“Okay," Kaye said, "what you have to lead with is 'I know Roscoe, and he said come on in, the water's great.' Then you will be able to tell me that you're stuck in a time loop. To which I will respond, ‘no thanks’ and you counter, ‘come on, it’s really, really refreshing’ then I’ll begin backing away from you looking like I’m terrified. Then you say, ‘you big baby!’ And the code phrases will be exchanged.”

“That’s complex. Why not just have one word or phrase and one response?”

“Bodysnatchers, that’s why. We needed to lean on more than one memory sense. It’s from ‘The Iron Giant’ my favorite movie.”

It clicked, and I could picture the scene. “When they jump into the lake?”

“Yep!” Kaye grinned.

"Who's Roscoe?" I asked.

"My teddy bear," she explained.

"Your teddy bear?"

"Yeah," she said, "duh, who else would work to say 'jump in the water is fine' in an invasion of the body snatchers scenario except for an imaginary friend? It's perfectly logical."

"I'm sorry, but I've never known anyone who's developed a just-in-case scenario for body snatchers. The people I know develop just-in-cases for fire and burglary."

"Fire and burglary? I don't have any just-in-cases for those. Which is a good point and an interesting oversight. I should probably do that, too."

***

Controlling my aura was harder than telekinesis. It required precise imagination, being able to picture in my mind exactly where my aura was, which I discovered was how Kaye used her aura. Things would only ever appear in her imagination, but she had no less of a real sense of it than I did. I could just physically see it with my eyes.

Then the hard part came. I had to move it.

Whether it was luck, or Kaye’s direction, I was able to find the ‘muscle’ needed to control my aura. Imagine being inside a giant soap bubble. You need to shrink the bubble, but the only tool you have to work with are your own lungs. So you take a deep breath. The bubble moves, becoming smaller, but the change is infinitesimal. Now imagine your lungs don’t have the restriction of ribs, they could take in more of the air, if only they were stronger. This is what it was like.

I pushed and pulled until sweat broke out on my forehead, and I was panting. I felt foolish, feeling spent, sitting in the shade of the tree. Kaye was sitting a couple yards off, waiting for me to contract my aura far enough that she wasn’t in it. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t moved it an inch.

“This is remarkable,” Kaye said, breaking my concentration. “An aura this size comes from years of practice and discipline, expanding over the course of a lifetime of control and training. Someone with an aura like this should be able to move like an athlete, but you have all the muscle control of a newborn.” She paused and looked thoughtful for a moment. “Did you know a newborn can be suffocated by the weight of their own head?”

I stopped my practice and looked at her, “No. That’s morbid. Why do you bring that up?”

“That’s you. You’re the infant. It’s no wonder other auras are painful to you. You’re wide open, but you don’t have the strength to lift your own head. Any passing aura could crush you, if it was focused on you. You don’t need to crash senior assembly, you could lose a fight with a kitten.” She giggled at the analogy.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t go?”

“Not at all! Are you familiar with ‘Attack on Titan’?”

“No, what’s that?”

“Never-mind, it’s a gem. For my purposes, it’s an example of how human ingenuity can overcome something impossible. You should keep trying to lift an elephant as a newborn, but be flexible. You’re not gonna be able to brute force it. You need to work around the problem. This,” Kaye poked my bicep, “is never gonna solve the problem. You need to use this,” she pointed to my head, “and this,” she poked me in the chest. Her eyes grew wide and she stopped, her finger on my chest, staring at the spot she was pointing to.

“Can I put my hand on your chest?” She asked.

“Sure?” I said, not knowing what she wanted.

She placed her palm flat on my chest, closed her eyes, and stayed still for a long minute.

“You’ve got two,” she said in almost a whisper.

“Two?”

“Auras. This explains so much. I thought you were a sociopath, or that becoming a vampire had blanked your aura, but I think I get it now.” She still had her eyes closed.

“What? I have two auras? I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I understand either, but you have a big aura, and it’s blank. There’s no information about you in it at all. You also have a little aura. You’ve put it in a cage. It doesn’t reach your whole body. It feels like you have been constricting it to make it smaller. It’s difficult to pick up any information about you through the cage. I think that’s why one person’s aura interacting with yours didn’t crush you. You have extra space to manage it. It’s when the cage around your little aura breaks that you get crushed. You should be capable of things other people aren’t with both auras.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“What kind of things?”

