8 May 2021 - Day 1

  My wife doesn’t deal well with change. Quitting her last job to get a new one was an actual ordeal for her, even though the job she left was filled with horrible bosses and nasty coworkers. The end of the world will not be good for her stress levels. I watched her as she went into the kitchen and grabbed a bag of chips. As she started in on them, she got another water bottle from the fridge to alleviate the influx of salt.

  “Ok, so how do they work?” Sandra asked, looking at me expectantly.

  “Theoretically,” I said with a grin.

  She groaned. I grinned at my little victory. “Yes, theoretically. How do I theoretically use my powers?”

  “Well, you used yours when you were scared and angry.” I said, smashing my fist into my hand. “Remember smooshing spiders without actually touching them while covered in a halo of blue light?” She nodded. “Well, I buried those bodies and the dead dog in the front yard with my Terrastria, my earth magic. I was still scared and angry and full of adrenaline and it seemed to jiggle something loose inside of me, like a muscle I’d never used before. I even pulled up a big rock from twenty feet below the ground using magic. Now I just have to figure out the others.”

  I turned and walked into the bathroom, grabbing the little plant next to the window. Setting it down in front of Sandra, I sat on the floor across from her where she relaxed on the couch. My big stone was right next to me and I put a hand on it. “I say, start with something easy. I have earth magic so I’m going to practice with this rock. You have plant magic, so start with that little vine. Touch it, meditate, try and make it move or grow or something.”

  “Or I could just pick it up?” The clay pot holding the vine glowed blue as Sandra cupped one hand upwards, lifting it a few inches off the table.

  “Or you could just pick it up.” The admiration was clear in my voice. “So this, this is your easy power, the one you use instinctively huh?”

  “It’s just like using my hands that aren’t actually my hands.” Miming setting down an object, the floating pot mimicked the motion of Sandra’s hands, settling down with a soft thump.

  I gave a little golf clap. “That’s pretty awesome! Now you see how much you can lift easily, how many things you can lift at the same time, and far away can you lift something, that kind of thing.”

  Turning to the basketball sized stone next to me, I squinted at it while pressing my fingers into it. “And I’m going to be doing similar stuff with this bad boy . . . and maybe the dirt in your pot too.”

  Focusing inward, I fiddled around in my head until I found that little spot where my powers seemed to flow from. It took a minute but the spot behind my sternum began to warm up as my focus intensified. After relaxing and letting it ease through me, I pressed my mind into the stone as I pushed my hands into it. The grayish ivory stone flowed around my hands like Playdoh. I pulled my hands out and a coating of stone came with it.

  “This is so damn cool!” I celebrated. The table in the living room had a couple stone coasters and there were a few glass ones as well. Reaching forward, I tapped the glass ones hearing a slight tinking sound. I didn’t even feel the strain from working with stone this way. Plunging my hands back into the main stone ball, I coated my arms in it. Elated with my success, I pulled at the stone with my will and it rolled up my arms and then covered my shoulders and hung down like a cuirass.

  It wasn’t a quick process, more akin to rolling out soft clay. Most of the stone sat up on the shoulders like football shoulder pads. Visualization and willing that visualization with magical energy seemed to form the basis for getting the powers to work. After a few minutes, my arms and shoulders were completely covered with the stone. I knocked on it to verify that it was still as hard as rock.

  “It looks like you’re getting eaten alive by living stone.” Sandra commented with a cocked eyebrow. “It’s like the Blob, but gray.”

  I laughed, peeling the stone off and molding it back into a ball in front of me. “I have to try something else! Terrastria supposedly works on all things that come from the earth, and we have that big, broken, cast-iron boiler from the freaking fifties in our basement!” Grabbing the big stone, I molded it so that it formed into armor again, coating my shoulders and trunk. I didn’t even feel the weight which meant my super strength was kicking in. That ability seemed more intuitive than the others, especially since it just seems to kick in when I need it.

