━━━━━━━━━━━━━ｓ ｕ ｐ ｅ ｒ ｂ ｏ ｙ !━✖ ✖ ✖ ━ash
age biologically nineteen location gymnasium tagged artifice mood amused
- ash smirked at artifice's comment, allowing a small, genuine laugh to escape his lips. he could get along with her, easily. she had silver, cunning eyes like bullets and a sharp tongue, traits easily accompanied with ash's. maybe this wouldn't be as bad as he had dragged it out to be. he expected to resent everybody in the room, no matter who they were. it wasn't that he wanted to; he just assumed that they would all be newbies and isolate them, leading on their lives as normally as they could with super powers. the thought of isolation brought goosebumps to his arms.
he relaxed his hips and crossed his arms, allowing himself to become more comfortable easing in with the crowd. for once, in the year he had been alive, he was exactly like everyone else. well, maybe not exactly, but similar to. that was okay. he could deal with that. as long as he knew who he was dealing with.
ash studied the girl in front of him. the quivering of her top lip told him she was rather uncomfortable not knowing why they were here. her gaze shifted back and forth and without meaning to ash had already picked out her weakness; ignorance. he wasn't surprised. he expected nothing less from black widow's apprentice. though he didn't really see a need to, ash kept that thought in the back of his mind. there were two things he liked to know in a person, their strengths and weaknesses. his weakness, obviously, was logic. thinking on the spot. he needed time to process everything, to make sense of what was happening. he had nearly no common sense and the synapses in his brain function about a millisecond slower than that of a normal human's. another glitch in his matrix. he had no ration, no control of his temper. his semi-artificial heart spoke faster than his mind.
because of this, it took a couple of seconds for ash to analyze artifice's question. he decided to avoid the topic of why they were there, as nobody seemed to know and bringing it up again seemed redundant. he swallowed, trying to come up with a reply that didn't make him sound more arrogant than he already was. "it's weird because it's normal to me. i could do it ever since i was, well, created, and people treat it like a natural anomaly. i guess it is, but it never seemed that way. like learning to speak your native language at a young age? it's kind of like that." he swallowed again, a small grin pricking at the corners of his mouth. "hell, it took me longer to learn how to brush my teeth than it did to lift up a car." super-strength was easy. it was the x-ray and heat vision that gave him trouble. x-ray vision confused him; sometimes his eyes would dilate to x-ray and in the instance afterward return to normal. it gave him a massive headache, and six months of peripheral vision only helped a little. the heat vision, however, was a bigger problem. it seemed to be activated by anger or passion, a strong emotion being emphasized. ash had no control over it.
ash averted his thoughts back to artifice. he knew there were a couple of kids here older than he was supposed to be- technically everybody was older than him, by a lot- and he started to get the feeling that she was one of them. artifice had a mature and sophisticated stature to her, a huge contrast between any of the other super-kids. "i'm sick of my story, though. what about you? were you born incredibly sneaky or is it a trait that's taught?" black widow seemed like the dream mentor. she was smart, quick, and impeccably keen. unlike superman, she seemed to actually care about what she was doing instead of caring about how the paparazzi were going to perceive her every move.
