Hiiro Volshebso

I remembered getting shot and getting slapped. Everything before that was a blur. My planetside upbringing on Intatenrup was little more than a hazy dream and my time on Tengoku was a haunting nightmare just beyond recollection. All I knew was that everything hurt, and I was warm.

"Where-" I started.

"You're in the med-bay on a ship. That's all you need to know for now." I sat up to face the speaker— or I would have if the restraints lashing me to the bed hadn't snapped taut. The man who'd spoke stepped into view.

He was several decades my senior, a bald head and sagging features hinting at a man just past middle age. His dress was sterile and professional, reminding me more of an organlegger than a butcher. His eyes were deep-set and of a soft blue, tucked behind a pair of reading glasses. Yet his skin was what drew my attention. The man was pink like a pig, I'd have thought there was something wrong with him were it not for the other pink man standing next to him.

The second man stood a half-head taller and at least thirty kilos heavier than the first. Close-trimmed black stubble wrapped his head and trailed down to his wide jaw. His pink skin was rife with scars paler than the rest of him and his thick arms were cut and healed in a way that almost looked decorative instead of random. Resting between those thick arms, held in a casual grip, was a shotgun pointed towards me. Where the bald man's eyes were half-lidded and sleepy, this one's were intensely focused on me.

"Why-" I started again.

"Hold it." The bald man said, waving a belaying hand. A finger went to his ear. "Your stray's awake."

The med-bay I found myself in was similar yet different from what I'd seen in the past. Something about how compact everything was sat at odds with the flat sprawling affairs that came to mind instinctively. The room had too much verticallity for me think of it as anything other than a tool shed— the cramped size only furthered the connection. My bed was little more than a steel cot shoved into an alcove corner and bolted to the floor. A knock beyond my field of view drew the bald man away with some whispered words.

"You still haven't cooled down." The woman said idly.

She was the unnatural white beyond that of any corpse; her skin, hair, teeth and even her nails were all so glaringly alabaster that she looked inhuman. The very sight of her made my own tawny skin crawl, but my restraints wouldn't allow me to keep her from getting closer. Then I saw her eyes. They were a purple so rich they seemed to spill out into the space around the pale woman, tainting everything she spared a glance at. Right now her gaze was fully fixed on me face.

"Get away from me you mutant bitch!" I spat, kicking out at her as much as my restraints allowed.

"Great, you're one of those people." She muttered, standing impassively just outside of my reach. "Don't try and act all high and normal. No reason we can't be civil."

"I am normal-"

"Did you know that the human body stops working above forty degree standard? Heat stroke." I blinked at the pale woman's sudden tonal shift. "Would you like to guess what your temperature is?"

I wasn't given time to guess, let alone to try and recall my limited education.

"Forty-nine." The bald man stated. "And your spinal column is floating around fifty-three."

"What do you people want from me?" I asked, finally able to get a question out without being interrupted.

"Short version? We want to get a return on investment for pulling you back from death's door." The pale woman said.

With a snap of her fingers, the bald man proffered out a datapad for me to look at. I couldn't read half the words arrayed in a neat column but it was clear I was looking at an invoice of some kind. The number at the bottom was smaller than I'd been expecting but the amount was still a staggering five digits.

"So you outlaws want money."

"We're mercenaries, actually." The large, scarred man said from the rear.

"When you abducted me, you didn't happen to grab my things, did you? A bag, maybe? It seems I left my wallet in my other pants."

"It seems like you aren't grasping the situation," The pale woman began. "Allow me to spell it out for you, explicitly. I found you pumped full of lead, stuffed in a crate with half a dead whore and a five-man airlock detail getting ready to space you. I saved your life, then I seared your wounds so you wouldn't bleed out and then, instead of leaving you to whatever passes for justice on that little gangster's paradise of a station, I brought you along on our side-gig to name names and point fingers. So you can imagine my surprise when you tried to blow me and mine out into low orbit along with all those bounties, just so you could grease some slimeball in a suit. The way I see our relationship so far, I saved you, then you tried to kill me AND you ruined a job— which I can't forgive.

