[X] Experiment more with your powers.
-[X] Before/After School
The Ascendance
You decide to see what else you can do with your powers - if, indeed, you can do anything with them - before heading to school. You close your eyes, and reach for the feeling in the back of your head. For a moment, you feel a pressure, a sense of infinity contained entirely within your skull.
Then the pressure expands, and a certain flow settles about you. In the air around you, in the ground beneath your feet, in your own body - you feel that constant, ever-shifting flow. You feel it, and you feel passage, of instants flickering past each other continuously, of eternities long past.
Passive Skill Discovered: Temporal Awareness
The flow of time is opened to your senses, and with it, you are aware of its passage, of how old everything is, of how young this world is. Should other Embodiments interfere with this flow, you will be aware of the disruption.
You take a shuddering breath as you realize how ancient things are. The earth... billions of years old. The Universe... You nearly laugh as you think back to what your physics teacher had said about the age of the Universe. If only they knew.
You reach out for the flow. You feel like you could manipulate it somehow, reach in with a clumsy hand and meddle with its passage, manipulate time-
"Kira!" Your mother calls you. "Kira, get down here and eat your breakfast or you're going to be late!"
You sigh to yourself. Speaking of time.
Reluctantly, you quickly wash and dress yourself, spending only the briefestof moments applying your make-up. You've never felt you needed very much to be pretty - you were blessed in that regard, really. But now, it feels as though your features are... more defined somehow. More regally beautiful, rather than a teenage prettiness.
You thunder downstairs, passing your little brother on the way. You muss his hair as you pass, and he half-heartedly swipes at you. You giggle and continue down.
Cereal has already been laid out on the table by your mother - a supremely pretty lady, even at the age of thirty eight. She has your same dusky skin and brown eyes, and you obviously inherited your impressive bust from her. She has however taken to dyeing her hair blonde.
"Kira, you look different today." Your mother comments. "Did you do something new with your make-up."
"Just went for a slightly different look, mom." You reply, and tuck into your shredded wheat flakes.
Your brother enters and grunts a greeting to your mom, slumping down into a seat and eating his own breakfast. You finish up before he's half-done, dump your bowl into the sink, grab your bag, and bid farewell to your brother and mother.
School is just down the road from where you live, so you pluck out your phone from its hiding place in your jacket and power it on. You flick through a couple of texts from Sarah and Tià, your companions on the volleyball team. Sarah was the captain. but really, you were the best player, and Tià wasn't far behind you.
Sarah wants to meet up at lunch to talk strategy, and you tap out a quick reply. Tià, meanwhile, has sent you a long text about her boyfriend, Cam. Apparently, they've been getting more serious lately. You scroll down, uninterested. Really, you were happy for her, but the high school drama of yesterday seemed... boring, now.
You sigh, and enter school.
(The Ascendance)
The first few lessons are uneventful. You have to sit through an hour and a half of Ms. Kerrigan talking to you about factorisation of quadratics, but you find the lesson a lot easier than you would've a few days ago.
You meet up with Sarah at break, and she informs you of the new formation they're trying out. You'll be moved up front now, which is new. It'll run for a few days, just to gauge whether it's a good thing or not. Sarah has always been very competitive about the volleyball team, so you aren't particularly surprised.
After lunch, you have a double period to see how the new formation pans out.
And boy does it pan out. The ball is easily followed to your eyes, and you think you're jumping just a little higher than normal. And when you hit the ball - you really hit the ball.
You crush you're opponents easily. You do usually win, but this wasn't even fair. Sarah hugs you in joy, cheering and celebrating with the rest of the team.
Sarah invites you to hang out after school, but you decline. You want to test out your new powers a little more.
You head to the park, to a little secluded corner hidden by a huge weeping willow and a bench. You know that the old seniors used to hang out here to smoke, but it seems it isn't in use at the moment.
You close your eyes, and focus on that flow.
Aeon. Instance. Eternity. Voyage.
The flow is constant, but you feel as though you can... interfere. You reach out with that pressure in the back of your head, and dip it into the flow. Instantly you feel a swelling as though the flow has been blocked.
To put it into a metaphor - if the flow was a river, then this pressure would be like dropping stones into its path. The flow was partially blocked, true, but some was still getting through.
You open your eyes. The leaves of the weeping willow are drifting glacially around you, and a leaf flutters past your face in slow motion. You turn, at normal speed, to see what is happening. All around you, the world appears to bemoving in slow motion.
You're... slowing down time, somehow.
Active Skill Discovered: Temporal Deceleration
You have taken your first step into interfering with the flow of time. By partially blocking its movement, you can reduce the speed at which time moves - except for you.
You suck in a breath, and feel a sharp, pounding pain in your forehead. You collapse to your knees as the pain intensifies, letting out a weak cry as time catches up with you. Raising a hand to your nose, you feel a wetness. Blood.
You stand. Apparently that was a pretty big jump to make. You'd have to keep practicing with it for it to be of any use.
You return home, after cleaning the blood from your nostrils.
Your mom is home, cooking. The scent of chicken hits your nose, and you hum delightedly, despite it mixing with the tangy copper of your own blood.
"Oh, Kiki, you're home." Your mom says, smiling at you. "Clara should be home in a bit."
You nod absently. Although your mother had you and your brother, Lucas, with another man whom you'd never met, your mother had met someone else when you were younger. A woman named Clara. They were deeply in love, and honestly, you were happy for them. Although growing up in your household and led to you often questioning your own sexuality, you had never felt the need to really define yourself.
Regardless, you hugged your mom and went upstairs. You didn't have any homework, but you had a lot to think about.
What did you want to do with your powers?
[ ] No matter what, you wanted to help people.
-[ ] But how?
[ ] Your newfound powers gave you a unique opportunity to be a little... Selfish.
-[ ] But how?
[ ] Maybe ask about it online? Trying to search about it would probably be useless, but asking if there were others like you...
-[ ] But how?