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always5hineee · 4 years

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Hell and Back - Chapter 1: The Offer

Chapter warnings: none

Word count: 1496

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Y/N was sick and tired. Her everyday life was boring. Not the type of boring that everyone else had to deal with, though. Rather, she was faced with true, mind-numbing monotony on a daily basis. Of course, much of this was self inflicted. From a very young age, Y/N had convinced herself that her life was basically meaningless within the big picture. This was due to the nature of the world around her.

Everybody around her possessed abilities. Many fell into the same categories, like fire or water. Some people could move small objects with their minds, others could solve intense math problems with no calculator. No matter how trivial, everybody had one. Everybody except for Y/N.

Her family had always tried to convince her that this was what made her more unique than anyone with special powers. Of course, she never believed them. Surprisingly, uniqueness did not make it any less cool that the kid sitting next to her in class could summon hurricanes at will, or the kid playing on the seesaw had the strength to launch a plane into the sun. It just made her feel stupid, inadequate, unable to compare.

Thankfully, there was one respite from all the crushing weight of the world: EXO. At least, that's the dumb name her ridiculous group of friends had chosen to give themselves. It's what they wanted their band to be called- if they ever managed to become a real band with a real record label. For now, they were stuck just dreaming, constantly bringing up what they would do if they were famous.

Now, unlike Y/N, each of them had their own abilities, although some were more impressive than others. Suho, the sort of impromptu dad for the group, was able to control water to a certain extent. Similarly, Sehun was able to mess with the wind, Kyungsoo with the earth, and Chanyeol with fire. Moving past the four most common elemental powers, Baekhyun was able to control light, Xiumin had ice-like powers, Chen could use a lightning-like electric power, and Lay could heal. Out of all of them, though, the last few had the rarest and arguably most intriguing abilities.

Kai was able to quite literally teleport. He hadn't quite figured out exactly how far, but his range seemed pretty serviceable. Popping out and back into existence at will, he could be anywhere at any time. Luhan was able to move things with his mind. While this wasn't necessarily uncommon in terms of the greater population's powers, the extent to which he could perform with it and his precise abilities were what made him unique. Kris had the ability to fly, although no one quite knew how. He could both levitate and practically soar, likely using some form of energy or magic. He had never enlightened the group on the true nature of his abilities.

Finally, there was Tao. His power was practically unheard of. Not in the sense that it was rare or few people had it, but in the way that no one thought it was actually possible. He didn't know a single other person with his capabilities, and he tended to keep them under wraps. He quickly realized when he was younger what an asset he would be for testing, or the use he would provide to someone with less than pleasant motives. Tao could control time.

Forwards, backwards, pause, play, fast-forward, rewind- he could do it all. Life was his VHS player, and he could move around freely no matter what state time was in. Many people just didn't believe him when he did finally mention it. Thankfully, after a few proofs to his friends, they all seemed more than willing to accept his abilities. It was an unsettling talent that even he regretted possessing. He tried not to use it if at all possible, but it could be addicting at times. Still, he was unaware of the side effects, so he was mostly conservative with its use.

Surrounded by all this power, Y/N was understandably a bit frustrated at times. Everyone had some cool unique defining factor of themselves that she'd never understand. It was infuriating. Still, it didn't stop her from being friends with them. As annoying as it could be at times, they tried their best to never make her feel inadequate- at least for the most part. All in all, they were actually fun to hang out with.

They were always talking about their band. They were dead set on becoming famous for their little group. They even had all the positions picked out. Honestly, she thought they were all capable of filling out every position, but she wasn't going to argue. It was hard, though, as none of them had any audio-related or mind manipulative abilities, they were at a heavy disadvantage in the industry. They still had hope, though. They had offered her a spot into doing whatever she pleased, but she had politely declined, making up some crap about how one girl in a boy group was strange. Insisting that she be involved, they decided she would be their manager as soon as they made it big. Laughing, she agreed, convinced it was a pipe dream.

As she walked home from one of their ridiculously random band practices, she looked at her phone. Suho had offered to walk her, but she politely declined. She needed some alone time to think. Occasionally, someone would float overhead, or race by with their super speed, causing her to sigh. It really was awful. She tried not to be so cynical, to avoid thinking about it, but once she was no longer busy, all the thoughts came flooding back.

