Mark woke to soft words from an unfamiliar voice.

“...rk… Ma… Mark. Mark? Okay. Yeah he’s here. I need you to listen to me, Mark. You’re in a kinetic hole. You’re too connected to what you’re touching to be able to distance it from yourself, and thus you are always holding that weight. Your instructor, Orissa Turner, told you about this, right before you fainted. Do you understand?”

Mark felt like he was being crushed with weight, so yeah, he did understand. But he couldn’t speak. He could only lay on his back, the world looking dark, but his eyes were just closed. All he could do was think. How was he supposed to answer the voice?

“I’m a mind reader so I can hear you speaking as you think. I’m here to help you through this.”

Mark was instantly scared. What if he thought of something wrong? Like how he had helped Addashield through the Tutorial, or about Sally and her hair, or about sex, so much sex, that he just didn’t understand the purpose of, and did people actually like each other like that? Was there something wrong with him? What about his bank account! His numbers were—

“Don’t worry about that sort of stuff, Mark. I’m here to help you get out of your kinetic hole.”

Why were they saying ‘hole’! They didn’t have to say ‘hole’ so much!

“Kinetic depths, then,” said the speaker, with a bit of smirking to their voice. “Don’t worry about the wordage. I’m here to help you out of these depths. Listen to the sound of my voice. You are currently holding weights on your body. A lot of weight. Adamantium is strewn all throughout your bones, like a fine dust. What you have to do is push that dust outward in order to remove it from your body. This is usually very painful, but we’re going to have someone help you breathe with a magic technique and this will help you expel the adamantium. You have this same power, called Union, but we’re going to have someone else do the breathing for you right now. When you’re ready. Okay?”

Mark wasn’t sure how he would ever be ready, but he was ready as he could ever be.

“Okay. Here comes the assisted breathing.”

And then Mark felt his chest inflate like someone had forced air into him, and then the air came out like a bellows emptying. Mark felt sand or dust blow out of his body, like he was exhaling a desert, and in that action he felt… lighter.

Mark opened his eyes and he didn’t see much besides a hospital ceiling—

There was a woman standing by his side, looking down at him, grinning a little.

She said, “Hello, Mark!” She was the mind reader. “I am the mind reader, yes. I’m Cheryl. Nice to meet you.” Cheryl picked up a paper off of Mark’s chest, showing off black dust on that paper. “Adamantium. It’s yours. We’ll save it for you to the side, for now.” She probably lifted and dumped the paper into a container, or something, because that’s what it sounded like. “That’s exactly what I did. And now I put the paper back down on your chest to grab some more. We’ll do this a few times. You okay?”

Mark couldn’t see the person helping him breathe with Union, but he was okay otherwise.

“The person helping you breathe is Priestess Lola Turner. I think you know her.” Cheryl waved a hand over Mark’s face.

Oh! Lola? She’s still here?

Lola’s voice came from the side, “Hello, Mark.” She poked her head into view. “You’re perfectly fine. You were out for 5 hours, though, so we got worried. The density of your kinetic-attunement is too large for you. You’d pull through to the other side of this problem with 2 days of strain, but we’re doing it this way.”

Mark tried to speak, and that wasn’t working, so he thought, ‘Thank you.’

Cheryl said, “He said ‘thank you’.”

Thanks, Cheryl.

“No problem, Mark. Ready to go again?”

Mark ended up needing to exhale a full five times to make his sixth exhale come out clean. Each exhale removed more of the weight from his body than the last. When that was over, he easily sat up, as though he hadn’t been pressed to the bed with the weight of a world upon him.

Cheryl held the vial of adamantium. It was, like, an eyedropper full of the stuff. “Around a tenth of a kilo. Just this much was enough to lay you out. I can hand it to you, but I want you to lay back down, first.”

Mark… lay back down.

Cheryl put the vial onto Mark’s stomach—

Suddenly the weight was back. Mark almost blacked out—

The weight went away as Cheryl took the vial away.