"Now," She continued. "What you're going to do is answer every question I ask you, and if I like your answers you might just live long enough to pay off your debt and go back to pissing off whoever you want with your terminal stupidity. Have I spelled it out clear enough for you?"

"Yeah, crystal."

"Good. Question number one, are you psychic?"

"You're joking, right?"

"Just answer the fucking question." The scarred man growled with a wave of his shotgun.

"No? At least, I don't think I am." I answered, shifting my gaze between the scarred man's smirk and the pale woman's scowl.

The pale woman stared into my eyes, and despite myself, I couldn't look away. Something about the near-sickening richness of her vibrantly purple eyes held me fast with a force of will that seemed to thicken the air between us. It felt like she wasn't just looking at me, she was peering through my eyes into my soul. My pulse quickened and as if in response to her scrutiny the heat within me whelmed up in defiance.

"You're not psychic and you're not normal, so what does that make you? Are you a mutant— a sub-human abomination?"

"No!"

"Face it. You're, just, like, me."

The pale woman was reaching her disgustingly white hand towards my face. The ghostly digits drew to mind childhood horror stories of cannibal blood-drinkers with skin as white as snow. I strained against my restrains, heaving so hard my seared wounds tore open. My blood was boiling inside me, my nerves were burning like white hot wires and this mutant bitch's pale hand was still coming closer, millimeters at a time.

"Don't touch me!" I roared.

To my disbelief, she actually paused, her hand hovering centimeters from my jaw. She tilted her head as if considering my words, then smiled wickedly.

"Hmm… No." Her hand darted in to grab me around the throat.

And then, her arm was on fire.

The bald man had an extinguisher in his hands as if by magic and started spraying with reckless abandon. Soon the pale woman was entirely lost under a pillar of white foam. The bald man didn't even pause as he moved the extinguisher's vomiting nozzle towards me and buried me under a blanket of foam. Eventually the extinguisher spewed its last and everything fell silent. I tentatively took a shallow breath, nearly choking as the foam crawled down my throat without smothering me. When my captors spoke, the foam I was swaddled in gave them all a distant, muffled quality.

"Great, a firebug."

"Come on Leeroy. This is the first who's actually like me! Can't you be a little more excited."

"You've been hunting for people 'like you' for two years, Princess. Now that you've found one, he tries to burn you alive and you want me to be excited? He just tried to kill you!"

"That's not exactly a one-off occurrence, Roy."

"I get that you're super stoked about this, but you need to listen to me. We're all stuck on this ship and he starts FIRES. What if that happens every time he flinches? We-"

"We should just throw the freak out the airlock and be done with it." The pale woman, Princess, finished with a mocking tone.

"That's not what this is about. Besides, I was going to say 'we need to be careful'."

"And by being careful, you mean we should kill him."

"Not kill, just-"

"Get rid of. Yeah, I've heard it all before. Get rid of all the freaks who do weird shit for weird reasons."

"You know I don't mean it like that."

"Of course you don't, because no one ever means it about me. I'm one of the good ones. You guys don't think of me that way."

"I'm not going to deal with you while you're like this. Have fun with your science experiment!"

A heavy metal door sealed quietly, right before something pounded it with a bang.

"Great, just fan-freaking-tastic." The pale woman growled. I thought I heard something like a slap followed by a resigned sigh. "Alright Firebug, I'm going to wipe some of this stuff off your face so we can have a conversation. If you burn me again, I'll cut off your balls and feed them to you."

"Just get this crap off of me! I can't breath." I coughed.

Gingerly, almost reverently, the pale woman started wiping the fire-suppressant from my lips, then nose and lastly my eyes. Afterwards, she probed the mound of powdery foam for the strap holding down my right are and released it.

