One Month Later

The cocoon rested unmoving atop a medical gourney in a cold, temperature controlled room. The very same room it had been in at Arborville Doctors’ Hospital for the last five weeks. None of the staff assigned to check in periodically, nor the family friends posted outside, noticed as life stirred within it for the first time in a month. Then, the cocoon began to crack.

A moment later the shell split from top to bottom, unsealing itself without so much as a sound. The black liquid-filled interior, roughly the same consistency as amniotic fluid, began to pulse rhythmically. The inner walls of the structure began to sag, forcing the split ever wider. Exposing the interior and what lay within.

Nestled inside the fluid as if it were an underwater bed rested the unmoving human form of an adult male. This young man breathed the black fluid as readily as if it were air, just as he had since it formed. He might have lain there longer, but electricity sparked along the outer edges of the shell. The entire interior mass rippled like the surface of a pond disturbed by quakes as crackling waves of electricity arced across the fluid.

It took several shocks to bring the unconscious man inside back to the waking world. As he began to stir, the electricity present in the liquid ground itself out against the very same shell it had sparked from. Almost as if on command.

Ryan Richards did not notice his strange surroundings at first. Instead he blinked a few times and realized the morning nurse must have left the lights off. All he could see was darkness. Ryan was not bothered by this. He felt cozy. Secure. The kind of comfort that comes from being deep under warm covers on a stormy day with nothing but hot chocolate in the belly, a favorite book, and a clear afternoon schedule.

Blearily, he lifted himself out of the already-fading dream he’d been having about underground dwarven kingdoms and grasped his knees to put himself into an upright position. Fluid fell off him unnoticed in soundless waves. As Ryan peered around to see if the shift change nurse had left his sound-activated light switch nearby, three facts about his situation shot through him almost as fast as the electricity had just a moment before. The implications of these three facts were… profound.

Fact One: Ryan wasn't actually on his bed. He actually appeared to be partially submerged inside of some sort of half-opened black cocoon. Understandably, this fact alarmed him considerably. The viscous liquid he was sitting in also seemed to fill his nose, mouth, and lungs. He had somehow been breathing it as if it were air.

Nightmares about alien abductions began to immediately run through his head. Unwilling to end up like the idiot cast member who inevitably died in the first act, Ryan began frantically coughing the fluid up and out. The process was not smooth, nor was it pretty. It felt like coughing up loose gelatin. Oddly enough, it reminded him of the chocolate pudding cups he’d gleefully eaten as a kid.

Odder still - it didn’t actually obstruct his breathing. Even when he coughed the fluid up it didn’t choke him on the way out. In a way it was kind of like gasping for air only to get more air. By the second cough his body was thoroughly confused as to what was causing this response. Despite that, the sensation of liquid in places it had absolutely no right to be in was so profoundly wrong that he forced it up all the same.

Fact Two: He could move. Ryan had been paralyzed from the neck down by a drunk in an accident two years ago. The inebriated asshole had rendered him a ‘quadraplegic’. The medical term for when pretty much everything south of his chin had stopped listening to the mind upstairs.

At first, it’d been infuriating. He’d raged at the prospect of never being able to move again. Then it became depressing. Ryan had slunk into a corner of his mind and refused to come out for several months. Then it had just… been. Like all humans, Ryan had adapted to the situation. He’d grown used to the repetitive daily existence of hospital life for a perpetual patient. His world consisted of copious internet usage, terrible-to-tolerable hospital food, and the occasional visit from old friends or family. Every month or so he’d even managed a virtual tabletop session with his dad’s long time inner circle.

Now though? Weak as it was, his body actually responded when he told it something. He could lift his hand. He was holding his freaking knees!

At least, he was for the moment. The simple assurance of feeling his own skin once more pushed all the nightmares of being ‘experiment 626’ away and locked them up tight. Ryan didn’t really care what had done it, experimental surgery followed by deep sedation was his best guess, but he decided that whatever the cost had been - it had been worth it. Tears of joy welled up in his eyes as he grinned like a madman over the simple fact of being able to flex his fingers by his own power once more. Even the blackness gliding off them wasn’t enough to marr the beauty of it in his mind.

