Fanfic #190 The Alchemist by TheFridgeLogician(Worm)

This fanfic is an au of Worm following Taylor with the alchemist powers form Full Metal Alchemist. I really like this fic because it has an interesting implementation of the alchemist powers and it does a good job of developing the story realistically based on that.

Synopsis: This is a fanfiction utilizing elements of Alchemy as described into Hiromu Arakawa's masterpiece Fullmetal Alchemist as the power Taylor Hebert receives. (i.e. This is not a crossover between these worlds).

Rated: M

words: 89k

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-alchemist-taylor-w-fma-esque-powers.963433/reader/

Here's the first chapter:

It had been the subject of countless news articles since Scion had appeared, and probably a lot of college studies, but only after becoming a parahuman could I really appreciate it.

Having powers is weird.

I'd had my powers for a little over a week now, and it still struck me every day since.

Literature class was probably the worst place for me to be thinking about my new powers instead of paying attention, since my teacher was pretty damn observant, but every time I glanced at the board or around the room, and especially out the dirty second-floor window, the huge plethora of materials and their associated symbols offered up opportunities that were far more interesting than Cyrano de Bergerac.

And I liked Cyrano de Bergerac.

My notebook was full of drawings that might have passed for notes in my Geometry class last year — circles and symbols that might have passed for Greek or Chinese — but the only thing I had been learning about was my new powers.

There was so much to learn, and I was still so lost. I couldn't even tell what I would be identified as under the Parahuman Response Team classifications — was there such a thing as a drawing Tinker? That sounded way weirder than any other Tinker I had ever heard of, and Tinkers were already the weirdest type of parahuman.

I wished I knew a parahuman personally, or even someone online; maybe all powers started out as confusing as mine.

Unlikely. I thought.

The bell rang, and I looked up from my notebook to see that it was lunchtime.

Food was within the repertoire of my powers, but there wasn't a symbol in my odd little language for 'pizza' or 'burrito', and I was a little bit concerned that whatever I used my powers on might eventually transform back.

Nothing had done so in the six days since I had left the hospital's psych ward and had inadvertently ruined an old book with my powers, but trying to digest a rock sandwich wasn't high on my list of things to experience.

My teacher, the enthusiastic and, admittedly hot, Mr. Matthews gestured for me to stay behind.

I sighed.

It was almost the end of the semester, and after missing almost a week of classes due to being borderline-catatonic in the hospital, my grades were not great. My obsession with my powers wasn't helping.

Ultimately, Winslow High School was still a terrible place, but for the first time since I had been here, the teachers were a little bit sympathetic to me. I didn't know if the order came down from on high, or if basic humanity had reasserted itself, or if they were walking on eggshells because of the news article from last week about a guy in southern California who — emulating the old Stephen King novel — walked through his middle school where he had been bullied and killed twenty-eight students off of his new powers.

He had killed himself before the PRT could contain him, but it was a chilling reminder that powers and a positive outlook on life did not tend to go hand-in-hand.

I hated that these teachers needed a reminder like that to treat me even remotely well. They were probably waiting to figure out if I had Triggered or not, after which they would go back to being blissfully ignorant of my plight.

I wasn't going to destroy the school, and while I had had a few pleasant dreams and fantasies about doing something appropriately awful to Emma and Sophia, I wasn't going to do it.

As much as I wanted to, I knew Mom wouldn't have approved. Remembering her was the best chain that kept me from going off the reservation, and I held on to it tight.

"Taylor." Mr. Matthews said, a little bit reproachfully, but with a bit of warmth and humor. I was taller than some of my teachers, but he still dwarfed me, especially with my head hung and my shoulders a little bit slumped. His dark sweater was some material that I hadn't seen before, and I internalized the symbol, processed it, and put it out of my mind.

"I'm sorry for not paying attention, Mr. Matthews." I said. It wasn't quite rote, especially in this class. I loved literature, almost as much as he did, who, in turn, loved it almost as much as Mom had. It wasn't like math, which I hadn't gotten from Dad at all.

He sighed with a crooked smile, and I felt a little worse. He had been pretty good, as a teacher. His good points — enthusiasm for a topic I loved, interesting lectures, good looks — were counterbalanced mainly by his obvious preference for the … not-me-looking girls in class. He still knew my name, though, probably because my essays were excellent, but it was more attention than most of my teachers last year gave me.

"I know you've been having a tough time lately." He said, gently touching my shoulder. "But what happened to all the enthusiasm? The Taylor I remember wouldn't haven't missed a chance to read a section out of a classic. Your Raven essay was one of the best I've ever seen."

I flushed a little and rocked on my shoes a little bit. I still loved literature, of course, but compared to my new powers… I sighed.

"I'll try harder, Mr. Matthews." I said, trying not to see or think about the symbol I was getting from his five o'clock shadow, slightly sallow skin and dark brown eyes. Being non-Manton-limited was just the cherry on top of the scary sundae of my too-confusing powers.

"You have a week." He said, "Then it's out of my hands."

