An incessant beeping intruded into his thoughts and like a diver breaking the surface, Dorian struggled out of the fog of sleep his mind had been trapped in. He stared around his dingy apartment, confused for a moment and then flinching when the memories came rushing back.
The decision to absorb echo into something he barely understood now looked foolhardy to the extreme in hindsight. He'd done it and had paid the price for it. At least he was still alive.
Dorian still remembered the pain that had knocked him out, how it had felt like the sphere that had formed within him was pouring molten steel into him and burning him up wherever it touched.
The incessant beeping was still going on and Dorian shut it off with an angry flick of his wrist. He struggled to his feet and that was when the smell hit him. Dorian gagged but nothing came up, he'd been sleeping in yesterday's meal along with some sort of hardened black sludge that stunk to high heavens. The thing was criminally foul. And Dorian refused to believe his body had expelled it.
After a lot of scrubbing of both the floor and his body, along with clothes slated for burning — Dorian finally felt like himself again. He'd changed into a shirt and shorts and felt surprisingly good considering his idiocy the previous night.
With that out of the way, Dorian flicked on his terminal and browsed through his messages. The messages and the dates made his stomach drop. He'd been asleep in his vomit for a whole two days. And worst of all he'd missed the panel replacement of the sphere at the power plant.
Almost impossibly, his stomach dropped further when he thought of how Robert would see it. He'd given Dorian a precious core and then he'd disappeared without a word and no reply to his increasingly worried messages. Dorian quickly typed out multiple assurances and sent them, hoping he hadn't irrevocably damaged his friendship with the man. It was the weekend and he had to wait for the weekday to find out.
Next on his list was to inspect wherever the thing he'd absorbed and empowered had done to his body. But higher on the list was food. Dorian was starving.
As Dorian walked through the streets of the Lodge, he thought it was his anxiety acting up and ignored the feeling that he was being stared at. At the supermarket, Dorian piled his basket high with steaks and vegetables. He was planning on keeping his promise to eat better. At the checkout, Dorian all but confirmed his fellow hunters were looking at him weirdly when the cashier, a younger hunter like himself did a double take and stared suspiciously at him till he left. Dorian almost run back home.
He got home and nearly kicked his door down in his rush to get to his bathroom mirror to see what horrid transformation had befallen him. Dorian flipped on his bathroom lights and stared dumbstruck at a face with a strong jawline, healthy skin glow, a straight never broken nose and bright eyes and spiky hair that looked stylish in its unkempt state.
He was looking at a stranger's face, or more accurately — staring at a much more handsome twin brother's face that had never been through the rigours of the life that was being a hunter.
He felt his face and it felt real and not a very convincing illusion. Dorian's appearance had essentially changed overnight and he finally understood the looks he'd been getting. The denizens of the Lodge had a particular look about them, the look of the downtrodden and depressed — and Dorian had shed that look and now looked like someone who belonged on the cover of something. Basically, he looked like a tourist to them.
Dorian stumbled back from his enhanced reflection and thought furiously about what he could do. There was nothing he could do except live with it he realised. An incessant thought prodded him to check the rest of his body for any other changes. Dorian savagely quashed the thought, he didn't need any more surprises.
With stiff movements, Dorian retrieved the food he'd left on his stoop in his mad dash to the mirror and moved it to the kitchen. There he made a simple meal of grilled steak and greens. As he mechanically chewed on his food, Dorian took a picture of himself and confirmed he hadn't been seeing things. His face really had changed.
After his meal, Dorian washed his backlog of dishes and moved around his house cleaning and ordering stuff for his house and searching for cheap places he could fix his bike. When he ran out of things to do, Dorian had to finally confront the thing he'd been dreading. The thing within him.
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His apprehension came from the transformations it had wrought on his face whilst he slept. And just before he'd passed out, Dorian had felt the thing burning and possibly changing his body in some way. With a spirit-bolstering sigh, Dorian closed his eyes and looked through his mind's eye at what had changed in his body.