Fact Three… despite the relative shock the other two had brought with them… Fact Three pushed both from his mind. Not immediately, this one took his still-waking mind some time to notice.

It waited until Ryan had managed his first full breath of that sanitized and stale hospital air. It waited until he looked around in disbelief at his muscle-atrophied body emerging from the black amoeba he was currently sitting in and the even blacker shell he was sure he’d been trapped in just moments before. It waited until he finally voiced aloud the question burning inside above all others about his new predicament.

The one question he had for this strange, new and possibly space-horror-show inspired world.

"What…" Ryan gasped out as loudly as his long unused lungs could manage. "The… fuck… is going on!? What the fuck am I, a zergling?!" Each new word had been a struggle, but by the end of his pronouncement Ryan’s lungs had mostly cleared and his voice was charging full sprint towards panic town.

That was when Fact Three asserted itself. It did so in the form of semi-translucent prompt messages like you’d find on a computer screen. They appeared in a flood, cascading over his vision and each other as if he’d just triggered a catastrophic system error. They overlapped over and over, providing him with a stream of unasked-for updates to his body’s status. Yet when he shut his eyes tight to escape the onslaught of information, the blue-tinged prompts remained.

After a few minutes attempting in vain to figure out just what in Sauron’s name was going on… Ryan took a breath and tried to treat the flood of information as he might on a computer. One at a time. With a bit of effort, he found that he could delete, move, or even minimize them. Emboldened at the small success, he continued to trudge through what felt like dozens, maybe hundreds of the irritating screens.

For all his effort, each individual prompt still didn’t make any sense. There was no organization. Each window showed only one thing. One prompt told him his name as if that were helpful. Another, his age. Some assigned a number to his strength (2) or his intelligence (18). One even listed his race: Human (Super). What in demon-loving hell did that mean?

Ryan quickly decided that there had to be a better way to look at all of this. If the information was in his mind, then it must have come from his mind, right? And if it came from his mind, then he should be able to organize it. He’d worked with charts, made presentations, and even compiled databases on data before. Most he’d built in his head before ever touching the keys.

He could do this. It was just a matter of figuring out how. The one relation all this data seemed to share was that it was about him. So, he worked off of that.

Ryan had played hundreds of role playing games (RPGs) in his life. Both as a kid into his college years and then later through the specially designed computer his dad had set him up with. Every one of those games had some version of a character sheet. A quick-list chart of relevant data about whoever the protagonist was.

So… if the information was about him, then that was what he needed. A character sheet. If he could just stick everything on there, maybe he could make sense of it. And since it was all in his head, he just needed to visualize it - right?

With nothing really to lose, Ryan decided to give it a shot. Some concentrated mental effort later, all of the prompts in his vision vanished as abruptly as they came. He was about to sigh in relief when a single prompt with what he realized was a freaking scroll bar appeared in the center of his vision. By focusing, he found he could scroll what was displayed just as easily as he’d been able to with the eye-tracking software his dad had installed on his gaming rig.

What Ryan saw as he read through took his breath away.

Name: Ryan Richards

Age: 26

Race: Human (Super)

Attributes:

Strength: 2

Dexterity: 3

Constitution: 4

Intelligence: 18

Wisdom: 13

Charisma: 14

Superpower(s):

Editor: Grants the capability to edit anything or anyone, to shape the universe itself to suit one's desires. Can provide additional information, to include hypothetical required energy costs to edit, if the subject remains within visual range.

Warning:

Requires an output of energy commensurate to changes made, pulled from the editor’s energy capacity. Requires physical contact with a target in order to make a change.

Energy Capacity: 50 of 50.

Status:

Physical status: General muscular atrophy. Recently evolved.

Mental: Confused. Recently evolved.

Ryan blinked in shock. He’d thought for sure he’d seen that wrong, but he hadn’t! ‘Human (super)'! Wasn’t that just another way to say superhuman? Is that what he was now? Had he really just evolved a freaking superpower? Is that why he was in this cocoon? To go from butterfly to badass?!

And what the hell was an editor? 'Shape the universe to suit one’s desires' sounded pretty dang awesome. Even if it did require an 'output of energy’ from his ‘capacity’', whatever that meant.

Wait - did he have to plug himself in now?

……….

