Mark woke up to a notification from Eliot. The video was live.
Mark texted back a ‘thank you for telling me!’, then proceeded to finish waking up. It was 6 PM, and after getting dinner in the mess hall, then taking a nice shower, Mark went back to his room and turned on the video, on his big tablet screen, as he took out the box of adamantium pellets.
Eliot’s voice started blasting over the video, “Welcome back to another episode of Very Human! I am your host, Eliot Cybersong, and this is the story of how my friends and I nearly got killed by mind goblins, and then we met the dragon! So without further ado, here’re the main protagonists!
“Me! I’m Eliot Cybersong…”
Eliot did big intros for himself, and then also Isoko, who were both trying to sell themselves as heroes, or monster hunters, or something along those lines. Mark was pretty sure it was a general ‘hyping’, which was good for both of them. Eliot even included some history about both of them that Mark was sure was going to get them noticed by… professionals? Or someone? Mark wasn’t sure, exactly. Eliot came from a line of city builders, which was not that surprising. Isoko came from a family of villains and supervillains, which was news to Mark; he had only known about Wandering Sage, but there were others of the Kanno family who did villainy all across the globe.
And then Eliot introduced Mark.
“Oh yeah. There’s Mark Careed. Let’s not bother him. He knows what he wants out of life.”
Followed by a scene of Mark, raising a fist to the sky and yelling, “DEATH TO ALL MONSTERS!”
It was kinda cringe.
Mark loved it anyway.
The video was 2.5 hours long, and there were secondary videos on the channel, linked to the main video, that contained all of the recorded heat map of the entire battlezone, as taken from Eliot’s scanners. That second video had timestamps to connect to the first video, but other than that, the second video was straight up 30+ hours of recorded mapping.
Mark didn’t watch more than 2 minutes of that secondary, bigger video. There was a pop-in of the battlezone map when there was an actual battle, and that was enough to see what had happened from a logistical standpoint.
A third video was the 2.5 hour video condensed down into 20 minutes of action, and Mark imagined that one would get a lot more views, but he watched the 2.5 hour one, anyway. The smaller video was a highlights and ‘story’ video, but the 2.5 hour one was done in a style that Mark had never really seen before, called an ‘extermination video’, and it was meant to fully illustrate how the team approached every encounter, and how it all shook out, and the various influences on every single battlezone. It was more ‘documentary’ than ‘killing video’.
Mark leisurely watched the video, only cringing a bit here and there when he saw himself make mistakes. Eliot didn’t linger on those mistakes at all, so maybe only Mark would notice them, but he was sure veterans would notice those slips, for sure.
And all the while, Mark tried to pick up a single bit of adamantium.
He had to use a fork to pick up one of the metal pellets and then drop it on the bed in front of him.
Honestly, it kinda scared him to pick up the metal, because one of two things was going to happen.
He was going to crash and be unable to move while he held the metal, for sure. That much was not in question. That was simply going to happen.
But, either he would be able to move himself enough to drop the metal and thus dislodge the weight from his astral body, and be able to move again.
Or, he would simply be locked in, unable to move his hand or his body, until his astral body grew accustomed to the weight, and he was able to move it around. That might take hours. A full day, maybe.
He had been told a few different times that if he simply took the adamantium he had from the Vault and held it for half a day, allowing himself to be incapacitated, then he would figure out how to lift it one way or another. With that in mind, Mark would technically be ‘fine’ if he couldn’t dislodge the weight.
But…
Mark had been locked in a hospital bed, in a coma, for 107 days, and then his recovery had taken… It had taken an archmage almost falling and all of Addashield’s shit and then a Color Drop treatment to be able to walk and move and be himself again.
Mark stared at that little black dot of metal, sitting on his bed sheets, as Eliot’s video played in the background…
He found himself thinking of Addavein again. Specifically the sound of those gonging metal spikes on the dragon’s back. It was a deep sound, a rumble, just like the dragon himself, like an avalanche. A hillside falling down—
Mark grabbed the pellet and instantly regretted it as he slumped to the side, against the wall, his hand locked around the pellet.
Ah, he thought. It’s the ‘stuck in the hand option’, I see.
He wondered when that would happen. He was surprised it hadn’t happened already.
