First creation

I awoke with a gasp of fear, my zombie sister had just started to gnaw away at my left leg and the adrenalin made me shoot up in bed like I had gotten an electric shock. Funny how my wider range of movement, thanks to the missing beach ball in my gut allowed me to actually touch me feet while keeping my legs straight. How is this important right now? I was busy checking my limbs for missing pieces and before I would have to contort myself in different ways. Now I could actually touch both of my feet with my hands at the same time, which was convenient because I could feel both my feet and hands at the same time. After proving that yes, I was still whole, I couldn't and didn't want to go back to sleep. I had stuff to do and I didn't need to see what kind of horrors my subconscious could conjure up.

So I decided to actually take a look at my powers. Enchanting was actually very close to programming, at least the programming part, there was no need for hardware, everyone and everything has aura and enchanting is basically reshaping and adding to that aura to give something different properties. As I couldn't actually use Magic, I was stuck with writing or carving runes into the physical form of an object, which would be mirrored in the aura of the object and cause the intended change. The upside of that method was that the enchantment is permanent, as long as the physical form isn't damaged, which couldn't be said for the more magical means of enchanting. Magical or better non physical enchantment only worked until the aura was depleted, disturbed, changed or disrupted in any way. I didn't really consider others interrupting my enchantments to be a problem, because there was no one else who even knew about it, but with parahumans there was no way to tell. I suspected my creations would be susceptible to the right power in any case.

Now there was a slight problem with me starting out, I knew the which runes to add in what way, but I didn't have any experience with drawing runes, I didn't have that much experience with drawing at all. My time in kindergarten had been woefully short and I had missed a lot of classes during the first few years of school. And later I had always been the more nerdy kind of guy who played handhelds instead of actually going out and learning things like painting. I didn't even take art class in school, my advanced subjects had messed up my schedule so I took home economics and cooking classes. Now there I was, ready to build my own master sword, but unable to because I didn't know how to draw precise forms on a piece of paper. A piece of paper I didn't have, because the apartment was devoid of anything even related to entertainment, part of the strategy to force me into the mold, I am sure.

Searching through the Apartment only gave me two real choices to test my power. The first was to use a knife on the furniture and I didn't think that would go over well with my handlers, even if they missed the implications, which I seriously doubted. The second choice was a piece of soap, a brand new piece of lavender soap, but a piece of soap wasn't really a great option. I choose the second option anyway, it was the easiest and not leaving any evidence was more important than actual use. I chose to start with a simple runic combination, 3 runes, air, clean and mind, a simple array to cleanse the mind of distracting thoughts every time I used the object. Which in case of soap would be only once or twice before the lines where smudged and destroyed. The advantage of such a simple runic combination was that the destruction of the array wouldn't cause any damage.

Now as I mentioned before, I wasn't a fan of crafting and certainly not of carving exact lines, so I managed to mess up on the second line during my first try. To avoid detection I was using a simple kitchen knife and carving under the cheap lighting in the bathroom. Luckily for me, a little water was enough to erase all mistakes, and everything I had managed before, so I had a great amount of tries left over. By trial and much more errors I finally managed to produce my first array, but because I had wasted so much of the soap, I wasn't certain it would even work. Taking a deep breath I used the shrunken bar of soap to wash my hands, for simple arrays you always had to use an object for its intended use to activate the aura. The effect was immediate, my thoughts cleared and I could suddenly see past the fear and pain, the memories of betrayal and torture and actually think about my next steps.

I recognized now that I had been hasty and while there was a possibility that my new powers interfered with my mind, I wasn't certain all my rushed behavior could be attributed to my powers wanting to be used. I had wanted a distraction from my memories, something to concentrate on and sink my time in, something that would help me gain an advantage while allowing me to avoid the thoughts about just how much I had lost in the last 2 weeks. While it was true my parents hadn't been deserving of that denomination, they had provided a safe haven, a home for me and my sister to live in. Where we could be ourselves and wouldn't be judged, mostly because our parents forgot our existence, but it had been all we had known and in our own way we had made it work for us. It certainly hadn't been the best of lives, most honest Youth Guard representatives would have removed us in an heartbeat, it could have been much worse. I didn't miss my parents, I missed the times when they had still been alive, the times when I could spend my days cooking and caring for my sister. Those times where gone, forever and that hurt far more than I thought possible.

It couldn't go on like this, I needed a plan and I still had at least an hour before I was expected in the cafeteria. I would take this time to really plan out my next steps.

The plan I came up with was simple and complex at the same time. I needed to become a villain, more precise a nemesis for my sisters hero persona. My sister would be forced to join the Wards sooner or later and knowing her she would jump at the opportunity to release her stress in a violent fashion. My sister had always been the type to prefer talking with her fists. It was her way of showing affection, solving problems and expressing her mood. The first time I had met her, she had pushed my baby self and then forced me into wrestling with her. She never hurt me intentionally and I preferred her way of doing things above being ignored completely, but most other people didn't understand how a slight girl could be so violent in her behavior. I didn't remember my sister ever having girl friends, only boys, mostly older teenagers hung out with her. She probably still was infamous at her old school.

So in order to combat my sisters violent tendencies and actually force the PRT to field her I had to put pressure on the entire Protectorate and PRT, easy peasy. I would have to be a threat strong enough to fight multiple capes, skilled enough to avoid excessive amounts of collateral damage so the Wards where allowed to fight me and a big enough threat to the PRT so they would risk sending an unprepared cape with anger issues against me, just because she countered my powers. About the only easy thing about that plan was that I could artificially manufacture weak points into my creation, so my sister powers would be the hard counter to my own. And how I had gained the knowledge to artificially produce weak points in structures was another matter altogether. It felt older than my enchanting powers, but I hadn't noticed until I had actually created my own designs. It didn't feel limited to my own designs, more like I had to already understand what I was looking at to see the weak points. I wondered just how many other powers I had gained, but never noticed.

Another major part of the plan was to restore my mental health, I couldn't always use a clean mind sop, mostly because my first one wouldn't work again, to smudged after the first use and there was a chance the PRT goons would notice. I had to actually do the work, go to therapy and learn to deal. That thought made me shudder, even in my serene state. I used the soap again to remove any evidence, it would simply look like I had left the soap under flowing water for to long and decided that it was time to leave my room and work towards my future. The serenity left me on my way down and know that I had experienced another state of mind I understood just how much baggage I was lugging around with me. Therapy had become an immediate priority.