Power is a dangerous and valuable form of currency that few people really know how to spend.
That is what Ren Toda had to find out the hard way. By the time he realized it, the 15-year-old boy had already wasted his talent on meaningless things, all for the sake of people who did not deserve any power.
It's been a whole year since that incident that made him rethink his "spending habits". He recalls the same memories daily: the desperate struggle of an Indian girl who was his age trying to flee their captors and return home. She was merciless, but mostly because she was scared. There was nothing else she could do but fight for her freedom.
Ren has seen the carnage hundreds of times. PYRA27 had just escaped the labyrinth of sterilized air and frigid metal into a residency level. Everywhere she looked, the standard lights were shut off and strobe lights loomed over each hallway, casting a layer of dread over everyone who recognized this. PYRA27 tried to sneak through the area regardless. She was all alone, wearing a burgundy jumpsuit and no shoes. Ill-equipped for combat but equipped light enough for stealth.
Even though the emergency lights played constant tricks on her mind, she was able to see her enemies coming first. She neared the corner of an intersection and listened quietly — heavy footfalls echoed from the distance. The armed guards were everywhere, and it made her wish she could just turn back and go to her cell quietly. No turning back now though. They're just as inclined to give an obedient agent a miniature palace as they would shoot her for denying it. Her face was quivering, but in this nightmarish world of red and black, she was a mute. Her silence only broke when the intercom over her head squeaked, leading into an announcement.
Corridor 1-31. Units proceed.
The footsteps changed rhythm. PYRA27 backtracked to take another route out of their path. But there were too many men to keep track of. She caught glimpses of red sheens passing by her, attributed to their fire retardants reflecting the sector's dim light. Their footfalls started getting quieter. They knew she was near and were now creeping through the hotel-like maze. PYRA27 froze in panic. She began to pull at her hair and scream silently for some sort of rescue.
Then she heard a brush around the corner; fabric against fabric. PYRA27's brown irises burned scarlet upon her realization that death was creeping ever closer. The hallway she occupied was bathed in the demonic light. The small group of guards had little time to react before a wave of searing plasma rolled from around the corner and flooded their hall. PYRA27 flinched when the cacophony of gunfire and screams erupted. Sprinklers came to action in the wake of their incineration. PYRA27 ran past along the charred wall, doing a quick take at her work to confirm the casualties: six men, all reduced to charred cadavers coated in molten metals and plastics.The sight sickened her, but it was the only way to survive.
PYRA27 felt her body getting colder with every blast of hellfire. Her uncontrolled bursts were consuming more body heat than necessary. She lamented how little time she had to try and warm up properly because the next squad was never too far. The power of a shiner is ironic like that. In Ren’s case, using too much of his psychic power can cause migraines, among other afflictions to the brain. The poor girl was foolishly dooming herself in the long run by all her expenditure. If nobody could've killed her, hypothermia would've.
Ren grimaced. This next part was one he hated most.
The intercom chimed in again. "Aashi Madan, this is your final warning," declared a human drone's voice. "We have dispatched a superagent. Get on the ground with your hands tucked beneath you, or you will be eliminated upon their arrival."
Aashi ignored the order, of course. The intercom clicked off for the last time, returning her to the constant hiss of spraying water. Her jumpsuit was now soaked. Rubbing her wet hands together, she pressed onward. Thanda hai, she muttered repeatedly. Suddenly, her muscles locked up. It'd seem like the cold froze her solid if it wasn't for the fact that she was unnaturally balanced on one foot.
"Lavagirl," came a chilling voice from behind her. She tried to turn around but was paralyzed entirely. Her eyes were the only thing she had control of. "Didn’t you hear the science guy?"
"What... What is this?" Aashi gasped. She struggled to regain control, but her muscles were as still as a statue. A vibrant purple energy enveloped her body.
"Telekinesis. I’m… sorta like you, but I manipulate mental energy.”
The entire space in front of the immobilized pyromancer suddenly ignited. Fire spilled to the walls behind her and lashed out at Ren. They barely scorched him, but it was enough to loosen his telekinetic grip on her. Aashi turned to unfurl her wrath one more time, but was quickly interrupted by a devastating blow to the stomach from her adversary’s violet energy. She was forcibly turned back around.
