Cal crafted the mindscape with exacting precision.
To anyone without his abilities it was indistinguishable from reality.
He built a familiar and comfortable place for his son.
The park across the street from Watch headquarters back in Sacramento.
Alin had fond memories of the place where he truly began his training in the combat arts.
Under the greatest swordmaster in the world he had bled and sweat to reach the limits of his potential.
And limited he had been, without a class or superhuman abilities.
Until now.
Cal decided on an overcast fall day with a slight, cool breeze occasional brushing against tree leaves just beginning to lose their green.
Birds chirped in branches or stalked the grass for buzzing insects while squirrels rushed to and fro getting their last minute shopping done for the holidays.
Memory he could access at will allowed him to populate the training areas with facsimiles of actual people.
Instructors bellowed.
Students grunted.
Steel and wood clashed.
Other people walked through the park, lingering on the periphery to watch.
They led or were led by dogs on leashes.
Children begged parents to be allowed to train or begged for treats from the carts scattered along the sidewalks.
There was a young woman that blended ice cream and churros to sublime heights.
He remembered always buying from her. Mostly for himself and his wife, but also for Alin and the other young kids after training class ended.
Hanna had always stared at him through narrowed eyes.
She didn’t believe in forming bad habits because it led to bad discipline.
He thought otherwise.
Kids were kids.
They should always be allowed to be such for as long as possible.
That’s when one knew that they were doing things right as a world.
It was a great shame to force them to grow up too quickly.
Besides, being a kid was the best time to eat like garbage. Especially, when they were actively training.
Hanna stood there a short distance away as she had been back then.
Dark black hair tied in a tight ponytail.
A few small scars on her face.
Two normal eyes.
Tall.
Intimidating, even relaxed as she was.
Little Alin and his fellow trainees rushed toward him and the ice cream churros in his and Nila’s arms.
He let the memory play out.
Happy times.
When he had still harbored hopes that his son wouldn’t have to fight.
Of course, he had failed.
He was no closer to that safer world.
Terminus.
Bountiful Decade.
The spires wanted conflict, craved it and thus, created it.
It played with their reality like he did with his mindscapes.
There was a lesson in that.
An understanding, even if he didn’t like it.
He could’ve stayed in the moment.
Surrounded by kids, laughing and smiling. Loving their treats, excited about the cool stuff they pulled off in swordspersonship class.
But he knew none of it was real.
Thus, he stopped.
The people vanished in an instant.
They had never been there in the first place.
Alin wouldn’t like them there anyways.
The fog powers tore at his son, eating away at his confidence.
He knew that seeing the people as they were back in past would only further drive in how different his son thought of himself when compared to everyone else.
First, it had been the isolation of not having powers like his parents or a class like his peers.
Now, it was the knowledge that he was unlike any other Earthian.
Not born of a father and mother but created by a terrible monster.
He pulled Alin into the mindscape.
His son blinked away the momentary disorientation of moving from reality to a construct but not being able to tell the difference.
“Huh? Is this what my subconscious wanted?”
“I can change it.”
“No. It’s cool. I was just expecting the usual training chamber. But this is good too.”
“Alright. You know how this works.”
“Yup. You’re in control in here and out there. There’s no danger of me losing it.”
“Let’s start small and easy. I’ve already mapped out your power’s progression. It should be mostly accurate since I peaked into your psyche. Obviously, things could and probably will change based on real world events. We’ll adjust the training as needed based on that and future scans.”
“Awesome.”
Alin held out his hand, palm up.
Gray fog emerged.
It was difficult to see with the normal human eye, but a thin, wispy strand connected the forming baseball-sized cloud to Alin’s hand.
The fog stopped expanding but thickened, turning from translucent to opaque in a few seconds.
He felt a bit of pride at how effortlessly his son did that, considering how Alin had resisted going further with it out in the real world.
Power use at the baseline came instinctively to the holder.
It had safeguards against accidentally hurting oneself.
One would need to consciously go past those limits, which wasn’t easy or even possible unless one had truly mastered their abilities.
Granted he only had a rather small sample size to go by.
There was no better example than how he used to bleed from the brain when he pushed through his limits.
What had been a frequent once was now rare.
He hoped to help his son avoid the same growing pains.
“How does it feel?”
“Familiar. Like it’s another hand.” Alin’s face twisted. “I’ve got three hands and it feels like the most normal thing in the world.”