I nodded a little bit limply.

"Could I stay in here and work on my homework?" I asked.

He winced slightly.

"Actually, there's a staff meeting today that I have to attend." He said, "And I can't leave you in here alone."

I knew that they couldn't. I had tried that many times last year.

"Okay." I said, and shuffled out the door.

Just outside were my two least-favorite people in the world.

Emma Barnes, my annoyingly-pretty former best friend turned vicious enemy. Even in the midst of a Brockton Bay winter, she managed to look stylish, and if she was cold with her calves and forearms bare, she didn't let it show.

Standing opposite her was Sophia Hess, the dark-skinned well of hatred who had ensnared my best — my former best friend. She was wearing her Winslow athletics getup, so I assumed there was a track team meeting or something after school today.

Their third cohort, Madison Clements, was missing, as she usually was for their near-daily lunchtime ambushes this semester. If I had to guess, she had a class somewhere far from mine, but I didn't know for sure.

They were just talking casually about nothing, two students like any other standing in the hall. Sophia was leaning against the wall, looking at anyone who approached with the sort of expression usually reserved for big cats on wildlife documentaries.

I turned away from them and tried to shuffle faster, and my hands tightened around the straps of my backpack. I couldn't trust the straps to hold on to my shoulders; I had learned that from backpack number two.

I was only a few steps away, and utterly aware of the two sets of eyes boring a hole into my back, when Mr. Matthews closed the door behind her, locked it, and hurried off down the hall to the closer set of stairs.

In the opposite direction I was heading.

Crap. I thought, and a chill settled into my stomach.

"Oh Taylor." Emma said, once he was gone, in a sing-song voice that carried no notes of our former friendship.

If I ran, Sophia would catch me in a few steps. She was shockingly fast, not just in running speed, but her reflexes, and after a dozen attempts last year, I had mostly stopped trying that.

I hurried up a little bit anyway, pretending I hadn't heard them, but their footsteps behind me felt like the tune from Jaws playing in my mind.

Unable to help myself, I glanced over my shoulder.

Sophia was right there.

Before I could do anything, Emma swung her arm over my shoulder from the other side, a hug that had once been friendly and caring that was now more akin to razor wire.

Considering the difference in our heights, which had been growing for years, I was pulled down and spun around somewhat.

"Quite a predicament you're in." Emma said, now right in my face. "Are you failing all your classes now?"

Sophia laughed meanly — all three of us knew the answer to that.

That bit into me somewhere, and what I hated more than anything else is that she was right. My grades were slipping hard, and not just in Literature. Biology was a mess. French was a catastrophe. P.E. had always been terrible — thanks to Sophia sharing that class and the locker room.

My stomach clenched as I remembered my other locker. I could still practically feel the smell, the darkness, the claustrophobic pressure all around me.

I tried to throw Emma's arm off of me and make a break for it, and it sort of worked. Emma's grip around my shoulders was removed, but within two steps, Sophia had grabbed me by the handle at the top of my backpack and swung me around like a rag doll. I barely kept my feet under me, and Sophia bent me down into almost a bow with her grip.

She was so strong.

"Listen up, Herbert." The track star said, deliberately mispronouncing my name. "Maybe you didn't get the hint last week, when someone showed you how unwelcome you are here."

It was the closest to a confession I was ever going to get.

Emma leaned down, close enough that I could feel her breath on my cheek. If I looked into her eyes, I didn't know what I would find, so I averted mine.

"You aren't welcome here, Taylor." She whispered, practically in my ear. "Go find a nice bridge and jump off."

I flinched despite myself. They didn't go to that well very often, but suicide dares dug at me.

Probably because there had been a time where I had wondered if they were right.

Sophia yanked at my backpack, almost ripping it off my back, but my grip on the straps was too tight, and I was jerked off balance and ended up on one knee.

I tried to scramble away, but the sound of fabric ripping alerted me that between Sophia's grip and mine, my backpack was proving to be the weak link.

The sound of a door slamming brought my eyes up. I wasn't stupid enough to hope for a protector — my savior was off at Arcadia High or at the Protectorate building — but it might be a distraction that I could use to get away.

Any protector I could hope for, any hero, was too far away to do something.

My backpack had stopped tearing; Sophia was also staring at the two guys that had just entered the hall from the floor below.

Sophia never looked out for witnesses, but sometimes other people being around did make her shift targets. It wasn't very reliable — not enough that I could use it, especially since I wasn't welcome in any of the cliques who might help me. The positive cliques; mathletes and student government and stuff like that, those didn't really exist at Winslow. I wasn't the right kind of athletic for any sport besides maybe cross-country, and there was no way in hell I was going to do that.

That left the gangs. I would never pay the women's entrance toll to hang out with the junkies and dealers, even if I didn't hold them in utter contempt. I didn't have the ancestry for the Azn Bad Boys, and the less said about Empire Eight-Eight, the better.

I didn't know what it said about Brockton Bay that the white supremacist gang — despite all their hate crimes and assaults — had the shortest criminal record versus membership, other than that my city was a complete shithole.

