SuperHero Girl [Now Public!]

Super powers suck.

Correction: Not having super powers sucks.

Abby had been made to watch other people fly, turn invisible, teleport, and so much more for the first eighteen years of her life, and as a minor she was excluded from having a power entirely. But now that she was eighteen, she could finally get one of her own.

Luckily, her parents had already bought one for her. It was kind of a custom for well-off parents to buy their kids a power the day they graduated high-school. That, and kick them out of the house. Abby's parents had done both, but she didn't mind. The power would be more than enough to propel her through the rest of her life.

Hopefully.

If not, she always had her good looks to fall back on.

Abby was pretty, by her own estimations. A bit short, but slender. She had curves in all the right places. Soft tan skin. Sparkling blue eyes. Long smooth legs. A winning smile. She was the girl next door with a flirty, sexy edge.

And soon, she would be super-powered.

The marble the power came in was a little smaller than a baseball, transparent, tinted lightly brown, and perfectly clear and bright. That's how you knew it was brand-new. If it had been dim or cloudy, it would have meant it was a used power, taken from someone else. The fact that it was bright meant it was a power that had never existed before. Almost like an egg, ready to hatch and birth something fresh into the universe. It would be a power created entirely by Abby, from her own soul.

Or at least that's what people said. No one knew exactly how that part worked. It could just be random.

She takes the marble in her hand and examines it. It was hard like a normal glass marble, and had a heft to it. It was difficult to believe it contained a super power. It looked like a trinket her grandma would put outside as a lawn ornament.

She closes her eyes, sits down on her new sofa, and prepares to release the power. Secretly she repeats a little good-luck chant in her head. Come on telekinesis. Come on telekinesis!

With a deep breath Abby closes her hand around the marble and squeezes. Almost instantly it breaks. But it doesn't shatter like normal glass. It pops and crunches, then crumbles like wet sand, and evaporates into dust. She opens her eyes just in time to see the remnants of the marble disappear into a thin purple mist.

And that was that. Apparently, she now had a super power. She didn't really feel different though. For a moment, she worries it hadn't worked.

But then text appears inside her mind. She couldn't explain it any other way. She couldn't see the text. It wasn't actually there, obscuring her vision. She just knew that it existed somewhere, somehow inside her brain. It said:

Power gained!
'Identification'
This power allows the user to identify the name and usage of any power they see, or that is used on them. Works by directly viewing the castor, or cast of a power within 3 seconds of use.
Does not consume energy.
Cannot be leveled-up.

Abby scanned her mind across the text two more times, making sure she fully understood every word.

Identification?

What a lame power! All she could do was look at all the cool powers other people were using. She could already do that with her eyes! The only difference now would be that she would know their names too. Big whoop!

Abby sighs and falls back into the sofa. It hadn't been what she was hoping for, but that didn't mean it was the end of the world. Any power was better than no power. And maybe her counselor could find her a position at a very niche company somewhere. And if not, well... she had a neat party trick.

Sure would have been nice to fly, though. Or have telekinesis.

Abby goes to bed both excited for, and dreading her first day of classes. She had purposefully saved her power marble for the day before going off to Powers-school so that she would have something exciting to talk about on the first day, and so that the experience would still be fresh in her mind to motivate her. Now she wasn't so sure she wanted to remember it at all.

Oh well! Nothing to do now but sleep! School starts bright and early in the morning.