“Graviton, the Scourge of the Champions, the guy who wiped Fiji off the map. The ultimate boogeyman for generations of hero-worshiping tweens. Hell, I learned to read from comic book fights between you and Kismet.”
He sighed, “Yeah, Kismet was amazing. After the Cthulhian got her, that’s when I decided to stop playing supervillain and start killing Kaiju. You can call me Senpai or Mister Bob, though.”
“So your battles were fake?”
He shook his head, “Oh no, the battles were real enough, just the reasons for them were fake. We were lovers for almost as long as you’ve been alive, and every once in a while, I’d haul the suit out and Kismet and I would get in a little foreplay.”
“Ugh. Now you totally wrecked my teenage spank bank.”
He grinned, “Good. Honestly, you should probably just pull every heroine the hell out of it. Most of them are supremely egotistical attention whores who would do anything, sleep with anyone if it gave them a chance to boost their rating or make them more relevant. Especially the over-the-top squeaky clean ones like Angelique. That girl’s had every hole violated more times than the old New York subway system.”
I put my hands to my head. Angelique was every boy’s dream come true. Blonde, beautiful pure white angel wings, sonic control… not production, actual control. Class five, and the most beautiful youthful face and incredible hourglass shape you could imagine.
Mister Bob smirked at my melodramatics. “Don’t be so worried about it. I mean, she’s old enough to be your grandmother, but she doesn’t look it. If you really need to get a piece of angel ass, you ARE a class 6 male. Just let it slip at a presser or something that you grew up dreaming about her, and she’d be on her knees faster than a sushi chef making California roll.”
I shook my head, still double-facepalmed. “No thank you. I will never touch an Alpha. Not even her.”
He shrugged, “That’s a really good rule of thumb, let’s see how long you can hold onto it. Just remember, if someone like Angelique comes around and suddenly you fall in love or lust with her, power abuse is assault, maybe even rape. Even if you enjoy it, her using her sonic abilities to manipulate your limbic system is the same as using a date-rape drug.”
“If she uses her sonics to try and control me, I’ll pull her wings off like a fucking fly. I will NOT be used like that!”
He looked at me askance, “There’s a history there, I think. You could try, but it might not be so easy. She’s a highly advanced class five, and as Alphas train and live their lives, fight, and even breathe, they become more durable and more resistant to damage, age, and disease. Ripping her wings off would take a hell of a lot of force. I could probably knock her unconscious with a gravity punch, but even as a class eight, I don’t know if I could do that. Break her bones, kill her, sure, but tear her wings off? I doubt it.”
I was pretty sure that a kinetically neutralized piece of two-pound test line stretched across her flight path while she ran into it at full flight speed could do it, but that wasn’t important. What was important was the next thing he said.
“I can help you with your energy problems.”
I lowered my hands, “What? How?”
He shrugged, “There are a few different ways. Like you, I am a Y-awakened. I looked at your records and noticed that while you trained for fighting, you never touched Chinese martial arts. Is there a reason?”
I sighed, “It sucks.”
“Sucks how?”
“Most of it is total bullshit. Monkey style? Like pretending to act like a monkey will help. You scratch your head and armpits, jump around, and act like it somehow gives you primate muscle structure. I KNOW what primate muscle structure looks like, and not even the best kung-fu master in the world can match it. A real chimp can rip your arm off and beat you to death with it.”
“The same with all the other animal forms. Crane style just means you offer people an easy nut shot when you concentrate too hard. In a real street fight, kicking higher than someone’s knee is a good way to get your ass kicked, it’s too slow. Even going to ground, or letting someone take you to the ground, is a good way to get kicked in the head with a steel-toed boot or beaten to death with a sign.”
I sighed, “And don’t even get me started with all that Chinese medicine and chi flow patterns, Dim Mak, and spirit-strike martial arts where fat old men pretend to knock people down from across the room without alpha powers. It’s all bullshit.”
Mister Bob nodded along as I was talking, and when I finished, he said, “You are both right and wrong.”
“Okay, what am I wrong about?”
“Most of that stuff is based around wish fulfillment and desperate old men trying to pretend that they own the secret truths of the universe. The whole concept is an important Chinese cultural artifact from a time when some of it actually worked.”
“You mean the magic times.”
His head shot up as he suddenly looked at me attentively, “What did you say?”
“I said the magic times. Back before the Q-bomb, when humans believed in that shit. Back when court magicians could turn a staff into a snake. When the powers of true belief meant that pissed-off gods could create monsters, or ride on flying chariots drawn by goats across the sky. When true love really was one of the strongest forces in the universe.”
