CURIOSITY, A BRIEFCASE, AND THE MYSTIC SHADOW PHOENIX

Tales From The Crypt-ic Thumbdrive

"It looks pretty sturdy, so I guess I'll try to pick it?" Ian postulated, looking around for his lockpicking tools. He'd picked them up a few years back, found them in pouch, hidden under a cinder lock in a long ago abandoned warehouse. Finding them had piqued an interest in learning how hard it really was to do, and he had spent countless hours discovering for himself, just how they worked.

It turned out to vary greatly by the lock, and this one would not be easy. Hour after hour slipped by as Ian worked on the lock, using a special stethoscope kind of thing to listen as he spun the dials.

Finally, the case clicked, the lid popping open slightly as it did.

"Yes!" Ian exclaimed in delight at his accomplishment. "Now it's time to see what's inside."

Flipping the lid fully open, Ian was treated to a view of a few thumbdrives and a small vial of blue fluid inside a case that was mostly filled with cushioning foam.

There was a brief moment of disappointment for the teen when he discovered it wasn't just a massive pile of money, like one sees in the movies. The disappointment didn't last, however, as Ian's curiosity quickly took over again.

Thumbdrives in hand, Ian plopped down at his ancient computer. It loaded up just fine, if a bit slow, showing folders worth of graphs and pictures and lots and lots of documents. He was quite smart, but as he looked through a few documents, he felt confident in admitting that this stuff was way beyond him. He knew that it had something to do with proteins and enzymes and lots of very complicated looking chemistry formulas.

The second thumbdrive seemed to go into results of the compound and testing, but it really didn't make much more sense than the first drive. Undeterred by the complexity, Ian kept with it, scanning through page after page to try to make some sort of sense of it all.

The night seemed to just slip away as Ian read. While he did, his mother came back, slept, and left for her second job at a breakfast diner. By the time he had any understanding of the documents, the sun had already risen, and he sat there with dark circles under his eyes trying to read a screen gone blurry from staring at it far too long.

The light of the sun cresting the buildings was enough to get Ian to lean back in his seat, rubbing at his eyes and thinking about what he had read. As far as he could tell, it was some kind of serum, derived from another scientist's work, that was intended to induce a specifically designed mutation in the person it was injected into.

"Devisor stuff," Ian muttered, attributing at least some of his lack of understanding of the documentation to the fact that it was something that wasn't actually comprehensible in the first place.

If someone had killed for it, that meant whatever was in the vial would probably work, and the documents included administration instructions. However, if it was devisor tech like he suspected, it probably wouldn't work quite the way it was supposed to.

He remembered there being a devisor lab not that far from where he lived that had 'spontaneously combusted' because of one of the mutant's inventions.

"Still, it is a little tempting," Ian remarked as he looked at the little vial.

If he was honest with himself, it was more than just a little tempting. That little glass tube could well be an answer to all his problems. He could immediately get out of the sh-tty life he was stuck in, instead of waiting ten years or more.

He couldn't just inject himself, though. Not until he'd run through the results document a few more times to at least see what awaited him if he did.

In the meantime, Ian decided that today was clearly a day to skip school. He carefully returned everything to its place in the case, then hid the case under his desk.

With his treasure secured, he flopped onto the bed, letting exhaustion take him to sleep while he dreamed about superpowers.