Aside from the absolutely horrible morning I’d had, I got over the threat of death pretty quickly. After all, I’d already decided I was happier in mediocrity than getting potentially murdered every day.

“That will be thirty dollars and two cents sir,” I politely but disinterestedly told the middle aged man who, for some reason, had walked into the store that day to buy roughly an entire shopping cart's worth of cleaning rags.

He nodded at me awkwardly - like even he was aware of how weird his purchase must look - and then swiftly withdrew his debit card to pay. He tapped the card against the reader on my register, and a second later there was a jarring beeping noise that indicated his card had been rejected.

The man froze, part way through getting ready to push his cart out the door, and turned back to me with an uncharacteristic amount of fear in his face.

It was at about this point that I started actually paying attention to him.

The weirdest thing about being a cashier is that everyone - even other cashiers - feel like their cashier is watching and judging them. For their purchases, for what they’re wearing, for how they act.

The truth is I think most of us forget our customers even exist once they leave our line of sight. The art of the minimum wage worker - which admittedly was quite high in my province - was to numb yourself to things that didn’t matter, so that you could mindlessly get through your day without wasting any mental energy. At the same time, you also had to have a finely honed sense for when something was off, so that you could re-engage your attention to focus on them.

This guy was acting weird, and I had a sneaking suspicion that he was going to try run away with his failed purchase.

It wasn’t my job to stop him, so I wouldn’t bother, but I’d have to describe him to loss prevention later, so I took that frozen moment to memorize his appearance. This would usually annoy me - because standing in one spot for hours was hell on my feet - but my recent acquisition of powers seemed to be almost completely negating that.

So you know, small favours.

I’d already scanned that he was middle aged, but as I looked closer at him I mentally slid him closer to ‘old’. His short brown hair was white at the sides, and styled into a neat comb over that gave off a distinguished air. He had a short toothbrush mustache and an extensive beard that was likewise well maintained. His frame was… weirdly toned for such an old guy, but really that wasn’t that weird.

What was weird was the fact that shoplifters generally didn’t look this put together. If you could afford to look as dapper as this guy - he was wearing a dress shirt and a bow tie for gods sake - you generally didn’t need to steal.

We continued to stare at each other until I chose to speak, conscious of the line forming behind him, and gestured at the card reader.

“It was declined,” I informed him neutrally.

“Oh, I, ah, just let me - I’ll try a different card. Sorry,” he said quickly, hastily darting back toward me and withdrawing his wallet again. He leafed through the various cards in the wallet, before finally pulling a different card out - a credit card this time - and I obligingly restarted the payment process which blessedly worked the second time.

“Thank you for shopping at Walldepot, have a great day,” I told him robotically as the payment was accepted.

The man nodded at me thankfully then, before hurriedly turning back to his cart and leaving.

I gave a mental shrug.

You learn to ignore small amounts of weirdness like that when you work in retail. You’d think all the weirdoes would be obvious metahumans, but the truth was, normal people could he just as weird as anyone with powers, if not more so.

That was the kind of world we lived in.

I was just about to turn to my next customer when I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to find other employee standing behind me. It was one of the floor managers who came and went so frequently I barely bothered to remember their names. I think in the entire time I’d been working here, two of them had stuck around long enough that I bothered to remember who they even were - and even that was because they tended to make me do their job for them.

Case and point;

“We need you in seasonal to drop a skid,” the younger guy, whose name escaped me, but whos uniform tag read ‘Dave’, said to me bluntly.

“Can you get someone to cover my register or-?” I began to ask automatically, lowering my gaze to the laminated plastic license hanging from Daves uniform that informed me he was more than capable of driving the machine he was sending me to use and probably good have gotten the task done in a shorter length of time than it took him even to come get me in the first place.

“I’ve got it,” Dave responded, somewhat belligerently. I shrugged and stepped out of my booth to let him take over, and began to make my way to the opposite end of the building to where I was needed.

Fifteen minutes and three customers interrupting my journey to ask me complex questions that I couldn’t possibly answer about the wiring in their homes later, I found myself in the seasonal department.

Now, here’s the thing about seasonal. It’s outside, because its where we sell all the flowers and whatnot, so they need sunlight. That means that in fall and winter, it was cold.

But the cold wasn’t why I hated this area of the store. No, what I hated, were the pigeons. See, at some point every Pigeon in the city had decided to roost in the overhead racking and lighting of the seasonal department at my store. This meant that the department itself was at least twenty percent pigeon shit by volume, and given that no one who worked here was inclined or required to do anything about it, it also meant that anyone working in the overhead - like I was about to - had decent odds of getting shit rained down on them.

Sanitary, I know.

“Yo,” I called out to the seasonal worker who was waiting lazily next to the forklift when I got outside.

“Eyyyy! Nick! What’s good? You see-“ Kevin started to blather at me as I approached, pulling myself up onto the forklift.

Kevin, was a short, skinny, guyanese guy who loved anime, and weed, and in the two years I’d known him he had never once come to work not blazed out of his mind. How he kept his job was beyond me, because he was so obviously high right now that it was baffling.

His questionable work ethic aside though, Kev was an okay guy. Nice, accommodating, empathetic.

Even if, in my head, I referred to him exclusively as Sketchy Kevin.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“What needs to be dropped?” I interjected politely, knowing that Kev could and would just continue to talk about whatever show he’d spent his night watching if I didn’t interrupt him.

I didn’t actually mind engaging with him when I wasn’t busy, but I knew Dave would get annoyed at having to work soon enough, and at that point he’d probably start looking for excuses to write me up for wasting time.