She had to avoid her mental marathon, so she pulled out her phone, scrolling through to clear notifications. She checked her social medias, text messages, everything with the little red bubble next to it. Seeing the boys still spamming their group chat, she smiled lightly and put them on mute. She'd go read through it later. Finally, she opened up her email.

Scrolling past all the promos and flyers from various products or companies she'd interacted with, she saw a few more interesting emails. The first was a jpeg that she had requested from Chen. It was a silly picture from practice. He was more outdated in technology than the others, so she just had to settle for an email rather than a text or an airdrop. She was just lucky he didn't print it out. Second was an email from an application for a new job she had applied for. They were still in the interview process, so it wasn't a decision. She would answer it later.

The last email was the strangest of the bunch. Opening it up, she thought it was spam at first. It was lined with black with an elegant silver logo located on the top. Written in clear white letters, there was a singular question with a text box below it.

What do you wish for?

Underneath the space to enter what she assumed was a wish, there was a brief explanation.

You have been given the opportunity to make a wish. The wish can be anything, quite literally. Do not underestimate our capabilities by making a trivial request. If we so choose, you may be invited to earn this wish. You are under no obligation should your wish be selected. You may only wish once.

"This is so stupid." She muttered, looking at it with a bit of annoyance. This was some sort of crappy prank, it had to be. Still, it couldn't hurt. As long as she didn't clink any links, she wouldn't get scammed, so she might as well. Whoever had sent it to her probably already knew what she wished for. Typing in quickly, she wrote, I wish I had superpowers.

After hitting the enter button, a buffering logo appeared for a moment, with a 'please hold' notification underneath. She watched with curiosity as it faded away, leaving a new message in its place.

Congratulations! Your wish has been selected. Please prepare a team to complete the trials. You may have as few as one person (yourself) or as many as fifteen. You will be contacted shortly to provide the details of your team. Thank you for your patience.

And with that, the entire email disappeared, completely gone from her inbox. She would be able to compete to gain superpowers? This could change everything for her! Not only that, but she had the perfect team backing her! But... would the boys be willing to help her with her wish? She had just made it for herself... They were always looking out for her, she was sure they'd be fine with it. Her heart rate increased as she jogged the rest of the way home, already texting the guys and asking for another group hangout the next morning.

Go to Chapter 2

#exo #exo x reader #exo fanfic #exo fanfiction #kai #kyungsoo #xiumin #luhan #kris #tao #chen #chanyeol #baekhyun #sehun #suho #lay #kpop #kpop x reader #x reader #kpop fanfiction #kpop fanfic

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sheepydraws · 7 years

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And So They Lived (3/6)

Part 1 Part 2

Odd sat down in the stairwell and put his head in his hands. He said he would just go over to Jeremie’s and hang out, but he couldn’t. He avoided that entire side of the dorm.

He understood. He really did. If he had someone to make out with he’d be at it every chance he got. But maybe he’d get with someone with a single? Or had more neglectful parents? Besides, if he didn’t leave he would have to watch them sitting on Ulrich’s bed, cuddling and chatting or watching dumb videos. No amount of trashy electronica in his headphones or bizarre and vivd imagery across his computer screen could block that out.

So he said he’d go hang at Jeremie’s since it was getting too cold at night to go on long walks in the woods. He wished Kiwi was still around. Not so Odd had and excuse to be out of the room, but so that he could leave Kiwi there and he would stare at them while they hooked up till they got uncomfortable.

All the things he did to keep that dog safe from the school board and XANA killed him. It wasn’t even calculated as far as anyone could tell. Just a bad mix of exposed wiring and an overly inquisitive snout. Jim caught them burying him and blustered over, asking what on earth they thought they were doing with those shovels, but then he noticed that Odd was crying so hard he was shaking. He stood there while Odd and Yumi dug, head bowed. When the headmaster passed by Jim jogged over to him and they talked for a while before leaving. No one bothered the five of them after that. Jeremie read a bible passage he had printed out, something simple about putting a soul to rest. Aelita carved a sigil into the freshly turned earth and left marigold seeds in it.

It was the nicest send off that turd of a dog could have asked for.

