Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. I wanted to transmute bismuth to gold. What if she can do more than that? What if she can make gold? Or find gold?
This might actually be even better than he’d expected. Provided that he could fix her.
That is, if he could keep her alive long enough to fix her.
A super with a decent power set would be worth a lot more than gold. Especially in the current environment where slaves were legal.
He started to think of any number of things supers could do and how he could profit from it.
Closing the passenger door, he walked back to the crate.
“Can you, er, can you hear me?” he asked her.
There was no response. Her chest rose and fell in labored breaths. Now that he looked at her body, he found the rest of it as horribly disfigured as her face. It looked like her fingers had been removed. Her breasts. Most of her skin. She was a real mess.
Could he even fix her?
His face twisted into a frown as he tilted his head to consider her.
He hadn’t used up his power today. It wasn’t as if he had any plans to use it before he went to sleep, either. In fact, if he was up past midnight when his power set reset, he could try again.
Solidifying his decision, he concentrated on her. She was his, he owned her, she was his property.
Felix was actually a superhero or villain candidate. He could modify any item he owned. Make it new, change it into another substance, make it better or worse quality.
Anything, really. The scope was incredible.
The problem was that the more he modified an object, the more it would take from his power pool.
And his power pool barely had enough juice in it to fix a crack in a toilet.
Felix had always thought of it like batteries.
Most heroes and villains had a pretty decent-sized battery. There were those who had smaller ones, and those who had larger ones.
If he had to compare himself in relative terms to others, Felix was a triple A battery that had been left outside in a puddle. The lowest measured superhero or villain before Felix would be akin to a golf cart battery.
Up to this point, the best use of his superpower had been repair jobs. Mostly maintenance, to tell the truth. He couldn’t modify or change big objects, but he could limit wear and tear for sure.
He’d tried minor transmutations with success. Leading to this moment here and now with the hope to change bismuth into gold.
In using his power, the change would simply occur over a few seconds.
The precursor to that, though, when he used his power, was a virtual window that appeared in front of him. It had the look of a checklist sheet with sliders on one other side.
It was all very strange, really.
Focusing on his unexpected guest, Felix struggled to activate his power.
To ultimately no result.
Scratching at his cheek, Felix thought on the problem. She was his possession. Legally.
Up to this point, that’d been all he had to do.
Taking a different approach, he tried using a character sheet. Generic, and yet taking root from hundreds upon hundreds of role-playing games he’d played.
Why not?
He saw it in his mind’s eye first. A piece of white paper. At the top, there was basic information and vital stats. Things that anyone would have regardless of being a super or not.
Below that, all of the powers, abilities, and functions that made them unique.
These sheets would contain everything from blindness, being sick, or even having a genetic disposition to heart attacks.
Then he opened his eyes and saw the exact same form he’d been visualizing floating in front of him.
Only he could see it. When he’d tried to explain it to his family, they’d thought he’d gone crazy at first. Only after showing them an example of what he could do, where he took a faded and dirty penny and made it new, did they believe him.
At first, he’d thought perhaps he was indeed crazy. What kind of superpower presented itself like this? This wasn’t a normal power. In fact, it’d been classified as unique. Nothing even similar.
Felix had become contemplative after that information had been given to him by the guild.
To him, that meant that he either was the one doing the visualizing of his power, or another entity had set it up for him.
Both answers disturbed him.
The reason why Felix had never gone any further with his talent was his lack of power.
At the bottom right of the sheet floating in front of him was where the cost would be to make the modifications he wanted. They were always more than what he had available for anything useful.
After much experimentation, he knew he had roughly one hundred and fifty points he could spend on things before he ran out. He could always tell if he ran out because the confirm button would simply go away.
That was a pretty small number when compared to the things he could change. Like turning a table into solid gold.
With a sudden thought, he tried to flip to the “second page” that his power normally offered up.
The real meat and potatoes of his power.
The upgrade page.
The viewing window changed.
It now looked like something out of a role-playing game character creation page.
He could modify anything about her, providing he paid the power cost. Strength, intelligence, reflexes, weapon skills, languages, skills, height, weight, senses, anything and everything that you could think of.
The list was extensive and a touch overwhelming. The possibilities for a living person were infinitely more complex than a simple item.
Felix shook his head to clear it. He’d have to worry about that later after he’d fixed all the problems.
Maybe try to limit what came up to what he wanted to change.
Focusing back on the here and now, Felix started to read through the list of debuffs this person was suffering from. It looked endless at first.
He began to feel sick at the problems listed. Some of them were rather horrible. She’d apparently been cut open and had a number of her organs removed. He couldn’t even begin to think of a reason for that.
“Waaaaaah…” he groaned. “That’s just sick perversion, isn’t it? Who the hell did this?”
This wasn’t going to be a quick fix; it’d take months to spend enough power to make her human again, let alone whole. That wasn’t even mentioning how long it’d take to get her back into a condition to be useful.
It’d take months to make enough money to buy a shipment of bismuth again anyways.
Besides, not like I’m doing anything else with this power. I could clean up some coins. Scrub the shower. Ooooooh, impressive.
Fine, let’s Frankenstein’s monster this shit.
Felix grunted and looked to the sheet again.
The cheapest thing to change, and which would refund some points he could work with, was putting her in a coma.
A single thought later and “Coma” appeared in the debuff list. One hundred points with a negative sign popped up in the bottom right corner.
Flicking through multiple options, he found that replacing her teeth would be relatively simple and cheap. Her lips came at a discounted price since it was all in the same area and some of the reconstruction could bleed into the other.
Then he was spent. That was all he had.
For a start, it was great. He’d take another crack at it when midnight rolled around and his points reset.
Before he clicked the confirm changes button at the bottom, he stopped. Below the confirmation button was a slider. One he hadn’t imagined or put there.
No time like the present to figure it out.
The slider simply read “Draw” and read from zero percent to one hundred percent. It was set at zero right now.