Having joined the local police academy recruitment program as a junior in High School, Hunter Murphy had long known what career he wanted to go into when he graduated High School. He was now finishing his senior year at Rockdale High School and getting ready to enter the accelerated program at the police training academy that all policemen who worked in Rockdale went to: the Austin Police Academy. Rockdale was a rather small town, so all trainees were sent to the nearest “big city”, which meant Austin.
Excited to finally begin the full version of the occupation he had been training for for two years, Hunter went through orientation and filled out the relevant forms almost in a daze. The next day started and he barely remembered half of the things he was told during orientation, and almost failed to locate his first classroom. This didn't dampen his excitement at all, and as he opened the massive gates the room used as a door, he barely registered that they didn't seem to be as heavy as their size and material suggested they should.
The doors appeared to be made of solid bronze, copper would have turned green, but he barely felt their weight, as though they were normal sized hollow wooden doors. Thinking nothing of it, he sat down in an available seat, the glow of his expectations finally being realized beaming from his face. More people arrived and most of them struggled at least a little with the hefty door, and in the back of his mind, Hunter noticed the inconsistency of that fact, but he was in no mind to pay attention to that. He took copious notes in the class, and headed towards his next one, where things continued in a similar vein, except that this room had a normal door.
As the day finished, he met a fellow who was in the program for a different reason than he was; as this guy had just migrated from England and was more learning how police work was done in America rather than how it was done in The Great Britain. Zach was nice enough, but he kept putting knives into an increasingly overstuffed duffle bag that he kept with him. It was weird, but not really worth obsessing over when he had so much to learn. And as time went on and they got closer to the end of the scheduled training, Zach seemed to spend less time putting away knives, and by the end he didn't seem to be doing it at all anymore.
Anyways, once Hunter got home, he put his bag down, and heaved a sigh as he sat in one of the kitchen chairs his assigned apartment came with, only to be a bit surprised by how loudly his bag hit the ground. It wasn't really that heavy, there were only a few books in it, so it shouldn't weigh more than twenty or so pounds. But it left quite the dent in the cheap linoleum, which thankfully wasn't so cheap that it kept the dent, and the noise it made when he plopped it down beside him wouldn't be out of place for a bag ten times as heavy.
Confused, he picked up the bag that he had thought was a bit heavy on the way home, and just acted many times heavier, and it barely felt like it weighed anything at all. Even more confused now, he put it back down again, and it made almost no noise, and the floor had no problems with it. Shrugging it off, he took his shoes off and went about getting dinner ready like he had planned to. The rest of the night went more or less as he had planned it and nothing else really stuck out in his mind as unusual, and he went to bed, looking forward to his second day of classes at the academy.
Things kept being easier or harder to move or lift through the rest of the week, and by the time the weekend came, he stopped really having any expectations for what weight anything he was going to touch was going to feel like. One time he was picking up his bag, expecting it to be heavy, and nearly threw it across the room, distracted by the pretty girl he saw heading down the hall in the direction of the gym.
Another time he was opening a door and it slipped out of the loose grip he had the handle in and smashed into the wall, making a large dent where the edge of the door hit and a hole where the handle punched through. The teacher rushed over and after pulling the door out of the wall, acted certain that the door wasn't even heavy enough to cause that much damage even if it was thrown at ten times the speed it hit the wall. An investigation was conducted, and even the surveillance cameras hadn't caught anything that should have caused what happened. Thankfully Hunter didn't get in any trouble for it, as there was nothing anyone could determine that he should have done differently.
Then there was the time that he put his lunch tray on the table at the cafeteria and the table collapsed under it. He only had a sandwich and some potato salad on the tray, but the table still collapsed as soon as he put his tray down. Another investigation was done, and nobody could tell what happened, but people started paying more attention at that point. The next Monday, when he was entering the cafeteria and the double saloon style doors crashed into the walls after the guy in front of him pushed them out of the way, causing damage on both sides, one of the site supervisors took Hunter to the side to have a discussion with him.
It was determined that he was the sole common factor in all the strange happenings, and he was to be sent to a specialized boot camp for government workers who exhibited new powers or were in the center of strange events. After being there for half a day, the first event like the previous ones happened, and someone accidentally lifted up a car instead of opening its door as Hunter walked by. This was all the confirmation the camp leaders needed, and they started working on helping him gain control over his new powers.
Hunter still had yet to feel anything or do anything intentionally, and spent a few days trying different meditation and thought exercises, he still didn't make any progress. Then one day, he was just finishing his daily jogging session, when he leaned against a large semi truck filled with heavy things. He didn't really know what all was in it, but most of it was brought to help him and the other grunts learn to control their powers, or so he had been told. Anyways, he was resting against the side of the truck, when suddenly it fell over with a soft 'whump' on the grass. It was such a gentle fall that it had to have had its weight changed, or whatever it was that Hunter did. Quickly Hunter went through his various sensing techniques that he had been learning to try and sense how he was changing its weight, as he pulled the large truck back upright.
