It'd been a few years since super-humans had begun appearing, and showing up on the news regularly, but Gregory Mendel still didn't have any superpowers. He was now a senior in High School, and he had seen friends gain all kinds of interesting and unique powers. Some used them to just live slightly more easily, enhancing the skills they already had, getting the remote control from halfway across the room using any number of creative solutions. Some seemed to be a little too clumsy with their powers to be able to make use of them to enhance their life, but weren't really any worse off because of them. And some people seemed to be constantly fighting against the effects of their powers, never quite managing to regain normalcy or gain any real control over what they could do.
Greg really didn't want to be one of those last two categories, and would rather not have powers than be one of those who couldn't control them. But he also really wanted to gain some sort of powers. His friend even managed to gain the power to glow when he held his breath, and even managed to turn it into something useful. That happened at the end of the last school year, and now, halfway through the next school year, Greg was getting frustrated at not being able to do anything special.
He was an athlete, and that used to make him special, but now, with powered classmates walking the halls, being a quarterback wasn't quite as impressive as it used to be. Feeling frustrated, let down, and left behind by the new trends surrounding powers, he trudged to what used to be his favorite class: P.E.. One of his fellow students was walking by juggling sticks with some wind-based power and, struck by a fit of sour mood Greg slapped one of the sticks out of the air.
“Ouch! What was that!?” Greg yelped, as the stick got stuck in his palm, an unnoticed branch having poked into him as he slapped it. “That's just great, now I gotta get bandaged on top of everything else.”
And so he went to the teacher's office before getting changed to get disinfectant and a bandage for his hand. He grumbled about how unfair life now was, and how annoying this thing or that thing was throughout the rest of the period, and finally his teacher just sent him to the nurse's office to get a more thorough checkup.
When he arrived, the nurse took the bandage off and tsked at how red it had gotten. Explaining about how infections were still dangerous even with superpowers popping up all over the place, she lectured him constantly even as she worked on treating him. Normally Greg liked talking to the school nurse, as she wasn't hard on the eyes at all, but he didn't like being treated like an idiot, and she was perhaps overdoing her lectures on not letting this happen again.
When she finally let him go, he bolted out of the nurse's office, and headed back towards the gym to finish P.E., but just before he got there, the bell rang for the next class to start, and he had to go change in the locker rooms and go to his next class instead. Grumbling to himself, he finished changing and headed over to the other side of campus where he had his next class. He decided to take a shortcut across one of the fields his school kept for gym and sports uses, which was covered in dead grass due to it being in the middle of winter.
Except that after he turned back to look at what everyone was muttering and chirping excitedly at each other about, he saw that the whole field was now green and healthy as though it was spring. Confused, but not really caring much about it, he made his way to his next class, and got on with his day. His hand kept bothering him through the rest of the day, and he went home with his mood not much improved at the end of the day.
He was working on his homework when the pencil he was using stopped working, and he sharpened it without really paying much attention before continuing what he was doing. He finished the homework he was going to do that night, put away his school stuff, and got on his computer and booted up a mindless shooter game to work off his frustrations. He went to bed that night feeling slightly less frustrated, and went to sleep, dreaming of triple kills and perfectly lined up shots that took out multiple enemies in one go.
As Greg was on his way to school the next day, he leaned on a tree to adjust something in his shoe that was annoying him and kept going, not noticing the tree starting to bloom behind him. He did notice his hand start tingling in an annoying way and shook it as he walked to try and get it to settle down. But that was the hand that he had adjusted his shoe with, so rather than looking behind him for the cause of his discomfort, he kicked a rock he passed by with the offending shoe, and felt much better about things when it bounced off a crack in the sidewalk and smacked into a tree in a nearby yard.
By the time he got to school he forgot about what happened on the way to school, and focused on his classes. Well, focused as much as he ever did. His mother always complained that he was wasting his intelligence by not applying himself enough on schoolwork, but he preferred to think about sports and fancied himself a shoe in for a professional football career. He was the best quarterback in his town, and practically carried his team whenever they had a game. He was lost in thoughts like these when he bumped into a girl walking in the same direction as him and nearly made her fall before he caught her.
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Apologizing and helping her pick up the stuff he knocked out of her hands, he handed her a potted plant that she had been carrying before, one that had pretty flowers and stuff like that growing on it. But when he handed it to her, she looked startled and confused, which made no sense to Greg until she told him it was dying and she was taking it to school to ask a teacher she trusted for advice. Greg didn't really care about any of that, but he did like the smile and hug she gave him before skipping off towards he next class.
