1) There was absolutely no precedent, and I was the first human in history to awaken telekinetic powers. Or there were others before me, but they died without realizing their powers, or their powers were so shoddy and pathetic that they got buried beneath the mountain of fakes.
2) This was a matter being restricted by the highest level of government, and all mentions of it on the internet were thoroughly erased.
Both seemed equally likely, but I was really hoping that it wasn’t number two. Special forces from a gigantic secret organization might be arriving at my door any moment now to kidnap me! That’s scary, haha... No man, that’s not funny at all. That might even be a one-way ticket to becoming a human test subject. I can only pray that it’s not number two.
After three hours had passed and the news sites still had yet to mention anything of the sort, I gave up on trying to gain information from the internet and decided to shift into actual experiments with my telekinesis. Electric scale from the kitchen, check. Plastic bottle (with water inside), check. Measuring tape from my desk drawer, check. To start, I lined all these up on my table.
The reason why the entire senbei didn’t move but the crumbs did was because of weight. At least, that was my hypothesis. So I needed to confirm how much weight I could move.
Firstly, I weighed the plastic bottle after dumping the water out. It was 25 g... which was even heavier than an entire senbei. Damn. I had thought to test my upper limit by gradually adding water to it, but that plan had gone out the window.
Without any other choice, I broke off crumbs of senbei and weighed them on the electric scale, eventually determining the limit of what I could lift to be 3 g. I could move up to 2 g without effort, but when it approached 3 g, then I had to really consciously think of “moving” it.
Leaving aside the pathetic output that could only move a single ant, I had already made my first discovery: the output of my telekinesis could be controlled.
It was more of a “feeling” and less something I could put into words, but I learned that when using telekinesis, there were three steps involved:
1) Look at the target.
2) Hold out my hand.
3) Put in strength.
“Look at the target” was exactly what it sounds like, so we can skip it.
“Hold out my hand” required me to open up my hand with the palm facing toward the target. It still worked if I didn’t hold out my hand, but then the output would drop significantly. To a third, to be specific.
“Put in strength” was also really difficult to describe with words. The only way I could say it was just that I put strength into it. It was like, straining, or doing it seriously, or something like that. If you were to ask me where I poured the strength into or how I strained, I wouldn’t be able to answer you. I guess if I really had to explain it... it was like having an invisible telekinesis muscle, or “telekimuscle” for short, and I just... moved it...
You know how you don’t really feel anything when you pick up something light, but when you carry something heavy or are arm wrestling with someone else, your muscles start quivering and getting tired and you think to yourself, “Oh right, I have these things called muscles, I’m totally using them right now”? That’s what it was like, sort of.
So then, after having determined my limit to be 3 g, I tried various things to see if I could make it go up to 4 g, such as doing handstands and getting down on all fours and shouting. As a result, I got tired, but this was a different kind of tired than the usual physical or mental kind. It was a sluggish, lethargic feeling, but after I rested for a bit, the tiredness went away. The normal conclusion to draw from this was that something like MP gets expended when I use telekinesis. I still didn’t really get it, but I was pretty sure that was the cause, so I wrote down “Be careful of MP over-usage!” in my experiment log and engraved it upon my heart. Excessive physical exhaustion could lead to death, and excessive mental exhaustion could lead to neurosis. Surely excessive telekinetic exhaustion wouldn’t lead to anything good either.
Next was range. How far could my telekinesis reach? I quickly found the range to be far beyond what my tape measure could determine. Rather than saying that I could reach anywhere in my room, it would be more correct to say that it reached however far I could see. The flip side of that was that if I couldn’t see it, then it was out of range, regardless of how close it actually was. If I couldn’t see the target clearly, like if it was on the other side of a dirty pane of glass or it was simply too far away, then the accuracy would drop. However, the output remained the same.
Last was operability. How precisely could I move things with my telekinesis? This turned out to be extremely limited. I could only “draw toward myself (my hand)” and “push away from myself (my hand).” To put it broadly, I could only initiate movement along the direct line connecting me and the target. Sideways movement was NG. To be more specific, I felt like it could be possible, but even when I strained my telekimuscle so much that it felt at risk of tearing, all I could achieve was such minute movement that I wasn’t sure if I had just imagined it or not. So for all practical purposes, sideways movement was impossible.
I wrote all my findings down in my experiment log. I had both run out of ideas and also heard my mom’s car enter the garage, so I hurriedly returned the electric scale to the kitchen and called an end to the day’s experiments. I mean, it wasn’t like I couldn’t secretly keep at it in the middle of the night, but wouldn’t it be scary if I lost control over it and got my family members caught up in this? Though maybe I was being overly self-conscious for someone only capable of moving a mere 3 g.
⚔
The next day, I was stricken with telekinetic pain. Exactly like how if you overwork normal muscles, it would lead to muscle pain, and if you overwork your brain, it would lead to a headache (yes it would). But with that said, I totally did not expect overusing telekinesis to lead to telekinetic pain. If you asked me exactly what kind of pain it was, I would again be at a loss for how to describe it to you. If I had to put it into words, then it was something like “FORUAH!” If I was to express it in a chuuni way, then it would be something like “I feel chaos overflowing from within as my soul breaks out of its shell.” But then again, it didn’t particularly hurt if I chose not to use telekinesis or just thought about having it, so I decided to just let the telekinesis rest for a day.