December 16 2001
Reincarnation doesn’t really work how my previous self expected.
Fantasy media made me believe I'd either get summoned or die to be put into someone else’s body, or born as a baby with my memories intact.
For me, some time before I turned 5 years old I just started… remembering things. Things that aren’t possible for a child to know. At first it was just little snippets here and there, but as it went on I’d get massive headaches remembering a life the current me never lived.
I know I lived these memories but at the same time… I didn’t. It’s like the memories are all there but they’re one step removed. To use an analogy: my body is new hardware, and my previous self’s memories are all files on an external hard drive. However, I’m running on the same OS, just a new version. I can access the memories, but they aren’t who I am.
That’s not to say I’m not affected. My previous self wasn’t exactly a complete loner, but I definitely struggled to truly connect with people. Remembering the abandoned friendships, the detachment from my previous family, the few failed romances. The previous me never really felt comfortable in their own skin and pulled away from everyone they knew by the end. The current me is terrified of living that life.
As of today I’m ten years old and while I have memories of an adult’s experience, since they didn’t actually happen to me I’m basically just a know it all kid. I have the vocabulary and knowledge of an adult but none of the emotional control or practical experience. The fact that I'm aware of that is trippy but it hasn’t stopped me from throwing tantrums and crying when I skin my knee. Though, I’m getting better at it.
I’m also pretty sure I know the world I’ve reincarnated into. And if I’m right, some major shit is going to start happening in a decade or so. I’ve decided that I'll do what I must to survive it. And if possible, prevent the worst of it.
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“Grey honey, come downstairs!”
“In a minute mom!”
Grey closes the laptop he was typing on and looks at the news story on TV. Tony Stark is holding a memorial banquet for his parents’ deaths. He looks very similar to the actor in Grey’s previous life’s memories. Not the same, but could easily pass as a brother or a stunt double. Same beard, similar playboy looks.
I’m pretty sure I’m in some derivative of the movie’s universe. I remember Tony’s parents died the day I was born, which lines up with the date from the movies. Didn’t read many of the comics but the fact that mutants either don’t exist or are still hidden, and the Fantastic 4 don’t seem to be around, makes me think MCU. Though I know Charles Xavier and Reed Richards are real people, Charles doesn’t own a school, and Reed is actually younger than me.
“GREY!”
“Coming!” Snapped out of his musing, Grey turns off the TV and heads downstairs.
Grey finds his mom and dad sitting at the dining room table, dad looking nervous and mom looking serious.
Shit. Did I do something? Or is this.. ‘The talk?’
Grey’s mother is a fit woman, with short strawberry blonde hair and steel gray eyes. Even after years of home schooling from her using this expression, Grey can’t help but get nervous when she looks at him with the serious face and gray eyes. Grey’s father is much less intense, with boyish, almost feminine asian features, with black eyes and hair, he basically screams ‘anime protagonist.’
Grey basically looked like an even more androgynous version of his father. Grey loved his father but never liked how he looked. Not to mention, Grey only called himself “he” for simplicity. Grey’s body was like a doll. No nipples, no… other things. He didn’t even know he was different until the memories started coming in. Being sheltered and home schooled tends to make you unaware of some things, especially when your parents don’t explain it to you.
“Grey.” Mom begins, “Today, you turn ten years old. Which means you’re now at the age for me to tell you about something important.”
Oh shit it’s happening right now. She’s got her teacher mode on!
“You and I are special. We are not human. We are a race of people called Chrys.” She drops that bomb.
“Wait what? What do you mean not human? Is that why I don’t have nipples like dad?”
Dad snorts and mumbles “didn’t expect that to be the first question…”
Mom gives him a side eye and replies, “Yes. We are born without many features. Chrys are people that are naturally capable of changing their bodies. When we’re young, we don’t have access to this ability, and simply take on the form of the non-Chrys parent without any sexual characteristics.”
To emphasize her point, Her gray eyes become purple, her hair becomes black, and after a few seconds of unsettling facial twitches, she suddenly has the face of a man.
Grey bolts upright and screams “WAIT, I’M NOT A BOY!?”
His mom calmly responds, “You can be a boy, you can be a girl. You can be both, you can be neither. At least, you will be able to in a few years. We don’t have the ability to change forms until about the age other humans are in the mid to late stages of puberty. Here.” She slides over a notebook Grey didn’t notice before. “This details everything I know about Chrys and what you’ll be able to do.”
“O-ok… why tell me this now and not later? It’s gonna be a few years before this matters right?” Grey’s voice is shaky. I knew I was different, but I didn’t expect… this.
