Does This Thing Have A Manual?

"No Fucking Way!", was an expression of my surprise which was replaced by a throbbing pain since the mobile phone hit my forehead with quite some force. I took a couple of deep breaths in order to collect myself. I extended my hand outwards and willed the water bottle towards me. Nothing happened. "Strange! Am I still in a dream?", I wondered and slapped myself pretty hard. "Arghh! That hurt!! Why am I hurting myself today?", I pondered while rubbing my cheek. I tried the same thing over and over again for about 10 minutes, muttering incantations I heard as a child. Nothing worked! So I decided to step back and reevaluate my situation.

"Does this have anything to do with the dream I had or am I finally going bonkers?", I asked myself and tried to recall the contents of my dream. I remembered the darkness, the orb and then the inscription on the orb flashed before my eyes once again.

A deity cannot be made in a single day,
Perhaps this will help you find your way,
All that is needed is a convenient mod,
I wonder what you will do as a Demi-God!

"What a vague poem! Where is the God-damned manual? If I really do have powers now, why can I not use them", I exclaimed, quite irritated. I decided to not think too much about it and decided to get ready for the day; I did have a job. I went into the shower and studied my reflection in the mirror; I used to be a cute kid but now the person looking back at me was just an ordinary looking man with no striking facial features. "Good luck getting hit on, loser!", I said to myself, as I did everyday. "Imagine what kind of a girl would actually like someone like you!", I continued. And that's when it hit me.
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IMAGINE
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I froze for a moment and thought back to when the mobile phone hit me in the head. Because I was too sleepy and did not want to get out of the bed, I imagined it flying towards me. The other times, I tried to reproduce the same effect I just willed it without visualizing it in my head.

"Could it be?", I wondered with a sense of curiosity, extended my arm towards the toothbrush, imagined it flying into my hand and that's what happened. Shivers of excitement ran though my body and I tried it again on the tube of tooth paste. Same thing!

I was able to make things move by imagining them moving! And then I started laughing, gently at first, gradually louder and wilder till I was laughing like a crazed maniac! I laughed for quite some time, expressing my glee at having discovered what I could do.

"A one word manual. Not half bad!", I said to myself continuing to smile and smirk.

"All bets are off! This gonna be fun!", as I began my journey, to discover myself, my powers and the world. The feeling of being a pathetic loser was replaced with a sense of destiny as I started wondering one single thing: "What do I do next?"

The Darkness

"Fiction and reality are different, don't mix them up." This is what I believed in all my life. And why should I even believe otherwise? I have watched plenty of movies, played plenty of video games and read plenty of books which resulted in me having a very active imagination. However, nothing I experienced throughout my life even came close to the fantastical things I always used to imagine. I always wanted to fly without any gadgets; I was barely able to jump 4 feet in the air. I wanted to be able to run faster than the fastest vehicle in the world; I could barely run straight for more than 10 minutes. I wanted to be able to see the stars and planets up close; the best view I got was through a telescope I had purchased years ago.

Simply put.... I was simply unable to enact the things that ran amok in my mind. I kept believing that through some stroke of luck I would unlock my latent abilities and I would have a lot of fun with the resulting powers I would obtain. Nothing happened. I lost my will to keep imagining and resigned myself to a life of mediocrity where nothing out of the ordinary would happen.

Did I mention that I did not believe in a God?

Yea.... that was simply because my lifestyle did not need the existence of God. Not that I ever missed an opportunity of diss at the powers that be when things did not go my way. Especially when I was unable to act out my imaginations.

Sounds boring and pitiful right? You are probably thinking: "What a loser!" Well, I was a loser. WAS!

I used to work at a software company that made mobile applications and I had a well paying 9 to 5 job. I hated it. On my way back to my room I decided to buy some stuff from a local burger restaurant and eat in room, alone, as usual. I was about to unlock the door when I got a strange feeling, a powerful feeling of foreboding, as if something was waiting for me. It had been a long time since my imagination had perked up but I beat it down since I had long up it.

I entered my room and saw nothing. It was not that it was dark, I literally could not see anything before me. I turned around and saw nothing; the doorway had disappeared. I looked up, I saw nothing, down nothing, I could see nothing, only my own body as if it were illuminated. I was somehow standing on a surface but could not see it. "Ahh.... I must be dreaming", I thought and felt a bit relaxed. I resolved to take a holiday for a couple of days since the monotony was clearly sapping me of my strength.

I decided to explore this darkness and after looking around I saw a faint source of light in the distance. "To the light", I thought and pursued it. After what seemed like an hour the light got brighter and brighter till I was a few feet away from it. To me it looked like an orb floating in the air. I had had dreams before then but that dream was a bit to surreal. It felt too real. I felt no time lapses. I waited before the floating, glowing orb; for what, I do not remember. I just waited.

I got bored and decided to inspect the orb which I found was floating in mid-air. The orb resembled a glass sphere with a source of light at its centre when I first looked at it but after studying it carefully there were inscriptions on its surface. I held it in my hands, squinted my eyes and managed to read the following:

A deity cannot be made in a single day,
Perhaps this will help you find your way,
All that is needed is a convenient mod,
I wonder what you will do as a Demi-God!

"Interesting poem!", I thought and the orb slipped out of my hand, fell down and broke into millions of tiny pieces. It was dark once again. I decided to wait again to see if my dream would create another source of light. I waited for what seemed like an hour and started feeling my heart racing. My heart rate rose till I was out of breath and suddenly the universe exploded before my eyes. In an instant I saw everything, literally everything. I saw the stars, galaxies, planets, atoms, photons, cells.... everything. I felt as if everything about everything was being squeezed into my tiny brain and the pain was unbelievable. I felt as if my mind and body were being ripped into shreds. Imagine the worst pain possible and multiply it by a million. That was just a trillionth of the pain I felt. I always thought that the human mind and body had a limit to how much pain it could take. Apparently the restrictions were taken off for me. It went on for hours, days, months, years and suddenly it all stopped.
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And I woke up with a start. Looking around I saw that I was in my bed. "It was a dream after all. Whew!", I said to myself and began to reach for my mobile phone which lay on the ground, a few feet away from me. "Get over here!", I thought and it flew towards me and landed on my face with quite some force. The only words that came out of my mouth a few seconds later were: "No Fucking Way!"