Chương 2: What he built

The first night in my new house was miserable. I was still grieving my grandfather, and the state of the house itself didn't really help me get into the right mindset for a good night of rest. However, over the next days, life got… better. I almost couldn't believe it, but the high of the first day returned as I threw myself into good old menial work, letting my hands do things as my mind had time to process everything that had happened and slowly come to terms with it.

Normally, I'd have buried my head in my phone while working a job I hated, hoping the emotions would go away on their own. Everyone knew it wasn't the right way to deal with trauma, but people did it anyway. This time I had actual work to do, and it was therapeutic. I found an old scythe in the dilapidated tool shed, and a quick YouTube tutorial taught me how to use the sharpening stone to breathe life back into the rusted blade.

It was still bent in some places, but it mowed the tall grass just fine, and I lost myself in the repetitive motions as I worked on clearing a small area near the porch, the future base of operations for all things garden, as well as a path to the shed that didn't turn my jeans into shreds of fabric as they caught on all the brambles. Then I moved on to some other minor things, little improvements and fixes I could tackle on my own with the help of an online tutorial and what I had on hand.

The house seemed to heal, and my mental health with it. I took trips to Halford, spending what little money I had to fill the truck with all sorts of tools and DIY construction equipment. I lost myself in the work, and realized that I was smiling more and more. With spring almost over, the days were long and I even had time to feed a black cat, a stray probably, who sometimes wandered in my garden. He looked at me sideways, meowing at me when I took too long to notice him (and therefore feed him).

I liked to think that he was slowly adopting me, rather than the other way around. And I also liked to think that I was slowly but surely reclaiming my grandpa's legacy after the banks dragged it through the mud with their repossessions and all that talk of debt. I just couldn't reconcile the image I had of the man with all that had transpired ever since, and for a while it was as if I didn't know who Gus Hale was anymore. The work helped with that. A lot. More than I could ever imagine.

I saw him in the little things I did around the house, in the tools he had, in the furniture I was slowly cleaning after what looked like decades of dust and water damage. My hands were growing strong and calloused, and I was learning a new trade every day, just by doing the work.

I could now repair and paint wooden shutters, negotiate with the squeaky door and its capricious hinges, and the electrician I had on call from town when the power went out taught me a trick or two after he and I realized we both had been dealt a bad hand in life, and found ourselves fast friends. I spent the evenings walking around the house with a little notebook, not even the phone but an honest-to-God paper and pen notebook, assessing all the damage that I could and could not repair on my own.

I replaced all the flickering lightbulbs (but only after buying a new, sturdier ladder to access the ceiling), brought over a new mattress and fixed the bed frame, and got the power and water to mostly work with only the occasional little issue here and there. There was a strange door I noticed, one that looked almost out of place in the old house, given how sturdy it looked. It was locked, and that's when I remembered the key to the front door and the cryptic note my grandpa left me.

As I thought, the key worked, and the door opened to reveal… a cellar. There was nothing out of the ordinary, at least at first glance. A few moldy supplies and a faintly damp smell, but to be honest, I expected much worse given the state of the rest of the house. Perhaps being underground, it was well insulated, and since the house rested at the top of a hill, there wasn't water pooling against the foundation. That was good news. But then, something nagged at me.

I re-read the contents of the note under the flickering halogen light, the only one I hadn't yet replaced with a modern, warm LED bulb.

"This opens more than just the front door, just so you know," it said. It nagged at me that all this fanfare would be just for an ordinary, if spacious, cellar. There wasn't even wine here! Not that I drank any. Too expensive. Then I saw it. A trapdoor in the floor, and in its lock once again the key worked like a charm. What might be hiding down there, I wondered? The light from my phone illuminated a perfectly clean chrome ladder that disappeared into darkness.

As an idle thought, I realized that anyone able to enter through the front door would already have the keys to here. Why a single key? This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. But then again, mine was the only copy in existence, and looking at it I realized that the key wasn't simple at all. It was complex enough that making a copy might end up costing more than some of the repairs around the house. I descended, and paused.