“Your shape changing abilities will take a few years, but we also have another major ability that will likely manifest itself much sooner. I’m telling you about it now because when it comes, it can be very disorienting. Do you know what an empath is?” she asks.
“Someone who’s good at reading other people’s emotions.”
“Yes. Chrys are natural empaths. We are able to sense the emotions of others, and before you get used to it and control it, you will feel those emotions yourself. It’s a long explanation on how it works but when your empath abilities manifest, it’ll be sudden, and if you’re not ready for it and in a public place, it can be extremely traumatizing. That’s what happened to me when I manifested.”
Curious, Grey asks, “What happened?”
His mom sighs and says, “When mine manifested, I was on an airplane with my family. I hadn’t gotten the explanation you’re now getting. I felt all the emotions of every passenger at once. I simultaneously felt fear of flying, excitement, boredom, lust for the flight attendant, hate and more, all at an extremely intense level. I had a panic attack and passed out. I… was catatonic for a week. To this day getting on a plane or bus or something similar is incredibly stressful. Part of the reason we don’t see your grandpa very often is because I still haven’t been able to forgive him for not preparing me.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“He said it was because it wasn’t nearly such a big deal for him. When he manifested, it wasn’t in public, and it turns out my abilities were much more sensitive than his ever were.”
Things are silent for a minute as Grey takes in all this information. Before he comes out of contemplation, his mom claps loudly.
“Ok that’s enough for now. Read the notebook later and you can ask me questions tomorrow. For now…” His mom changes her appearance back to normal and her ‘teacher mode’ expression goes away and her ‘mommy mode’ enters. Which to Grey… is much more terrifying.
“MY BABY IS TEN YEARS OLD!” Grey’s mom nearly dives across the dining room table to tackle him to the ground. Kissing his cheeks and rubbing her face in his long hair. “What am I going to do? You’re almost a grownup, soon you’re gonna leave me and this house and I’ll just be an old lady all alone”
“I’m only ten, mom. Besides, you have dad even if I did leave.”
“Oh woe is me my baby is growing up too fast!” The melodrama only increases.
Thankfully Grey’s dad saves the day by bringing in his birthday cake.
“Dear, stop smothering our child and let him blow out his candles. If you keep going, maybe he really will leave.”
Dad to the rescue as always!
Grey’s mom reluctantly stands up and manhandles… womanhandles? Grey into his seat. She sits down right next to him.
“Alright baby, make a wish!”
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December 17, 2001
So it turns out I’m not human. I’m a shapeshifting species called Chrys. I guess it makes sense, can’t be in a superhero world without being kinda weird right?
Though after reading my mother’s notebook, I don’t think it meets the minimum requirement to be ‘super.’ The shapeshifting is more limited than I initially hoped. The empathy sounds good, but I’m not stopping Thanos by knowing about his feelings. I could probably make a great spy, but I doubt that’s gonna make enough of a difference. I’ll have to brainstorm safe options to get some superpowers.
Stolen story; please report.
Anyway, back to my Chrys heritage.
There are two kinds of shifting, one can be done fairly quickly but is limited and the other takes a while but is more complete.
‘Minor shift’ can change my skin, eye, and hair color like a chameleon, and change up my face and body shape to a limited degree. Apparently Chrys are savants when it comes to muscle control to the point they can change their facial features, as well as appear more or less muscular, or create the illusion of being fat. All within limits. I can’t suddenly go from looking like a petite 16 year old girl to the Hulk. But I can go from feminine to masculine, or fit to pudgy.
A ‘major shift’ gets a little more out there, and it’s where the name of my kind comes from. I would form a chrysalis around myself and essentially break my body down completely and form a new one. Depending on what the new form entails this can apparently take anywhere from 6-12 hours. There’s some weird quirks to this and I honestly don’t know how it's possible biologically but I guess I’m in a world with superheroes and magic so…yeah.
Basically with a chrysalis I can take any body shape I want, be male, female, hermaphroditic, or barbie doll style like now, and if I ingest a nutrient concoction that my mom invented beforehand, I can make myself taller or more muscular.
The main awesome part though, is I can ingest the DNA of someone or something else and take their form, or integrate part of them into myself. I immediately thought of getting the DNA of some powerful mutants to get some good powers, but after thinking about it, I’m pretty sure it wouldn't work that way. The chrysalis essentially grows the body as if from birth. So I wouldn’t have gone through the stress inducer that mutants require to trigger their powers, not to mention having to learn from scratch how they worked. Even if I did all that, if I ever did another major shift, I’d lose the powers and have to start from scratch. Also I don’t think I could integrate more than one power at a time based on how I remember the X gene working.
