Meta rating is based, not on power, but on the ability to affect the world. Class G is assigned to all baseline humans, animals, and anything able to affect primarily itself and only affect the world through their normal strength or intelligence. Class F is the first meta rating and means that their power is only able to have minor effects that are almost entirely ineffective, something like changing your eye or hair color, or the flavor of food. Class E means minor world effects, usually limited to a single person. Many Metas, even the combat effective ones, fall under this category. Improved (But not super) strength, the ability to fly with your own mass or only the mass you can carry, a minor addition to your combat effects like power-enhanced punches, improved but not extreme damage resistance, and the ability to summon minor local effects, similar to Class F but in an area, fall under this category.

Class D metas can have more serious, but still limited, effects on their environment. Metas with enough strength to punch through walls or push cars around, ignore bullets, create large or persistent effects capable of harming others, and teleport or phase into secured locations or drain power networks and make major information changes, such as cyberkinetics are considered class D metas. Class C, the minimum for joining the Prometheans, are capable of much broader scale changes. They are often nearly or completely immune to certain types of harm, can knock down buildings or wreck infrastructure, and in some cases defy physical laws with impunity, such as flying over the speed of sound without causing a boom, or grab and throw a car by its bumper ignoring the fact that a bumper isn’t capable of taking the strain without simply tearing off.

Class B metas can do even more physics-defying things on a larger scale, and are considered true global threats. They can empty a city of all life or fill it with plant life, summon Kaiju, and invent giant weapons of mass destruction that defy all common sense, like a giant sneeze gun that gives an entire town a cold or ignites a zombie apocalypse. As far as we know there are only two class A Metas that have ever existed. Our own Commander Freedom is one, as he appears to be immune to nearly any sort of harm, can fly faster than light, can breathe endless air in defiance of natural law to freeze and pick up entire small lakes, and could destroy a city in minutes with his laser eyes. The other was the Warlock, who I am not going to talk about except to say that we are fortunate that Commander Freedom ended him.

There are still small areas in Russia that regularly suffer dimensional incursions due to Warlock’s rifts, that require class D Metas or higher to fight and close. Supposedly Spector was a class A superhero as well, but Warlock killed him long before Doctor Cannon created the power registration hardware we use today.

It is conjectured that there may potentially be three more categories. Class S, which is a true global ability, is conjectured to be able to make broad changes to entire species, teleport one part of the planet to another, or simply rupture our planet’s core. Class SS could do things like igniting or putting out stars, and class SSS would be basically God. The Church of the human god, for example, believes that their deity is a meta that ascended to class SSS, but I pray we never experience even a class S meta or even another immoral class A as a species. It might end us.

Proteus Director Steven Hammond, during his address to the UN security council, 1988.

I went ahead and splurged on Pizza. Big Max pizza was utterly delicious, and my brother was going to be here the day after tomorrow to clean me out.

I was such a stupid sucker. He was crying on the phone, crying, telling me that the people he owed money to were going to kill him if he didn’t come up with five thousand dollars.

He knew I didn’t have five thousand dollars. I think he wanted to hide out here hoping they wouldn’t find him. But he was my brother. I was such a soft touch. When he broke down, I told him I’d find some way.

I knew it wasn’t his fault that mom and my little brother had died, but I still felt like he should have been there and helped somehow. I knew he was not lying, though. He was almost as stupid as I was. The fact that someone would kill him over five grand was not even a remote surprise. He’d been even more of a screw-up than I was in high school, dealing drugs and getting caught, and then getting two years in prison after he was tried as an adult at 17 the second time he was caught dealing heroin.

He was only dealing to support his habit. But still, he was my brother. The only family I had left. I was such a stupid sap. I wondered how much of my family home had gotten pumped into his veins.

Rather than dwell on my idiot brother’s problems, I thought about what I had learned. Callie had aspects too, which must mean that they were somehow important to my power. And she was going to live to be 150 years old, assuming she didn’t get gunned down by a thug or killed in some kind of supervillain death trap.

