If you think having psychic powers is cool and easy, you've never  had them. I mean, sure, having psychic powers is  cool and all, but with powers like telepathy, your favorite shows, movies, or the video game you've been dying to buy and/or play is completely spoiled for you. Surprise parties? Forget about it, because no mind, let alone a plan for a party is safe from you. You'd think life rocks when your psychic, but lemme tell you from first hand experience and give you a reality check.... It sucks. Okay, lemme back up and tell you who I even am before I get too into my powers and what the include....

My name is Akemi Tanoka. Almost 16 years ago, my parents gave birth to a baby girl... with sapphire streaked, ebony black hair and clashing ruby red eyes. About a month after I was born, I started talking... In my head. At only a year old, I found out I could read people's minds... Which, I'm not gonna lie, creeped me out a bit for a while. At three years old, just as I was getting used to having telepathy, I found out I can turn invisible during a harmless game of hide and seek with my (then) six year old brother that turned into a three hour search for me that nearly sent him into a panic attack even though I'd been behind him the entire time. When I turned seven, I found out that I could telepathically communicate with my brother and also found out about one of his other  powers a mere 6 months after that. Something we liked to call his "copy cat" power.

See, Daku has a power that, if you can learn a skill, he can "copy" that skill for a year. For example, if he read about cryptography, he'd be able to decode any coded message for that year. There were limitations as well as a drawback: The limit was three skills a year that could be copied, and they all expired when the year ended. If he wanted to keep a skill, he'd have to "copy" that skill two more times to have that skill permanently. If you don't get how it works, just think about copying and pasting something onto a paper and have to do it two more times before it actually stays  for good. But, when I was almost ten, Mom suddenly disappeared. It was extremely unusual, and suddenly our normal became Daku and me taking care of ourselves at 13 and 10 while Dad either worked extremely late or shut himself in his office obsessing  over finding Mom and not getting any  sleep. For 3 years, it was like that... And for the same 3 years, I had these horrible nightmares about Mom screaming for help, about her being tortured so bad you could hear her bones breaking. I'd always wake up screaming from those nightmares, and I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep unless Daku was there to manipulate my dreams into something more pleasant.

Then, one night, the nightmares suddenly stopped. Usually, nightmares going away would be a good thing, but something felt wrong. It didn't seem to make sense to me that I'd have the same nightmare for three years and then have it disappear out of nowhere. The day after my nightmares stopped, we found out the truth... Mom was gone. According to how the police found her, she'd been kidnapped, mistaken for someone else, and tortured badly for 3 years for information she didn't have. One night, the pain got so bad, Mom died from the pain in the middle of it. When they finally realized that she wasn't who they thought and that they just killed an innocent woman, the guys panicked and disposed Mom's body in a way that made finding them stupidly  easy. The night Mom died had been just the night before, the same night my nightmares stopped. It couldn't have been a coincidence, and Daku didn't think so either, which is how we found out I had a curse: what we called "Bad News Nightmares", the foreshadowing of something bad going to happen to me or the people I cared about, usually appearing anywhere from 48 hours to years in advance of what was going to happen. But what my powers failed  to show me was what happened next...

When I went to go see my Dad in his office, he was facedown on the desk. At first, I'd assumed he'd finally crashed after 3 years worth of no sleep, so I tried to wake him up. Nothing. I tried for another good hour with no response before panic began to set in and I had yelled for Daku, beginning to cry. Daku had checked for Dad's pulse and merely shook his head. First Mom, now Dad... I wondered how things could have possibly been worse. When the doctor gave the diagnosis on his cause of death, the answer was merely a broken heart. At the time, I didn't understand how something that seemed so cliché  and fake  took my dad away from me. Here's the clincher: I looked through Dad's last memories and saw that he had actually gone to bed the night Mom died and had instantly woken up the moment she was killed. For hours, he vehemently denied it in his thoughts that was Mom was gone, and the moment he found out that she was, he gave up. His body literally  shut itself down because Dad couldn't take the thought of living without Mom. After that, it was a battle, Daku against the courts to decide who'd get to raise me. Since Daku was 16 at the time, he fought hard, and after a good three months of court dates and watching my brother fight for the right keep what was left of our family together, the courts allowed it. Once that whole mess was over, Daku moved us away from our hometown of Mizaki, Japan to a small town about an hour or so away: Omika. The minute we moved into that small town, she popped into our lives.

