Chương 8: Chapter Seven

Friday October 7th I woke up on my couch wrapped in my brown blanket and blinked at my ice blue walls. It felt weird to just sleep and wake up without planning on going to bed at X time so that I could set my alarm for Y time and get exactly Z time amount of hours of sleep. I sat up slowly and stretched. Yesterday would have been my career changing presentation and instead I wound up with a life changing super power. Neat. Now, the thing about work-a-holics is that even without work, they are still a work-a-holic.

So, what was a suspended-without-pay-which-really-meant-fired senior designer to do without a project to obsess over? Find a new project of course. I shuffled to my kitchen where my dead coffee maker continued to taunt me and take up space. I ran to the coffee drive thru and came home irritated that I got to drink bad coffee for 5x the price and I had to get dressed to do it. I took a sip and sighed, well at least it was pumpkin spice season.

I grabbed the notebook I'd been doodling symbols in and set it on my counter along with my newly purple pen. If I was going to have some kind of reality-altering superpower I should really document it, for science. I turned to a fresh page and frowned seeing that there were only a handful left. This would have to do in the meantime.

At the top of the page I wrote: Level 1: Abilities: -Inconsistent code vision -Activated by disassociating Symptoms: -Ringing ears -Headaches / Migraines -Eye pain -Eye burst blood vessel This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. -Nausea -Vomitting Triggering event: -Trauma/ Stress of getting fired?

Level 2: Abilities: -Code vision -Adjust color levels Symptoms: -Nausea -Headaches -Nosebleeds Triggering Event: -Changing the color of blanket from cream to brown Questions to answer: -What the fuck? -Why me? -Who is the level up voice? -Is life a simulation? -Can I activate the voice or get it to respond? -If I change something does it change forever? -Who else can see the code? I stared at the list. It was relatively short, all things considered.

Only two abilities, a bunch of questions and the very distinct possibility I was having a psychotic break–but Kate noticed the wall. If she noticed the wall then I had a much higher chance at not being insane. I was pretty pleased with the side effects progress. Since my second disembodied voice announcement I had no ear ringing, reduced headaches and my eyes had felt much better. I was learning my limits and when to push and when to wait. What I wasn't pleased with was how few abilities I had.

While it was cool beyond measure, changing the color of things was going to get me only slightly further than the average street magician. I needed to keep practicing, to keep pushing my limits and learning about which symbols I could change and which I could not. Throughout the day I'd come to the conclusion that the color of something was far more nuanced than I orginally thought, and I was disappointed in myself.

As someone who uses the Pantone Matching System and the hexadecimal scale for any of my webpage work I was well aware that there were millions of colors. While experimenting I'd discovered that each symbol wasn't really a color but rather a similar version to what I'd seen in any photo editing software. If I adjusted this section of the shape it affected saturation, another affected temperature, this part over here was tint.

Several others seemed to impact brightness or how light seemed to reflect off of the surface. It was far more advanced than any software I'd worked with and there were still things I was trying to figure out, but I felt fairly good about color adjustments by that evening. The margins of my notebook were filled with theories and shapes and questions. All I seemed to be missing was the red yarn to really tie the whole crazy person look together.

I decided that since I'd run out of paper it was a good opportunity to rest, eat something and make a shopping list for tomorrow. I sat on the couch eating some leftover cold pizza. The television was turned on to something I wasn't really watching. Exhaustion fell over me and I fell asleep with a slice of pizza still in my hand.