“-and I swear, like my mentor before me, that I won’t rest until this threat is handled. I swear it on my honor as the Atomic Karate K-'' A nasally man's voice was saying somewhere in the distance, loud enough that the sound broke through the haze of pain that I was currently in.

“We, of course, fully plan to track Adrenaline down. He’s been terrorizing people for too long, and the horrific damage he’s caused to local businesses is something we take very seriously.” A female voice my hazy mind recognized said, cutting the man off.

I guess right around then was when the gears in my head finally managed to catch on to each other, because I abruptly went from ‘very probably dead’ - at least if my memory of what had happened to me was accurate - to more or less fine.

Naturally, before anything else, before even opening my eyes all the way to get my bearings, my gaze darted to my health bar - which I could see even when my eyes were closed, seemingly just by thinking about it.

Health: 25/100

Ki: 10/10

I let loose a sigh of relief as I saw it. Twenty five out of a hundred wasn’t ideal, but it was more health than I had ever had since getting a health bar so that was probably tainting my view of things somewhat. I still didn’t feel great - my whole body hurt, and even the small amount of light breaching my narrowed eyelids was giving me a migraine - but I wasn’t dead which was always the goal.

In the background, sounds had begun to jump to my attention. I’d have expected to hear sirens given the villain attack, but depending on how long I’d been unconscious the authorities might have arrived and helped resolve everything already. It’d be pretty counterproductive to get somewhere, then blow the victims’ eardrums out while loading them into the ambulance after all.

…unless Bat Beast was here too, in which case the sirens would serve to aggravate his improved hearing and keep him away from-

No, focus. One villain showing up didn’t mean a whole bunch of them had grouped up to do something. It wasn’t unheard of for a bunch of them to sync up their PDS (Power Derangement Syndrome) - somehow - then do something insane like ‘try to steal a building’, but it was rare. Most of the time, Villains tended to hate each other about as much as they hated the heroes.

I guess that happens when you have mutually exclusive delusions that can’t be reconciled.

What was I doing again?

Right. Trying to figure out what had happened.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the crater. Calling it a crater might be sort of an exaggeration, but not by much. Since I was laying on my back, the first thing I saw was the top half of the building I worked in - the exact location I had landed when Adrenaline had hurled me away from him. Two of the letters in the giant sign emblazoned on it had fallen off, leaving just the H and E in ‘Home’, and where the O and M used to be there was a vaguely person shaped indentation in the siding. Jagged bits of aluminum rose out of the indentation, some of them visibly covered in dried blood, and the wiring that used to light up the name of the store hung limply overhead.

I had to assume someone had the wherewithal to shut the power to it off, because none of it was sparking or anything, but I instinctively started to shift myself away from the dangling cable anyway. Just in case.

My brief attempt to move, of course, brought to my attention the fact that I was laying down on a sheet in the parking lot, surrounded by a bunch of other employees; and that at some point someone had erected a police barrier around us.

“Nicholas! Thank god you’re okay!” Someone called to me as I was trying to prop myself up enough to get a better look at things. I turned to find Pam dusting herself off and standing to rush towards me.

Pam wasn’t my friend. I didn’t hate her, but I didn’t like her either. She was just someone I stayed on good terms with because I worked with her.

But I was still glad to see she was okay herself.

“Yeah I uh- thanks. You too.” I replied awkwardly, because I wasn’t quite sure what else to say. I was never great with social situations even when they were as simple as making small talk in the break room.

This was sort of a few orders of magnitude above that.

Standing up myself, I had just enough time to catch my balance before Pam grabbed me in a big hug.

Now, this was weird for a couple of reasons, chief among them that Pam had never hugged me before. There were people who did - they treated hugs the same way some people say ‘hello’ - but Pam wasn’t one of them, and it made me instantly feel a hundred times more awkward than I already did. I gave her a weak pat on the back and returned the hug partially, then pulled away from her.

“What’s going on? Why is everyone in the parking lot like this?” I asked, gesturing around us and catching sight of the origin of the voices I had been hearing earlier. There was a camera crew just outside the yellow tape blocking us off, and two Metahumans were standing in front of it, giving an interview. I recognized Breakdown instantly, but the other guy was less familiar to me. I felt like I had seen him before, but that I just hadn’t bothered to keep him in my memory. Probably because I found his powers boring, or, more likely given his obnoxious karate gi’s red and orange coloration, his costume.

