Yu's home, and you find yourself questioning your assumptions

Yu lives in a nice two-story house on the outskirts of the city, backed by rolling hills. It's a wealthier neighborhood, if only because the land out here is cheap, and homeowners with money to burn want big properties.

It’s pretty early in the evening when you arrive, not even 6 o'clock yet. Your date with Pearl both started and ended early, which suits you just fine. After the intense and intimate drama between the two of you, you could use some distance from her, both in the spatial and temporal sense. And it'll be nice to try things with your power without her reminding you every two seconds that you're doing it wrong, or you're not thinking through the consequences of your actions.

Having texted ahead, Yu greets you at the front door of her house. “You said you needed help learning more about your powers?" she asks brightly.

"And how," you say, inviting yourself inside. "All kinds of things have happened since yesterday. The rabbit hole on my claiming powers goes way deeper than either of us guessed."

Yu’s house is very clean, with a million immaculately framed and positioned photos dotting the walls. Big booming explosion sounds bounce out from the stairwell that leads to the basement.

Yu shuts and locks the front door behind you, excited. "I'm glad you came by. I've been thinking about your powers all day, taking notes."

“You have friends over?” you ask, nodding to the stairwell. “Jane’s not here, is she?” Jane and Yu are like peanut butter and jelly, but the situation between you and Jane right now is complicated.

Yu shakes her head no, then takes off her glasses to clean them off on her shirt. She wears a simple featuring an illustration of a bird and a pair of yellow and blue checkered pajama pants.

“So who’s over if it’s not Jane? You look like you’ve been home all day.”

“Jane hasn't answered any of my texts today, she must be worried about something. She forgets she has a phone when she's stressed," says Yutong.

Not about you. There are a hundred other things for Jane to be stressed about, right? Like what her summer plans are, or...

"Actually it's my cousins who are downstairs," she continues. "They came in to cheer me on at graduation."

You recall the particularly loud hooting when Yutong Liu was read over the announcement system at the school football stadium.

“We’ve been loafing around all weekend watching anime and playing board games. So, what have you been up to with your weekend so far? Besides getting used to having impossible claiming powers.”

There’s another particularly loud boom from the downstair subwoofer.

You keep the details sparse. “Well, I'll have you know, I went on a run with Jane this morning, and she seemed fine then. Then spent the rest of the day messing around with Pearl."

“I hope you don't mean that literally," says Yu, frowning. "You drove Pearl home last night too, after the party. You didn’t claim any more of her things, did you? I know, technically, you can if you want, but she was having a hard time yesterday after you took her snarky attitude.”

“Of course not! I gave her attitude back after all of about ten minutes,” you say, outraged at the insinuation you did more to Pearl than that, especially because it's true. "We caught a movie today and had some fun, and... look, I need to figure out what I can do now with my claiming powers, and I need an independent observer who knows what they’re talking about to give me feedback.”

Yu replaces her glasses after cleaning them. “Then I'll have you know that you came to the right place. If you didn’t claim my help, I’d have kept calling you till you accepted it the normal way,” she says, hands going to her hips. “This omnipotent ownership power ability is probably the most incredible thing that’s ever happened, from an academic standpoint. If it didn’t affect everyone’s perceptions I’d think the best place to take this would be a university."

"So if universities are a no go, where is the best place to take it?"

"Well, I did some digging online, but I found nothing mentioning situations like yours, not that it's likely I would have. What's remarkable s that what's happening with you hasn't ever happened in all of recorded human history. If it did, we'd have legends and myths with similar themes, and at a glance, it doesn't seem like we have any. So if anyone ever received powers like yours before, they either kept them a secret, nobody wrote the story down, or it happened pre-history."

Yu spouts off her theories about why that is - that you've received your powers from a god, or that perhaps you are a god, or an alien in disguise, and you listen politely. But you find your attention wandering. Frankly, you're disinterested in the origins of your powers. What concerns you is how to harness them.

Your gaze wanders naturally over Yu herself, then. Five foot flat and petite, the compact girl gestures excitedly as she talks through her ideas. Yu's overall waifish build fills you with the urge to sling her over your shoulder and carry her off someplace, but it's her face that makes it impossible to deny her cuteness. Glasses and sleek black hair (with its blue streak) frame an awfully pretty, expressive face, with angular Asiatic features. You’re just friends - you know that - but considering what you did to Pearl, the boundary feels fuzzier than you're used to.