Ryan hurriedly checked to make sure he didn't have any Matrix-esque holes in his body, any extension-cord toes, or any other techno-dystopia nonsense sprouting from strange places. To his immense relief, he found nothing of the sort. Nothing but good ol’ fashioned (super?) human body. Phew!

A worried thought struck him and Ryan felt around to make sure his boy downstairs hadn't gone off and evolved a second prong. Terrible images of some three-headed alien laughing himself stupid while designing the new males-only ‘plug’ to optimally connect with the human female played out in his mind. Luckily, it appeared that idea was every bit as ridiculous as it sounded. Lil’ Ryan was just as he’d always been.

Ryan let out a long, relieved sigh and settled back into the water. Some of it spilled out onto the floor, again making no noise, but he decided that was likely someone else’s problem. Like whoever had put him here. Jokes on them for not making his former prison spill-proof.

Soaking in the black liquid was surprisingly comfortable. It was warm somehow - the good, bathwater kind not lukewarm - and wiggled like jello when he moved. The liquid also seemed to cling to his skin the same way water attracted itself. Like he was a part of it - or it, him.

Ryan abandoned that odd line of thought and decided to just relax. To re-center himself mentally. To calm down after the multiple shocks he’d received after waking up. The interior of the shell cracked a bit as he moved around. More of the black liquid began to slowly drain out onto the floor, but he paid it no mind. It wasn't like the former quadraplegic had anywhere to be, after all.

His character page had said he was ‘recently evolved’ - on both his physical and mental status, which seemed odd. Considering he was sitting in what looked like a caterpillar’s metamorphosis aftermath however, that seemed… well, hard to deny. Ryan brought his right hand up and flexed his fingers in front of him. The gaunt digits moved easily, his bones clearly visible underneath soft skin. He reached back and felt at the back of his neck, where he knew the source of his paralysis had been. Had the evolution fixed his spine? Is that why he could move now?

Two years. That’s how long he’d been trapped inside his own body. Two years being unable to move anything besides his head. He’d long since stopped being embarrassed about calling a nurse just for a nose scratch. Left unattended, the itch could drive a man mad.

And yet… Ryan lifted his other hand and idly scratched the tip of his noggin. He marveled at how easy the simple gesture was to do. At the agency even that tiny bit of control over his own situation brought back to his life.

There’d been weeks when he’d been half-convinced he could mentally force his body to change. Weeks of chanting to an audience of only himself trying to hype his muscles into movement. Hoping against hope that sheer force of will could save him where science hadn’t.

The weeks after he’d finally given up that notion hadn’t been his best. His hand might look nearly skeletal now, but at least it moved. That was really all that mattered.

After some time spent testing out his limbs and wiggling his extremities, Ryan pinched himself to make sure this wasn't some cruel dream. For a moment, he’d been concerned that instead of waking up he’d actually just slipped into a coma. That his mind had retreated from the banal existence it was faced with and come up with something new. Something exciting.

Pain caused his eyes to well up faster than his earlier joy had. It didn’t feel great, but he did it again anyway just to be sure. When it looked like he was on the verge of giving himself a bruise, Ryan stopped.

Well, at least I know I'm not dreaming. He thought with no small amount of relief. Then he realized something else. The prompt was gone. He’d gotten so used to it being there that he’d kind of just blocked it out. As if it were just a scratch on his glasses.

Now Ryan wondered if he could get it back. What good was a superpower if you didn’t know how it worked after all. His mind went back through what had happened just before the prompts appeared. They’d flooded in as soon as he’d shouted. Maybe it was the wording?

What did I ask? “What am I?” No sooner had the thought appeared than his character page popped up in the center of his vision once more.

It worked! It was still kind of annoyingly located, but it had worked! Ryan decided to see if he could fix that little inconvenience. With a mental effort he pushed the screen further back in his vision, as if it were being projected onto the wall.

Hmm… If I can edit anything… can I edit… me? He wondered.

"Careful, Ryan. Play with yourself too much and you'll go blind..." Ryan answered his own question with some amusement, using the same warning tone old Miss Simonson’s matronly voice from his middle school years had carried. To his surprise, the prompt vanished and another appeared.

Removing capabilities from oneself does not have an energy cost. Instead, you will gain the associated energy cost of your eyes as they are turned to dust. Would you like to blind yourself and gain 1,500 points worth of energy? Yes, or no?

