Which ending is more powerful?

[BigMcLargehuge]

Poll question: Which ending is more powerful?

Here's the story synopsis -

Super-Agile, and very famous superhero Kinetic Girl has made first contact with the parents of a 9 month old baby who has manifested the power to generate and manipulate electricity. She has to convince the mom and dad to give the baby to The Union of Superheroes. Though, in this case it's unprecedented because the recruit is so young (most powers manifest themselves during puberty).

There is a strong backlash against The Union and its costumed members due in part to decades of media saturation and a growing series of serious PR mistakes (as described in other stories).

A crowd has gathered outside demanding that she leave without the baby. The media is present.

Ending 1 -


“Thanks for the coffee. It was nice meeting you.” I turn towards the door. The crowd is bigger now, and angrier. I step to the porch. They seem surprised that I’m not carrying the baby. We have a car waiting at the end of the block. I walk down the steps. The family follows. Junior still hangs on Maria’s shoulder.

“We told them no way!” Manny barks to the crowd, they cheer back. I see signs and a tide of angry faces.

The minister opens the gate brushes past me “Heathen,” he whispers, “abomination.”

Manny shakes the minister's hand vigorously.

They don’t understand. When the lawyers get here there won’t be any smiles, there won’t be any crowds, just some police maybe, a special container for the baby, and tears.

The media rushes the gate, a dozen camera’s focus glare at me, a porcupine of microphones wave in front of my face. “No comment. The Union will release a statement through their official channels.”

I push through the throng, feel their hands brush against me, see the hate in their eyes. There was a time when I could count on a crowd to beg me for autographs or pose for pictures. Now they fear us, want us gone, or dead.

The telephone wire runs along the road down towards the seashore a half-mile away. I leap up, twist twice and flip. My feet land softly on the cable thirty feet over the crowd. I crouch there like a cat.

They don’t even look up.

Ending 2 (continues from where Ending 1 ends if that makes sense)

The minister yowls back, "Look at her run away. No comment? Of course they have no comment! How can they comment on stealing a baby away from its rightful, God-fearing Mother and Father?"

The crowd chants again Na na na-na! Na na na-na! Hey Hey Hey! Goodbye!

"We will no longer submit to their hegemony! We will no longer allow The Union and their freakish members to take our children and make them into costumed freaks!" The preacher snatches Manny Junior from Maria's arms and holds him high.

I can see the whiteness of the baby's eyes, no pupils. He cries out and wriggles in the minister's hands.

"Reverend no! Don't touch him!" Manny claws at the preacher.

Both men begin to scream.

A blinding flash, then another, tendrils of electricity flicker out of Junior's stubbly little fingers and toes. The thin blue bolds snake down into the ground. The crowd panics, people run in every direction. Screams echo off the tall tenements that line both sides of Roger Street. A stunning thunderclap ends the chaos.

Maria sits on the cement walkway and sobs beside the two charred corpses, Manny Junior nuzzles against the thick rubber sheet draped over his mother's shoudler and coos softly.

[frogmarch]

1. Ending 2

is my choice.

Are the endings for a complete story, or are they chapter endings? The reason I ask is because I was left wondering what was going to happen next. It didn't seem to me as though either ending offered a resolution. But maybe I'd have to read the whole story to understand.