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"I've been looking at the wrong things this whole time." She idly whispered, staring at something near my torso.

"Are you really a princess?" I asked as I set to wiping the worst of the foam from me.

"Are you really a firebug!?" She snapped, her eyes whipping back onto me with a savage focus. "It's just a bad joke that stuck. What should I call you, Sparky?"

"Volshebso, Hiiro Volshebso."

Princess sat herself on a chair at my feet and held out her charred hand for the bald man to examine with medicinal disinterest.

"Alright, Hero, the big guy from before was Leeroy, I'm Princess and this man-of-the-faith is Gerald. Let's have a plain talk now that all the cards are on the table."

This situation kept getting weirder and weirder. Even now that the lingering haze of my unconsciousness was fading, I still found myself disoriented and wrong-footed at every step. The scarred man, Leeroy, had said they were mercenaries and one of the few things I knew about the trade was that they never did anything for free. The fact that they'd already done as much as they had meant that for some reason, someone thought I was worth more alive than dead.

"What did you mean when you said I was like you." I asked. "Am I really a mutant?"

"You can rest assured that you are entirely human." Gerald answered, finally adding his drawling dour voice to the conversation. "No noteworthy hereditary or adaptive mutations. Aside from your higher-than-average resting homeostatic thermoregulation and cold weather acclimatization you are completely 'normal,' at least medically speaking— if there is such a thing as normal."

"So what's wrong with me?" I asked, flicking a glob of foam to the floor.

"There's nothing 'wrong' with you," Princess said. "You're just…"

"Like you?"

"Yeah, but different."

"You still haven't told me what you meant by that. What are you?"

The pale woman had to stop and think about that, which wasn't a good sign. Anyone who looked at her could tell she wasn't really a human being— more of a distant cousin at best. Her eyes, in addition to being so repulsively inhuman in color, were the largest I'd ever seen on a person. Looking at her face in a wider focus, her hard features were too symmetric which added to the passive wrongness I felt just from looking at her. The longer the silence drug on as she thought about how to answer what should have been a very simple question, the longer I had to vaguely realize that this woman sitting before me really wasn't a human being at all.

"Oh stars, I'm going to sound like a condescending asshole but bear with it, okay?" Princess finally said, having reached some weighty decision.

I didn't give voice to my doubts or disquiet, but I still nodded in agreement.

"Okay. So basically, magic is real but it's not really magic, it's all just energy and some people for some reason kind of sort of… aim it, I guess? And there's this whole argument of if this aiming process is really magic or if it's psycho-something and it's all in the brain but certain people can only do so much and other people can do anything but they have to figure out how to do it. But some of it isn't in the brain and you have human consciousness which is supposed to just be your brain firing off signals but there's so much that we don't know about how it all works except that it just does until it doesn't. And everyone has this natural bio-electric energy field around them, but it's also got another kind of energy in it too and that's supposed to be the aura or maybe it's the soul but it's stronger for some people and… I sound like a lunatic, don't I?"

"Yeah… I'm not following you at all." I admitted once the woman stopped rambling long enough to draw a breath.

"I don't really know how it all works either. The… thing that gave me my crash course turned into a black slug monster and just, kind of… showed me. I don't know what any of it means though. You're the first wizard I've met, I was hoping you could explain it to me."

The room fell into a potent silence as I tried to process what she'd just said. I could hear the hum and churn of the ship around me, the faint hiss of the foam plastering half the room dissolving, and the minute sound of Gerald working a needle and thread through the swelling blisters on her hand. Some part of me wondered if her black slug was similar to the hallucinogenic secretions of the Miilo Toads back in Intatenrup. However, the majority of my attention was focused on her final sentence.

"Did you just call me a wizard?" I asked incredulously.

It was her turn to blink at me dumbly.

"Yeah? Did I forget to mention that part?" She asked. I could almost hear the her train of thought crashing to a derailed halt.

"Yes, you did."