“How do you know about that?”
I gave him a ‘look’. “My power lets me observe molecular structures and interact with almost any particulate, and detect energy enough to both manipulate and interact with those structures meaningfully. I know damned good and well that no physics could account for what ‘I’ can do, let alone the people that can change into a giant bear, shoot laser beams from their eyes, or shit golden bricks.”
“I figured out years ago that there’s some magical asshattery going on, and that it was here long before the Q-bomb ripped a new asshole for magic that a few very lucky people could draw on to do stupid magical stuff. I figured, in the end, pretty much every human has a special gift that could awaken if just exactly the right circumstances occurred… it’s just that those circumstances are invariably lethal, and if it’s not the perfect situation, people never sodomize the magical sphincter to get the power to keep themselves alive.”
“The only difference between now and then is that people think they are too smart to believe in anything that isn’t vomited from the mouths of con artists and Hollywood freaks that have the word ‘doctor’ in front of their name. It takes a direct connection to the aforementioned cosmic blowhole to overcome all the energy of that disbelief, and save yourself from whatever suicidal stupidity would have gotten you killed otherwise.”
He chuckled, “I think that is both the most cogently crude and enlightened explanation of alphas I have ever heard. So.. first the scientific stuff. Everything is made of energy in the end. You’ve heard of the unified field theory?”
I nodded, “I have heard that it’s in pieces and has been expanded and broken constantly since Einstein proposed it, mostly because he was a fake too. He stole a lot of other scientist’s ideas and marketed them as his own, like Edison.”
He nodded, “It’s in pieces because we don’t have a descriptor for the fifth force, We have frequency and wavelength from photons, mass and temperature from electroweak bosons, weight and compression from gravitons, and quarks from gluons.”
I chuckled, “Simplified, but close. I hate how physicists use the same word for boson strength as for molecular vibration, but it is what it is.”
“Well, there’s a fifth force. With it, the entire theory of everything becomes possible. Magic, chi, dao, or essence. I guess its aspects would be described as ‘shape’ and ‘flavor’, but the more mystically-minded would call it ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’. The problem is, the very existence of spirit and soul would make atheists shit a brick, which means most scientists.”
“Spirit is that which KNOWS itself, like dirt, light, or even quarks, and of course, the soul is that which can define itself, meaning life. That’s why scientists will NEVER discover the origin of life from its chemical basis, because it requires defining the soul of that life, and the unified field theory will never work because the link with which everything is truly defined involves self-knowledge as an immutable law. It is the definition of order, and while chaos is easy enough to find, order requires its own definition on every level.”
I nodded, “Very deep.
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He nodded, “That’s what the magic rectum is accessing. A level of power of undefined soul and spirit. Now, we are only human… I have no idea how the soul works, but the spirit? Well, every single human uses shape constantly to interact with the world, from the moment their eyes first open, they start recognizing self-defined objects and their personal ability to interact with their body and environment.”
“Fully X-enhanced humans, alphas, have a direct line to that wellspring of power. They use the shape in ways that both define and defy the other forces and because that wellspring of shape and soul are as undefined as it’s possible to be, uncontaminated by the ‘self’ and waiting to be formed into whatever ‘self’ is defined as in THIS world, they can use their gifts, gifts which pretty much magically permit them to define that raw self into whatever their gifts dictate. Got me so far?”
I nodded, “Yep, the pucker is full of raw magic, so most of them can mold that into whatever their gifts need it to be.”
He nodded, “Yeah, but it also brings with it soul, and that soul builds up as well. That soul is the very definition of life, so as they use their powers effectively, more and more soul accumulates. Either slowly as they accumulate and use power, or quickly if they use... other methods.”
“That makes them more and more alive, and an alpha cannot accumulate more ‘spirit’ energy than their soul permits, because the soul is sort of the container for the spirit. Otherwise, the energy is just lost into the real world like an overfull glass, where it gains its own identity.”
“It’s a slow process, but it’s natural, and it seems very fast because the soul constantly draws more spirit from the wellspring to equalize it every time the alpha uses their gifts to define and use it.”
I nodded, “That’s a pretty good theory for magic. So what about us Y saps?”
“You ever read Xianxia books?”
I nodded, “Yeah, for a little while. I’ve also seen some of the Chinese magical dramas, like Two Princesses and a Phoenix, The Jade Dragon, and Hidden Finger Crouching Llama.”
