Welcome to the next episode of what the fuck is a schedule, I'll be your host this evening, my name is Omni. I also go by Cod3d sometimes.

Anyways, if you're here right now, wondering where your follow went, then you're probably one of the four people who lost it when this shitty website decided it didn't like that I uploaded chapter 2 through my laptop, thereby deleting the entire story.

Sorry about that.

Onto bigger and better things, here is where the story starts to truly pick up, so buckle up kids, it's gonna be a wild ride.

Enjoy

~oOo~

Under the cover of the night, long past waking hours for the civil sort, suffering was underway.

Between the Dusty Debby- a whorehouse whose clientele were all regulars, and all drunk- and a nondescript wearhouse, somebody was squealing and whaling, echoing death throes to all who would listen, taking what they thought to be their final breaths, before going silent.

Or rather, something, for you see, in this alleyway there were only two living beings.

I was one of them, and the other was a rat pierced by a short yellow needle with a round head, or as I now knew them to be there for, a round handle.

But it didn't look like a rat any longer, in fact, it looked like it's worst enemy, a cat, a small one, but proof of concept all the same. The yellow needle was for physical transformation, and it worked on both man and mice. All I had to do was pierce it and picture what I wanted it to look like.

Proof of concept for a different, but altogether similar thing also. That I had some kind of power. My imagination was the one that was used to morph the rat.

Now onto the next-

"-You there! Hands where I can see them!" someone ordered from the entrance, and it was just my luck to turn around and see exactly what I thought I would see. A police officer. His pistol is held firmly, barrel trained on my back, rather than my head.

Now how do I come out of this situation comfortably?

The world felt like it slowed down as I got to analyzing my situation.

A bullet travels faster than the eye of an average person could ever hope to track. But I'm not exactly average. Could I track it, and better yet, could I dodge it? It was too uncertain. I can't take that risk.

Could I run? Very likely. Throwing off his aim would be simple. But there was always the chance that law enforcement were trained in super powers, in which case I'd be screwed. Unfortunately this seemed like the only good option. He was holding a handgun, so the further away I was the lesser the chance that he'd be able to accurately hit me, but I needed him distracted or otherwise occupied.

I slowly put my hand up, pulling the needle out with it, but just as my left hand was about to pass my shoulder in height, I threw, and I threw it as fast as I possibly could while ensuring I accurately aimed for the officer, just as I bolted.

But the shot never came, the only sound that followed my escape was that of choking, and despite how potentially foolish it was, I decided to glance back and look.

My needle hit him dead center in the chest, right between heart and lung, and his entire body was seizing up.

I couldn't believe what I was doing when I decided to do what came next, but again, I wasn't really thinking. I was just morbidly curious.

I imagined myself. My flawless skin, my long black hair, and my tar pit eyes.

The officer's face started being melded like play-dough, his arms were being stretched out and padded, while his stomach was thinning out to widen the chest and shoulders.

It wasn't long before I was looking at a mirror image of myself dressed in a police uniform, sobbing and choking on his own spit. Weeping.

I winced. He probably just went through the exact same process I did the evening prior. I had functionally just tortured this police officer who was just trying to do his job. He had likely been called by one of the ladies next door, who heard the gut wrenching squeals of my lab rat, and was here on the slight suspicion that someone was actually being murdered, and wasn't just a squealer.

I walked up to him and put a hand in his left pocket, where a wallet was stashed, and flipped it open. Behind transparent plastic was a picture of a well dressed man next to a woman in a white dress, and two children in tiny suits.

I had to silence this man. I couldn't let him talk, as there was just too great of a chance of this coming back to bite me in the ass. Not even twenty four hours and I'd already fucked up enormously.

I read the name engraved above the picture in the wallet, and regretted it immediately. Knowing his name made this even worse. He was more of a person than I was.

"I'm sorry, Adam Rose," I swallowed, but saliva just kept flowing. I looked myself in the abyss that were my eyes, and the other me stared back in absolute wide eyed panic. I could see his entire body sweating as sweat built up on his forehead, to drip down on his police uniform, and veins started popping out in the whites of the orbs. "I-" I choked up, before continuing, "You weren't supposed to see this.."

"I expected you to dodge," my inner mind filled in, but I couldn't say it, not in this man's final moments; not when it was my fault.

"Goodbye," I finished lamely, before punching him hard in the throat, watching his eyes bulge out, and his neck collapse on itself, and head fall forward before stopping, hanging impossibly low against his chest.

But his body didn't fall, it kept standing to my wide, guilty eyes, and my breath caught.

Then I heard a static voice echo from his radio, and I pulled the needle out before stumbling away, backwards, watching him return to the appearance I saw in the photo, and fall to the ground, dead at last.

Why did it have to come to this?

Tonight was supposed to be fun.

I couldn't stop cursing myself as I ran away, because no matter what, spiting even my own guilt, my mind instinctively went back to where it had strayed every hour since I realized the slightest hints of what I was capable of.

I couldn't stop thinking about how his body didn't fall until I had retrieved the needle from it.

Even as I thought about it, and even as I fought with myself to at least give Adam the respect he deserves in not treating him as another fucking experiment, at least in the privacy of my own mind, I realized that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, a screw loose, or maybe missing those essential moral lessons I somehow knew a child was supposed to be taught was more significant than I'd realized.

