Blake sat cross-legged on the cold metal floor of the med-bay, back straight, shirt folded beside him. The recycled air raised goosebumps across his bare skin.
"This will feel strange," Eland said, settling behind him. "But it should be perfectly safe."
"You keep saying that word 'should.'" Blake's muscles tensed as Eland's massive hands pressed against his shoulders. The alien's palms felt warm, bordering on uncomfortable.
"Deep breaths. Try to relax."
Blake did as instructed, falling back into the familiar pattern of meditative breathing he had been using for years. Four count inhale. Seven count hold. Eight count exhale. Repeat.
The heat from Eland's hands intensified. It spread outward and into Blake like ripples in a pond, soaking into Blake's muscles. The sensation pushed deeper, past tissue and bone, reaching for somewhere Blake hadn't ever felt until now.
Energy coursed through his body. It burned—yes, with pain, but also with raw potential. Every nerve lit up. His spine tingled. The power flowed like liquid lightning, racing through pathways he hadn't known existed.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears. The room's dim lighting seemed to pulse in time with the surge of energy. Each breath drew in not just air, but something more—something alive and electric that made his skin buzz and his thoughts sharpen.
The force of it threatened to overwhelm him. Blake's fingers dug into his thighs as he fought to maintain his composure. Sweat beaded on his forehead. There was no way he was going to tap out. He remembered the lessons he had abandoned outside.
Move the energy. Circulate it. Don't think about the fact that it's burning you alive; think about washing machines. Spin cycle.
Blake was more than a little shocked when the energy did start moving. It was stupid, but it was working, so Blake focused on the image of a glass-fronted washing machine. He visualized the water tumbling and spinning. He lost himself entirely in that image.
Distantly, Eland said something, but Blake didn't really hear it. After getting no response, Eland seemingly started to push harder, so it must not have mattered. The pain mounted, and Blake's body was boiling, but he was someplace far away. A memory from somewhere deep. A laundromat in Saginaw. Autumn 1990. The radio in the corner was playing the game: the Tigers were up 10 - 3 against the Yankees. He was just a kid, maybe 7, and for a little while, nothing mattered to him except the rows of machines and the way the water, clothes, and bubbles swirled around and around and around.
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The fire in Blake's veins picked up speed. It churned and turned and bubbled. And while Blake was distracted, something else inside him came wearily to life. This vessel had given Chimera nothing but trouble since she found it. But it had been the only viable target for bonding—nothing to be done. Poor Vylaas was gone and Chimera could not survive alone.
So she reached out into the spinning vortex of power Blake had created and directed it into a funnel. She had already sacrificed nearly all of her existing bio-mass to prepare this new vessel, and finally, there was enough energy in the system to complete her installation. The nanites coursing through the vessel acted as her many hands, shaping the power and preparing it. She shifted her metaphysical mass into the correct alignment and pulled.
This vessel may not have come with a proper unawakened core for her to bond with like dear Vylaas, but that wasn't required. The vessel was underdeveloped, so Chimera would help compensate. Use herself to bulk up the atrophied core so that the vessel could function at proper capacity. It would harm Chimera in the short term, stunt her abilities and regress her advancement, but if she could keep this creature alive for a century or two it would be entirely worth the effort.
Chimera compressed her essence into a tight shell around Blake's core and pulled on all of the power that had accumulated. It burned her, but that was no matter, her plan was working.
The vessel would be whole.
They would both live.
She wouldn't be trapped in the dark.
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The mana surged through Blake's meridians like a flash flood through narrow canyons. Eland's fingers trembled as he pressed them against Blake's shoulder blades, desperately trying to maintain his grip on the wild energy. Sweat beaded on his cetacean features.
"Come on, kid," he complained. His own mana core strained as he attempted to redirect the violent currents away from Blake's vital organs.
Blake's body seized. His back arched away from Eland's hands, muscles rigid. The ambient temperature around them dropped several degrees as the mana continued to build.
Eland's connection to the flow slipped, of course. It was like trying to hold onto a live wire with wet hands. He poured more of his own energy into the effort, but it only seemed to feed the maelstrom. Blake's meridians blazed like superheated metal in Eland's spiritual vision.
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The energy flow should have been simple to control. Eland had guided dozens through their first mana cycling, but Blake's meridians blazed with a wild, untamed power that threatened to tear free from his grasp.
