The Empowered

Chapter 3

The next day was a Saturday. My parents were at work, which meant that I had the whole kitchen to myself for the day. Around 11 am, I woke up and sent a text message to my cousin Abrian, "Hey, do you want to hang out at my house at 2 today?"
He sent one back. "Sure, I can come by then."
"Hey, by the way, while you're here, would you mind tasting some turnip soup I made?
I'm testing out a new recipe."

"Since when do you cook?"

"Lol, gotta start preparing for college eventually, right? You up for it?"

"Sure, I don't mind. Just as long as it's decent."

I let out my breath in a sigh of relief. It had worked. Now, I just had to assemble my ingredients before he came. I had decided to
choose the recipe for something called Underground Detection. The ingredients seemed fairly normal and unlikely to poison anybody. Also, I wasn't willing to give out any
really major superpowers, until I had a better grasp on this cookbook thing.

After spendin an hour outside shopping, I arrived back home with a bag full of groceries, ready to see if this was actually going to work. The recipe called for very specific amounts of the ingredients in a very particular order. I doubled checked and then triple checked to make sure I had everything right. Once the soup was boiling, I turned off the stove and poured the creamy concoction into a bowl. I took a sniff. It didn't seem that appetizing, but it didn't seem that bad either for a first attempt.

After that was done, I gathered all of - the leftover ingredients and stuffed them into my closet. I didn't need my parents asking questions about why I had wasted money on buying stuff like chicken broth, acorns, potato extract, paprika or pumpkin seeds.

At two pm, Abrian showed up as he promised. I welcomed him in and walked over to the kitchen. "Well, here it is. Have a taste,' I said, trying to keep my voice casual. I fidgeted nervously as I watched him drink the whole bowl. In truth, I don't know what I was really expecting, but I was expecting something. Instead, he just put the bowl down and licked his lips. "Not bad," he said.
"So, you want to play Super Smash Bros Brawl now?"

I tried to put on a fake smile. "Sure,
we can do that." The whole time, I kept
watching him from the corner of my eye, looking for anything out of the ordinary. An hour passed and I was getting increasingly frustrated now. One, because he had beat me seven times in a row. But also, because I was starting to feel like I was being made a fool of. My mind started wandering back to my history lessons. Maybe he needed a trigger. Not everybody immediately knew if they had developed superpowers.
Sometimes, they needed to go through physical damage to know if they were gifted.
In the past, they had used beatings.
Nowadays, the government provided electric shock tests for any curious 16 year old looking to see if they had superpowers. As one might imagine, they weren't many volunteers. For a few crazy moments, I
thought about knocking Abrian down the stairs and pretending that it was an accident.