Like I said, retail work.

“Huh?” Kev grunted at my question, pausing to turn blurry bloodshot eyes on the area around him until his gaze landed on a couple who appeared to be waiting for something nearby.

Then he snapped his fingers and turned back to me.

“Those two want some patio stones,” he informed me with a dopey smile on his face, pointing at a specific skid two aisles over.

I nodded, ignoring the nearby couple, and reached behind the seat of the forklift to toss the two bright orange safety flags that rested there to Kev.

That done, I relaxed and allowed myself to actually talk to the guy as he slowly led me and my machine through the aisles to get where we were going.

“You been good Kev?” I called to him over the annoyingly loud rumble of the forklifts engine.

“Yeah, you know, the usual. Oda’s a fucking mad man bro,” he aswered me, immediately pivoting back to his previous conversation topic like it was nothing.

“Yeah?” I asked him leadingly, turning into the correct aisle which he quickly gated off behind me.

I had never watched whatever show he was talking about, and I probably never would, but no matter how many times I tried to explain that to Kevin, he forgot.

Probably because he was always high out of his mind.

So eventually I’d just taken to nodding and smiling at him when he started to ramble about it.

“Bro, I think Muron is gonna fucking die bro,” he continued at me.

“Muron is-“ I started to ask as I made the extremely narrow turn required to line up with my target.

“Big nose,” Kev supplied.

Again, no matter how often I needed him to clarify things like this, he still persisted in believing I knew what he was talking about.

“Right, right. And uh, why’s he gonna die?” I asked, putting him back on track.

Forks go up, forks go into skid, lift, angle back-

“Bro he’s been foreshadowing that shit for like two seasons!” Kev replied, and I realized midway through reversing that the sound had come from way too close to me.

I abruptly stopped reversing, snapping my head around to find Kevin had stepped clear past the safety gates and was standing less than a foot away from me.

Exactly where I would have reversed if I’d kept going.

“Dude!” I barked at him, gesturing at the gate.

Again, Kev blinked at me in confusion, before proceeding to spend an annoyingly long time working out what I meant.

“Relax, I’m not stupid.” He grumbled at me before pausing, again. I ignored his grumbling in favour of turning back to what I was doing. I could lose my license or even my job if someone reported me for having someone so close while I was driving, and given I’d just gotten a quest that emphatically required I not get fired, I really couldn’t afford to get screwed over by something as simple as a stoner coworker.

So of course, that’s exactly what happened. Sort of.

“You gotta angle back more though, it ain’t maxed out,” Kev added absently, stepping forward just as my foot hit the gas to slap one of the levers that controller the angling of the forklifts mast down.

Now, understand this.

I hadn’t fully angled back this skid of stones, because stones are so heavy that they didn’t generally have anything securing them to their skids. As long as they were level, they were stable. If you tilted them too far though…

I watched in slow motion as a deluge of thirty pound rocks began to slide off the top of the skid directly above both myself and Kevin.

I did two things at that moment.

Not because I was feeling heroic, or whatever, but because it seemed like the thing to do when I had the power to do something and someone else did not.

First, I blindly dumped all my free stat points into dexterity.

Then I leapt out of my machine - I should really have had a seatbelt on but never bothered - to land next to Kev at a speed that definitely wasn’t human, while also conjuring a stone soldier on his other side.

I wouldn’t say the world moved slower, because it didn’t, my perception of what was going on just… became clearer. It still felt nearly instant to me when myself and my soldier started punching and slapping stones out of the air to either side of us.

The pain of using my entirely human levels of durability to punch falling stones out of the way was likewise, kind of freaking distracting.

It should have hurt more, if I’m being honest. My bones should have broken, my skin should have torn, and I should have ended up a crippled smear on the ground next to this idiot stoner.

Instead, over the span of about three seconds, I Blocked most of the deluge, allowing my stone soldier to eat any hits I couldn’t stop with its body.

And when it was done, my hands ached… but were otherwise fine. My soldier had some cracks in its exterior… but was holding.

I quickly popped my status menu open to check my health.

Health: 273/300

‘Okay so… that seems wrong. If one hundred health is human base normal each on of those should be doing way more damage based on their ability to definitely kill a normal person so what-‘

I squinted, turning to a different portion of my screen with the fervent interest of a gamer trying to break a game.

Block

Description: While blocking, reduce incoming damage in the direction you are facing by 25%

I considered that, but still felt like the math didn’t add up. Not unless…

I paused, turning to my minion, which had frozen in place the second the crisis had passed and I stopped giving it orders.

Did Block stack? If my minion and I were both blocking the same thing, did we both take fifty percent less damage? That felt broken. No, it was definitely broken.

…except it required I be aware of what I was trying to stop and have the ability to impede it. So, it was useless against, you know, bullets.

‘Eh. Still useful,’ I mused before a voice drew me from my furious theorycrafting.

“Bro, you’ve got powers?”

I froze, then slowly turned to Kev, who was standing in a clear ring at the center of a pile of broken stones, smiling as dopily as he ever did.

Fuck.

“No?” I tried.

He turned to my stone soldier which I quickly banished, then back to me with one eyebrow raised.

Fuckity fuck fuck.

Well, I guess I didn’t really expect to be a secret for long anyway, even if it was kind of suspicious that no one with access to the security cameras had bothered me about it yet.

Maybe I was tempting fate with that thought, because just as I had it, the communication earbud only about half of the employees in the building wore sparked to life with a staticy buzz.

“Nicholas, can you please come to the office?”

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuu-