Prologue
This work is fiction. The places, organizations, and individuals that appear in it have no relation to reality. If they happen to share a name with something else, please take them as something else entirely.
Everyone in the world has at least one superpower. Mind you, a superpower is not fantasy magic. No one is breathing fire from their hands or soaring through the sky. That would be fantasy magic, not a superpower. What people mean by the superpowers they actually possess is simply an ability that has climbed past the ordinary.
Across the ocean in America, for instance, there lives an Awakened Individual whose superpower is setting a table with almost unfair perfection. Set a fast-food hamburger down on a place setting he has arranged, and it will feel like a meal eaten in a fine restaurant.
A useless ability, you might think. He is, all the same, a man drowning in offers from the restaurant trade—not only in America, but across the entire world. People willing to pay the price of a new mid-size car for a single setting are everywhere you look. Starting to feel just how hard that ability hits?
Another example was a person with a superpower for interpretation. It was called a superpower, but in truth it was an ability sitting right up against fantasy magic. They could speak languages they had never studied with perfect fluency, and they caught every nuance carried in a person's words so completely that even the meaning hidden underneath came through at one hundred percent.
That person was the one entrusted with interpreting at high-stakes working meetings between nations, and it was said they earned roughly an ordinary office worker's hourly wage for every single character they rendered.
Not every superpower, of course, is anything like those two. Where there are superpowers that fall on the good side, there are bound to be superpowers that fall on the bad. Some draw a dud no matter which option they pick in a game of pure chance. Others lay a hand on a dish to cook it, and what comes out is no ordinary meal, but some twisted cuisine from the underworld.
And so the people who never received anything remarkable will sigh, half in jest, that whoever balance-patched reality did a fucking shit job of it. Land even one good superpower and your life turns around that very day. A bad one, though, doesn't merely fail to help—it becomes a minus on the life you already have.
Anyway. Why am I telling you all this?
Because I just obtained an ability that is absurdly rare, and worth real money.
"The balance patch came out fucking perfect! This is a balance patch done right!"