Superpower Dialog Box
1
That day, Shane pushed the latest update to his public account, stepped out for a walk, and wanted to record some daily details as material—only to discover that the entire world had somehow changed.
It wasn't that buildings were collapsing or the landscape was transforming. Rather, he noticed that a dialog box had appeared above every person's head. The words people spoke from their mouths appeared as text inside these dialog boxes.
Out on the street, the dense crowd was matched by an equally dense field of floating dialog boxes. The sight was surreal.
To observe these suddenly-appearing dialog boxes more closely, Shane ducked into a café by the roadside and sat down next to a young man on the phone, discreetly studying the box above his head.
These dialog boxes were like those in social apps such as WeChat or QQ—white background, elongated shape, roughly a hand's length in height, with a small pointed tab pointing toward the box's owner. The text was black, and its font size adjusted based on the number of characters, neatly fitting within each box.
The young man beside him was speaking softly, and Shane couldn't catch the words, but the text on his dialog box was crystal clear.
The lines flashed by—
"You think I don't want to come home? The boss needs to boost his numbers, insisted we work overtime."
"Alright, alright, I'm at a café waiting for a client right now."
"Gotta go. Love you."
Shane stared at the young man's dialog box, finding it fascinating. The young man, having finished his call, noticed his gaze and turned to look.
Shane watched as a line of text appeared on the dialog box—"Hello, is there something I can help you with?"—and his heart lurched.
Then he heard the young man ask suspiciously, "Hello, is there something I can help you with?"
Quickly recovering, Shane waved his hand. "Oh no, nothing, nothing."
The young man shot him an eye-roll, and Shane noticed that the text on the dialog box appeared a fraction of a second before the spoken words.
Later, after further testing, Shane realized that it wasn't the world that had changed—it was him. Only he could see the dialog boxes above people's heads.
But being able to see dialog boxes and reading people's words before they spoke wasn't exactly a useful skill.
Walking down the street, being bombarded by walls of text everywhere was frankly annoying. So for a while, Shane wished he could get rid of this strange ability—until he discovered that his power went further, and he fell in love with it all over again.
2
Shane could not only see dialog boxes, he could also pause time—with a snap of his fingers.
The first time he discovered this ability, he was so startled that he froze like the time-stopped people around him. Eventually, he gathered his courage, accepted this bizarre new reality, and discovered something even more entertaining.
When time was paused, he couldn't change people's behavior or rearrange objects in the world. He could only return to the exact spot where he'd snapped his fingers to release the time freeze. But he could add text to people's dialog boxes!
Previously, he'd tried touching the dialog boxes and found them intangible. But when time was stopped, they became physical objects—whiteboards hovering in midair, waiting for him to write on them.
He couldn't erase the existing content, but he could use a marker to add new text. If a person had just finished speaking or hadn't spoken yet, their dialog box would be blank, giving Shane free rein.
After altering someone's speech, Shane would return to his original position and snap his fingers again. Time would resume, and the person would speak whatever he'd written. Only after they finished speaking would the text disappear from the box.
So when he saw a woman who'd been splashed by muddy water flag down a tricycle driver and start yelling, "Are you blind?!"—he added the rest.
"I'm so gorgeous—how could you bear to splash me?" was, of course, Shane's addition. No normal person would say something so narcissistic in that situation!
Then there was the driver, his face still angry, who blurted out, "Since you're so gorgeous and I'm pretty handsome too, why don't we make a pair?"
The onlookers couldn't keep up.
And the woman, shocked by her own narcissistic outburst, furiously shot back, "Go to hell!"
This drew laughter from the crowd. Shane watched their dialog boxes flash with row after row of "Hahahahahaha," and inexplicably, his mood lifted.
In truth, Shane knew this was nothing more than a silly prank. But at nearly thirty years old, he was having the time of his life—probably because his daily work pressure was just too high.
3
These days, Shane was hooked on tampering with dialog boxes to prank people. He also discovered that if he wrote a typo, people would read it anyway—the listener would assume it was a slip of the tongue.
If he wrote gibberish symbols in a dialog box, people couldn't read them normally, and the characters would emerge as hiccups instead.
Once, when a waiter was rude to him, he snapped his fingers and wrote in the man's blank box: "I am * stu@pid # stu ε pid is Ω me."
The next second, the waiter—punctuating every other character with a hiccup—confessed his own stupidity to the entire restaurant, sending everybody into peals of laughter, while the waiter himself sat there bewildered and mortified, wondering why his brain had suddenly malfunctioned.
But Shane soon grew tired of these pranks.
After all, in real life, modifying other people's dialog boxes didn't really get you anything. He might as well stick to writing his public account.
Just as Shane was about to "repent" and stop pulling stunts, letting his superpower collect dust, he met Sophia Xiao.
That day, his home printer had broken, so he'd gone to a print shop to make copies, tucked them in a folder, and headed home. On the way, passing a shopping mall, he decided on a whim to duck inside and buy some barbecue pork rice.
The moment Shane pushed open the mall doors, he collided squarely with Sophia Xiao.
A meet-cute straight out of a TV drama.
The folder flew from Shane's hands, and the photocopies inside scattered across the floor. The girl realized she'd caused a mess and, flustered, apologized profusely as she scurried to pick up the sheets of A4 paper.
Shane's gaze settled on her.
The girl looked around twenty-five, with delicate features, pale skin, and long hair that kept falling across her face as she hurried to gather the papers, tucking it behind her ear each time.
The sight set Shane's heart racing. He walked over and crouched beside her to help collect the pages.
After a while, Sophia finally gathered the scattered papers into a neat stack and handed them to Shane. She exhaled in relief and stood up.
Under normal circumstances, the script would play out like this: the girl apologizes again, Shane waves it off, and they go their separate ways.
But in that moment, Shane instinctively snapped his fingers behind his back, stopping time.
The world fell silent. He heard his own heartbeat still hammering fast, and he understood—he'd fallen in love at first sight.
Because of his work, Shane rarely met women he was drawn to, and because he'd been timid since childhood, even when he did encounter someone he liked, he'd never make the first move. To make matters worse, he belonged to the category of "gets better-looking the longer you look"—no woman was going to approach him first.
But now... now, things were different. He looked at the dialog box above the girl's head and smiled to himself.
At this moment, her dialog box displayed three simple characters—"I'm sorry."
Even when time resumed, that would likely be all she'd say. But Shane, determined to manufacture a connection, decided to add a few words.
He pulled the marker from his pocket, thought for a moment, and wrote a line. Then he snapped his fingers, and time began flowing again.
The next second, he heard Sophia say: "I'm sorry for making a mess of your papers. Let me treat you to a meal—also, we can sort out the pages."
Uttering such an apologetic invitation against her own will, Sophia stared at herself in disbelief.
"Ah, no worries." Shane looked up and tried to decline.
Sophia exhaled in relief, but in the very next second, she heard herself say: "Please do me the honor, otherwise I won't feel right about this."
This was, of course, Shane's doing. And the architect of it all put on an expression of reluctant acceptance: "Well, alright then..."
And so the two of them headed toward the food court.