  **********

  Thomas

  I’m not really sure what to do. I’m about twenty five miles from home which is just over a solid day’s hike, or, I can haul my butt to my brother’s house which is roundabouts twelve miles away. Crap. Forgetting the part where I have three new powers from God knows where, I don’t even know how to use them, and that’s ignoring the most pressing need, seeing if I’m in the real world. I know, I get it, I’m alive, but there’s so much strange in my head right now that reality itself seems not real.

  “Ok, what can a hallucination not simulate?” I asked aloud, looking around. I started with the basics. I ran my fingers over every part of my body, yes, every part. Then, I pinched most every part just to make sure that pain was still a thing, which it was unfortunately.

  My clothes had rips and tears in them and yup, my motorcycle was still in three pieces not too far from me. Taking out my phone, I quickly dropped it as the screen almost singed my finger. “Oh hell no!” Giving it a light tap with my boot, the phone sizzled in the dirt. “Feels real . . .” The cracked screen wavered as the sun reflected off the jagged bits of glass.

  Picking it up, this time with a glove on, I walked over to my Suzuki and put the phone down. Pain. Hallucinations aren’t supposed to simulate pain, right? Eh, what do I know, I just graduated college. With my mind barely made up, I reached down and picked up a shard of glass from the shattered remnants of my motorcycle’s windshield, quickly pricking the meat of my palm.

  “Ow! Shit!” Ok. I guess I’m actually real. The bead of crimson looked creepy against the backdrop of my pale skin. Just to keep in the feels of the trippy moment, I poked it, feeling the thick stickiness of blood cling to me. Yup, still liquid.

  “Somebody help!”

  “What a realistic mindfuck.” I growled, getting a bit irritated as I pushed my circumstances further and further away from the forefront of my mind.

  “Somebody please!”

  Wiping my hand off on my pants, I shook every part of my body one last time to make sure nothing was too off. Luckily, I was. Looking up at the twenty foot hill in front of me, I started up it, taking a quick glance again at my list of abilities. So, bone magic, shield magic, and some kind of energy storage I don’t understand. Literally nothing offensive, great.

  As far as the eye could see, both going north or south on the interstate, were horrible car wrecks. Smashed up trucks and devastated cars spotted the road. What made the grisly scene have an element of disbelief was that plenty of thick gray dust was gathered in big clumps up and down the road. Some of them had clothes and shoes sticking out of them.

  “Anybody! Please!”

  “Damn this hallucination sounds real.”

  Grant

  The ugly boiler loomed in the dirtiest part of the undeveloped side of the basement. The people who owned this house before us finished half the basement, making one side nice where people could hang out and then the other side of the basement is bare concrete. The unfinished side is mainly used for storage as well as where the washer and dryer go. Although there were a bunch of pipes all around the cast iron boiler, they had all been disconnected about twenty years ago. The guy we called to fix it quoted us a price of sixteen grand because it was basically a giant dinosaur from the 1950s that nobody had parts for anymore and then the next quote to get it removed was for twenty grand, to which I said ‘hell no’.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Today is the day that I can give those men the middle finger.

  Leaning forward, I gripped the five by five by five foot cube of grimy black metal and pushed my will into it. My chest heated up again as trickles of power roughly coursed down my arms. After a minute of channeling and purely expressing raw will, the outer covering of iron sloughed off, slumping down my arms until I looked like an under-budget knockoff of Iron Man.

  “I hope the stairs can handle this weight!” I grunted, taking one unsteady step at a time as my earth magic and super strength worked hand together to keep me moving. “Eh, I’ll test that later.” My magic filled me with joy and my body sang as I did twenty thousand dollars worth of labor in ten minutes. Before I knew it, I had the entire cast iron boiler melted down and shaped into cubes with handles that were roughly twelve inches long. That meant I had about sixty-two cubes of cast iron to play with. The reason I didn’t have a hundred and twenty five cubes is due to the large amount of hollow space within the boiler that was devoted to heating the house.