Mark sat there, gripping the pebble, listening to the video play as his head hung down and his shoulder pressed against the wall. He couldn’t stop himself from slumping forward, and face planting half onto his tablet and half onto a pillow. The tablet tumbled to the rug in the middle of the room and continued to play.
Mark would have mumbled ‘fuck’ if he could have.
And then he realized that he couldn’t use Union, either.
He couldn’t control his breathing. He couldn’t control his heart. He couldn’t even flicker Union of Brain with the world, to draw in resilience and expel weakness.
Mark did not panic.
He merely realized that all of his astral body strength was being contained by the little bit of adamantium in his hand, and thus, there was nothing to panic about at all.
He was still breathing. He was still alive. He was fine. Autonomous functions for the win!
He was Perfectly Fine!
Mark wanted to scream.
He was pretty sure his breath was coming out ragged now, as he breathed against the pillow, his body crumbled down onto his face and his right arm, while his left held the drop of adamantium and would not let go.
Mark did not panic.
Okay! Okay. Focus.
Focus, Mark.
You can do this.
Mark thought of his recent Scan, as of 12 hours ago, when he came back from the training mission and got debriefed by David, Orissa, and the Mind Reader, Cheryl.
Body, Healthy Body: 038
Shaper, Adamantium: 051
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Mind: 37
Natural, Union: 062
Soul: 35
Arch: 29
Or something like that.
Adamantiumkinesis was up to tier 5, PL 51. This meant that he should be able to lift some adamantium just fine. Even with just his body. Therefore, he should be able to lift this little bit in his hands.
Mark struggled. He grappled. He couldn’t move a finger at all.
He couldn’t mo—
He could still blink. Mark blinked, and realized he could do small things. And his body was still working just fine.
Five minutes later, Mark managed to move his body, just a little. He rocked a bit to the left. He listened to the recording of David talking about the two goblin heads he was holding, and Eliot paused the video to talk about how goblin biology worked.
Five more minutes passed, and Mark was able to move a bit more.
His astral body was not growing that much stronger, that fast. No. Quite the opposite, really. He was only able to move because his astral body was experiencing an overload-type event, and when his astral body overloaded, then… Well. His kinetic Power simply didn’t work when he overloaded, right?
Maybe.
It was like his body wasn’t his own. The world felt fuzzy as he moved. Indistinct. Like he was slightly drunk, in a bad way. No euphoria at all; just inability to control oneself.
Five more minutes passed, or maybe one, or maybe seven, and Mark tensed his arm, and his arm actually moved.
Five more minutes passed, and Mark’s astral body had gotten weak enough from trying to hold the pebble that his Power sort of just gave out. Mark’s hand opened and the pebble fell away and Mark launched upward, feeling so fucking weird that he was finally free of the pebble. He almost flopped onto the ground. He managed to stay standing, breathing easier. Feeling better.
The pebble was still there on the bed.
Mark got into a better position, laying down properly, and then he put his hand on top of the pebble—
And was sucked back down into the weight of the pebble, that wasn’t really a weight at all.
Eventually, when the pebble grew to be too much, he was able to use Union again, in a small sort of way.
This proved to make everything much, much harder.
When he healed his astral body, strengthening himself back to full Union power, it also healed the stress that the pebble was causing him, so the full weight of the pebble once again returned, because his astral body was ‘strong enough’ to get sucked back into the pebble… maybe.
It took time.
It took patience.
A full hour later and Mark gripped that damned fucking pebble in his hand as he stomped on the ground, hunched over, glaring at the ground, because that was the only thing he could see right now.
He breathed out weakness, a miasma escaping his body as thin, wispy black veins beat from his body, into the world. He breathed in resilience. The pebble got heavier as strength returned to his astral body, but that was fine.
Mark was handling it.
His black veins gathered in his palm where he still gripped the adamantium, and Mark opened his palm.
The pebble hovered in his astral body.
It hovered. An inch from his palm, the pebble hovered.
Mark chuckled maniacally.
The drop of metal hovered there, connected to him by wispy, shadowy tendrils, his entire astral body focused on that damned pebble, like how a lodestone cast metal filings into arcs around magnetic fields. Mark breathed and beat with a flow of resilience and weakness, and his black veins shot through the pebble, into the world, like light through a lens, distorting and refracting.
