The Amplified : Fire Blight (Book 1)

Chapter Nine - The Star, The Fox and The Mistress

I burst awake into a room that I didn't know, I was lying in a small olive-green bed that took up quite little of the room. The dim white light glowed in the corner of the room from a tall lamp, navy blue walls surrounded me and rows of beds with heart rate monitors on the left of them, just like the one I was in. I looked to my left and saw more beds and monitors that extended to the end of the room and Stephy slept on a chair beside me. A hand grabbed my arm and when I looked back at the person who was holding me, I saw the old lady from the dais. She let go of my arm and rolled back in her chair, her oriental eyes continued to watch me as if I would faint again any minute.

"So, fire then." She said as she picked up a book of her lap, a little smile gleamed as she started to read.

"Where am I?" I asked sat back against the walk.

"You're in the Med Bay. You are a lot heavier then you appear." She said.

"What happened back there?" My head began to blare as I tried to think about what had happened to me in the library.

"Well," she looked up from her book and looked at me, "you were shouting at everyone in a three-meter radius and that somehow triggered your powers. Before you could hurt anyone, Adam hit you in the back of the head, knocking you out cold. I had to convince Max and Adam to carry you up here and they were none too thrilled to do so." she said as she returned to reading her book. She kept her eyes fixed on her book. There was a long pause of silence before she spoke again. "I suppose you have a few questions."

"A few isn't enough. Who are you? How did I get the powers? Why was Stephy born with them? Why are we being chased by a government organization?"

She smiled again and slowly closed her book, "I am Akari Saito, I run The Foxhole and make help Amps like you and your sister, giving them somewhere they can stay. As for how you got your powers, is simple. You are a smart boy, what's happened in the last few days?"

"Nothing. Last few days I've had a normal life. Had a fight, went to the Storm Watch party-" then I could almost hear a click sound as I figured it out. "The Storm? There was pink lightning and the fog."

"Good. It usually takes longer for the powers to manifest, about two days, but since your family has a history with powers you got yours in a few hours. It's also why your sister was born with powers." Akari eyes drifted to my sleeping sibling, her breathing was soft, and her hair was sprawled over her face like a firework went off.

"My family has a history? What do mean family history?"

"This wasn't the first storm you know, but it was the largest one to this date." She said with a concerned look upon her face. "Usually it would only be in small parts of the country but last nights it large parts of the world were affected by the storm. We used to know a rough estimate of how many Amps there were in the world but now maps are showing maybe three times the number of Amps there were before. The red dots all over the map in the library, those were all the suspected or confirmed Amps."

"Wait what's an Amp. Colts said the same thing at my house and you've been saying it since I woke up."

"Ah sorry. I'm moving a bit too quickly. An Amp is just short for amplified, our genetics are slightly different from normal humans, hence amplified."

"Okay, I see. You said my family had a history with powers. Who had the powers, was it my grandfather, my grandmother."

"Your great grandfather was an amp and so were his siblings but then it stopped at your grandfather and who knew why but it just skipped a generation. Then your father Francis was born." She said those words with sadness in her voice.