Supernova

Chapter Six - The Price of Power

Most people's quirks manifest in early childhood, but I was born with mine, fully activated and all the way on. The reason I know that this is the truth is because I've seen my baby records. My blood type was unknown for a long time because they were unable to draw any. It is fortunate that indestructibility makes me unable to become ill, because I couldn't take needles either.

The discovery of my sensory disability came later. Before they understood what was wrong, I was simply a burden written off as an invalid. I was a troublesome baby, or so I've been told. Crying constantly and difficult to comfort. I vaguely remember learning how to walk and use cutlery, so it must have happened late, the way my sisters had told me it had when they teased me. Nannies took care of me for a long while. There were specialists brought in who taught me how to use the bathroom, and how to wash, feed, and dress myself. When I was able to master those things, I begged my father to let me into the gym with my sisters.

Most of the kids around me were well accustomed to gyms, having had started their quirk training in toddlerhood, as soon as they learned how to walk. My sisters had. I wanted so desperately to be a worthy Stronghold; a genuine member of the family that seemed to be showered in extensive praise by the rest of the world. By the time I was able to walk and move myself around and I was allowed to start training, I was already considered quite the late bloomer. My pride was bruised, and I was hungry.

It was quickly apparent that I was very different. My father kept track of and pushed my sisters' limits and thresholds in their training, but I didn't seem to have any. The only thing I'd needed to learn was technique. I'd caught up and surpassed my sisters in less than a year, despite them being four and eight years older and more experienced than me. My sheer lack of control and accompanying ability to use my quirk at a master's level was the one advantage I had. I was the youngest, and in a family monarchy, that's not a great position to be in. All I wanted was to be my father's pride and joy, and I thought I might be able to fight my way there.

However, power comes with a price. The California council members, including the Strongholds, used a highly confidential healer, and they kept a closer eye on me than anyone else in my family. I didn't understand this right away, and it deeply offended me. I was the one who never got injured or felt pain. I was the one who needed a healer the least out of all of us. But when I became older, I began to understand the whispers and comments that had always surrounded me.

"She's not developing emotionally the same way without sensory stimuli," the healer would tell my dad. "Her motivations are skewed, and her fear or hesitancy don't seem to be emerging. She may make a great hero and trainer some day, but she's not very personable. She doesn't seem to bond with others much."

Behaviour specialists were brought in, and they sat with me, teaching me conversation skills and how to recognize and respond to facial expressions. Conversation skills were easy to learn, and I liked them because they taught me to lie better and made it easier to get what I wanted. I liked looking at eyes, because they spoke a language all their own, and I desperately wanted to learn it. Which I did. That too, was wildly useful, especially among a society of liars. The specialists also tried to teach me how to control my face, which simply mirrored however I was feeling at the time. That had some success. Based on how much of the world I could see, I could manipulate what my eyes looked like. I learned to associate my tone of voice with whether or not I was smiling, and what kind of smile it was. I could see my nose crumple. But I didn't always catch it right away. It seemed like a tedious and useless skill, but I didn't like the idea of not being able to do something, so I underwent the boring lessons without complaint.

"Having a full body quirk like Indestructibility turned on all the time means her sympathetic nervous system is also constantly activated. That is likely taking a toll on her system. She doesn't have pain stimuli to signal to her if anything is wrong, so any failure of her system would probably come without warning," the healer would say. "You might want to think about preparing her to lose one or more of her other senses. It's not out of the realm of possibility for her to become paralyzed or die suddenly, either."