So what the hell were aspects? I started going around my little lair collecting things. My little aloe vera plant, a lighter, my first-aid kit, some vitamins, a couple of types of food, a piece of pizza, a tiny airline bottle of vodka, a little bar of hotel ivory soap, and a little painted miniature of Spector, the first class A superhero ever recorded. Three of the items, after scanning them, seemed very interesting.

multivitamins

Value: 4

Aspects: nutrition, regeneration, health, fitness

Power: 1

a bottle filled with nearly-expired multivitamins.

Aloe Vera sprig

Value: 2

Aspects: regeneration, health, fire resistance

Power: 1

a leaf from an aloe vera plant.

Vodka

Value: 3

Aspects: alcohol (suspension)

Power: 1

a small bottle of liquor sold on board an airplane

Another weird thing. What on earth was a suspension? I knew what it was in medicine, it was a medium to hold medicinal substances for injection or consumption.

I know I should have tried it before, but I had two objects here that both had the same aspects, health, and regeneration. I opened up the little bottle of vodka, took a sip, and then melted one of the multivitamins and the aloe vera sprig into it.

I couldn’t melt the vodka, it was already melted, unless I wanted to melt the glass, which I wasn’t sure would help. I poured out the mess into a glass tumbler and touched it.

Inactive poor mending pill

This potion contains minor regeneration and minor healing components.

Value: 0

Aspects: regeneration, health

Power: 3

Once this pill is activated, it is permanent. You may not improve the effects by taking more pills unless those pills are a stronger variant and can replace this variant.

Caution: If this pill’s power is stronger than the recipient’s power, they could die due to power shock.

I knew what power shock was. Some Metas could ‘overcharge’ themselves. They could drain more energy into their power than their mind or body could handle. When that happened, they started taking physical damage from whatever they were doing. Fireshock was known to have done that to defeat Doctor Proton’s freeze ray satellite back in ‘51 before the first meta could get into orbit to stop it from creating a new ice age.

I started slowly melting more vitamins and the rest of the poor aloe vera plant into the mixture in the water glass. Right now it was a murky grey-green color, but I was trying to figure out how to activate it.

Maybe it was the number of ingredients. I started searching through my cabinets for stuff that had ‘regeneration’ or ‘health’ in it. Aspirin did, but acetaminophen didn’t, so I added two aspirins melted into it. Ironically enough, a packet of wasabi from sushi takeout had it as well, and since it was already gooey, I didn’t even melt it, as its power was 5.

When I finished, the thing had changed.

Inactive good mending pill

This potion contains regeneration and healing components.

Value: 0

Aspects: regeneration, health

Power: 106

Once this pill is activated, it is permanent. You may not improve the effects by taking more pills unless those pills are a stronger variant and can replace this variant.

Caution: If this pill’s power is stronger than the recipient’s power, they could die due to power shock.

I still didn’t know how to activate it, so I tried one final thing. I touched my arm and tried to analyze what I had, myself.

Louis Albert McCarthy

Parahuman 10% Class F(S)

Aspects: body

Power: 120

Conditions: Extreme fitness

Projected Lifespan: ??? Current Age: 24

Stressed, driven, fatigued, confused, depressed

Powers: concoct, analyze, improved endurance

I was class F. Was the second letter my potential power level? What the hell was S? Or Parahuman?

Well, I guess a power of 120 was good, that meant whatever this was was not going to kill me. It appeared that every time I added a new component to the mix, it had a multiplicative power effect. Every time I added the same component, additive. I kept adding vitamins to the mix, finishing the jar, until the total got to 119.

Some chemical formulae required some type of catalyst to activate. This was a lot more like Frankenstein than any sort of science. I was a metahuman, or a parahuman, whatever that was. The prefix para generally meant ‘more than as opposed to meta, which, in ancient Greek, was the third letter. So I was more than human as opposed to human version 3.0.

So, how to get the Para power from me, into a concoction. I had a thought. Oh, eww. I should be wearing a white lab coat and rubber gloves and cackling evilly. Spit or other bodily substances had my generic materials in them, but blood or semen was probably the strongest source of genetic material.