The two guys at the end of the hall were almost certainly new meat of the ABB — old enough to be proper members, rather than drug carriers or the other, darker, things that kids supposedly did for the ABB. Both of them were shorter than me, wearing loose wife beaters and jeans with their jackets. One had a rather ridiculous-looking mohawk, and the other had hair so red that it had to be dyed. I knew if they rolled up their sleeves, there would be tattoos on their arms, and among them almost certainly one of a red dragon, representing their leader.

Lung, the red dragon of Brockton Bay, founder and tyrant of the ABB — a pan-Asian gang that only someone with superpowers could possibly have created — and an absurdly powerful villain.

Sophia growled, low in her chest, and pushed me down hard.

My knees hit the ground, and I caught myself on my hands before anything worse could happen.

"Don't forget what we said, Taylor." She growled, her grip on my backpack's handle clenching like she was imagining it was my neck in her hand, but suddenly, she opened her hand and began walking away.

"And maybe you should take a bath." Emma added with a sniff. "With soap. And a toaster."

And with that, she sauntered after Sophia.

I suppose I was lucky she didn't try to step on my hands.

After waiting a few seconds for them to move away — there was no quicker way to arouse their ire than to get up too fast — I rose to my feet. Under my jeans, my knees felt sore, and there was an obvious stain of dirt and who knew what else on my hands. The floor, linoleum, had the telltale streak marks of my fingers.

The symbols for linoleum and dust that I could see on the floor were very different.

The perception — and presumably, Thinker — part of my powers wasn't distracting. It wasn't like reading — the voracious reader that I had always been could tell. Trying to read a billboard while riding a bike was a distraction. My power didn't distract me at all.

My symbols were more like colors. It took essentially no thought to internalize a STOP sign being red or my hair being black. It was such a fundamental aspect of the object that it was communicated, instantly and without distraction.

The real distraction was imagining what I could do with it. Linoleum and dust weren't high on that list.

After the two ABB prospects or initiates moved on up the stairs, the hall was left empty, and I sat down in a corner where I couldn't be seen from most of the hall.

I hoped Sophia and Emma wouldn't come back when Madison joined up with them. Lunch was when most of the horrible things they did to me happened, but numerous lunches came and went before without them making even a token appearance. One day, I got a garbage can spilled on me or locked in a closet. Another, they didn't even notice that I existed.

Maybe Emma gets tired of ruining my life sometimes.

I looked through the smaller pouch on my backpack until I found the packet of sticky notes that I had grabbed off of an office phone and went to work fixing the ripped fabric.

It was probably the easiest application of my powers — reshaping without transforming. I didn't need to turn the fabric into silk or steel or skin, I just needed to reshape it back into a complete piece.

I drew out the simple sigil on one of the post-its. The symbol for the denim or whatever it was that my backpack was made out of, the symbol for a flat surface, the symbol for reshaping, and an overall surrounding circle. Just four symbols, and my powers could work.

Carefully, I put the paper against the torn parts of my backpack and used my power. I covered the slight blue glow that emitted from the sigil with my hands and the sleeve of my coat, and when I removed the post-it, that part was basically fixed.

I moved on to another part, and used the same sigil.

After fixing my backpack and tearing up the post-it, I munched on a sandwich and I leafed through my notebook. At first, back at the hospital, I tried to keep track of every symbol I had learned, and to tie them to actual real-life material names, but that had soon turned into an exercise in futility. The drive home had delivered so many new symbols to my brain that I couldn't begin to catalog them all. Annoyingly, but not surprisingly, I couldn't look at materials or objects up on the internet, either. It had to be the real thing.

Fortunately, my powers let me remember all the symbols that I did know. It felt like I was filling up a very strange dictionary in my brain.

I could work at a pawn shop or authenticators. I thought humorlessly. Fools gold wouldn't fool me.

I blinked, and an idea flashed through my mind, and I just about smacked myself in the face.

At home, underneath my bed, I had a shoebox full of memorabilia. Mostly it was stuff from old vacations or hobbies that I didn't do anymore, like my flute from when me and Mom played, but also in there was Mom's wedding ring. Dad had given it to me after she had passed.

It was gold with a diamond on it.

And those things were worth money. Real money. Lots of money.

I almost started hyperventilating. It should have been an easier thing to leap to, but Winslow was not exactly a place where nice jewelry lasted, and Dad didn't wear his ring anymore, so I couldn't remember actually seeing any jewelry since I had come back from the hospital.

Money could be the answer to so many problems that we had. Money could get me into the sort of training a wannabe-hero needed. Money could make Dad able to be around more often. Let us go out to eat more, or just a little better.

And all I needed to make money was a pen.

I wanted to tear out of school, run all the way home, and learn those symbols. I didn't know of any parahuman who could manufacture or create diamond, and while I hardly knew much about materials science or mineralogy, I knew that diamond was just about the hardest substance on the planet in any dimension.