Basically, it’d be worth testing out if I meet a mutant but I’m not optimistic.
Anyway, apparently Chrys spend their lifetimes creating and adapting what is called a ‘true form,’ which is basically the one that they associate with their day to day lives. It rarely looks anything like their birth form, which is apparently little more than a clone of their non-chrys parent. I can definitely feel this, because as soon as I read it, I felt a huge wave of relief that I didn’t have to look like my dad for the rest of my life. I love my dad, but I hate the idea of looking like a generic anime protagonist forever.
That’s the main bits of shapeshifting, and since I won’t be able to do it for a few years anyway, let’s move on.
The empath ability is what it sounds like pretty much. I’ll be able to instinctively interpret the emotions around me, and even feel the emotions of others directly. Mom’s notes didn’t really talk about the limits of this much, she mostly just has notes about how to turn on and off the part of feeling others emotions. My instincts tell me it’s a lot more useful than my mom let on; I’m guessing how it manifested for her made her avoid trying to push the limits of it.
The next part is a little more… interesting.
Apparently Chrys have certain instincts ingrained in us. For example, by nature of our empathy, when we find a romantic partner we develop our feelings for them extremely quickly, and very rarely do we end a relationship. Basically, we fall in love fast, hard, and forever unless the other person ends it. We also subconsciously modify the appearance of our ‘true’ form based on the reactions we pick up from our partners. Not in a major way. My mom’s example was that her more muscular form and the intensity of her gray eyes are a result of her reacting to what Dad liked. Her true form was muscular with gray eyes before, but became more pronounced after meeting Dad.
The last major takeaway I got from my notes is that we’re theoretically immortal. Every time we form a new body with a chrysalis, our age becomes that of the new body. It turns out however, that it's rare for a chrys to choose to do so. Once a Chrys finds a partner, they often keep that form to age with that person, and when that person dies, many choose to let that body be their last.
Not all do this; my mom says my grandpa is apparently over 150 years old and he’s been married and grown old with 3 partners before forming a chrysalis after their deaths.
Anyway this entry is getting long so I’ll end for now. Starting tomorrow I need to research and create a plan to save the world. No biggie for a 10 year old.
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January 1, 2002
So with a couple weeks of thorough research and planning I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no idea what to do.
I’m pretty sure this is the MCU but also something else. It’s hard to tell. I watched most of the movies, read some of the comics- namely Spider-man and Xmen related ones. I also did some random wiki browsing out of boredom.
Tony Stark and Bruce Banner both exist and look like stunt doubles of their actors. Current events match up to what my previous self knew about the MCU.
But then there's also Charles Xavier out there writing papers about human evolution. There’s no public information about mutants but I’m convinced they exist and are hidden. Turns out he does have a school, but is mostly low profile and also not a full time school, more like a dorm with accelerated programs.
This means Apocalypse just got added to my list of threats to prepare for, and also Jean Grey. Some of the few comics my previous self read was X-men and that girl always got the shit end of the stick with the mental lobotomy from the professor and being programmed to fall for a dickhead like Scott Summers by Sinister. I’ll have to find a way to save her to prevent a Dark Phoenix scenario as well.
Speaking of girls with the power to end the world if they go crazy: Wanda should go on my list. I don’t know if it’s too late to save her parents, but hopefully I can meet her and her brother before they get sucked into that Hydra business. The movies implied they got their powers because Hydra used the Mind Stone on them but I’m guessing they’re just mutants and the Mind Stone just manifested their powers.
Let's just start a list of shit I need to stop or fix.
1. Thanos- either need to prevent the Snap or get good enough with quantum mechanics to hide me and the people I care about in the quantum realm then deal after.
2. Jean Grey- Girl deserves happiness and if she becomes happy, maybe she won’t destroy the world. I honestly don’t want to get sucked into too much Xmen drama but I’ll do what I can for Jean
3. Hydra- Gotta deal with them better than Cap did. Destroying SHIELD probably made the whole civil war thing worse than it should have been
4. Apocalypse and Sinister- lumping them together because they’re related, but both these scumbags got tah go.
5. Wanda- lower priority since if I get involved with the Avengers, which I’m pretty sure will be inevitable, then I can meet her and help.
6. Wakanda- gotta get these guys to not hide away. A Wakanda out in the open will be better for kicking Thanos’ scrotum chin.
