Looks like I woke up before the flood hit. It would be soon though. I could feel it in my bones, the anxiousness of knowing what was to come. My body was attuned to notice small fluctuations in the environment that were the precursors to worse natural disasters. A tight feeling in my chest told me something bad was about to happen… The animalistic instinct to survive was triggered even though I was safe and nestled in between two beauties.
The first usage of teleportation was to escape the tender embraces of said two women. I teleport and expect to be fine, but as I do so, I feel an extreme lurch in my system that makes me almost throw up. Melissa had her hand on my stomach while Vicky had her arms wrapped around my neck. I felt like I just got punched in the stomach and close-lined at the same time.
Alright… So don’t try to teleport with a person touching you. I needed to test it further but having the wind knocked out of me made me wary to try anything else. What if, when I tried to teleport through a wall, I had a similar reaction… No, my clothes teleported with me, so I could most likely teleport with items, but I still needed to test to make sure.
The very beginning of the apocalypse isn’t a good time to splatter me on a wall or get cut in half by teleporting where a table is. I was hoping that the unconscious woman would wake up soon. It was thought that most powers gained were based on the person's personality. My first girlfriend could control animals and she ran an animal rescue center before the apocalypse happened. I don’t know why space was chosen for me…
Dominic could control water, which didn’t make much sense, and there were a few outliers on how people gained powers; the rarer, the less it had to do with the person, but it still held true most of the time. I made my way downstairs and made myself a big breakfast. Starving in the first timeline wasn’t going to happen now. Unless something went catastrophically wrong, which wouldn’t happen, I was now a walking farm on top of everything.
The genius farmer who ‘convinced’ me to buy the pigs was someone I had to save. Suppose I could find someone with farming power; that would be amazing for the future of our survivor base. I flipped the omelet as I thought about what other powers I deemed necessary. The truly powerful powers were, of course, added. Anyone with any strength would always be a boon as they would make the base safer. Even the metal manipulation fucker I was going to kill was someone I deemed important enough to make into a zombie general.
Lightning, fire, wind, earth, and water. Elemental control powers were always good to have. I didn’t know any that were in this part of the country when the flood struck, though, so I’d have to wait. Speed power was the most useful, but it was always good to have a dumb, muscle-brained strength user as backup, in my opinion. A science division, so I could start producing the serums and perhaps even perfecting them further. The basic necessities of water, food, and shelter were covered, and it left only the powers I wanted for convenience.
A cleaning power, an enhancement power, and a healing power were the most quality-of-life powers I could think of. There were also the powers that city leaders had to look for. Plant manipulation was great for base defense; it worked as an early warning system, helped grow food for the shelter, and made the plant manipulator more reliant on staying in the spot their plants were, so they would be less prone to betrayal.
I couldn’t really think of any survivor cities that didn’t just have a powerful person as the leader. I couldn’t think of any survivor towns that did it in a way that made living less painful for the lower-tier survivors… Even after the apocalypse, the powerful decided who and when to fight, and it was almost always at the detriment of the lower-class survivors.
I only knew the people I needed to kill. I would try to get every powered person I could on my side and hope that I wouldn’t be sabotaged in the process of helping humanity crawl back to the peak of the food chain. Infighting had effectively doomed humanity; it would still trudge on and might have made a comeback, but as the zombies kept getting stronger, the people who could fight against them kept becoming fewer and fewer.
I heard about a survivor who functioned as a mobile power supply. She couldn’t use electricity or anything like that. Just by being around her, your electrical devices would recharge. She died early on, to weaken the survivor base she was part of. Anyone who had any real usefulness to the city would either have people trying to poach them or assassinate them.
It was only after people lost the one good thing the city had in the form of letting them use phones did the base collapsed. I didn’t remember her name, it was just another story of someone dying unnecessarily in a contest of who would end up on top. I was already useful enough to make the base one of the best in the world, no, not even that. I was strong enough to defend the utility I brought, which made it, if not impossible, to kill me, far too costly to do so. This might be the only base that survived the entire time; if it didn’t, then the next base I set up would be almost as good.
I still needed to practice, I needed to plan, and I needed to prepare to head out into the flood after I felt ready to. Right now, it seemed terrible, but this was the only time in the next year you wouldn’t need to worry about going out and being hit with hail, frozen to death from a cold snap, or being picked up by a tornado. I pulled out a huge block of bone that I made out of all the spare bones. I had more control over this than I really had any reason to this early into its usage.
Even the super-strong powers took some time to learn. I could somehow do it effortlessly, whether it was the knowledge I gained beforehand, I used control bones like a seasoned veteran. Shaving off a sheet, I began to roll it up and shape it into a ball. Not only were that hundreds of bones, but it was also compressed. It was hard enough to compete with iron on durability while being lighter than metal.
I shaped the bone into a mask before shaving off another chunk for a chest plate. I could survive being shot, but having a bulletproof bone vest was a safe bet for something I’d need to make in the future. Making a full set of armor was my next mission, but I got a strange message. “Miss Vicky… Your ex-boyfriend Jake is here, and he’s refusing to leave the premises until you talk to him.”
The guard just yelled it into the door. It was something that Vicky told them to do when something important came up. It was unorthodox compared to the rest of the high-class residents, but that was the difference in learning that someone was right there or having to wait until they were in range of the com, which was just inside the main entranceway. The rightful source is novel•fire.net
There was a good chance you wouldn’t receive the message, that’s why Vicky told them to come up to her house and yell in if she didn’t answer the buzzer call. I sigh as I think of how to deal with this. Did I go out and show him he doesn’t have a chance now? He’s probably here to outlast the flood…