Before the end of lunch, I had drawn a sketch — a pretty good one. A suit of armor, a mix of kevlar and metal, with a diamond faceplate like a motorcycle helmet. A belt with some key essentials; a first aid kit and zip ties for arresting criminals and stuff.

The gloves would have some of my sigils on them, if I could make it work. Maybe they could expand into a shield and then contract? It might get complicated, but in my eagerness, I kept noting ideas on the sheet in the smallest handwriting that I could manage.

In my pockets or something, I'd have a bunch of post-it notes with pre-drawn sigils, things that I had figured out in advance. Maybe one to help me open doors, or maybe to climb up a building or something. Maybe some kind of trap; I didn't know, but I kept writing.

Last, I drew my weapons.

In one hand, the drawing held a felt-tip pen. In the other, a spear-like-thing The long blade would be diamond, with a super-sharp edge. The pen for any spontaneous sigil I needed.

Isn't the phrase 'the pen is mightier than the sword'? A part of my brain mocked me. I pushed it away. If a spear-thing was good enough for Armsmaster, it was good enough for me.

~

The entire bus ride home, I was too excited to focus on anything. Not the homework I would have tried to do normally, not my powers like I had for the past week. Even the ideas that I had spent my afternoon classes obsessing over were unwilling to crystallize in my mind.

I had decided that I was going to start small. I wanted to be a hero at some point, and being unmasked before I had even put on a mask because I brought a gold ingot worth thousands of dollars into a pawn shop or something would be beyond embarrassing and stupid.

To start, I would just make another ring. If I could put the diamond on it, even better, but that might be too complicated for my skills right now, and a simple gold ring would probably be worth something.

Visions of briefcases filled with thick, paper-wrapped stacks of cash out of crime dramas danced in my head, but I forced myself to remain realistic. A few hundred dollars, maybe. It would be enough for me to get started. I could pay for martial arts classes or the basic implements of heroing, maybe both. Maybe a computer or phone.

Maybe just a computer. I thought. I don't need a cell phone. Not yet.

The sounds of cars moving around me took me back to the nightmares from when Mom died, and I closed my eyes to try to force the memories away.

I exited the bus with the usual few people who I didn't know and hurried down the street. Home was about half a mile away on streets that were perfectly safe by day and not recommended for anyone by night.

The porch step creaked its usual greeting as I hopped up to the door. I was almost bursting with excitement. I hadn't felt so good in a long time.

The lock clicked behind me as I closed the door, and I turned the deadbolt.

"Dad?" I called out, just in case.

There was no answer. The familiar quiet of my home helped to settle me a fraction, but I still took the stairs three at a time up to my room.

I tossed my backpack on my bed, spilling my textbooks and papers and my P.E. clothes onto my blankets, but I didn't care. I knelt down and looked under my bed. I pushed aside a box of old clothes that I had outgrown and found the shoebox. It was dusty, and the character for dust shone, as did the character for cardboard.

I pulled it out and sat down on my bed with it on my lap.

The key to my future was inside.

I flipped the lid open. I couldn't remember how long it had been since I had looked inside, and the rush of memory flooded through me as the old, crinkled photographs and the random tokens of family vacations stared back at me.

I saw the symbols for a few plastics and probably aluminum from a few keychains, and whatever it was that photographs were made out of.

I pushed them aside carefully, looking for the small telltale band. It was one of the last things I had put inside, as far as I could remember, but it had probably fallen through the gaps between the larger objects.

My fingers found a key ring, which was a disappointment when I yanked it free, and an obsidian arrowhead that I vaguely remembered from a trip down to one of the Smithsonians. I set it aside. I didn't know much about obsidian, but it was a new material that I knew the name of.

After a few minutes of running my fingers around the inside of the box and finding nothing, I resisted the urge to just turn it over onto my bed. These were some of my prize possessions, after all.

I carried the box over to my desk, where I removed each item and set it aside. My desk wasn't much better organized than my bed was, but I found enough space.

Photographs. Keychains and magnets. A small stuffed animal that got a gentle pet. A drawing Mom had given me. A fountain pen that had leaked its ink into the cap that got all over my hands.

A dead battery, with some silvery stuff leaking out around the ends.

I wondered why I had put that in there, but the symbol I got from the leaked material was new, so I put it aside.

I was getting down to the bottom of the box, and I was starting to get nervous.

Did I lose it? I couldn't help but wonder. Did Dad take it back? Did we need the money while I was away at camp or something? Did he forget to tell me?

"Stop it." I said out loud to myself. I refused to believe it. It was possible we had needed the money. Possible Dad had thought of his dead wife's ring as something to tide us over. But it was impossible that he would have taken it without telling me.

I removed the last few items from the box, and the cardboard bottom stared back at me.

I put the box to the side and got back down on the floor. I wished for a flashlight immediately, but I didn't know where our emergency kit was, so I just ran my hands across the carpet, feeling through the dust and the cast-off strands of my own hair.

My searching fingers bore fruit, and a metal ring, cool to the touch, with a pointy something on one side, was found.

