Chapter 11 – Life 4 – The Research

I was studied, of course. The Harmonium was dedicated to scientific understanding, and I was now high on the list of things that needed to be understood. No amount of Water Affinity recorded had been known to suck someone dry like that, not even my mother has… had, that power. Not to mention, Water was shown to be my lowest Affinity out of all of them, so it couldn’t be that.

I was poked and prodded and examined again and again, kept somewhere on the lower decks I hadn’t known existed. Part laboratory, part prison. A place where criminals with high Affinities were kept. Eventually, something new happened. The researchers brought in a man on a gurney, his slow breaths and nothing else indicating he was alive. One of the researchers explained.

“This man is a Lieutenant from a subordinate ship. He was accused of high crimes and was found guilty. He is only sedated currently but has been marked for death. Whatever you do or do not do to him, this man will die. But if you can repeat the… incident, from before, it may further our understanding of what happened. The Caretaker considers your case very important.”

I felt sick. I had done… whatever I did to my mother by sheer accident. Now they wanted me to do it on purpose. I looked at the man, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest. “What… what did he do? What were these High Crimes?” The researcher raised an eyebrow, then looked at some paperwork on his clipboard. “Apparently, he was pressuring women to sleep with him, using his Fire Affinity to threaten them if they didn’t. One of the women managed to get him to do it in a place where a Sergeant could overhear. Both those threats, and the fight he caused to attempt escape, carry the death penalty. The Harmonium must be kept civilized.”

I felt… a bit better, about being told to kill this man. He clearly wasn’t safe to keep on the Harmonium, and who would want to take him in, were he exiled? It was an entirely different situation from my own. I had to keep telling myself that.

I placed my hands on the man’s arm and… I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I focused on sucking the water out of him. Nothing. With some trepidation, I considered if it had been blood that I drained, perhaps the dream I had was correct? But no, the man remained normal. I tried some breathing exercises that were supposed to help Absorbers. I worried what would happen if my power wasn’t repeatable. Would the Harmonium have any use for me, in that case?

My mother’s specific cause of death hadn’t been given to me. I wasn’t sure why. The researcher looked at me expectantly. Gripping the still-sleeping man’s arm, I started to become worried. Was I just as useless as I had been told? Was my mother killed by something else? Was I going to live the rest of my life on the lower decks? No. I did what I did, and I needed to accept that. And I needed to accept… that I was going to do it again.

I began to feel the surging sensation I had felt that fateful day. The man on the gurney began to spasm. I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the researcher had left the room. The man’s flesh began to writhe, then all at once he stopped moving, stopped breathing. A husk of his former self. I had done it; I had killed again.

I overheard some people from behind the room’s one-way mirror. “-confirmed then? Just as the-“ “-believe so, it matches the-“ “-vital essence-“ “-green Affinity-“.

The realization hit me like a hull breach. Of course, the forgotten Affinity, that of the Green Moon! With reports of green crystals being *astonishingly* rare and unreliable, no-one was sure what the Green Affinity actually was, or if it even existed. Some said, based on the color alone, it should be some sort of Nature Affinity. Others thought it was the source of some mythical All-In-One Affinity that no-one could possess. But some theories said…

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That since it orbited opposite the Brown Moon, the Metal Moon, that it should be something opposite Metal. And I think that’s exactly what was going on. The opposite of Metal was living things, and since I was an Absorber, I was Absorbing the very life out of people. The scientific possibilities were immense. If I could absorb life, could I also redirect it, like other Absorbers? Could I equalize a healthy and injured person to both be lightly injured? And what about monsters? If I could kill them just with a touch, I could be very useful to people who went out and hunted them…

The researchers agreed with that last thought. A few days later, they brought in two caged Burrowing Rats, some small monster from a distant land. With no Earth to burrow through, they were unable to escape. One of the researchers, an Absorber, talked to me for a bit about how she could gather Fire energy through one hand and reproduce it with the other. I was to attempt to do the same.

The first rat I absorbed even as it attempted to bite me. I was getting better at doing that, although sadly I did still need to get quite near the thing. But as the sensation of life essence entering my body hit me, I quickly tried to focus that feeling onto a single hand, and then onto leaving my body entirely. After a couple of seconds, the still-living rat squeaked, then its skin began to bubble. It grew in size, grew in musculature. It began to rattle around the cage incessantly. The researchers took away its cage.

Another few days, and another experiment. A third Burrowing Rat and a small dog. The dog was not monstrous, it had no elemental abilities. I took life from the rat and gave it to the dog. The dog didn’t grow in size as noticeably as the earlier rat, but it did grow somewhat more muscular. I also noticed its face narrow slightly, as if becoming more rat-like. The researchers took it away.

For the next week or so, I only saw the servants who brought me food, none of the researchers. Then, many of them came at once, alongside two women on gurneys, one of whom was covered in wounds. Uncharacteristically, the researchers explained exactly what was going on. “One of our best Air Affinitied suffered a loss of pressure in the submersible she captained. A swarm of monstrous piranhas, we barely got her out of there alive. She has been in a coma for three days, and her life signs aren’t looking good.”

I blinked. They wanted me to be a healer, I would do that. I considered asking what the other woman had done, the healthy one, to deserve being a test subject. But I figured that the Harmonium had marked her for death for whatever reason, same as the man from earlier. There was no time to waste with hesitation. I sucked energy from the healthy woman and pumped it into the injured one. It felt a little harder, this time, but eventually the injured woman’s bite marks went away, and soon after she groaned awake. She was quickly brought out of the room. The other woman was, as usual, a shriveled husk. The corpse was removed as well.

I was given nicer accommodations after that. Perhaps the woman I saved pulled some strings, or perhaps they were simply seeing me as having more worth.

Experiments were done, first with monsters and then with people, to see if I could remove health from something without killing it entirely. The results were mixed. I could do it, but even my most tentative uses gave the subject nearly a week of being tired and hungry before they regained full strength. I mentioned that my powers would be better used if I could drain from monsters and give to humans. The Caretaker seemingly agreed.

The next day, I had myself my first voluntary test subject. A man from the subordinate fleet whose arm was cleanly sliced off by a monster with swords for hands 3 years ago. Alongside him was an ape-like monster that was elaborately chained up. I guessed that the researchers wanted to find a monster that was as close to a human as possible.

After the ape was drained, the man first reported that his stump was, quote, ‘itching like FUCK’, and then over the course of about 5 minutes the arm genuinely grew back. First it was a pinkish ugly thing ending in 5 miniscule digits, but then it filled out to the right size at the base, then the wrist, and then the fingers. The man clapped, then hugged me and thanked me profusely. I wasn’t quite sure how to react to a stranger giving me more affection than any of my family, but I told him was grateful for his contribution to the cause of science.

What he didn’t notice, but what the researchers and I most certainly did, was that the arm had grown back much hairier than his other one. Almost like the hair of an ape…