"No peeking~!" said the psychic. "Do that again and your flame gets snuffed for good."
Aashi managed to catch a glimpse of her attacker. He was Asian, looked around her age, and wore a similar jumpsuit with the tag PSY14. His eyes were dark-colored for a split second, but in the moment she took that blow they fiercely emanated a purple light. "Why are you helping them?" she gasped, struggling to caress her aching stomach. "I just want to go home!"
"We all kinda do, but we have no place in society anymore, remember?" Ren glanced at the pile of smoldering, charred corpses of Aashi’s most recent victims. “Making stick figures out of people like that definitely won’t help your case.”
"Please listen!" Aashi cried. Her tears were quickly lost in the streaks of water pouring from the sprinklers. "I don't like doing this to people. I just want to see mumma again. I never wanted this power!”
Ren frowned. “It’s not up to me. Besides, look at the mess you made. Whether you really intended to or not, you’ve made it abundantly clear to them that you're a threat to society. Final chance. Are you gonna do the thing he said?”
"Please let me go," she begged. "I just want to live normally. I don't want to hurt people anymore! You don't have to help me or anything, just let me go!"
“Sorry, not up to me. I’m gonna release you now. Once I do, carefully lay yourself flat on the ground until I say. Do anything else and I will have to kill you.”
"O... O-Okay," the girl sobbed.
PSY14 let go. PYRA27 immediately spun around to face him again, her crimson eyes like a pair of red flashlights. But it was over in an instant. The bloodcurdling snap that resulted from her challenge was deafening. PYRA27’s hellish eyes faded back to brown, devoid of light and heat. They merely glistened beneath the sprinklers now, staring straight ahead, wide open, and full of terror. Not anger, but terror. Her body remained suspended by her broken neck while her arms hung loosely at her side. Ren hesitated to let her body fall. He was in a trance the moment he fulfilled his duty, broken out moments later by a chirp coming from his belt.
“Good job, Toda,” said a voice followed by clapping. “You can go back to your cell now. We’ll talk about your reward later.”
But Ren stood there in silence. A feeling he was not entirely familiar with began to dawn on him. Despite having killed countless strangers he labeled as enemies, this one was different. This felt like an undeniable sin. Yet, deep down, Ren felt no grief. All he knew was that he did something very, very wrong. It was his lack of grief that shocked him. Ren had reached the point of no return and he finally realized it. He gazed at the poor girl’s crumpled body in dismay. He hoped that maybe he could cry for her or something, but all he found was disappointment and disgust in his own actions.
Aashi hadn’t left his thoughts since. Every night that Ren would cave in to his body’s demand for bed, his mind would instead stay awake for hours, dwelling on memories of the past – memories of executions and countless battles that would further desensitize him to future executions and battles. All the times he put his own desire for improvement over others, his own curiosity before mercy, and his own ideals before others -- it was all something a psychopath would do. Everything was building up to the murder of a homesick little girl.
Ren isolated himself in his cell from that day forth, and more than a year has passed since.
******
PSY14 laid quietly in the darkness of his chamber, staring tiredly at the small red light on the intercom near his door. The digital clock above it read 5:37.
Maybe today they’ll give me something new to read, he thought hopefully.
Anything was fine as long as it made a good enough distraction from the heavy cloud of drowsiness wrapped around his weary body. Sleeping has always been one of his least favorite activities. It’s fallen even lower on his to-do list due to a recent spike in sleep paralysis episodes and nightmares of a violent death in alternate realities. Insomnia has been both a blessing and a curse depending on how badly he wanted to sleep.
Time goes by much slower in this barebones chamber. All he can do is read and keep his psychic powers sharp through practice. But when the lights go out and he has nothing to do, he tends to sit and stare at the lonely red blip as his mind runs wild. For 23 more minutes he stared blankly at it, but it felt like two hours. Eventually, the underground dawn came around. The end of every night is marked with a friendly chime and an ambient hum of machines within the walls coming back to life. Then his retinas are assaulted by the automatic lighting made worse by the design of his cell. Whoever designed this facility really loved white metal surfaces. PSY14 rolled onto his back and cupped his hands over his face, rubbing furiously at the cold haze stuck to his eyelids.