Mark gasped to be free of the weight. “Holy crap.”

Lola chuckled, but she looked worn out. She smiled softly, saying, “It was good to see you again, Mark. I have to go help other patients now, but if you want someone to help you learn Union aside from the Holy Mother, I’ll be here for that, almost every day.”

Mark smiled and said, “Thank you. Yeah. Maybe I’ll... I didn’t know you were still here.”

“I’ll be here for a while as they do all their investigations into Addashield.”

Mark lost his smile. “Okay?”

Lola stood up and said, “When an archmage falls, they hit a lot of people on the way down. Addashield hit more than most. We’ll talk more some other time. It was good to see you again.” She gave a courtly bow toward Cheryl who nodded in turn, and then she walked out of the room.

Mark watched her go.

And then Cheryl brought him back to the present, saying, “Kinetics gain strength by being in contact with their designated substance and being able to lift it as they would their own body. This vial of adamantium is way too much for you, by far. For now. Eventually I imagine you’ll be wearing bracers of the stuff like Addashield used to wear.”

Mark suddenly realized how far out of league he was, yet again. “He had, like…” Mark wasn’t sure how much weight of adamantium, actually. He touched his forearms, measuring in his mind, and guessed. “50 kilos of the stuff?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Something like that.” Cheryl held up the vial, saying, “I want to put this in storage for you, if that’s okay. It’s still yours. You can make decisions about it all later. You’re not safe to hold it at all right now, and your body is already producing more of the stuff. I have a suggestion for you, if you would hear it.”

Mark didn’t want to let the adamantium out of his sight, but he understood that he couldn’t hold it himself, so he said, “… Sure. I can hear it out.”

“In 8 more months you’ll have this much more adamantium in your body, once again. You might acclimate to having that much in your body by then, because the weight of it all will steadily ramp up inside of you the whole time, and also you’ll have other Powers to grow at the same time. If all you had was adamantiumkinesis, then I would suggest you let me dump almost all of this into a separate vial, and you could hold onto a small, small portion. But you also have Healthy Body, which you can grow like normal, and Union, which is so incredibly robust that you could only have that Power and you would still never run out of ways to improve.

“So I believe you should let me put this vial into the Vault for you, and you can just gradually grow your own adamantium again, and acclimate to it that way. You are free to disagree. What do you say?”

Mark said, “I want to donate all of that to the church so…” Cheryl tried not to frown too deeply, but she frowned deeply anyway. Mark continued, “So someone can make it into a weapon… that they’ll use for the good fight...” Mark frowned a little. “Why not? It needs to be used. Not sit in a vault. I’ll make more, anyway.”

Cheryl easily said, “Nope. Absolutely not. This is yours. The church won’t accept this.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a prisoner here, so we won’t take anything from you. Anything you make is yours to keep, and this most certainly includes the adamantium that you create inside of your bones.” Cheryl looked at him. “More to the point, though, you have nothing to feel guilty about. You were used, harmed, and left with a lifetime of trauma. Don’t go making more trauma upon yourself with bad financial decisions. Now! I’m putting this into storage for you, and it’s yours when you want it.” She added, “Don’t go snubbing your nose at us. We have money. We have resources. We want you to eventually join us here as a Paladin or Inquisitor. And that means we’re doing this relationship right. We’re not taking your money from you. You have had enough taken from you, Mark. You deserve nicer things in life.”

Mark felt like Cheryl had wrapped him in a warmth on the inside. He teared up. “Okay.”

Softer, Cheryl said, “I’m a therapist, Mark. I’m here if you want to talk to me. But since you don’t want to talk, how about joining a club and doing something while you’re a prisoner here? How about the Future Paladins club? Monster hunters is a good club, too. There are classes you can take, too, if you’d like some book learning. A club is the active part of the curriculum, but the class is the classroom part of the curriculum. Labs versus classes, you understand…?” Cheryl hummed. “I guess not. That's a college thing, yeah.”

