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As soon as I left the building where the generous survivors were staying, I thought of my apartment and activated the teleporting ability… and it worked! I instantly moved from outside the building to the middle of my apartment! Woohoo!

I then spent the next few hours experimenting with my teleportation ability.. The most fun I had with teleporting was when I teleported to the clouds! I just focused on the clouds and teleported, and there I was high up in the sky near the clouds! It was much, much higher then the maximum height I could fly at, and actually touching and feeling the fluffy clouds was exhilarating! I would then free-fall from the clouds for a good while before I used my ability of flight close to the ground to slow down again! I had always wanted to try sky-diving, and it was well worth the wait! I repeated the whole process of teleporting to the clouds and free-falling a number of times! I really felt like a little kid for a while before I actually got serious trying out a few things

For instance, I couldn’t teleport to places I could see in pictures. I either had to actually be seeing the place I wanted to teleport to, or I had to have visited the place beforehand. I would have tried teleporting to my parent’s house for an experiment, but that place still probably had abominations crawling all over so I refrained from trying to go there. Instead, I tried moving across the entire city, from one end to the other, and found no difficulties at all. However, I could only move to places on the other side of the city I had been to. I could move to one building because I had been there, but I couldn’t move to the building next to it because neither could I see it from the other end of the city nor had I visited it before. Apparently ‘visiting’ means actually setting foot on the place, and not just being near it…

Next, I tried teleporting while using hiding presence. At first, I had a few problems as I kept losing hiding presence when I teleported. I tried again and again, trying to increase my concentration on keeping hiding presence active each time. It took about an hour but I finally managed to teleport and keep hiding presence active at the same time. This was a crucial thing for me, as I didn’t want to teleport to someplace right in the middle of monsters without hiding presence active.

I then did a few more experiments. I tried to check whether I could teleport to only the places I could see normally or if I could use one of my vision abilities to teleport further. I used improved vision and ‘zoomed’ in as much as I could, and then I teleported, and it worked! This would increase the possible distance to be teleported immensely! I then tried using X-ray vision to see if I could teleport from inside a building to the outside and vice-versa, and it worked too! I tried using X-ray to completely see through a building to see if I could teleport on the other side and that worked too!

The only thing that didn’t work was when I tried using it with heat-vision. For some reason when I used heat-vision to see I couldn’t teleport near a heat-signature. This was a strange thing, if X-ray could make me teleport through buildings why couldn’t heat-vision make me teleport near to a heat-signature? I kept trying to succeed in using heat-vision in conjunction with teleportation but no matter what I tried it never worked.

Next, I approached one of the few still alive cats, picked it up and tried to see if I could teleport living things along with me. The cat was still alive and well after the teleportation, and by increasing the number of animals and creatures I found out I could teleport at most 20 different living things at a time. However, the catch was that everything had to be connected with me, either directly or indirectly. I tried using telekinesis in controlling a few creatures to come along with me but it didn’t work. The only way for me to teleport someone else was if I was physically in touch with them…

I also experimented a bit with metal manipulation and X-ray vision and was satisfied with how easy everything was working out to be.

The biggest disappointment for me was ability-identification. When I used it on the trolls, they only had the stupid stomach ability and an even stupider ‘decreased sense of smell’ ability, which probably explained why they didn’t seem to be bothered by their own disgusting smells! Even though I could also use the decreased sense of smell ability to get rid of their disgusting smell, I saw no reason to because I wasn’t planning on staying in the city for long anyways.

One reason I decided to leave the city was because of the disappointing results of the ability-identification. No matter how much I used it on the different type of creatures present, I couldn’t see any ability I wanted. I could see good abilities like enhanced speed, elemental manipulations, hardened skin, enhanced strength etc etc, but all of these abilities I already had! The other abilities I saw were along the lines of the terrible abilities of the trolls and I didn’t want them! Even the big-ass tiger only had one ability of increased-size!

The biggest reason for my decision to leave the city was because I saw a lot of my friends while I was experimenting with X-ray vision, including my ‘best friend’ James! They had all decided to hole up in the university, and altogether they were probably more than a hundred in number! The number was far too large for me to control them all through telekinesis and do the same thing to get their abilities like I did with the 7 others. If I did try to pull off some stunt to get their abilities I could get in serious trouble with a fight against the whole lot of them.

I would never do the manipulating game I did with the guys in the ballroom, as if I showed myself the ever clingy James would never leave my side! He and a few of my friends would assumes that I would stay with them and I just didn’t want to do that! If I could, I wanted to stay as alone as possible for as long as possible!

Therefore, I decided to leave the city. There were no useful abilities that I could get here, the whole city smelled worse then shit because of the trolls and worst of all this city contained clingy friends!

With that decided, I woke up bright and early in the morning and set off out of the city in search of useful abilities and such!

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P.S. I mentioned James and the group of survivors because they will have a role to play in the future, though that future is distant.

P.S. (2) 20 chapters done! I'm hoping I can get my first advanced review soon! Would love to know in detail what you guys think of my work and if you guys have any suggestions for improvement :)