I Gained Superpowers?

After the incident with the strange and seemingly powerful force user, or who I assume was such because of his lightsaber and the feeling of being scanned so thoroughly, we didn't see him again. In the middle of sleeping that night, I woke up suddenly, cold sweating profusely for some unknown reason. Despite a questioning glance from a half-asleep AJ, nothing else happened. It's been 3 years since I have arrived in this world, and I've learned a couple of things. First off, is that the 3 kids in my cell when I woke up, Callista, AJ, and Dahlia, were way less innocent than I had originally thought. I guess being in slavery for several years from a young age grows some distinct grown-up attitudes from certain people.

The second thing I learned is that the three of them are extremely good-looking. I know very little about the Zabrak, AJ's race, and absolutely nothing about the Zeltron and Keshiri, Dahlia's and Callista's races respectively. But apparently, not only are they rare enough slaves to be the only ones on this planet, from what I've seen, but they are extraordinary in their own ways. AJ, the Zabrak, looks like a handsome teenager at about 15 years of age. With muscles to put most bodybuilders to shame and the frame of a swimmer, he has this uncanny ability of higher strength and vitality than almost every teen around our age. While he is quiet and reserved at times, he has this sort of charisma that could make him an amazing leader. Though he tends to have a short fuse when it comes to things or people he cares about, more than once he has sent someone to the medical ward and had to be detained in solitary confinement for a day or so.

Dahlia, she's a character and a half. Despite being in slavery for so long since childhood she is seemingly super innocent and often super cheerful. At least, that's how she normally is. Sometimes, when something starts to go wrong, she adopts this sort of persona that is the opposite of her normal cheerful self, being pessimistic, paranoid, and any other emotion that goes along with them. Other than her split personality, she is extremely cute. It's more of a younger, prettier beauty, but it's still impossible to miss about her. She often makes an amazingly cute face whenever she's confused; it's a kind of look that could topple countries. Though being only around 14 makes room for getting even prettier, which would be a sight to see.

Now Callista, I figured out why I seemed to be so attentive to how she looked, and that's because as she started growing up with the rest of us she started to resemble Caroline more and more. I won't lie, it was painful. In fact, it still is, because every time I see Callista I get reminded of my failure to protect Caroline, and it was what eventually led me to wrap my head around my previous life, and all I could think was that it was my fault. The death of Caroline, the pain of losing all of my friends and family, the deep hatred that never left, and the pure grief that I still feel from my last years of life. Everything comes to the surface when I see Callista, which I do my best to hide. I can see she knows something is up, but she never brought it up, which just made it hurt more. She keeps becoming more and more similar to Caroline as time passes, showing several traits that she had. Now that she is about 15 she has the same eyes as Caroline, passionate and caring.

But besides my grief, there was something else I discovered outside of those two things, and that's a strange understanding of events that have yet to take place. For instance, a year and a half ago we had a shift change to the cliffs of despair, as the slaves have named it, where there are self-replenishing mines for valuable ores, and an accident occurred. The four of us had been separated, far enough to not see each other, but I got solace in knowing where their general locations were. I was mining away, just waiting for the day to end, when I felt a sharp pain float into my head. Nothing big at first, but each moment that passed made it get worse, eventually making me drop my pickaxe and hold my head. Each second that passed made it worse, but with the pain came images. They popped in my head, slowly turning into something akin to a movie where I saw Callista mining away in the exact location she was at today, and a rockslide occurred, burying her alive and ending her life. The pain of seeing her die reminded me of Caroline, causing tears to come out as I saw it end.

Once the images stopped, the pain stopped, and I had this pulling feeling in my gut, pulling in the direction of Callista. I don't know why I didn't question it then, but I'm glad I didn't because I saw the rocks begin to crumble as I ran towards her.

"Callista!" I yelled, but she couldn't hear me over the pickaxes hitting away at the rocks. Soon, as I was barely just too far from her, the rocks started to fall. I felt my stomach drop as I saw the images flash in my head again, of both her being buried and Caroline in my arms, as an almighty roar in the form of her name left my throat.

"CALLISTA!" and with that, she heard me. She looked at me, and then looked up. She froze, and without thinking about it I jumped at her. I knew I couldn't make it, it was too far and I wasn't fast enough. At least, that was before I ended up being launched faster than I have ever moved, slamming into Callista and skipping over the ground on my back as we barely managed to not get killed from the rocks. Once the dust settled Callista looked down as I was laying on top of her. Being momentarily stunned, Callista realized I was face deep in her chest, which made her blush violently before going pale as she saw my back, heavily wounded, dirty, and bleeding from deep gashes running down it. The pain would have been unbearable, if I hadn't experienced the pain from the void, so with a happy look on my face from saving her, I faded out of consciousness, failing to notice I hadn't felt the normal pain from looking into her eyes.

