Chapter One

Emily’s dreams were all hazy nightmares.

She woke with a bit of a jerk, a sense of wrong racing across her that only faded when she heard the distant honk of a car and the sounds of a bathroom flushing somewhere. The fact that she wasn’t home was quickly followed by the realization that she was in her new dorm.

That much she had kind of expected. She had never spent that many nights away from home, but on the rare occasion her family went on vacation there was always that sense of being misplaced on waking up.

She looked at her clock, realized that she hadn’t actually set it up yet, then pulled her phone from the crack between mattress and bedframe. A tap and she read ‘0634’ on the top of the display.

Her head fell into her pillow. She had her first classes at ten. Sleeping a bit more was possible, but she wasn’t tired, just lethargic and more than a little nervous.

With a heavy sigh, she climbed out of bed, picked out some clothes from a still-packed box, then slumped her way towards the bathroom.

She set her PJs aside first. They were clean enough to be worn one more time, she figured, and she still didn’t know too much about the laundry situation. The shower wasn’t as warm or as strong as back home, but she didn’t mind. Her blond hair took some scrubbing to look nice and neat, then she was out of the shower and wrapping a pair of thick towels around her waist and through her hair.

Her last stop was before the mirror where she brushed her teeth.

The brush fell into her sink, dropped when her hands went slack.

Eyes that were still misty locked onto the reflection in the mirror. Not of her own freckly, still-pudgy face, but on the words hovering above her head.

Emily Wright

?, Level Zero

She took in a deep breath, then another. “No,” she said.

Her denial didn’t do anything to the words hovering there. A shivering hand wiped the smog off the glass. All it did was make the hovering words shift along with her.

She wondered if it was a projection, some fancy hologram, but the words had to be written backwards for her to read them in the right order when reflected.

Emily’s eyes screwed shut. She went over the facts like her councillor had once taught her. It had been an exercise to keep the stress down.

Fact one. There were words above her. The kind of words that appeared above the heads of heroes and villains when they wanted them to.

Fact two. It had been Power Day when she went to bed the night before.

Fact three…

She grabbed onto the edge of the sink, then noticed her toothbrush. Carefully, she pulled it out of the sink’s hole, wiped it clean, then spat into the sink. A simple gesture, one she’d done a thousand times before. It felt wrong to do something so normal while her life was falling apart.

“No, no, it’s…”

She swallowed and ignored the minty freshness of it. Another exercise came to mind. The old three-tens trick. How would this impact her in ten minutes? In ten days? In ten months?

In ten minutes she’d be… screwed. In ten days, likewise, and in ten months her life would probably be ruined.

Emily felt tears stinking at the corners of her eyes. None of the answers were good. The exercise had made it worse.

She wanted to rush to her phone and look up a guide. Some sort of ‘I woke up with powers, now what?’ but she knew that half the responses there would be excited cheers from idiots and the other half admonished by the government to join up right away… or else.

Her mom… couldn’t fix this. Her dad wouldn’t know where to begin.

She stumbled into her bedroom and got dressed with manic energy, clothes pulled from every box she could find until she was in a long skirt and a nice blouse with a warm cardigan to go atop it. It didn’t expose any skin beyond the nape of her neck, and it was all in somber colours that would blend in.

And then she was dressed for a class she might not be able to attend, not if there were literal words hovering above her head.

Sure, there were some open masks out there, people with powers who didn’t care if people knew who they were out of costume. She didn’t want people to notice her at the best of times.

She went over what she knew, which wasn’t all that much. One thing she did know, though, was the magic word, the one that could give away a Mask with only two syllables.

“Status,” she whispered.

A screen appeared before her.

Her eyes glazed over and she stumbled back until her rear found its way onto her bed. Only then did she actually read the screen before her.

“Oh god,” she said.

Fate Accepted!

Rolling For Alignment.

The screen warped into a simple bar. To the left the word Alignment, to the right, a spinning mass of words spinning too fast to read that would determine just how ruined her life would be.

It slowed, words ticking by at a pace that was slow enough for her to make them out. There were a few that were more common. Hero. Martyr. Saviour. Vigilante… and then it clicked to a stop.

Congratulations! Your Ideal Morality Is… Villain!A life of crime and destruction awaits you!

Emily brought her hands to her face in time to smudge some of the tears welling out of her eyes. “No, no no,” she said.

It wasn’t the end of the world. Just because the system said one thing didn’t mean she had to follow what it said. She didn’t need to play its game. Plenty of people received powers and went on with their lives as if nothing was happening.

She shut her eyes as hard as she could, but it did nothing to stop the telltale impression that something was waiting for her.

When she opened them again, there was another prompt waiting for her.

You Have One(1) Power Slot Waiting For Unlock. Unlock Your First Power Now?

She shook her head.

The prompt didn’t leave.

Emily wanted to shove it all aside. To go back to bed and wake up as just another normal girl with perhaps a few minor disorders that could be treated with some therapy and a bit of experience.

She had dreamed of being a Mask, of course, of shrouding herself in an identity that didn’t have any of her problems, but as she’d grown up she discovered that that wasn’t for her, that she…

Power Slot Point Spent! Unlocking New Power!

“What?” she squeaked. She hadn’t agreed to that!

Congratulations! You Are Now Level One. Power Unlocked!

Emily stared around her room, expecting at any moment for something awful to happen. She swallowed, then poked at her bed. Nothing. Then she poked her thigh. Also nothing. The world didn’t feel any stranger than it had. Was it all a stress hallucination? She knew it wasn’t but… “Status?”

She blinked. That… didn’t seem all that bad. She didn’t know what kind of power Sister Summoning was, but it sounded… nice? It wasn’t demon summoning, or anything that sounded outright evil. Did it let her teleport people?

The one skill on the list, Create Sister, didn’t seem to indicate as much.

And, just on thinking about it, a new screen opened.

“Oh,” Emily said.

She considered–actually considered–using her new power. But the moment the thought crossed her mind, she crushed it. There was no time for that. She had classes in… in less than three hours and she would need to cross half the campus to get there.

Maybe she could find a councillor? Were they obligated to report to the police?

A distant rumble had her looking around. She wondered if that had been an explosion. She was still wondering when her phone buzzed.

To All: Please Stay Indoors. The HRF is on scene. All current classes are suspended until 9am. All classes after this time are to resume normally.

There went her plans to get to class early to maybe build up the courage to say hello to her professor.

She fidgeted on the spot. Another boom rocked the dormitory windows.

New Quest!

Join the Battle Against the Forces of Good!

Reward: 3 Skill Upgrade Points Per Hero Incapacitated or Killed. Villainy +4 per Kill!

Accept? Refuse?

“Refuse!” she squeaked. “I, I can’t fight heroes. I don’t even know what Create Sister does,” she whined to the box.

And then, as the words escaped her lips and an inward rush of wind filled the room, she realized her mistake.

For better or worse, a sister was coming.

***

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