The hard bus seat beneath me abruptly lurched as the traditional yellow school bus I was riding hit another bump in the road. 

This did nothing however to distract me from the intense argument two of my oldest and closest friends were having. 

“I’m telling you Steve! Clara’s character is the most powerful in our party!” Yelled Leah passionately.

“But if you look at the stat breakdown theoretically my character could beat the entire party flat out!!!” Steve, ever the muscle head, yelled back.

My two friends were having an argument about the latest homebrew tabletop game our little group had started. Tuning them out for a moment I glanced over at the person sitting with me in the bus seat. 

As expected I found her smirking slightly as she watched the two argue. After a moment longer she turned her attention to me and leaned over to my ear. 

“I wonder how much longer before they finally just kiss and stop pretending to hate each other” Clara whispered mirthfully.

As I was preparing to respond to her a unified cry of “KYLE!” sounded out from the arguing pair.

I turned my head to look at them and asked, “yes?”

Steve took the lead in the questioning and quickly asked “Who do you think would win in a battle, me or Clara?”

I looked at him in disbelief, “You do realize I am obligated to answer this question in a bias way, right?”

“You better.” I heard Clara say from behind me as a chill crept down my spine, Clara could be scary. 

Without even waiting for Steve’s response I began a in-depth reply, “While your stats do exceed Clara’s you have no chance simply based on powers. Because your character has no mental protection Clara’s passive mind reading would allow her to be a step ahead of you the entire fight.” 

This caused Steve to begin to mumble to himself, “Stupid powers, unbalanced game.”

“Hey” I said “it was your idea to incorporate our actual ability’s into the game… you went on a rant for about an hour straight about how it would teach us to use our powers more strategically”

As Steve began to argue with Leah again, now losing ground rapidly, and Clara leaned into my shoulder I began to think about how I got to this point in life. 

About 14 years ago, when I was two, an event happened that completely changed the world. The reports that I could find on the event claimed it looked as if the sun exploded, this was followed by a great wave of heat that overtook the planet. This in particular was scientifically interesting as even the most precise equipment recorded no significant spike in temperature that day. While the sun returned to normal just minutes after the “explosion” the effects of the event would be felt for a long time after, one by one children all over the world began to manifest strange powers. 

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All of the children that manifested seemed to be within the range of about 10 - 15 years of age and manifestation wasn’t a guarantee. In the end it seemed as if only about 10% of children would develop an ability when they were between the ages of 10 - 15. After that it was pretty much a lost cause, there were a few weird cases such as a unborn baby developing healing powers to save her mother who was dying during child birth and the queen of England who, according to scientists, actually became immortal. but other than those miniscule number of odd cases if you did not develop a power in the 10 - 15 years old timeframe you would never develop one.

This unfortunately created a lot of animosity between those who developed powers and those who did not. To keep the problems to a minimum it was decided that a unique schooling system would be put in place for those who had developed powers to train with them while also receiving a normal education. 

That was the type of school I attended now along with Clara, Leah, and Steve. We had actually been good friends before this school so when we all manifested powers we were very excited. 

Clara was a relatively short brown haired girl with beautiful blue eyes, we had been friends since childhood as we were next door neighbors and our parents interacted a lot. Her awakening of powers was very embarrassing for me. Since the age of nine I had feelings for Clara, and Clara’s power is the ability to read surface thoughts and do some other psychic things like Telekinesis. This was embarrassing because Clara awakened her powers while we were laying on my couch watching a movie together when we were both 12. Let’s just say, my surface thoughts made it clear I was more interested in her than the movie. It all worked out in the end however and now years later we are a happy couple with the longest standing relationship by far in our school. 

Steve, a massive and well built muscle head of a guy with dirty blond hair and odd gray eyes, and Leah, a tall sporty red head, on the other hand are friends from middle and elementary school. We initially bonded over fantasy novels but later this grew to include tabletop and video games. Leah awakened a power that allowed her to become effectively invisible as long as she didn’t interact with the environment at all, as soon as she picks something up or touches something she becomes visible again. While Steve, like the muscle head he is, got a pretty generic strength and senses enhancement.

I awakened the weirdest power by far in my little group of friends though. The best way I can describe it is creation based on a random set of ingredients.

Basically every day a random set of ten colored marks appear on my arm. I can then select a combination of those marks based on what each mark's color is and create an object that reflects a mental image of what I want to create. Doing this uses up the marks.

For example, if I wanted to make a glass coffee pot I could do that by thinking of a glass coffee pot and selecting a brown mark as glass is a product of the earth and earth is represented by the color brown. 

It took a lot of practice but eventually I was able to pretty consistently make anything I could think up. I also learned that if I did not give my power an end goal it would make something random containing the marks selected.

After breaking out of my reflective reverie I began to ponder about something else related to my power. Rolling up my sleeve I looked again at the source of my thought. A mark color I had never seen before had appeared this morning. It was purple. While I was thinking about what it could represent Clara started talking to me, “So are you excited for this field trip?” 

“The camping, not so much, the fact that I’ll get to spend some time with you without my mom teasing us, definitely.” I responded while smiling at her. 

With that she leaned over and gave me a quick peck on the lips smiling brightly and said “Oh, by the way, purple could represent poison, so be careful.” before returning her attention to the now dead horse argument still continuing between Leah and Steve in the form of a glaring match. 

I will say one of the advantages of dating a mind reader is they will always be able to offer assistance on problems even if you don’t directly ask about them. 

Eventually I decided that in order to figure out what the purple mark did I would just have to try making something with it. 

Looking down at my arm I started to decide what marks I would put into the craft. The first one I decided to add was a green life mark, just in case purple was poison that might make it healthy or something of the sort. Another addition was a yellow energy mark as most things I made with that mark had an on and off switch. And finally I added a gray metal mark as that would most likely create some form of container. 

Giving my power no image to work off of I willed an item into existence. What popped out in front of me almost looked like a ward from the game league of legends, it had a crystal on top of a metal tower with detailed runic markings on the side. It was about the same size as a pen so I decided to put it into my shirt pocket until I could experiment later when less people were around. 

Gazing out the bus window and watching the scenery go by I decided I should probably take a nap before we arrived at the campsite. So I leaned back on the hard bus seat and closed my eyes.