Here I am recounting possibly the most ordinary life anyone will ever hear about and yet it has become anything but ordinary. I grew up in a small town, just outside of a major capital. It was the typical life where my parents brought me to school, church and family gatherings out of the goodness of their heart. They fought all the time from the moment I can remember and yet they never held a grudge against one another. I felt the love they had for me even then, but still I was afraid of what might happen if they turned the heat on me. So I tried to be good, but I was average at best at that and kept messing up, teasing my brother to the point of tears, tormenting my sisters from time to time. Each and every time I would get punished in a random way and every time I said I would do better. Still, my life ended up much in the same manner my childhood went: average.
It wasn't until I reached high school that I thought I finally could escape this normality in my life, this sense of inadequacy that I would never be nothing more than a grunt. I was surprised at first, for once I began to hit the top of my class, getting As I never dreamed of only to eventually look around me and see the sorry eyes in the class for their own failures. I couldn't bring myself to be better than all of them for that was too selfish, so I taught them what I knew. I fumbled through my words and explanations to try to get them to understand I was trying to help, not just letting them copy off of me. This undid my attempts to be more than normal and made it so that I was merely a single low A amidst the plethora of near perfect scores. There I was back to being my old, boring, normal self, merely a year after I had started my freshman year.
When everyone began to ignore me because of my wealth of knowledge, I looked to sports as another outlet to be better than everyone. I tried football, soccer, baseball, golf, tennis and anything else my average school could offer me. Everyone seemed pleasantly surprised when this skinny kid could keep up with the best of them and decided to try me out on the team for a while. It quickly became apparent that while my skills were superior to many athletes, my frame and build were so average that my execution always failed since I was trying to copy someone else's moves who had twice my weight. Looking to right that fault, I began working out, but nothing ever seemed to help to get me to gain weight or muscle. I just stayed at that average BMI index that said I was typically healthy. I was so disappointed in myself that I quite trying to play sports altogether, the sad part about all of that, the coaches were neither happy nor sad to see me leave. They just gave me a usual look and said, "That's life sometimes."
My last ditch effort to become something greater happened in college when I decided to act on mild aspirations to get a degree. I was going for something rarely anyone could ever be and it paid good money too to be one, but honestly I was okay with any art form I could get my hands on, be it programming, painting, music, drama, theatre or even acting. Much like all my other plans, things seemed to be going well. I was getting good money to go to school based on my grades and I could understand everything that was being taught. It felt like a miracle had occurred, maybe it was possible for me to finally do something great in my life. That was all undone by one word: why. That one word sent me down a spiral staircase, making me question everything I had ever known. It's not like the word had any malice to it nor was it anything out of the ordinary to ask, just the mere questioning of my work caused me to doubt my own abilities to the point where I could no longer function in class. As a result, I became the average drop-out with no place to call home and no work to look for. I had nothing to my name, so I ended up back in my parent's home living off their money, pondering the question: "Why am I so average?"
And yet that's when it happened. Something I had never dreamed of appeared before my eyes, something that promised me that I would no longer be the standard by whom the world calls average. It was so profound, that I could not believe it was true. The entity spoke like a booming voice.
I beseech thee. What is thou's truest desire? Would thou cast away this life for the sake of another? If thou wisheth, I can grant three one power bestowed upon me.
"Can I have all the powers?"
Thou does not know what thou speaketh of. Thy power would be unique to thee, but if thou truly wanteth this wish, then I would bestoweth it upon thee with all the burdens it bears. It paused then spoke again. Thee must choose quickly, for I haveth little time.
Even though the answer was vague I understood that I must choose now and so I picked...