Blood raven used her own blood as a material for her superpowers. I wasn’t going to jerk off into the glass, and there was some argument to be had that semen contained a bunch of genetic variances as well. Meta traits are not heritable. Blood it would be.

What’s the worst that could happen? It might not work, and I was out about 5 bucks in materials. Every medical student had a glucose testing kit, even if they were not diabetic, it was one of those things you just did. I found my backpack and pulled out the kit.

I pulled out a fresh sampler and loaded the pen. In a moment I had a tiny wound, and a drop of blood was hovering from it. I hoped that this was NOT how my abilities worked regularly, but it would certainly be par for the course. I squeezed my fingertip and soon dropped a single drop of blood into the glass.

The fluid in the glass started to glow. Great. This was how my powers worked. Still, it was right up there with hating having meta powers in the first place. At least, unlike the great hero and tolerance icon Rainbow Warrior, I couldn’t be casual and accidentally slaughter people thoughtlessly.

There was now, in fact, a pill sitting in the glass. It was a great honking big pill, glowing faintly golden with an almost robin’s egg patina. Despite all the stories, very few metas actually could hurt themselves with their powers, unless they did something monumentally stupid like trying to solidify themselves into a wall, or one of the metas with variable powers overloaded something they were not resistant to.

Would taking the pill be monumentally stupid? Probably. Maybe. But it was MY power, whatever it was. It was not like mad science, where I was taking an untested chemical formula that could irradiate me or turn me into a kaiju or something. I picked the pill up.

Active good mending pill

This potion contains regeneration and healing components.

Value: 0

Aspects: regeneration, health

Power: 119

Once this pill is activated, it is permanent. You may not improve the effects by taking more pills unless those pills are a stronger variant and can replace this variant.

Caution: If this pill’s power is stronger than the recipient’s power, they could die due to power shock.

Remember. This is no different than a flying Meta practicing flying for the first time, or Calliope throwing her first lightning bolt. Everyone with powers goes through this.

I sighed, talking myself into consuming a semi-random substance was probably not my brightest idea, but hey, I was too stupid to be a real doctor, right? On the plus side, if it didn’t work, my brother would show up the day after tomorrow to a stinking corpse. He might even feel bad for a few seconds and be a bit grossed out as he rifled my apartment for spare change and then forged a power of attorney to steal the seven grand I had in my account.

I chased the oversized pill down my throat with a bottle of water. And then I waited and waited. Had it worked? There was no glow, I didn’t suddenly grow 60 feet tall and start spitting fire, and except for a weird feeling of weakness that passed over me for a moment and then vanished, I didn’t feel any different. After a few minutes, I analyzed myself again, noting a minor change.

Louis Albert McCarthy

Parahuman 13% Class E (S)

Aspects: body

Power: 6 of 126 (-20)

Conditions: Extreme fitness, mending (Healing + regeneration)

Projected Lifespan: ??? Current Age: 24

curious, depressed, confused

Powers: concoct, analyze, improved endurance, mending

The -20 was a little confusing. Maybe that’s what mending required? That made sense. My Parahuman percentage had increased, and so had my class rating. Class E. Was that because, with regeneration, I was tough enough to make a real difference? Or was that due to whatever healing was? It was a pretty generic word. Did that mean that I healed really fast, and could regenerate stuff I couldn’t heal, like missing limbs? Or did I have some kind of cool power to project healing onto others? That would certainly make up for missing my chance at being a doctor, and might even open up the opportunity to finish my education later. Probably the former, since the latter would probably be considered a class D ability. Healing was a big deal, and if I could figure out how to create some kind of rapid healing potion, I could do even more good for the world than I would as a regular doctor. I guess that I also used power when I made concoctions or used them. Ow.

