In a remote corner of a room unfamiliar yet somewhere he had lived all his new life, Andrew woke up on his hard bed to the sound of his phone ringing. The venomous coldness refused to let him get up, chaining him down with a numbing pain in his chest.
His memories felt vague and distorted, his powers non-existent.
"Bella?" He tried to search for his phone thinking that perhaps it was his childhood friend who was calling him.
"Who's Bella?" A young boy's voice greeted him before Andrew completely sat up.
Beside him, on his own bed, Andrew saw a younger child, much alike to his own appearance, sitting and having a bowl of nachos.
"...?" Andrew was confused for a second, and his confusion was aggravated by none other than the stranger kid himself.
"Are you still having nightmares about Chumana? Forget her already, be done and move on."
The kid munched on his snacks as he fiddled with Andrew's phone.
"High school's over for you and now you have no real job except to be a burden on our poor family. Life at eighteen is a blessing they say." The kid's sarcasm was off the roof.
"Who's…Chumana..?" Andrew muttered.
"Sigh…I did you a favour and set up a date with Sampie while you were asleep." The kid got up from the bed and walked to the nearby desk where he kept down the bowl of nachos.
"This isn't breakfast for an eighteen year old." The kid seemed a little disappointed at Andrew's state of affairs.
"Shawn! Enough is enough! It's already 8, what if they close the gates! Your attendance is too low, remember the teacher-!" Kara's raging voice echoed from outside.
"Ah… time for another boring day in mid-school." The kid named Shawn stretched his body and smirked at Andrew. "Life sucks."
And just then, Andrew's phone, lying idle on the hardness of his newer reality, rang again and he saw 'Sampie' calling. The call cut abruptly and news of new mid day meals being offered for stray dogs popped up.
"Atleast that doesn't have to be the case for the both of us." Shawn smiled and left, kindly closing the door on his way out.
"His appearance and name…" Andrew silently looked at his tiny back which screamed 'similar' in every possible way.
He recollected himself slowly and digested his situation.
He couldn't use any of his powers, he felt no energy inside to cultivate. His body felt strange, weak.
Again his phone rang, but this time a text message had come.
[Sampie: 10 am, my house. We'll head out from there.]
Andrew just sat there, in a state of catatonia, unable to understand what in the world was happening.
Three human faces were clearly etched in his mind thanks to the overuse of his 1st technique. Anastasia, Kara, and…
"Ray…" His desire for vengeance seemed to gnaw at his human nature.
"Andrew!" Within moments, Kara burst the door open and walked in with an old sewn school-bag.
His mother's appearance was exactly how he last saw her. Beautiful and ever kind. However, simple signs of wrinkles and sexagenarian blessings overshadowed her grimace.
"I thought school was over…?" Andrew remembered Shawn telling him that.
"Your medical entrance exam is in a week! Are you still daydreaming?"
She kicked him out of the house in a jiffy, only telling him that his Physics private tutor was waiting for him at his abode.
With a small choice within his grasp, he merrily chose the option that didn't involve anything with bookworms or nerdy dystopias.
Reaching Sampie's place, a dirge of choir greeted him, his new beginning.
Andrew obviously wanted to understand his past, find more about the events that drowned him, and unveil the happenings of his diminishing control over his self wrought catastrophe- but instead of doing anything about it, he chose to go on a date with a girl.
"I thought you'd never come." Sampie opened the door with a cold smile.
She had already dressed herself elegantly and the scent of her feminine perfume hit Andrew's nares with sharpness. Watching her take so much preparation for this, he realized that simple coffee was just not what she had in mind.
"I'm a little under-prepared for this."
Sampie eyed him as if he was a joke and cracked at his dry humour with her own.
"You'll be handsome when you grow up."
They together left her place, and went on their date, reaching the farther end of the city, the posh places where kids with renowned parents had their feet placed firmly on the turf.
Their conversation was just little banter, both acting fully to their introverted natures, none oversharing and no one taking the initiative to break the ice. It was a gamble of dice, of whoever slipped first would be the one to reveal themselves. Financially the date was funded by Sampie, as Andrew was supposed to be solving kinematics at that moment and not flattering an adolescent.
The date was uneventful, he had an expensive coffee, a large lesson on titans who liked to drink mashed beans with their laptops open and that baristas rarely gave a dime about one's name.
Perhaps this was a turning point Andrew failed to catch, the coffee rejuvenated his dampened spirits, and he found the strength to move on.
On his way home after dropping Sampie off, he had the feeling of checking his cell. Over a hundred missed calls, none of them he caught whiff of, all from his mother.
"Where have you been?!" She was horrified at Andrew's disappearance.
"I went to check at your tutors-"
Kara had already realized that Andrew had not been studying at all. It's just Andrew himself who hadn't realized that his mother was two steps ahead of him.
"Do you know how long I was searching! I ran up to every grocery store to ask if they had seen you-"
Grounding him with unlimited lectures on discipline, Kara jailed him to his own room till the exam date.
Andrew had been given the ultimatum to crack the exam at any cost or to witness his mother's cold corpse.
Now any child who has any maternal feelings whatsoever, regardless of his circumstances, would know what to do at such a petty point in life.
The thing was, this was a positive for him. He could now recultivate, start from scratch.
His plan was to rebuild everything anew, all while staring at textbooks that made little sense to him.
Thus, he began his new journey by focusing on the remaining bits of Jenna inside him, circulating it, amplifying it steadily, and applying Mon now and then to pick up academic lines that might help him overcome this huge obstacle.
"The only way forwards is downwards." Shawn patted his back at midnight and offered him a cup of coffee.
"?" When Andrew, who was still taking time to get accustomed to his new stranger, looked at him with confusion-
"The vector, it has a direction and magnitude." Shawn smirked at his older simpleton. "Better than a scalar product, I quote."
"Right, the answer is D, why didn't I understand it before?"
"Maybe because you never tried to."
"Hm?"
Not saying anything more, Shawn softly left Andrew's room and let him continue on his struggles.
He couldn't play a part in his fight, this had to be done by the exam candidate himself.
But, both of them played oblivious to the poisonous breeze that entered through the open windows, causing little ripples on Andrew's untouched coffee.
One, because he was focused on revenge, choosing to focus on the broken past.
While the other…
"He's not ready for the power he's about to get…"
Shawn smirked as he closed the door to tomorrow.
"Maybe that makes it more interesting…" His silky rich hair covered his eyes to the blues of eternity.