Evelyn walked, and walked, and walked. The light-headed exhaustion she felt was overwhelming, and simply staying conscious was taking all of her strength. She thought she may have blacked out a few times, only to discover that she had somehow managed to cover half a mile or more in the time that was missing from her memory. Around her came noises that she couldn't handle right now and thoughts and sights that she didn't have the ability to deal with. She shut it all out and just walked; she needed, absolutely needed to somehow keep walking. It was all so confusing and surreal, but she kept walking.
Each step was an experience in itself. Her left leg was still far from stable. Despite the ludicrous amount of that weird red energy she had dumped into repairing her injury, she hadn't done a great job of it. She had never actually healed a wound like this before, and had only a vague idea of what she was supposed to do. She had just used a combination of guesswork, intuition, and brute force to patch up the muscle and sinew. While it worked, it didn't work very well.
All of this meant that her leg couldn't really hold her weight. It felt like it should work, but when she stepped with her left leg, it crumpled. She continued to refine her healing efforts, using the constant motion of her walking gait to observe how the muscle fibers interacted and isolate where the problems were. With each step where she lost her balance, she visualized what went wrong and looked for what was missing, so she could figure out what needed to be replaced or rebuilt. It was a slow, repetitive, iterative process that required all of her remaining thought and concentration. But in the process she got better at rebuilding body tissue so that next time she would more likely be able to get it right on the first try.
This slow reconstruction under load required her to somehow compensate for the lost stability while she walked, otherwise she'd topple over. And Evelyn eventually did manage to compensate using more "red." She was overflowing with the stuff; it would just dissipate anyway if she didn't use it, so use it she did. She wasn't particularly aware of how she managed to stabilize the leg, but an observer watching her walk would see that every time she stepped with her left leg, an ethereal crimson brace would shimmer into existence in a quick wave from her heel to her hip. And as the force of the step diminished, the brace would dissipate, as if it had all been a thing of smoke or a trick of the light, only to reappear again on the next step.
She had managed to solve the stability problem allowing her to walk quickly toward her goal even as she worked on rebuilding her leg, but in doing so she created a new problem. The leg brace was expensive, consuming red energy even faster than her pendant could produce it. Without the overflow of power, the red smoke stopped pouring out of Evelyn's skin, and her reserves started to be consumed, step by step. Evelyn was largely unaware of the brace that her body was creating to aid her motion, but she did notice the loss of energy reserves. It felt like an annoying dip in potency and a lack of responsiveness when she tried to use it. The lack of power slowed or sometimes even blocked her attempts at rearranging the muscle fibers, blood vessels, and nerves in her leg.
Working with so little spare power, she was forced to work more deliberately and think more carefully about each change. She grew progressively more adept and effective at her craft. She couldn't just let the power direct her actions on its own. Instead, she had to carefully shape the outcome and plan the changes based on her visualization and her own understanding of anatomy. There was an instinct in there somewhere, a "natural" solution that she could easily take without requiring conscious control. But she found herself frequently needing to overriding it. The raw instinct was decently effective, all things considered, but still it frequently missed the mark. Over time, with each step and each push or pull within her, Evelyn grew more skilled at controlling the flow of it.
She was still painfully aware of the limits of what she could do using the red energy alone without the "yellow" she was seeking. Over time the limits grew more clear. With the energy she held she could push and pull, she could move and reconnect the pieces within her. But with red alone, she could not truly rebuild. For each piece she built up she needed to tear something else down. And every time she did so, she incurred a net loss. Building a single muscle fiber required her to destroy two or three or even ten just to acquire the materials. But a single muscle fiber in the right place might be worth a dozen that aren't pulling their weight. This made it a valuable tool for repairing important structures, but entirely useless for dealing with problems like blood loss.
