I awake to see a tired-looking Sam looking down at me from the end of my bed.

  "Jacob, you up?" He asks quietly.

  Confusion floods my mind as I stare up at him. 'Why is he in my room watching me sleep?' I blink a few times as memories from the day before trickle into my foggy mind. 'Oh right, wheels and shit.'

  "You know, I always thought the first person I would hook up with in the group would be Noah, but I definitely don't mind waking up to your face," I say while shaking my head and sitting up in a poor attempt to wake myself up. I get out of the double bed, causing the wooden frame to groan slightly as I look around the pale blue walls of my room, marked with blue tack stains from recently removed posters.

  Sam snorts. "Speak for yourself; that bedhead doesn't do you any favours, mate."

  "Gasp, a one-night stand then," I grasp my heart for dramatic effect. "Turn around? I need to get changed," I say while bringing out the clothes I plan to wear during the day from my inventory. I also grab some underwear and socks from my clothes drawer.

  "I'm sorry, but you aren't quite my type," he says, turning to look the other way.

  "But I can change for you, Sammy, "I snorted before changing the subject. How are you holding up?" I asked, putting on my clothing and protective gear.

  "Yeah, I'm ok, well, no, I'm not. I don't think anyone is, but I will get there." He pauses for a moment as if to gather his thoughts. "I keep seeing their faces, the dead. How they stare off into nothingness. So many lives lost and broken before their time." He sits on my bed and stares into space

  'Shit, I don't know how to deal with sad people. Ummm…Hugs? People like hugs, right?' I take a step before him.

  Before my potentially disastrous attempt at cheering Sam up comes to fruition, he takes a shaky breath and carries on. "I know we can't do anything for them now. Maybe bury the ones we can find, hold a few funerals or something…"

  'That would take ages and hold up far too much time.'

  "But the people in the warehouse, what if they died?" He looked up at me sorrowfully as if hoping I could tell him everything was ok. "I get they had a gun and wanted to stop us, but I can't get their faces out of my mind; what if they died so we could take a few cans of baked fucking beans? I don't want to hurt people. I wanted to become a Doctor, for fucks sake. Do you think we killed them?" He trails off, filling the air with a pregnant silence until I figure out it is my turn to talk.

  "We? No. I would be the only killer. I caused the collapse, and I take full responsibility. And I would do it again if it meant we would walk away in one piece. I'm sad they were there, but I won't beat myself up about what happened. Is that the right or even moral mindset? No idea. But if you want to blame someone, blame me and get some sleep." I lie with a straight face as I try to comfort a friend to feel better about the potential deaths of people waving guns at us. It's not something I personally had on my apocalypse bingo card, but it was still in the early days, and I haven't exactly filled it out yet.

  It took a few more minutes of talking for Sam to get ready for bed and finally give me time to play with myself in the dark. And who could blame me? What self-respecting teenage boy doesn't want to see new interesting ways magical powers gifted from a deranged God could tear their body apart?

  'Now to spend the next hour alone with my thoughts, how hard can that be?' I lasted a grand total of two minutes. After escaping the dark recesses of my mind, I started obsessively training and planning.

  New notebooks appeared in flashes of blue light as I began writing and sketching every idea that managed to break free from the storming recesses of my mind. It turns out that when I was working on something I actually enjoyed, I could briefly tame my thoughts into something coherent away from the noise of hollowing memories and intense flashes of wayward thoughts. No mind-numbing meds were required, something I'm sure would bring teachers everywhere into a fit of blind rage. Well, that's if most of them aren't dead now. But I digress.

  Shaking my head, I get back to work. Each of my supposed powers had its own notebook as I tried to sketch out training and possible uses to better my chances of survival and enjoy my new life.

  With my thoughts safely guarded upon the white pages of my sketchbooks, I decided to try to reduce the adverse effects of my powers first so I could use them without incapacitating myself. But to do this, I needed materials to rapidly fire off my abilities to build up my stamina in whatever weird occult shit was happening within my body. In every nerdy fantasy and sci-fi book I have devoured to hide from reality, the mythical superpower stuff always worked like a muscle that improved with training. While it was depressing that was the best I had to go off, it made sense in the context that our lives were now used to entertain Gods on a multiversal scale.