Feeling better about his day, Greg continued on, not really giving the interaction a second though, other than thinking about how pretty she was when she smiled, and trying to remember if he knew her name. And once more being distracted, he failed to notice how many random places across campus started having healthier looking greenery. Well, he wasn't the sort of person to stop and smell the roses anyways, and the school didn't have any rose bushes in the first place, as those were deemed to dangerous to have around kids. He was an athlete after all, and far more focused on manly pursuits to spend his time wondering about the greenery around him.
But soon he started noticing something weird about his school. It took a few weeks before he noticed, but even someone who cares so little about plants as he did couldn't help but notice that the paths between his classes had started looking far more springlike than they normally did in late November. It was little more than an interesting thing to think about on the way to his next class, but he did notice it. But what did give him cause for pause was how his pencils were starting to look.
Between the sharpened tip and the metal cap with the eraser in it, they had started having buds show up here and there. It never really prevented him from being able to comfortably use them, so it took him a while to notice that part, but they also needed sharpening far more often than they usually did. It was like the wood kept overgrowing the lead at the tip. One of them even grew a flower off the side of it, so he gave it to a girl he liked in one of his classes.
She seemed quite happy when he said it suited her, and decided not to say the second half of what he originally intended to say. That it suited her much better than him, switching to the words “quite well” rather than “better than me”. He did stop to wonder at why his ruler was longer than it should be, and was thus less than accurate, but he just threw it away and got another one. When his desk started warping and growing little buds along the edges, he started to realize that the weird things happening around him specifically had a rather arborous nature to them.
Now that he noticed it though, the feeling he got before things went weird, and the way that things around him got weird all had a theme to them: plants. He was, as stated before, not much interested in the plant life around him, which might have been why it was nearly three weeks after it started that he noticed that things were not quite normal around him anymore. But now that he was paying attention, his hand felt weird just before something happened, and what happened was always related to plants growing where, how, or when they normally would not.
Greg was the sort that typically excelled at things when he put his mind to it, which was part of why he was so good at football. So when he decided to put his mind to figuring out the workings of his powers, he quickly noticed the baselines around what was going on, and was able to get a feel for what he was doing. Getting a feel for it, and controlling it actively were two very different things, and one things football had taught him was that practice and paying attention to the process in review were quite important.
Thus, while others took many months, and some even took years to get good control over their powers, Greg only took a few months, three or four, depending on when you start counting, to get the hang of his powers. He started showing off about a month after he started working on actively controlling them by making things bloom interesting ways, often near girls. One time he tried to get a flower to grow out of a tree just as a girl was getting close to it, but ended up causing the grass at his feet to get tangled in his shoes in the process, tripping him.
Another time he was climbing a tree and couldn't find a branch to grab onto where he wanted to, and ended up making the whole tree grow at the same rate. Which ended up getting him stuck in it, as he was too far away from the other branches now to even get down. He managed to get down eventually, but he refocused on precision when he was practicing alone after that.
This is not to say that he was able to skip being put in the “Proper Use of Powers and Controlling the Unknown” class mandatory for anyone who “presented powered symptoms”, though. It was mostly boring lectures on being a responsible citizen of his country, with some time spent in smaller focus groups with people who had similar powers trying to learn to control their powers better. This was where things really got chaotic, as he was already able to consciously control his powers to some extent before he was placed in the class.
Being in a room with other people who had similar enough powers and similarly low control over them as himself lead to many a weird experience. Once he was trying to get a stick to grow leaves next to a guy who's powers seemed to be related to making metal act alive, and his stick grew a branch that tickled the other guy. The other guy then twitched and lost focus, making his ball of metal grow arms and start trying to hit Greg before he was able to make it stop.
Another time he was trying to make a seed sprout when the guy next to him suddenly made what he was working on explode into power. As he tried to stop sneezing, he accidentally knocked the seed off his lap and it sprouted in midair, growing so rapidly that it knocked a few people off their chairs and the class was in chaos for a while after that. But eventually, and much faster than his teachers expected, he got the hang of his powers and was able to spend less time in manifestation practice, and more time in the ethics side of the class, making him ponder whether it might be wise to pretend not to be quite so in control after all.
He would have considered it more seriously, if it weren't for the fact that he had to have his powers fully under control before he was allowed back onto the football field. He really didn't want to stop playing football, and was planning on using it for a college scholarship program to help him get a degree in business management for when he retired after going pro. But alas, the teachers had set things up that way both for safety reasons, and to encourage their students to control their powers carefully.
And besides, new sports were being born out of the many powered individuals popping up all over the place and the unique ways they were able to use their powers. Greg may have been interested in football before, but now there were sports being invented by the day, and he wanted to get in on the ground floor of this new lucrative looking industry. And thus he made no effort to stop the categorizing and documentation of his powers, as he slowly began being able to heal plants offensively and defensively, even in open combat. Who could say no to becoming a world famous player in a brand new sport, after all?