group of apes when it landed to evolve to become intelligent enough to craft complex cloth and lose enough hair to need to wear clothing that it could hide its fibers in.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!, a giant meteor of orichalcum crashed near the city of Atlantis, which proved rich in mining and technology but slowly turned the inhabitants into most of the monsters that the Egyptians collected and Pegasus transmuted into Duel Monsters trading cards. There's also a special collector's card made from fusing a blank card with a piece of orichalcum meteorite, which has the power to activate a specialized playing field.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, certain powerful cards fall from the sky in meteor-like tablets, including the Meklord Emperors and Yusei's Shooting Star Dragon. These cards are later revealed to be sent by Z-one, the enigmatic Greater-Scope Villain of the series, and the meteor tablets are presumably his delivery system (when Z-one himself duels near the end of the series, he uses similar giant tablets in lieu of proper cards).
• Deadly example found in Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam, where an asteroid was found that contains a virus that can turn human in to black goo.(and the said goo is just a large amount of the virus.)
• In Saint Seiya Omega, A meteor of darkness Cosmo was summoned by Medea to Earth in the middle of the first war against Mars, upgrading everyone's Cloths and giving them Elemental Powers. Sadly, it also upgraded Mars's Galaxy, making him even more powerful than before. The incident also lead to the infant Kouga and Aria inheriting their darkness and light Cosmo from the meteor and Athena, respectively.
• In Toriko, Gourmet Cells first arrived on Earth several million years ago on a meteor. Said meteor is a Planetary Parasite that now takes up 70% of the planet's surface as what is known as the Gourmet World.

Comic Books

• In the DC Comics comic book Ball And Chain, a fighting couple both get bathed in strange phlebotinum from a meteor and get superpowers.
• Hector Hammond, a Green Lantern villain, found meteor rocks and used their powers for evil.
• In the comic book Rising Stars by J. Michael Straczynski about 113 people (called "Specials") got superpowers from a mysterious meteor crash.
• In the DC Comics series Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!, six ordinary animals gained their superpowers from a meteor. They had a rabbit for a leader, and a duck on the team.
• Hawkman villain Lionmane got his powers from exposure to a meteor.
• Metamorpho (alternate identity Rex Mason) got his superpowers from a crashing meteor.
• In an Animal Man story, a fellow got powers from a meteor only to find out it was being able to kill with one touch.
  • This was meant to echo Animal Man's Pre-Crisis origin panel-for-panel, as Buddy Baker originally got his powers from meteor radiation.
• There's a Spider-Man villain, the Looter, whose whole schtick was stealing meteorites for their yummy power-granting abilites.
• In Scare Tactics (DC Comics), Grossout gained his powers (and became a giant walking tumor) from exposure to an exploding meteor.
• Darna, the heroine of a Filipino comic, found her Transformation Trinket stone in a meteorite (or rather, the meteorite is the stone).
• DCU villain Vandal Savage gained immortality from sleeping next to a magic meteor.
• Marvel heroine Firebird got her (fire-based) powers from exposure to a meteor, that in a later story was revealed to be the dumped remains of a failed alien lab experiment which had accidentally landed on Earth.
• Many powers in WildStorm can be traced back to the Comet Effect, an event in the 1970s wherein the mysterious radiation from a comet passing close to the Earth caused widespread mutations.
• Black Condor's origin from the 1940's consisted of him being raised by wild condors from a young age and somehow simply learning how to fly. When the story was retold in Secret Origins, writer Mark Waid added a panel showing a passing meteor, to at least give it some kind of explanation.
• In DC Comics Adam Blake is a metahuman who was "born a hundred thousand years before his time" due to a comet passing overhead at the moment of his birth. Hence his taking the name Captain Comet.
• The Atom Ray Palmer managed to work out his sizeshifting technology using the white dwarf star matter provided by a meteor made of the stuff.
• In Big Bang Comics, Ultiman (a Superman expy) gained the superpowers that made him 'the ultimate man' when a meteor crashed into his car.

Fanfiction

• Inverted in The Ash where Equestria is hit with an Anti-Magic meteor.