“I’m not detecting fog inside of your body. So, we can tentatively guess that you’re generating it spontaneously through an act of will. Out of nothing. Violating the laws of physics, as usual.”
“Still clinging to the old, defunct ways, I see, old man. Do you want some time to shake your fists at the clouds again?”
A bit of his son’s usual self leaked through in the moment.
“What clouds? Those?” He pointed to the sky.
The thing about the mindscape was that he controlled everything in it.
His son squinted, shielding his eyes with his free hand as he gazed up.
“What is that? A mouth? And a turd? Oh? Ha. Ha. I’m telling mom.” He smirked. “I will give you points for making it move. Very realistic chewing too.”
“Let’s see if you can maintain that ball with this movement.”
He sent a squirrel flying into Alin's face.
An angry one, prone to scratching and biting.
His son cursed, swatting it off after a second.
A bite mark and shallow scratches vanished while the whirling ball of fog hovering over his palm remained.
“Not even a wobble or the slightest dissipation. Impressive.”
“I told you. It’s like another body part. I’m barely paying attention to it.”
“Fatigue?”
“Either there is none or it’s not noticeable.”
“Tingling in the brain? Body?”
“Nope.”
“Breathing?”
“Consistent with standing here.”
“Muscle strain?”
“Zero.”
Cal went through a few more potential indicators before deciding to push Alin further.
“Make it bigger.” He created flags, planting them in a circle at 1 meter intervals from Alin in the center. He placed floating ones above and ones only he could ‘see’ beneath the grass-covered earth. “Start at the lowest density you can manage at each interval. Then thicken it to like you have it now. Then thin it again before moving to the next flag.”
His son frowned.
“Underground too?”
“Yeah.”
The frown turned into a scowl.
“I can’t… I mean I can, but it’s only filling in the empty spaces.”
“Like seeping water?”
“Not even as strong. The fog is just flowing into the cracks. It’s not moving even the smallest bit of soil. And before you ask. I don’t know how I know that.”
“Try to explain.”
Alin’s brow furrowed in the same way it had always since he was a little boy trying to figure out how much cake he could cram into his mouth in one bite.
“I just know. Like I feel it. I’m touching it with my fingers… but not really.”
“As vague as expected.”
The fog had gone from a dark, dense ball in Alin’s hand to a wispy haze surrounding his body.
Cal sensed it wavering.
Did it disappear from existence?
Or did it go to another extra-dimensional space?
Perhaps one of pure ‘fog’?
The fog dimension?
If that was the case it raised a lot of troubling questions on the possible fates his son faced.
“Having trouble?”
“Yeah. I feel like it wants to expand equally in all directions, but it can’t so I’m off balance. Like I’m going to fall even though I know I’m just standing here. I’m struggling to keep it from just disappearing.”
“Okay. So, you instinctively form a sphere. Soil is too dense for it, but not air. What do you think?”
Alin answered by lifting his hand over his head.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“I’ll just move the starting point.”
Cal adjust the flags.
His son didn’t have any difficulty going through the exercise.
They moved through several more exercises.
Alin pushed the starting point of the fog sphere to about 3 meters from his palm and maxed it out until the bottom of the sphere touched the grass. Each time it enveloped his body without issues. Clothing didn’t pose a problem.
Cal made a mental note to repeat the exercises later with Alin in full power armor and gear.
An hour passed in the mindscape, while a second elapsed in reality.
Time had never been a fixed thing.
It had always been subject to perspective.
An hour chained to a desk plugging data into a spreadsheet and interpreting data in other spreadsheets took longer to experience than an hour drinking with friends down at the local whisky bar.
“Now to answer the real question. What does it do?”
“It’s cold.” Alin shrugged. “What I mean to say is that I think it’s cold. It feels like it’s cold, but I don’t feel cold. Does that make sense?”
“Absolutely.”
“Not, like, freezing cold, but more like cool cold. Hoodie cold.”
“Can you control the temp?”
“Absolutely… not.”
This was the part where Cal purposely withheld information from his son.
He could simply tell Alin how the power would progress over time and with use, but he knew that knowledge wouldn’t land well at this very early stage.
He knew his son’s thoughts on the matter.
Alin needed time for a slow realization and ultimate understanding to accept that which was an intrinsic part of him.
