Chapter 3: Miracle Musical - The Mind Electric

I just wanted to enjoy a weekend out in the woods. I guess that was too much to ask for? I might be dreaming. No, hallucinating. I've been delirious before, after all… but this was not that. There was no mounting panic and the sheer belief in the terror of reality. Just dark, downright peaceful woodlands and a happily burbling stream. Along with a floating blue box and a sea of churning energy.

Maybe I was on to something.

But I stifled that thought down. I wasn’t creative enough for this. I was usually more formulaic. More constrained. Now if I started seeing numbers pop up into the air we could start talking about psychiatric wards. Ah. I guess they already had, hadn't they? It was the numbers that worried me most right then.

But all I wanted to do was ignore everything, curl up into a ball and pretend that it didn't have anything to do with me.

Because it didn't. I was far and away from the problems that suddenly existed. If they did at all.

I peeked over at the dark silhouette of that first mountain where the sea came from. What did it look like, over those walls? How safe was I, here?

I needed to get some sleep. I knew I probably couldn't. But something told me it would be much harder to sleep later. Another part pleaded that everything would be better in the morning.

The last embers of the fire glowed, dimly lighting the edges of the pit. How long had I been staring at them?

I stood up from the slightly uncomfortable stool and stretched. The mystical swirls in the air had started to die down a while ago. One twirled my way, as though drifting in a slight breeze. It spun into itself like bubbles caught in changing currents. I poked at it as it passed, but my finger passed through it without a change at all. What a strange sight. It reminded me of smoke rings. With that idle thought, I pushed out my hands a bit, trying to imagine twisting the line into a ring.

And then it did. A perfect little ring of light, churning along for moments before it was caught in the invisible current and sputtered into another scattered mess.

Now I knew I must have been dreaming. That flowed perfectly with dream logic - being unable to physically touch something only for it to bend magically to a thought.

I went to grab the lantern from the hut. I didn't want to try and stumble through the night looking for my sleeping bag, even though I knew exactly where it was. I also wanted to check to see why it didn't fizzle and die like the truck did.

I flicked it on. Immediately, the light went off like a flashbang, blanketing everything in a sheet of white before I turned it off as fast as I could. I blinked away stars for minutes. I completely lost my night vision. I collected myself and patiently waited for my scorched retinas to clear up. Eventually the silhouettes were definable again, and the faint wisps of light made themselves known once more. The smell of burnt plastic tinged the air, and I already knew what to expect out of this experiment.

I opened the case and removed the fresh batteries, totally unsurprised by the singed diodes. I had more of these to use too. Tomorrow I'll try again and see if things were, in fact, screwed. I tried to spot any more damage on the actual lantern. If it turned out that it wouldn't work even with a new set of batteries, that meant the truck would be in a similar state.

The lantern was a standard thing, nothing special about it as far as I could tell. It hosted a set of bright LEDs behind a thin plastic covering, with a dainty handle at the top. It wasn't like one of those high-capacity lanterns that could charge your phone or could be hand-cranked for power. Oh. My phone. Where did I –

It was in my pocket. That didn't track. Why hadn't it died too? It was something that was always turned on. I pulled it out for a moment. I could wait and try it tomorrow… but my curiosity was having none of that. I turned on the screen anyway. And it worked like usual. That was… very unexpected. Almost as unexpected as the notification that appeared immediately afterwards.

[Technologist (D)] Species Perk!

Your kind has always seen challenges as opportunities, achieving through intelligent design what nature deemed impossible.

[Technologists] will never be set in their ways, and always push forward through failure.

The Imperium recognizes your creation. Your greatest achievements will remain to be reforged in your world anew.

[Internet Of Things]

Internet-connected devices and technologies have been hardened against mana.

It was just past 2 AM. That was all my phone was useful for, despite the grand announcement that my computer at home probably wasn’t a useless piece of scrap at this point. If nothing else, my phone did make for an effective light. Mana, huh?

I idly observed the constant flowing of the ocean of mana while I grabbed my sleeping bag. I laid it out over the cot in the tiny shed, finally stripping off my clothes for the night. I still couldn’t believe it. It was all disorganized, out of context. Things were happening, but they weren’t. It almost felt like I was watching someone else’s history unfold. What did it have to do with me?

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

I lie down, wondering what kind of absurd, apparently life-threatening changes waited for me when I decided to leave this place. I caught myself marveling for a moment as a strand of mana passed straight through the wood without as much as a twitch. I grabbed hold of it. This time, with as much focus as I could muster. It froze, stock-still above my fist. It didn’t look like anything. At first I had thought it was like smoke, or maybe even a liquid, but that was wrong. You could see the tiny particles floating around in smoke, you could see how liquid stuck together. This was formless. Interwoven. It passed through itself like it passed through everything else. If it was concentrated in one place more than another, it became a brighter, more vibrant blue. It was light, water, and smoke rolled into one.

I twisted it into a ring. Then another. Then another. Watching as it dragged the world around it, as it cascaded inwards in a small ripple, like reversed footage of a pebble being thrown into a lake. I pulled on it, pressed it down, forming the brilliant blue lines into a marble of white light.

Ah. I knew it. this had to be a dream. Something this pretty couldn’t exist in the real world.

I fell asleep right as the marble unraveled itself.