He almost collapsed again.
He maintained.
Mark stayed like that, Union active, struggling to hold the pebble in his astral body—
The pebble slipped.
Mark’s black veins scattered to the winds, the tiny drop no longer containing his demand for healing and protection. His Union flashed wide, filling the room, but Mark pulled it back. He breathed easy, though sweat still poured off of him. A few beats of purity/impurity cleaned his body up, and then he looked down at the ground, at the pebble.
He reached down with a hand—
He paused.
Mark felt out a weird, new sense, that he was just starting to understand. He had an astral body that he could control like limbs, so he used that ephemeral, existent-yet-not part of himself to pick up the pebble.
Tentatively, like moving hairs, or maybe pushing out with a breath that was not a breath at all, Mark touched-without-touching—
It was like picking up a 300 pound full-body weight.
Mark grinned as he struggled, his astral body locked back on to the tiny bit of metal, practically sucked inside of it…
But 300 pounds? Big deal! He was benching 300 these days!
Mark stood as tall as he could—
The pebble fell out of his astral body again.
Mark laughed as the pebble dropped onto the carpet.
With limbs and muscles he never knew he had, Mark reached down, astrally, to the bit of metal, and he picked it up again. Instantly, the weight was back.
It was a lot damned easier than lifting weights, that’s for sure. With actual weights you had muscles you were using and vectors of gravity, and all of that junk. This tiny little pebble felt like an entire world, like grappling with gravity itself. It didn’t matter where it was in Mark’s astral body; he felt it everywhere. That’s because it wasn’t actually a gravity-based demand on his body at all. It was an astral demand, and the tiny pebble sucked up his entire astral body, the whole thing…
Or at least that’s what it had been doing.
Mark grinned.
Mark's astral body was too strong for one pebble anymore.
As his Union danced to a rhythm of resilience and weakness, all the strain of the pebble remained at full strength. His astral body did not weaken with too much of a load upon it. All it did was get stronger.
It was like lifting weights and resting at the same time.
It was not the most mentally taxing thing that Mark had ever done.
But it was close.
With a smile, Mark tried moving his astral body, moving that tiny bit of adamantium, to reach down and press the pause button on the video. The black pebble bounced off of the tablet, and nothing happened.
Huh. Well. Guess that doesn’t work.
Mark almost stumbled as he moved his actual body, to grab the tablet and set it back on to the bed, and then go back 20 minutes to see some of what he had missed.
On the video, Mark watched as Eliot and Isoko went out into the city, while Mark was incapacitated, and got some metals from some old cars.
In his room, Mark floated one pebble in his aura, gently orbiting it around a hand, and then up over his shoulders, and over his head, hitting the side of his head a bit because he messed up his ‘new proprioception thing’ happening here. He was a baby learning he had fingers and toes, and everything about this was so odd, but also really, really fucking cool.
Mark was moving around a tiny bit of the strongest metal known to man, with some sort of extension to his body he still didn’t understand. The tiny bit of metal was like a lodestone to his nearby black veins, as it floated over his body. The absolute strangest thing about it, though, was that… Mark could feel the adamantium. Like. It was a finger. Or something.
Mark touched the carpet with it, and felt the softness of the carpet on the metal, though it was a dull sort of feeling. Mark touched the stone walls, and the stone was harder, but Mark accidentally put too much pressure on the adamantium and his whole body tilted the other direction. The adamantium was very strong, but the floor was reinforced, and Mark’s body was easier to move than the floor was able to be moved.
It was like pushing off the ground with a pinky finger. Mark had only been moved because he hadn’t been ready for it.
Also, maybe that wasn’t the strangest thing about it. Mark knew that kinetics used their various attuned things as ‘parts of their body’, so, tactile feedback? Sure! Why not.
And, perhaps more than anything else, Mark instinctively knew that as long as his astral body was strong, no one would be able to remove that bit of metal from his control. It was like a disconnected finger, that was still very much connected. If someone yanked on that metal, Mark would find himself yanked instead. They couldn’t take it from him…
Which was pretty cool!
Mark made the mistake of trying to pick up a second pebble.
He crashed to the ground.
Air escaped him like a groan of annoyance, because that’s exactly what it was.