Focus...

Slowly breathing in and out, I stared through the scope, waiting for the right moment. There was nothing else in the world, just me and my rifle. Suddenly, movement forced me into action, a dark figure was rounding a corner, moving into my line of fire. After centering myself, I trained my rifle on the figure, leading it slightly before a slight pressure of my figure changed the world from stillness to noise.

'Bang!' the sound rang out as I absorbed the recoil and got ready for a follow-up shot. Not on that enemy, I was certain that my 'one shot, one kill'-philosophy had been true once more. Sadly, those guys were like cockroaches. There was never just one. My focus tightened, shutting everything else out, leaving just me and my lines of fire. I checked the spots I had been assigned to guard and made sure that nothing moved there. Maybe the enemy had an idea of my position and was not willing to throw their people away in an unwinnable assault. They could never get through those spots as long as I stood guard and every try would cost them dearly.

All of a sudden, my focus was broken, the vision jerked and I just saw a knife flash before it turned black.

'You died.' a blood red message was displayed for a moment before the monitor showed my carefully chosen hiding-spot with an enemy player rapidly crouching and raising over my downed corpse. 'Jackass', I thought watching the juvenile taunts before bringing up the scoreboard and wondering how the hell that guy had gotten by the rest of my team. Now that I was dead, the general voice-chat was unmuted and I heard the guys on the other team throw taunts and jibes our way.

“We done goofed...” I said into the ether, surprised by the sudden silence. 'Oh, right, female gamer, what a shock.' The silence lasted for one or two breaths before I was asked to strip, post nude-pictures, go die and to do a plethora of other either humiliating or sexual things. In most cases, both. Sadly, there was little maturity to find in shooter-games online. At least if you played after school and on public servers. Part of me wanted to stay and play another round but I knew better. There were more important things than shooting people online. Even if it was a great deal of fun and, at least for me, a great training.

No, not training to shoot people. Hell, I had used a real rifle a few times at a shooting range and to no one's surprise nothing translated. I could use my keyboard and mouse to kill hundreds, if not thousands of virtual humans but the thought of shooting something other than a paper-target in reality? Let's not go there.

The training-effect was for training a side-effect of my power. Or my curse, depending on your opinion. I could not get something common and cool, like durability and strength referred to as the Atlas-Set or maybe even the cooler version of it, adding flight to the mix and becoming what some called the Hermes-Set.

No, I got a rare power. Seriously rare. Sadly, rarity does not make something awesome, unless you are a collector. I got a power I named Craftsman's Trance. Sounds awesome, right? Well, it's a great power if you want to create something with your hands. It allows me to focus on a task to an impossible degree, allowing for normally impossible feats of craftsmanship. The downside is that it creates a set of blinders, preventing me from taking in my surroundings, thus the training in shooter-games online, trying to focus on my sniping while at the same time being able to keep an eye on my surroundings. As shown by the scene above, it does not always work.

But back to my power. Every child dreams of gaining a power, a lot of them want to be heroes and fight bad guys. I was no real exception in wanting a power, feeling that it was about the coolest thing possible. Having a power, using it without interference, maybe having enough power to be free.

No such luck, my power is just boring, and thus my manifestation was about as unimpressive as possible. Manifestation is the moment when your power changes from a latent possibility into a graspable reality. In my case, it happened while I was reading. I missed dinner...

Yes, my manifestation-story is that I got so absorbed into a book that I missed dinner. Others manifest to save themselves or their loved ones, gaining their power in the face of disaster and overcoming it.

I didn't even realize what had happened until I went to sleep at night. After manifestation, the newly empowered being is visited by his or her predecessors, seeing them using the power they share through their own eyes. Nobody knows why it happens or how it works, it's one of the many unknowns with powers. I saw sculptors creating wonderful works of art, smiths working on beautiful blades, painters, simply said various artists and craftspeople throughout history. The dreams always last two weeks and the rarer the power, the fewer people have had it, the more time you spent in each of their minds. I spent twelve of my fourteen days with craftspeople, watching them make true works of art. The other two days, I spent watching through the eyes of artists, trying to emulate nature instead of creating reality.

Sadly, with the manifestation of my power, my hopes to gain a power to free myself were dashed.

I would stay within my cage, imprisoned by obligation and tradition. Yes, it is a beautiful, gilded cage and I am fed and watered like a good pet should be but it is a cage nonetheless.

My cage is the fact that I'm the second child and only daughter of Martin King, current owner and president of KingCorps, making me one of the wealthiest woman on the planet. Sadly, there are a lot of things money can't buy. Family is one of them. My father and older brother are absorbed in their work at KingCorps, often even sleeping in one of their executive rooms to save time.

So, allow me to introduce myself, I'm a woman of wealth and taste. I've been around for fifteen years, read many a book, letting no knowledge go to waste. I am Alexandria King and this is my story.