I pulled it out from under my bed. A wisp of a cobweb lingered on my fingers, along with a new symbol, but I put it out of my mind.

Between my fingers, I clutched Mom's ring. Gold with a small diamond set into it.

I wanted to let out a whoop or some other sound, but I didn't. A funny quivering feeling came over me.

I set the ring on my desk, next to the arrowhead that I had found earlier, and carefully replaced the other stuff into the box. It was time to be calm about this.

First, I needed some raw material. Basically anything would work, as far as I could tell; I could even work with smoke — seen from cigarettes — and probably air, as long as I knew the symbols, but it was easier for me to think about solids.

I glanced in my garbage can. There were pieces of my previous backpack, and some ruined homework, but no small thing with a lot of mass.

It was a lesson to remember; without raw materials, I would have a harder time working. I wasn't about to transmute part of my room into usable materials.

I went down to the backyard and picked out a few rocks from the dried dirt. The January chill was pronounced, and I was happy to be back inside with a small handful of stones, ranging in size from smaller than the tip of my finger to about the size of a big battery.

At my desk, I let the rocks spill out into a pile in one corner.

I cracked my knuckles. It was time to try to use my powers.

I laid a sheet of binder paper out on the remaining space on my desk and pulled a pen out of my pen and pencil cup.

Then I set it back down.

I need to make a ring. I thought, picturing the geometry in my head. And it has to be gold. I don't need to do both of those things at once, though.

I looked at the pile of stones. Most of them were the same drab grey, with bits of dirt still clinging to them.

I can just turn whatever this is into gold, and work with that. I thought.

I drew a circle a few inches across in one of the corners of the paper, and added the few necessary symbols. The symbol for gold from Mom's ring, the symbol from the stone, the symbol to direct the transformation from one to the other. It took less than a minute.

I put the stone on top of the circle, and with a simple touch, and the slightest effort of will, my powers went to work.

The circle glowed, a brief blue flare, and the stone shifted and shrank into a lump of gold, much much smaller than it was before.

I picked it up. It was unexpectedly, even shockingly, dense; a small lump of gold that weighed on my palm far more than felt appropriate. Only after rolling it around in my hand could I confirm that it weighed the same as the small rock from before, and that was only an intellectual observation; the lump of gold in my hand still felt like it outweighed the rock from before.

I set it aside, and picked up another pebble. It was the smallest one that I had grabbed, but it was still noticeably bigger than the diamond sticking out of the ring.

I can make a diamond out of this one. I thought. And if I have to cut it down to size, I can do that too.

I didn't know exactly what a 'carat' was, but considering how expensive diamond jewelry in ads was, I didn't want to show up with a suspicious twenty-thousand dollar rock that got checked out. I was just a girl selling off some old jewelry her grandmother left her.

That was the lie I had come up with during French.

I drew another circle, very similar to the stone-to-gold one, except with diamond as the target. The small pebble shrank slightly, and took on a translucent hue. I wouldn't have been able to tell it apart from a piece of quartz without my powers.

Now for the hard part. I thought. Reshape the gold into a ring, and maybe try to cut the diamond.

I hadn't thought about the fact that the diamond in the ring was intricately cut, with tiny facets that caught the light; complex geometry that was far beyond my present abilities, but making it the right size was a start.

I wonder if any place would take uncut diamonds. Do I need to explain why it's uncut? Who would have uncut diamonds? A rock collector? A geologist?

The symbols that I used to change the geometry were either kind of basic or more complicated than I understood. I had lots of basic 3-D shapes; cones and cubes and cylinders, pyramids and corners and stuff like that, but there were other things I hadn't been able to really test yet, ones that all I had were a symbol and a vague notion for what it would do, but no concrete example of it.

Start with the ring. I thought. A ring is easy. A cylinder minus a cylinder. Two cylinder symbols should do it.

I drew out a sigil — the most complicated one I had drawn so far.

When I used it, the gold ended up looking like a chess piece, and it was obvious what I had done wrong.

I tried again, and ended up with essentially a tiny cup.

"Getting closer." I mumbled as I drew another version. The sigils looked almost exactly identical; only something in my powers told me they were different.

Fortunately, I was able to keep using the same misshapen lump of gold for each test, leaving my handful of raw materials to the side.

It took a few more attempts before I got a ring of gold made, and it still wasn't perfect. The ring in my hand was long enough to cover the entire bottom joint of my ring finger.

I guess I can cut this down too. I thought.

I pulled out another sheet of paper and drew a simple cutting circle, which was a simple application of the 'plane' shape symbol and the 'gold' material. It would take the gold ring and slice it into pieces.

I laid the over-long ring in the circle and set my hand on it.

It glowed blue, a soft shade that I liked. A reminder of my new status as a parahuman.

I withdrew my hand, and sure enough, the ring had split into a few pieces. It was obvious evidence that the sigils could do more than strictly instructed — they could take input from what I wanted or thought about. The ring was sliced neatly into four identical rings, each about the width of the original ring.

I put them to the side and grabbed the small lump of diamond.

