Joseph waved goodbye and followed Principal Murphy to the door, locking it once he heard the man's car door slam shut. Engaging the bolt and slipping another security working into the jamb from his little stack next to the register, he made his way up the spiral staircase to his apartment.
Another door, another lock, another blue negative test. He stepped inside and deposited his keys on the hook. The room was barren except for a twin bed, a night stand, a rolled up drop cloth, and a workbench with built-in stool. He checked the sliding glass door that led to the balcony area, burned his security working (again, blue), then closed both it and the curtains until no light could enter the room.
He made his way over to the workbench and reached for the pull chain for the lamp, but when brushed against the little metal beads he felt a sharp pain on the tips of his fingers followed by an accompanying yowl.
“Gah! Really?” He yelped, in a voice higher than he would be comfortable admitting belonged to him. He tried a second time to pull the chain to illuminate the desk, and the culprit, a gray and orange tabby cat, stared at Joseph with haughty disinterest like she didn't just literally bite the hand that fed her.
“You absolute menace,” Joseph said, turning around and limping over to Tash’s bowl just inside the bathroom door to scoop out a double helping of food. The cat hopped down and practically dove into the dish alternating between rubbing against Joseph's leg and inhaling the food.
“I hadn't planned on staying gone so long. Something came up," Joseph whispered apologetically. The cat purred even as she swallowed. "You'll forgive me right?"
Back at the desk, Joseph took out a piece of flash parchment and a pen that he'd filled with the hydrocarbon ink. Time to experiment.
Joseph worked through his body, relaxing his muscles one by one from his toes to his shoulders then made his way up to his face. He slowed his breathing and closed his eyes, listening to the sounds of the world. The whistle of the heat traveling through his exposed ducts overhead. The purr of Tash as she munched happily on her kibble. The squeal of brakes at the stop sign on the corner. The shrill chitter of a group of bats as they hunted overhead. The crackling hum of heavy cables conducting electricity into the transformer outside. The corrosive whispers of the thing in the caves. The thrum of the membrane that separated his world from the other.
He focused on that, hearing the whisking, gentle caresses of the two realities brushing against each other. The two were brought together by chance, now inexorably linked, spinning through the between places together for as long as they would exist. The sound of their touching was carried and magnified by an impossibly huge membrane stretched so thin one could almost make out what lurked on the other side in silhouette if properly attentive. At least that's how he perceived it. He breathed deeply, steeling himself for what he was about to do while careful not to lose his place. A lapse in concentration meant lost time and energy, and he had precious little of both just now. Morning would come quickly and, with it, attention from the Company.
Opening an aperture wasn’t particularly difficult, not of the size he could manage at least, but the opening needed to be of a particular type, focused and untainted. He’d learned his lesson with the gray goo. As interesting and terrifying as it was, he wasn’t ready to “discover” something like that in his state. Not in his apartment at least.
Concentrating, in his mind’s eye he placed his metaphorical hand against the membrane and summoned his fire. A tiny pinprick of concentrated energy in the palm of his hand flared to life. The membrane between the two worlds shuddered subtly under his touch, changing the tenor of its sound as he bored through. There was no shape or geometry in what he did. He wasn’t working with the world as humanity understood it. This was all about feel. He burned into the other world, feeling the pressure of the energy backwash as his aperture took shape and he wrestled with the alien forces as they struggled to pour through.
The energy of the other side was… everything. And also nothing. Joseph likened it to tapping into a realm of limitless potential: dark, unformed, terrible, wonderful chaos. Everything was without form and without cause. However, when it crossed into his reality, it became. It became what his reality dictated it should be. At least that's how it worked if an opening occurred naturally. What Joseph was doing was as unnatural as it got. Depending on the type of aperture, the chaos of the other world could be made to become all sorts of things. The “shape” of Joseph's aperture was like a prism in that it separated the different kinds of chaos energy from each other, enough to be able to work with one while allowing the others to dissipate.
What Joseph needed to work with today was Force, but first he needed to draw out his working. He honed his aperture, warping it, separating and organizing the chaos into distinct spectrums to be examined and discarded until all that was left was his chosen types. This proved difficult at the best of times, since the energy spectrum was deceptively complex and volatile, depending on how fine a burgeoning practitioner could get with his control.