“I have no idea…”

***

Before I was ready, it was time to head to senior assembly. Kaye was continuing to encourage me to try again and be creative. She had questions about how luck healed me, and if I was really drinking life force like a ‘real’ vampire, to which I could only shrug. I didn’t know if what I was taking from people being ‘luck’ was a white lie from Not-me, told to get me to go along with it.

I pushed through the curtain, glancing over my shoulder as I did. Kaye flashed me a thumbs up and a grin. Of course, she insisted on coming along. Facing forward, the ocean of colors once again roiled before me.

“Focus on your core,” Kaye had told me, “Try using your big aura to redirect and avoid letting your core get crushed. Maybe try to reinforce the cage and let anything else wash over you and pass by? I don’t know, be creative!”

I stepped into the spotlight and introduced myself, “Hey, it’s great to be here, thanks for having me, I’m Timmy Freak, your friendly neighborhood luck-vampire. If you’ll hold up your phones and attempt to take a picture or a video, you’ll find I don’t show up.” I winked at the crowd, giving them my best grin.

I could hear a murmur begin, and continue to rise as several people cried out, “What the?” Or “How is he doing that?”

The crash of focused attention was more intense than last time. Whatever advice Not-me or Kaye had given me was washed away in a multihued tidal wave, that I found I was powerless to resist. My mind conjured, helpfully, the picture of a mosquito, caught in a whirlpool, swirling around and around before being sucked down.

Hot anger lashed and burned me, as cold despair chilled my innards. Inadequacy bored into my core and anxiety crushed down upon me, like the end of the world. The emotions felt physically painful, and for the few moments I was still aware of my body, I was aware I was bucking and jerking. The pain caused my vision to begin to tunnel and fade, and even as it did my mind kicked out a snarky thought, ‘I’m a mosquito, being flushed down the cosmic toilet of teenage angst.’

***

When I found Kaye again, it was between classes. For some reason she wasn’t in the hallway when she had been last loop. I got her attention and delivered the line.

“Roscoe says, ‘come on in, the water’s fine…” my brain ground to a halt, that wasn’t right, “great, I mean great.”

Kaye’s look soured and she looked around, as if for someone muffling laughter behind a hand, or a hidden camera. Her eyes darted to the other people, suspicion clear on her face. I faltered at this, but plunged ahead,

“I’m stuck in a time loop and you’ve been teaching me aura control, oh yeah, my name is Timmy Freak, local luck vampire.”

Her face turned into a full blown frown. “Okay,” she said, acid in her tone, “who put you up to this?”

This was not the agreed upon code phrase, but a rejection was a rejection, I supposed. “Come on, it’s really really refreshing.” I said.

She gave me a look like I’d spit on her shoe and stepped closer. “I don’t care who you are, and I don’t care who put you up to this, if you talk to me again, I’ll break your nose, you little jerk.”

The look in her eyes at that moment, the venom she felt for me, you’d think I’d burned her house down, or worse. I was speechless. It was like I’d encountered a different person. I nodded, and she spun and walked away. I watched until her pink converse melted into the crowd.

Why hadn’t that worked? It had been her plan. Feeling dejected, I wandered out of the halls to practice my telekinesis and aura control. I didn’t want to spend any more time in school. Just when I thought I’d made a new ally, it’d fallen apart. I felt hurt, disappointed. Suddenly alone. I stuffed it into the cage.

***

I fell into a routine. Take luck until healed, practice telekinesis, work on aura control, then crash the senior assembly…

That description is deceptively simplistic.

This became the marathon hero training montage that appears in the classic action movies, massively oversimplifying hard work and pain wrought growth. The difference is, I wasn’t learning to fight with kung-fu or box. Most of what I was trying to learn was how to exist, now that I was what I was… whatever I was.

For the sake of the sanity of anyone who happens upon my story, I’m going to skip over large periods of time here. For example, each loop until senior assembly gave me approximately six hours, if I crashed it near the end of their two hour period. I began pushing it to the end of the two hours my next loop, to maximize the time in a loop I had to train, but mostly to avoid the pain as long as I could. Being crushed by the aura train left me entering a loop feeling like I had drunk battery acid while standing in a lake of fire and zeroed out on luck.