I wondered if I could do a simpler cutting pattern. Not the intricate facets that the ring's had, but maybe something simple. I held up the pebble and compared it to Mom's ring. I could do smooth cuts, probably better than what a machine could do. Perfectly straight lines, perfect angles.

Looking at Mom's ring made me think better of it. The way it glittered and sparkled, all the intricate facets, the tiny scale; the more I looked at it, the more impressed I was, and the more daunted. It wasn't a simple pyramid cube. I might as well be trying to make a DNA helix.

I decided to make do with downsizing the diamond to an acceptable size, and come up with an appropriate lie for why the jewelry used a mostly-uncut diamond. Maybe my fictitious grandmother was a geologist? Maybe her husband was?

On the sheet of binder paper with the gold-cutting circle, I drew another one to cut the diamond. It worked fine, neatly cutting the stone into two pieces of about equal size.

The new, smooth side was clearer, more obviously transparent, and I liked the way the light glittered inside, reflecting off of the rough other side internally. Kind of like a geode.

Hopefully the pawn shop would like it, too.

I took two of the rings and the slightly smaller half of the diamond and wrapped them up in a sheet of paper. The rest I put in a plastic bag and stuffed into a drawer of my desk, along with the handful of rocks. The two sheets of paper I had drawn my sigils on went into that drawer too.

When I opened up my backpack to put my soon-to-be money away, I hesitated. If my backpack got stolen before I had the chance to sell the stuff, I couldn't predict what might happen. So far, Emma had contented herself with ruining my backpack with paint, drinks, food, makeup, and similar avenues of attack, Sophia by ripping it and damaging it in other ways, and Madison by knocking it off my desk, my chair, and other stuff like that.

Stealing was apparently beneath them, but it didn't make it impossible, and it was a risk I couldn't afford. At the same time, I was unwilling to wait until the weekend to get started.

I sighed and put the paper-wrapped jewelry to the side. I'd figure something out later.

My Biology textbook — sitting on my bed — beckoned.

~

I got off the bus at a vaguely unfamiliar stop with a bunch of people I didn't know. This stop put me right where I needed to be; the slightly shady part of downtown, about five blocks inland from Market street and a little bit south of the pier. It was a little bit before four PM, so I figured I had about two hours before I needed to be off the streets, considering how soon it would get dark.

In the deepest, tiniest, most inaccessible pocket of my jeans rested the two gold rings and the half-cut diamond in a fold of paper. I had put two stitches into the paper and my jeans before putting them on this morning with a few inches of thread, just to be extra sure it wouldn't fall out somehow. I was paying for it now — taking it out properly was a pain — but it was worth it to be sure they wouldn't be stolen or dropped.

The pawn shop I was walking towards was more than a few blocks from the bus stop, and the fact that it was still solidly light out was the only reason that I felt safe enough to come into this part of town. Pawn shops weren't exactly tourist-friendly fare, except maybe in Las Vegas or something, so I didn't have a ton of choices for ones close to a bus stop or the safer parts of town when I had searched the phone book last night.

The bar-protected windows, made of some kind of steel, confirmed I was in the right kind of place even before the sign did. Paper signs in the windows declared in faded red and yellow 'WE BUY GOLD' and other, similar, ads.

I resisted the urge to look around before I went in. I wasn't suspicious, nor was I doing anything suspicious. I was selling some inherited jewelry from my grandparents.

I am doing something totally normal. I thought insistently.

The door opened with a typical bell-ringing sound above the frame. I glanced up. A little metal bell, a new symbol. Some kind of brass or copper or something.

Inside, it was a little cramped. There were lots of glass cases filled with gadgets, jewelry, and a variety of other things. On the walls were paintings, swords, and shelves packed with odds and ends.

The elderly Asian man behind the counter glanced up from his magazine. He was shorter than me, and had on a pair of wire-frame glasses that looked like they belonged to a professor.

I smiled nervously at him. There wasn't anyone else inside, which I was grateful for.

"Hi, uh, sir." I said as I approached. "My grandparents left me some jewelry that I don't really need, and I was wondering if you could take a look."

He nodded and pushed his magazine to the side. I glanced at it. Cars. I couldn't begin to understand the hype.

I pulled the paper out of my pocket and unfolded it. The rings were around the diamond in the center of the folds, and I set the paper down.

He looked down at them, then pulled a plain black cloth out from somewhere and laid it on the counter opposite my paper. It looked like nice, dark material.

A new symbol. Velvet, maybe.

"May I?" He asked, with just a bit of an accent.

I nodded, and he picked up one of the rings and held it up to his eye.

"Gold. Very clean. Did you polish them?"

I shook my head. I hadn't thought about that. The gold that I had made, whether or not it was 24 karat or not, was clean and clear; no accumulation of dirt and wear from years of use.

"Not a lot of design on these. Your grandfather's?"

I shrugged.

"Speak up, kid." He said.

"I don't know. I guess that makes sense."

"Alright." He set the rings to the side on a cloth.

