Looking at my personal assessment through the magic ring Liz had given me months ago, I had a rather sad realization.
Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 18y0m11d Known skills:
Points: 9/241
Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap
Attributes: Might 50, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 30, Luck 7
Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III
Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II
Sometime between all the monsters, the meetings with old friends and family, the battles with superpowered terrorists in deep space, and political discussions several miles beneath the Earth, the world had turned, new days had dawned and I had become an adult as far as human calendars were concerned. My birthday had come and gone and I had missed it. Was it because I was doing far too many things too quickly that I was distracted and forgot? Was it because for me the passage of time and worse, the perception of time, was so much faster that calendar dates were no longer really important? That living close to a dozen years of subjective time while less than one passed with the rest of the world kept pushing me further away from what was considered important, let alone normal?
I could not decide. I did not even try to. Instead I closed the mental projection that summed up everything most other people would consider important, closed my eyes for a moment, then stepped outside of time. Then I flew off. With time and me being out of sync and collateral damage thus being a nonissue, I sped away much faster than I would otherwise have. In only a couple of heartbeats, I was in space. In a couple dozen more, I was landing in the dark side of the Moon.
Instead of rejoining the timestream immediately, I flew around until I found a nice, deep cave. Caves are a rare thing on Luna due to the lack of both liquid water and significant geological activity. Most of them that do exist are the result of meteoric impacts interacting with previous impact sites or unusually differentiated rock formations. Still, some caves exist and they are not terribly hard to find with penetrating awareness of forces that extends for dozens of miles. The one I found was an underground cave, its uppermost reach a good thirty or forty meters below the surface.
Feeling nostalgic more than anything else, I folded space through the Spatial Leap power, finding myself inside the cave in what felt the blink of an eye. Since I was still outside the normal flow of time and causality, it didn't actually last as much as an eyeblink but happened in no time at all. The interior was dark and this being the moon, it was also silent. Silence was... not something that happened on Earth - ever. People may think a particular place is quiet but that's because they can't hear the vibrations from cars in the street outside, the grinding of concrete and metal as the skyscraper sways left and right, the water running in thousands of miles of pipes, or their own breathing and heartbeat. And then there's other people, of which there are from hundreds to tens of thousands within easy walking distance in most places on land. The sea, of course, is neither still nor silent, it just has different things to hear. But the Moon? The only sounds here were the occasional impact from a meteor and the almost constant but very, very distant vibrations of faint moonquakes coming from more than six hundred miles below.
It was relaxing, to be able not to listen. Liberating, even. Out here, accidents and crimes did not happen within range of my senses every second of every day. I did not have to ignore far too many things lest I become first a tyrant over others, then a slave to my own desire to help. I still remembered exactly how petty, arrogant, greedy and generally stupid people chose to be from months of having super-senses active inside a major city. But I was not reminded of such things via a constant bombardment of such incidents coming up in range of my awareness either.
Some would say that I did not have to fly to the Moon just to enjoy some peace and quiet. I could turn off my super-senses instead and raise a force-field that blocked vibrations in just about any place and any time. It was something I had done when I was first getting used to my abilities, several times. But the longer I had my powers and the stronger those powers became the more natural it felt to use those senses. Turning them off was not just like closing my eyes, it was entering a sensory deprivation chamber. Blocking them with force-fields was even worse because my awareness extended to active powers I created. It was like wearing a blindfold that itched mightily, or making earmuffs out of bubble-gum and feeling the stickiness where they touched skin.
So for my belated birthday gift to myself I flew somewhere I could relax without having to roughly disable who I had become. I set a force-field that enhanced atomic vibrations on the cave floor until it turned a nice, glowing orange color, dismissed my suit, banished every bit of dirt and grime clinging to my skin from past battles and splashed into the molten stone. It felt comfortably warm the way water baths nowadays did not. So I added a force-field to press the magma against itself before upping the heat generation until its color shifted from orange to yellow, then to white, then a pale cyan that finally felt toasty hot at around fifteen thousand Kelvin.
The heat had turned up enough it was on the very edge of becoming pain but before it took that final step it was just as hot as I wanted it to be. An adjustment of gravity allowed me to sink up to my neck into the denser liquid without having to swim downwards and thus I sat back and relaxed. I finally rejoined the normal flow of time when my stamina was utterly spent maintaining it, leaving me pleasantly worn out and with my body protesting against any further activity. Before I knew it, I was fast asleep.
xxxx
I woke up an indeterminate time later feeling refreshed and in no particular hurry to return to the political minefield I'd left behind. The radiant cyan liquid stone was just as toasty as before and after soaking in it for what had probably been many hours I was feeling a faint dizziness and the oddly pleasant discomfort that came before a heatstroke. With my natural recovery outpacing the actually harmful effects of too much of a good thing, I stretched like a lazy cat before flying out of the pool.
Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 18y0m12d Known skills:
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Points: 9/241
Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap
Attributes: Might 50, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 30, Luck 7
Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III
Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II
Yep, another day had passed, or at least my ring's programming claimed so. Looking around me at what would have been an ongoing plasma explosion without a force-field squeezing the molten stone into fluid, I wondered how the ring even survived all the bullshit I put myself through. Maybe I should ask Liz the next time I met her? I made a mental note to do just that then thought about what the new day would bring. I knew what I should be doing but I wasn't feeling particularly productive. The molten stone bath had done wonders at both cleaning me up - I'd yet to see the dirt or bacteria to survive temperatures nearly three times hotter than the surface of the sun - and burning away accumulated stress, but it was only the first step.
Still, mild guilt and discomfort of not preparing enough for the coming battles motivated me into spending my current accumulated points. Not feeling like doing any extensive cost-benefit analysis or introspection, I spent eight of those points on Might at once. Fighting the Red Dragon's wraith and seeing Liz's underground fortress-prison first hand had showed me that other supers would not remain behind forever. As much as I wanted to relax, evil never slept and tyrants did not remain idle. My own growth had been slower after the Invasion. Fighting powerful foes and defending the world against terrible threats like any hero should have had kept pushing skill with my powers and let me cover some weaknesses as well as learn new tricks, but in the end of the day every fight I'd won was by leveraging my abilities in the right way to overwhelm my enemies. Ensuring I had the superior force at least individually was my best bet with how my powers worked in concert as well as their fundamental nature.
Adding eight points of Might at once to the fifty I already had did not cause any outward physical changes. With Agility and Ego being at a good, round value of thirty, I could have up to a Might of sixty without being forced to either alter my self-image or lose effective speed and range of motion from bulking up like many male supers tended to. The differences at a deeper level were another manner entirely. By this point, my bones were already some type of crystal instead of the sponge-like internal structure of mundane human bones. Crystal spun into threads woven into layers upon layers until the end result was both incredibly hard and flexible. With the significant addition of power into the stat that governed both strength and durability, those changes both intensified and spread to the rest of my muscles and organs.
What had been cells comprised mostly of water adjusted their entire chemistry into something different, somehow without compromising either the end result or the nature of my consciousness. Water was entirely replaced by non-Newtonian fluids. Protein structures turned metallorganic. Cycles of chemical energy turned from lipids, sugar and ATP into denser, longer molecules whose names I did not know. Everything shifted further, extending a hair into additional dimensions that hadn't been there before, much like how Jerry had built his armor. My body didn't just have a different biology at the molecular level while still pretending to be the same macroscopically, but could now shoehorn a lot more mass and structure into the same space.
I was also seeing some reinforcement of the same type I could do with my active powers begin to be woven into that new biology. With eight points the effect was far from complete but my body was well on its way to not depend on active Force Adjustment to get the most use out of its innate abilities. That specific application would become not just passive but innate, part of me in a way that most powers weren't. No longer would my base and full strength and durability differ by a factor of twenty; with eight points over the milestone of fifty a good forty percent of the maximum values were now permanent even as the base values themselves were also majorly boosted.
This change wouldn't make Force Adjustment useless, of course. Powers like Proximakinesis or Forced Acceleration still got enormous boosts from it and its applications in force-fields were endless. It just made things like surprises, power negation, or disabling attacks less of a concern, a major plus in my book. It also felt nice for the majority of my strength to not rely on a trick and not waver as wildly as it did for supers in the comics.
There was only one point left. I could put it into Might as well, but there had been something I'd been meaning to get, a field of my powers I'd been meaning to improve for some time. For more than half the time I've had powers, I've kept adding tricks, utility and varied offensive options to broaden both the scope and the versatility of what I could do. What had allowed me to survive my first battle and about a dozen hard fights I would have otherwise lost badly was not something I'd improved for some time; my Regeneration. It was time I got a second Regeneration skill and since trying to develop one when I already had another and my baseline healing was quick, I was willing to burn a point on it.
With an act of will, I searched through the nigh-infinite list of countless potential powers on automatic, asking for contenders for the best regeneration skill according to my needs and desires. The results were half a dozen possibilities, some of which I'd seen before, all of them intriguing.
Devoid Regeneration: Heal at a decent pace. This does not count as regeneration, healing or a power and ignores effects working off such descriptors. It also ignores alphabetic order.
Adaptive Regeneration: Heal at a decent pace. The more you've healed from a specific source and type of damage, the more resistant you become to it.
Holistic Regeneration: Recover from everything at a very slow pace. Everything means everything as long as it's on you and negative, not just bodily harm.
Progressive Regeneration: The more times you've been injured by a given attack and the longer injuries lasted, the faster you heal from it.
Redundant Regeneration: This ability counts as a copy of any other regeneration, ongoing healing or lasting recovery effect on you. If you don't have those, it doesn't do anything.
Retroactive Regeneration: The timeline and causality you occupy regenerates. Paradoxical and paracausal changes to it are slowly undone as if they never happened.
Well now, those were some interesting and scary options...