7) Killing time
Most people with powers at a rank of 1 lived pretty normal lives. The type of jobs that you could get with your power at that level seldom paid all that much more than any other job you could get with no degree or experience.
A rank 2 on the other hand, tended to either look for jobs that their power favored or gradually drifted into one, especially people who inherited their powers from a parent and grew up with the idea of using those powers to make a living.
For a rank 3, you get recruited.
Me, since I was officially an S2, I did the normal teenager jobs. Then I went to community college and took a few Concentric University courses. But no career path really appealed to me.
So like a lot of people with powers at a 2, I drifted into a job that my powers could help me with.
Collecting road kill.
I didn’t try to ride the flattened corpses. But I could find them a lot easier and the city paid out in bounties for cleaning things up. So the bodies that got thrown off the road when they got hit, or crawled off to die, that normally would just rot away undiscovered got me cash.
Besides, the crows and the mice were fine with road kill. Meat was meat.
Between the cash from the city, for the roadkill and taking care of the powered animals, the half acre of kitchen gardens, the chickens, and going hunting in the national park. I was doing pretty good. Not rich, but comfortable as I let the years drift by.
Then some Genius 2 came up with an automated robot with chemical sensors that could sense rotting bodies, and I lost my main source of income.
I watched an interview with the guy once, a college kid who saw the little bodies around parts of the city and felt bad about people who lost pets and never knew what had become of them. The "Bring out your dead" bots were his college graduation project. His business adviser made him rename them Bio-recovery Drones.
That was when my friend Mike hooked me up with a Mortician named Adams.
Mike was always a schemer, and this one was a dozy. While I couldn’t bring people back to life who had been dead for too long. I could fix them up well enough that the people who had died in a way that wreaked their bodies could still have an open coffin burial.
Adams often had to undo some of my work to prepare them for burial, but he quickly got a reputation for being a miracle worker. A well paid miracle worker.
At my insistence, he did do one "restoration" job for every two he charged for, but since he didn't have to do the work himself, and he wasn't that bad of a guy, he agreed to it.
I got paid, he got a lot of work, and we both got to help some grieving people say goodbye to a face instead of a lid every now and then.
It sometimes took a few hours to fix up a body since I wasn’t “pushing” the regeneration to get as much work done as I could before somebody woke up. So when I drove out to the Adams funeral home I always brought a tablet along to watch or read while I did my work. While my body was stretched out on a bed in the guest room in the apartment above the funeral home I was getting paid to watch Tube videos or read free novels on my favorite web novel site.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Now when someone is buried with jewelry or other valuables, they usually get brought over on the day of the funeral and then put on the remains while a member of the family watched to make sure nothing went missing. But the three idiots who decided to rob the corpse of one Mrs. Suki Sumter decided to force their way into the funeral home the night before.
Really, if you wanted to rob her corpse, the Sumter’s have a private crypt. I knew that because graveyards had been my training grounds when I was a kid. A crowbar could have gotten them access with no witnesses if they had waited for two days.
Mrs. Sumter had been sitting in her bathtub overnight before she was found, and she had kind of… saturated. So my tablet was sealed up in a plastic bag, as one was needed rather than being largely symbolic and I had set it up on top of the sheet covered corpse's chest rather than hold it up and have it pull things loose from her hands with it’s weight.
Which is how the three thugs, Mr Adams and his wife who worked as the funeral home’s secretary found me when the Adams were led in at gunpoint. "Where's her stuff, old man."
I turned the corpse's eyes over to see the three idiots with one gun between them, the other two had a baseball bat and a machete.
The one with the baseball was staring at me with a horrified look. At first, I thought he had seen me move the eyes, but then he asked. "Why is the dead lady watching Tube?”
The guy with the gun looked over and then frowned at Adams, “Man, that’s disrespectful. Don’t be leaving stuff on a dead body. God dam man.”
Then I opened my eyes back upstairs.
Yeah, even in an elderly, waterlogged body I could have taken care of three idiots as a Brute 3. Out of terror if nothing else. But they would talk and people would ask questions. Besides I had spent over an hour firming up Mrs. Sumter and throwing someone’s grandma into a fight felt a little wrong.
The smart thing to do would have been to call the cops and let the professionals handle it. But I was worried that the idiots might get violent when Adams was unable to hand over jewelry which he didn’t have.
Adams and his wife didn’t have powers, or at least none that either of them had ever mentioned, while nothing short of a shot to the head would kill me. At least as far as I know. And if the thugs did somehow kill me, well, that had only been a temporary problem the last time that had happened.
I still called the cops and assured them I would be a good boy and find a place to hide.
Sorry Shimmer, I do lies.
The funeral home had an elevator, an old slow one, to which I pressed the button to send it down to the basement but I sent it down empty. The reason? It dinged when it arrived at a floor.
While it was slowly going down two stories, I took the steps down to the basement and got there in time to find a confused guy with a bat looking around for the mysterious elevator passenger that he had heard from the sound of the elevator arriving.
I had wanted to take some martial arts classes at a strip mall when I had delusions of being some sort of superhero as a teen. Instead, my grandpa had set me up with an instructor who taught Brute 1s and 2s since I would have hurt someone in a normal class.
From Mr. Turlow, I learned how to fight normal people without hurting them.
Before we learned how to do a chokehold, the coach let us experience one, so I had some sympathy for the baseball guy when I stepped up behind him and wrapped my arms around his neck and my hand over his mouth. "Shhhh, just go to sleep and you'll be fine. We won't bury you alive in a coffin with a dead body and a box of matches.”
And sure, saying that just made him struggle even more. But screw him. You threaten people, try to rob them, scare the crap out of them. You deserve to have a scare put into you, along with some bruises.
Then karma reared its ugly head as bat boy dropped his bat as he passed out. It clattered back and forth from handle to tip a few times before it began to audibly roll away.
“Pete, you okay?”
I looked into the eyes of the machete guy from over the head of an unconscious Pete who was still in my choke hold. “Well, he’s still alive. Trust me I know.”
The machete guy just had to start yelling. "Arny, we got trouble out here. Some guy took out Pete. Hey!”
The last part was from me dropping Pete and running away.
Yes, I have superpowers. He had a machete. With a B2’s toughness, he wasn't going to chop off my arm or anything, and I could easily heal from what he could do. But my real body, unlike a corpse, can feel pain.
No thanks, maybe if was a choice of someone without powers getting hurt or me, I would take the hit. But I just wanted everyone to get out of this alive.
“I already called the cops, grab your buddy and go before they get here.”
From around the corner, I could hear them yelling at the Adams about staying where they were, and then I heard the elevator door open as I looked across the hall at the circuit breaker.
As I heard the door close, I pulled open the little door of the metal power box and saw that all of the circuits were neatly labeled. Including the one saying elevator. I was glad they were being reasonable and leaving without hurting anyone, but why give the chance to come back, or just go after someone else?
Later on, I got scolded by a young blond police officer who was unamused when I asked for her phone number in case I remembered anything else about the case. I wasn’t sure if she was annoyed due to me hitting on her while she was trying to do her job, or for hitting on her while looking like I was several years younger than her.
I got Mrs. Sumter solidified after another hour of reading Forum posts.
I did not get paid for dealing with the three criminals since I was not a licensed Superhero under my real name or even a registered support member of a team with a licensed superhero on it. I can see the reasoning, but it still seemed cheap.