Warning: Energy gained over your maximum will be lost if not immediately used. There is also a chance it may violently escape.

"Wh--No! Hell no!" Ryan responded immediately, splashing away from the prompt on the wall in fear even though this was all occurring squarely inside his head. The prompt vanished as soon as he responded. Ryan’s heart thundered in his chest, pounding so forcefully he thought it might burst out of his ribcage and splash about with him.

What… What in the name of all that was good and holy had THAT been? Had he almost blinded himself? Over a terrible joke? And did that just say the energy could violently escape? How?! And out of where, exactly?!

Several minutes passed as Ryan calmed himself down. Tense minutes, he felt, wherein he was very, very careful not to say or even think anything that might trigger another prompt. Apparently his superpower loved hypotheticals a bit too much.

Which meant he knew what change he had to make first now. His power may be awesome on wheels, but if those wheels ran off into crazy-town and could potentially maim him over an off-hand joke then they needed to be curbed now rather than later. Or at the very least, he needed a way to apply the brakes.

One carefully constructed thought later, Ryan received a new prompt.

Would you like to restrict your power activation with the mental code phrase: "For Pony"? As this change is purely a mental exercise, it will neither cost nor refund energy. Yes, or no?

Happy that he now had a measure of control on the crazy-wagon, Ryan selected 'yes'.

The 'code phrase' he’d chosen was the favored battle cry of a warlock from a particularly great webcomic he’d been addicted to back in the day. The crafty, comically evil fellow shared Richard’s last name and had been his favorite character. Somewhere in his bedroom there was even a signed card from the authors.

Still, as amusing as it was, that wasn’t the real reason Ryan had picked it. The real reason was ‘for pony’ was something he’d never actually heard said out loud. And since thoughts seemed to trigger his new gift too… yeah. A password for his power seemed best. At least for now.

Disaster averted, or at least postponed, he decided to try something else. His character sheet had said his muscles were currently atrophied, a fact made obvious by his strength of ‘2’ and how even his upper arms were basically just skin and bones.

Fixing muscular atrophy wasn’t a matter for surgery however. The cure for it was muscle rehabilitation. Basically, because he hadn’t used his muscles in so long his body had stopped maintaining them. Now, he needed to use them again. A lot. And slowly, or he risked tears and all sorts of nasty muscular-breakdown business sane people preferred to avoid.

That was really it though. Long term, careful exercise under the supervision of a professional could fix the atrophy completely. He'd been in the hospital long enough to see patients that started out looking almost as bad as he was now walk out of here looking like Johnny Bravo. Hu- ha- HUH!

Grinning at the thought, Ryan checked to see if his new power could do the same.

Insufficient energy. Energy required to permanently increase strength to estimated 'Johnny Bravo' level: 13,570 points.

Over thirteen thousand?! That was way more than the cost he'd gain even if he had blinded himself!

Ryan still didn’t understand exactly how costs were being calculated here, but apparently eyes - while complex - were not worth the same as cartoonishly bulging muscles. Even though muscles were practically useless without the ability to see anything. Unless your enemies were half-retarded and closed within grabbing distance that is, then you could go all Mountain on ‘em. Blind them for being dumb enough not to finish you off.

Ryan shook his head. Now was not the time to worry about stupid scenes in Game of Thrones. He had another idea to try.

Energy required to permanently increase strength from 2 to 3: 30 points. Would you like to increase your strength? Yes, or no?

Now we’re talking! Ryan thought with a wide grin. Just 30 points to permanently increase his strength! Thirty points which, according to his character sheet, he had! His total held 50 points, leaving him with another 20 for later. Problem was, he had no idea how to get more whenever later came.

A worry for another time, he supposed. What good was a superpower if you never used it? That’d be like the Flash choosing to walk to work every day. Or watching Superman take the bus.

Noo, thank you. Keep your alter-ego limitations and whatever other excuses well over there, thank you. Ryan chose: ‘yes’.

All at once, every muscle in his body contracted and hardened. New muscle fibers formed and he could feel his frail body fill out - even if by just a bit. The whole process was over in seconds. He found that he was sweating a bit, but a dip back into the liquid fixed that.

Once it was over, Ryan realized he’d never actually tested his previous strength, so he had no idea how much stronger he’d gotten. Then again, it wasn’t exactly like he had a weight set just lying around. Man, wouldn’t that have been a cruel gift to someone of his condition. My previous condition. He reminded himself.

A growling erupted from his stomach, as if in reproach at his lack of foresight. Ryan decided to ignore his grumpy gut. Bland hospital food could wait. Right now he had more questions than answers.

Energy required to permanently increase strength from 3 to 4: 40 points. Would you like to increase your strength? Yes, or no?

Warning: Insufficient energy.

Ryan selected ‘no’. While somewhat disappointing, this answered at least one question.

It appeared that the energy cost to upgrade an attribute was simply 10 times that of the next level. Ryan did some tedious mental addition. 40+50+60… After a moment, he realized that either the math didn’t add up somewhere, or the formula must change as attributes went up. If it didn’t then his power must be taking some rather broad liberties with what ‘cartoonish strength’ meant.

Still, it was interesting. If Ryan could replenish his lost energy... then he could conceivably increase his strength up to 5 before he had to worry about upgrading his total pool further. Then all he had to worry about aside from what in the Sam Hill ‘5 strength’ even meant was upgrading his capacity to hold more.

Speaking of...

Energy required to permanently increase Ryan Richard’s total energy capacity from 50 to 51: 50 points.

Warning: Insufficient energy.

Well… that was harsh. It took all fifty of his points just to increase his new max by a single point? That was cheap, man!

Ryan wondered if his low constitution had played a role into how low his starting capacity was. He felt like a noob with his current stats. Sure, he was just starting out as a super but… still!

Thinking about it rationally however, it made sense. In most comics, great power usually came with a drawback of some kind. And in most RPGs, the average adult had a base strength of 10.

If Ryan could just wave a hand and upgrade himself or someone else way above that… It was easy to see how that could ramp up out of hand quickly. His power didn’t seem to allow for that. At least, not right away. It appeared to be the ‘start small and invest’ kind of power. Long term rather than short burn.

Only if the description of his power held true… Long term my potential might literally be limitless.

Another thought occurred to him after that.

Would the cost change if he tried to upgrade someone else? There was nobody in the room with him, so it wasn’t like he could get a real answer just by sitting around in his butterfly-bath. His power had said the subject must be within ‘visual range’. Which most likely meant he had to see them.

Looking around, there was a standard patient gown in an ugly off-white and even uglier pastel floral pattern hung up to his right. Ryan clambered out of the shell as carefully as he could and slid off the metal table. The floor felt slimy and sand-like between his toes. Almost like the fallen liquid had mixed with something.

Ryan ignored the strange sensation and stripped off the thoroughly goo-ified gown he’d been wearing for however long. Wrapping it around one hand, he used it to de-slimify himself as best he could. It was hard to tell where exactly the liquid was in the dark, but he felt like he did a decent job of it. Once he’d slipped into the new gown and turned on the room’s light, Ryan realized what had caused the sandy sensation on the floor. T

Four piles of ash lay around his hospital bed coming up to just past ankle height. The piles near where he’d climbed out were now thoroughly mixed up in the goo that had followed him out of the cocoon.

That’s… not ominous at all. Ryan thought with some trepidation. He’d have to ask one of the nurses about that. If they were… still alive, that is. The thought - especially in light of how often superhero stories started out in a lab somewhere - was more than a little disturbing. Ryan tried to put it out of his mind. He would be the first to admit he had no idea what was going on, but the room had been mostly as he remembered it. He didn’t think he’d been moved.

Or maybe it was more accurate to say he hoped he hadn’t been.

With that, Ryan put his hand on the doorknob and mentally reviewed the chain of events that had occurred since he’d woken up.

A paralyzed man had just stepped out of a man-sized black cocoon like some sort of super-butterfly with and then beefed himself up just by thinking about it. Sacrificial ash seemed strewn about too, for some reason.

Hmm. Probably not the… best way to phrase that. Ryan thought, a little off-put by how his mind had colored that last part.

Discarding the thought as irrelevant nonsense, Ryan squared his still-frail shoulders and opened the door to discover just what kind of world he’d woken up in.