Since then, I have tried to reenact those events, whether it be the future sight or the sudden burst of speed and power during my jump, but to no avail. Every attempt made me fall flat on my face or ass, and the concentration from trying future sight got more than one joke about constipation. I gave up after a while, but the feeling of that jump is something I couldn't get out of my mind. Something about it felt different, and yet it felt so familiar as if it was something that I could do since birth.

To get my mind off of it, I did one of the only things I could recreate from my old life that I did to forget about something, and that was working out. Granted, we already had a lot of physical labor from the tasks we were forced to do, but working out was the only thing I could think of that I could do with my limited resources. Having been a little bit of a workout junkie for a while I knew what muscles were where, and how to best work them out with certain pieces of equipment. Now, I didn't have the equipment, but I made do with rocks and stuff.

So now, with me being what I assume to be about 14 or 15, I had a nice swimmer's build with toned muscles and a decent height for my age. Of course, I was still shorter than AJ, but I can tell I'll eventually reach his height. I was happily taller than both Dahlia and Callista, though barely because they seemed to be in the taller range for girls our age.

Now back to the present, we are all doing push-ups in our cell. We were never separated, for several reasons, but somewhere along the way, the other kids in the cell decided to follow along with my workouts. Of course, I was easily soon outmatched by AJ, as Zabraks are physically superior to plenty of races. As we are doing our push-ups though, guards start to file into the hall outside, and quickly into our block as well. Stopping in front of a cell to our left, they dragged out one of the kids and ignored the yelling cries from their friends in the cell as they left, following a trend that started soon after the rockslide I saved Callista from.

"That's the 5th one this week, what do you suppose they're doing with them for them to never come back?" AJ had a tinge of concern in his voice, for the same reason I was worried, and that was because if it continued then someone from our cell would soon be taken as well. In these last couple of years, I grew attached to these people, each one holding a place in my broken heart, barely keeping it together. I won't lie, I'm a broken man. I do my best to hide it, but I think Callista is catching on and the other two are following close behind.

"Who knows? It could be anything, after all, we are their property." My cynic side was tingling, voicing a vague opinion is better than narrowing our view and leaving out possibilities that could have been.

"Well, they might decide to skip over us. Once they pass a cell they never go back to it, and they've skipped several cells before, so you never know." Dahlia always managed to look on the bright side of things, I don't know how she does it but I don't envy the naive thinking she must have to believe in things like chance.

"Yeah, and maybe we'll escape on a rainbow, riding dreams and butterflies without a single care in the world." AJ had wonderful sarcasm if I do say so myself. It's something that has made me appreciate his presence in more than one situation.

"Knock it off AJ, it's not bad to have some hope." Callista was a very good peacemaker between the clashing personalities of AJ and Dahlia.

"Callista~" Dahlia started fake running towards Callista with a smile on her face as a token of goodwill for taking her side, but she didn't get more than 3 steps before Callista ruined her happiness.

"I agree with AJ though, being overly optimistic isn't a good thing in this situation." AJ had a smug smile when he heard Callista's response to Dahlia's happiness, causing Dahlia to come to me for my decision.

"Aaron, they're being mean to me." With the puppy dog eyes that I could never refuse, which is something I'm pretty positive Dahlia knows since she always does it, I had no choice but to let out a long sigh and finish the argument. I had to try to get a plan going in case someone did get taken.

"Haaaaah, stop messing around and take this seriously you three, what if it's one of us that gets taken? We have no idea where they go after they take someone, so even if we wanted to do something, what could we do?" My not directly taking her side showed how seriously I took the situation, and the amount of care warmed the girls' hearts just a small amount. AJ was the first to pick up my hidden sentence, and since we didn't know if they could listen in on us he decided to play along.

"Nothing, these cells are locked, and the keys are always on one of the guards. They can't be overpowered without the physical force that people in our position lack." Now and then, AJ would accentuate a word enough to be noticeable to those listening well, it's something we have practiced before for these kinds of situations. Callista and Dahlia partook in these sessions only because they had nothing else to do, so they picked up the words as well. Despite the fact that the guards generally showed little interest or knowledge of Galactic Basic, despite it being so widely used, we decided this was the best way of communicating these kinds of things in case someone could understand and hear us, then rat us out.

"Good point. In a position like ours, all we can do is stick to the schedule, use the pickaxes in the right ways, and not break things to have to pay for it." Doing our best to get across a whole discussion that we had to hide in a couple of words was hard, but all of the practicing did wonders as even Dahlia picked up what we were saying, and she paid the least amount of attention to the lessons.

From what I picked up from the conversation, the plan for if one of us gets taken was pretty simple. We would take the guards' keys after overpowering them, which was easy considering how strong AJ was and I was ample backup, then from there we arm ourselves with anything we can use, and grab a pickaxe or two in case it's needed. At least, that was my understanding. I just hope me and AJ were on the same page, and from the looks on the girls' faces, it seemed they understood at least most of it as well.

After giving a silent nod of understanding, I decided I was done for the night so I lied down on my bed, if you could call it that, and drifted to sleep as my mind wandered about what they could be using the slave children for.