[You have been summoned for induction into the Champions education courses at Peak Empowerment Academy]
He scrambled in the air after he'd panicked seeing a pothole and lept in the air, and mid air a pop up from his new system obscured 75% of his vision with what looked like looking through blurry sunglasses covered in white words. He was now about three stories in the air and dive bombing directly at a large herd of cattle. He noticed a cattle feeder full of hay and tried aiming himself for the hay to try and break his fall. As he plummeted down, he tucked into a ball and hoped and prayed for hay.
Then he hit. The air rushed out of his body as his back smashed into the ground. He had burst through the hay and hit the frozen ground hard, skipping across it with jagged frozen mud balls tearing through his clothes and skin alike as he skidded his way across the field until coming to an abrupt stop against the large wheel of a combine. His vision faded out as pain shot through his body and head. The last thing he could see was a bunch of cows nervously edging their way towards him and even more rushing as far away as they could.
When he opened his eyes again, he was looking up at the sky with his mom and some guy in overalls and a tan carhart jacket. He couldn't see straight. His head was pounding, and he could barely move his legs.
"-ijah! Eli, talk to me! Come on baby, tell me you're okay!"
Surprisingly, he wasn't dead, but he did hurt all over and felt broken in many spots.
"Fuckin pot holes... I jumped over one... and ah.." He looked over at what he assumed was the farmer. "..I lost control.. of my motorcycle and hit the ditch... and went flying." He finished groaning out through gasps of breath.
"Son, you're gonna have to lie better than that." The farmer looked down at him with equal parts shock that he was alive and pissed about his tractor, that Eli had ruined the wheel on by colliding with it, he glanced back, and there was a very clear indentation where his head had hit the edge of the hub. Blood stained the yellow metal where his head connected with it.
His mom stayed sitting over him. She pressed his sore body back into the ground when he tried to get up. He let her push him. The pain was astounding, and he didn't know how to breathe without agony raking his torso, much less stand. "Just stay laying down, you've been unconscious for nearly 40 minutes," She readjusted to be next to his head sitting on the thawing ground that was starting to get muddy as the sun melted the ground around them. She lifted his head into her lap, gently getting it off the ground. "There's an ambulance on its way, baby boy. Just relax."
The panicked look on her face told him not to move. Instead, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes, reading the pop-up that had made him lose his composure.
‐-----------------------------
[Dear Mr. Elijah Harding,
Congratulations! You've been selected as one of the higher-rank Champions, earning the exclusive opportunity to join Peak Empowerment Academy, a privately-funded government-backed super-powered educational facility nestled in the scenic state of Washington.
Upon acceptance, you'll enjoy significant benefits, including a lump sum of 50,000 U.S. dollars and a generous weekly stipend of 1,500 U.S. dollars. The offer also encompasses free relocation for you and two other champions of B rank or lower, with temporary housing until permanent arrangements are made, ensuring a seamless transition for you.
This unique opportunity provides a safe environment for you to explore your newfound abilities alongside other super-powered individuals. As part of your enrollment, you'll receive top-notch education from human professors and Alaxid Mentors, guiding you in expanding your power base and refining your existing abilities.
Our comprehensive curriculum integrates combat training and academic guidance at both high school and college levels, fostering not only the development of your superpowers but also your intellectual growth.
Moreover, the educational site hosts a diverse community of students, each with varying ranks and skill levels. To promote collaboration and growth, stronger prospects may be strategically paired with weaker champions, creating partnerships that complement each other's power sets. This dynamic environment aims to facilitate mutual learning and support among the students.
Upon arrival, shared housing will be provided, giving you the option to reside in the dorms or seek super-powered roommates. This aligns with our priority of minimizing interactions with level 0 humans for everyone's safety and confidentiality.
In addition to the academic and residential aspects, the two champions you bring with you will be enrolled in a support program. This program is designed to teach them how to best utilize their powers in conjunction with yours, fostering a cohesive and effective team dynamic. This initiative adds an extra layer of synergy to your collective abilities.
Moreover, you'll have the chance to engage in local sports, powered or unpowered, fostering a sense of community and camaraderie. We believe a well-rounded experience contributes to a thriving and supportive environment.
As part of our commitment to your holistic development, opportunities to travel to other super-powered communities will be provided. This opens avenues for cultural exchange and participation in competitions that showcase and challenge your abilities.
We eagerly anticipate your positive response to this unparalleled opportunity.
Signed,
Dr. Vivian Crest
[Time left to accept 167H:11M:12S]
Do you accept?