Kana Takashiro, a young woman Daku's age who had chocolate brown hair with electric blue streaks and matching eyes that looked like they could start a fire. If there was one thing about Kana, she never  let anybody push her around or even try to tell her what she could or couldn't do. Kana, that fiery girl, and my brother instantly clicked as friends and six months later started dating. Life with Kana was so much better than I thought... I finally had someone to talk to, didn't have to worry about thinking I was weird and all that. With Kana, I felt like I belonged and she treated me like her kid sister, short tempered with anyone that tried to mess with me but never  short on love for me or  Daku. The year Daku turned 18, Kana gave him a gold sheathed knife. The sheath itself was beautiful, with gorgeous designs that seemed to tell a tale of a warrior princess who fought beside a dragon. One the blade was engraved "Never stop fighting", three words that still drive Daku forward to this day. Kana had told us that the knife was given to a guy by the girl who wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, and once they had a daughter, the knife was passed down to their daughter as a precious heirloom for her to give away to the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. I took it as Kana was telling Daku by giving him the knife that if he wanted to ask her to marry him in the future, she'd say yes.

But then, a month before I turned 15, Kana found out about our powers. Daku and I instantly waited for her to call us freaks and run, but instead, much to our surprise, she handled it really well and asked us more about our powers. The year Daku turned 19, he proposed to Kana and they planned to be married that summer. But, then it happened...

The "Bad News Nightmares" were back, and this time, they showed a grave with Kana's name on it, Daku standing silently crying at her grave with the knife she gave him clenched in his hand. For the first time in my life, I was more scared of the nightmare going away  than the nightmare itself. For months, I dreaded going to bed, thinking that one night was going to be the night the nightmare wouldn't be there. As the wedding day came closer, I started to relax. Once the wedding happened, I completely relaxed and thought it could have been years off... But that's where I was wrong. Because about a month after the wedding, I stopped having the nightmares. I completely panicked and lost it. Because the next night, Kana left to get groceries on her own and never came back. Daku and I found her on the cold cement just a couple blocks from the house. I'll never forget the way her blood looked spread out on the sidewalk like that... I felt the extreme rage run through me before the grief set in and I sobbed harder than the day we lost Mom and Dad. Daku... Daku had been silently crying at her funeral, trying to hold back tears but knowing he couldn't. It broke me to see him like that. I knew he was broken hearted, and it suddenly occurred to me that he looked as broken as Dad did all those years ago. As I peered into my brother's mind, I had hoped that I'd find anything but a mind shattered like a mirror shatters after somebody throws something at it or punches it. What I found was a dark void, with one, small candle lit in the center. When the flame flickered, I could see my face and I understood why Daku wasn't going to end up dead like Dad had...

Dad had given up the day we heard about Mom, and although he was just as heartbroken as Dad had been when we lost Mom, Daku was refusing to give up because he had promised to protect and take care of me until the day I no longer needed him. But, Kana's death effected him in a different way... Daku became almost... Emotionless in public, the only time he ever displayed emotion was when we were talking telepathically and he'd act like his goofy old self for a couple seconds before being quiet again. Kana's death had been a month ago, and Daku moved us from Omika a couple weeks after Kana's funeral. This time, we weren't so far away from her grave, just a ten minute drive in a town called Ozawa. As soon as we moved, Daku got two jobs, one as a manga writer and another one that was an office job. Since he had to start his jobs the day we moved, I was left alone to school shop on my own. At first, I'd protested this. Why? It's quite simple: Crowds make it harder to tell who's thinking what, and I just don't do good with a bunch of people at once. But, after Daku insisting that I'd be fine and to just go anyway, I finally left the house. I had to get my uniform and school supplies at some point, and Daku wasn't exactly going to have a breather anytime soon with two jobs and going to PK University, the college conveniently located next door to the high school PK Academy.

