Just to be doubly and triply and quadruply sure, I dropped the fragment. Held out my hand. The fragment flew into my hand.
This was starting to creep me out.
I wasn’t going to pinch my cheek or mutter “is this a dream?” or do anything cliché like that. This was waaaaay too realistic for that. I had no doubt that this was reality.
Eh—
Eh——
In times like these, what am I supposed to do? I had no prior experience or knowledge to draw from. “Hell yeah, I got a superpower!” wasn’t exactly absent from my mind, but if I was being honest, I felt way more troubled than anything else.
’Cus, y’know, in light novels and manga, specific reasons are provided for why the protagonist gets their powers, right? A voice appears inside their head asking for help, or they discover that they were actually part of the bloodline of some retired magician. They get a guide or a hint, or something like that, yeah?
So what was this? I dropped the senbei fragments. They floated up and settled into my hand. Dropped. Floated. Settled.
So, like, what is this, really? Depending on the way you think about it, it might be awesome, but still. Just, what? I was able to use telekinesis, but I didn’t have a single clue what triggered my powers. An ordinary teenager who awakens to superpowers is a standard trope, but almost invariably, it is eventually revealed that the protag’s background was anything but ordinary.
Both of my parents worked, and my family was normal. There was no possibility of them actually belonging to some underground world. My dad was an inspector for materials used in making automobiles, and I personally saw him at work back in elementary school on Workplace Visit Day. He went on about light getting reflected when lasers hit the materials and bouncing off and whatnot. My mom helped out with the flower cultivation business at her parents’ home. I helped out there every once in a while during summer break to earn some pocket money, so there was no room for doubt. I had never been spirited away when I was younger, there was no suspicious transfer student at school, and there were no enigmatic bruises on my body. Rather than saying that I had not encountered anything mysterious lately, it would be more accurate to say that I had not even seen the “M” in “mysterious” throughout the entirety of my life.
The hell, man. In my 17 years, I’ve never before been in any situation this incomprehensible. Even the math questions on the Tokyo University entrance examination are more comprehensible. I may not know how to solve those, but at least I kinda get what they’re saying. But this, I don’t get. Like, at all.
No, wait. Am I being too conceited thinking I’m the only person capable of using telekinesis? Is this perhaps one of those cringy chuunibyou delusions where I think I’m awesome ’cus I’m special and all that?
Could it possibly be that it’s normal to be able to use telekinesis, but just that all the adults have been carefully hiding the fact?
Or maybe... has the entirety of the human race suddenly awakened to telekinesis at the same time? It totally... could not happen, d’oh... It can’t, right? Guess I should look into it just in case.
I got back into my seat, turned on my computer, and got on the internet. I clicked through several news sites, but didn’t see anything of the like. Well, it’s only been about 30 minutes since I became able to use telekinesis. Perhaps it just hasn’t made the news yet. Leaving the news aside for a while, I tried other search terms.
[Search: adolescence, telekinesis, discover]
[Search Results: “things said by adolescents,” “Wikipedia—adolescence,” “adolescent mental illnesses,” etc.]
I clicked on all the links on the first page of the results, but all of them proved to be completely unrelated. I wasn’t particularly surprised. If you mentioned adolescence together in the same sentence with telekinesis or whatever, it would raise doubts about your sanity for sure. Either that, or it’d evoke a gentle smile and an averting of the eyes. So with that, I had gone and reconfirmed that claiming to be able to use telekinesis would be just cringy as hell. OK, yep, I’m never discussing this with anyone else. Even though it was true, having to prove that it was true would have been a pain. In the first place, even I had been bewildered by it until I managed to accept it, so other people would probably just suspect it to be a magic trick or something. And even if I managed to prove myself, whatever would happen afterward would also be a pain. I might have learned something if I asked some renowned physics professor to use some state-of-the-art physics machinery thing on me, but I had no such connections.
So mum’s the word on the whole thing about me being able to use telekinesis. All right. Just having decided on this one single policy has made all this online searching worth it. The internet really is almighty.
Next, I turned to a new set of search terms while hitting F5 on those news sites every few minutes or so.
“Illnesses of the mind” sounded worrying, but I didn’t know if this telekinesis came with any risks or side effects.
Like, what if it shortens my lifespan every time I use it? Or I’ve become able to use it as a side effect of some illness? Or some poisonous substance builds up inside my body every time I use it?
Just to be sure, I walked out of my room to grab the emergency kit, then put the thermometer under my armpit. I looked up the normal heart rate of a 17-year-old male, then measured that too.
In short, I was absolutely normal. I wasn’t experiencing any headaches or dizziness. It seemed that at the very least, nothing awful was going to happen to me in the immediate future.
It might make sense to avoid using something that I’m not familiar with and just leave it alone, but that in itself may also be dangerous.
Like, if I don’t use it regularly, then something like MP will build up inside my body until I eventually go boom. I’m gonna have to say “no thank you” to going boom.
Rather than just putting a lid on the whole thing, it might be safer to risk examining it long term. There’s no indication of it going away if I just leave it alone.
Let’s examine it as far as we can go. If this develops into a telekinesis cheat that enables me to become popular, then go me. Fuhehe.
I looked up “psychokinesis,” “telekinesis,” “mind powers,” “parapsychology” and every single related word I could think of. I clicked on every single link and read it all. What I learned after one hour was that none of it was of any help to me whatsoever. There were sites that discussed the topic with the assumption that it wasn’t real, and suspicious sites with dubious logic and mentions of power from the devil or inner energy. But not a single one of them—scientific or otherwise—was relevant to my current situation.
So from that, I arrived at two possibilities.