XANA’s parting had been less ceremonious. Odd had thought it was over when they shut the supercomputer off for the last time, but about a week later Jeremie called him.

“I keep having these dreams where it lights up again all on it’s own.”

“Aelita’s the one who has visions, Einstein.” Odd mumbled into his pillow. Besides the abrasions and sprained ankle he felt like he was coming down with a low grade cold. It didn’t help that Jeremie had called him at five in the morning.

“I know. I know. We cut all the power cords, we smashed the circuit boards, but I can’t help but wonder if she’s still in there somewhere.”

Odd rolled over on to his back and squinted in the early morning sunlight. “So? You want us to take the whole thing apart?”

“Yes.”

Odd groaned. “Why don’t we figure out why the building’s been abandoned all this time while we’re at it, eh?”

At least Yumi was put on that job, tracking down the deed. Odd preferred working with the welding torch or prying wires apart. Their last few weeks of summer fell into a pattern: Wake up early, walk down to the factory, take things apart for a few hours, lunch, a little more work, and then goofing off for a while before heading to bed. Occasionally Odd would think to ask why they were never in the factory after sundown, but then he would shudder and the urge would pass.

Jeremie was even more obsessed with tearing everything down than he had been with resurrecting Aelita. He filled journal after journal with drawings and pictures and notes as they took the transfer tubes apart.

“Do you think you’ll ever build them again?” Ulrich asked once they had taken apart the first tube and Jeremie was satisfied that he didn’t need to monitor the dismemberment of the other three as closely. “I mean, you took all those notes cause you want to reverse engineer it, right?” He made grabby fingers and Jeremie passed him the large screwdriver, the one they used as a small crowbar.

“I think the knowledge is worth having, but I don’t know if there will ever be a real use for them.”

“Are you kidding?” Odd said, grunting a little as the panel Ulrich had been working off the tube came free and it’s full weight landed in his arms. He heaved it to the side and Aelita hauled it off to add to the pile of scrap metal upstairs.

“What?” Jeremie said.

“There are like a million things you could do with these! A fully immersive gaming experience aside, the army funded them the first time, they’d probably pay for them again.”

“Odd’s right.” Yumi said from where she had set up camp at the side of the transfer room. Even with her fractured arm she was doggedly typing away, trying to figure out who had the deed for the factory, and if they had, in fact, been paying the power bills. She didn’t have to, but she was there every day with the rest of them, sitting out of the way with Aelita’s laptop. “If you got the patent on these you could be a billionaire.”

Jeremie made a face. “But I didn’t build these. I’d be profiting off someone else’s work.”

“Aelita could submit it, then.”

“Aelita could submit what?” Aelita asked as she walked back in.

Jeremie passed her a pair of wire cutters. “Yumi was just saying that if we patented the transfer tubes, and the coding behind them, we could make a lot of money.”

Aelita turned to the massive cables that covered the inside of the tube like arteries and snipped the cutters absently. As they had done the last time, Odd and Ulrich would get all the panels off the tube, while Jeremie and Aelita started on the wiring inside. Then they would get out the ladder, rip out the chunks of metal that held the tube to the ceiling, and work their way down until there was nothing left except for a few bolt holes in the floor.

“We are the only people in the world who know how to work it.” Aelita said as she cut the top of a bundle of cables. “And it’s my father’s invention. I probably would have gotten the money one way or another.”

Odd took another sheet of metal from Ulrich and dragged it to the elevator. By the time he got back Yumi had been asked to open a new word document and was taking dictation on possible uses for the transfers.

Of course that had been summer vacation. Now it was the middle of October and what was left of the super computer and the tubes were in boxes in Jeremie’s room. They had sold a lot of it as scrap metal, the rest Jeremie wanted to repurpose. Maybe it comforted Jeremie, or gave him a sense of closure to put XANA’s pieces back together as useful, normal computers, but Odd still didn’t know the first thing about technology, and all he saw was XANA slowly invading the world again. Jeremie explained to him over and over that it was like using the organs of a cadaver to give new life, but Odd’s fear was just getting worse. He couldn’t be in Jeremie’s room anymore without feeling like the boxes were breathing, spilling the same dark smoke-nanoparticles, he now knew-that trailed through the last four years of his life.

“Are you going to throw up?”

