Arcania Academia

But I guess I should introduce myself.

I am X495, a tool created by the government to have unbelievable intelligence with an infinite IQ and powers that can send five countries into desolation. The government has taken every single piece of humanity out of me and replaced it with the parts of a monster. Trillions were spent on experiments for morphing us into the governments' own personal weapons. I'm the 495th test subject out of five hundred and only I and five more have managed to make it this far.

Now that I've explained a bit about me, I'll talk a bit more about what's happened and what's happening.

One thousand years ago in the year 2187, a child with the power to move things without touching them was born. The parents didn't understand why this was, they took him to priests, monks, doctors and whoever else had the slightest chance of knowing what was wrong with him. But they all knew nothing. When it made newspapers, many people thought this was a sign sent down from God. Just like Noah had to build an arc to protect him whilst all the bad people drowned and were washed away, they believed this child would cause destruction.

However.

After months of looking at the parents' diet, their daily routines and doing countless blood tests, they finally found something. The mother herself was a meteorologist and was studying a strange meteorite that had crashed into Earth a few years before she got pregnant. She took it home with her and did countless tests on it, but after finding nothing she put it on a shelf, gave up and soon forgot about it. When she got married her husband moved in with her whilst workers were moving furniture into the house. A lamp knocked the shelf the meteorite was on and fell onto the table below. The couple sat down and when the woman saw it had fallen, she put it back on the shelf, not noticing that a tiny piece of the meteorite had broken off of it and went into her soup. A few months later, she became pregnant. Still oblivious to the fact that some of the strange chemicals of the meteorite still ran through her veins. But even after blood tests, the chemical was never found and the reason behind that is still unknown.

However, that baby wasn't the only baby with strange, new powers that defied reality. All across the world, newborn babies and even animals had begun gaining weird and wonderful powers. The reasons why they were all being affected too? The answer is simple.

The food chain.

That wasn't the only meteorite of its kind, there were thousands, possibly millions of other ones like it. Some gave the same kind of power, mind-moving and others have completely different ones. For example, a mother bathing her baby accidentally slipped and fell unconscious after hitting her head off of the floor. After an hour passed, she came back to her senses. When she realized her baby was still in the bath, she started panicking but was shocked to find the baby underwater, alive and well. The baby lived because she had the power to breathe underwater. When scientists tested why this was, they found out that one of the fishes the woman had whilst pregnant had eaten a piece of a meteorite that had fallen into the ocean.

That meteorite fused with the fish to create the power of water breathing.

The same cycle kept happening across the globe. Many strange powers like spawning chickens out of thin air, turning plastic into wool and even the ability to have a tongue that could stretch to ten meters appeared. But alongside the strange ones, were amazing ones. Like the ability to grow wings and fly, control the weather within a limited radius and x-ray vision. After a few hundred years, having powers became completely normal. An academy was built just for the kids with exceptional powers that could benefit the economy and world. In the academy, they'd be taught the right way to use their powers and fight against those who use their powers for evil.

But world peace isn't what the government wanted. What they of course wanted, was world domination. Becoming greedy, they kidnapped 500 babies who were rare enough not to have powers and started experimenting on them. 125 died after the first test stage, 49 the second, 62 the third, 105 the fourth, 100 the fifth, 14 the sixth, 25 the seventh, 3 the eight, 12 the ninth and now it's the final test stage. Stage ten. No one knows who will die and who will live to become the government's weapon, but if you were to only know the smell of blood and wet paint, I guarantee even you would want to die. To us, this is our world.

They feed us food with bits of different meteorite within them in hopes of us absorbing their powers. So far, only the six left have managed to force the food down without throwing up.

But the cost?

Pain. A few kids couldn't handle the pain and ended up killing themselves by hitting their heads off of the walls to cause severe brain damage. It's traumatic and it's tearjerking to witness such nightmares. However, I am younger than all the kids here. Whilst they might have even a tiny memory of happiness, I have nothing. As a kid, watching them go through pain and even go through pain myself became normal. Soon, my emotions and the ability to even feel pain left me. Now, if someone dies in the most horrific way possible, I won't be able to feel a thing. Or at least that's what should have happened.

Back when I was four, 12 years ago, I heard one of the children tell everyone about the outside world. He had managed to sneak out through the vent and told us about green blades sticking out from the floor, but when he touched the blades, they were soft. There were hundreds of brown tanks that you couldn't see through and without bodies in them. He also described that pure green blades grew out of those tanks. He also told us how bright the paint was outside, the ceiling was light blue and white paint seemed to be moving across it. He explained that the room looked so big and he wanted to explore it more before he got caught.

After hearing how he described the 'outside room', every kid that overheard him that day had a life goal to one day visit it. When I heard it, I finally felt an emotion.

I told myself that no matter what, I'd explore that room. I was determined, every night I'd pray that my wish would come true. So no matter what pain I had to face, I fought against it, I did everything in my power to fight back against my heartbeat that threatened to stop. And I made it, to the final stage.