At the same time as Evelyn improved her conscious control, the part of her mind or body that was maintaining the leg brace was improving as well. The brace had started as a solid shell, casing the entire leg in enough strength to support thousands of times Evelyn's weight. But from step to step the construct became increasingly efficient. First, holes in the brace started appearing in the spots where it wasn't actually supporting any weight. Then changing with each step, the holes coalesced into a grid pattern, then it slowly morphed into a honeycomb pattern. Eventually the brace became a sparse network of lines that traced the most efficient pattern of force and support required for the task. As the efficiency increased, the energy regeneration was freed to support Evelyn's healing and reconstruction efforts. The healing, in turn, strengthened Evelyn's leg, which meant that even less energy needed to be spent on the brace. Eventually, Evelyn could no longer use up her red energy as fast as she absorbed it. Then once again, she became so saturated with the stuff that it poured out of her skin in swirling waves of glowing vapor.
As her body became once again saturated to overflowing, that saturated sensation fizzed in her head. This time she realized that she had felt the same buzzing, fizzing sensation the first time around when she found herself in that car crash. But now she was a lot more aware of the differences. She had by now reached the limit of what reconstruction she could accomplish with the red energy alone, so she took to examining the sensations of the energy and trying to understand it. She could feel the flow of it through her body, and she could use it to some degree to push and pull on the physical world. But she couldn't push or pull on the energy itself, and that felt wrong. She couldn't control the energy in any meaningful way, but she was absolutely certain that she ought to be able to do so. She was certain of the wrongness of it, like something fundamental was broken.
Evelyn was getting closer to her destination, and she picked up her pace; she could practically jog now that her leg was better. She tried to spare a glance for the world around her, but it was all wrong, all broken. Buildings were burning and people seemed scared. People were running. Why were people so scared? Was this because her smokey red energy was broken? Of course, it must be, the people were running from fires because Evelyn needed to figure out the problem with the energy. Everyone was depending on her; she could tell because of how they seemed to look to her for help when she met their eyes. She tried to focus as she jogged. It was tiring.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She thought more about the problem with the red energy. Her head was still fizzing with an exhausted sort of clarity. What did she know about the stuff? She could use it, that was true. She did use it, in fact. But she wasn't using it very well. Most of what could potentially be done was currently unavailable to her, and what she had managed to accomplish was done by brute force alone. She felt certain of that part. She should be able to control it far better than she could. Evelyn let her mind follow the connections as she willed her body forward.
OK, then, why can't I control it? Something was missing, like her connection to the stuff was incomplete. No, not quite, she thought. It wasn't incomplete, it was the wrong form, the wrong shape. It was like she was trying to use a glove that didn't fit anymore. No, it was more than just that. It was more like she was trying to use a glove that was entirely the wrong shape to begin with. It's like I'm wearing gloves designed for penguins or something.
The jogging was pushing Evelyn's body way too hard. Her vision started to darken around the edges and she was losing her balance. She slowed to a walk, but she felt like she was sprinting. As much as she panted and gasped, she couldn't catch her breath. She looked around, the world swayed and sloshed with each turn of her head. There were people out here, on the streets outside the burning houses and office buildings. A few of them looked at her as if they needed her help. These people need me. They need me to figure this out. The world around her was in serious trouble. Something bad was happening, and she was certain that everyone was looking to her to figure this out. Her brain was barely working, but she tried to remember how she was supposed to help them. The thoughts flitted in and out of her head like a confused butterfly.
Evelyn saw two people across the street, looking at her. It was a lady leading her daughter somewhere. The girl looked to be around five years old and upset about something. The mother asked Evelyn something, pleading and concerned. Evelyn saw the lady's mouth move, but there didn't seem to be any sound. All she could hear was a dull roar in hear ears like a rumbling waterfall, barely drowning out the sound of her racing heartbeat. The lady spoke again, again with no sound, again wanting something, again pleading with Evelyn to help. Evelyn tried to remember what the problem was, but it didn't make sense anymore. She seemed to recall it was something to do with gloves and penguins, which didn't make any sense. Penguins don't wear gloves. They don't even have hands, they have flippers.
Frustrated, Evelyn shouted at the lady, screaming to be heard over the rushing and pounding in her own ears: "I don't even own a penguin!"