"Um, surprise?" She stated with all the fanfare of a single shrug.

"And you're a wizard too?"

"I don't know what the hell I am." She said with a grimace. "The term I heard was Esper but I don't know if that's a skill or a breed or…" She shrugged her foam drenched shoulders. "The closest I can guess is that I've got one foot out the door going somewhere I can't even begin to imagine. All I do know is that I grew up seeing things that no one else could and what that monster showed me, it was like nothing else. Even my eyes couldn't prepare me for the sight-"

"It's like you were frozen to the brink of death and something lit a fire inside of you, and now you wonder if you every really knew what it meant to be warm."

"Yeah, something like that."

For the first time, out eyes met—as repulsively abhuman as she was—we shared a knowing look and I could relate to her struggle. My own quest for enlightenment hadn't exactly been a well-lain straight road, but at least there was some evidence that I wasn't insane. My indomitable warmth was proof that something was out there, that the voice I'd heard in the snow and in the darkest night wasn't just a hallucination. I could only imagine if my conviction would have survived a year without that warmth. A feat like that went beyond simple reason. It was nothing less than an act of faith.

"So what happen's now?" I asked, flicking the last of the disolving fire-suppressant foam off of me. "I'm of no use, so you kill me? Just to be safe."

"I'd rather not. How much control do you have over…" She motion broadly at my entire body, "all that?"

"I don't really know." I admitted. "You were the forth or fifth time I've-"

"What did you do the other times?"

"I made the bullets in a magazine explode, at least I think I did that. Normally I just get really hot. And I… the first time that is, I popped a guys eyes."

There might have been more but those were the only times I could remember. Now that I'd admitted it out loud, it was starting to finally sink in. This wasn't some hallucination or freak occurrences or coincidental instances of spontaneous combustion that just happened in my proximity. I was responsible for it. I was a wizard. The thought was terrifying and exhilarating.

"When you say popped, you mean like…" She pointed to her eyes and motioned with her fingers.

"Yeah, like that. I can still remember how it felt when their steaming chunks splattered on my face. And the smell, like seared tofu-"

"You can stop now." Princess said, glancing at her burned hand.

"I always associated the smell with a watered down, salty marmalade." Gerald idly noted as he treated her injury.

"Can we just drop this part and focus on the real issue? Please? What actually triggered each cook off?"

"I was about to die the first time. I was pinned and this lunatic had a knife-" Princess made a 'get on with it' gesture with her offhand. "Then there just before you found me in the airlock. I did a job for local boss-"

"The Void Dragon?" Princess asked, and I could tell she already knew the answer.

"Yes. I painted a house for him, only it turned out the target wasn't just a rival gang gashira, he was also an undercover cop with ZashaSec. I did the job, got away clean and when it was time for me to cash in and take off…"

I struggled to find an explanation for this pale woman and her alien eyes that seemed to cut right through me. There was more I should have said though I wanted to skip to the end. It felt like a disservice to be absolved my own failure through a lie of omission.

"He changed the deal, had me paint another room to spare his honor, and I did it. I did an innocent woman whose only crime was getting too close to me and wanting a better life. After I'd finished, Satou looked at my work and he said 'she is magnificent' and I agreed with him." I fought down the disgust rising in me, and the killing heat that sought to accompany it.

"So you burned him?" Princess asked, a note a gentleness slipping from her ghostly lips.

"I tried to shoot him." I said, recalling what had spurred this memory. "One of his bodyguards had a pistol and he had me dead to rights but the magazine exploded. That bought me a few seconds." I could only shake me head as I was forced to relive my failure. "It wasn't enough. I got shot, they beat me and I blacked out. Satou got away."

"I'm sorry that happened to you." Princess said. "The girl, was she- no, nevermind. So it sounds like you only cook off in life or death situations. So why did you burn me when I touched you?"

"He was strapped to a table, gun pointed at him and a vampire with deamon eyes was about to tear out his throat." Gerald said without looking up from his work. "Does that about sum it up?"