Odd jumped. He had his head buried in his hands for so long the fluorescent lights seared his eyes and he had to blink rapidly before Sissi’s face came into focus.

“What are you doing here?”

She shrugged. “Nicholas was sick. I brought him some vitamin C and stuff.”

“I thought you two weren’t friends anymore.” Ever since Nicholas finally started his own band.

“Yeah, but we were. And he’s sick.”

This isn’t the kind of logic Odd would have expected from Sissi. It’s shockingly nice. But then, more than one thing about Sissi had been shocking lately.

“You wanna watch a movie?” Odd asked.

Sissi shifted the weight on her hips and he couldn’t help but notice A. she had hips, and 2. the way the fabric of her jeans stretched across them was mouth watering.

“Which one?” She asked, rightfully suspicious of his taste after last time.

“You choose.”

“Like Water For Chocolate.” She said, with a decisive nod.

Odd stood up and felt light headed for a second as all the blood rushed to his feet. “It’s another romance, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but then you cry.” She looked him up and down. “You look like you’re in the mood for that.”

Odd didn’t respond, just followed her to her room. There was still candy left over from last time, but it paled in comparison to the food porn on screen. And the actual porn.

“Jesus.” Odd muttered about halfway through. It was embarrassing enough watching two people make out with Sissi next to him, now he had to see bare breasts too?

“That’s completely non-sexual, Odd. Grow up.”

Odd smacked the space bar. “I’m sorry, you want me to rewind it? Did the narrator lady not just say, ‘The passion of his lover’s gaze transformed-‘“

“It’s a metaphor.”

There was an extended stare down, which Sissi won by pressing play.

“I don’t know how I’m going to cry about this.” Odd said.

“It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It sneaks up on you.”

Odd considered this, but, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Romeo and Juliet.”

Sissi paused the movie again, just so she could look at him aghast.

“Okay,” She said, slapping the space bar, “We’re watching that next.”

Odd did not appreciate the assumption that he was ever going to do this again. But he did cry at the end. It was beautiful. He tried to explain exactly what was so beautiful about the last scene even as he watched it, but he choked on the words and just cried. Something about that made Sissi laugh, though tears rolled down her cheeks too.

“I always cry at the end.” She managed. “Every time. Same with Romeo and Juliet.”

Odd tried to say something back, but he was crying too hard. He kept it up right through the credits. Sissi sat with him till he finished. She didn’t say much, or rub his shoulders or anything like that, but she walked him back to to his dorm. Odd wasn’t sure how that might look, but it felt good to have a buffer against anyone he might run into, even if Sissi might have been one of the people he dreaded seeing under other circumstances.

“Good night.” She said as he opened the dormitory’s front door.

“Night.” He replied, his voice shaky and spent.

Ulrich was still up when Odd kicked his way into the room, but Yumi was long gone. “Where have you been?” He asked.

“Out.” Odd said as he sat down on his bed and wrestled his boots off.

Ulrich looked up from his laptop. “Were you crying?”

Odd touched his cold cheeks. He considered telling Ulrich the truth, but ‘I was having a heart to heart with Elizabeth Delmas’ sounded like sarcasm. “Nah. Just kind of drippy from the wind.”

“I’m sorry about that. We probably shouldn’t be sending you out when it’s this cold.”

“No, I-I was in the library. Watched some stuff in the media room. It was fine.” That was when Odd decided not to say anything about Sissi. It wasn’t a big deal. Not like he was going over to her place all the time, slowly working his way through her massive movie collection. They were almost all romances, many of them rom-coms. She always warned him if he would cry at the end, and he was surprised the first time he told her he wasn’t in a crying mood.

A/N: Like Water for Chocolate and Romeo and Juliet are both about star crossed lovers and for both of them I spend the first 3/4 quarters laughing inappropriately and the rest crying.

The best movie version of Romeo and Juliet (in my humble opinion) is Romeo+Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s colorful and stylized and it makes you believe in Romeo and Juliet’s love, which is what a successful production must do. (It’s why i don’t like West Side Story, but that’s a rant for another day).

Part 4

#code lyoko #odd della robbia #sissi delmas #elizabeth delmas #angst with a happy ending #hurt/comfort #fanfiction #multi-chapter

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