Blake shouldn't have been able to take control of the process like this. He had no experience circulating mana, and while the ridiculously expensive nanite suite Eland had gifted the boy might have helped, they shouldn't even be fully integrated yet. If Blake had just remained passive, allowed Eland to shepherd the mana through the proper channels, they'd be halfway done already.
But no. The stubborn man had to go and develop cycling abilities in the middle of the procedure. Raw, uncontrolled, and powerful enough to disrupt Eland's careful guidance. The energy sparked and crackled, resisting his attempts to contain it. It wasn't even a proper technique! He was just creating a vortex of power, a hurricane of mana that was trying to pull in more and more of itself to increase in speed and power.
Blake's newfound talent was impressive—in an academic sense, but his timing was atrocious. The untrained cycling threatened to destabilize the entire process. Eland's arms trembled as he fought to maintain contact with Blake's shoulders, his own mana core straining against the chaotic resonance.
And then he felt it. Ever so faint, an energy like the one he had sensed in the junkyard earlier. The symbiote. And even as Eland felt it, he also felt the tempest tearing through Blake… shift. It started coming under control. Not completely, unfortunately, because Eland had no way to stop the power from starting to condense and gather to a point, but he could at least keep it stable.
"Zeph, catalog everything," he said, knowing that she already was. "And let's be ready to identify any anomalies in his core ASAP."
"What do you think is happening?" the AI asked.
"I'm sure we're both thinking the same thing," he responded.
"Yes," she said flatly. "The suit suborned the remaining payload of untasked nanites in Blake's bloodstream. It's using them as a bridge to control the awakening."
"I feel like I might have made a mistake with those," Eland said. His heart rate was rapidly returning to normal, yet he remained concerned. He could feel the energy melding with whatever sorry vestigial spiritual organ Blake had in place of a proper core.
"I told you that before you offered them to him," Zephyr said dryly. "Ashok is going to murder you if Blake doesn't shape up to be a good ally for Shelter."
"He wouldn't murder me," Eland countered.
"We could have fed the sect for a year with the cost of that vial. And you gave it to him so that, what, you didn't have to mime at one another?"
Eland frowned. She was right, Ashok might kill him.
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Blake distantly felt the pain in his body rising to a crescendo before—
-CLICK-
—something fell into place. Something wonderful. Something vital.
Something Blake had never realized was missing.
He breathed in, and when he did, he breathed in so much more than just the stale air of the ship. Mana. He could feel it. That was what it had to be. He smiled. And then he broke out into a peel of joyous laughter as he felt the mana—no longer liquid metal, but cool and refreshing, coursing through him.
He fell backwards, and Eland caught him. Blake opened his eyes to see the muscle-bound whale-lizard man smiling at him. In Blake's current euphoric state the strange alien situation just made him laugh all the harder. This carried on for almost another minute before something started happening in front of his vision that finally calmed him down.
Text flashed across Blake's vision, scrolling past faster than he could process. His euphoria dampened as he tried to focus on the rapid-fire messages cluttering his field of view.
[ Gnosis Matrix initializing... ]
"What the—" Blake blinked hard, but the text remained.
[ Ascension Engine: Core systems online. Awaiting user calibration. ]
He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. The messages continued their relentless march across his vision.
[ Logos System beginning user inference... ]
[ Celestial Codex: Beginning archive scan. ]
Blake's head swam as he tried to make sense of the cryptic notifications. Each one appeared in different corners of his vision, some fading while others persisted.
[ Aeon Interface establishing regional link... ]
[ Enlightenment Grid: Mapping current knowledge base. ]
"I'm seeing... messages," Blake said, reaching out to steady himself against Eland's arm. "Some kind of startup sequence?"
The text continued its parade through his field of view, seemingly unconcerned with whether he understood or even acknowledged its presence. Numbers, percentages, and progress bars danced at the edges of his perception, threatening to overwhelm his senses.
"Empty sky," Eland spat from behind Blake. "They're able to interface that directly with Demiurge?"
"I told you," he heard Zephyr say. "Very high end goods. I could have already learned his native language and been translating, but no. Not fast enough for Eland Turun."
Blake gripped his skull in both hands, willing the deluge of information to slow. "Damnit you two, go argue somewhere else."
Eventually, after another agonizing minute and a half, his vision began to clear. He blinked away tears from his eyes and tried to focus on the only remaining messages in view. The first was short and confusing.
[ Custom OS "Chimera" Installed ]
The second message was longer, a deep golden color, and more confusing by far.
[ Welcome to Demiurge. Your path opens before you. Seek. Learn. Ascend. ]