Chapter 2: Chapter One

Chapter One

Emily’s dreams were all hazy nightmares.

She woke with a bit of a jerk, a sense of wrong racing across her that only faded when she heard the distant honk of a car and the sounds of a bathroom flushing somewhere. The fact that she wasn’t home was quickly followed by the realization that she was in her new dorm.

That much she had kind of expected. She had never spent that many nights away from home, but on the rare occasion her family went on vacation there was always that sense of being misplaced on waking up.

She looked at her clock, realized that she hadn’t actually set it up yet, then pulled her phone from the crack between mattress and bedframe. A tap and she read ‘0634’ on the top of the display.

Her head fell into her pillow. She had her first classes at ten. Sleeping a bit more was possible, but she wasn’t tired, just lethargic and more than a little nervous.

With a heavy sigh, she climbed out of bed, picked out some clothes from a still-packed box, then slumped her way towards the bathroom.

She set her PJs aside first. They were clean enough to be worn one more time, she figured, and she still didn’t know too much about the laundry situation. The shower wasn’t as warm or as strong as back home, but she didn’t mind. Her blond hair took some scrubbing to look nice and neat, then she was out of the shower and wrapping a pair of thick towels around her waist and through her hair.

Her last stop was before the mirror where she brushed her teeth.

The brush fell into her sink, dropped when her hands went slack.

Eyes that were still misty locked onto the reflection in the mirror. Not of her own freckly, still-pudgy face, but on the words hovering above her head.

Emily Wright
?, Level Zero

She took in a deep breath, then another. “No,” she said.

Her denial didn’t do anything to the words hovering there. A shivering hand wiped the smog off the glass. All it did was make the hovering words shift along with her.

She wondered if it was a projection, some fancy hologram, but the words had to be written backwards for her to read them in the right order when reflected.

Emily’s eyes screwed shut. She went over the facts like her councillor had once taught her. It had been an exercise to keep the stress down.

Fact one. There were words above her. The kind of words that appeared above the heads of heroes and villains when they wanted them to.

Fact two. It had been Power Day when she went to bed the night before.

Fact three...

She grabbed onto the edge of the sink, then noticed her toothbrush. Carefully, she pulled it out of the sink’s hole, wiped it clean, then spat into the sink. A simple gesture, one she’d done a thousand times before. It felt wrong to do something so normal while her life was falling apart.

“No, no, it’s...”

She swallowed and ignored the minty freshness of it. Another exercise came to mind. The old three-tens trick. How would this impact her in ten minutes? In ten days? In ten months?

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In ten minutes she’d be... screwed. In ten days, likewise, and in ten months her life would probably be ruined.

Emily felt tears stinking at the corners of her eyes. None of the answers were good. The exercise had made it worse.

She wanted to rush to her phone and look up a guide. Some sort of ‘I woke up with powers, now what?’ but she knew that half the responses there would be excited cheers from idiots and the other half admonished by the government to join up right away... or else.

Her mom... couldn’t fix this. Her dad wouldn’t know where to begin.

She stumbled into her bedroom and got dressed with manic energy, clothes pulled from every box she could find until she was in a long skirt and a nice blouse with a warm cardigan to go atop it. It didn’t expose any skin beyond the nape of her neck, and it was all in somber colours that would blend in.

And then she was dressed for a class she might not be able to attend, not if there were literal words hovering above her head.

Sure, there were some open masks out there, people with powers who didn’t care if people knew who they were out of costume. She didn’t want people to notice her at the best of times.

She went over what she knew, which wasn’t all that much. One thing she did know, though, was the magic word, the one that could give away a Mask with only two syllables.

“Status,” she whispered.

A screen appeared before her.

Her eyes glazed over and she stumbled back until her rear found its way onto her bed. Only then did she actually read the screen before her.

Name: Emily Wright
Alignment: Undetermined
Alias: None
Level: Zero
Powers
None!
Points
Power Slots: 1	Skill Upgrades: 0	Skill Slots: 0

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