Chapter 13_SINGULARIS [a cosmic horror sci-fi litrpg]

CHAPTER 13

And so, on Monday, we went back to school.

It went about the same as any other Monday. I woke up, I got out of bed, I stretched, and when I walked over to my desk to turn my computer on and get some music playing, maybe Thirty Seconds to Mars or The Killers, I looked at the tower and—with a look and a thought and a sensation of payment—the fans whirred to life and the hard drive began to click over. I stared at the Windows login screen for about thirty seconds, before I shook my head and went off to have a shower.

As far as superpowers went, Forces I didn’t seem like much of one. But I had activated it, called upon the symbiote, without really being aware of wanting to do it. Like scratching an itch I’d only realized was bothering me when my arm was already in motion. There was no secret knowledge of the cosmos, no ethereal music of the spheres, no third eye opening to vistas beyond sight, no octarine hues in the colors of the rainbow. It was just like knowing I could now influence electricity the same way I could raise my right hand. I still spent my shower with my head bowed, looking at my feet.

So, after three minutes of staring at my feet and wondering if I could slow down time through sheer force of wheel (no), I got out, and dried off, and brushed my teeth, and spat into the sink, and then, when I looked up and into the mirror, I saw the tesseract staring back at me.

YOU

Caleb Cross

Species: Human

Class Monitor

Status: Synced

Condition: Healthy/Lucid

Synchronicity: Stable

Synergy: 1/5

QP: 2/3

XP: 0

COMPEL

GUIDE

RESIST

POWER

Strength

1/5

Intelligence

1/5

Presence

1/5

GRACE

Dexterity

1/5

Manipulation

1/5

Agility

1/5

NERVE

Endurance

1/5

Sagacity

1/5

Volition

1/5

FIRST ORDER

Matter

0/5

Forces

1/5

Mind

1/5

SECOND ORDER

Life

0/5

Death

0/5

Space

0/5

THIRD ORDER

Chronos

0/5

Kairos

0/5

Arche

1/5

So, I’d spent a Quintessence Point without truly being aware of it. That struck me as a pretty poor bargain. For a second, I wondered who was really in control, myself or the symbiote, and then decided it didn’t matter. I swiped the tesseract away, and it showed me something else.

WEEKLY QUESTS 0/3 Protect the Weak 0/1 Punish the Wicked 0/1 Preserve the Whole 0/1 REWARD: 1XP per completion

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

“Okay?” I said and, when I blinked, the window into the ether or the sub-reality or whatever that interface was wasn’t there anymore. “Cool,” I said, to the empty bathroom, and went out to get dressed.

----------------------------------------

Mom was in the kitchen, making breakfast. She’d worked over the weekend, so, today was her day off. As we made the usual ‘have a good day at school, darling, I'll try’ small talk, I had another feeling—like I was ignoring a ringing phone. I very carefully continued to ignore it, because I had the distinct impression that, if I didn’t, I’d give up another one of those Q-points and end up listening in on my mom’s thoughts—and that was not something I wanted to do.

So, with the unsettling thought that perhaps I was not quite in control of my new superpowers, I grabbed my backpack and went off to school. It was a five minute walk to the bus stop, and a thirty-two minute trip to Stonestead High. There were forty-three people on the school bus that morning, and I took a seat at the back, so no one would talk to me.

It wasn’t that I dreaded school or hated it or anything like that, but just that I did not care about it. I maintained my 3.7 GPA with such ease that every single test, assignment, and exam had me thinking that my apathy towards my studies would catch up to me—yet, somehow, it never had.

Stonestead High was on the north side of the town, backing onto Brookfield Park. St George’s Academy, with their fancy uniforms and statue of Saint George stabbing a serpent because what other kind of statue depicts the wonders of education, was on the other side of the highway that ran through town. There was a part of me that wished everything had transpired that I’d been enrolled there, and had gone to school with Emerson, but then again, I suspected the only reason we had the friendship we did was because she did not see me every single day.

