Maius 11, 0090
CLARISSA WAS FRUSTRATED, and that was putting it lightly. It was the eleventh day of training, the fifth day since she woke up, and she had yet to figure out her powers.
She sighed as water dripped down her face and buried her head into her hands. She groaned before she looked up at the shower head, her lips parted and her eyelashes dripping.
As the calendar days were crossed off, time spiraling towards the future without ever looking back into the past, Clarissa felt as if she was in a race against time itself and she was losing, badly. Each day that passed brought with it insecure jealousy and desperation. Everyone had found their powers, except for her.
As the seconds ticked on, turning into minutes, hours, and days, her beat just a little bit faster and descended lower into her gut. Her nerves were shot, her limbs trembling, and her head was pounding incessantly. There were an infinite amount of adjectives she could use to describe her mental state at this point, but none seemed descriptive or powerful enough. All she knew was that she was strapped onto the first seat of an emotional roller coaster and there was no end in sight.
She was anxious, nervous, desperate, and hopeless. All of the above and none of them at the same time.
Clarissa leaned against the cold, slippery bathroom wall for a few minutes and allowed herself to enjoy the warmth of the water traveling down her spine for a few minutes longer. When even a hot shower could not relax all the tense muscles in her body--acquired during rigorous hours of training--she reached out limply and turned the shower off.
It was a feat that she hadn't fainted from exhaustion yet because, as the only person to not have found even one single power, she had to work a hundred times harder than the rest of them. Of course, she didn't have to, but doing so proved to her that she was giving her best performance.
Hope was slipping from her hands faster than sand, however. She may have trained harder than anyone else, but her insecurities were gnawing on her stomach lining like blood-sucking leeches. She felt like it was only a matter of time before she was kicked out of the competition for being the weakest, but her biggest fear was that one day she'd wake up and be told that this was a mistake and that she had left behind her loving parents for nothing at all.
She was beginning to regret ever leaving her house. It had been a rash and foolish decision on her part to go off on a whim and put everything she held near and dear to her heart in peril. A small voice told her that she had made the biggest mistake of her life and she didn't know what to say in response. There was no way she'd last past the next round, if she even managed to participate in it some how.
If it hadn't been for Sabrina's persistence, Clarissa would've already planned out the first conversation she'd have with her parents once she returned to Underworld. She was fortunate, however, to have someone stand by her side and pull her up whenever she began to sink in the quicksand that is depression.
Although Sabrina had been one of the first, if not the first, to discover her power, she hadn't let that inflate her ego. She kept herself chained to the ground and, instead of ignoring Clarissa like all the other contestants, she helped her. Always glued to her hips, like the best friends from the movies Clarissa used to watch at home with her mother, Sabrina did her utmost best in trying to keep her bright and cheery.
While Sabrina did not excel in her attempts, she did not fail either. Clarissa was not a die-hard optimist, but because of Sabrina's support, she didn't find herself drowning either.
In the past five days, Clarissa had learned quite a lot, but none of it helped her in any way. Sabrina had tried to show Clarissa how her powers worked in hopes that the latter would discover hers as well, but all that was discovered was that Clarissa did not have super speed nor agility. Then, through process of elimination, she had also figured out that she was not fantastically inclined to water either and therefore was not a water-wielder nor breather. She was not the fastest swimmer nor runner and flying was as foreign a phenomena as Edelae's existence was to Underworld inhabitants. Her body was not invulnerable like Vance's since her migraines were still acting like pesky thorns in her side, and she could not, for the life of her, teleport from one place to another like Gabby or control ice like Elsaya.
