Powerless ch. 1
I am so failing this test.
Seriously, this isn't like when your annoying friends say, 'oh I'm definitely failing this test' and up with a 97. I am completely bombing it. I'm halfway convinced that a third of these words don't exist. A small sigh slips past my lips, my eyes instinctively searching left and right, not that it would help. The testing room is pure white, no posters, windows, not even a clock to help. Not that a clock would help, but at this point I'm mostly complaining so that you can see how pathetic my situation is. Is it working?
I can't even look at any one else' test, there's at least three feet of space between desks, and little blinds set up on either side. That's right, whoever designed this room had to have been some kind of dungeon master from the dark ages, a master of hopelessness and torture. With yet another sigh--I think it’s the 10th this class--I turn back to my test and try to make sense of the gibberish that was question 23. Nope. Not a clue. Rolling my eyes, I fill in a random bubble, just to have something to turn in. I figure as long as I do that I have a 1 in 4 chance of getting it right, so I always fill something in. C. I always put C (Spoiler alert: this test so far has 18 Cs).
Question 24 isn't looking any better. I grit my teeth at the sound of scratching pencils around me, glaring at Calypse smirking in the seat next to mine, though her eyes are firmly locked on the back of the head of the brainiac in front of her. Probably reading his mind to get all of the answers. The kid behind her, Cyrus, is looking at her back intently, his eyes glowing as he looks through her body to the paper. I turn back quickly as his concentrated look turns into a leer. Okay, maybe not all the way through her then. Gross. He’s a brave man, she’s going to destroy him for that later. I’ll probably sell tickets.
Randolph has his force shield up to keep people from peeking at his paper, though I'm not entirely sure why he would bother. I wouldn't exactly consider him worth copying personally. Though I suppose if I were him I would be doing the same thing if Crane kept on stretching his neck across the aisle. Of course, now Crane is just doing it to the kid in front of him, but honestly Randolph would probably be the better option. Wanta took a page from Crane’s book and had changed her neck into a giraffe's a while back, but I’m pretty sure that it’s unbalancing her human body because she keeps almost falling out of her chair. Clair's torso is invisible so that her idiot of a superstrength boyfriend behind her can cheat. Every once in a while papers went flying or disappeared as Zari or Zayne utilized their telekinesis and teleportation.
I glare at them all, whatever.
24. C
I know that I can't exactly complain about it. After all, using your powers to cheat is just as much part of these tests as actually knowing the information. The super geniuses know the stuff, obviously, they were going to be the next investors of the death ray or cure cancer or whatever. The telepaths try to read their minds, and the geniuses try to keep them out. It’s as much a game of trying to cheat as it is to not get cheated on.
Crap. 25. C
I know what you’re thinking, you're thinking now is about the time I'm gonna tell you my power, and you'll get a front row seat to see me save the day. Or, at least my GPA. Well, think again. This is not the part of the story where I tell you what amazing gift has landed me in this classroom of freaks. Mostly because I don't have one. That's right, no special powers. Why am I here then, you ask? Because when it comes to me, no one else does either.
Wait... what? What is that even supposed to mean? You know what, strike that last sentence. It made sense in my head, but now... you know whatever.
Hey, I actually remember this one. 26. A
Anyway, what I mean is that no one else' powers work on me. At all. Like, it’s not like it's just the mind readers who can't read me or whatever. Cyrus can't see through me, I can walk right through Randolph's force field. The only way I know that Clair's torso is invisible is because her boyfriend keeps looking at her back and writing answers. None of the shape shifters can turn into me and I always see them in their original form. So I guess I don’t know that Wanta has a giraffe neck, but she does it every test so I’m pretty sure this monster is no exception. No matter what they do Zari and Zayne can't move or teleport anything I'm touching.
I've beaten speedsters in a race. Once I watched a kid with super strength break through five cement walls without breaking a sweat, the come at me and hit me square in the stomach will all of his strength. It hurt less than that time one of the genius kids hit me cause I beat him on a test. Not this subject of course.
27. C
One kid's only power was glowing, and no matter how bright he was, I only saw a dark room. They can shoot at me with lasers, sonic bursts, and fire and I never burn. Their ice powers don't make me shiver. Once a healer stayed up with me all night, but I'd still had a broken arm.
Sometimes I really hated my "powers", the fact that I was immune to everything. Like now. If I’m going to fail I really wish I could drag one of them with me.
28. C
A loud clatter beaks me of my thoughts and I instinctively jerk around to the sound, though no one else so much as looks up. Hipe glares when our eyes met, angry that she can’t hypnotize me into giving her the answers. Ha, as if.