Although he was getting better by the day, Joseph's control was nothing to write home about, and he was sure that if he wasn't the only person in the world that could do this, he'd be entirely unimpressive. As it stood, though, he was the only being in the cosmos that could do what he did, and he waffled back and forth on whether that was a comforting thought or a terrifying one.
He sought out the types of energy he knew best.
Heat, his old friend and his most familiar, was the first he found in the stream. It wasn’t needed for this experiment, so he put it aside. Best not work with fire inside a tinderbox like his shop.
Light, the quick and excitable thing that it was, was difficult to block. It tended to blend in with a lot of the others, making it a pain to get rid of entirely. Joseph did the best he could though. It wouldn’t do to blind himself during an accident, if things went poorly.
There were a couple types of energy he didn't know the names for, and they felt wrong in a way he couldn't explain, like their presence in his reality was an affront to some immutable natural law. Experimenting with these was something to be done at another time, maybe in a bunker somewhere.
After he had his bearings, he honed in on the part of the spectrum he needed. Force and Potential. They sprang forward, surpassing the others until it was only they who manifested through the aperture, seeping into Joseph’s body, their coiled readiness seeming to urge him to Do. Do anything.
His hands trembled on the desk.
With the proper forces humming through the channels in his body now, Joseph opened his eyes. In front of him was his paper and pen, next to which the digital clock displayed 9:50pm. He began to design his new prototype.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
First, the trigger (or was it a fuse?), which he overlaid with a heavy concentration of Potential, which would channel the energy Joseph planned to put into the spell to activate it. The line started in the middle of the paper, but it really could have been anywhere. The position on the design was less important than the energy that followed the path he created. The spiral then terminated in a wide, semi-pentagonal reservoir that Joseph would fill with the desired amount of Force at the tail end of the process. From the reservoir he drew the designs for the parameters of how the working would be shaped and what the constraints would be as well as where the construct would be formed relative to the trigger point. The more constrained a working was, the farther it could stretch its energy reservoir and to greater effect. This working, he gave tons of constraints, allowing it to stick around for an extended period of time unless otherwise directed.
As a failsafe, he did add a tiny leak in the containment structure to allow the Force to dissipate if left alone for long enough. He really didn’t want another semi-permanent forcefield situation in the middle of his apartment. Tash would never forgive him for that.
With the design done, he went to work on the long process of adding the appropriate amounts of Force and Potential to the reservoir. Joseph didn’t lie when he told people he could only manage a trickle of fire at a time, and that held true for the other types of energy he had at his beck and call. He had enough throughput to produce a potent little flame, but that was it.
The power he could bring to bear came from him at a trickle bordering on a drip. On the world stage, he was the weakest super he’d ever met as far as raw power went. So, creating an effect of much consequence meant time spent channeling the requisite juice into the right place. Then it was all about storing all of that energy and knowing how to access it.
Only a few years ago, a lot of introspection and experimentation got him on the path he traveled today. Originally, he'd simply been curious why his little flame differed in color and luminosity from day to day. With time, his understanding of his power grew, and just how much potential his power gave him was… frightening, if only he knew how to use it.
He was like a damned wizard.
A wizard with absolutely no guidance. No gray bearded mentors. No dusty tomes to study. No accumulated knowledge of past generations to act as guardrails.
He was a caveman banging rocks together.
Except, in this metaphor, the rocks represented the forces of creation and destruction at a fundamental level.
Half an hour later, he’d added enough Force to the reservoir to give it some punch, about the intensity of a firecracker. So, he marked out the connection from the reservoir to the rest of the design as the final step. Now, if he were to light the fuse, the working would use the power in the reservoir to manifest in reality. Once the reservoir was empty, the working would fizzle out or fade away depending on how he built it. This one would probably fizzle or, more likely, explode, hence the small reservoir.
The time read 10:45pm.
“Okay, my trusty familiar. Time for function calling test number one. You ready?,” he asked the cat as he stood, popping his back.
