“oh God, no, what have I done?” Harmon Sorine whimpered softly to himself as he lay there. All around him a field of corpses, burnt and charred, barely a smoking husk remaining. He looked up at the sky and saw a blue sky with sparse clouds, truly a beautiful day save for the remnants around him. He tried to think to himself about how this had happened. He tried to form recollections through the trauma of what he had done, what he had been forced to do, because he would never voluntarily have done the things that he had. He didn’t know how many had died, he didn’t really care how many, all he knew was that as of this moment everything would be different. He would be hunted down by everyone for what he was capable of, what he had done. He was sure he would be tested and experimented on for military purposes if nothing more.
He slowly sat up and looked around. The buildings that used to cluster together here were gone, just piles of rubble. On one particularly odd-looking assemblage of rubble he swore he saw a child’s hand sticking up, bloodied and beaten to a pulpy mess only to be burnt to a crisp. For exactly 100 meters in a perfect sphere around him everything was destroyed. Pieces of buildings and body parts scattered about, smoking ruins of what had once been a downtown area. He tried to forget what had happened before. He could remember hearing a weird noise, like the rest of the patrons at the restaurant he walked outside out of curiosity. Then a raging headache, to him it felt like a wild boar had decided to use his head as a battering ram. He had collapsed from the pain but was fully aware of his surroundings. Suddenly it felt like he could see more than any man had the right to. He could feel, more than anything, the world around him and at such a level of details that he just knew instinctively that it was exactly a 100 meter sphere. Then in what spanned an instant but felt like days to him he felt it, a throbbing energy pulsating around him, slowly expanding from the North. He reached out to it with his mind not knowing what to make of it. Once he touched it he realized he could control the energy to a certain degree, more the closer it got to him. When the pulsing energy touched his physical being light flashed all around him as the energy was sucked by his body at a prodigious rate. He couldn’t control it, he couldn’t influence it, he could only watch and grimace in pain as his body soaked up the energy as if it was a sponge. At this point he noticed that people had finally noticed him on the ground writhing in pain as his mind and body adjusted to the newfound senses and energy. Years passed in an instant and a crowd gathered around him. That’s when he felt it, his body had gathered enough of the energy and was overflowing, his newly acquired control over his body starting to slip again. He tried to form words, but nothing came out as the world slowed around him. Then like a dam crumbling he felt as if his body exploded outward in a blazing heat. Static trembled the air in his sphere as his body lost control over the energy it had gathered. He felt it as the energy moved through him in a pattern he could not understand but knew that it came from his very being, as if his soul was guiding him to a profound conclusion. Then all around in his little sphere lightning and thunder blazed with the glory of hurricane. He was a powerless god among men as he watched everything in the 100 meter sphere slowly char from electricity, even the buildings crumbled perfectly leaving a beautiful perfect cut where his sphere ended.
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He cried in agony at the recollection. “NO!!! Why is this happening!!” A few moments later he finally regained some composure. He started thinking more rationally. “I got to get out of here, I won’t let anyone find me like this.” He finally got up and was startled at the fact that he was now naked, his old clothes seemingly evaporated in the violent exchange of energy. Harmon yelled in frustration as a dawning realization came to him, “My keys! How am I going to make it back to the apartment without my... Wait, where’s my, my car!!” His car had been destroyed in the blast. Now he was stuck in the middle of the wreckage, naked, and without transportation in the middle of a Michigan winter. Soon the air started to stabilize as it recovered from the sudden heat. The temperature was dropping rapidly, soon it would be back to the freezing temperatures it had been before. Strangely, he noticed that even though he knew the temperature was dropping rapidly and would soon go back to the single digits he felt fine. He stood there stark naked in the middle of the day on a frigid January and new that he could stay there forever and be perfectly fine. He felt as if he was in his apartment with the heater on just walking around in his underwear. This new revelation excited him, and he started to use his newfound awareness to look inside of himself. Sure enough, he noticed how the overflowing energy had made his body it’s home, no longer overflowing it was covering every cell individually protecting him from the cold and much more he was sure. He also found that he now had regained control over the energy inside his body. And once again his body was his fully.
Curious and intrigued he slowly grabbed some of the energy and moved it in that pattern he had just learned. Although he had just learned the pattern it was almost like an instinct to him. A movement that was part of his very being, a profound conclusion from the universe, a law that was untainted and pure and he knew, unbreakable. So much so that he wondered how he never knew it beforehand. As a small portion of the energy moved through him he saw it change properties and take on an electric form. Suddenly, from his hands, a bolt of electricity shot to the ground creating a small crack of thunder for his efforts. Dread and horror filled him with equal parts euphoria, he could control it he just knew he could. Instilled with a newfound sense of confidence and excitement he started the long trek to his apartment by foot.
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