The Empowered

Chapter 2

"Yep, that's right," he said, floating over to me.
"So, what do you want?"

I walked over to one corner of the banquet table, readied my nerves and bit into the table. I could feel everyone staring at me. I looked up at the floating boy and for the first time, I saw him look just as baffled as everyone in the room.

"What.....what are you doing? " he asked, tilting his head. "You said that we choose anything from the table. Well, I'm choosing the table then."

There was a tense silence as we stared at each other. For a moment, I was worried that I had
offended him. Then, he started laughing hysterically. "My gods, I forget how crazy you humans can be sometimes." "Well" he said with a devilish grin. "You can certainly eat the table if you want. But you have to actually swallow part of it. A simple bite isn't enough."

I nervously gulp. It takes fifteen minutes of me constantly stabbing the table corner with a fork before part of it breaks off. The entire time, I can feel the rest of the kids looking at me, probably thinking that I'm a fool or a lunatic. But I've already committed to this. It's too late to back down
I put the piece in my mouth. It's even more disgusting than I imagined, foul and rotten with sharp edges poking into my gums. But, I manage to swallow it without vomiting.

"Well, well, well," the boy says, smirking. "You know, you're the first person in 500 years to consider eating the table. I think that such creativity deserves a unique reward, wouldn't you say?"

He slowly descended from the air until his feet touched the ground. He pulled out a red book from his jacket pocket and handed it over to me.

"Only you will be able to read this. Do take good care of it. I have a feeling that you're going to be very interesting to watch indeed."

"What is it?", I asked, struggling to talk against the waves of nausea coming from my stomach.
"My cookbook," he said, laughing, before clapping his hands together.

I woke up, startled, in my chair. My first thought was that I must have fallen asleep at my desk and dreamed the whole thing. I certainly wasn't feeling nauseous anymore. But then, I saw it, the red cookbook resting next to my laptop.

I stared at it for a few moments, struggling to accept what I was seeing. Then, I snatched the book up and immediately started paging
through it. I was supposed to be working on my U.S. history paper, but who cares about any of that when you have a recipe book for superpowers right in front of you?

The first thing I noticed about the book was that it was very old. Which makes sense if it belonged to that boy that claimed to be over five centuries old. The pages were yellowed and close to falling out of their bindings, the ink was fading away in multiple areas and even the cover was crumbling away at the edges. The second thing I noticed was that I couldn't take photos of it. I tried using my phone to take pictures of the pages in case the book suddenly vanished on me, but in every photo, the pages appeared blank. I guess he wasn't kidding when he said that I would be the only person able to read it. So, I did. I read it for the
rest of the night.