On the other side of the street, the child's eyes went wide. The mother pulled back with a look of shock and confusion. Then she grabbed the child's hand and hurried away. She seemed to be taking special effort to not look at Evelyn or even acknowledge her existence.
Something was definitely wrong, and Evelyn was afraid it might be her.
She was pretty sure now that she wasn't getting enough oxygen to her brain. This blood loss thing was no joke. The other problems would have to wait; she first needed to fix her own body. And she could fix it, she just needed the right tools. That's where she was going: a tool shed, of sorts, which would have what she needed in order to rebuild what she had lost with her injuries.
She wasn't sure exactly how much time she had left before the opportunity ended; she only knew that she was cutting things dangerously close. Her destination was only half a block away now. She could see the empty parking lot of the shopping center from here. That was actually pretty lucky, the fact that the whole shopping center was deserted. What she had in mind wasn't what you might call "traditionally legal." She felt like she had a perfectly valid justification, but this would be a whole lot simpler if there weren't any witnesses.
It was the typical suburban strip mall with a dozen small shops. There was a clothing store, a barber shop, even a dentist office, of all things. But right in the middle, sandwiched between a coffee shop and a shoe store was a gigantic storefront with a diamond ring over the logo: a jewelry store.
Evelyn stood in front of the entrance and tried to assemble a plan. She wanted to be as inconspicuous about this as possible, but not waste any time either. The doors were locked and the store deserted, but unlike the rest of the shops around, the jewelry store was protected by a roll-up fence made of chain-linked bars just inside the windows and doors.
The power was out in the store, just like everywhere else, but the showroom was far from dark. Inside, a kaleidoscope of colors shimmered and danced with ethereal light. Luminescent vapor poured out of gemstones in the elegant stands on top of the display cases. The glowing vapor cascaded down from surface to surface to create a shimmering, luminous pool of vapor that blanketed the entire showroom floor several inches deep. However, the majority of the light in the showroom came from the display cases themselves. The store featured row after row of these enclosed glass cases, housing the vast majority of the gemstones on offer. The energy trapped behind the glass had grown so dense that it hurt Evelyn's eyes to look at them. It was like staring at headlights. If she squinted, though, she could make out distinct patterns of differently colored streamers behind the glass, forming shapes that coalesced and dispersed from second to second.
For several minutes, Evelyn just stood there. She had no idea what to do next. The tools she needed lay just inside the door. She was so close, and yet at no point since she came up with this amazing plan had she given any thought to how she would actually get inside the store.
Her intuition told her that the energy churning inside those display cases would be more than enough to allow her to break the metal and glass that kept her outside. But in order to use that power, she would first need to get inside the store. Open this box using the tools you'll find inside the box.
It was maddening. She was so close. She had walked so far to get here. What she needed was only an arm's distance away and yet entirely out of reach.
"Honestly, who locks a jewelry store?" she grumbled. It was frustratingly inconsiderate.
She could walk to another store, perhaps? But no, she would just run into the same problem again. She could break the window, but she'd likely injure herself even worse in the process, and she still wouldn't have any of those display cases open. Without the power trapped inside them, there was nothing she could do about the metal bars.
As she stood there, stumped and frustrated, Evelyn heard a crashing rumble, like the sound of the gods themselves smiting the wicked with a hammer the size of a dump truck. It shook the ground and rattled her teeth. She had already had more than enough disorientation for one day, and this wasn't a welcome addition to her plight.
Evelyn turned to look at where the sound came from; directly away from the storefront. Away in the distance she saw a plume of fire and smoke reaching up into the sky. From that point came a wave of the most unimaginable sights and horrors flying straight towards her, faster than she could comprehend. It had already torn apart the countryside, uprooting trees, tearing up patches of earth, and leveling small buildings before it had even reached the city. Now it was overturning cars and smashing down walls as it ravaged one city block after another. It was a long way off, but moving so very fast.
With this inescapable wave of death and destruction bearing down on her, Evelyn finally understood what she was seeing.
"Oh," she thought, "that must be the end of the world that everyone has been talking about."
And then it was upon her.