Mitch woke flat on his back coughing and gasping for air. The stone had been flung across the room under the cabinets in his kitchen. Rolling onto his side, he clasped his stomach and tried to control his breathing. Everything hurt. It hurt like an abandoned child on Christmas. Even his fucking teeth hurt. And, for some reason, he was tasting strawberries and smelling lilacs.

His mind wallowing in pain and befuddlement he attempted to get up off the floor only to collapse, banging his head again. The floor was good for now. Mitch lay on his back for a while longer focusing just on breathing and managing the pain. Eventually the speech centers in his brain restarted and he was able to perform his best ever Lurch impression.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been on the ground but with the help of several nearby objects eventually he was able to regain his feet. His success was marginal, and his continued success even more so. He was forced to use his chair like a walker to get to the sink for some water, where he couldn’t even reach the cupboard to get a clean cup and had to use one that was already in the sink. After that he collapsed into the chair. Both his mind and body rebelled against the idea of any kind of work so he just sat looking at the ceiling.

Couldn’t something just be easy for once? Why couldn’t he be the one who found the magic ring with the o.p. teacher? Or find a secret manual? Or a just have his little hunches always be right? All he got from Kanshou were death-threats and the Pebbles of Doom, there were no fucking manuals on this shit, and he was always about six inches away from falling ass first into the river Styx. At this point he’d even take an annoying bird if it could give him some fucking answers.

Mitch was tired of hurting. Tired of the risks. Tired of putting his life on the line every day just to be able to survive the next. Suddenly the weight of everything he had been through since the first Tolling seemed like too much to bear. He screamed wordlessly, the scream transitioning into a roar at the end scraping his already sore throat raw. He threw his glass across the room as hard as he could, which wasn’t very hard at the moment but was at least hard enough to cause the glass to shatter satisfyingly against the wall across from him.

The pain in his body surged at the effort and he was left gasping as he clutched the shoulder of the arm that had done the throwing.

Fuck this shit. He might die, or he might live, but he would take a full twenty-six dick marathon eighteen inches up his keister before he would die because he bitched out. So, he did what every red-blooded male does when they hit an emotional wall. He wrapped his hands around that bullshit’s throat and shoved it down deep where he would never find it again.

He had work to do.

Mitch stood shakily and grabbed a pair of tongs from a drawer of kitchen utensils and used those to pick up the stone from where he had seen it under the cabinets earlier. Holding the thing in the tongs he stumblingly dragged his chair back over to the table and sat back down. He set the stone down next to the others and looked at his items again.

The stones might be the most obviously useful item but that did not mean they were the only one. His found his eyes being drawn to the stylus looking stick now. He looked at it more carefully and noticed a few things. It looked to be made of bamboo and was about as wide as one of those fancier ergonomic pens with the rubber grips, although it was taller than it was wide. One end tapered down to a point, the other ended in a slanted chisel creating both a single blade and a point.

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Mitch couldn’t escape the impression that it was a writing instrument of some kind, although he had no idea for what medium. Wax or clay seemed like the only options for a wooden instrument, but he had no idea how that was going to help him. He needed to make gear that would help him survive an onslaught of mutated beasts, not to write a bedtime story. Still, something about the thing drew him to it.

He picked it up, holding it in his hand like a pen, but that didn’t feel quite right. He tried a few different holds but settled on a hold that reminded him of a video he had seen once of a Chinese calligrapher, with the chisel side down. He wasn’t sure why, but this felt the most natural for the shape of the object. He waved his hand around a bit and got a feeling for the object he was holding. He could employ just the tip of the chisel, or if he turned his wrist and used more of his arm for the movement he could pull the entire edge of the chisel along whatever surface he had in front of him.

Figuring out how to hold the thing gave him no satisfaction whatsoever, because if all he was going to do with is was write things down a regular old ballpoint would be a thousand times more effective. He wasn’t planning to make art here.

There had to be a way to employ the energies.

Made cautious by his experience with the stone he wasn’t willing to send his consciousness back into his channels to experiment with the stylus. Instead he tried to get a feel for the channels in his body without changing his state of mind. Not using any of his meditation techniques he just tried to get a feel for his body using his normal senses.

He was trying to find the energy channels within his body but was thwarted again and again. He couldn’t isolate anything that felt different from what he remembered before the Tolling. There was no weirdness, or extra-ness. Nothing that screamed “I am you energy, use me!”

After several hours he was still not making any progress. He had taken to walking around, much more smoothly now, and waving the stick around with abandon. He had tried making random martial-artsy motions based on the movies he had seen, writing, throwing, spinning in circles all to no avail. He had even been balancing the thing on a fingertip for a minute just for shits and giggles. Nothing. No matter what he could think of, nothing made the stick behave like anything other than a stick.

“Fuck!” He yelled randomly. Not at anything or anyone in particular, just expressing his frustration to the universe.

The universe seemed to have listened though because all of a sudden the stylus shot out an orangish beam from the chisel end. The beam expanded rapidly and became much less distinct but still left an impressive scorch mark on his wall. The scent of smoke filled his nostrils as he dropped the stylus and recoiled as one would from a live spider. If that had hit him he would have been in serious trouble; third degree burns were no joke.

“What the hell?!”

He looked from the stick to the wall and back again several times. The tiny stylus had left a mark four inches wide on his wall, slightly curving until it fell off into an uneven line where he had dropped it.

Did Kanshou give him anything that wouldn’t kill him? He was tempted to stomp on the damn thing and forget the consequences but managed to, barely, hold himself back. He suddenly had the thought of holding a supersized one of these, spraying wide beams of death over a horde of encroaching mutant beasts; and it was good.

If he could really weaponize this thing it might give him a legitimate chance. If it was focused it could act almost in the same way a sniper rifle would; if it was spread out it could act almost in the same way a flamethrower would.

Given the damage he was seeing the stylus in it’s current form was not truly viable as a weapon, excepts against perhaps a single target at close range, but supersized….

If he could figure out how it worked and make a much more badass version of it he might just stand a chance.