Chronicles of the Supers (Book 1): Born From Darkness (The Story of Max)

by Williams, Jeremy

  Chronicles of the Supers:

  Born from Darkness

  The Story of Max

  Text Copyright © 2015 Jeremy L Williams

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, or other, without written permission from the original author. Exceptions are provided only for the use of short quotations for review or educational purposes only if proper accreditation to the original author and work are given.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, events, locations, or other works (both fictitious and factual) are purely coincidental.

  To my best friend, P., in particular. Without her constant support and criticisms this story would have never developed in any form.

  And also to my other friends, who kept their sarcastic wit flowing when I was stressed out from writing.

  Part 1:

  Beginnings

  Chapter 0:

  Prologue

  "Are we ready to begin the experiment?" asked the voice of a figure shrouded almost completely in shadow.

  "Yes. You may begin." said another figure, sounding as if it was a great distance away.

  The first figure reached its 7 fingered alien hand into the light of a large but dim monitor. It pressed a single, not very obvious, button. On the screen the display shifted from a series of illegible statistics to a live video feed of a young girl. She had long blonde hair and pasty white skin. Standing at 5 feet 5 inches tall she was somewhat small and skinnier than appeared to be healthy for her. Her deep purple eyes, which shone like moonlight being reflected off of a pond, greatly contrasted the rest of her appearance.

  She was running and panting with a bag slung over one of her shoulders, headed towards a decidedly grandiose building that appeared to be very old based on the worn appearance and slightly chipped paint. When she crossed into a grassy portion of the area just in front of the building she tripped and violently hit the ground.

  Unseen to her or anyone on the planet below, a small bracelet suddenly appeared in a wash of silver light. It was mixed in with the girls belongings in such as a way as to ensure she picked it up. After the device had materialized, the alien hand pressed another button, and the device activated.

  Chapter 1:

  Discovery

  As the girl laid upon the ground she tried to fight back the tears that were streaming out of her eyes. When she finally stopped crying she slowly picked herself up to her knees to pick up her bags and the items that had scattered from within. In her hurry she didn't notice that she'd picked up a small silver chain bracelet that had been lying among her scattered items.

  As she stood up and dusted herself off she noted that her body wasn't severely injured. She had a nice bruise on her arms and stomach, but it wasn't really painful or very obvious. The girl touched the bruises just to be sure they were minor and didn't even wince under the gentle pressure, so she satisfied herself that she was in fact okay.

  She looked around to see that no one had seen her fall and, after a sigh of relief, she took off sprinting towards the building in front of her again. On the way she wiped the last of the tears off her face and thanked her self that she had chosen not to wear makeup that day.

  ##########

  The girl came upon a non-descript door on the third floor of the building and stopped for a moment. She visibly steeled herself and opened the door as carefully but swiftly as she could. Peering inside through the forming crack, she saw a very old woman writing information on a board.

  She wiped some sweat off her brow and quietly entered the room and began to sit down while the woman continued her lecture seemingly unaware of the intruder.

  "And that is the formula for finding the relative time difference of an object moving at nearly light speed. Now, Maximiliana Einhardt, would you care to give us a real life example of how time dilation affects humans as a whole?" the lecturer said as the girl sat down.

  "Um... I'm not sure...." she responded, unsure of what the woman was even talking about.

  "Then perhaps you'd like to explain how it is you sleep. Because your lateness to class is a result of you experiencing time dilation by sleeping at half the speed of light, is it not?" the woman said as coldly as she could manage, which was in fact very coldly.

  Maximiliana huffed and glared at the woman as she turned back around to continue her lecture. After the lady was no longer looking Max glared at many of her classmates to silence their giggling.

  "An excellent answer to my question would be GPS satellites..." the woman continued.

  "Nice Max, you pissed her off. Now we all get double homework." said the student next to Max.

  "Sorry, my alarm clock got smashed by a drunken party in the girls dorm last night." Max uttered sheepishly. After that no one said anything to Max and she quickly tuned out the lecture.

  'God I hate this woman so much. She reminds me of...' Max gulped visibly, but no one noticed.

  As Max finished that thought she shivered and a single tear ran down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away before anyone noticed and started to draw in her notebook. She really didn't care about this class, and her grades couldn't be pulled up enough for her to pass before the end of the semester anyway.

  'Thank god this class is optional and I don't need it to graduate' She thought as the womans voice finally disappeared from her awareness completely.

  ##########

  Max sprinted out of the building as the final class bell rang behind her. She jumped down the two steps and continued her sprint unabated. Within minutes she had reached the dorm hall and her room. She quickly changed into an orange collard shirt with a nametag on the front and a pair of blue slacks, then grabbed her bag and sprinted back out of the dorm room and off campus to the local grocery store. After she had clocked in with her id card she ran off to begin her work.