It was all so normal. I walked through the halls without a care, because being bullied was something everything had gotten tired of, least of all me, at the end of freshman year. Now, I was just a shadow. I ran into Max and he smiled at me and said, “Hey, man,” and slapped me on the arm, but it felt far more like most-popular-guy-in-school social charity than the fact that we had both gone through what we had. I stood there in the hallway and wondered what Emma and I would do if he really did just walk away from all of it.

Then, I wondered about Kree and her father, and what they would do.

The day trudged along. I hung out with Vince and Brit, and then settled in for an afternoon of humanities. Sitting there, listening to Mr Sorensen go on about the Cold War, I was struck by the thought that even being in the classroom was bizarre. Over the weekend, I’d learned more about humanity’s place in the universe than I had in all my eighteen years on the planet. Okay, the world had come to the brink of nuclear annihilation decades ago—well, so what? The Earth would keep spinning around the Sun, and the Sun around the supermassive black hole that kept everything from separating into nothingness, order from entropy, living proof of the Incarnate teachings.

Ah, I thought. Yes, that is not my usual train of thought.

Then, I looked up, glanced at Mr Sorensen—and picked up the phone.

The closest way I could describe it was the memory of biology class, where we’d played around with these inducting headphones. I could hear Mr Sorensen without using my ears, and he was thinking: Christ, I stayed up until 3AM learning this shit, I don’t know a thing about the Warsaw Pact, why can’t I be teaching coastal geography—

And even that felt like enough of a violation that I closed my eyes, shut it out, and went back to half-heartedly paying attention to the history of the political differences of our small blue world when there was a whole galaxy of history out there, waiting to be known. And, perhaps, I’d be the first human to know it.

Perhaps then, I’d find somewhere I belonged.

----------------------------------------

I ended the school day with a list of topics to investigate.

The first, of course, was how these powers worked. Being familiar with role-playing games, I had something of an idea, but I needed more than that.

Then, I had to make sure Max wasn’t going to duck out on us. I had the feeling that, even if he had said it was fine for Max to leave, Maarek would not actually allow it.

Maarek and Kree were the third item on the list. Okay, they were aliens, and they had been here for a while—but that just raised further questions. Neither Maarek nor Kree looked old enough to have been alive when that ship ended up beneath the land that became the Eagle Rock quarry.

Fourth was the gulfhound. Max had said it had been sent after us, but I wasn’t so sure. Kree had acted like it was more of a natural predator—only, nothing that looked like an eyeless hybrid of crystals and flesh could be natural. So, what was it, where had it come from, and was there more of them?

And last, the fifth item on the list, was the thing in the cave. Him. The Shadowman. The Shadow. The Grim Reaper. The Entity. The Disentangled Psyche. Whatever we’d call it, it was the being that had seemingly instigated this whole chain of events—and why, for what purpose?

I couldn’t think about him for long. Whenever I tried, nothing made sense. Just that sensation of my memories being assembled incorrectly. Being re-tethered hadn’t made that night any clearer. Still, thinking about it—or trying to—made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I hurried through the halls, toward my locker, to gather my stuff and get ready for the bus ride home. Even under the stark hallway lighting, just thinking back to that cave was almost like being back there in the flesh.

All these questions, all these things I had to know.

Funny. Perhaps Monitor really was the right class for me.

----------------------------------------

There was a package for me in the mailbox when I got home. MONITOR CROSS had been scrawled across the front in badly handwritten Sharpie. I muttered a quick prayer thanking God that Mom hadn’t checked the mail, because the events of the past week were not something I knew how to explain, and tore open the package.

There was a phone inside. Not one of those fancy new iPhones, but a standard mobile phone—keypad, monochrome display, the works. Like the one I had in my pocket, but in purple. Well, the color alone made it clear who it was from. Still, when they had mentioned a way of keeping in contact with us, I thought it’d be something more high-tech than a burner phone.

So, I went inside, said hi to Mom, and told her my day had been fine. Then, I went upstairs, dropped my things, got changed, and did what I normally did: procrastinated my studies by wasting time on the Internet. I was trading Superbad quotes with Vince on MSN when a message came in from Emma.