March 31st

For three days, the Earth heaved and bled magma onto the surface. Three days of absolute terror and fear the world was falling apart without any control. Activities that should have happened on a geological timescale happened instead in a geological blink. Lakes of lava flowing up from the interior of the earth that seemed to have all the heat drawn from them, only to shatter as more material broke them up from below.

A rather large portion of everything had shut down as people had fearfully watched over the New Madrid Seismic Zone just southeast of Rolla but nothing had come of it.

For three days, the Dantian Seekers had held classes for what felt like half the population of Rolla as word of mouth had spread that we could teach people to gain and use power. It didn't matter how many copies of my research were available, people wanted classes.

I hadn't blamed them, it was something to do to keep their minds off the feeling of the end of the world.

Everyone on my 'team' from Michelle to Mike, had all pitched in. Ash and Melissa had both managed their second breakthrough where we learned that anyone on an external path apparently black gunked themselves on that breakthrough as well. Ash wasn't happy to learn that the hard way and had to get rid of a set of clothes himself. Karen had stolen a sample for testing.

The local grocery stores and Wal-Mart had basically been stripped bare of food and other supplies too.

"Officially as of 3:48 this morning, various sites around the world still running that monitor seismic activity stopped recording any new activity in any plate edges worldwide." Brent was a little dead-eyed as he read off, using his DARPA laptop to reach back into systems for information the news would probably hear about soon too. "USGS survey teams are already in route, although we have no clue how long it will take them to get there with this insanity. The government lost contact with onsite teams and hasn't re-established them yet."

"So we survived, yay?" I asked, slumped into a chair of my own. The past three days had been stressful in ways I didn't know I could stress. I'd started dodging a certain twelve year old boy who had ignited his dantian in one of my lessons, because he assumed since I was the strongest I should go beat up the alien soon.

"Survived is a good word for it." Brent continued looking at his laptop as he spoke. "The west coast all the way up to Alaska is a disaster and satellite imagery shows the coast is expanded by half a dozen miles or more pretty much all the way up. Asia is bad enough off that all their port cities are likely a hundred miles inland now and probably on fire from the damage."

"Fire won't last for long." I mumbled, dropping my head against the table. "It's going to rain for months with all the water vapor."

"Months?" Danny sounded worried.

"The earth's surface is about seventy percent water." Brent said. "Well, was. All those fault lines of magma coming up, a lot were underwater. For three days. That boiled a lot of water."

"And it'll have to come down. Unless the alien decides to continue playing weird with our weather and just yank it all back into the ocean, weather patterns are completely screwed and we're going not going to see the sun for a while." I said into my arms. "That rain that started yesterday? Welcome to monsoon season. Projections are moderate rain in the morning followed by heavy thunderstorms in the afternoon. By night it should taper off into just a deluge. Forecast for the week is much the same." I waved a hand as if showing off something. "Wear a raincoat, find your galoshes."

"Rain just starts the problems." Brent sighed. "Deep sea fiber was lost obviously, but depending on exactly how bad the cloud cover gets, the satellite mesh for internet is going to get seriously spotty."

I looked up in time to see a confused look on Danny's face. "I thought there was like eighty thousand or more satellites up there, solely for the internet? Hell, that's why they were sending datacenters in rockets up for the past decade."

Brent nodded. "A deep enough cloud cover can kill even the strongest signal, and when that happens you normally get routed via fiber to other locations. Somewhat hard to do that when the entire sky ends up covered in deep clouds and you can't just accept the latency to be routed to another continent. Connection is reasonable now, but it's liable to get worse."

"Brent, is the list of things screwed up or still working shorter?" I asked. "Because I'm getting serious post-apocalypse vibes from all this now."

"Things are still limping along. We have power, don't we?" Brent looked up at the lights, but they failed to accept the taunt and stayed on. "The grid was sixty percent renewables, but with the likely loss of all the wind farms on the west coast and solar being a loss for the next few months, all those 'just in case' mothballed power plants are probably running again."

Brent looked at the two of us. "Discounting the west coast, the continental US survived this with limited impact. I don't have good answers for you for anywhere else in the world though, besides just looking at the fault line maps and guessing."

"Fuck." I sighed.

"I do have to ask, Nicole." Danny started and I looked back to him. "It's probably a dumb question, but if the earth is going through breakthroughs as well...Well, you know where yours are. Is it possible to figure out where it maps to on the earth? Or do you think we're just going to see more insane lava next time?"

