Other alphas could recharge themselves from the ether just by resting. It’s infuriatingly efficient. I wasn’t a genius, but I’d been able to cobble together a ‘battery detector’ from an old quantum displacement meter I found in a junk shop. It’s not precise, but it gives me a rough idea of my pitiful reserves. Over the last two years, careful exercise, frequent and regrettable power debt, and a diet that would give a nutritionist a stroke had increased my energy storage potential. I’d just arbitrarily decided when I started that I had one hundred ‘points’ to play with, a number that had painfully, glacially increased to nearly two hundred and sixty by this point.
But other alphas, even starting out, seemed to have storage potentials in the thousands, and could get it all back after a good night's sleep and a power nap. One of my energy ‘points’ was about the equivalent of a single blatant effect, like speeding up the molecular vibration of air to create a ‘heat blast’ capable of putting a good scorch mark on concrete, or a minor reset like stitching up a small cut. Healing myself after Glacier Girl’s misplaced ice explosion had cost me a solid forty points, which probably left my ‘energy balance’ at a pathetic fifteen points left. I was running on fumes.
And there was only one way for me to refill my tank. It wasn’t meditation or connecting to the cosmic all. It was eating, exercising, and resting. And I ate a LOT. On a good day, if I won the lottery and could afford a side of beef, I could recover a solid fifteen points. Twenty-two if I managed a killer workout without using my power. But if I had tried to reset my armor? Well, that probably would have cost me hundreds of points, plunging me into an energy debt so deep I’d look like an extra from The Walking Dead.
Energy debt sucked. It meant I had overextended, spending energy I hadn’t actually generated yet. Of course, a little debt was inevitable—it was the only way I could expand my ‘bank’, like straining a muscle to make it stronger. But a serious energy debt could leave me zombielike, pale, shaky, and feeling like I had the flu combined with a hangover, for days or even weeks until I managed to shovel enough calories into my face to get back into a positive balance again. It’s a fantastic diet plan, if your goal is to be miserable and poor.
That’s another reason I couldn’t just make myself rich. Alchemy is a scam. Creating something like gold, even starting from a lump of lead, would cost me hundreds of points between the actual atomic conversion and safely absorbing the neutron fallout. Electrons are easy enough to push around; they’re flighty, promiscuous little things that almost seem to want to leave their orbits and shift their charge. Neutrons, however, are the stoic, unfriendly bouncers of the atomic club. They are profoundly difficult to pry out of their matrix. Or, at least that was the mental impression I got from using my power—like trying to convince a particularly stubborn boulder to please move out of the way.
And ‘free’ molecules, like the mixed salad of gases in the air or the loose associations in water, were pretty much easy as hell to push around. Creating a wall of condensed air to ‘simulate’ some kind of kinetic ability wasn’t particularly hard. But lifting the tightly-bound, sociable molecules of something as small as a penny was a hell of a lot harder. Heating it up, electrifying it, freezing it, or even releasing the molecular bonds to turn a penny into copper dust barely took a point of energy. But simultaneously and in concert, pushing every single molecule in that penny to actually move it was a nightmare that could take hundreds of energy points. It was cosmically unfair.
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No, I don’t know why it worked that way; it just did. I wasn’t a quantum physicist; I was a community college student with a weird party trick that could kill me. I just assumed that state changes were easier than telekinesis, a fundamental law of the universe, at least for me. If I robbed a bank, which I had done twice in order to set up a scene, ripping the vault door off its hinges was absolutely impossible. But melting the entire door into a sad, bubbling puddle of alloy or a neat pile of metallic dust? As easy as pie. Ironic, I know, since ‘super strength’ was one of the most common and marketable enhancements. It was a glaring weakness in my performance portfolio; I couldn’t play the ‘super strong villain’, which unfortunately put a hard cap on my earning potential. The market for villains who can turn things into dust is surprisingly niche.
My small studio apartment cost me over a thousand dollars a month. A princely sum for a box with bad plumbing. When I’d moved in, it had been a vaguely affordable six hundred a month, a student special that was reasonable for a single occupant or a couple just starting out. Last year, though, a new management company with a name like ‘Urbane Living Solutions’ had bought it up, painted all the ceilings a depressing matte black, added a neon lip to the algae-filled pool, and had started re-marketing the apartments as ‘edgy’ and ‘vibrant’ because there were two mid-scale bars and a student club within walking distance.
And, of course, ‘edgy’ doubled the rent. If I could have afforded to move, I would have, since I had about as much attraction to edginess as I did to self-cutting, but the same company had bought a bunch of the local complexes and done similar ‘flip theming’ to them. If I still wanted to stay within jogging distance of the school, my choice was between overpriced theme parks, only this time I’d need a roommate to afford the privilege of a black ceiling.
A roommate would be a catastrophic liability considering my side gig. Hell, I couldn’t even risk a girlfriend or participating in hook-up culture. All I needed was a nosy neighbor or a date barging in while I was trying to reset a dislocated shoulder, or wondering why I was walking around like a drugged-out zombie for a week after a big job. I wasn’t necessarily an introvert, but like Bruce Wayne, my lifestyle demanded I act like one, only without the faithful butler, the limitless trust fund, or the cool car. I had a ten-year-old Honda with a questionable transmission.
Between my ridiculous food bills, my crippling rent, and the Herculean task of scraping up enough cash for next semester’s tuition, I might have to take a new gig at half power, and resurrect my old ‘junkyard armor’ I’d built out of stainless steel scrap and sheer desperation when I first started out. All because some hot, powerful girl, who might even be a student right here at my own university, couldn’t control her ultimate combo move. My life was literally being derailed by a cutscene failure.