  Thought it was only part time work, she still hated it. The store paid less than minimum wage for where she lived and her job was only part time. But the income was necessary for her to continue to live independently. And it was also the only evening job she could find, so she didn't really have a choice in the matter.

  ##########

  After five hours of work, Max finally entered the break room. She only had a 20 minute break to sit down and eat her supper before her last hour of work would begin. She opened her bag and pulled out her lunch from inside. When she looked at it she realized it had been flattened at some point. She let out an exasperated sigh and slammed the bag on the break room table. Some other workers looked at her strangely but she glared at them until they felt uncomfortable and left the room, leaving her almost completely alone.

  As she carefully pulled open her lunch bag she noted with a deep frown that the contents, a single ham sandwich and a small cake, were flat and mixed together. She gagged as she thought about eating it, but relented as she remembered it was her only meal for the day, as was often the case.

  As she bit into a portion she noticed a small glint from the edge of the now destroyed lunch bag. She moved her hand to touch it and found a small silver chain bracelet hanging from the edge. She picked it up and admired it for a second.

  'Happy Birthday to me' she thought as she put it on. She didn't know where it had come from but she didn't really care. If the owner had been careless enough to lose it inside her bag, then she would be careless enough to keep it for herself and consider it a free birthday present.

  As she put it on she felt a small pinch on her wrist where the clasp was fasten
ed. She looked at it but didn't see any visible marks, so she let the feeling and the thought escape her mind within moments.

  A few minutes later she finished her sandwich and birthday 'cake' she left the break room to continue her shift.

  Only an hour later she was out of work and quickly sprinting back to her dorm room. She sprinted inside, not caring about how many people she had woken up doing so. It was now midnight and all students were supposed to be asleep. The school administration didn't know of her job and thus assumed she was in her room where she belonged. They never bothered to check on the girls dorm room so they would never find out that Max left almost every day to attend a regular job.

  She quickly opened her computer and started it up, wincing at the sudden and very bright light. She turned the brightness down some and started repeatedly tapping an icon on the desktop. When the program finally opened, many copies came along with it.

  "God damnit you piece of shit computer." she exclaimed quietly but tensely. She closed the copies and began working on lines of code.

  "I fucking hate web design." she said whispered. "I'd better get paid for this one too, or there'll be hell to pay."

  She thought back to her last client, who had refused to pay for the website she had made because the background colour was electric blue instead of daylight blue. Not that it was a hard problem to fix, but they refused to allow her to do so and refused to make a payment. Without any spare cash to throw around, Max couldn't file a police report or go to court and get her money from the customer. This happened more often than people would like to admit, and especially to Max because of her cheaper than normal prices.

  Today she was, ironically, working on a website for the grocery store she worked at. They didn't know it was her obviously, and were thus offering a small sum of money. That money wasn't a lot, but it was equal to 2 months worth of her normal paycheck. It would be the last amount she needed to finish paying off her school book loan and then she would have a little extra money to throw at her actual school loans and hopefully get them paid off before she graduated next year.

  She finished the project as quickly as possible and then sent the rought draft to her employer for a review. It would be likely later the next afternoon that the employer would see the email and thus she would be able to sleep.

  Max looked at the clock and noted with disdain that it read 4 in the morning. She had to be up at 7 for class, again. And then she would repeat the day over and over again. She didn't even get weekends off because she worked for a small gas station on the edge of town on the weekends. Her work there totaled more than 18 hours each weekend and what free time she had was spent doing more work on web design to try and grab as much cash as she could. School was expensive, especially considering it was a private school and had exorbitant tuition prices. Hell her uniform alone cost thousands of dollars and the rest of the expenses caused that to pale in comparison.

  And on the off chance that she didn't have any projects lined up she would instead spend time working on homework. It was already piling up on her pretty fast and she was having trouble getting in assignments. She often spent her lunch hour and break hour working on it so she wouldn't have to worry about it later that evening or on the weekend, but the teachers seemed to enjoy draining happiness by assigning too much work to the students.

  She hopped into bed, not caring that she was still in her work uniform and fell asleep before she'd even felt her head hit the pillow. Sleeping 3 or so hours was very common for Max, so she had become used to it. Or at least as used to it as she could. Every morning it was getting harder and harder for Max to obey her alarm clock and get the hell out of bed.

  ##########

  Max woke up in her bed back at the house she had grown up in. She was lying in a simple and small bed with a set of white sheets and a single white pillow. Her room was very spartan, containing only a single mirror on the far wall and a single white dresser. The walls were an off white colour and there was a single small window with bars on it next to the mirror.

  She didn't know why, but she felt compelled to get out of her bed and good look at herself in the mirror. Staring back at her was a much smaller and clearly younger version of herself. She was completely naked and had bruises covering her body and a single tear running down her battered and bruised face.