“They said they had to keep us here for a little while to screen us for mind control.” Pam answered me with a shrug. I could tell she was already done interacting with me and had probably woken up not too long ago herself because she was already turning to try and locate other people she wanted to talk to.

She probably wouldn’t have put that so bluntly, but I knew myself well enough to know that’s what it was. I wasn’t exactly an amazing conversationalist.

“Mind control? I mean, I know Adrenaline does something similar but he’s not like Heavy Mental, he can’t leave, like… suggestions behind or anything.” - I responded warily, suddenly just a bit more concerned by where I was standing than before.

After all, I was surrounded by Adrenaline’s victims, was one of the only people he hadn’t gotten his hooks into and, - I glanced at the me shape indentation in the building - I had demonstrably pissed him off.

Still, with my new powers - note to self; check powers - I figured I should be able to handle a bunch of normal people, so long as they weren’t being boosted by Adrenaline. At least, these specific ones anyway. My coworkers were pretty much all geriatrics or young teens with nearly no in between. I wasn’t exactly staring down the peak of human physicality here, and there was some comfort in the lingering knowledge that I could conjure a minion to handle anyone that decided to attack me.

“The police said he did something new while fighting Adrenaline, so they’re revising how they treat him.” Pam said distractedly, not bothering to look at me as she spoke.

“What-” I began to ask, intensely curious at what new abilities he’d shown, but was cut off by Pam calling out to someone else and darting off to hug them too.

I had been about to ask what new powers he’d shown, but frowned as I realized Pam probably wouldn’t know. I’d have to check the boards tonight.

It wasn’t entirely uncommon for Meta’s to get stronger over time. As a rule of thumb, the length of a Meta’s career was usually indicative of how powerful they were. Generally. Some Meta’s - like Adrenaline and Breakdown, actually - had powers that were so good that they could punch above their metaphorical weight class with minimal effort, but for guys like Slammo the Living Mallet (silver age, I know, but he was one of my favorites from that era) who had powers that were almost purely physical buffs, there wasn’t much for it but to keep at it until they were strong and durable enough to hack it.

Actually, the success of Metas who could apply some critical thinking through their power to achieve victory was probably the origin of the brick with a trick moniker, now that I think about it.

Now, at this point I have to make it clearly understood that I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t mean ‘I have no expertise in this situation’. I mean that I had gone from being extremely keyed up about my imminent death, to even more high strung when I got my powers, to fighting for my life. So I hope you understand that, now that I was just sort of standing there waiting for something to happen, I was understandably at a loss.

If I’d been safe and in my right mind when I got powers, I probably would have immediately called out of work, then taken the bus downtown so I could apply with the Ultra League. It seemed like the sane thing to do if I wanted training and experience.

Now that I was on the other end of my near death experience, I wasn’t sure if that’s what I wanted to do anymore. Sure I had - theoretically - infinitely scaling superpowers, but dying was scary. More to the point, I barely understood how my powers worked. I had a health pool, and it seemed to go down when I was injured, but was my health bar just a measure of my overall physical health, or was it an entirely separate thing? How much health did I have relative to a standard Brick type Meta? Could I survive gunshots now, or was one hundred health the average for a normal human? And that wasn’t even delving into all the questions I had about the mechanics of Ki, or my skills or-

Well, you get my point.

With all that had happened I was left with the lingering anxiety of having to do something, but lacked anything to actually do.

Organizing my thoughts for a bit, I realized that there should be at least one thing I could do while I waited. The problem was, I couldn’t possibly be sure that my power was only visible to me. Sure that would make sense, but lots of powers made no sense, or had blatantly self destructive qualities to them. Breakdown herself had stories from when she was first starting out that told the tale of someone who instantly vaporized everything that got too close to them. Obviously she had gotten it under control, but that hadn’t always been the case.

I tried, for a handful of minutes that felt way longer than that, to not indulge my curiosity in public. The last thing I needed was for someone to see a giant blue window appear in the air in front of me. There would already be a ton of questions about what had happened inside the building. But… the more I thought about it, the more I talked myself around to the prospect of just not caring. After all, the store had cameras - surely one of them would have caught the moment my Glow had set in, or part of my fight with Adrenaline. And if that was the case, wasn’t it pretty much just a matter of time until someone saw those tapes and realized I had powers anyway?