Mark shook his head. “Never expected to go to college.”

“The classes and clubs around here are on 3-month staggered rotation or more, so there’s always something new starting, and you need to be around people your own age, Mark. Ask COFR about clubs. You’ll find some fun ones, I’m sure.”

“… Sure?”

Cheryl stood up, asking, “Ready to get back out there? It’s just about time for dinner. It’s everyone’s favorite pizza night, too.”

Mark had a few mixed emotions. Mostly, he was happy, but also tired. He admitted, “I’d like to stop feeling like a weakling sometime soon. Do you think that’ll happen?”

Cheryl looked him straight in the eyes, and said, “You’re going to be one of the strongest people on the planet someday, Mark. Not today, though. Not for a long while.”

Mark had no idea why that was funny, but he laughed anyway.

Cheryl smiled. “Good luck out there, Mark.”

Mark got up, saying, “Thank you, Cheryl…?”

“Doctor Cheryl Appell, but ‘Cheryl’ is fine. It was nice to meet you, Mark.”

“You, too.”

- - - -

As Mark walked out of the hospital wing, he felt… Weird.

Like a bolt from the blue, Mark realized what he was feeling.

He hated himself.

That’s what was weird. As Mark walked across the paths between grass fields, among the towers of Citadel Freyala in the afternoon, Mark knew what he was feeling. And it was hate. Too much hate. Hate at himself and at Addashield and at… A lot. He had fallen unconscious and needed to be rescued from his own power, too! What the fuck! Sure, he had known kinetics sometimes had issues, but he wanted to be a kinetic. He didn’t want to be weak! And maybe he would be a strong kinetic in the future… But holy fuck!

He never used to be weak like this.

He never used to balk at anything, either.

He had balked back there at Cheryl, the mind reader. So what if she read his mind! She probably saw weird shit all the time.

But Mom and Dad were dead and home was gone and he could never return, and all the world was different. Mark felt a deep sense of shame, like a coldness along his spine and in his guts, as he thought about how… How people told him he hadn’t failed anyone at all. But Mark still felt like a failure.

FUCK.

And it was fucking stupid to feel like this, too!

He knew he had been used! He knew none of it was his fault! But his stupid brain kept telling him that everything was his fault! Why? Because Mark wanted it to be his fault, because—

Mark stopped in his tracks.

I want it to be my fault.

Why did he want it to be his fault?

Because that means I can do something about it when it happens again, when the next big thing comes into my life.

But since he couldn’t do anything about it…

It’s not my fault.

… Mark breathed out slowly, imagining that he would be experiencing that particular revelation for a while to come.

- - - -

Mark sat in bed, belly full of pizza, as he flicked through his phone, looking up clubs to join and classes to take.

There were a few easy choices.

He signed up for healing practice with Healing Hall tomorrow, putting his name into the basket as a ‘tier 0 Union healer, no proven skill yet’ and let the gods take the wheel. If Lola should be there, then that’s who he would talk with, but it was equally likely that he’d get someone else. It was not a class, but a club, meaning active work. They expected a person to not have any skill at all, and they’d learn on the job.

The sparring club was another easy choice. Mark needed to get back to weapons work, and he was eager to go up against others. Instructor Gravel never let them actually injure each other in Tutorial training because injuries could be serious without healers on hand, but that didn’t apply here, at Citadel Freyala, where every other person was a healer of some sort. The club even promised that injuries would happen.

Less easy choices were movie club and stuff like that…

Mark eventually decided not to pick any other clubs. He’d meet people in Healing Hall and sparring club and make friends and connections that way.

Yes.

“Good plan,” Mark told himself, smiling a little.

… And then he felt bad about smiling.

He thought about everything.

He watched his parents’ farewell video again, and then a few more times.

Eventually, he fell asleep.