Nathaniel Greene, or as his friends and followers called him, “Nate” was a professional ghost hunter, and had been quite successful in his craft for years before the supers started coming out of the woodwork and making his discoveries far less interesting. Fewer and fewer people cared about the supernatural when there were super-humans out there to point and gawk at. But that didn't mean that his market dried up completely, on the contrary, there were tons of new viewers all the time. Turns out, watching weirdos duke it out in the skies above your home using bizarre and dangerous looking powers more often made people more superstitious than than it did less.

While Nate had always been in a fringe interest market, where you had to go above and beyond just to get any traction, suddenly there were self appointed superheroes and supervillans all over the place. And, despite how certain people professed to be that ghosts and the afterlife weren't real, everyone was at least a little worried in the back of their minds. A scientist could rationalize away all the things that were supposed proof of a ghastly encounter, but they could never quite eradicate the last little niggling questions lurking in the back of their mind of “but what if...”?

And so Nate continued making his videos, with his viewership almost entirely replacing themselves on a near monthly basis. He was still getting more views than he used to on top of it all, even back when he was able to get that pretty little blonde co-host to colab with him every once in a while. Not much got the fans excited back in the day like watching a cute little lady get scared out of her wits.

Nowadays it was hard to find a truly abandoned haunted building to explore without accidentally finding a lair of some goofball who fancied themselves the next great crime lord due to getting a new ability that usually was barely any more useful than being able to pull a few cups of water out of the air per day. Nate had gotten splashed in the face by more than one of those fellows while investgating supposed haunted locations, and he had taken to carrying a taser and a tranq gun on his person while doing his initial sweeps.

All it usually took was showing that he was armed in some way other than with a camera for these spooks to run off and leave him be. His viewers even often found it funny to see him chase off another wannabe villain, so he uploaded those videos as comically edited shorts. Sometimes he even managed to find one that had a warrant out for their arrest and turned em in for a small bounty.

Today, Nate was exploring a mansion that had been in the hands of this trust or the other for decades ever since the last owner to live in it had been caught attempting to capture another victim to bring back and torture to death. Nothing made ghosts stick around as vengeful angry spirits like a grisly death, and Nate was sure he would find some signs here, and maybe even get some interactions on camera this time. He had gotten permission from the latest trust in charge of the place to do his whole ghost hunting thing, and even to burn the place down if he thought it was needed.

Honestly, it certainly was worth more as insurance money than it was as a building or as a tourist location, so he couldn't blame them for their stance on the matter. The place looked spooky as could be, windows all over the place, Victorian architecture with gargoyles and black paint on the outside with white trims. White gauzy drapes facing outside with thick black curtains behind them. For an added bonus, there was even a detached garage that some bats had taken roost in.

So as he approached the property, he was already filming, and between the impressively creepy house at the end of the road at the top of a hill ambiance, and the downright chilling vibes the place was giving off, he was certain this place would bring him lots of proof of life after death. He actually had a cameraman for this job, and she was pretty enough that he was going to try to get her to go on camera with him at least a few times for the extra views. She did say she was comfortable being on either side of the camera, and was clearly feeling the vibes of this place as they started filming b-roll footage for the start of the video.

Nate launched his drone after they were done to really take in the scope of how creepy this place was, taking more video for the intro. He even made sure to get clear shots of each opening on the outside of the house in case they needed it for reference later on. He and his cameraman went over the footage they took, and made sure everything looked good before they went into the house to start the investigation. They set things up quickly and got rolling, different weird looking devices spread around the room and ready to go.

“So, is there anyone here that wants to announce themselves before I get started?” He asked, watching his equipment to see if any response was to be had.

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Except, it wasn't his equipment that he got his response from. And it was a rather quick response too, as a door down the hall slammed closed, causing a gust of wind that set off nearly half of his devices for a good few seconds before they calmed down and went back into their standby mode. He glanced at his cameraman with wide eyes, and she stared back at him, then, with a nod of approval from him, she turned the camera on herself and said; “Guys, what the ^&$*% was that? Did you see which door that was?” she asked, as she turned the camera back on Nate.

“No, I think it was around the corner down that way.” Nate responded, pointing down a very creepy looking hallway. “Do you not want us here?” He asked looking at the devices that were still chirping a little here and there. And then all of them went perfectly still and silent.