  All of which led me down what has to be one of the strangest training montages I have ever heard of. Sitting on the cold wooden floor in a pile of recycling, dry heaving and eating glass while I struggled to draw an airtight mask in a notebook. You know, like a normal person. So far, the breathing and eating abilities don't have any noticeable negative effects. I feel fine even when I hold my breath for a solid 20 minutes. Other than the bone-deep nausea that tormented my every waking moment from breaking down the chemical bonds that hold together our very universe, but that was already well established.

  'Melting something for 6 minutes is my current limit. On to the next power! Now, how does one step between dimensions?'

  As my stomach recovers, I look around at the piles of twisted metal, plastic, glass and cardboard, thinking about how to enter the afterlife without dying. 'Or was it the spirit realm? Either way.' Turns out it was super easy. Ish. Getting into the spirit realm/afterlife or whatever you want to call it was as easy as thinking of it and flipping a mental switch. It causes whatever powers the abilities to coarse through my veins like an electrical current, this time from what feels like my skin, through my whole body and into my heart, like it was trying to compress me within myself.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  It caused small, mild muscle camps, but the real problem was the nerve-tearing pain that shot through my system, eating away at my sanity and shredding my willpower. I couldn't see, I couldn't stand, I could barely think as my body was ravaged by misery, making it twitch and spasm like a possessed puppet. I gasped, screamed and shrieked like a banshee, clawing at my skin, trying to remove the root of my suffering that seemed to seep into every pore, infiltrating into my very being and twisting it from the inside out.

  I wanted it to stop, begged for it, my sense of self slowly eroding away into the sea of suffering. I don't know how long I lay on that floor. A day? A week? Did it even matter? Slowly, ever so slowly, my suffering seemed to ebb away bit by bit until I was able to unclench enough to take a gulp of the thick, foul-tasting air and open my eyes to take a look at the world around me.

  It looked just like my living room, with the TV and small archway that leads into the dining room, but the shadows were elongated, and everything was tinted a deep red from a thick miasma that permeated everything like a toxic smog. Thick, viscous wisps of it swamped around my comatose body, trying to dig under my skin like parasitic worms looking for their next meal. For whatever reason, they were concentrated around my stomach, twisting and churning around my midriff in a morbid dance before slowly drifting off as if losing interest.

  The more wisps that left, the less the pain tormented my body. If I had been sane, I'm sure I would have found the whole process fascinating, but in my current state, I was lucky enough to not bite my own tongue. Time crawls by at a snail's pace as more and more wisps drift off and fade into the surrounding blood-red miasma. But even as the last of the smog tendrils left, I still writhed in agony, swearing with every curse under the sun and some I'm pretty sure I just made up in my blinding misery.

  But I was lucid, well, lucid enough to realise I could just leave the realm at the flick of a mental switch. And yet I knew deep down that If I left things Like this, I wouldn't be able to make myself come back. I would lock away one of my powers, a quarter of my survivability, hidden behind a wall of trauma. So I grit my teeth, curled into the fetal position and focused on filling my lungs with putrid smoke. The torment had lessened, but it still felt like I was being drowned in burning oil, and I needed something to distract myself from the torture.

  "If it's the red that causes the pain.." A feral grunt of pain forces itself through my throat and out into the world. "Fucker. Then I need to adapt, take some of it with me, use it as…Shit!...Use it as a weapon." I think out loud, trying to focus my thoughts on a solution rather than the enticing idea of simply giving up and going home.

  I snarl at myself for letting the thought surface again. It is a temporary solution to a vast problem I don't even know the beginning or end of. So, I pushed through. I will paper to appear in a flash of blue muted by the red and scratch out whatever concepts swam through the miserable recesses of my mind. Miasma forged metal into jewellery for consent exposure and adaptation. Blades, water soakers mixed with the red mist, handles turned toxic to control who can even use the tools of death, shrapnel for explosives and toxins galore.

