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It was dark, it was cramped, it was wet and disgusting and vile. I was surrounded by filth and blood, locked in, unable to move, to escape. My throat was raw from screams, tears and bile. Likewise, my hands and arms hurt from banging on the locker’s door. Not that it had helped any.

I was alone now. Out of all of it, that’s what hurt most. The locker room was empty. The silent hallways of Winslow were empty. It was after-school already. Had the sun already gone down? I didn’t have any windows to check. There wasn’t a single soul around to help me.

Oh. Dad was probably freaking out right now. I had to get out.

I had tried freeing myself, I really had. But all of my struggles only ended up hurting me more. I had bruises on my arms now for sure, and my knuckles were scratched. And what for? It wasn’t like I even dented the metal around me. How come high school lockers are so easily broken into and robbed, but so hard to get out of?

I was thirsty. Hungry. Tired. Had to keep my injured hands from the filth.

There were bugs crawling over me.

I felt like crying again. More. The pressure built in the back of my eyes but my tear ducts were all dried up, all spent from before.

I wanted out. I wanted to be free and I didn’t want to be all alone like this ever again. Never ever again, I needed to get out I was going to die here Dad and I’m sorry I don’t know why Emma but I she and I alone please why just outfreesorrysalonepleasesomebodyanybody

And-

Trajectory. Agreement.

– there was force. It blasted out of me. From me? I was floating.

“What?”

I was floating. It was hard to tell in the locker but I was floating, as if I was in water. I was floating several inches off the bottom and sides of my metal cage. Tampons and pads floated around me too, and I was glowing, softly illuminating the interior of the locker. I stared down at my hands and felt my mouth go dry. I could see something inside my hands and arms, running down my legs and within my chest, smouldering. It looked filamentous but solid, a golden crystalline incandescence. The rest of me was as if made of dark glass, opaque but for the inner glow, tingeing my edges yellow.

I didn’t really feel different. Certainly not like I had burning things inside me. Or like I was floating.

Tentatively, I tried pushing against the locker. It was like I was suspended in mid-air. I could turn and move but I was anchored to a point in space and couldn’t move from there. There was really only one explanation for this.

“Parahuman.”

“Woof.” A dog barked.

“Yeah. I’ve… become a parahuman.” This was surreal. I didn’t think it had hit me yet. “How did… Wait. Dog.”

“Whoof.” A dog, the same dog, barked again. From outside the locker. What was a dog doing in the middle of the school?

I rotated myself awkwardly into a position where I could somewhat see through the vents on the door. I very much ignored the… things floating around me. Straining my eyes to see through the slits, I managed to make out a dark shape in front of the locker. It looked canine, but I couldn’t really see much from here. “Dog?”

“Whoof… Ruff.” He sounded… disappointed?

“I don’t think dogs can sound disappointed.” I muttered, then raised my voice. “Hum. You look like a good boy. Want to help me? Like Lassie. You could go fetch help!” What was I doing? He didn’t even look like a collie.

“Arf.” He barked back happily.

There was the sound of claws on metal and I shrank back. What was he doing? It sounded like he was fighting with something, puffing and uffing, beating his paws against the door and making the lock jiggle. He continued for a while, the door shaking in front of me,  then there was a crunch and a snap. And the locker door swung open.

I was free!

I sobbed in relief and… And realized I was still stuck in the same place as before. Still trapped, but this time by my own superpower. This time I sobbed in frustration, curling into a ball, face against my knees. Nothing in life could be easy or fair, could it? Something wet and soft nudged my pants. I looked over my knees. The dog whined, ears down. He had his paws on the edge of the locker and looked at me sadly.

He wasn’t a normal dog. He was made out of the night sky. I could see his fur, individual hairs even, but they were transparent and inside him I saw stars and small galaxies floating in the black and blues of the universe. Instead of eyes, he had two bright stars shining white. He was beautiful. And I knew what he wanted me to understand.

Don’t give up, he seemed to say. You’re not alone.

“Right.” I wiped my face, noting how the texture still felt the same despite my changes. “These are my powers. I can… I can control them. I just need to learn how.” I took a deep breath of the fresh air now that the locker wasn’t closed.

I focussed on my power. On the sensation of floating. It was, I realized now, more than just floating in water, or being underwater. It was an absolute lack of weight. There was no pressure on me from anywhere, not even the infinitesimal weight of my own limbs being pulled towards the Earth’s core. I had never felt like this. So free. There was just the bare sensation of pressure from inside me. Like I was exerting pressure on the environment instead of otherwise. Maybe that’s what kept me floating.

And as I thought back on these new impressions, something clicked. Anti-gravity. This had to be what astronauts felt back in ‘69, when humans had breached the final frontier, before the Simurgh. It made sense, looking at the dog. My dog, it felt like. Had my power created him too? I could offer no other explanation.

“Whoof!” He barked, and I got the feeling he agreed with my thoughts. He nudged one of my hands and I scratched him on the head. His coat felt like normal fur, soft and silky, pretty long under my fingers.

“Gravity…” It sounded like such a cool power.