Film — Animated

• Ice Age: Collision Course: Geotopia, a settlement in the asteroid on the crash site of all previous collisions, keeps everyone who stays there from aging within city walls. After it is destroyed and its pieces used in a volcano to avert the asteroid, a piece of it lands in the geothermal vents of a hotspring, turning it into a Fountain of Youth.
• Susan gets her powers from a meteor in Monsters vs. Aliens.
• Straight Outta Nowhere: Scooby-Doo! meets Courage the Cowardly Dog: All of Nowhere's weirdness has been happening for millions of years due to a meteor that crashed in its prehistory.
• Most of the animals in DC League of Super-Pets get their powers from an orange Kryptonite meteor that gives superpowers to animals.

Film — Live-Action

• In Black Panther (2018), this is how vibranium came to Earth — a whole meteor of it crashed in Africa in what is now Wakanda. It created Mount Bashenga, a mountain full of vibranium deposits that's been mined by Wakandans for generations.
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend involves a meteor giving the titular character her powers. She also turns blonde and gets a magical boob job.
• In the movie The Meteor Man (it might have been a comic book too), a guy named Jefferson gets hit in the chest with part of a meteor and gets powers. To be more precise, the meteor chases him around a corner and into an alleyway.
• Used in Chronicle where a mysterious crystalline object found at the bottom of a crater gives three teenage guys telekinetic powers.
• In Creepshow, Jordy Verill (Stephen King) finds a meteor, which proceeds to turn him into a walking shrubbery.
• Stephen King's Trucks and Maximum Overdrive uses a meteorite as an excuse for trucks coming to murderous life.
• In George A. Romero's original Night of the Living Dead (1968), a space probe carrying a "mysterious cosmic radiation" from Venus blankets said radiation over a third of the US, which then causes the dead to come back to life and, y'know, start eating people. Not a meteor per se but close enough.
• A scientist becomes an insane Poisonous Person in The Invisible Ray, after he is in contact with radioactive meteorite for too long.
• In Super Mario Bros. (1993), the meteor that supposedly killed the dinosaurs sent them to Another Dimension and serves as a portal to our world.
• In The Curse, a strange glowing meteor falls near a farm, and starts mutating the flora and fauna around it, causing everything to be infested with worms and disgusting boils.
• Killdozer!: The energy entity arrives on Earth in a meteor and remains trapped there until the dozer smashes the meteor and the entity is released and possesses the dozer.

Literature

• In the book Meteorite Strike, everyone who wasn't killed by an asteroid got strange powers.
• In Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, magic sword Thorn was made from a meteor that, according to legend, struck a temple that God disapproved of.
• In The Colour Out of Space, the titular "colour" comes to earth in a meteor. Unlike most examples, it's not even remotely beneficial it slowly drains the life out of animal and plant life, which eventually turns grey and crumbles to dust.
• Seven Stars: In the prologue, the jewel is said to have fallen from the heavens, already in its current form and possessing its powers. If it was deliberately created, nobody in this world knows by whom or for what purpose.
• This is the entire foundation of the Wold Newton Family, a massive case of Canon Welding by Philip José Farmer. In 1795, a meteor struck outside Wold Newton, Yorkshire. In our world, it was just another meteorite with no particular unusual properties (the stone can today be seen at the Natural History Museum in London). However, Farmer proposed a scenario where radiation from the meteorite changed the reproductive DNA of the passengers of a passing carriage. As such, their offspring were gifted with unusual levels of intellect and/or strength, resulting in extraordinary individuals such as Doc Savage, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow and other iconic characters from early science-and pulp fiction.

Live-Action TV

• In The Flash (2014) and Legends of Tomorrow, Hawkman and Hawkgirl got their Reincarnation and Winged Humanoid mutation from an Nth metal meteorite that fell at the moment of their first deaths in Ancient Egypt. Vandal Savage also became immortal from the same meteorite. In Legends of Tomorrow, it's revealed that the meteorite, and others like it, were sent to Earth by Thanagarians in order to prepare the planet for an Alien Invasion.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The fall of a mysterious meteor is witnessed by King Gil-galad in Lindon and it subsequently comes down in Rhovanion near the Harfoots' camp. There it turns out to actually be a mysterious man with powerful magical abilities.
• In Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, it turns out that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs was one of these. Presumably it would have given them superpowers had it not destroyed their entire ecosystem first with the impact. Pieces of it are the Mineral MacGuffin that give the Rangers their powers.
  • There was a later meteor that wackily rearranged the Rangers' personalities. Trent seemed normal when affected by it, but the next time the White Ranger powers overtook him, he remained himself and helped the other Rangers defeat the Monster of the Week. It didn't last.
• Raising Dion: Years before the events of the series, a meteor shower interfacing with an Aurora Borealis in Iceland gave everybody who was there to watch it powers, including Dion's father Mark.
• That's So Raven has Eddy get powers for one episode by a meteor passing that only does once in a while.
• Superman himself may not count, but in Smallville the Monster of the Week was often a "meteor freak," i.e. got their power from exposure to Kryptonite.
• In Van-Pires, the four teen heroes get the power to transform into cars by a meteor.