"And what's this? Piece of quartz?"

"It's a diamond." I said firmly.

"Really?" He said. "Looks like quartz to me."

"It isn't cut." I said.

"I can see that, but how do you know it's a diamond?"

I started to feel nervous. I was sure it was a diamond, but if I couldn't prove it somehow, he wasn't going to take it.

"The will." I said, louder than I intended. "It said it was an uncut diamond."

"Umm-hmm." He said, sounding unconvinced.

"Really." I said, feeling a little bit desperate. I tried to calm down. "Isn't there a test you can do?"

He looked at me hard, probably waiting for me to back down, but I refused to. I figured he thought I was lying, but I wasn't. Not about this.

"Fine." He said. He turned around and fumbled around under the shelves behind him, before pulling out a tool that looked sort of like a two-prong soldering iron.

He pressed both prongs against the flat side of my diamond and waited a few seconds. It beeped, and he looked at the readout.

His eyebrows rose a little bit, just above the frames of his glasses.

"It's a diamond." He said, putting the tool in his pocket. "Where'd your grandparents get something like this?"

"My grandpa was a geologist." I said. "Maybe he found it sometime."

The owner umm-hmmed again.

"So, will you buy it?" I asked, after he was silent for a little while longer.

He looked from the diamond to the rings.

"These are pretty cheap." He said, touching the rings. "Not worth much more than melt. Say, fifty bucks each. The rock's a different story. Uncut diamond, not a lot of people come in for something like that. Probably worth half to resell it. Typically gets cut down. The color's reasonably good. Did the will say how many carats it was?"

I shook my head and felt like an idiot. My story was such nonsense.

He rolled it around in his fingers.

"For a diamond this size, uncut, good color, how about a grand?"

I hoped my eyes didn't pop out of my head. A thousand dollars! For that one little rock!

"Or, if you're interested, I can do about fifteen-hundred in trade." He gestured around the shop.

I had no idea if I was being totally cheated or being dealt with generously, but either way, I had what I wanted.

"Let me look around." I said. "But you've got yourself a deal."

He smiled just a little, and I smiled back before walking over to the tech.

As I did, I passed by a display case loaded with weapons. The bottom half was all pistols, some like the old-west type, others more modern. The top was knives in all shapes and sizes.

The symbols leapt out at me. The blades of the knives were all very similar, almost the same symbol, but not quite. It was a tiny matter of degrees — slight differences in the curve of a line or the distance between two strokes.

I realized I was seeing the difference between the kinds of steel; the alloys. All of them were basically the same steel-shape that I saw on most cars, but I could change its exact type if I used a subtly different symbol.

"Pepper spray's more your thing, if you're worried about guys." The old man said from where he was sitting.

"Huh?" I said.

"If you're worried about being out late at night, pepper spray's a better bet." He said, having gone back to his magazine.

"Just got distracted." I said, and continued on to the next display case. Cell phones, cameras, and laptop computers filled this one.

"Do all of these work?" I asked. "Power cables and everything?"

"Unless otherwise noted." He said.

On the second from the bottom shelf, there was a laptop for two hundred and fifty dollars. It wasn't the cheapest one in the case, but of the ones without cracks in the plastic or anything, it was on the cheap end. It had a bunch of marks on it where someone had removed stickers from it, but other than that, it looked fine.

Two hundred and fifty dollars. It was more than I had ever had before, but compared with the money I could apparently make now, it was nothing. School would be so much easier if I didn't have to go to the library to do research, and I could read up on capes in the area before I decided to go out for the first time.

"Excuse me." I said. "I'd like that one, please."

"Alright." He said, and unlocked the compartment from the back. He pulled off a post-it stuck to the bottom, and pulled a power cable from a cardboard box on the floor next to him, and handed both to me.

"Anything else?"

I glanced over at the weapons again, and the phones, but shook my head.

"This is fine."

I unzipped my backpack, which bore the annoying scent of some kind of powdered juice mix that Emma had used as she passed me by between periods. The laptop fit neatly between my textbooks, and the power cable fit in at the top. It was a little heavy, but not problematically so.

"Eleven-hundred minus two-hundred and fifty is eight-hundred and fifty." He said.

"But you said more in trade." I objected before I could stop myself.

He snorted, and I felt a flush rise on my cheeks.

"That I did. Memory's not what it used to be. Call it a grand?"

I nodded. It was a little bit less than he had probably offered, but a hell of a lot more than a few pebbles from my backyard were worth.

"Twenties alright?"

I nodded. What would I say, no?

He took the cloth that held my rings and diamond away onto his side of the counter, and at the register, he punched a few buttons on a machine to the side, which began whirring.

The post-it note he had taken from my laptop, he held up to his eyes before tapping a few keys on the register. Beside him, cash was whirring out of the machine, so much that I licked my lips, either from nervousness or anticipation.

"Your receipt and payment." He said, causing me to start.

I accepted the barely-readable receipt for the laptop, and then he handed me a stack of twenties with a paper band around them. It read $1000.

