Chapter Twenty-Four – Additional Testing

“Okay, Aurora, go ahead,” Emily said. She said it as if she had the faintest clue of how the power worked. She was sure that if she poked at it enough, the Endgame would eventually unlock the powers she wanted, but she hadn’t seen an interface for that.

Aurora nodded, then looked up and down the quiet street. “Well, here goes, I suppose,” Aurora said. She pinched her tongue between her lips and gained a look of pure concentration for a moment. “Got it,” she said.

“Good work,” Emily replied before gesturing at the door just ahead of them. She hoped that the school didn’t have high-tech locks. The skill was called Unlock Simple Door, and the old wooden front door of the school did seem simple to her, but maybe they’d replaced the latch with something complicated at some point?

“First,” Aurora said. She reached for the handle, then tugged on it. The door rattled. “Just needed to make sure it was actually locked.”

Athena and Maple giggled, but Emily thought that it was a pretty sensible thing to check.

“Okay then, here goes.” Aurora frowned, then there was a heavy clunk from the other side of the door. When she pulled on it, the door opened wide, giving Emily a glimpse into an empty lobby space just within the school.

“It worked!” Emily said.

Her sisters cheered, because they liked cheering over anything, but Emily was quick to gesture for them to calm down.

The skill had worked, which was fantastic. “Any limits? Any complications in using it?” she asked.

“I don’t know about limits,” Aurora said. She inspected her hand, then shrugged. “I just needed to think to use it, and the door was unlocked. I don’t feel tired, and the system’s not telling me that I’ve used up anything limited.”

“So, infinite use, maybe,” Emily said. “That’s good. It’s not a strong

power, but I think we can make use of it. Come on, everyone inside. Keep an eye open for alarms or anything like that.” Sneaking in… or walking into rather, the school was a risk, but staying out on the street was even riskier.

The interior was about what she expected from a school. It smelled a little dusty, with a faint lingering odour of chalk and disinfectant in the air. There was a large glass-fronted shelf to one side with trophies within, and a desk for reception just a few paces in. Some generic educational posters hung from the walls, next to a board with announcements pinned to it. It was tall enough that Emily imagined that they were mostly directed towards parents rather than students.

“Good work, Aurora,” she said, which had the tallest of her sisters looking a little bashful.

“T’was nothing,” she replied.

“Still, thanks. Ah, I guess the next one down the list would be Trinity’s. Let’s close the door and find a room we can use to experiment in,” Emily said.

“What about looting?” Teddy asked.

Emily blinked. “You want to look at the school?”

“Yeah?”

Emily shifted. Robbing a convenience store and a hardware place was one thing. They had insurance, probably, and a lot of the stuff they took would be written off as lost to the Endgame anyway. But a school?

“Maybe. But I’d rather we didn’t,” Emily said. “Let’s not leave too many signs that we were here.”

“What about the cafeteria?” Trinity asked.

“Maybe later. We can test if Aurora’s power works on Vending machines… if they even have any here.”

Trinity cheered at that. She did love her vending machines. And the snacks within.

She needed to distract her brats before they started tearing the place apart. “First one to find a good room gets, uh, gets to go to bed five minutes later,” Emily said.

All of her sisters took off like bolts, sneakers squeaking across the corridors. She rolled her eyes and followed. In the end, Maple won, because Emily knew that Maple wouldn’t abuse the five minutes of extra time at night, and the room that Maple found looked like a lower grade science class.

There was a large window at the back, overlooking the side of the building next door. It happened to be in the direction that the sun was in for the moment, so there was a wide beam of sunlight across the floor and desks, which she thought might be handy.

“Okay! Gather up, everyone. Trinity, your power is next,” Emily said. She pulled out her notebook and then went around to the teacher’s desk and pulled the chair behind it out towards the side. She wasn’t about to try to sit on one of those kid-sized plastic chairs.

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“Okay!” Trinity said, then she paused and looked at herself. “Uh, what power am I buying again?”

“You’re buying and testing Minor Shadow Blend,” Emily said. “Think you can manage it?”

“Yup!” Trinity said. She made a face, then grinned. “Got it!”

“Good work, now, give it a try?” Emily asked.

Trinity nodded quickly, then looked around. She hopped over to the centre of the room where the sunbeam crossed it. “Using it… now!”

Emily blinked, then squinted. One Trinity quickly turned darker than the other. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t see both of Trinity’s body, but the one that wasn’t in the sun’s direct light seemed to fade slightly. Not transparency, but more like the colours of her clothes were carefully blending into the background.

“Interesting,” Emily said. “Can you move a bit?”

Trinity broke out into interpretive dance.

Emily resisted the urge to roll her eyes. What she could tell of the power’s use was that it made Trinity blend into the dark just a little better. She had Trinity move to a corner, then nodded to herself. The power worked best when Trinity was masked by shadows already, and when she wasn’t moving too much.

It wasn’t perfect. Far from it. She suspected that anyone actively searching would see anyone using Minor Shadow Blend, but that didn’t make it useless.

Better yet, the power was subtle. If they used it white out in broad daylight, or were seen or something, no one would expect them to be using something like it. That was… not much of a silver lining, actually.

“Useful, but not the most useful,” Emily muttered as she wrote in her notebook. “I think… Maple, did you want to go next?”

Maple blinked, then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Um… I have the power already?”

“Oh… well, alright then, good, uh, initiative. So, Reach, do you mind testing it out?”

Maple smiled shyly, then extended a hand forwards and towards the teacher’s desk. There was a cup on it, with spare pens and pencils inside. The cup rattled, then lifted up, all on its own.

It hovered there, about an arms length away from Maple’s outstretched palm.

“Wow, neat,” Emily said. “Can you move it further away?”

“Um,” Maple said. The cup moved back… about a handspan, then stopped. “That’s as far as it goes.”

Emily eyeballed it while Maple moved her hand around. If she pulled her hand back, the cup came with it. All in all, the total range of Reach was a bit shy of a metre. That wasn’t as impressive as Emily would have liked.

Further testing showed that there was an upper limit on speed, too. Maple could wheel her arm around and the cup would only slowly follow after it. So the power couldn’t be used to extend the range on a throw, or to swing something way further than they could throw it. Smacking Teddy in the head with the cup proved that it wasn’t all that strong, either.

Definitely not a combat ability. Emily questioned its entire purpose, though it did allow Maple to grab things and bring them to her hand fairly quickly.

“Athena, you’re next. We’re doing Whisper Drift next.”

“Okay,” Athena said right into Emily’s ear, despite being across the room. She was smiling smugly.

The power did what it said. It allowed Athena to whisper at someone from afar. The range seemed to be decent, but the volume left a lot to be desired, and Athena still needed to actually vocalize what she said aloud, though just as a whisper.

Again, not something very strong. It might be useful in some very narrow, specific circumstances, to distract someone, or relay a message from afar, but that was it.

The next power went to the very impatient Teddy, who grabbed it right away and used it to summon… a rather small ball of glowing light.

It was about half as strong as a LED flashlight.

Closing the blinds on the windows did make it seem more impressive, and the ball could move around Teddy at a slow but steady pace, but in the end it was little more than an omnidirectional light ball.

She could change the colour, albeit slowly.

Emily stared at her notes. What was she supposed to do with this?

***

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