I counted the exact number of hours spent in the loops for a time, but found this number to be a looming distraction, not an encouragement. So I simplified my count to number of loops, roughly estimating that each four loops was a twenty-four hour period. I didn’t sleep, which probably means that I should count each twelve hour period as a day, but I wanted to know total time spent, and decided to count by twenty-four’s. So my count began looking like this:

***

Loop 22, day 5,

I stumbled into the hall, sketching the symbol on my palm as quick as possible. I slapped the first person in reach, ignoring their protests and drawing deep. My whole existence was fire and pain. I let them go, moving down the hall before I drew too much of a gawking crowd and grabbed a new victim. It took one more person to reach a balance point. Then I began to heal, and I had to grab two more to finish healing without dipping below my balance point. It was taking more luck to heal each return.

Most of what I had learned since loop six when I first met Kaye, was how to control how much luck I took. I was no longer taking only scant sips, or devastating gulps. I had yet to drain anyone like I had Billy, when I turned him into a walking gremlin snack, or become luck bloated again, like I was when Kaye stopped me in the hallway. Wait, what if…

I stopped walking. I was rewarded by the person following bumbling into me.

“Sorry,” they said, stepping around.

I eyed the teenager, as they passed. I’d been bumped thousands of times in this hallway. This was the first ‘sorry’ I remembered hearing. I checked on my luck, more of that idea flashing through my head. I examined the luck I had, counting. My luck was positive by two…

I need to explain. I had to develop my own system for how much luck I had. Having a heads-up-display I could reference with a logical layout, where luck zeroed out at negative one-hundred, balanced at zero and anything beyond was positive, was just a fantasy. What I had, was the ability to look at my core, physically looking at my solar plexus, then beyond. I could see the ropes of twining, crystal, water-like streams, and count them.

Zero was easy, when I had none, not even a thread, I was zeroed out. I could take less than what it took to form a rope or a stream, but once I had enough, it would form naturally. So I counted the ropes. I guessed average human balance point to be about thirty-six. This was easy to figure out, because every twelve ropes would form roughly a ‘Dara Celtic knot’ pattern. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a complex four-quadrant weave of a single strand, that ends up being roughly circular. When two ‘knots’ got together, they would connect at their center, forming a shape with height and depth. Slide two pieces of paper together, one vertical and one horizontal. If they’re both circular, it’s a very rough sphere. When a third was added, it got interesting— I say as if this wasn’t already— the third knot would rotate through the other two, pivoting in the center. The whole thing would take on a glow at this point.

This is how I was able to easily tell most people had thirty-six, plus or minus a few. So I began thinking of people with a glowing core as at balance point. Not hard to spot, if you knew what you were looking for, and had the ability to see.

My idea… I had been careful since I puzzled out balance, not to go beyond it— Why would I take more than I needed, when the people I took from would have a bad day?— Could the amount of luck I carried be influencing how people treated me? I bumped into someone else who wasn’t looking.

“My bad,” they mumbled, without looking up.

I watched them pass, thinking hard. Did people treat me different with sub-balance luck? I could test this. I cleared my throat loudly, like I wanted attention. I felt several auras lash at me, the biting sting of strong emotions burning me as I deflected them. I felt a pull on my luck as something deep within me healed.

Looking at my core, I saw one of my knots unraveling. It settled, the loose ropes that did not form twelve, now spinning around the two knots that were still formed. I was two down. I stepped back into traffic and was bumped. The person who hit me grunted, but paid me barely a glance.

I tried several more people, but they all barely acknowledged me, if at all. No more apologies. I snatched some luck from a passer by, forcing them to pause and look at me in puzzlement, before I let them go and tried again. This time at plus three. I bounced off of someone, meaning to bump them, but they stepped into it.

“What? Hey, watch where you’re going nerd!”

I looked up. Of course it was him. Billy George looked down at me, a scowl on his face. Then he shocked the hell out of me by reaching down and helping me up. He didn’t apologize, but he didn’t try to punch me either. I was so shocked that it took the hall clearing for me to realize the bell had rung.

The idea I’d had finished, standing alone in the hallway. Did I need to be positive a certain amount of luck to make friends with Kaye again? Was that why she’d seemed like a different person? What had I seemed like to her? I was pretty sure I had been only six or eight ropes total then. Not even enough to form the first knot.

I needed to test this.

***