So it was a dumb idea, I knew that. But it didn't stop me, I needed that shapeshifter's help.

I read the entire article, but it wasn't very helpful. It was just about a series of thefts by who the police assume is a shapeshifter because the crime scenes all looked similar and were all from a bunch of rich people's mansions. The report suspected that the shifter had disguised themself as a staff member; a cook or a maid, to get into the mansions unsuspected. They would then take some valuables, like a fancy watch or some other luxury item that only the wealthy would own, and escape, probably to pawn them off somewhere. They had been suspected of stealing nearly one hundred thousand dollars over the past year, which was a lot, but considering how potentially dangerous shapeshifters could be it was actually pretty mundane. A few years back, someone with a shapeshifting gift kidnapped and impersonated the president for a solid week. Which was hilarious, but potentially catastrophic.

I did some more research on the matter. The shapeshifter pulled off one of these heists about once every other week but only stayed in a specific city for at most two months. Which meant that If I was going to catch them I would get at most three chances before they run off to another city.

I needed to catch them, and really catch them. I needed a favor, and the only way I would get that would be if I did them a favor first. And not handing someone over to police sounds like a pretty solid favor to me.

It was a bad plan. I hadn't thought it through much, and I could probably go about it better, but I was desperate. I needed them to shapeshift me.

But as things were, there was no way I would be able to catch someone that the police had yet to capture. But luckily there hadn't been any heroes called on them yet. Police departments rarely called any heroes for assistance, and when they did there was always a huge power struggle between the two. Something about cops being too prideful to ask for the help of someone with a gift. But that was understandable, Heroes were more useful in major emergencies, like natural disasters, or some genocidal maniac threatening to destroy a city.

I would just have to be the hero to catch them. No, I'm not going to jump through all the hoops that it takes to become a professional hero. There's way too many steps for that and it's supposed to take half a year, and I can't wait that long, the deadline is a month and a half. That just means that I'll need to get lots of practice.

But I can't get any more practice today. It's too late. And I definitely don't have a good enough handle on my gifts to go out and do any vigilante work. So I really need to practice a lot.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sunday was calmer. I spent most of it in my room researching the shapeshifter and trying to test out my gift more.

I discovered that I could toss something up in the air and catch it with my gift, which meant that I wouldn't need someone to throw shit at me for it to work. Today I was testing things out with a random quarter I had in my room. I'd flip it into the air and then stop it midair over and over. Each time I was met with the same magenta glow, and the same buzzing warmth in my chest. But each time I caught it the warmth grew a little bit.

It was at this point that I noticed something different than yesterday. I could feel what the warmth was supposed to be. It was some sort of energy or fuel for my ability. As I collected more and more, from the coin I felt it growing. But I felt something else too, there was a limit to how much I could hold. I couldn't tell how much it was though, like when you fill a water bottle. As the bottle fills the sound that the water makes changes and becomes more high pitched as it fills. I could tell that there would be a limit at some point, but I wouldn't know where it was until I crossed over.

That's what must have happened yesterday, I went past my limit and I suffered the consequences, but I refused to believe that it was all negative. For one, I now felt the energy in a more precise way, I also figured that I could store more of it now, not to mention my hair turning red, whatever that was about. Maybe that's where the excess energy went.

I came to another realization later on. I figured out how to use the energy I had stored up.

I was still messing around with the coin, flipping it around, catching it, and watching it float in front of my fingers. Up until then, whenever I caught anything, it would hover in front of my hands, staying in the same spot relative to my hand. If I moved my hand whatever it was would come with it. But I wanted to see if I could float the coin around in my hand.

I held the quarter above my right hand and then dropped it. The coin fell until I stopped it and it hovered above the palm of my hand completely still. I closed my eyes and focused on my hand and the coin that it held.

I could feel the coin suspended above my palm. I could feel how it wanted to continue to move downward. It pushed ever so gently on my palm, but I resisted, keeping the coin above my palm. Next, I imagined the coin moving forward in my palm. I wanted it to hover above my fingertips and willed it to do so. The coin did not move.

Maybe that's too specific. I simplified what I wanted the coin to do.

Forward.

All the energy I had stored up vanished, and so did the quarter. The coin shot off across my room and into the wall with a loud thwack and then went spinning back towards me, landing on my bed next to me.

That was... strange. I know the coin wasn't going that fast when I caught it. But maybe it didn't need to be. What if the energy that I felt was the momentum of the coin? Maybe I wasn't catching the coin. Instead, I was taking its momentum and storing it, only for me to use it all at once by shooting the coin at the wall.

That made sense!

And that's what the pink glow was! It was momentum!

That's why the size of things affects how well I can catch it, size doesn't matter! It's the weight that does!

That is kind of a weird power now that I think about it. Momentum? Really?

It's a cool power to have and I'm sure there's a bunch of crazy things to do with it, but it was way too hard to figure that one out. I could have just gotten the power to fly, that would have been pretty simple to understand, you fly. But momentum is such a peculiar thing to have control over. But that still leaves me with one question; why the hell did my hair change color? That has nothing to do with momentum.

I continued to do some thinking about my gift and what momentum entailed. I busted out Wikipedia and my trusty graphing calculator and did a lot of calculations. I speculated that I could probably defend myself from a bullet if it came down to it. Bullets actually don't have much momentum, which meant that they would, theoretically, be easy to stop. But that also meant that I had to be careful with smaller objects because, by my calculations, the biggest rock that I caught yesterday had roughly 20 times the momentum of a bullet.

So that's definitely something to be wary about.

I inspected the wall that the coin impacted. There was a pretty deep quarter-sized slit in the wall. Yep, the house is not a good place for training. Which is unfortunate, because I had lots of theories to test out.

I called Emma and told her all about my discoveries (excluding my plan to... recruit a shapeshifter). We made plans to practice more when Molly wasn't home, so pretty much any day after school until five.