I spent almost four more hours trying out various combinations. Sometimes they came out as salves, especially when they used materials unsafe for consumption, sometimes potions, and one mixture of some stuff I had under my sink came out as a ‘fuel-air bomb’. That one was a little concerning but definitely explained the class upgrade. I discovered that it indeed cost me power to create concoctions, but that it came back, slowly, about a point per second or so.

I carefully labeled each of the mixes as I made them, and then padlocked them under the stairs. One of the concoctions bothered me, though. I made it from some Viagra pills Jim had given me as a joke and a few other ingredients that all had the ‘pleasure’ affinity, and quickly noted that power levels matched pretty close to classes, or they were marked with minimum power levels. Class G entities, which meant normal people, couldn’t exceed power 5 concoctions.

Halo dust

This dust causes temporary pleasure for one half hour

Value: TBD

Aspects: body, pleasure

Class requirement: G

Power: 5

This dust, if consumed, provokes a temporary feeling akin to a mild, full-body orgasm. If eaten, the effects are standard, but if absorbed through injection or inhalation, or other fast-absorption membranes, the effect is shorter but much more intense. The effect will also increase your energy and inspire a sense of well-being much like coffee or chocolate for a longer period, depending on your body mass and chemistry.

It is not physically addicting, and can only be used once per 24 hour period

Normal, baseline humans apparently could not withstand more than 5 power even if their power was much higher than that, like Brandi.

Sometimes they just didn’t work, too. I don’t know if it was due to certain aspects requiring more ingredients, if there wasn’t an ‘obvious’ form they could take, or if they were just out of my reach, currently.

In the end, I was left with 4 definite reproducible recipes. A mixed pain reliever that I had no chance to test, Halo dust, the fuel-air bomb, and a concoction called a minor healing potion that had a blue cast to it that looked like it had been ripped right out of A video game. I needed to have a better way to test things, but I had a feeling that, if I was creating a concoction specifically for one individual using their own aspects, the concoctions would have a much greater effect.

The way my power points had dipped left me feeling utterly exhausted by the time four AM rolled around, so I finally locked them all up in my little safe under the stairs up to my landlord’s part of the house, and I crashed.

I woke up later than usual, around 8, and had a good hour to eat my morning eggs, work out with my free weights and do a bunch of suspended sit-ups, and then take a shower. I only had two work shirts left, and I was very conscientious about wearing a clean shirt every single day since a little work left me quite funky by the end of most days. Brandi once told me that it was sexy as long as it wasn’t more than a day, but I think she was just trying to compliment the fact that she liked seeing me sweaty.

It was weird. I was used to healing quickly, but I had a mass of bruises last night after my sparring session that were now gone. I checked carefully both in the shower and in the mirror afterward, and even the scar I had gotten on my left pectoral when I got stabbed with a pencil in the third grade was gone. I supposed that meant the regeneration ability was working, but I hadn’t expected it to heal old scars. Usually, when someone awakened as a Meta, any old wounds or scars they had from before came with them.

I wore my ‘manager’ shirt today, a short-sleeved button-up with a tie, the Home workshop logo on one lapel, and my nice little gold name tag on the other. Tuesdays were Brad’s designated day off, and Brenda was closing so she wouldn’t be in until after school let out, so for the first half of the day I got to handle customer complaints, open drawers, and deal with late employees. Oh, joy. I spent most of my time working as a floor manager, and if the store could afford it I’d probably ask for a promotion, but I hated following corporate types around and preferred to just do some of the work myself.

I got in at 9:30 as usual, letting myself in and unlocking the back door. The back door still required a badge to access, but between midnight when we closed and 10:30 when we opened, we also had a deadbolt that required a key. I had the key to the deadbolt, but only Brad had the keys to the front doors, whoever opened came in through the back and then just undid the locks on the show doors from the inside when we turned on the auto-doors.

Kelly was in the break room getting changed. He always showed up 15 minutes early, which I appreciated. He was somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred years old and had served in the Navy through some war or other. Seriously, though, he was probably around 50 and looked eighty, but he, Brad, Sherry, and I were the only ones trained and authorized to use the pallet truck, a sort of stand-up fork truck we used for really heavy stuff and bringing pallet stock down from the 14-foot shelving in the store.