His conscience slipped for a brief moment, right before the intercom sounded off and a gruff voice came in. "The weekly analysis begins in five minutes, Toda. Be on your feet and at the door by then."
The boy yawned. The analysis is currently his only opportunity to make requests. He formulated a list of ideas to motivate him to get up and dragged his body until his feet were on the floor. After sluggishly pulling his socks on and half-trying to fix his hair, he shambled to the door and waited. He took one look at his room and outlined what was missing. It wasn't always so bare -- it had everything a teenage boy could ask for. It was all granted under the condition he obeyed their requests. Looking back now, he's ashamed to have once called that a good deal. The scientists weren't too happy when he started refusing missions. As a consequence of his changed attitude, they repossessed everything they gave him, started feeding him slop instead of good meals, and became hesitant to give him anything other than comic books to keep him from getting too crazy for their liking. Anything firmer or heavier is usually off-limits because of his telekinetic ability. It's for that reason he can't even wear shoes and that his bed and shelf are bolted in place. They did let him choose the color of his spare blanket, though – red, his favorite color.
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It gets boring pretty quickly here once there’s nothing left to read, but in the end it was his choice, and one he more than deserved. It sometimes amuses him how hopeful the scientists are that he'll change his mind one day, at least. Perhaps the only reason they haven’t gassed out his cell yet is because the power-hungry geeks have yet to figure out how to harvest his power. He’s not the only psychic in the facility of course, but he’s the first and only psychic of the shiner breed -- at least that's what he heard a couple years ago.
He checked the clock and groaned. 6:02. Three minutes later, the door finally slid open. The next room was designed for interviews, tests, surveys, and eating. Just recently they fortified the chamber so it was more like an extension of his cell now. They did that because he obliterated the one-way mirror to make a point during an argument he had with one of the researchers. Now, in its place, was a 10-meter long shutter of steel. Why was that mirror so long in the first place?
"Morning, Toda," the man greeted. "Let's begin."
Ten minutes of questioning left the boy dozing off. Listening to the man speak was incredibly mindnumbing. Every scientist had one thing in common -- a voice so formal and robotic he often wondered if he was talking to real people.
"Toda?" the man asked.
"Huh?" he awoke with a gasp. "What?"
"Did you hear me?"
He rubbed his eyes. "No, you kinda bored me to sleep." Then Toda groaned under his breath. "You guys need speech therapy."
"Speak up, please."
He perked up forcefully and faked a slight smile. "What were you saying?"
The man sighed. "We are requesting your help. There is a... new threat... invading our country, and we have been requested to bring in a psychic. We recently located and attacked the threat's hideout, but the major targets we sought to eliminate fled through means we're still trying to understand. We need your psychometry to track them down."
The boy yawned for a good few seconds and smacked his lips. "No," he replied.
"Ren, we will reward you for this, of course. You won't have to do much. Just sniff them out and lead the troops to battle if--"
"No."
There was a long, uncomfortable pause. "Please reconsider, then. This is for the good of our country, and I promise to make it worth your while."
"I'm PSY14, right? Go ask the 13 other psychics you have here. There’s no way I’m the only one capable of helping out.”
More silence. The speaker grew a hint of smugness in his voice. "I tried. In other news, I have recently been authorized to personally handle any requests you may have. So... if you are not willing to help us, I have no interest in doing you any favors. We are done here, thank you. Please return to your cell and wait for breakfast."
Ren threw his hands up in outrage. "Wow! What's the matter? Are you too shy to ask anyone else? Why does it have to be me? I think I know why! Oh, but I already told you!"
The microphone shut off without another word. Ren howled into it like a monkey in an attempt to annoy the man, but it was evidently no use since the light on the base was no longer on. It relieved some anger, though. Ren fought off the urge to break that microphone and returned to his chamber with the urge to punch something else. His anger quickly cooled after some time spent leaning against the frigid wall. Then, he stood back up and cracked his knuckles. "Alright, time to train," he sighed.