Mythology and Religion

• In Islam, the Black Stone inside the Kaaba of Mecca is presumed to be a meteorite that fell from heaven, and forms an important part in the pilgrimage ritual.

Tabletop Games

• The Dungeons & Dragons book The Complete Arcane features a prestige class called Green Star Adept, which is basically a living being transforming into a living golem by consuming pieces of a comet.
• The Mutants & Masterminds book Mecha & Manga offers a setting where a comet deposited crystals on Earth that are the source of all of the world's super powers.

Video Games

• Tiberium from the Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series came from a meteor that landed near the Tiber River in Italy. The third game eventually reveals it was intentionally aimed at Earth by the Scrin to support their Tiberium addiction.
• In the beginning of Shounen Kininden Tsumuji shows the game's main villain having a meteor fall near him, and as soon he gets close, it then enters his body and grants him demonic powers.
• Meteor G from Mega Man Star Force 3. While it doesn't grant powers directly, the Noise generated by it and its effect on electronic beings causes some positive battle effects.
• The meteor that starts Ness' adventure in EarthBound. Not only was the time traveler Buzz Buzz riding in it, but the meteor contains a material needed for time travel. Which makes sense in retrospect.
• In Poptropica, Super Power Island's objective is to capture six villains after the prison is hit by a glowing green meteor. The meteor powered up the criminals, who are now running around with super powers.
• The Chaos Comet from Illusion of Gaia apparently gives off a type of magical radiation. Being bathed in the comet's light had been known to give people anything from psychic powers to horribly mutating them into demons. At one point, it's mentioned that "The Ancients" had enough understanding of the comet's powers to outright create living things, like camels and the Dark and Light Knights. The comet also ended up causing these civilizations to fall, since "evolving too fast brings destruction". It seems to return once every 800 years, however.
• In Final Fantasy VII, if Sephiroth lived to see his gigantic rock crash into the Planet, the massive damage it would cause would have granted him the powers of a god. This trope is only averted because the heroes stopped him.
• Since the Zodiacs of Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City gain their magical abilities through studying the stars, it's hardly surprising they can learn a Meteor spell. Simply learning it takes a lot of investment, however, and the spell itself is the most expensive one they can learn.
• The Temsik Meteor from Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective:
  • You die next to it: Your spirit gains super powers like telekinesis, teleport-swapping similarly-shaped objects, the ability to instantly travel anywhere via telephone lines or the ability to turn back time for brief periods.
  • You are killed by it: Additionally to the former, your body turns immortal and indestructible by being timelocked at the moment of your death, but you are unable to feel any kind of sensation, exhaustion or pain and can leave and reenter the body at will.
• The early Penvellyn alchemists from Nancy Drew: The Curse of Blackmoor Manor believed that a meteor found by their ancestor had magical powers. More recent generations may not have believed this but kept up the tradition of guarding it as a family secret.
• The plot to Inca II is kicked off by an asteroid entering the solar system that contains an enormous energy source. The majority of the game is centered on El Dorado finding a way to destroy this asteroid before Aguirre uses its energy to expand his reign.
• In Terraria, every night Fallen Stars will crash down like meteors in random places. You can collect them and craft them into an item that will permanently increase your maximum Mana pool (which is the only way to get a Mana pool in the first place), and if you're lucky, they can also hit enemies while falling and do 999 damage to anything, including bosses that you can fight outdoors. They can also be used as ammunition for a special type of gun, and do the most damage of any type of ammunition in the game. Actual meteors have 50% chance of falling offscreen after the next midnight whenever you destroy a Shadow Orb and 2% chance of appearing every midnight afterwards and any location that has at least 50 meteor blocks in close proximity spawns unique flying enemies. The resulting meteor ore can be crafted into various items, including the aforementioned star-shooting gun and a rapidly-firing laser pistol which gains infinite ammo with a full set of meteor armor.
• In Gadget: Past as Future, several devices in the Empire are powered by a meteoric ore that seems to provide near-infinite energy. But it also causes strange hallucinations when used in the Sensorama. The tie-in novel, "The Third Force" explains that the ore gives out a strange radiation that distorts time.
• Phazon meteors in all the Metroid Prime Trilogy hit various planets, corrupting the various lifeforms thereon, either killing them outright or mutating them into stronger forms while eventually robbing them of their will. One in the second game creates a whole new Dark World. In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption these "meteors" are actually giant living creatures called Leviathans.
• The cause behind all the trouble in Maniac Mansion.
• In Pokémon Sword and Shield, Dynamaxing is powered by energy radiated from what's called Wishing Stars, which true to their name are meteors. One drops right in front of the player and Hop near the beginning of the story and the fragments are used to make their dynamax bands just like everyone else's. It's eventually revealed the Wishing Stars are actually shed pieces of Eternatus' body.
• The cause behind the battling in Clayfighter is a meteor that crashed into Mudville, turning everything into clay.
• In Inazuma Eleven 2, the superhuman abilities of the supposedly alien members of Aliea Academy are actually the result of exposure to a glowing space rock called the Aliea Meteorite.