"What is this place?" I wondered out loud. Because surely, what extended before my eyes had nothing to do with the rural, pastoral house I inherited from my grandfather. This was a lab, clean and sterile, half-biotech, half-engineering. If someone told me this was a mad scientist's lair, I'd believe them. It was the furthest thing I could ever associate with my grandfather. And yet, it was real. The tools, the machines I couldn't recognize. And a suitcase, half-open, with six vials in it.

They were filled with a viscous, slightly shimmering silver liquid. I looked around some more, but found nothing else quite like them. The lab was full of tools, but little else. No half-finished projects. No other knickknacks. The suitcase and its contents were the only things that stood out, the only finished product. They seemed to call to me, and I only stopped when I saw a scattering of notes on the table near the suitcase. Reading them, I felt my head begin to swim, and I had to take a seat before continuing.

In the vials were nanomachines, a swarm of them specifically designed for one single purpose.

"To gift powers to those the lottery deemed as unfair losers," the notes said. I could feel the anger and resentment through the text. This was my grandpa's doing, no doubt. But he was just… a man with a homestead. Suddenly I realized that I never really knew anything about the man from before my parents' death. He was just grandpa, back then. I was a kid, not interested in looking into his nebulous identity. And them my parents died and he remained just grandpa, with his homestead and no questions about his past.

But this? The lab and the vials? Was he a mad scientist? The notes answered that for me. If there was a subset of Supes he resented the most, it was the mad scientists. Unstable, unpredictable and, most of all, people who did nothing to deserve their mind and intellect.

"Damn," I muttered heavily. I didn't agree with all his points; my position much more moderate. But if I looked around at this lab, and thought that he had built all this without the help of a superpower, just as a normal, brilliant, genius human… I could understand. Because, yes, the notes made it clear. He had done it all by himself, and he didn't have superpowers. He was just that brilliant. The last few notes were about a sort of speech he was preparing, planning a grand reveal that never happened.

This was a technology that could change the world, and it had never been tested. The common wisdom was that powers were random, as were the awakenings. Only powers could influence other powers, and all the money thrown at developing some compound or technology that could interact with powers had amounted to nothing. It took a while before I managed to get up, leave and lock the doors behind me. This was big. Too big. A technology that could change the world was not something I could deal with on my own.

Besides, the temptation to just grab those vials, stick them in the injector and just pump myself full of the stuff was too strong. Not to talk about the whole deal with my grandpa. I didn't even want to think about that right now, and so I thought about the vials and the nanomachine swarm. Injecting an unknown, experimental nanotech compound was just Russian roulette, I told myself. I wasn't going to bet my body and health on this, not when the safer path was still open. I could still awaken, right?

I had a few months before my birthday, before all hope was lost. And even then, did I really need superpowers? I could live a perfectly happy life without. I kept telling myself that, even as a summer storm came and raged and I rushed to swap the buckets collecting the water from the leaks in the roof. It needed major work, unfortunately, but I was out of money and buckets would have to do for now. After the storm passed, it was clear that no, buckets were not going to cut it.

The black cat had come to help, circling the overflowing buckets while dripping wet from the storm. I suspect he had other motives too, because he sort of moved in after that episode. He must have enjoyed my heat as I let him snuggle up to me, still sopping wet, cursing the lack of functioning heating. Another thing in the long to-do list, but it was summer, and it could wait.

"No going into the cellar, you hear me?" I told him, laying some ground rules. He just stared. I stared back, and there was understanding in our gazes. He seemed to say okay, but fix the damn roof.

"Can't. Broke," I replied. I was sure it was just a momentary thing, I told the cat. I was in contact with a store that needed a new clerk for the summer, but it was still a couple of weeks away. Then everything would change.

"You'll see, cat. Wet food every day. Riches beyond belief." The next day, I decided the least I could do was to scout the problem with the roof. This way I knew what to say when I called the roofer. That's how I found myself three stories up, assessing the terracotta tiles with the help of the AI on my phone. And that's when the awakening happened. It almost made me fall down in shock. The world just… flickered, and words came to the forefront of my mind. The hint.

"The world will wait for you."