We used to keep the keys in the truck, but then Kieran decided to try and learn how to drive it on his own. Almost 3 grand in destroyed stock and a pallet truck lying on its side later we decided that each of us would keep one of the keys. Brenda, as an assistant manager, insisted she had far more important things to do than use the pallet truck, and since she was the one willing to keep the regional manager busy and entertained when he showed up, Brad was willing to let it slide. It cost us a little extra in free delivery trips when she was the only one closing, but it was worth it to keep the executive bunch out of our hair.

I checked the schedule as I pulled three drawers and loaded the registers. Lindsay and Johanna were working the front, Barry on the helpdesk, Dan and Daniel, whom we jokingly referred to as Dan, and my other brother Dan, were both working the floor and stock, and Gillie was working hardware. I looked forward to the shift, since, if it got slow, Gillie was as much of a health fanatic as I was. Her only flaw was that she was a Vegetarian and her girlfriend was a vegan, and she occasionally went off on a vegetarian nutrition rant, but I could brag about finally breaking 700 squat last night and she would be appropriately appreciative. We had similar tastes in women, so she might also like hearing about the sparring.

I didn’t understand how you could both be into lifting as well as being a vegetarian, but maybe it was different for girls. I had to eat a protein-heavy diet with lots of meat and eggs to build my muscles up. Gillie had quite an impressive musculature for a girl, muscles rolling under coffee-colored skin, but whatever she ate must have worked, even though occasionally you had to stay away from her if her diet was making her stomach act up. I think she kept a bottle of beano in her fanny pack at all times, but sometimes forgot to use it.

At ten-fifteen, I headed out to unlock the drawers and have the morning meeting, all 8 openers clustered together around the helpdesk plus a brand new face, a dark-skinned Hispanic that looked to be in his early 30s. “Hey, I am Louis. You are?” I asked him.

“Ramone Martinez. Brad gave me my badge last night and told me to be at the opening this morning. He said I was supposed to fill in on paint and stock?” He said in a voice with only a slight accent, and I noticed he had a big purple splotch on his neck, and little purple squares on each finger. Tattoo coverup, I guessed, as I shook his hand, and got a new notion in the back of my mind.

Ruiz Hesterez (Ramone Martinez)

Human class G

Aspects: body

Power: 50

Conditions: TB carrier, long-term damage, high fitness

Projected Lifespan: 12 Current Age: 33

worried, focused, grateful

Ruiz has a moderately damaged liver, a kidney that is no longer functional due to extreme piercing damage two years ago, and one of his fingers was broken and has been set badly at some time in the past. He also has long-term scarring from six bullet holes. He is a TB carrier, and should not be permitted to prepare food until he is cured.

He is currently on probation. He was a member of the Lupe Cartel but is trying to go legit and stay as far away from his former gang as possible since no one quits the cartel.

He must have noticed a change in my expression, because he asked me, “Is something wrong?” probably due to the noticeable cover-ups on his hand.

I shook my head and grinned, “Not even slightly. I am really glad you are here. We could use another guy in paint. You look like you lift?” I asked, squeezing his hand firmly for a moment but not trying to crush it or anything before letting go.

Lindsay took advantage of the opportunity to roll her eyes dramatically, “Oh shit, here we go again. Just give us our drawers before you start preaching like a Vegan and comparing your lifts and dick sizes.”

Ruiz, or Ramone, smiled a little, “Yeah, I spent some time in, you either get strong or find a gang, and I wanted to get out.” I nodded to him and started letting the girls count their drawers. Maybe it sounds sexist, but most of our registers were girls, and floor people and help desk were guys. Dudes just tended to be more trusted by home project fans and often knew more about construction and hardware, as well as being more capable of pulling down heavy stuff, and the girls tended to be more social and keep the customers happier when the lines were long or for stuff like returns, and they tended to struggle more with stocking. There were crossovers like Gillie of course, but our store was not really important or visible enough for most folks to make a big deal over it. We didn’t sell coffee, and our demographic was do-it-yourselfers, so we were invisible.

