a tiny lie to get you through morning - [ 1 ]

Instructions

Next Chapter: WIP ─────── One ─────── Enhancements weren’t very common anymore in L’manburg. Years ago, the city had seen a massive increase in documented civilians with some sort of ability. Enhanced senses, environmental manipulation, unnatural intelligence. There had even been a small amount with physical enhancements, like wings or tails. Nobody was quite sure what had happened. There were hundreds of rumors about hunting or illnesses, hate crimes from anti-enhancement groups. The government tried to convince everyone that people had just gotten better at hiding their enhancements, or that they’d moved out of the city. Tommy was extremely aware that they were lying when they said that. He was one of the few kids in the city with an enhancement, at least that he knew of. What made him even more impressive was that he’d grown up around enhanced people his entire life. Tommy’s family was probably one of the very few in the city that could truthfully say they had an enhanced bloodline. Of course, they tried to avoid sharing that information. It was better safe than sorry in most cases when dealing with enhancements. He was the youngest in the family, four and six years younger than his two older brothers respectively. The first time he’d ever really understood his enhancement had been when he was six, when Wilbur had said a tiny unimportant lie and Tommy had instinctively known. After that, he abused his ability to the extreme around his brothers. If they didn’t tell him the truth, he knew and could provide them with hundreds of threats. Most enhancements took some sort of need or energy, but Tommy’s was instinctive and subconscious. It was switched on all of the time without him even needing to tell it to be. Wilbur was the middle child. His enhancement let him “convince” people to do what he wanted them to with just his voice, though it didn’t work on Tommy. They guessed Tommy’s built-in lie detector combated any attempts to control his actions, but there wasn’t any way to really be certain. He would use his power to sort out minor inconveniences, much to the threes’ dad’s frustration. He also liked to use it to torment said dad, and the eldest sibling in the family. Tommy had always looked up to Techno the most. He had always seemed cool, even though he was constantly reading (which, in Tommy’s opinion, was not cool. Books were boring.) Techno was stronger than most people, mostly invincible too. Which made him powerful in battle. That was the one part of Tommy’s life that would have separated him from any other family similar to his. Instead of family dinners and movie nights, though he did have those of course, most nights were spent running across rooftops and narrowly avoiding anybody against them. His family, though the government wasn’t yet aware of their blood ties, were labeled as villains. Outcasts, dangerous. In reality they’d just refused to wait for the system to fix itself and instead taken action, even when it was against the government's say. It hadn’t really been Tommy’s choice of this life, though he’d never complained. He could have easily decided that he didn’t want to spend his teenage years running away from official government workers, and his decision would have been respected. But there was something weirdly fun about concealing his identity and chasing his brothers in the cold night air, high above anyone still awake. He’d started running after them when he was ten, and by the time he’d turned fifteen it felt as normal as waking up to go to school each day. At fifteen years old, Tommy felt like he had the entire world in his hands.