***

I couldn’t decide if my dream was pleasant or not, or if I’d even dreamed at all. But the earthquakes put everything into perspective very quickly as they forced me awake. It looked like the nightmare continued

A mountain was on the move.

At first the shaking roused me from fitfully squirming in my sleeping bag, but they progressively got worse, until I was almost certain whatever was shaking the land beneath me was right on top of me. Bolting up and slapping on what clothes I could, I managed to step outside and greet the monstrosity with a slack jawed expression.

A giant column of stone landed squarely in the valley, the edge of a truly enormous foot only a few dozen meters away. It diverted the stream with the motion, sending a splash of water in all directions. When it hit the earth, I could feel my body lift from the ground for a fraction of a second before losing my balance. Even sprawled on the ground, I had to crane my neck upwards and still couldn’t see the top of the great being in front of me. Wherever its head was, it breached well past the clouds.

Panic mode enabled. Suddenly the missing billions came back to the forefront of my mind as I no longer had to wonder what kind of disaster could cause loss of life on that type of scale. This was a massive, moving disaster on a scale that would boggle the mind. If the foot had been placed a little to the left, I would no longer be on this earth. The foot flattened an area about the size of a neighborhood cul-de-sac, houses included. I scrambled backwards on all fours, trying to place myself as far away from whatever this thing was as possible. Its stride picked up the other massive leg, which banged against the nearest mountain face and broke apart the peak into thousands of shards of rock.

The distance and sizes involved made the whole thing look like it was happening in slow motion. One moment the mountain peak was there, the next it was an avalanche of rock and debris that swept away from the leg as easily as kicking a pile of snow. Something blared in the back of my mind, telling me to run. As though there was any time to outrun that.

I sprinted to the truck, the only somewhat sturdy covering anywhere nearby. I spared a glance behind me, watching trees get shattered by a falling boulder and wondering if a metal deathtrap was any better protection than the woods around me. I decided it wouldn’t matter anyway. Well, it was less ‘decided’ and more…

Shit shit shit shit shit shit fuck shit dammit hurry the hell up!

I numbly brought the keys to the door, realized it was a damn stupid idea to lock it in the first place, and dove behind the truck instead. Small pebbles pattered against the ground around me, scoring against the truck like a hailstorm. Then a large thunk jostled the whole thing and rocked the suspension violently, pushing me forwards and almost causing me to stumble away from the relative safety. Then another shattered a window. My small hut was crushed by a boulder twice its size. Watching that, all the blood in my body felt like it had been drained completely.

The leg passed over me, a long shadow blotting out the sun for many more moments than I was expecting. Once it was directly overhead, all of the falling rocks stopped, and seemed to be sucked into the abomination as it passed. The mana was raging violently. I didn’t have the presence of mind to pay attention to how it flooded out of the giant, spooling into the surroundings like the lines of a magnetic field and attracting all of the earth in its path. All I could think of were tiny thoughts, like a mouse in an exposed corner. The boulder that crushed my hut climbed into the air slowly at first, before shooting into the leg like a cannonball. Far from harming it, it seemed to only add to its already impressive size.

I only recovered after it soundlessly lifted itself out of the valley and continued onwards. What in God’s green Earth was that? I felt a slight tugging sensation as I stared at it. I cautiously leaned into it, wondering what sick justification the System had to give for such a display.

[Competitive (F)] Species Perk!

Your kind has a fierce competition with itself, never able to sit still, never able to stagnate, else you’ll be left behind. This is the base nature of all life, but in your people it has been cultivated to an extreme. The Imperium sees that it can be developed further.

[Envy]

You can now compare yourself to others without their knowledge. Unlocks [Inspect] as a racial skill. Classes involving inter-species conflict are easier to acquire.

[Inspect (F) Lv. 0] -> [Inspect (F) Lv. 1]

[Earth Elemental (???) Lv. ???]

Attributes:

Strength: 999+

Vitality: 99+

Dexterity: 30-40

Perception: 3

Intelligence: 7

Willpower: 20-30

Skills:

[???] [???] [???] [???] [Assimilation (???): Lv. ???]

I dispassionately watched the back of the giant-- Elemental for a while, feeling more than a bit frayed along the edges. I unwound, watching as it moved over each peak. Sometimes it would carefully step over a mountain, other times it would blast through if it could. Actually, I wasn't confident it was picking and choosing at all. It looked more like it was stumbling in random directions... exactly how low is a perception stat of 3 anyways? I still don't have enough context for anything. I sighed and dismissed the screen with a wave of my hand. Then it was time to finally observe the wreckage that used to be my little slice of heaven.

My sleeping bag was crumpled, but that wouldn’t harm it. The lantern was pulverized, but the batteries weren’t damaged -- not that I was going to reuse them, I just had an experiment in mind. The truck had a few more dents than it used to, and half of the driver’s side front door was crushed inwards. I felt a deep headache coming on as I thought of all of the extreme, utter bullshit that the world was forcing onto me. But I’d deal with it. Somehow, every time I came out here looking to escape from it, it always found some way to shove me back. This time wasn’t like any of the others, but it wasn’t any different.

I looked up at the morning sun, reveling in how it shone through the destroyed peak. I almost cursed myself in my head for thinking it was beautiful, after it had nearly killed me. I probably had too many brain chemicals coursing through the system to think straight. Well, whatever. I’ll have to rub two braincells together and hope it makes a third. I turned to the batteries, ready to try something a little crazy. Because why not, when everything already was?