Interlude: Over the Moon

After all the intensity of the previous few days, I decided that I needed a bit of a break, and figured that taking another look at myself— or more specifically, my Powers, and whether or not I’d gained some, or what I had, had grown any. I didn’t exactly expect that my Powers would grow or change, but at the same time, it seemed like it would be the thing to happen; kind of like a superhero in a comic book. And, while I didn’t have any way of comparing myself to anyone else, I felt like I was pretty damned powerful, and I didn’t think I needed to be more powerful. But I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to check.

I found out pretty quickly that there had been some changes.

In making preparations to test myself out, I pulled together all of my so-called “equipment” to have it ready at hand, including my pellet gun. That particular action, though, reminded me that I hadn’t had a lot of call to keep my pellet gun fully loaded, as I’d been mostly flitting about in my other persona, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was trying very hard to be intimidating without having to pull that particular gun. But it still served me as a bona-fide weapon, and it was as good a time as any, to go ahead and make sure that it was reloaded.

The pellet gun worked a lot like a ‘real’ gun, in the sense that it had a magazine slide— albeit a very slim one— that one pressed the pellets into, just like one would put bullets into the slide of a ‘real’ gun. I ejected the slide, and noted that there were only two pellets left. I also didn’t know whether or not I needed to change the CO2 cartridge, so I got up and grabbed a new one, just in case. I’d put them down on my ‘kitchen’ table, earlier in the week, right next to the bottle containing the pellets for the gun, and hadn’t moved them since. When I went to reach for the bottle of pellets, I bumped into the plastic bottle and knocked it over; it rolled on the tabletop and over the edge, and without thinking about it, I reached out to snatch it out of the air.

And then, just as I got my hand underneath the bottle and the bottle settled into my hand, I felt them. I felt the pellets. All of them. Each one of them, all at the same time.

I almost dropped the bottle.
How in the fuck was I feeling this?

The feeling, no pun intended, was kind of on the overwhelming side; it was hard to explain, even to my own mind, just how weird it felt, to feel all of those pellets like that, and the thought crossed my mind to simply pour a couple out into the palm of my hand, and maybe I could feel them better, maybe understand how I was feeling what I was feeling.

I began pouring out a few, perhaps a dozen of the little lead bits, and I could feel them. But then I realized, that I wasn’t touching them. Not all of them, anyway. I opened my hand, feeling them all settle against my skin, but I could see them settling against my skin. Could I manipulate them with my mind? I wondered; could I have telekinesis after all? Did I have it all this time?

After a lot of trial and error— and after leaving the motel room for a ‘safer’, and certainly more quiet location away from potentially prying eyes— I found that, as long as the pellets were within about five to ten centimeters of my hands, I could feel them just as if I was actually touching them, I could touch them without actually touching them, and I could even move them. Telekinesis, maybe? or some off-shoot of some mental power? I supposed, and if so, perhaps just a very limited sort. But within those limits, I discovered that I could do a few fantastic things! I could accelerate the pellets from zero to faster than I could see even with my improving vision, almost instantly, and I could do that either one at a time, in rapid succession, or all at once in one direction like a laser beam or in a scatter of a shotgun-like blast. Oh, I could see a few advantages of that! I almost decided to ‘get rid’ of the gun, but I stopped myself, thinking of the tactical advantages of continuing to keep my abilities hidden.

It was while I was while I was still playing around with that new? new to me? ability that I stumbled upon the next things; namely that: one) if I was aiming at something distant, my vision would sharpen and focus, almost telescopically, so that I could see what I was aiming at; over time, I learned that there was almost no practical distance issue, so long as I had something to focus on; two) something a lot like a ‘crosshairs’ would appearing in my eyesight, allowing me to ‘pinpoint’ what I was aiming at, and three) whatever I saw, whatever I was aiming at, I could make my reactions fast enough to get ‘on point’, and steady enough to ensure that I hit whatever it was I was trying to hit.