Because in the end, what won wasn't my guilt.

It was my curiosity.

I couldn't stop imagining the possibilities of the transformation needle.

Even in my dreams, Adam Rose wasn't there to drag me down to hell with his loosely hanging neck, or his children growing up fatherless, cursing their father's murderer, or his wife being widowed, being forced to whore herself out to provide for her kids that haunted my dreams.

It was a pleasant dream where I stood back as the corpse of the old, slow martial artist fought for me in the tournament, fighting Leorio who was being controlled by the Clown on the other side, while I laughed happily in the back.

~oOo~

When I woke up, I let out a long yawn, and stretched happily. I got out of bed feeling oddly refreshed, and so I made my way over to the kitchen, grabbing a slice of bread which I popped into the toaster, happy in my knowledge of how to do things despite lacking the memory of ever actually having done them before.

As I clicked latte on the coffee machine, last night caught up with me, but just as it happened last night, my mind drifted to the behavior exhibited by the needles. I can change anyone's appearance as long as I stab them with the needle. The potential for this is through the roof.

"Corpse control..." I shook my head, and tried to ignore it.

But I drifted back by the time my sandwiches were ready.

Is it really any worse, I wondered. The pain of transformation is probably far more heinous, morally speaking, than playing puppet master with a corpse..

Killing Adam, and apparently having control of his corpse were the two things that had me feeling so utterly conflicted about last night, and I couldn't keep the guilt from coming.

But hitting him with the transformation needle, oddly enough, didn't feel like that sore of a subject to discuss with myself. I knew it was wrong, I was well aware of that. But it felt like it was an order of magnitude less taboo than the rest of what I did, even though logically I'd argue...

I just killed a man and here I am trying to argue for why the pain he suffered through might be worse than never being able to see his wife and kids again.

I'm fucking mental.

"Just let it go," I told myself. "You can't change the past, you can only strive to do better, and learn from your mistakes."

But was that really okay?

I shook my head.

Even if it wasn't, I had to stand by that, otherwise I'd simply stagnate.

I nodded at my own conclusion, and chugged the cup of coffee, swallowing down my guilt and regret. I had more important things to worry about.

I finished up my read of the hunter manual right before I went out the night before, and learned of what could possibly be my saving grace. The internet would be the rope to pull me out of this abyss. The hunter website could also come in handy.

The elevator that took me back to the ground floor played a pretty relaxing piano piece that I couldn't recognize, but I could still hum along to. As I exited, I waved my goodbyes to the hot brunette receptionist after I passed her desk and put my keys on it.

She looked confused to the highest degree, but I left before she could say something.

Out on the streets again, it felt different than the last two times I'd been out here.

I felt far more confident than I'd ever felt in my short experience of living as I made my way to the nearest net cafe, which is apparently the easiest place to find a computer I'd be free to use. The thirty minute walk was a relaxing experience, just watching all of these people going about their life as I did my own. Watching traffic jamming for the first time despite feeling like it was something so very common, and even trying my hand at street food, which they provided for free in exchange for me telling them a little about the hunter exam. I obliged, and told them the story of Leorio, with a touch of comedy befitting of my own experience of the event, but probably not his, was relaxing.

Getting access to a private booth in the netcafe, and starting up the internet, I plugged in my hunter's license to a slot that accepted it, and got internet access for free. The first thing I did, despite having read the handbook, was to search up the word, "Hunter," looking to find additional information, or public belief surrounding the title and occupation.

And boy did I find more than I bargained for.

The ten things you need to beat the hunter's exam, was a blog I regretted clicking on. "Rejuvenating and strengthening bath salts," really?

On and on it went, with blog posts and articles, promoting complete falsehood, and vague tips that could indeed, probably help you become a hunter, but it was so vague it instead became obvious.

On the other hand, the wiki pages provided essentially the same information he had been bestowed by the hunter's handbook. Only, it also gave me the option of clicking and expanding on a few specific topics I wanted to know more about. Like the picture of the old man, that led me to the page of said old man, Isaac Netero, the Shungen-ryu Kung Fu Grandmaster, elected as the 12th chairman of the hunter's association a few years after an expedition to some place called, "The dark continent."

This was a rarer case. Almost any other name I clicked on led to a barebones website with so little information on it I realized it was a worthless endeavor. I moved on to forums, which I accidently stumbled on, finding threads theorizing Hunter base incomes, threads discussing the very few public figures, and even a thread dedicated to hunter appearances across the globe.

It was intriguing to find out how secretive this whole hunter thing was, but it was also pretty damn irritating for me as a hunter. There had to be a better way, no chance was information just spread by word of mouth when technology like this existed, and I intended to find that method, one way or another.

Despite the ups and downs, however, I was having a pretty good time. I found threads where people talked about their dream superpowers, so I decided to see what other people had to say about the power of transformation, and it was an intriguing read.

Right as I clicked enter for my final search for the day, and probably the one with the least likelyhood of giving me anything useful, I stopped.

I heard loud footsteps echoing my way the silent corridor outside the private booth, and on a hunch I pulled out my hunter's license, turning the way of the door right as I felt the gaze on the back of my head.

Right behind me was a two meter tall goliath of muscle, and proportionate in size to this behemoth slowly spinning triplet of barrels, aimed right at me.

The behemoth smirked, "Your life or the hunter's license, what's it gonna be?"