“If you want us to leave, please make this device chirp.” Nate said, pointing at one of the bigger ones all by itself. Immediately, every other device went back to their normal standby modes, but the one he pointed at stayed perfectly still. “Okay, I guess we'll continue our investigation then, he said, his focus leaving the device he had been pointing at just before it too, went back to its normal standby mode. The night proceeded about how most ghost hunts in clearly haunted houses went, which is to say spooky and with no more clear signs of anything being there than what he had already seen.

But that was still a roaring success, his cameraman even agreed to come for more haunt hunts later, and even be featured in this and future hunts she came on. And so he went back home and started the arduous process of editing and getting the footage ready to be uploaded. As he was editing it, however, he reached for his water bottle to take a sip, not realizing it was too far to reach, and it flew into his hand. It hit with just enough force to make him glance at his hand, which wasn't quite where it should have been for him to be able to pick up his water.

Thinking this was weird, but hardly worth his focus at the moment, he got back to editing, and soon he was uploading the video, watching the slow crawl of the progress bar. One of the things that made a good ghost hunter vlogger was patience, and he had plenty of that. In fact, he picked up his laptop and popped in a comedy DVD, a habit he had picked up a few years back to help calm his nerves after editing spooky videos.

For one thing, it didn't take additional bandwidth, and thus didn't slow down his upload. For another, by this point he had usually had his fill of horror and spooky themes and just needed to relax. And so, as he re-watched one of his old favorites, glancing up at his desktop's monitor from time to time to keep track of its progress and make sure he could respond quickly in case anything went wrong, Nate started eating his dinner that had finished cooking as he was editing.

At one point about halfway through the upload, when he was almost done eating, he dropped his fork and snatched it out of the air before it hit the ground. Or at least, that's what he thought he did, but the moment caught in his mind, so he went and checked his security logs before he went to bed, as he had his editing room under constant surveillance just in case anyone got the bright idea to help themselves to his expensive equipment.

And as he was watching it, he found that several times throughout the night, he reached for something that came to where his hand was, rather than being caught, or being where he thought it was. Now, Nate was already primed to think that anything strange going on was supernatural in nature, and his first thought was ghosts, so he quickly got his most sensitive and best equipment out to see if he could communicate with whoever was there. But try as he might, he never got any response, so a few hours later, when it was getting to be more morning than night, he went to bed, confused, exhausted, and a little spooked.

The next day as he was eating breakfast, he reached for the milk he had pushed away earlier, and noticed that it went the last few inches to his reaching hand on its own. At one point his spoon came to his hand before he reached it, and as he was washing his dishes afterwards, he turned the sink off without touching it. He was beginning to realize that something off was going on, but it clearly wasn't ghosts.

A few days of weird coincidences like that later, and he thought he figured out what was going on, and started working on controlling his new powers. He watched a few videos online showing suggestions on how to learn to control telekinesis from before super-humans were a widely known phenomenon, and tried the tricks they suggested. He spent most of the day on that, in fact, and only really stopped for lunch and dinner. The next day, he tried even more tips and tricks and finally started having results just after lunch.

As he slowly got better at controlling his new abilities, he stopped having as many accidental uses, and started having more subconscious uses. He'd reach for a thing and pull it to him at the same time, he'd close a door with a gesture after going through it. Nate didn't really care overmuch about those, as they were more or less how he wanted to do things, and he had been working on building those habits into his daily life.

There was one problem, though: his ghost hunting would likely be effected greatly by this. One of his devices even reacted half the time that he used his new powers. So he practiced even more, and nearly half a year later he was back in full control. But his videos had taken a slight change in the meantime, with him casually using telekinesis every here and there during them, and having to be extra careful not to pollute his results with his own powers.

He gained new views, lost old ones, and generally things really didn't change all that more than they had been doing since the outbreak of powers started a few years ago. He did get closer to Claire, his camerawoman who he had been with when things first started happening, so that was cool. But really that was something he was working on anyways, so who knows how much being powered changed there.

As he uploaded yet another video to the internet, he played with his telekinesis, juggling a few pens in the air without touching them to help with his fine movement control. It had been a wild ride, but he was back in the saddle, doing what he loved, and he didn't even need to worry about powered squatters anymore, as his powers were more than a match for most of what they could do. And as the library was updated, he enjoyed his snack, just another average citizen doing his job.