I couldn't help but nod at the doctor's summary. A dagger-like scowl from the vampire woman in question caused a low surge of heat to build in my hips.

"You have to admit, that's a pretty rough way to wake up." I stated defensively. After scowling for a while longer, she sighed.

"I suppose it could have been worse. But I had to know. I've been looking for someone like me for so long, I was starting to go crazy thinking that this was all in my head."

"I know the feeling." I admitted. "When I first heard the voice, I thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me-"

"Then you started to know things." Princess finished.

"Things I knew I didn't know and things I wasn't smart enough to have just imagined." I said while nodding.

From the look of her deathly pale face, I knew she took my meaning and suddenly the formality between us shattered. In a single instant, I knew I could trust this woman— even if the sight of her skin and the way her freakishly purple eyes seemed to swirl while sitting still made my skin scrawl and my hair stand on edge.

"What did you see?" I asked.

The air about her became brittle once more, her eyes flicking around the room as if she were hunting for something unseen. She bagan shaking her head, slowly at first yet gaining speed until the motion was a frantic nervous twitching from left to right. Her lips twisted into a manic smile, the very image of a woman unhinged yet desperately clinging to her sanity with broken, bloody nails.

"I saw Nothing." She said with fragile reverence.

A furious, snorting chuckle slipped from her lips and the air of the room seemed all the darker for it. Tears began streaming down her repulsively pale cheeks and her disgusting purple eyes appeared to be streaked with shards for deep crimson as they flailed about the room. While the display sickened me just by proximity, there was also something enthralling about it and I was enraptured by her fit for its duration. It only ended once she'd laughed herself dry minutes afterwards. When the fit had ended she rebuilt a jaded demeanor within seconds and I found myself wondering if I had imagined the whole thing.

"Forget that. The last thing I need is-"

"I know." I said instantly. "My life was ruined when I started asking about… all this, to people who didn't get it. My lips are sealed, on my honor."

"Good." Princess said with a nod, then turned to the doctor wrapping her brunt hand in moist gauze. "So how about it Gerald? Think he's safe enough to keep around?"

"In my medical opinion, he poses no significant risk beyond the normal pathogenic vectors— which we're well equipped to handle. He's at higher risk from us than we are of him for the sniffles. On a more… esoteric note, spontaneous pyrokinesis poses a very real danger. From what you've described, your particular abilities seem to be an autonomous defense mechanism which you have some small influence on. If these reactions are purely instinctive, then you should be able to manage these manifestations the same way we could stress on any other patient."

Gerald finished wrapping Princess's hand, went to an unmarked cabinet and tossed one of its contents at me. The fine chain floated across the room in a shallow arc that made my ears start to warble. I caught the chain and examined its decoration, a tiny golden cross.

"Um, thank you."

"Put it on." The doctor commanded. Princess rolled her eyes, but I did as he'd asked.

"I keep telling you, your crosses aren't magic. There's nothing spooky or holy about them." Princess muttered. Gerald ignored her.

"If you want to leave this medbay, you have to wear that at all times. No exceptions."

I slid the necklace over my head and felt the cold metal settle against my skin. The doctor breathed a sigh of relief as if he'd been expecting something to happen but was glad that nothing did.

"I'll want to run some more tests from time to time. You'll also need to carry a fire extinguisher until we can narrow down your triggers and the extent of your manifestations. You'll be kept on a short leash until I can definitively say that you aren't a danger to this ship or its crew. With that said, I see no reason to keep him locked up in here."

"Alright, then there's no reason I can't put him to work." Princess said.

"I won't paint anymore houses." She looked at me sidelong. "I won't kill in cold blood, not anymore."

"Relax, Firebug. The Shadow is still weeks out from anything but us. If you wanted to go on a killing spree on this ship, you wouldn't get very far. Even if you're not a cold-blooded murder, we'll find something to keep you busy."