Tash didn’t answer, electing to lie on the desk with her belly in the air, batting at the dust motes in the air dangerously close to the ink well. Joseph thought about reaching down to rub her belly, but he knew the irresistible softness was a trap, and he wanted to keep his hand. The ink well made a little *tink* sound as Tash's paws jostled it in place.
“Hey, if you knock that off, you’re paying for it.”
The cat stopped for a moment to stare at him then put a singular paw atop the inkwell's cork.
“I’m serious.”
She just stared at him disdainfully, the way cats do, then she half-heartedly batted the cork until it hit the base of the lamp.
He frowned and rubbed his new design between his fingers. "Once I learn how, I'm turning you into a chihuahua."
Joseph stepped over to the empty spot on the floor between the foot of the bed and the door and bent down to flatten the paper against the floor. He summoned his fire and watched the paper burn to ashes under his palm, blackening the floor slightly and reddening his skin. He was used to it by now. "Super physiology" meant he healed relatively quickly, but he really needed to come up with a way to do this that didn’t burn his hand every time. He had to be getting nerve damage by now.
Once the medium was consumed by the fire, Joseph felt a change in air pressure just above his head. Up at about eye level floated a semi-translucent ball that glowed a dim blue. It was the size of a soap bubble and looked to be just about as fragile. However, when Joseph touched it, the surface felt like cool glass. He tried pushing it gently then tapping on it. It didn’t move or make a sound like one would expect. It was simply there. At least he'd given it enough constraints.
“Well, part one didn’t blow up in my face. Let’s do part two.”
This working was something he’d not tried before: a reference to another working. This time, the design and the reservoir were both pure potential. The idea was to check for the presence of Joseph’s previous “Force Ball” working and direct it to break its containment. Simple in theory, but if he'd learned anything from his experiments in the past, nothing was so simple that he couldn't screw it up.
So, by 11:05pm he had his “call” design finished and charged. He brought the newly minted design over to where the Force Ball floated. It was noticeably dimmer now. Apparently the leak in the containment was doing its job, and the whole thing would cease to exist soon enough. He hoped the call working had enough "Force Ball" to work with to make things happen.
He set himself a few feet away, hoping to stay well back if the ball construct did anything unexpected, then he raised his fist and burned the paper in his hand. A loud *snap* sounded in Joseph’s face, followed by what felt like catching a well thrown baseball in his bare hand, slapping it down and leaving it stinging and raw.
“Ow. Mother f-”
Tash hissed at him. She jumped off the desk to go hide in the bathroom looking twice as large, tail straight out, hair standing on end. Joseph didn’t blame her.
What went wrong? There wasn’t much force in that ball, and the containment should have just popped, allowing the energy to dissipate evenly over the area of the sphere. What he’d experienced felt like a punch right where he’d just “called” his construct. Meanwhile, he felt no force on his arms, chest, or face, like the energy had all been directed downward.
He shook out his hand, trying to get some of the feeling back. He really was fumbling around in the dark, but his methods did produce results. Whether he could survive his gift long enough to be a real force for good in the world was still up in the air.
Doubts or no, he tried again, building his Force Ball, connecting the fuse, and constructing the containment parameters, but inspiration struck him just as he was setting dimensions. What if he gave the containment parameters a flaw, a thin part of the containment construct separate from the rest that would fall apart when given input? What would he even use to make that happen?
On into the night, he worked. Experiment two failed differently than number one, and Joseph ended up with a nasty cut on his hand. Experiment three was more promising in that he was able to direct the failure of containment, channeling the force away from his palm instead of further injuring his hand. The solution didn't come from the construction of the force ball either. It came from the trigger call. The force needed a path to travel when it was "summoned", and he'd summoned it right down into his palm the first and second times he'd tried it. Why did it work like that? Did it matter?
After attempt number three, he could tell that he would at least not blow or cut his hand off if he tried a larger scale working, so that was nice. He wrote down his observations in the notebook he kept in the top drawer of the desk and extinguished the light.
The clock read 4:55am. Maybe after some sleep and a strong cup of coffee, he'd give it another try.