  In the background she heard a man yelling, which caused her to cry even more. Distantly she was aware of a woman screaming too, but she tried her best to push it out of her mind.

  Suddenly her door slammed open and a large and visibly drunken man walked in. He was shirtless and had a surprisingly well defined upper body. His muscles bulged with his movement as he grabbed the door and slammed it behind him. His pants were torn in various places and were very loose, looking like they were going to fall off at any minute.

  She screamed as he grabbed her roughly and started throwing her tiny body around, hitting everything in sight with her like she was a bat and the room was the baseball. It took smashing into several objects before Max lost consciousness. The last thing she remembered was the feeling of glass from the mirror she'd just broken cutting her back.

  ##########

  Max bolted upright in her bed. Sweat was rolling down her entire body and her uniform was soaked through. She jumped out of bed and went to her dorm room mirror. Once there, she quickly stripped her clothes and checked her entire body thoroughly. Though it was extremely thin and unhealthy looking, she had no bruises or other signs of injuries. Even the bruises from earlier were completely gone.

  She continued to check for nearly half an hour as she shivered despite the sweat that was flowing off of her like a waterfall. She couldn't help but remember the nightmare again and again and nothing she did put it out of her head. Pretty soon she felt like she was going to pass out from the memory but forced herself to stay awake even as her vision started going blurry.

  She looked over at the clock and saw the blurry 5 am marked on it. Realizing she probably wasn't going to get anymore sleep, Max decided instead to take a shower and put her clothes through the wash. She headed silently for the showers to begin her day a bit early. Besides, it would be a good idea for her to tackle more of her gargantuan pile of homework.

  ##########

  The next week flew by for Max. She didn't understand why it seemed like her life was getting easier, even if only a little bit here and there. She didn't put a whole lot of thought into it though. At least until she noted her wounds healing within hours instead of days. One day she cut her arm using a box cutter at work and the wound had completely healed within the hour. Not even a scar was left. Max thought about making a note of it but her responsibilites quickly knocked the stray idea out of her head and she had completely forgotten by the time she left for the day.

  ##########

  "How is the experiment proceeding?" asked the distant alien voice.

  "It is proceeding well. At this rate we should have the final result in one more of this planets revolutions about its central star." said the alien sitting in the shadow of his console.

  "Very well. Keep me informed." The distant voice said.

  "As you wish commander."

  Chapter 2:

  Despairs Return

  "Will you slow the fuck down?" said Max's exasperated coworker. For the last 2 days now she had been doing the work of 3 people by herself. She was almost sprinting around the store, even performing feats that would normally take 2 or more well trained workers to handle. She'd begun absorbing knowledge quickly and she'd already learned to operate the powered transports. Of course, she'd also been reprimanded and threatened with losing her job for operating one without any certification. Apparently, being smarter than most workers was frowned upon by management.

  After that incident she had moved on to greater feats of ability. One day she had managed to restock half the store in under an hour. Many times she walked past her coworkers so fast that they fell to the ground, though that was more out of shock and awe t
han any wake left behind by her running.

  It was now 9 pm, a mere 3 hours into Max's shift and the entire store had been fully stocked again and there was no real work to be done.

  "Nah. I wanna get outta here now. I'm tired." Max said exhaustedly. It was Friday and she wanted the weekend to come and go as fast as possible. For some reason she was giddy about the coming weeks, but she didn't know why. There was nothing but an endless stream of work to look forward to.

  Though at least she'd be able to sleep tonight. She had finished her freelance projects the night before, a full day earlier than she had planned, and the company who had hired her would likely not contact her again until next week, since it was a weekend and the company was closed on the weekends. And since she charged a flat rate she would, hopefully, not have to worry about the pay.

  She still had her job at the gas station to not look forward to. This time she had 2 shifts in a row on each day. She'd be spending 36 of her 48 weekend hours working at the gas station this weekend and she knew it would be hell. Especially since the gas station job required her to stand around and not move much. Not moving was as foreign to Max as her hellish work and school schedule was to most people.

  "I'm tired too. Tired of you." The guy said in a huff before leaving to go to the breakroom. She had been stealing the duties of her coworkers and many were worried that they would be cut from the payroll. All of them needed this job just to barely get by in life and Max was possibly going to consign them all to death by doing too good of a job. And they were pissed about it. There was even a betting pool on who could get Max fired first, though she didn't know about that.

  Max watched him leave sadly as a single tear flowed from her eye. Though he hadn't intended to, that statement had forced a painful memory from her past to re-surface. The memory flashed through her mind as she drifted off into a day dream. She was, quite thankfully, interrupted from the daydream by a woman tugging on her shirt. She turned to face the woman who had a scowl that could curddle milk.