Making Friends

Trigger warning: mention of suicide at the end and borderline/implied violence

A recipe turns many bland, simplistic elements into something more complex, but only the best make something so interesting that people hunger for it. I hunger for books who’s ingredients include a villain, like me, who cooks. I love those characters, but most stories prefer a complex protagonist, one that’s a mix between the evil that created them and the bland perfection they used to be, though a hero will never admit that they’re two parts villain. Forever flawed, cooks in books tend to make by mistake. In their actions they’ll birth something that’ll rise into their demise, but I don’t much like these types of chiefs, I prefer the ones that saw a recipe in that bland protagonist and started their story.

Ingredients

-A perfect child with straight A’s that leads a happy life alongside their two loving parents

-Power

-A mentor figure

Steps

1. Start by killing their parents. You can do this a multitude of ways, but it is most likely to be effective if you follow your own origin story, so in my case I will be setting the child’s house on fire while they are at school. Their parents will die inside and the child will blame themself thinking that something they did caused the fire.
2. The kid will move in with their cousin, one who lives within the same school district. They’ll be terrified when they arrive at their new house with nothing (since they lost everything in the fire) but it’ll get worse when they go inside and get treated as an inconvenience by every member of the family.
3. Sleeping at their cousin’s house is impossible because trying gives them a chance to think about everything they’ve ruined. They’ll start getting little, if any sleep each night.
4. Over the next few months, their grades will drop and their friends will stop talking to them. Now the social outcast, they’ll spend a large portion of the school day unintentionally falling asleep before being startled back awake by claps, shouts, and falling books. 
5. The kid will decide that getting a job will fix all their problems so they will get one in a bad part of town “delivering packages” but will be so overjoyed by the prospect of a distraction that they won’t realize they will actually be moving drugs.
6. The job makes things a little better for the kid! They’ll spend so much time and energy on their job that when they get home, they’ll fall asleep before they can think. They’ll sleep through the night and stay up during class.
7. A few months after they get into that routine everything will be ruined when someone tries to steal their package but can’t because they’re holding it too tightly. The bag will fly open and they’ll realize that they’ve been delivering drugs this whole time.
8. Faced with the decision to either report the drugs or put them back in the bag, they’ll report them, but upon doing so the police will arrest them for drug possession. 
9. They’re cousin’s family will call them a degenerate and help the police send them to juvie.
10. In juvie they’ll make their first friend since their parents died: someone a month from being eighteen in for murdering their bully.
11. Their new friend (Raija) will be special, but they won’t mind. The friend, only a day before they turn eighteen, will reveal that they have super strength. The friend will go as far as to prove it before leaving.
12. After Raija leaves using well timed words and tricks they’ve learned from observing their surroundings, they’ll make the rest of the kids at juvie their minions.
13. Raija will stop sending letters six months after he got out for no apparent reason.
14. Eighteen months later, when they get out, they’ll find that the reason their friend stopped answering their letters wasn’t because they hated them, but instead because they went missing.
15. They’ll swear to find Raija so they come up with a complex plan to do in the process questioning if the police ever looked for their only friend.
16. In the process of finding him they’ll gather a second series of minions including a few released from Juvie and two superhuman individuals. Each has a power, one being able to turn invisible and the other will be able to rewind time by a single second. 
17. Soon after both are found, a third superhuman will appear asking to talk to the other two. After being sent away the two kids will disappear, taken by the third super.
18. By investigating the third super they’ll find a world full of these superhumans, including Raija.
19. In the world there are less than five hundred, mostly naive, people. Using what they know of manipulation and politics as well as the three superhumans, they’ll take control of the super world.
20. Once the super world is theirs they’ll spread their influence to major cities by replacing key members.
21. Over the next ten years the scientists they now control will find a way to give people powers so they’ll give themselves a superpower. It will just so happen that the power makes them immortal. 
22. After generations of being alive, they will be tired of losing everyone, so they’ll start looking for a way to make others immortal, but even after finding a way, they won’t find anyone worthy of joining them in immortality, so they’ll decide to replicate the circumstances that created them.
23. Before they put their plan into action, they try writing it down in the form of a recipe, but the first attempt to do so turns into a biography so they, unable to delete it, write a better recipe below, hoping that one day they’ll be able to show their new immortal friend the life story they accidentally wrote.