  All decent ideas in theory, and yet here I was, sweating bullets and practically begging for death if It meant I could make the torture stop. Despite it all, I held on, I've spent far too much of my life begging for death, and something interesting finally happened. I will be damned if I let even a drop of it slip through my fingers.

  With shaking hands, I took out one of the cheap green-handled knives from the catering rooms and began to melt and bend it methodically. I first dulled the blade so as not to accidentally cut myself and then systematically melted and mixed the metal, trying to make as many air bubbles as possible. It took awhile, and my angle from the floor was horrible, but eventually, the metal started to take on a slight red tint that gradually grew deeper as the passage of time crawled onward in its endless march.

  Eventually, I simply couldn't take any more abuse. I don't know how long I had been in this hell hole, but I was a wreck and could barely move any more, I grabbed the tinted metal and tried to pick up my notes, but my trembling hands missed the mark, and instead of picking up the paper I ended up giving myself a shallow paper cut across my thumb. An action I very much regretted when I finally saw where the wisps had gone, or more likely how they were formed.

  Like a moth to a flame, the red miasma flowed to the cut, thickening and twisting around the wound before rushing in, past flesh and blood and into whatever essence made up my being. The pain was immediate, and this time, I could not hold on; my thoughts raced past the invading torture, and I found the mental switch to hop between dimensions and hit it with as much willpower as I could muster.

  The results were as immediate as before. One second, I was surrounded by red, and the next, I was lying on the cold wooden living room floor, drenched in sweat, shaking like a leaf and panting like a priest at a kindergarten. I wasn't exactly proud of my current state or the whimpering that escaped my lips, but I could finally pull myself up into a sitting position and rest my head against the chair behind me as I tried to calm my racing heart and fried nerves.

  It took a few minutes to break out of my dase and would have probably taken longer if I didn't feel my left hand start to become sticky with a pooling liquid. I look down with tiered half-lidded eyes that slowly widen when I see the small paper cut on my left thumb had turned into a large gash, and the sticky wetness was my own blood steadily streaming out of the open wound and onto the clenched bit of paper.

  I stared at it momentarily, my mind not quite comprehending what was happening before I started to mechanically clean and dress the wound. 'There is no way paper can cut that deep and wide. Was it the mist? Does it worsen the wounds and pain? Is that why it collected around the cut before I left? But then, why was it around my stomach when I first arrived?' I had a lot of questions and no one to ask them, too, and the more I thought about the hellish realm, the more inconsistencies I noticed.

  The curtains and windows were open there with none of the glasses we laid out to act as a primitive warring system. None of our spare bags were laid out from our late-night organising. It was as if the realm was a time capsule of the day before. 'Or it had some freaky time dilation going on.' I pause, wrapping up my injured thumb to contemplate the possibility. I had no idea how that could work, but I could test it with a couple of watches. I quickly finished bandaging my thumb and noted it in the spirit realm notebook, along with a brief description of the toxic miasma.

  The best theory I could come up with is that the red targeted the spirit, soul or whatever you want to call it simply because it was in the spirit realm. This would suggest that it puts pressure on the soul, which was the constant pain I couldn't pinpoint. I also theorised that getting to the soul through injuries was easier, hence the increase in pain and worsening injuries as the mist travelled through it to wherever the soul was, and it was around my stomach because I was abusing my phase of matter abilities.

  That or it fed off pain. Maybe both? Maybe that's what it meant by "watch out for the realm's inhabitants." I had envisioned it would be ghosts or shit, but trillions of red microorganisms trying to wiggle into my living body were equally as terrifying. I would have to test to see if I could manipulate the mist as I "Couldn't affect living organisms."

  There were so many tests and things to train, but first, I would have to build up my tolerance to the miasma with the metal I gathered, and I would only be able to test it when I was alone anyway. Deep in thought, I tap my finger against my notebook before storing it away in a flash of blue into my inventory. Because for now, I needed to rest, I could feel my mind and body beginning to give out after my ordeal, and the day hadn't even started yet.