The fact that Alin had not once asked him to reveal it all was proof of that.
“How are you feeling?”
“No headache. A little winded. Like I ran around the park a couple of times.”
“What kind of pace did you use?”
“Like a light jog. The kind I can do all day.”
“Oh, good! Let’s try some harder stuff then!”
Hours turned into days into weeks.
Long days followed by quick nights.
Simulating sleep was necessary to trick the brain and body to avoid the effects of sleep deprivation even though only a few hours had passed in reality.
Mind over matter was a truism in the environment.
Meal breaks were necessary for the same reason.
Full immersion protected the mind.
Fidelity would eventually break otherwise.
Alin progressed quickly within a safe space to practice his new power.
He felt less concerned with the possibility that he’d lose control and usher in a repeat of the Manila Fog Quest.
He increased his range and speed.
Failed to solve the issue of moving his fog through anything denser than air.
That included his clothing and armor.
The gray only emerged through bare skin. It came easiest through his hands, but he could reliably call it forth from any part of his body.
Discovering that and practicing it had been an embarrassing day for him.
Although, he did see the comedic possibilities of using certain areas of the body to expel the fog.
It became clear fairly quickly that Alin’s fog resembled the monster.
Cal copied a myriad of scanning and detection devices. Technological, magical and both.
At the fog’s sparsest state the devices didn’t have any problems detecting Alin, other living creatures and inanimate objects inside its sphere.
The readings grew increasingly garbled as his son increased the density.
At its most opaque all, but the most powerful devices, detected nothing.
It was like an empty void or a blank wall behind which nothing existed.
Alin hadn’t been happy to discover that it had been the same with the fog monster.
“So, expect power levels to take precedence… as usual. Don’t assume it’s impenetrable.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good, Boy!”
“Ha. Ha.”
“Are you ready for the next set of tests?”
“No, but I have to do it, right?”
“We can take a break. A real one. How’s a week in actual reality sound?”
Alin shook his head.
“I’d rather get as much as we can done in one session.”
He didn’t like being on the shelf while his girlfriend, family, friends and everyone else were putting in long, daily shifts defending their community.
“Alright. What loadout do you want?”
Alin thought for a moment. “Undersuit. Multi-weapon. We can try other weapons later. I want to keep it simple for now.”
“Done.”
The items appeared on Alin and in his hand.
The wire shoot out of the hilt and the hardlight blade flashed to life.
He raised his left hand and called forth a hazy sphere of gray with a diameter close to 50 meters.
It would contract as he increased its density, forcing him to create more to keep the size constant.
“Ready for whatever,” Alin said.
“We’ll start small.”
Cal created a handful of the human-sized gremlins.
A classic.
Lean and wiry, they hunched over warily. Their claws dug into the earth as they readied themselves in a sprinter-like stance.
Mouths opened and closed, snapping sharp teeth together as spittle flew.
Rather, Cal made them do all that.
He felt it before Alin said a word.
The gremlins were a product of his psionic powers, so he could experience what they experienced, feel what they felt.
It brought him back to Manila and many years ago.
The creeping dread of countless eyes on you.
The slow, growing malaise that weakened the will while fatiguing the body.
It crept up on a person. The change was subtle as the body’s stamina drained and struggled to recharge.
“Are you doing anything intentionally?”
“No, but I think I know what you’re talking about. I think I feel them tiring.”
The gremlins weren’t actually moving much.
A snarl here. Flexed fingers there. Eyes focusing on their target.
“Yeah. There’s a drain effect going on. It feels tiny, but I’m feeling something. Might just be adrenaline though… er… a facsimile of adrenaline.”
“Both. Your actual body is mirroring some of your mindscape body’s response. Do you want to try controlling the drain effect consciously?”
“I think I have to, right? It’s the whole point of this thing.”
“Not if you aren’t ready.”
Alin mulled it over in silence for awhile before he steeled his gaze on the gremlins and nodded.
Concentration furrowed his brow.
The effect was quick.
The gremlins slumped to the grass like puppets with their strings suddenly severed.
“Well… crap. That felt really good.”
“Details.”
“It’s simple. Took effort to do it. A lot more noticeable than what I’ve done so far, but I got that energy back almost right away.”
“Net gain?”
“I’m pretty sure.” Alin nodded. “Er… do I need to…” He pointed his hardlight blade at the unconscious gremlins.