As it turns out, going on my own had been the worst thing to do. I got stared at worse than back in Okima or even Mizaki, and I already knew it was because of my hair color clashing with my eye color. To make things worse, most of the people staring at me were guys. I'm not exactly used to guys in general (beside Daku), and the fact that more than half  of them were either cat calling or thinking dirty thoughts about me made things even  worse. I wished for Kana to be right there with me to glare at them and send them running, but somethings just weren't going to happen. That's about the time I noticed the four guys following me around, most of them were around 6 foot 2, extremely muscular and looked like they were ten times stronger than me. They started flirting with me, and the leader had a lustful look in his eyes that made me sick. The closer they got, the more uncomfortable I became. I ignored them, staying silent until one of them had the nerve to touch me. Mustering all the strength I had without using my powers, I slapped his hand away from me. "Don't touch me!" I barked, pissed off but my voice shook too much to have any real effect. The guys just laughed.

"Whoo, we got ourselves a feisty one." The leader spoke up before grabbing my arm. I struggled in his grip.

"Let go of me!" I snapped.

"You heard the lady. Let her go, now." A new voice snarled that nearly scared me to hell. I turned around to find a nerdy looking guy glaring at the guys, his eyes and posture obviously ready for a fight if it came to that. His eyes were purple, hiding behind glasses with purple hair to match. He looked pretty skinny, like someone who couldn't take on these four and come out alive let alone the victor. But, with the experience I've had, nothing is what it seems. His appearance screamed nerd, but his posture seemed to say "I'll kick your ass".

"Or what, nerd?" The leader snarled, throwing me to the ground and stalking toward the guy with his goons behind him. The guy simply answered by throwing a punch and knocking the leader on his ass before dodging the other three attacks that came at him and knocking those three on their asses too. The guy got into a fighting stance, but the one hit to each of the four had done its job. The four guys made the wise choice and ran away like puppies with their tails between their legs. When I turned to the guy, he had relaxed out of his fighting stance and turned to me.

"Are you okay?" He asked me. I nodded in reply, letting him know without talking that I was just fine. "They didn't hurt you in anyway?" He asked. I shook my head again to respond. I fond his eyes checking me over for injuries anyway before he nodded in satisfaction. He bowed. "My name's Aren Kuboyasu." He introduced himself.

"Mine's Akemi Tanoka." I introduced myself as I bowed, my voice soft. Unless I was pissed off, like I was with those four guys earlier, that's how I normally talk... Soft toned. After the introductions, Kuboyasu became my unofficial escort for the day to make sure that those guys didn't come back to bother me again and make sure no other guy would try anything. Once we were done, Kuboyasu was sweet enough to show me where to get the best coffee jelly in town, which I bought him and myself one, one for him to thank him properly for saving me. When he escorted me home, Kuboyasu and Daku met each other and instantly clicked as best friends just because they knew the same handshake from their gang days. After telling me he'd see me at school on Monday, Kuboyasu went to his own home.

Lemme tell you about Daku's appearance and why Daku and I look the way we do: Daku has the opposite of my hair: ebony black with ruby streaks, but his eyes are Dad's amber color with flecks of my Mom's ruby red. As you might now know, I inherited Mom's red eyes. If I had to guess, something in Daku's genetics enabled him to have Mom's ruby red as flecks while the base color for his eyes was Dad's amber, and not to mention our Mom's Dad had red hair, so I guess that that trait somehow incorporated into my brother's DNA as streaks as well. As for the blue streaks in my  hair, my Dad had blue hair while my Mom had ebony black hair. As soon as Daku shut the front door, he let out a deep sigh, one that instantly let me know that he had Kana on his mind again. It seemed an impossible thing to hope for, but I honestly hoped Daku would find someone who would love him just as much as Kana had before she died. But, that was impossible... Wanna know how I know? Here's the reason: Because no matter how much another girl likes or loves him, Daku would never  love a girl as deeply as he loved Kana... Kana had been the love of his life, the  girl of his dreams. I could wish for Daku to be as happy as he was with Kana all I wanted, but it would never  actually happen.