Ingredients

-A perfect kid (under 16)

-Money

-A mentor figure

-Minions

Steps

1. While the moldable child is at school, burn their house down. Their parents must be inside.
2. Ensure that the child stays at the same school (via paying or replacing whoever you need to)
3. Pay the family taking care of them, as parents, to ignore them, and as children, to treat them badly.
4. Once their grades fall and all their friends ditch them, have your minions approach them about a “delivery” job.
5. Have a different minion purposefully spill the contents on a delivery run.
6. Have the police come upon them directly after the incident and arrest them. Ensure this happens by paying people or if need be, replacing them.
7. Have the family taking care of them abandon them via a bonus in the money they are receiving.
8. On the first day in Juvie, ensure they are targeted by the other kids. 
9. Have a young minion with powers save the kid and gain their trust.
10. The minion leaves a month later.
11. Pay the Juvie kids to start following the kid, as their own minions.
12. Bring the kid’s initial friend, the young minion, into your inner circle and have them declared missing publicly six months after being released from juvie. At the same time they will stop contacting the kid.
13. Once the kid is out, leave them alone until they find their friend at which point meet them personally and befriend them.

Reviews

#1 The first practical attempt resulted in Jamie, the child, retaining her friends and never accepting the delivery job. 

FIX: Whilst paying the family taking care of them also pay a large portion of the student body to treat them badly.

UPDATE: Jamie and two of her friends started a hair salon that is doing well. She regularly attends therapy, has a loving husband, and plans for a baby to join her dependents.

#2 Dylan was sent home during the first period, saw the fire, ran into the burning building and saved his mother.

FIX1: Pay the staff as well, both to ensure that the kid is not sent home, but also to ensure that they do not interfere with the kids home life later on.

FIX2: Remove the parents before starting the fire. Rather than killing them, have them promise to stay away under promises of their child becoming immortal and joining me in ruling an empire. Later, when the child finds out where their friend is, they’ll be reunited with their parents.

UPDATE: Dylan made a complete recovery, but his mother retains burn damage to this day. With the disability checks, the two get to live in relative peace with Dylan never having to work a day in his life. He likes to write.

#3 On his first day in Juvie, Kaiden started throwing punches before my minion could help him.

FIX: Avoid people with preexisting anger issues.

UPDATE: Despite all my attempts to help him, including reintroducing him to his parents, he continues to fight which has put him in jail for battery and assault. 

#4 Ariya didn’t believe that the fire was their fault.

FIX1: Wait till they make a stupid mistake like leaving the heater on and then have them over hear others talking about it.

FIX2: Avoid people that are outwardly confident. 

UPDATE: When reunited with his parents he acted like he always knew they were alive.

#5 Liz killed herself after being visited by her extended family in jail.

UPDATE: You were the last of my tries. You did what you did because of me. I’ve lost before and forced others to lose, but never before has it been like this. Thank you, Liz, for showing me the error of my ways. Because of you, I can accept that I'm meant to be alone. I will spend the rest of my long life making up for the pain I put you, your parents, and the other’s through so that maybe after years of my semi-redemption, my apology might mean more than empty words.

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She never deserved forgiveness! How could she even ask for it! Doesn't she know? The only way to redeem yourself is death, not that she ever tried my way. I took her life because she took everything that was in mine. She deserved to die. She really did, just not in the eyes of the world. To everyone else, she was a leader so magnificent that she didn’t even deserve to be questioned so now that I’ve killed her, in everyone else's eyes I’m the villain, but that’s fine. I know I’m the bad guy, that’s why I know people like me can’t be redeemed. All we can do is wait for when the fight leaves us.

Kaiden