29 was either B or D. I'll go with B
Of course there are other times I hate my particular brand of powerlessness, though that typically centers on the fact that I'm the first they've discovered with my powers, so there's a lot of experimentation. A lot of specialized tests. It's worse too because none of the super-geniuses that work here can study me without their brain turning into mush as they fall prey to my anti-powers. So my fate is in the hands of normal geniuses. Yeah, not much fun.
30 through 37 all C. Crap.
And there aren't exactly a lot of those in supply here. See, I bet I know what you're thinking. You probably have all these assumptions about who I am and what I'm like and what the setting of all this is, and bla bla bla. You're probably right about some of it. But I can tell you one thing you were thinking that you're wrong about: this isn't some story about some kid going through some kind of magical super hero high school where despite having odd powers he's going to be the star hero valedictorian homecoming king whatever. You're wrong, you're so wrong.
38. A
See, I may have said class and GPA and whatever, but this isn't a school; its a training facility. Small nuance, huge difference. We aren't going through classes to help us in the real world after graduation, where we'll all get a job and become heroes and villains or whatever. No, we're being trained. Like guard dogs or trick ponies. The only thing waiting for us at graduation is an auction sending us to the highest bidder, the rich and elite who want a powered pet.
Like, imagine if Bruce Wayne had been really lazy and instead of becoming Batman he used his riches to buy an already trained Robin to save Gotham. That's us. You just had to hope that you ended up with Batman and not Lex Luther. (Yes, I know that's Superman's villain, but he's super rich and could actually afford one of us. Joker would... I don't know kill people, blow stuff up, make lame jokes and puns, cause general chaos)
Or at least, I hope to end up with Batman. All of the other kids here have been in training since birth and are as brainwashed as they could be. Morals don't bother crossing their mind, they just hope for someone who'll give them three square meals and a comfy bed. It's not their fault. You would go along with it too if that's all you'd ever known.
39. B
How am I still so aware you ask? Well for one, I haven't been here nearly that long. There are various powered people--the trainers refer to us as Vires, which is apparently something in Latin--in hospitals all over the world whose whole power is the ability to sense other Vire. Vire is the plural of Vires. I don’t know how adding an ‘s’ makes it singular, just roll with it. Anyway, when they sense a Vire they either switch out the baby’s or make something up about IDS and the kids are shipped off here. Their powers didn't work on me (see above if you're confused why) and I would have probably gone my whole life in ignorant peace if dear old dad hadn't been rich enough to own a couple of Vires himself.
At first even he didn't know, but all it took was one party where a friend with an empath showed up to ruin everything. Poor guy flipped when he couldn't read anything from me. Like, full blown panic attack. It had never happened to him before. As far as I know it hasn’t happened to anyone since. I have no clue how the facility here got news of it, but next thing I knew a couple of freaks were breaking through my walls and dragging me here. It almost hadn't worked, they had been so used to relying on their powers. The speedster who was supposed to grab me and run had been too slow, and the person who came to control my mind and make me compliant failed horribly and I screamed the whole time. Dad had shot one of them in the leg.
But it hadn't been enough and I'd been forcibly "enrolled" here. Seven years later than everyone else.
40. B
I mean, that's still pretty young. I'm not going to say that I'm not brainwashed at least a little. I totally am, (does it count if you know you've been brainwashed) but not nearly as bad as anyone else. It also probably helps that the telepaths can't get into my head and leave behind thoughts I think are my own.
41. B
Sometimes I entertain the idea of hoping that my dad would be waiting for me on auction day, checkbook in hand. But then I would remember the teens always handing in the background in my fuzzy memories of his house. Their faces always marred with bruises and flinching anytime someone neared. As good a father I remember him as, I wouldn't want to be his Vires.
Well it had been good while it lasted. 4 in a row right wasn't bad. 42. C
So yeah, now you know it all. My whole story in all the sordid details. To this point at least. My group turns 16 this year, which means this spring is auction. So, there'll probably be a lot more story to tell pretty soon. If I go to auction at least. They may decide to keep me another year or so to continue their experiments. They may never sell me. That thought alternates as my greatest hope and my biggest fear.
I don't know what'll be out there, but I keep on going back to the thought that it could never be worse than this. Then I remember that things can always get worse.
I know 43 isn’t C, but that’s all I got. If is out then go for D, unless D is ‘all of the above’, in which case never do D.
A small ding sounds in the room, followed by a series of curses. Five minutes left on the test.
Sorry, but I need to focus now. At this point, it's desperation answering. Reading through the question and only answering if I know that I've got the answer.
4 and a half minutes later I stand with the rest of the class to turn in the test, already feeling the ghost pains of punishment as I place the paper in the pile.
Total test questions: 100. Total Cs: 83.
Crap. Oh well, at least it'll be auction soon. Nothing can be worse than this.