The one thing Ren has grown to hate most is wasted potential. They know he's keeping his powers sharp with nothing to work with but his own body and the impenetrable walls, which have been dented slightly from all the violent hammering dealt by telekinesis. It reminds the labcoats eyeing him through cameras how powerful he has become. After all, they hate wasted potential just as much as he does, if not more.
But more importantly, Ren valued his power. Without it, he was nothing. The night he discovered that gift was the most exciting day of his life -- or at least the next one was. It was a ray of hope after all he had been through: being shipped to America from Japan after being caught in a crash that took his parents, enduring constant assault from kids who looked down on him for only speaking Japanese, and getting into fights with those thinking they could give his little sister the same treatment. He rejected the real world and engrossed himself in the comics that his grandfather collected. It was the first thing they bonded over, which led to him opening up to his grandparents. Comics were a huge part of his life.
One Sunday night, seven years ago, he was getting ready for bedtime after reading a comic about psychic superheroes. He was dreading the next morning of school and wishing he had a superpower to make life more interesting. Like any daydreaming little kid too lazy to get up, he reached out to the lightswitch across the room and focused. Then, to his shock, the lightswitch actually flicked off. For a split second, in the darkness around that lightswitch, was the lavender-colored hand of a ghost.
He confirmed it wasn't a hallucination and ran to his grandparents in the other room. Though they made him promise to let this stay a family secret, Ren never intended to keep such a thing. He already had plans for the future with his new gift, but he knew better than to outright show his hand to the world mere days after discovering it. Ren trained his telekinesis every day after school, falsely assuring his grandparents that this was only going to be their little secret. It was already causing an impact in his regular life, though. Homework became fodder for his ethereal claws and fists and he defaulted to using telekinesis instead of his own hands to do the simplest of things. He was already getting careless, but he was getting stronger every day because of it.
But one day he made a terrible mistake. He was walking home from school with his sister when a bunch of kids tried to gang up on him out of revenge for the last time he stood up for Ayaka. Ren couldn't help himself at that moment. He had gotten so confident in his own abilities that he lost interest in hiding his talent. This was going to be his opening act, he decided. So he savagely attacked the bullies in a flurry of fists and telekinetic tendrils. Unfortunately, a classmate was recording this and it was quickly put online. That was when the government noticed him. It wasn't the sight of kids being thrown around at his maniacal behest that caught their attention -- anyone can create that kind of footage. They were actually drawn to him by the intense violet shimmer of his irises while he performed telekinesis. A handful of superhumans that were already in their custody shared this particular trait. They were called "shiners".
Ren knows very little of this odd “brand” of power. What few pieces of information Ren's captors had on shiners somehow eluded him throughout his five years of captivity. He confirmed once before that Ayaka was on their watchlist for a while, but she never showed any signs of being a shiner and so was left alone. Well, they probably only said that to avoid angering the little neck-snapping psychopath.
I hope she’s taking care of herself, Ren thought to himself. Normally he'd avoid thinking about his family since it just opens an old wound, but today he felt a bit desperate. His homesickness was getting the best of him. Ren laid his head back and closed his eyes. Remote viewing was one of his favorite abilities, since it allowed him to monitor any place from memory as long as his brain recognized it. Its requirements were strict, however, compared to the less interesting “remote audience” which only allowed him to hear what was going on in a certain place. He rarely explored the city of Detroit so few places were ever embedded into his conscience. Sadly, it seemed the routes he took to school and the store had changed significantly over the years and were no longer accessible. He hesitated to try his apartment, but convinced himself to try viewing it next. It, too, has been remodeled in some way, locking him out for good. It was only accessible through remote audience now. Though he won’t get to see the lovable faces of his grandparents or little sister anymore, he at least still had the pleasure of being able to hear their voices – until they inevitably move out one day.
Ren tensed up when he began to eavesdrop on the living room. His family used to eat dinner there while watching a variety of funny game shows. At the moment, all he could hear were commercials and the clinking of utensils against plates. Everyone in the room was eerily quiet. For a moment, the boy feared this wasn’t his family anymore, until a burp broke the silence.