  But I got even more excited the more I thought about it. Cars don’t work. Trucks don’t work. Any metal thing that runs off of electricity is currently a piece of junk. Which means that I can scavenge any vehicle and pick it apart with my earth magic and super strength! Old cars are made from solid steel and the newer cars, while they’re a lot lighter, they still have a bunch of useful metal. People actually repurpose the steel springs from cars in forging for modern versions of medieval weaponry. After molding five blocks of cast iron to cover most of my body, I walked slowly to the living room.

  “Guess what this is?” I crowed, proudly giving a turn in the middle of the living as if I were a runway model. I struck a ballet pose and then flowed into a body-building superman pose before flowing into a set of jumping jacks.

  Sandra stared in disbelief. “That can’t be the boiler, can it? Did you mess with it just like you did with that stone?”

  Grinning like a sly cat, I flexed my biceps. “Yup! It’s just a proof of concept but think about it! I can make armor! I can easily mold metal to fit our needs! It’s not a super quick process but I can realistically fortify this house to be a freaking castle!”

  Sandra didn’t look as happy about it as I thought she’d be.

  “You think we need to fortify? Do we need to make a castle? Can’t we go somewhere safer?”

  I took all the armor off and put the molded blocks in front of the fireplace. “Honey, we uh, where can we go? For real? What place is safe?”

  “The military . . . the police . . . can’t they do something? Can’t they set up a safe place where things can get back to normal?”

  I picked up a cast iron block and tossed it into the air, deftly catching it over and over as if it were a light tennis ball. On the last toss as it came down, I used my earth magic with extra juice to mold it into a form fitting gauntlet. It came easy to me, as if the earth wanted to be molded. Flexing my will, I experimented, using more power than was necessary. The metal flowed faster than before, morphing the gauntlet into a crude miniature impersonation of a machine gun. I noticed that the more I played with a specific chunk of metal, the more easily it continued to mold to my will.

  Sighing with more than a hint of relief, I shrugged as I laid out my dark musings. “Babe, if my guns don’t work, then the military’s guns probably won’t either. And that includes law enforcement not to mention all the gun stashes of the prepper community and veterans. To stay on this line of thinking, if sixty percent of the military and police survived, don’t you think they’ll take their new abilities to go check on their families? And get this, it probably gets worse. Think about the prisons?”

  Sandra turned green. “Shit, this is way worse than I thought.”

  I nodded. “Unfortunately, that’s probably true. All the prisons across America, how long will it hold them? We are going to be prepared for the worst, and then we’re going to have to be prepared for just plain evil. Without guns, there’s no police and no army. Doubly so since there’s no communication, they won’t be able to coordinate anything. Each army base will be its own city and every city outside of that will be a warzone. Shit, gangs will be better off than most cities in terms of protection.”

  Sandra’s face fell further and further as I explained my thoughts. “But you have powers, so that means women aren’t outgunned anymore when it comes to dealing out violence. Even the weakest person could have willed their way through that hellish madness and gotten powers to be a goddamn hero.”

  I couldn’t help but feel a bit of happiness deep down in my soul and I know I shouldn’t, but this is an opportunity. This is a once in a lifetime chance to do whatever, something, anything different. It’s almost like settling into a new world. Yes, it generally does suck but every sucky day has a silver lining no matter how thin.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, trying to provide a modicum of comfort while hiding my hint of inappropriate joy. “You are in the best position of anyone. Once you figure out your abilities you can go anywhere, start over anywhere! With your plant magic, you’ll be able to grow anything anywhere. Your psychokinesis will keep you safe from pretty much anything and I’m sure the other thing is kick ass too!”

  “You think?” She said, wiping her eyes.

  “Oh yes hun,” I said, smiling as big as I could. “Definitely.”

  Determination flooded my wife as she turned to glare at the vine. “Then I better get started.”