If I could control gravity, maybe I could stop this anti-gravity effect, return to the usual physics. I looked in front of me and thought really hard on the feeling of falling, like normal gravity. And then I was falling. Falling from the locker and towards the wall in front of me. The locker room wasn’t big, but it was still ten feet long. That was a ten foot drop face first into the lockers covering the wall.

“Whoaa!”

Stop! Stop, stop, stop! Floating! Float! Float!!

I closed my eyes inches away from the metal, screaming mentally. But my power responded in time. The momentum stopped abruptly but smoothly, not jarring me as it should have. I was in null-gravity again.

“Oh God.” I was breathing hard and rapidly, almost hyperventilating. The adrenaline rush that came with the panic slowly left me and I sighed, shaking. “That… That was close.”

“Ruff.” The dog chided me.

“Yeah, I’m not…” I swallowed. “I’m not trying that again so soon.”

It seemed my gravity control wasn’t just an on and off switch. It was directional too. I looked around me and noticed that the filth that had been floating with me was now floating around me in my new position. So I could affect things in a radius around me, or just some things? The locker behind me still had plenty of stuffing inside. It seemed I would need to experiment a bit to find out. But now… I braced my knees and elbows against the locker in front of me the best I could, ending in an awkward all fours position because of the zero-gravity. Then I thought about falling again, keeping my eyes facing forward. And like a mental button was pushed, gravity reasserted itself on me. The lockers under me became the ground.

Cautiously, I stood up. A disconnect was present. I was standing on a wall, ninety degrees perpendicular to the normal gravity, and yet I felt like I was standing with both feet on solid earth. Behind me, the floor had become a wall and in front of me so had the ceiling. Only I and the few pads and tampons from before were affected by the world had seemingly rotated for us. I took a few steps, jumped a little bit just to make sure. It was like a completely different world. My perspective was so different. This was amazing!

I giggled. “So cool.”

“Arf.” The dog barked joyfully and rubbed his flank against my leg.

“Uhn?” I startled, jumping a bit. “You?”

“Whoof.” He barked, as if to say: yes, me. He was standing with me on the lockers. I puzzled over it for a bit but accepted it pretty quickly. If he was part of my power, however independent, it made sense for him to have the same abilities as me.

The adrenaline high was fading. So… On the one hand, I was free. I had powers, cool glowing gravity powers. And a dog too. On the other hand, I was dirty, I smelled, I was starting to shake and oh God, Dad didn’t know where I was. I had to go home, now.

First things first, I had to return to normal gravity. While I was standing on the wall, following a different gravitational direction than the rest of the world, my clothes and my hair weren’t. They fell towards the normal ground, which was a wall to my left. It was a strange quirk, but the pressure my long hair made on my head made it easy for me to know where I should be falling towards, but wasn’t. Internally too, I could feel that left was the way things should fall. It was like a compass inside of me, I couldn’t explain it better, but I imagined it was akin to the way migratory birds knew which was North.

I readied myself and moved until I was touching the right wall, previously the ceiling. Now if I fell, I would have time to catch myself with my floating powers again. And then I pushed the mental button ‘OFF’. Or something. Immediately, normal gravity returned. The faint inner pressure I had been exerting cut off and the Earth’s great ferrous core decided I was in a perfect position to accelerate towards the ground. I had, however, overestimated my sense of timing. I hit the ground before I could activate my power again, curling up instinctively.

“Ah! Ow…” I panted and cried. My entire left side felt hot and painful, like one gigantic bruise. I whimpered. It hurt so much. A wet tongue licked my face and the dog barked. “I’m okay.” I answered shakily. Slowly I uncurled, gasping now and then. The pain didn’t get worse, but it didn’t abate much either. I prodded myself carefully. I didn’t think I had broken anything. Surely it would hurt more, right? It hurt to breathe and it hurt to touch my arm and chest, but I was pretty sure that was the giant bruise I was developing.

I got up carefully, helped by my canine companion. When I was steady on my own two feet, I looked around for my bag. Luckily, it was under the bench that ran the length of the locker room. I was about to pick it up when I noticed the state of my hands. And hair, and clothes… I needed a bath, or two. For a moment I considered whether or not I should use the school’s showers before deciding that yes, I should. I couldn’t go home like this. Forget what people on the street would think of a girl covered in blood, Dad would freak out. I had no hot water, but frankly at this point I welcomed the freezing shower, not even bothering to undress. It washed away the filth.

I got dressed in my spare clothes and bundled up my wet gym clothes inside my backpack. My hair was still dripping, but it felt strangely liberating to have cold droplets running down my back every now and then. I wasn’t thinking too clearly. The door to the locker rooms wasn’t locked, something I only realized was off when I opened it. They must have left it open on purpose. Why? I didn’t want to know.

The sun was almost done setting outside. Considering it was January, it wasn’t that late. It surprised me. I had lost so much time, so much of me inside that place. I shuddered just to think of any small closed place. It felt claustrophobic.

I ran the best I could all the way to my house. The dog followed me and I had to take a weird path through the streets to avoid being seen.

Only when I reached home did I remember I could have flown.