Chapter 4: Decisions

One of the first thoughts I had when I woke up the next morning was not— surprisingly— about suicide. That had, for the time being, been replaced with thoughts of flying. I wanted to do that again! That made me think about how I could go about it, though, without being seen, or failing that, without being caught or recognized, and I began thinking of anything I could wear to disguise myself.

What I came up with, after a lot of thought, was a wetsuit- mainly because of the close coverage, the general ‘smoothness’ of the material, and for the coloration; that would do for the time being, until I could do something better. It would give me plenty of body cover. In thinking about that, I ended up taking a look at the clothes I was wearing the day before, the ones I had gone flying in. Now that I was paying attention, I was surprised to find that there were only a few errant scorch marks on what I was wearing; at the speeds I was moving at, my clothes probably should have either suffered burn damage, or tearing from wind shear. Thinking about that made me frown, wondering why that wasn’t the case.

That lead back to my thoughts about what the cause, or the source, of my abilities now, had to be. On the one hand, the asteroid was the most obvious choice for things; it was a world-wide event, and it was the most recent thing to have happened in the last month. But, a part of my mind countered, how could it be the source of my abilities, if those abilities were only showing up now, a month later? Wouldn’t it make more sense that it was something more recent? Or had I just been so caught up in my grief, that I hadn’t noticed whether or not there was anything different about myself?

So was that it? I wondered. I’m invulnerable, and I can fly? I mean, I had eliminated a few things with vision, but were there other things? I hadn’t tested to see if I could move mountains, or race a bullet train, or any number of myriad powers that could be out there; I mean, I had been a comic geek- and deep in my heart, I still was- so the powers I could try and find out if I had, were almost endless.

And that’s what I did, even while in the deeper part of my thoughts, I was still trying to sift through my memories of the last month and figure out if I had been doing anything special or spectacular.

I found out that I could run pretty damned fast. How fast, I couldn’t tell right then, since I was in the park, and not out on the highway— again, I didn’t want anyone to see me, or catch me doing anything “super powered”— and so I could only tell by how fast the trees seemed to whip past me and how much I needed to pay attention to the curves and turns of the path I was running on. It was like I had super coiled springs in my legs, and with each step, each push, I was launching myself forward, and the faster I ran, the further I could launch myself. Of course, though, I attributed that to be connected with my ability to fly, to being able to launch myself up into the air. Why wouldn’t it be applicable to ground velocity as well?

I did find out the hard way that I needed to pay attention to being able to stop, as well as move; tripping over a small rock ‘curb’ and cartwheeling into a tree— even though it didn’t hurt physically— was a bit of a smack to my pride. Speed kills— though, maybe not in my case— and so I needed to pay better attention.

I also found out that I could pick up damned near anything that wasn’t bolted down; I didn’t try on things that were bolted down, because that might have attracted attention. Picking up a fallen tree, deeper into the park, was no more difficult that picking up a sheet of paper from the floor, except that I had to be conscious of where I was swinging it. Much later that evening, I snuck-flew to the Greyhound bus station, and briefly picking up one of the busses was like picking up an empty cardboard box. I did make sure to wear gloves, so I didn’t leave any fingerprints.

But I didn’t have a huge array of powers; no energy blasts of any kind, not from any limb or orifice. No super breath, no super hearing; I couldn’t conjure weapons out of thin air. No getting stronger in the sunlight or weaker in the darkness, no ability to talk to or understand animals. No eidetic memory— though I did notice that my memory was a lot better than it had been— and no ability to read, hear, or manipulate others’ thoughts. No ‘spidey sense’, but I did have a better sense of when people were near me, or approaching me, so there was that, I suppose. No transformations, and if I could do something like a “Super Saiyan” and increase my power, I didn’t know how to make that happen. I couldn’t manipulate the elements, nor could I create something out of nothing. Or, to be perfectly honest, if I could somehow do those things, I didn’t know how to trigger them; admittedly, I tried each and every thing I could think of, for perhaps thirty minutes at a time, and nothing seemed to work.