  “Go slow,” I cautioned as I turned to play with the chunk stone by itself. “It’s just as important to learn to use our powers safely. What are the limits and what happens if we get close to them or go past them?”

  I switched between the basketball sized stone and the dirt in the pot for about thirty minutes. It really did get easier the more I did it, kind of like relearning an old skill. I shaped the stone into big gauntlets around my arms complete with spikes, changed the colors of the stone as well as compressing it to make it much harder to penetrate.

  While shaping the stone was pretty easy, my attempts at conjuring the material were nowhere near as successful. Moving it around and turning the basic stone into different things was as easy as lifting a tennis ball but conjuring a disc of stone the size of a quarter left me feeling like I had just sprinted a couple football fields. Beads of sweat ran down my face as I mushed the new stone bit into the main chunk.

  I breathed real deep a few times for air, feeling like I’d just sprinted a hundred yards as fast as I could. “Note to self, conjuration sucks!”

  If it was that hard for me, and part of my power is to have ‘great magical strength’, I reasoned that conjuration must be far harder for normal magic users. Deciding I had to test it out a bit more, I picked up a cube of cast iron and waited a few minutes until my metaphysical tank wasn’t screaming at me. In my other hand, I concentrated on a spot the size of a pencil eraser and willed a tiny piece of cast iron into existence.

  I gasped as a metaphysical horse kick smacked me right in the soul. Gripping my chest, I scrunched forward. The attempt would have knocked me on my ass if I weren’t already sitting on the floor with my back leaning against the wall.

  “Ok, ok, can’t be doing that again!” I gasped, beads of sweat popping out of my forehead.

  “Are you ok? You look like death warmed over.” I turned my head to Sandra wreathed in vines that nuzzled her like a loving pet.

  “And you look like Poison Ivy’s hot cousin!” I grinned, wiping my face on my sleeve. Her face was blank. “You know, Batman? His redhead crush that he couldn’t fuck cause, well, you know.” Still blank. “Nevermind.” I decided to leave that fantasy alone. “Anyways, can you make them grow thorns? Or fruit? I know it’s not a fruit vine but just try, like, put some strawberries on there.” I wasn’t as out of breath anymore but my body still had the post-exercise shakes.

  She gave a quick concerned smile, god she’s beautiful. Blue eyes that are a lighter shade to my own, standing at about five inches over five feet (when she’s not floating) put her at half a foot shorter than me. Her lightly tanned skin had a healthy glow of good living and exercise that had dimmed a bit for a couple years due to constant desk work. Magic really did look good on her.

  She grinned. “Is that a way of telling me you’re hungry?”

  “I wouldn’t be opposed to snacks,” I smiled back. That didn’t fool her. She could see that my stomach was shaking the walls of its prison in desperate rage. “If we don’t find a way to keep food cold then we’re going to need to eat the stuff in the fridge first and then work on the food in the deep freezer when it eventually defrosts. Which also means we’re going to see if propane still works on the gas grill, uhg. And if we’re really screwed, we still have a stack of firewood next to the house.”

  “Sandwiches it is.” As my beautiful wife rustled up some grub, I chugged some water to shut my stomach up and began working out what my powers meant in terms of capability and potential. Opening up my status screen and staring at it, I read it over and over.

  “The super strength is basic, pretty easy to understand.” I said, mentally ticking off one option. I paused for a second as I thought it over. While I haven’t done a full battery of tests to figure out my limits, the fact that I can easily heft a solid rock the size of a basketball with one hand is telling of what I might be able to do. To me, it felt like tossing around a baseball, not a thirty pound chunk of stone.

  The other side of that coin, the greater magical strength, now that in and of itself can be a game changer. Logically, I will probably be able to outlast or overpower my problems which will give me time to gain enough skill and practice so that finesse will be able to play a bigger role the longer a fight goes on.

  Insanity aside, this magic shit is pretty cool.