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There still was nothing really different about how he felt, and he didn't even feel the energy or force the other trainees described. That is, until the truck was suddenly back to normal weight about an inch before he had it back to normal, and thumped to the ground and Hunter felt a slight tug in his gut. While the feeling was still fresh in his mind, he rushed over to his councilor's office to talk the experience over with them and try and finally make some progress.
Many hours later, Hunter left their office feeling drained. Not physically, but mentally, as he talked through every facet of what he felt during his latest “episode”. It felt weird talking to someone who seemed little different than a new age-y shrink who's only qualifications before powers came out would likely have been spending too much time around crystals and reading ancient texts about things that had long since been proven false. But he did feel like he finally was making some progress in his attempts to “get in tune with his powers”.
It was past dinner time, so he stopped by the commissary and chowed down on some food before heading back to his living quarters to sleep for the night. The next morning, he worked through the exercises he had been assigned the previous day, and tried to replicate the feeling of using his powers. It was not easy, and the morning passed and lunchtime came before he managed to make and progress, so he headed back to the commissary to get a bite before working on things again.
And then one of the local goofballs who fancied themselves funny clowns came up behind him and surprised him, causing him to instinctively send the guy flying with a shove. One that was far more effective than it should have been, as the poor prankster found themselves soaring through the air for a good 300 yards before they landed soft as a feather. It was at this point that Hunter began to see some rather fun implications to his new powers, and his thinking about them shifted from burdensome to fanciful and fun.
Did he suddenly gain more control? No, no, not at all. In fact it would still be a few more months before he was able to leave the powered people's boot camp. But he did gain more interest in controlling his powers, which his councilor soon noticed, and which led to him spending more time working on them. He didn't even get bored with the exercises as easily anymore either. So when he went back to working on it after lunch, he was more focused and should have had more success.
But he didn't and the next day he once more activated them on accident, this time causing all the leaves on his neighbor's lawn to become totally weightless, which then made them float upwards slowly away as if they were filled with helium. It was a bit surreal, and kinda cool looking, but he once again had no control over it, which was quickly proven true when the leaf he was watching suddenly plummeted to the ground and left a small crater in its wake as it broke into dust, mixing with the cloud it created on impact.
Hunter was not really sure what to make of that, and barely felt anything throughout the whole incident. He spent more time with his councilor and even more time meditating and trying to recreate the sensations he was feeling when it happened, and went to bed that night without even bothering to go get some dinner cause he was just that mentally exhausted from it all.
Afterwards, a few more twilight zone like scenes transpired. Causing a car to float like a balloon until it slowly drifted back to the ground. Making the grass clippings he threw onto the pile slam into the ground as though each one weighed several pounds. Causing the barbells in the gym to float around like dandelion fluff until they all suddenly crashed to the ground at once. And finally, he caused something to happen on purpose. Mostly.
He was focusing on a large piece of metal, trying to make it lighter, and trying to channel the feeling he felt before – whatever that meant. And then something happened: it cracked the slab of concrete it was resting on and the scale registered its weight skyrocketing. Instead of making it lighter, he had succeeded in making it many times heavier. He stopped what he was doing, and it slowly went back to normal, which he could only tell because the damage it was causing to the floor slowed down, then stopped getting worse.
Progress was progress, however, and he went and recorded everything he could remember in his progress journal before he forgot anything. And then he helped the people that showed up clean up the mess he made. Once they finished, he spent some time with his councilor and went over everything that happened, and added some things he had forgotten to his progress journal.
The next day he was meditating and focusing on his powers and the sensations they caused him, when he noticed that he was floating. He slowly got back on his feet and returned his weight to normal, before attempting to change the weight of a feather he had been given to practice with. He first managed to make it weigh even less than it already did, then made it heavier. Feathers already fall in a rather odd and unpredictable fashion as they are naturally, and it seemed that falling while heavy changed that a bit, and turned them into something more like a dart.
Another few days of practice, and he was able to notice what it felt like when his powers activated without his direct input, and was able to prevent a few accidents. A week after that, and he was able to change the weight of things at will, and even started training to use his abilities in combat. This was a boot camp run by the government after all. Did he stop having accidents where things happened unpredictably? No, but he was able to control how things progressed from there much more easily.
Slowly but surely, he got more control over his new powers, and was even able to use them to float around a bit, but he stayed rather cautious when using his powers for that. He was cleared to return to either the police force's special unit for dealing with powered people, or to join a military task force meant to protect the USA from foreign powered threats. Of course he joined the police special unit. Some weirdos out there were using their powers to commit crimes and others were fighting with them calling themselves heroes.
Hunter thought poorly of both groups, obviously the police were supposed to take care of criminals, and if he and Officer Hughes were any indication, they were quickly gaining the power to deal with them as needed. He even arrested a few colorfully dressed oddballs within the first year he was in the unit.
And as he got into the swing of things, his data was submitted, and he submitted the data of those he arrested and investigated. Police work is made up nearly as much of filling out forms as it is made up of actually arresting people or patrolling the streets after all. Not all matters were as weighty as others, but Hunter liked to think that, one way or another, he lightened the load the people around him carried.