So really, it was either now or later; and at least now I had other heroes and police around to protect me if something went wrong. I don’t know if I actually did manage to construct a valid argument for doing so, or if lingering adrenaline (hah!) in my system just made me too fidgety to resist; but, at length, I finally settled on biting the bullet and poking at my menu.

Assuming I had one outside of leveling up. It would really suck if I didn’t.

So with a glance towards the news crew, and Breakdown, who was still giving a long winded sounding speech about law and order or some such, I sat back down and closed my eyes.

Now at this point, you would think I’d have had to spend a minute muttering things like ‘Menu’ or ‘Character Sheet’ to get more of those blue screens to show up; but to my utter surprise one popped into my field of view the second I started thinking about doing so. I didn’t read it right away, instead trying to achieve the opposite effect - trying to make it vanish - which it did just as quickly. I opened my eyes and repeated the process, suffering the mildly uncomfortable feeling of having a massive floating image hovering over my field of view, then closed it again.

Then I quickly looked around myself in what was - in retrospect - a highly suspicious manner, with my breath held in anticipation of the inevitable confusion and yelling that would follow if a group of people who were recently victimized by a Metahuman saw a power being used in front of them.

After a handful of seconds with nothing happening, I let loose a sigh of relief and shifted around on the sheet I was sitting on in order to get more comfortable.

So, it would seem that my interface, for lack of a better word to call it, was intent based. It didn't have specific commands; I just manipulated it by wanting to manipulate it. That was different from my original experience of having to concentrate for three seconds on something to get details about it, but I set that aside for a moment to actually look at the menu when I called it up this time.

>>>Stats<<<

Skills

Inventory

Quests

Strength

🔼 10 🔽

Dexterity

🔼 10 🔽

Vitality

🔼 10 🔽

Intelligence

🔼 10 🔽

Wisdom

🔼 10 🔽

Luck

🔼 10 🔽

Health: 26/100

Ki: 10/10

Available Stat Points: 20

Name: Nicholas Cole

Class: Monk

Attunement: Summoning

Status Effects: None

I must have stared at the screen for a solid minute, before reminding myself that this wasn’t a game, and that I couldn’t just dump every stat point I apparently had available into Luck - just to see what would happen. I tried to remember that single highschool course everyone has to take about Metahumans. It was instated as mandatory to the curriculum alongside Civics and Careers classes. You would think a class about superhumans would be the most interesting thing in the world but it had ultimately turned out - much to young me’s disappointment - to be very dry reading.

Metahumans had been around since shortly after World War Two, so by the time I was born they were pretty much commonplace. Flyboy and The Witch had been the first, and their efforts had been a rallying cry for all those who came after them. This meant that my Metahumanity class had largely consisted of a bunch of boring crime statistics rather than anything to actually do with having powers. And, yes, there was a fair amount of obvious ‘Join the Ultra League’ propaganda built into it,but I’m fairly certain even a toddler could see why that would be preferable over having more unattached villains roaming around.

Still, one thing about those classes that had always stuck out to me, was one of the few pieces of advice it had actually given with regards to someone actually getting powers.

That being: don’t experiment with them. They even had a little slideshow of horrific but mostly off screen deaths as examples. Guys that could control water thinking they could control sharks, then subsequently diving into a tank full of them and, uh… never coming back out. Guys who were bullet proof assuming they were also fireproof. That kind of thing.

So as much as my first instinct was to slap the twenty stat points my power said I had available into something - preferably vitality as I assume that’s what increases health - I unfortunately had to opt not to.

For now.

Instead I tried to do the same ‘focus on it for three seconds’ trick to try and eke some more information out of the sheet. The first thing I looked at was Ki;because that seemed like my primary resource and knowing exactly what controlled it seemed important.

Current Ki: 10/10

Ki is the manifestation of the body's life energy. Counts as both a magic and physical resource.