Webcomics

• At Arm's Length: This is what uplifted the original Enchanters from "Unga-Bunga" mortals to four-armed magic goliaths. The villains' main goal is to find the planet that the shard came from.
• In the webcomic Super Frat, fratboys gain powers from a meteor striking.
• League of Super Redundant Heroes: Parodied by Distractarella, who gained her distraction power from being struck by "a sexy meteor".

Western Animation

• The origin of Team Go in Kim Possible involves a rainbow comet hitting Shego and her brothers as children. The comet gave them all special powers and coloring to be more technicolor.
• In Wild West COW Boys Of Moo Mesa, one meteor as such gave rise to the mesa and mutated all the animals.
• In the Mighty Max episode "Tar Wars, it's learn that a meteor fell to Earth a million years ago and gave immortality and super strength to both a caveman and sabertooth tiger.
• In Loonatics Unleashed, a meteor strikes Acmetropolis, but instead of destroying the city, gives everyone strange superpowers. The team in the show is ripped off of the Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sozin's Comet is a celestial object which passes close enough to the world to become a huge and powerful source of fire every 100 years, providing an enormous boost of power to Firebenders. The fact that it heralded the genocide of the Air Nomads and attempted genocide of the Earth Kingdom also marks it as a Comet of Doom.
• An episode of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers began with a meteor falling to Earth, splitting into two crystals, one of which goes to the hero, the other to the villain, giving them both Rubber Man abilities.
• Camp Lakebottom: The Lakebottom campers and Buttsquat gain temporary superpowers in the "The Superfantastic Mega-Buds" episode from a glowing meteorite that lands in the middle of the camp.
• Ben 10 starts with the protagonist finding an alien shapeshifting device crashed to Earth like a meteorite.
• PJ Masks: Meterorites with special powers are a common phenomenon in the show. The first main example is the hero Newton Star, whose powers come from six asteroids that he named "Ajax, Velo, Lumino, Kino, Nova and Zihamba". The hero Ice Cub also got his powers from a supernatural asteroid when it shattered and a fragment got embedded into his onesie. Unfortunately for the heroes, the other fragments ended up giving the various nighttime villains a power boost.

Real Life

• On the night before a decisive battle during a civil war in The Roman Empire, Constantine the Great had a vision of a cross in the sky, which inspired him to convert to Christianity after winning the battle against great odds and seizing the imperial throne. From this point on, as emperor, Constantine tolerated and eventually promoted the new faith. Scientists have proposed that the cross Constantine saw may have actually been a meteor, a theory also detailed by the good folks at Cracked. In a way, a Magic Meteor may have increased the power of Christianity within the Roman Empire and eventually the rest of the world.

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