It was mine. The thick stack of fifty twenty-dollar bills was mine.

I took the stack and pushed it deep into my pocket, but the pocket wasn't big enough for it to fit properly, so I was forced to open up my backpack and put it in one of the smaller compartments.

"Pleasure doing business with you." He said. "Come back any time."

I nodded and hurried out.

I need to get home, ASAP. I thought.

Once outside, every shadow felt dangerous, and every narrow alley that I could see looked like the ideal hiding spot for muggers and thugs. I clung to my backpack straps and hurried up the street.

I was barely two blocks away when I heard some steps behind me, coming too fast. It was the sound of someone running almost directly towards me.

I cursed under my breath, wishing my powers had come with any kind of fighting ability. I was essentially a naked Tinker.

"Hey, sorry I'm late." said a guy I had never seen before in my life as he fell into step next to me.

He was older than me, probably about twenty, but a little less than my height. A little bit pasty, with brown hair and broad shoulders. He looked like he spent a lot of time in the gym.

"Uhh." I said, somewhere between confused and terrified.

"Keep walking." He hissed under his breath.

"What the—" I began to shout.

"ABB thugs in the next alley." He said. "Like to mug anyone who sells to that shop."

I paused, considering. It was possible, at least, but it could also be a ruse to get me away from people.

He stood by, and I got the impression that my hesitation was frustrating him.

"I'm heading to the bus stop." I said, as firmly as I could.

"Perfect. I'll get you there safe."

We started walking, awkwardly side-by-side. My grip on my backpack straps got tighter as we approached the alley.

He looked over at me and cracked a little bit of a smile.

"I'm Joey." He said.

I hesitated a little bit, but smiled back at him.

"Taylor." I said.

Instantly, I wished I had lied, used a fake name, anything, but it was too late now.

"It's nice to meet you, Taylor." He said with a grin that made him look a little younger.

When we passed the next alley, there were indeed two guys a little older than me, both Asian, leaning against the building and smoking. It wasn't proof of Joey's story, but it made me relax just a little bit more.

We walked in silence all the way to the bus stop. I couldn't stop wishing that I had lied about my name, but I did my best to reassure myself that, if I had tried to lie, I probably would have just screwed it up.

"There. Safe and sound." He said brightly as we stepped into the shade of the bus stop's shelter. "Stay safe."

"Uh, Joey?" I said, before he could walk away. "Why'd you do that?"

He shrugged. "Figure we should try to stick together. Those ABB assholes have done enough damage to this city."

He gave a jaunty wave and took a few steps over to hit the button on the traffic light. The small white figure lit up on the other side of the street.

"I'll see you around, Taylor." He said as he made his way across the street at a brisk jog.

I just waved, until it felt awkward to wave anymore. He wasn't looking towards me anymore, anyways.

I sat down to wait for the bus.

It felt weird. It was the first time a stranger had gone out of their way to help me in at least a few weeks, if not months. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that I had been duped, in one way or another.

The desire to open up my backpack and see if I had been intangibly robbed or Mastered out of my money was strong, but I forced myself to wait.

I waited for twenty more minutes before a bus arrived that I could use to get close to home. The entire time, I clung to my backpack. I couldn't even be excited about what was in it; I was too busy being afraid of anyone who passed by.

Nobody looked at me twice, not even the eldery couple who sat down nearby to wait.

This bus ride was another trial for my heart, but I fortunately had a row to myself. There wasn't enough privacy to open the zipper though. Images of twenties spilling out of my bag and all over the seat forced me to keep still.

By the time I was walking on the sidewalk in my neighborhood, the fear finally began to give way to anticipation and excitement. I unzipped the top of my backpack just enough to confirm that the money was still in there.

It was all I could do not to squeal.

I had my very own laptop! And a thousand dollars! All from one evening's work. No crime, no job, nothing objectionable at all, and my fortunes had exploded.

The door was unlocked when I got home, to my very great surprise.

Inside, Dad was sitting in front of the TV, but he wasn't looking at it. There was a can of something on the table, as well as his Dockworker's Association laptop and an open manilla folder full of disorganized paper.

When the door closed, he perked up.

"Hey, kiddo." He said. "I thought you were up in your room."

"Nah. I went downtown for a little while." I said. The extra weight of the laptop in my bag seemed to pull me down, far heavier than it had any right to be.

"Good." He said. He sipped his drink. "What do you want for dinner?"

Food? I could barely think about food, I was so excited. I hadn't even been able to touch my lunch today — I had spent the whole time trying to find somewhere Emma, Sophia, and Madison wouldn't find me.

I had been successful, albeit due to being on the move.

"Whatever's fine." I said. "I should probably get started on my homework."

"Alright, kiddo. I'll call you when it's ready."

"Thanks, Dad."

I took the stairs two at a time, almost tripping halfway up, and when I got inside my room, I slammed the door and put my chair under the knob.

I wanted to scream with joy, but was content with excited squealing as I clung to my backpack.

My first mission towards being a superhero was a complete success.