Before now, you've noticed how pretty Yu is (at least when she's not slurping down a frosty or sticking her nose into a textbook), but you've never paid her looks any real mind. All through high school, you were too busy crushing on your rough-and-tumble friend Jane, who apparently knew you liked her the whole time and chose to ignore you.

While you're happy you have a more physical arrangement with your sexy skater friend now, and you finally have firsthand experience with how good Jane's hands feel wrapped around your cock, now you can't help but view the way you spent your high school career as a mistake.

Pearl, who you never even thought of in a non-platonic sense till yesterday, turned out to be a curvy sex pot when you got her clothes off. Nothing felt better than pinning her beneath you, fucking her into her bed, breeding her in fulfillment of your carnal desires.

But before your grad party, before your powers, you never gave Pearl the time of day, beyond friend things. She didn't exactly match your personal preferences. Yet, she was cool, she was fun, she was aloof - even thinking about her now turns you on. Sure, she demonstrated zero interest in shallow boys like yourself (not that you agree with that assessment), but what if you showed interest in her? Would Pearl's big romantic heart have melted the second her best friend asked her on a date?

More importantly, however hot Jane is, was she ever really hotter than Pearl? Or was Jane merely a different flavor, one you thought you liked better than all others? While there were so many flavors out there that you never even thought about trying them?

Which brings you back to Yu, who's TED-talking you to **** on the implications of omnipotence.

Yu, the chatterbox. Sweet, reliable, solid Yu. She can talk anyone into oblivion with boring intellectual trivia of interest only to herself. But at the same time, Yu's let you copy her homework countless times. She laughs at most of your jokes, even the ones that aren't funny. Yu games. She internets. She knows the lore, she rolls the dice.

What if instead of chasing Jane for years, you asked Yu out?

Yu's so polite, so shy (until you get to know her), never wanting to let anyone down. She would have said yes. Would it have worked out? You really don't know, but that's not the point. The point is that you never even thought of Yu as an option before, when maybe, she was an option the entire time. A good one, too.

Yu, Pearl, even Indy - if you asked a cheerleader out, you assumed you'd be turned down, so you gave up without ever even trying it once. Hell, on graduation night, you might've been spending the night with Indy, _you _could've been her loving boyfriend for years, not Sully.

But Sully dared to try where you didn't. Instead of daring, you hung all prospects for a high school romantic experience on Jane. The one person you now know for sure never wanted to be with you, until your powers opened her eyes. You don't resent Jane for that - she is your friend, and she's coming around now - but the irony isn't lost on you.

That's the lesson you should have learned by now.

You've had your fair share of ups and downs, but what truly limits you is your frame of mind. You put yourself in a box, with self-imposed rules and limitations for why you can't leave it, and so in the box you stay. Morpheus was right.

"Free your mind," you say aloud, interrupting Yu's yammering treatise on metaphysics.

"And that's why I think you should - what was that?"

"Free your mind," you say again, looking down to Yu and clapping your hands on her shoulders. "Don't you see? We're so scared of breaking rules that we make up invisible rules for ourselves. Rules we don't even know we're following, Yu. It's not about fixing your mistakes, it's about letting yourself make mistakes in the first place."

"Oh. You weren't listening at all, were you," says Yu, with an apologetic smile. She looks to the floor. "Sorry, I guess I got carried away."

"Never apologize! Do what you want to do, not what you think you should do!"

"Ah - uh - okay, sure," says Yu, ducking her head and quietly moving back a step. She clears her throat. "W-what you said is right, though. Mistakes help us learn."

You listen close to Yu's wisdom. It's why you came here and nowhere else.

"I watched Indy sketch a picture of a rose, once. She kept making mistakes, but then she erased them and kept going. The next time I saw her draw a flower, she did it right in one go and made it look easy. But if I hadn't seen her draw the first time, I would have thought that for her, drawing was easy. But drawing's not easy at all."

"What you're saying is that I need drawing practice," you conclude. "That there's no way to learn something but to do it over and over."

"It's important to master the fundamentals," she says.

"So even though I could claim some research institute and have them look into my claiming gift from a physics standpoint..."

Yu concludes her thought. "You're better served by picking low-hanging fruit first. First you have to determine which questions need asking. So, how do you want to start?"

That... is a very good question. Some quick and dirty informal testing sounded best to you when you arrived, but when Yu asks you straight up, you find that the question of what 'quick and dirty testing' actually entails remains nebulously elusive. You owe yourself to think your plans through a little more thoroughly than that.