7. Asgard/ragnarok- similar to Wakanda, just need to get Thor and Odin’s heads out of their respective asses.
8. Ultron- seems pretty easy, just need to get the mind stone after the NY battle. Or before, if I can prevent the attack.
That’s all the major stuff I can think of. There’s other stuff like preventing Kilgrave from enslaving Jessica Jones, or ensuring the Red Room goes down.
…What is it with female heroes either getting mind controlled or going crazy? Why is that shit so common? Jean, Wanda, Jessica, Natasha, Carol Danvers. That’s just off the top of my head.
Anyway, doing anything about any of this is pretty much gonna require super powers. There’s a lot of ways to get powers in this world with my knowledge so I need to work on finding one that is both strong and with a low risk of dying to acquire. I’m not smart enough to pull a Tony Stark and make tech that can split the difference.
1. Copy the powers of a mutant- means losing my ability to form a chrysalis and requires finding a mutant with a good enough power. Something about not being able to shift when I want makes me itch so I’d rather avoid this option honestly.
2. Get spider man's powers- I’ve always thought the combination of spider sense, perfect equilibrium, and stickiness was way underplayed. I really want spider man’s powers, but I worry about the whole ‘great weaver’ thing my previous self read about on a wiki.
3. Find a symbiote- these didn’t show up in the MCU but maybe I can find one. This would be the best option cause if i remember right, Venom had spider man’s powers without the whole giant god spider overlord thing, so if I can befriend Peter and get him to let the symbiote copy his abilities, I’d be golden.
4. Become a sorcerer- This seems the most likely to work, and doesn’t eliminate the other options.. Only issue is I’m half sure the Ancient One will just kill me when she finds out what I know and plan to do.
I’m sure there’s other options but the ones I can think of either require a crazy amount of suffering, or are just as likely to kill or cripple me as they are to give me powers.
Anyway there’s a few things I’m pretty sure I can do for now even if I don’t have a perfect plan. I’ll start brushing up on my coding/programming/hacking. My previous self was a programmer so I have a head start there, hopefully I can create my own version of JARVIS to help me keep track of all this.
I can also start pressuring my mom to let me go to a proper school with a quantum mechanics course. A quick check shows that Midtown High, aka Peter Parker’s future school, has a program for that.
Other than that I should probably just go to the sanctum sanctorum to see if I can get them to teach me magic and fighting. If not, maybe I can get Matt Murdock to teach me martial arts, he should be in college right about now.
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“Mom, I want to go to school.”
Grey decided to confront his mom about school. After the big reveal about not being human, he realized he wasn’t sheltered and homeschooled without reason, which means convincing his ridiculously affectionate mom would be a project of months, if not longer. School is one reason, but if Grey is unable to gain any independence, he would be unable to get access to the sorcerers.
“Absolutely not.” She replies simply, without even looking at Grey.
Yeah that’s pretty much the response I expected.
“But mom, I want friends! You barely let me leave the house.” Pity tactic first, get her on the defensive.
“...mommy can be your friend.” she says lamely, clearly knowing how ridiculous that is.
“Mom, I need real friends. I also want to learn things that you don’t teach me.” Grey adds.
“What do you mean? If there’s something you want to learn I can get the materials and add it to our lessons.” It’s at this point she turns around to look at Grey.
Good at least she’s listening to me. “You taught me how to program but you know I’m already better than you. I also want to learn quantum mechanics.”
“Quantum mechanics? Where the heck did that come from?” She’s confused. Grey doesn’t blame her, this is definitely out of left field for a ten year old.
“You talked about it in some of our science lessons. I thought it was interesting so I looked it up on the internet. I read some stuff written by some old guy named Henry Pym. I didn’t understand a whole lot but enough that I wanna learn more.” Not exactly true, but I guess I should look up any papers that guy wrote. If I can’t make shrinking tech on my own I’ll have to either learn from or steal from him. I’m not exactly a genius.
His mom ponders for a bit then offers, “I… might be able to get you what you need to learn that stuff. It would be self study. I’ll have to call your grandpa.”
What does grandpa know about it? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t work and the few times I’ve seen him, he didn’t seem like a scientist. Wait, that’s not the point!
“I appreciate that mom but you’re missing the point, I want to go to school!” Grey inwardly cringes because he couldn’t keep the whine out of his voice. Stupid kid emotions.
“No baby, that’s final. It’s not safe. Not until you’re older. We can talk about it again when your empath abilities manifest.”
Her tone brokered no argument, but Grey was satisfied with that. He did, however, make a show of being displeased and stomped off to his room. Forgetting that his mother is an empath and could tell he was happy about it.
This child… when did he learn to manipulate like that?
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