Thanks again to Daylius for the PR and editing, and I'l probably be releasing a chapter every week until classes start again and then I'll figure out what I'll do then. But until then, enjoy!

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Now that we’re done with all that hypothetical, self important, chunni-like introduction to my own story, I’ll go ahead and start telling you everything, well everything but my name. So we’ll just call myself [John], short and simple right? As for any names that are involved in the story they’ll be changed for their convenience. Y’know, for privacy and all that jazz. Back to the point at hand though, like I was describing before there are people with strange things happening around them and you may think that they’re either faking it or they have a slightly better ability to do, whatever they're doing compared to you. But in all actuality, in most of these cases these people are able to use “abilities” way beyond what a human should be capable of.

The reason they have these abilities is the important thing to consider in these cases. For myself I have the ability to add value to items. Now this may sound ridiculous and you are probably doubting what I’m saying right now, but just bear with me because what I’m saying is all true.

My ability manifested during the summer of my first semester in college, I was walking down a pathway on campus and noticed a dirty old coin on the ground, now it may seem insignificant to most people and by all rights it should, but for some reason that coin captured my attention entirely. So I did what any person would do in that situation….. I ran away.

   You may be confused as to why I did what I did, well for one I was pretty terrified of what was happening, I nearly lost control of myself because of a coin on the ground, it completely captivated me and overpowered my senses and its only by sheer chance that I somehow managed to regain control of myself. Of course even after I ran back to my dorm, I couldn’t get that coin out of my mind, so I did what any self respecting person would do. I ignored it, now at this point you’re probably shouting “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” and anybody would be so inclined to do so. BUT consider my position not superficially, but  beneath the surface you’ll find the answer. For most of my childhood I was a lonesome child, at some point I was a compulsive liar (hint hint nudge nudge) and because of this I was quickly ostracized from the rest of the children. My loneliness eventually turned me into a coward and as any good coward would be, I was afraid of change, and this coin represented just that. So like I said, I ignored the problem and went on with my life.

   The next morning after the event I woke up like usual, went to the bathroom and all that good stuff. Of course things turned out much differently from what I had hoped because once I opened the door to go eat breakfast I got a strange feeling, like something was there that I should be seeing, so I looked towards the source of the feeling and lo and behold there’s the dirty ol’ coin just sitting there like it owned the place. So just like that I ran away once more, now that was not the end of it, oh no that was just the beginning. Throughout the rest of the day, that dastardly coin followed me wherever I went, don’t ask me how it did, even now I’m not entirely sure. But well the coin just showed up wherever I was going to be until finally I had had enough and just went back to my room [sanctuary]. And right there in the middle of my floor was the coin, This time I did what any sane person would do. I gave up!  And just like any good person that has given up I picked up the damn coin that had been torturing me the entire day.

    Once my fingers touched the coin I felt a jolt flash through me as if something that was supposed to be there is now there. Now let me stop my story here real quick to explain something that I didn’t find out till a couple years after this, the coin I did pick up turned out to be some sort of old Roman coin called the Argentus(see afterword), and that sometime during the roman reign it lost it’s value because of the decreasing silver content inside of it, and this particular coin at some point in time somehow gained significance in the hearts and minds of enough people that it became an artifact of power. Now this is the first time that I've mentioned this but an [Artifact of Power] is essentially any object that a sentient race bestows meaning upon, in other words if enough people believe that a certain object represents defence then that object gains the power to represent the meaning that it has been bestowed upon and so it’ll be an object with absolute defence.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    The things that are tricky about objects of power though is that not just anyone can use them, a person’s base personality has to be compatible, as for me my original personality was that of a compulsive liar and considering that the coin kept following me around, it obviously felt that I would be an ideal holder so of course it pursued me until it finally took hold. In general all Artifacts of power are like this, once they find someone that is compatible they will continuously try and bond with that person. Another tricky thing about them is that there is a price for using an Artifact of power, and while it may be something that is not immediately obvious it is there nonetheless.

      Each Artifact has some sort of cost for using them, and the price can range from something big like your soul or even something small like having to eat a peanut. and it just so happens that mine is a pretty big one, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. Now like I said the Artifacts will only be attracted to someone with a compatible personality and since my base personality is the ideal for what it represented it was attracted to me and to make a long story short the coin essentially represented Constructed values in money and trade. So hence the ability to change the value of an object.

That being said I can’t just make any object worth something just like that, I do have to put in some thought into everything, so large amounts of bullshitting is needed. Take the pebble for example, just to even convince someone to buy it for $100 I would need to sugar coat it quite a lot and in that respect my ability is pretty weak compared to most Artifact holders. So if we really boil down my ability to what it can do, the only thing that it really does is increases my persuasion ability to above the normal levels of mundane humans.

So back to what I was saying about gaining back something that I lost, in all actuality most if not all Ability holders are special from the very beginning, for one our personalities are formed at birth though, being the babies that we are at the time it’s not really obvious. And our abilities really just lay dormant until we come in contact with an [Artifact of Power] so really it’s not so much that the Artifact bestows rather it unlocks the abilities of an Artifact user.

Now you may be asking yourself “But John what does that have to do with anything?” Well random ignorant stranger let me tell you. Since our personalities form at birth, those attributes never really go away so any personality traits that appear later and superimpose over the base personality are subdued when an Artifact user comes into contact with his or her [Artifact of Power] And this is where listening is important kids. If you remember I was a coward, and a wimp because of my childhood, so when I came into contact with the Artifact it was almost as if my personality took a back seat and someone else took the wheels and the moment the dormant personality suddenly took control at the forefront of my psyche, everything went dark.

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Afterword

So while the Argentus was a real Roman coin, the value of it never really did decrease all that noticeably, though there actually was a real Roman coin that did and I would have used the name of that one but the name “Antoninianus” hardly rolls off the tongue. So I took some historical liberties and just switched the two names of the coins to fit my needs. Now aren’t I cool? :D