Yes/No
He looked at the time, and it popped up with the thought of it. It seemed to pop up in the middle of his vision like all the other screens, overlapping with the newest one and navigated itself to the upper right of his vision like a phone layout, only in his vision. It seemed like, as his new system brought out new features, they were being adjusted to his preferences subconsciously.
8:48 a.m. Monday, Nov. 6th, 2023
He let out the breath he'd been holding while reading it to himself and processing it.
Sirens wailing came into earshot, and within 30 seconds, they were deafening. As they pulled into the farmers' circle drive that passed his barn and his house, they turned off the sirens leaving the lights on. Two people jumped out of the truck, one grabbing a bag and a carrying board from the back as the other came running to them.
He pushed the message away with a thought, and it moved to the bottom right of his vision in a tab labeled inbox.
A man with a bushy golden mustache with two gray streaks under his nostrils and the scent of cigarettes clinging to him was stabilizing him and getting a neck brace on him while the tallest lady he'd ever seen in person was preparing a board to carry him. The stocky man who's name he'd not gotten yet moved to his feet while the woman who reminded him alot of Brienne of tarth from Game of Thrones, but with voluminous curly brunette hair tied back into a bushy pony tail, positioned herself at his side supporting his back and shoulders as they lifted him gently onto the board.
They took him to the ambulance and loaded him onto the stretcher and into the back, the mustachioed man of mystery getting into the front seat while the beautiful Amazonian climbed into the back with him. She placed a pulse monitor on his finger and an automatic blood pressure cuff.
"HI!" She piped out entirely too cheery for the situation. "I'm Olivia, but you can call me Liv. I know you're hurting right now, and I'm going to get you some pain management very shortly, I just need you to answer a couple of questions for me. First, could you let me know your name?"
He nodded as much as he could with the neck brace. "I'm Elijah," He paused as a sharp burning pain pierced his right hand, left thigh, and left foot suddenly before fading almost as quickly as it came on. He clenched his eyes shut with the pain, "But you can call me Eli." He tried to play off the pain as injury related, but he could tell there was something off about it.
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Another message popped onto the screen.
[Chaos Energies have been properly affixed to your soul. Runic tattoos have been applied to solidify the connection and make it permanent.]
Realizing what that meant for him, he slammed his eyes open and lifted his right hand up, and there on his palm was a golden silhouette of a scopes cross hairs. He looked from his palm over to the woman next to him that was staring at his hand while leaning back with her hand on her right eye and cheek like she was shocked.
She looked from his hand to meet his eyes, an air of recognition went over her as she dropped her hand slowly revealing a golden a golden rod of asclepius, the head of the rod in her right eye and the staff going down her cheek nearly to the corner of her mouth.
_"You have powers, too."_
_"You have powers, too."_ They said in unison.
They sat there staring for a moment. Sharing this event in their lives, the moment that everything truly changed. There was no hiding it now. They were marked, the fresh memory or burning pain making that very evident. Getting an entire tattoo all at once was a very intense process, and getting 3 of them at once damn near made him faint.
With that, hers started to glow as she activated her powers, giving her sight of all of his injuries. His head lit up a light yellow. His spine was a light orange on a couple of specific vertebrae.
She lifted her hand to reveal a sign that looked like a cosmic mandala glowing a warm gold on her palm as she held it over what she'd seen as the worst part of his spine and used her ability to heal him until his spine registered as as a dark yellow. She focused and muttered under her breath as the glow flowed from her hand into his body, providing him with instant pain relief. A cold sweat broke over her brow as she sat back and took a couple of deep breaths.
He realized that he was holding his breath the entire time he was watching her, only letting it out as his pain subsided and his body released muscles he didnt realize he was clenching. After a couple of deep breaths and some readjusting now that he could move himself better, he looked over at as she cracked an ice pack and applied it to the base of her skull. "Umm, I don't know super hero etiquette, but I am curious about your class?" Elijah offered up to her, not honestly expecting her to answer him. Your class felt almost personal, to you.
She waved her hand in front of her torso and looked like she was searching around for a moment, trying to figure out the user interface before speaking up. "It says here, I'm a C Rank Battle Cleric. Both of my powers are based around field medicine, one that identifies injuries and another that allowed me to heal you. I pushed my ability to its limit by trying to heal you there. My power just kind of shut off and wouldn't let me heal you anymore, then BOOM! Massive headache!" She readjusted the ice pack on the back of her neck and continued. "I also got a big bonus for my strength and a slightly smaller one to endurance cause I'm a semi-pro body builder. What about you, Mr. Durable?" She pulled out her phone and showed him the picture of the rim bent in. "Any normal human would have been in pieces from this, and you had a couple cracked vertebrae and a concussion."