I only thought about becoming an assassin for maybe five seconds. I wouldn’t hesitate to assassinate someone if I felt like it was going to further my own goals, but I wasn’t going to make a go of it as a career for hire or anything like that. Not directly, anyway. Besides, while I probably could do it, now that I knew what I could do, it would be beneath me, beneath my interests. I did file the thought away, another weapon in my arsenal that I could use if I needed to.

With some more testing, I found out that I could do that with more than just the pellets; I could apply my Power to things like rocks, and cans, and even insects. I stopped at insects, though I suspected that I could use it on other living material if I needed to. I could think of some interesting applications for that ability- some of them even good for others. I’d have to think carefully about what I did with that ‘new’ Power set.

After that, it seemed almost like I needed to look at what else I could do.

On a whim, I looked up just what were some of the heaviest objects in the world: one of the most noteworthy listed were the pyramids in Egypt, one of which was said to weigh nearly six million tons.

Why did I look it up? Because I wanted to see if it was something I could pick up; if one of my other Powers had grown, perhaps my strength had, too?

Of course, finding the pyramids wasn’t terribly difficult, but getting to them without being seen—which, while it wasn’t illegal for me to fly over the pyramids, and it wasn’t illegal for me to be in Egypt, I was planning to- in a very technical sense- vandalize the pyramids, and I didn’t want anyone to see me and associate any damages to ‘one of the seven wonders of the world’ to me—wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. While the pyramids were decently swarmed with people during the day and were comparatively empty at night, there was still enough night time activity that I had to be careful and plan out when I wanted to try my chances at lifting the structure.

And in the end, it was ... easy; in some ways, almost anti-climactic. It took a little while to burrow under the sand and the foundation underneath, and find the actual ‘bottom’ of the pyramid, and then a few moments to really get up underneath the stone structure, but once I felt that I could do it, it took about as much effort as lifting a sheet of paper.

I got down underneath the stone, and as I put my hands on the base of it where I could touch, I could feel every single block of stone, just like I could feel every one of the pellets in my hand. I could feel them, and I could, I realized, make them fly apart into literally millions of lethal projectiles ... or I could keep them exactly where they were.

One would think that I would have given some real thought to just what it took to burrow underneath the pyramid in the first place to get to where I could lift it, or at what physical cost to my body it was to make that happen; it wasn’t until much later when those thoughts crossed my mind, but it look another shock about my Powers to make me think about it.

Of course, I kept the pyramid blocks as they were; perhaps I could be a bit loose in morals from time to time, but I wasn’t a complete monster. Wanton destruction wasn’t my goal, wasn’t really ever my goal; in the moments I was in Giza, my goal was simply to test my strength.

I could feel the people inside of the pyramid as well, and I held them in place, too; I didn’t think a few hundred pounds shifting slightly would affect anything, but at the same time, I didn’t want anyone in the pyramid to get hurt by me picking the damned thing up, either; it wasn’t their fault that I felt like I needed to see if I could lift a pyramid.

And to be honest, at the time I was doing that, I didn’t give it a lot of thought; the people in the pyramid, as far as my ‘touch sense’ was telling me, were as much a part of the pyramid as the pyramid itself. They were ‘touching’ the pyramid, and so I could ‘touch’ them- just like I could ‘touch’ every block of the entire structure. It also wasn’t until later that I realized that the fact that all of those thousands of blocks of rock were not actually touching my hand, but that I could lift and move the entire structure of the building like it was all one giant block, meant that I was projecting some sort of field around whatever I was touching, in order to be able to ‘feel’ it like I was. Now that was definitely something I filed away for later consideration, once I realized it.

But there was nothing difficult at all about lifting up an Egyptian pyramid, and that in and of itself was mildly terrifying to me, the physical power I could command. I didn’t hold things for long- no more than about five minutes- but there was no strain; I felt like I could have held up those six million tons all day. But I put everything back the way I found it— to the best of my abilities, anyway— and quickly got the hell outta dodge.