“No point.” Cal waved them out of existence and replaced them with one much larger gremlin.
The huge monster was a super-sized version of the others. It was ubiquitous as the miniboss for most lower level encounter challenges and spawn zones in populated areas.
Alin had fought and killed many.
The Threnosh power armor made them trivial opponents.
Just the undersuit meant that they still weren’t much of a threat.
“Okay. Go ahead.”
“Um… shouldn’t I try with it not just standing there?”
“Later. We do our practicing and testing in safe, controlled scenarios building on each session.”
The large gremlin lasted much longer than the human-sized ones.
It took just over three minutes for it to fall into unconsciousness.
Alin had struggled, but once again he ended up at a net positive in stamina.
“Feels so weird. Like I was hitting a wall. Then it was like I hit the turbo and shot right up the ramp. Went from nothing to a whole lot.”
“You’ll have to work on making it smoother. It’ll be a different story if you’re trying to drain while they’re coming for your face.”
“Speaking of…”
“You sure you don’t want a break? Think this over. Meditate a bit. Regain focus. I don’t need powers to notice that you’re riding something like an adrenaline rush.”
“No. This is the exact scenario I need to practice for the real world stuff. Like you said. The monsters won’t stand there for me.”
“Alright. What do you want?”
“Normal gremlins, but, like, twice as much.”
----------------------------------------
Alin lay in the hospital bed.
It was an upgraded thing. All sleek and matte gray in keeping with the Threnosh aesthetics. It wasn’t one of the pods. Those were reserved for the most dire of injuries. The kind that pushed people to the edge between life and death.
Holographic projections displayed Alin’s vital signs.
“You know, in the old days you’d have to have needles and wires sticking out of you. Now we can just scan you and stick a few patches on for the more in depth stuff.”
“I know, Dad. You and Mom made me volunteer at hospitals when I was a kid. Not everyone has Threnosh stuff like we do.”
“Working on it and it’s not the end all, be all. Some of the magitech they’re pioneering in Sactown is just as good. Then there’s high level spells and Skills.”
“Yeah, I mean, high level doctors can get all this just by using their Skills.”
“That’s great, but also bad.”
“Right, cause it’s like replacing infrastructure, organization and institutional knowledge with one person. Something happens to them and it could be a crippling loss if you don’t have other people ready to take their place. Even if you have that, there’s going to be a transitional period while the new guys level up and that could take years. About the only guarantee you’d have is that people are going to suffer and die during.”
Cal smiled.
His son hadn’t forgotten old school lessons.
More importantly, Alin was showing good willpower and control in not complaining about the raging headache and asking for something to help with the pain.
Mindscape training wasn’t easy.
There was a steep price for the massive advantages it gave.
The chamber shook from a sudden and powerful gust of wind.
He had brought them and the structure to the isolated island in one trip.
It was about as large as a two bedroom apartment.
The custom job had been made in one piece to provide everything they needed for the training period.
Alin had insisted on a location far from people and impossible for him to leave in the event his fears came to pass.
Easter Island had been a spawn zone.
They had left it alone because the stone monsters, which vaguely resembled the Moai in miniature, had always stayed on the island.
It belonged to Cal now. Although, he planned to let it go once they no longer needed it.
“This place is actually a pretty good example of that. The population here had a written language. The, I guess, glyphs were carved into wood tablets. At least that’s all that remained. They probably wrote on other things too. The sad thing is that they were untranslatable.”
“No Rosetta Stone?”
“Nope.”
“Sucks.”
“Absolutely. Think of the knowledge lost. Or even just their history.”
“Let me guess… colonizers killed them all? Although, it’s barren. What could the people have had that the colonizers wanted to take?”
“People will always have something that other people want. Want to take an educated guess? I’ll give you a hint. It has something to do why the Rongorongo never got translated like the Egyptian hieroglyphs.”
“That’s a weird-sounding name. Pretty cool though,” Alin said with a nod that made him grimace. He still didn’t ask for help and instead continued. “The Church wanted to make everybody Catholic. They killed anyone that knew how to read and write it. Then they destroyed what the people had recorded. Same thing they did in the Americas. Destroy the culture and replace it with your own.”
“Yup. The playbook’s pretty standard for imperialists.”
