I should have been terrified.

Lying in a trunk with a bag over my head, my hands tied behind me, I should have been trembling with fear.

The men who'd grabbed me and Dad from the house had been pretty clear about what they planned to do to us; they were going to make an example of us.

Yet my mind was clear and calm.

"Inventory," I muttered.

The screen appeared in front of my face, dimly lighting the area around me. I could see the two other bodies in the trunk; unlike me, they were dead.

I could see twenty slots; I'd filled half of them when I was first experimenting with my power shortly after it had appeared a week ago.

"Slot three," I muttered.

Mom's kitchen knife clattered onto the floor of the trunk. I did my best to roll over and start sawing away at the plastic zip ties.

-1 hp

-1 hp

-1 hp

-1 hp.

Although I cut myself repeatedly, there was no blood. My body wasn't as human as it had once been, and the pain was a dull, muted version of what it once would have been.

-1 hp

Damn it. This should be easier.

Skill Leveled Up!

Physical Resistance: -2% to all damage taken. Level Two.

That'd be a lot handier if I didn't only have ten hit points. I might be able to level it up to something decent if me and Dad survived this.

I decided to ignore it for now.

I felt something loosen, and a moment later I was free.

New Skill Created!

Escape Artist: The art of escaping bondage and of wriggling through tight spaces. You can wriggle into any space larger than your head.

10% chance. Level one.

I ignore the message, and I murmur again.

"Inventory, number eight, three units."

I could store up to fifty identical items in one slot. I grabbed the three granola bars and ate them as quickly as I could.

5 hp restored!

The better the food, the more I healed, but I couldn't eat the soup I had stored, both because it was still hot, and because the smell might alert the passengers in the car.

It'd only been a week, and I hadn't learned about the healing properties of food until yesterday when Sophia had pushed me down the stairs at school.

That's when I'd gained my first level of physical resistance, and I'd healed at dinner that night.

That gave me an idea.

I turned, leaving the menu on, and I observed the corpses behind me.

Corpse:

A dead man. Only hours dead, he is starting to stink. The tattoos on his neck and his Asian features make it likely that he was a member of the ABB.

Apparently Observe didn't give me the names of the dead. Because they no longer had identities?

The other two were Caucasians, but observe didn't tell me much other than that one was dressed in a business suit.

Neither of them had anything useful in their pockets. I was considering the thought of banishing all three of them to my inventory; it was getting rank in here.

The car started slowing.

It stopped and I could hear the doors opening.

I touched all three dead men and put them in inventory. I was going to need as much room as I could get. I shifted around.

"You don't have to do this," I could hear Dad pleading. "At least let Taylor go."

"She's seen our faces," a deep voice said. "We can't even whore her out; she's gonna have a grudge. It's nothing personal; the boss just says we have to make an example out of you."

Footsteps were coming around to the back of the car.

They had Dad hostage, but they were planning on killing us both. I didn't have any choice but to fight.

"Inventory, number one," I said.

An iron pot of steaming hot stew appeared in my hands, as hot as it had been the moment I'd put it in inventory. I couldn't put living things in there, but non-living things seemed to be held there in a timeless state.

The trunk opened, and I slung the boiling stew into his face.

He screamed, and I grabbed my knife and stabbed upward at his face.

CRITICAL HIT: 10 hp!

5hp!

5 hp!

Two other men were coming around the corner, while a third man was holding Dad.

I touched the car behind me, and I felt a strain as it vanished.

"Inventory, number eleven!" I shouted, pointing at the men who were pointing their guns at me.

I pointed slightly above them, and the car appeared seven feet in the air.

A moment later it crashed to the ground and the men vanished beneath it. I could see blood pooling from under the car.

"Y...you're a cape," I heard the man holding Dad stutter.

"Yeah," I said.

I touched the car again, and it vanished. The corpses underneath didn't. Gamer's mind helped me to keep from wincing.

"You can let my Dad go," I said. "And you can maybe get to run away. If you kill him, I'm going to drop a car on you, or maybe worse."

"Worse?"

"I'll send you to the bad place," I said.

I bent down and touched the foot of one of the corpses. It vanished.

I touched the next corpse, and it vanished as well. Apparently corpses counted enough as identical that they would stack. I doubted that I'd be able to remember which was which, so I'd have to pull them all out.

"So you've got to touch me?" he said. He stared at me. "Capes have all kinds of limitations."

"I'm not a normal cape," I said. "You think I should teleport you over a volcano, or maybe out to the middle of the ocean? Ocean might be crueler; you'd spend hours drifting, hoping that thing you're seeing on the horizon isn't a shark's fin. Leviathan might even say hello."

"You're bluffing," he said.

"Am I?" I asked. "My Dad is the only thing that you've got that's keeping me from crushing you to death."

The man I'd hit in the face with soup was laying on the ground. He groaned suddenly.

I looked down, and suddenly I felt a sharp pain.

-8 hp.

Skill Leveled Up!

Physical Resistance: -3% to all damage taken. Level three.

I'd been shot!

It looked like the wound had only hit me in the arm.

Dad was struggling with the man, and there was the sound of a second shot.

Dad slumped to the ground, and his killer looked up at me. The reassuring name over Dad's head vanished, replaced in an instant by something else.

I had already cleared the intervening distance with knife in hand, and before he could shoot I was stabbing him.

5 hp

4 hp

5 hp

Critical hit! 10 hp.

The man was down, and I kept stabbing him over and over and over. It took me a while to realize that he was dead.

I staggered over to Dad's corpse, and I stared at him.

Corpse:

A dead man. This is the body of the man you loved and knew as your father. He was killed defending you from the Empire.

Sometimes I hated my power.

I sat and stared. After a few moments, I grabbed a few more granola bars out of my inventory and I began eating.

New Quest!

Kill them all.

The Empire has been terrorizing your home town for far too long. Now they've killed the last member of your family.

Reward: 50,000 experience points. Notoriety.

Failure: Death.

I thought about it for a minute, and then I clicked yes.

What else did I have to do? My whole family was dead, and I knew who was responsible.

I should have been enraged, or at least overwhelmed with grief. Instead I only felt a weird kind of dull numbness.

I'd heard that psychopaths were that way partially because they couldn't feel fear. Part of the reason people could empathize with others was that they'd experienced similar emotions before and could empathize.

The Gamer's mind kept me from feeling fear. Did that also mean that I'd never really feel sadness, or love, or anything?

I could probably feel rage, if what I'd heard about gamers was true.

Maybe being a psychopath wouldn't be that bad, if it let me do what I was planning to do.

I finally looked around.

We were in the woods; from the length of the drive, it couldn't be more than ten miles outside of town.

I could guess the direction Brockton Bay was because there was only one set of large woodlands nearby.

I looked at the car; the seven foot drop looked like it had damaged the car too much to be used.

I used my inventory to begin moving bodies; into inventory, and then out of it and into the car. One after the others, with the exception of Dad, who went into his own inventory box. I could keep him there, timeless until I decided what to do with him.

The car went into my inventory too. I suspected that it was getting close to the limit of what I could place in the inventory, although it was possible that I could put more than one in there. I'd have to practice and see once I got back to town.

I started walking.

I was going to kill them, but first I needed to get stronger. I needed to actually figure my powers out instead of stumbling on new features every few days.

The last thing I needed was surprises. Taking on a group with hundreds of thugs and the most parahumans of any group in the Bay would take planning, and it would take power.

Fortunately, my power was the kind that seemed to thrive on escalation.

It was time to begin my quest.