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Brent looked like he was going to say something, but then paused and looked at me. I shook my head. "Sure, just as soon as you tell me where the sternum of the world would be. That's where the second ring ends up at."

"Worth a question though." Brent noted. "But I don't think we can do something with one data point."

Danny smiled bitterly. "I just hope we're still here when we have more data points then."

"So the earth broke a bit, but we're not as broken as some places." I summed up. "Which is why Tasha still has an interview scheduled for us tomorrow. I can't even wish we'd broken enough to not have that still happening though. Even that Bisley guy would be a lesser evil."

"It's an interview for the Dantian Seekers, and honestly primarily you." Brent answered. "And this is honestly to counter a bit of the idiots that are saying your paper being released cause the alien to strike back to keep us from beating him."

"I hadn't seen that one." Danny looked startled. "Did they have an answer as to what we're supposed to do without having power?"

Brent shook his head. "I think the idea they're pushing is that it should have only been shared in limited numbers to keep it secret. Military weapons and soforth."

"That's more coherent than my uncle's normal ramblings he gets from them." I shook my head. "Whatever. We've still got time before any classes this morning, right?" A nod from Danny. "I'm going to go practice some." I paused. "Let me know if there's something I can do?"

"Will do." Brent and Danny both said.

"Thanks."

I left the conference room and grabbed my duffel from what'd been given over to me as my office. Walking back into the hallway, I smiled to myself as I jumped out and came down lightly in the receptionist area, bending my knees and feeling little impact physically and only a fleeting push in my energy.

Tasha still startled though as I landed nearly at her desk. "Don't do that!" Her voice was a little high from surprise.

I grinned just a bit. "Sorry." I breathed out. "Just trying to stretch a bit. I didn't look, anyone else in right now?"

"Karen's in right now, Ms. Firen. There's a class with a few people scheduled in an hour, I believe Melissa is supposed to be in by then to handle it." Tasha looked past me where it was raining. "I need to find some umbrella bags."

"Danny needs to find more help too." I muttered, to Tasha's knowing nod. "Alright, I'm going to the gym."

Past the partition walls was a wide open, empty space that still showed markings where we'd moved all the remaining aisles. Off to the left half of the empty was a wall of aisles, providing a room where we had a handful of beds, now covered with waterproof coversheets that people had to change if they had a breakthrough.

The back half was split between a still mostly empty medical area, filled only with a handful of first aid supplies. The other portion was supposed to be the gym, but only had a bunch of waterproof matting placed.

The insanity of the past few days had kept anything more from being done, and honestly I applauded the delivery guy for still making that initial delivery right after it all started.

I changed in the side restroom before going into the aisled off gym area, noticing Karen was already in there, stretching.

"Hey." I called over to her and she looked up. "Doing good?"

She nodded. "Yeah. How'd the meeting with the boss go?"

"Good news, the world stopped sweating out magma. Bad news, lots of stuff is pretty screwed up." I summed up for her. "We're lucky we aren't in California or Asia."

"Yeah, I saw a few clips of the Middle East too. I'm fairly certain there's a lot of glass desert." Karen sighed. "What are we going to do?"

"Get stronger?" I asked. "About the only thing we can do, unless someone comes up with a miracle thing to drive of the alien, we have to assume if we reach his requirement he'll leave us be." I dropped down next to her, starting to stretch myself.

Karen gave me a look. "You sound like you're rehearsing."

"Yeah. Somehow, I'm still stuck doing an interview tomorrow with the Associated Press. Danny is too, but I get to be the focus." I switched into full splits, right hand touching left toes and barely felt the stretch. I sighed.

"That bad?" Karen crossed her legs, looking at me.

"Yes. No. Kinda. But that's not what's really bothering me." I hadn't bothered to come out of my stretch as I talked, not even straining. "I'm not exerting myself warming up. My routines don't even push me." I complained.

"Huh. That's weird." Karen looked at me still holding the stretch.

I brought one hand back and pushed into the gym mat, easily giving myself enough momentum to come up on one foot, still holding my toes with the other hand. I then let my leg drop. "I feel like I'm not going to be able to make the next breakthrough unless I can push hard enough, and I don't know if just energy is enough. My last two breakthroughs, I threw everything into doing something and that's when I managed it."

"Does Danny need to look into an obstacle course for you?" Karen grinned.

"Maybe." I laughed, sitting back down and falling onto my back. I stared up at the open beams running across the ceiling. "Maybe not?"

"No." Karen said, catching where I was looking. "You're insane."

"I'd need to test my falls first." I agreed. "Maybe something to look into after the interview tomorrow."