Unfortunately for me, the description I got back was about as helpful as the class descriptions had been - that being, not very. I had no idea how to increase it. I didn’t know if I even could increase it. In a normal game, a resource as easily replenishable as Ki apparently was wouldn’t tend to have as big of a pool as a slower regenerating resource like mana; but I couldn’t be sure that was the case here without testing it, which I was obviously loath to do.

Health wasn’t that much more useful, although it did at least seem to confirm that it was based on Vitality, for which I was grateful.

Current Health: 26/100

Health is the abstract representation of your physical Vitality and wellbeing

That was it. That was all it said. The only reason I could even consider it as confirmation was the fact that the word Vitality was capitalized, and even that was making a few assumptions.

Panning the screen around - it would shift around in my field of view to center whatever it is I wanted to look at, which was helpful - I turned to the stats, hoping they would be slightly more illuminating. They were... and they weren’t.

Current Strength: 10

Strength is a measure of your ability to inflict physical damage.

Current Dexterity: 10

Dexterity is a measure of your ability to inflict range damage.

Current Vitality: 10

Vitality is a measure of your physical hardiness and well being.

Current Intelligence: 10

Intelligence is a measure of your ability to inflict magical damage

Current Wisdom: 10

Wisdom is a measure of your mental hardiness and well being.

Current Luck: 10

Luck is a measure of how lucky you are.

I stared at the series of windows for several moments, attempting to puzzle that out. I mean, yes, it should be fairly obvious that being stronger meant I would punch harder - thus dealing more physical damage - but at a glance there was no way for me to tell if strength actually made me stronger, or if it just improved the end result of my physical attacks.

The same was true for almost all of the stats, with exception for luck which was even more vague than its counterparts. No shit luck was a measure of my luck. How does that manifest in reality though? If I had one hundred luck would I always win the lottery? Did it actually affect random chance somehow, or did it just factor into whatever calculation determined my ability to critically hit? Could I critically hit? I didn’t exactly see numbers floating off of Adrenaline when I had punched the guy, but truthfully that might have been because I literally wasn’t doing any damage to him in the first place.

A very cheery thought, that.

Irked, I flicked through the skills, inventory and quests tabs of the menu, but I didn’t get much more information from those than I had already had. My only two skills were there - Block and Summon Terracotta Soldier - and… that was it. My inventory was a six by six row of empty gray boxes, and I assumed I could put stuff in it, but I couldn’t exactly test that while in public. And Quests… the Quests tab was just a blank page. There was nothing on it, and no helpful information to tell me about a way to acquire something to go in it.

Altogether, my options for testing and learning boiled down to getting into another fight or spending my stat points.

Both things I wasn’t exactly keen to do.

So I shut all the menus and leaned back on my hands while I waited for something to happen.

Fifteen minutes later, the situation having not changed at all, I reopened them - because I have the patience of a goldfish, and the self control of… I don’t know, an animal with very little self control? I was tired, don’t judge me.

‘So… Terracotta Soldier says it scales with Wisdom, so that should be my primary stat for using skills right?’ I pondered to myself, before taking another look around and hurriedly concentrating on tapping the little ‘up’ arrow next to my Wisdom score.

The score ticked up to 11, my available stat points dropped down to 19, and… nothing else happened. I didn’t get any pop ups, I didn’t feel any wiser, and my Ki score didn’t increase.

A niggling feeling in the back of my head, perhaps an instinct from years rushing home to play video games after school told me to double check my class, which I did, although it wasn’t any more helpful than the last time I had looked at it.

Class: Monk

Description: Perfect the Mind, Body, and Spirit in order to wield them against opponents.

I pursed my lips at that. The capitalization present in that description was pretty specific, and I decidedly didn’t like what it implied. You see, in most games there existed the concept of MAD - not Mutually Assured Destruction, but rather, Multi Attribute Dependency. Basically, wherever possible, it was always best to play a class and pick abilities that relied on the same statistic. If you could cast spells, obtain health, and deal damage with just the Vitality stat, then suddenly the Vitality stat possessed significantly more value than any other. You could put points into that single stat to the exclusion of all others, and still come out the other end a well rounded character because everything you were already doing scaled with that single number.

‘Perfecting the Mind, Body, and Spirit’ sounded distressingly like I needed to put points into Vitality, Intelligence, and Wisdom in order to function as a Monk, and I didn’t appreciate it.