“Which means slavery. Okay. I got this. They came here and enslaved the people. It’s a small island without a lot of resources. Probably, just enough if you lived in balance with the nature junk. So, I’m guessing the slavers didn’t stay here and build plantations.”
“Peru.”
“An old country in South America.”
“Do you know where, specifically?”
“Well, we’re in the South Pacific, so it has to be on the coast. Is it the long, skinny one?”
“That’s Chile. Peru’s just north. It was done in the 1800’s. Slavers came, took people and left diseases. The end result was that anyone that knew how to read and write the glyphs were murdered. A language and history lost forever.”
“No one found something like the Rosetta Stone?”
“Not that anyone knows of.”
“It might be buried somewhere out there. Maybe you could find it?”
“Yeah, if it is, then probably. We’ve got the tech, magic and powers to make archaeological expeditions trivially easy. It’s just that there’s no time. I can’t justify the resources and effort when we need to dedicate everything to violence.”
“Sucks though. I think it’d be pretty cool to find lost cities and civilizations, like Uncle Eron always talks about.”
“The problem with that is how will we be able to tell the difference between a true piece of ancient human history or something the spires created. Your uncle’s been to places like that deep in the Amazon and the Congo. Even brought back samples for study. No one has found anything conclusive when it comes to dating the sites.”
“Yeah, I get it. The stuff under San Diego dates like it’s thousands of years old, except there was nothing under San Diego until the spires.”
“Same with the stuff under the pyramids in Egypt. Tunnels and necropolises were already there pre-spires, but they were nowhere near as expansive as they are now. Did the spires add to them to make the challenges bigger? Or were they already there and archaeologists just hadn’t uncovered them? You can repeat that story with places all over the world.”
“Should we be writing our history and knowledge in stone? Cause, that’s, like, the only thing that really lasts for thousands of years. I bet you or Uncle Eron could do it. Or Uncle Remy could do it on metal. I’m picturing, like, a huge wall on the moon. Or maybe even in space.”
“And how will the people that come after be able to read them in both cases?”
“Put the wall flat on the surface of the moon… so, I guess it’s more of a floor. And telescopes.”
“Or maybe I could put it into humanity’s collective unconscious.”
Alin scowled. “You can do that?”
“No idea. Don’t really want to try. Seems like something I can mess up badly. First, I’d need to find out if that collective unconscious is an actual thing. And there’s the whole ethical question.”
“Oh! I know!” Alin snapped his fingers, then winced at the sound. “Genetic memory. You, Threnosh tech and magic. Burn all our knowledge and history into our genetic code junk. Make it so people can access it. Like a library in their heads.”
“Ah! But, what sort of fundamental changes would that bring? Would humanity still be human at that point?”
“It’s just like evolution.” Alin shrugged.
“It does bring up interesting thoughts. But, remember, just cause we can do something doesn’t mean we should.”
“Yeah. Makes sense.”
“Alright, I think you’ve held out long enough. Do you want help for that headache?”
Alin hesitated.
“I’m not testing you.”
“Aren’t you always, though?” His son pointed out reasonably and factually accurate a majority of the time. “Let’s finish the debrief first. I don’t want to knockout while it’s still fresh.”
“You didn’t like fighting the simulated Earthians.” He went straight to what had brought an end to their first training session. “Why?”
“It was intimate. When I drained them of energy it was like I was also taking them into me. It was like I was starting to be them. We studied the fog monster. I was doing what it was doing.”
“That’s something to work on next session. You’ll have to learn to take only the stamina and not the essence or soul.”
“Dad, when you say things like that I don’t feel good about my powers. Like, it reinforces the idea that I shouldn’t have this for the sake of everyone.”
“You’re not the fog, Boy. You’re you. You’re in control of you. You’ll learn and improve. Remember, progress isn’t a straight path. It’s winding. It goes up mountains and down valleys. You’ll hit dead ends and come across raging rivers and blocked passages. You’ll have to backtrack and find the right path many times. You’ll move forward and back. Sometimes more of the former. Sometimes it’ll be the latter. The important thing is that you keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
“There are a lot of different paths, though. One might be good for me, but bad for the people I care about.”
“Then you’ll choose the one that is good for all.”
“But, I won’t know until I get to the end. What if I think it’s a good one, but it turns bad at the end? What if I pick the wrong path?”
“Then you change it. Make it what you want it to be.”