Being born in a world of hero is a dream for a lot of people. Mostly because Those same people often wish to HAVE those powers. The sight of those super being flying above the cities, riding a dolphin to save a drowning child or lifting a truck with strength alone would make anyone wishful.
Yet, for every existing hero, hundred powered individuals remain hidden. Not because their powers were useless, mostly because heroes are saving the day without pay and thanks are not accepted as a currency.
Also, and maybe more importantly, governments hunt those with power but no power. Those without the means to protect themselves from specials units sent to capture them.
That's how some of them began to sell their services to people able to protect them from country or any group hunting them.
Most if not all rich families in the world has a super human on call, some call those people mercenaries but in polite society they are called private protection.
In my family, the Schmidt, a tradition was born because of those gifted men and women. Back then, before these people were widely known, my ancestors began to marry them in the family to gain their power.
It all started when my first recorded ancestor, Igor the cunning began to employ witches for his army. Record from this time were either lost or damaged but he was the first in our family line to have a child with a gifted as we call them because he wanted his child to get their powers.
Our family kept doing it for generations, searching those with useful abilities and adding them to the bloodline, sometime not giving a choice.
Time passed and the Schmidt became THE name for private protection and old money. With the many powers and family members in the business, no one on earth ignored the family. How could they when everybody important enough had a contract with the Schmidt.
The current family head was my father, Oscar Schmidt. Born as the second son, his mind reading ability, working in a range of twenty meters, allowed him to keep ahead of his brothers whose powers were more physically oriented. Without surprise he became the Boss and his brother were shipped off to the branch family where they would work as private contractor.
A far better future than those with useless aptitudes that mysteriously disappeared.
Born in 1989 as the eldest child of five brothers, I had the bad luck of being born with said useless aptitude at the time. I could hear the electronics devices, understand how it worked and how to upgrade them. When it was discovered, my power that is, computers were a novelty and most saw it as an idea with no future, my family was among them.
I was discarded as soon as my power was determined at the age of six. My name was retired from the family records, changed from Schmidt to Wagner and I was left to an orphanage in the united states to keep me as far away as possible without killing me.
Thinking back, the only reason I was not killed was probably my mother. My father had a sweet spot for her even if he tried to hide it.
Growing up while knowing you were abandoned for being useless was hard. I was a quiet kid growing up, trying as hard as I could to hide myself from others.
The nuns were good to me, they helped, taught me and more importantly, loved me, something I don't believe anyone did aside from my mother. I learnt English relatively well and as years passed, forgot how to speak German.
In 2005, as I was celebrating my sixteenth birthday I decided to leave to make something of myself. I worked for a few month as an IT for a transport business based North Bay near Milwaukee and sold a few of the programs I made as a freelance developer. My ability made it so natural, developing was like speaking and writing English to me, I felt like I was telling the computer what I wanted my program to do and, magic, it would do as I wanted.
Contrary to what my family and everyone else at the time believed, computers and electronics devices became commodities. More and more people asked for my expertise and I was able to leave my job and live from my passion. Making those programs was easy and gave me a lot of free time, which I used to play video games on a cheap computer I bought broken, and fixed.
Ultimately I decided to make my own game, a survival game based on legends: Call of Cthulhu.
The game that changed my life.