Of course, that might not be the case, and my suspicions might be flagrantly wrong. There was really only one way to find out.

Once more, I turned my attention back towards my stats, and deposited a single point in Intelligence - before checking my Ki, which hadn’t increased at all for the expenditure. That was okay, because that was more or less what I had expected. It was only when I put the third point in Vitality - dropping down to 17 stat points to distribute - that my maximum Ki score ticked up to 11.

So, on the one hand, my Ki score appeared to be an average of three of my stats. I had successfully sussed out some of the underlying mechanics of the game system that had been grafted on to my existence. On the other hand…

‘Damn it.’ I grumbled to myself, eyeing Strength and Dexterity with a forlorn glare. I could see two paths to go down from where I was standing - I could rely on the fact that Ki regenerated frighteningly fast while I was in melee, dumping all of my points into physical combat abilities - or I could do my best impression of a kung fu wizard, maximize my Ki score so I could avoid melee combat, and let my minions do the job for me.

It might seem really obvious which one of those was safer, but in a world where people could run faster than the speed of sound, being a squishy caster did not appeal to my sense of self preservation.

Of course, that was assuming I still wanted to put on a costume and go be a superhero. It might be cowardly to say it but… I liked my life. It was simple, it was stable, and I got to spend the majority of my time outside of work doing things I enjoyed - mainly, playing video games. I wasn’t the kind of person that really needed or wanted the love and adoration of the public, and as much as I had a mild obsession with Metahumans, that obsession was less a result of admiration and more a simple fascination with powers and how they worked. I mean, how can anyone live in a world where people could breathe fire, or fly, or teleport to the moon and back, and not be interested in it?

Perhaps as a result of the path my thoughts had taken as I pondered things, or perhaps simply because I was exhausted from the day I’d had (being knocked unconscious doesn’t count as sleeping, in case you were curious), I was still just staring at the sky and thinking when a police officer stepped up to me, nearly scaring me enough to get punched in the face purely by reflex.

Blessedly, I had restrained the automatic intrusive urge to take a defensive stance long enough to grasp what was happening, and so I merely ended up looking like a dazed idiot, instead of accidentally assaulting an officer of the law.

I was going to have to work on that. The package of combat skills ‘Monk’ obviously came with wasn’t exactly conducive to the normal operation of someone who made slightly above minimum wage at a superstore.

“Nicholas Cole?” The officer asked me as he approached, and, after a few seconds of dazed staring, I nodded slowly and replied to him.

“Yeah, that’s me.” I said, and was gratified to find that the cop was barely paying any attention to me - no doubt seeing me as nothing more than a checkmark on a list he had to work through rather than as an actual person. That would have usually annoyed me, but given that I was trying to go unnoticed for the moment, I was willing to take it.

“I’m required to inform you that under the Psychic Tampering Act we have pulled all of your personal information from your employers files and will be using it to verify that you are of sound mind and full control of your faculties. Do you understand?” The man said, and I nodded slowly at him.

“I need a verbal response.” He said flatly to me. I frowned at the irritation in his tone, and followed his line of sight to the two Metahumans he was shooting glares at, before turning back towards him and lifting an eyebrow.

“I understand.” I said, and the guy had the good grace to look embarrassed that I had caught him being so unprofessional. It wasn’t uncommon for the police to dislike Heroes. In fact, it was probably more common than not, given that they were effectively rival agencies as far as government funding was concerned.

Three guesses which of the two tended to win out at the budget meetings every election cycle.

“There’s a tent over there where you will be examined. When you’re done you are free to go. It goes without saying that the business is going to be closed for the rest of the day.” The cop said, his voice softening when I didn’t bother to call him out on his faux pas.

I nodded, he nodded, and then he turned away to say the exact same thing to someone standing two feet away from me, directing them to a different tent - of which there were many - that had been hastily erected in the vast parking lot.

A sigh of relief escaped my lips as I began what I hoped was a brisk walk towards the tent I had been directed to.

Once I got home, I’d be safe, I told myself. Once I got home, I could experiment with my powers in peace, and decide on what to do next without any social pressure or anxiety to influence my decisions or distract me.

I know, I know, tempting fate and all that. But really, what was the worst that could happen?