The changes were staggering. Where once the thing he'd absorbed had been a large sphere, it had shrunk into a smaller dense orb that spun slowly and held the blackest void he'd ever seen. The dense orb seemed to pull at everything though he had no idea how he knew that. From the orb spread what could best be described as veins or pathways that snaked throughout his entire body. It was like Dorian had grown a second circulatory system with the orb as its heart and the pathways carrying whatever it contained to the rest of his body.
Dorian brought his attention back to the orb and again felt the overwhelming density and the sense of attraction the thing seemed to exude. A closer inspection sent Dorian's heart racing, after hunting enough monsters in his life, Dorian was familiar with their anatomy. And everything he saw in his mind's eye leaned towards a very troubling conclusion. He'd grown a core complete with pathways to use said core.
At the beginning of the Systems arrival to earth along with its monsters, it was theorised that the cores within said monsters were a motivation to hunt monsters, they'd been wrong. The cores were an untapped power source that some monsters could use to do the impossible. There were multiple examples of monsters bending some law of nature like breathing fire or conjuring lightning. The Dire Cat that Dorian had gotten his first essence stone from could seemingly jump off the air.
Dorian calmed his racing mind and thought critically about his situation. Something he realised he had been doing too little of lately. He'd harvested cores, yes, but he'd never seen the pathways his body currently had in any monster. Plus whatever it was that was in his body, it looked like no core he'd ever seen and so if it was a core would behave differently and not turn him into some monster. He hoped.
Dorian scrutinised all the changes in his body trying to find another hidden one but finding nothing else. It was just the core and the pathways. Dorian slowly got to his feet and did a little jump. Nothing bad or weird happened and Dorian wondered how he could even move with something so dense in his body.
Dorian knew what he needed to do next, but he had been running headfirst into so many things he barely understood that he didn't trust himself anymore. Calling and asking anyone for help would be useless since he couldn't get help till he knew what was going on himself. What decided it for Dorian and gave him the much-needed push, was something unexpected or dangerous happening whiles he was among friends. He couldn't let that happen.
With his mind made up, Dorian closed his eyes and tried to get the core to do something. It continued to spin slowly. He whispered to it and got nothing, shouting and repeating the gestures he'd used to activate skills as a hunter also did nothing. He was about to move to more drastic measures when he remembered the pulse he'd felt the last time the core had activated. Like flexing a new muscle in his mind, Dorian pulsed his core and like turning the key in a car it answered.
The core's spins sped up and it pulsed once, flooding the pathways in Dorian's body with Echo that felt changed in some way. The power that ran through his pathways was empowering and electric and sent Dorian's mind back to when the system was around. He looked down at himself to see whether he'd changed outwardly and breathed a sigh of relief when no horns or tails appeared.
A bullet dodged.
To find out what the energy could do, Dorian snapped a kick at the air and shadow boxed. He felt stronger and faster but something felt missing. Dorian sank into his mind and flexed the new muscle he'd gained. He couldn't put it into words but it felt like he'd lessened something. Dorian opened his eyes to find himself floating up and towards his ceiling. He yelled and reversed whatever he'd done, hard. Dorian slammed back into the floor with a sickening thud that nearly knocked him out and felt something press his body into the ground.
He quickly shut off the power and the weight on him disappeared. Dorian gasped out a breath and swore loudly. That had been too close. His experiment aside from nearly killing him had proved one thing, Dorian had the power of gravity or something close to it. He sank to his knees at the realisation and stared at nothing for a while. After so long he'd finally gotten his power back. It wasn't the same but he'd take it.
Dorian was about to rush out and break the news to his close friends when he froze. There was no way he was lifting himself off the ground ever again. To test whether the power worked on something else, Dorian looked around his house and decided on his folding chair as the recipient to test his ability. Focusing on the chair, Dorian reversed it's gravity with a thought and watched in awe as the chair shot off the floor and towards the spinning blade of his ceiling fan. He panicked and reversed gravity again, slamming the chair back down and shattering it.
A manic grin blossomed on Dorian's face when he began to think of ways he could use the power. But first, he had to improve his competency and map out the powers' strengths and pitfalls. All that could wait though, first he had jaws to drop.