“What about him?” said an old man.
Ren grinned. After all this time, he was elated to finally hear from grandpa again. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
“Aww!” a girl squealed. Ren’s elation turned to shock. Ayaka sounded completely different now. It has been only two years since he last heard her voice. He could only imagine how old she looked now, or how much taller she got. Ren's focus was interrupted by a surge of emotions, briefly cutting off his remote audience until he got it together. “--got tons of tricks in mind already.”
“I hope so,” came the voice of a soft-spoken old woman. It was grandma. She sounded so sweet and happy despite everything she probably went through. “What are you gonna name it?”
“Don’t know yet. I got a few names but they’re all Japanese. It mostly depends on whether we get a boy or a girl and how big it is.”
“I vote for a huge dog so it can be like our little bodyguard. You’ll teach it to aim for the balls, right?”
Grandma gasped. She couldn’t stifle her laughter though. “Oh my! How would you even do that?”
“Heh. I can make a dummy.” There were a few clicks and scrapes, and the sounds that followed suggested they were done eating and now grabbing their plates. “You ladies wanna head out now or wait a bit?”
“I’m down to go now.”
“Hang on, let me wash these dishes first!”
“Oh right!”
Grandpa shuffled around to grab his things while the girls cleaned up. The sound of dishes and running water echoed from the kitchen. Soon enough they were done, so they went to get their things as well and met up at the door to finally head out.
“Ready. You?”
“Yup,” answered grandma and Ayaka.
“Alrighty. Let’s go.”
The doorknob clicked and rattled. On their way out, each family member whispered cheerily into the room. Ren couldn't process what they were saying until it came out of his grandpa's mouth, right before he closed the door and left Ren alone in silence. “Later, Ren!”
That caught the boy off guard. He opened his eyes, trembling with emotion. Though Ren was happy to know they had moved on, it was clearly a mistake to visit his old home. He was no longer a part of their life. On the day of his abduction, their memories of his power were wiped and they were led to believe he was killed in a drive-by. It's fortunate that was all his captors did to them. According to some of the scientists, a "greater power" prohibits them from involving civilians in any way, so Ren would never have to worry about his family being used as leverage for his obedience. That is, as long as his family remains unaware of his continued existence. But even if Ren was given total freedom without any strings attached, he would still avoid coming home to them. He wasn’t their Ren anymore. Really, it would be wiser to just forget them and move on, but that is much easier said than done.
Ren produced a disk of violet energy in his palm and stared at it. “Yeah… I’m already dead. I was dead the minute I ended up on the internet. Seriously. I just can't stop messing things up, can't I?"
His tired eyes glossed over the door to his cell. A strong but indiscernible desire began to well up in his chest. Ren walked over to his bed and laid down, closing his eyes so he could finally get the rest he needed for later.
I'm dead because I made all the wrong decisions possible. I've wasted this power. I've wasted my life. I've wasted everything and everyone. Now I have nothing to look forward to. I have no real purpose anymore.
His conscience began to drift. Finally, he was able to sleep. It was a recurring dream, one he only had once when he was little: him, flying a mile over blank cities, striking faceless humans from above in a flash of purple until the paper-like city he guarded felt at peace. With that peace came satisfaction. So he would then move to the next city and repeat. It was nice, he thought. It was like cleaning.
As he flew over this surreal, endless world, he felt countless eyes drawn towards him. The faceless civilians down below were watching him. Seeing these blank entities used to make him feel happy, but not anymore. They were insignificant.
Nothing. Why?
He couldn’t feel anything from encountering these innocent dream denizens. Even then, he couldn’t help but make an effort to help each one that was sitting in harm’s way. He didn’t question why he bothered. He didn’t question what would happen if he let one get hurt. He just helped them. In this infinite world teeming with faceless nobodies, he rushed to each endangered being’s aid without hesitation. All he wanted was to feel a change, but he felt absolutely nothing. Still, it was the right thing to do, and that alone drove him to continue.
That was how his dream carried on until he found himself staring at the ceiling of his cell.