"I'm an A Rank Shifty Sniper. It says I'm an Agility type champion. I have three abilities, one that makes my steps springy, one that makes me jump far, and one I haven't tried out yet that makes me throw things accurately."
He jumped slightly as something hit the side of the ambulance. She leaned towards the front. "Everything okay, Jimmy?"
"Yeah. I'm just trying to navigate the back roads and avoid rioters. I forgot about the bank over here and ran into a group of them. We're okay now. Be there in 2 minutes."
She turned back around and started preparing him to move into the emergency room. "I healed your spine from a break, but there is still a pretty good sprain there. I have to keep working. Things are crazy out here right now, but here's my number," She grabbed her notepad and jotted it down, slipping it into his pocket. "We should meet up soon and talk about our powers."
The ambulance came to a gentle stop, and from the front, Jimmy started rustling around, grabbing his stuff and pushing a cigarette between his lips. He hopped out and came around to the back of the ambulance, swinging the doors open and unlocking the wheels of the gurney rolling him out as Liv supported his head and torso while the legs extended. "You got him right, Liv?"
"Yeah, I'll take him and get the paperwork, but you have to fill it out whi-."
"What the hell is wrong with your eye?" Jimmy cut in, with half curious, half horrified expression gawking at her face with his lit cigarette dangling out of his mouth, the cigarette stuck to his bottom lip like it had frozen on. He blanched white. "You're with them aliens, aren't you?"
She opened her mouth to respond, but by the time she had found an appropriate response, he was already on his way back to the ambulance, full cigarette bouncing off the pavement as he fumbled with his pocket ripping his phone out and jumping in the ambulance, slamming the door behind him and yelling into the phone as they crossed the threshold into the hospital. She sighed "Well I guess my partner doesn't like the idea of the aliens as much as I did."
"Im... sure he'll come around." Eli tried to reassure her unsuccessfully.
"No, that man still blames Mexicans for the Alamo. I'll be with a new partner tomorrow, I'm sure." She gave Eli a half-hearted smile. "Stay safe and no more 'motorcycles' for a while. See ya later." She said with a turn and moved towards the door, answering a call to dispatch on her shoulder mounted radio.
A nurse had taken the gurney from her and moved him into a room that had TRAUMA CARE posted above the door. He assumed they heard motorcycle, spine injury, and no helmet and assumed the worst.
A few minutes later, his mom came into the room fully updated on his status she wasn't near as freaked out. The doctors came in and gave him a shot in his back that made the rest of his pain fade away, then moved him from the trauma room to a general urgent care room.
He and his mother spent some time talking about his hand tattoo and decided to try and play with it for a little bit. While they waited in the busy emergency room for their discharge paperwork and his prescriptions. His mom handed him a roll of gauze and moved across the room.
"Throw it to me." She said excitedly.
"Mom, I could do that anyway. Give me a better challenge."
"Okay." She thought about it for a short time before she looked over at the jar of tongue depressors and dumped them on the counter and held the jar above her head. "Throw it into the jar then."
He tried targetting the jar and the jar lit up blue, and he saw that on the bottom of his screen, a little blue target appeared, indicating his skill was active. _Cool, so it isn't supposed to be a blur._ He tossed the gauze, and it flew directly at the jar but ended up falling a few inches short.
"I guess it can't add momentum. That makes sense." His mom commented as she tossed it back to him. "Try to make it to it this time."
"I was just in a very serious motorcycle wreck I'll have you know. You should cut me some slack." He heaved the gauze this time, and it hit the jar but didn't go in, instead knocking it over and making his mother catch it before it rolled off onto the tiled floor.
"So, trial and error it is." He muttered as his mom set the jar back up on the little counter in the corner of the room. He threw the gauze over it, this time throwing it hard enough it wouldn't naturally arc in but instead soar above the jar. Just as he thought for sure he had missed again, the gauze took a sharp and unnatural turn, curving its flight path directly into the jar.
"Wooo!" They shouted together as the nurse swung open the curtain that separated his room from the hallway. With a sudden air of awkwardness in the air, he felt the need to apologize. "Sorry," he hesitated for a moment, "we were having a bit of fun with the medical supplies." He explained as his mother hurriedly cleaned up the mess they'd made.
"Yeahhhh, so you're all good to go. Just stop by the front desk and sign some papers on your way out." She looked more like she'd rather forget what she'd seen than confront it as she left the discharge papers on the counter and walked back out.
10 minutes later, he was back in his mom's olive green Dodge charger. And then they were on their way home after stopping at the local hole in the wall taco place named **Casadores Tacos.** they made the best burritos, and their carne asada had this smokiness that was to die for.