After all that, I unlocked the front doors, and we got to work.

The day was fairly uneventful. Ramone turned out to be a hard worker, and I looked forward to having him at the store. He was one of our oldest floor guys outside of Kelly, and it felt a little weird giving him directions since Kelly had worked here far longer than me and never needed to be told what project he was needed at next. Ramone picked up stuff pretty quick, though, and by the time openers were ready to go, he needed little other than the occasional mention to get going on the next task. At lunchtime, I ordered subs for both of us, explaining to him that it was something I always did for new hires to welcome them to the store, which was a flat-out lie, but he seemed to appreciate the foot-long, wolfing it down as well as the energy drink.

Energy drinks were… weird. They had so many ingredients, with stacking aspects, but I couldn’t activate them because each one was, I think, so minor. I was going to stop at the store at the end of today and pick up a bunch of different varieties for experimenting. It would be more than cool to have pre-assembled potions for healing and curing fatigue. I also wanted to stop at a GNC and see what other sorts of effects I could get from herbs. The idea of a power-enhanced building formula seemed great, and maybe I could find a way to break past normal human maximums and into the area of superhero strength. The idea of being able to stop murderous bastards like Rainbow had a certain appeal, even if doing it meant I would be labeled as a supervillain. Perhaps the reason just activating an energy drink didn’t work was because I had to assemble it myself, I didn’t have the right suspension, or there were ingredients like preservatives that actively retarded my efforts.

Keiran didn’t work today, which was a relief, especially since he didn’t work even when he was present. I didn’t have overtime today, so I was leaving at 6, I didn’t have classes, I couldn’t go to the gym or I’d draw funny looks doing a hardcore workout without downtime. Not having anything to do but maybe screwing around with more potions was way past weird, I was used to passing out from exhaustion at night, even with my naturally high endurance. Having free time was just weird. I didn’t have a computer, since I did most of my research on my phone and used the school library to write papers, so I couldn’t waste time playing games. Most of the weird group of people I occasionally hung out with back in school had gone their way and I’d lost touch.

I know that after a date you aren’t supposed to call back the next day or it would look needy, but still... would it be weird to ask Calliope to train today outside of the Gym? The idea of getting sweaty with her had a certain appeal, and I had to admit I had learned as much from fighting a small opponent that could hold their own with me as she probably had. But it wasn’t really like a date, right?

I went ahead and grabbed a rotisserie chicken and some club soda from the store next door to the GNC while I picked up about a hundred bucks worth of herbal supplements for experimenting. If she came to the gym again, I might even be able to afford it, proving that money management was not part of my diverse skill set.

I got back to my car, and stared at my phone for a few minutes, looking at the number she had transferred to my phone. Finally, I bit the bullet and texted, “Training?”

A few moments later I got a reply, just as terse, “Gym?”

I replied, “Fountainhead, near Occoquan. Davis cemetery parking lot. Good places nearby for practicing air stuff. Might want to wear cape gear.”

The response took a bit longer this time. And I got back, “Pay Jim?”

Jim was going to friggin kill me, but I texted back, “No charge. Call it a date.”

The response took even longer, but this time I got back, “Can’t call it a date, cape stuff, but I wish. Can I bring a friend?”

I shrugged. Well, I guess a fight with a superhero doesn’t really qualify as a date, and I understood where she was coming from. If she showed up as Calliope with a baseline, it would put me right in the line of fire if she had enemies. I suspected whoever she wanted to show up with her was there to make sure someone wasn’t using me as an ambush or something, but an evening of adrenaline sure sounded a lot more exciting than a night at home, dwelling on my brother’s arrival tomorrow and watching videos on my phone. And the 'I wish' part was promising.

“Sure. Do what you gotta do to keep it official. I will be there by 7.”

It wasn’t too long a drive, even when I swung by my place to change, grab my gear, and eat my chicken.