The rest of his day was spent laying on the couch playing on his laptop, the only power his mom would let him use right now, being his one to throw things at things accurately. And wouldn't even let him walk to the bathroom by himself even though he told her he was fine after Liv's healing and the shot. She kept telling him, "Back injuries are no joke, look at Grandpa Joe, he got into a car wreck when he was thirty and it weakened his back so much he developed a hunch." She was terrified he'd get a hunch, so was he to be fair. But all the more reason to work it out himself rather than use her as a crutch.
8:57 P.M.
He'd taken the time to Google Dr. Crest, some articles called her a quack on the cutting edge of pseudoscience had popped up. It was easy to see why after looking up a couple of her classes on Coursera.org. They were all claims about how the void of space isn't nothingness at all and that the void itself is a form of energy much like light. It was an energy fueled by consuming a little bit of matter from all the celestial bodies in the universe so little that it probably equated to less than a kilogram of lost mass of earth in this manner yearly. The only thing her class failed to talk about was ways to collect and harness the energy she talked about in the course. Which, of course, is now solved with the Alaxid and the Framework here helping us channel the chaos energies she was referring to.
It was also easy to see why she had been chosen to lead the new school for superheroes if she is the closest human to understanding how chaos energies worked preintegration.
He closed his laptop and flashed his user interface open with a thought.
Does this system have a messenger system? He got that invite through the system, and it went into his inbox earlier. As the thought popped into his head, the screen changed to a contact list that was the same as his phone list, only every contact had the person's legal name and their contact name in parentheses next to it. He pulled out the paper from his pocket and looked at it, and a new contact popped up on his list.
Olivia Erikkson [Liv]
(815]555-5555
He selected the text feature, and a small box popped up in the corner of his vision. And he thought about what he wanted to write.
《Hey Liv, it's Eli. Sorry for texting so late. I was just wondering, have you gotten any weird system messages inviting you to stuff since this morning?》
He waited for a response, which didn't take long.
《Woah! We can text with our brains now?!
Yeah, I ended up getting two today, both invites to schools. _Did you?_ 》
《Yeah it was actually why I crashed. It popped up in the middle of my vision, and I couldn't see anything.
It's like some superhero college or something, and the Dean is named Dr. Vivian Crest.》
《I got an invite into one called 'Desert Bloom Academy of Therapeutic Heroics'. And another named 'The Bayou Brawn Institute'. One is a healing school in Utah, and the other is a battle school for lower ranks in Alabama. Betcha can't guess which is which.》
《Mine says I can bring two lower ranked champions to come with me to be support champions》
《You spelled sidekick wrong》
《Well I was thinking about accepting mine. I haven't told my mom yet. I'm just trying to figure out who to take with me, and you're the only other 'chosen one' I've met so far.》
He heard a knock on his door followed quickly by it opening and his mom popping her head in.
"I'm going to bed. How are you feeling? Do you need anything before I lay down?" His mom asked with eyes full of sleep from waking up at 5 a.m. and a day of superpowers and aliens.
"No, I'm okay. Thank you, mom. I'm actually doing great now, I can barely tell I hit a tractor at 100 miles per hour today."
《Hey. Can you sneak out tonight?》He was confused until he realized this was a new pop-up. The text boxes worked a lot like messenger windows popping up when you get a new text. It was his best friend Marcus.
"Hey, mom!" He called out down the hall. "Marcus is asking if I can sneak out. Is that cool with you?"
He heard her footsteps stop. "I would prefer if you didn't, but as long as you go to school in the morning and come home before midnight. Also, I thought we were mad at Marcus right now."
"You're telling me. The superhero. I still have to go to high school the day after aliens were revealed to exist. And we are, at least until he apologises for being a shitty person, which is probably what he is asking me to come out for because he's not _that_ shitty of a person."
"Yes. Slacking off will get you nowhere. It's bad enough that you took today off."
"You literally went with me to the hospital because I broke farm equipment with my body."
"Yeah? And the farm equipment is still broken, and you're ready to go galavanting off with Marcus. So you can go to school tomorrow, and tell Marcus I'll be making fried green tomatoes on wednesday, you know he loves those. That is if he's done being a shithead."
He let out a loud groan as his mom's footsteps started back up again. That was his cue that the conversation was over and her word stands.
《Was that your way of inviting me to come with you?》Liv texted back after a few minutes.
He decided to text Liv back first 《Not for certain. I have no clue if anyone else I know has been chosen yet. Think of it more like networking.》
《Joe's. Be there in 5.》He shot back to Marcus with a quick thought as he stapped on his combat boots, and with that, he was off.