He nodded, “Well, it’s like the difference between a fish and a creature that lives on dry land. They will never understand the concept of drinking because water is what they live in, even if they can recognize when they are beached and out of energy, and being out of energy for too long can kill them.”
“Us bastard mammals, though, know damned good and well what drinking is. We are not going to dry out in an hour, and we can also lug around water in a way the fish couldn’t even dream of… their bodies don’t NEED to be made of mostly water like ours do, because they are never away from it for more than a few moments.”
“So you are saying that I can learn to drink?”
He nodded, “Right now, you are just regaining energy like a turkey. Occasionally you tilt your head up and get a mouthful of water, and while that’s plenty for normies, you burn a lot more off by defining it with your gift. The ‘function’ part of function and concept, which is, to be fair, a pretty poor way of defining it.”
I nodded, “Yeah, I heard the whole function and concept thing before. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense except for explaining why super-brains crack.”
He nodded, “Super-brains crack because they are exposed to the soul of the power without being able to experience or connect with the spirit. It would be kind of like being a ghost. Exposed to all of the world but never able to touch it.”
“Can you come up with an example from the fish metaphor?”
He gave me the stinkeye, “Do you need one? They have a normie soul that can’t use any spirit other than their own, but it’s constantly dragging in more spirit that they can’t touch. Their minds and souls expand with the constant life gain until it eventually pops like an overfull water balloon.”
“So wait, you are saying that if there’s an afterlife, they just disintegrate and never show up at the pearly gates?”
He grinned, “That’s why the word soul is loaded too. I don’t know if there is an afterlife that we would recognize as such, since, you know, things like memories and personalities are part of our body’s brain, but I am certain that our souls live on as long as we can self-define, and that self-definition is the meaning of soul.”
“And no, I think that their souls just hit a point at which they can no longer effectively draw in spirit, and just… cut loose of everything that is NOT their soul, or self-definition. They leave all definitions that are not themselves behind, just like a soul whose body has died. Of course, if the person is still alive, it just leaves a living body with only the barest amount of soul to keep their cells working. The body and brain are alive, but the mind is gone.”
“So how do we drink?”
He grinned, “That’s the easy part. Drinking is not the problem, when we learn how we can hold many times the water that a fish can. The problem is, that the spirit essence that is in this world is like muddy water. Instead of drawing it in pure and defining it instantly like an X, we have to hope we find water that matches our gifts so we have to do the least amount of cleaning up to make it drinkable without killing us.”
“So the Xianxia stuff.”
“Exactly. Spirit exists in everything, and the soul exists in all living things. When we pull, we expand our soul and fill it with spirit. Unlike the fish, though, our gifts only use certain shapes of spirit or our dao. There’s energy in everything, and each thing has its own shape, but there are certain similarities in groupings that let us either purify it more easily into what we can use, or pull directly from it because it’s a shape we can use. If your soul can use pink essence, well, every shade of pink works, although we can make all those swirling variations on the shade of pink mix together and purify it eventually into our BEST pink.”
“For example. If we were to pull spirit essence that strongly resonated with fire, or magma, from the bottom of a volcano and our gift was strongly associated with that spirit, it would fill us up quickly, we would barely have to purify it for use, and our soul would easily grow and expand to hold more quickly. Way faster than those who constantly draw pure spirit from the sphincter and have to define it as fire-shaped to use it.”
“And that’s uhh… cultivation?”
He nodded, “Right. First, you learn how to pull in essence consciously. Then you learn how to clean it up and transform the close-enough types into what you can use easily, and then you get the fun time job of trying to get rid of the bits that are contaminated with shapes that are so alien to your body and soul that you cannot do anything at all with them. Cultivation, purification, and expulsion. You have been increasing your pool by running yourself completely out of energy, right?”
I nodded, “Pretty much.”
He nodded, “That works, but extraordinarily slowly. What you are doing is not expanding your soul, but strengthening it so that it compresses the essence you get more effectively. That is, without a doubt, our greatest gift… we can advance in leaps and bounds by both expanding our souls and then strengthening them to compress the energy. The ancient Chinese scholars even have names for the different stages, although I probably should look them up.”
“Expanding your soul is the opposite of what you are doing. It means filling yourself up with so much spirit that your soul is stretched out and gets bigger to hold more. You don’t want to draw too much, or your soul, your foundation, could rupture, but if you can compress the spirit energy far enough, amazing things can happen.”
“Is that what you did?”
He nodded, “Yeah, things start getting complicated at some point, whether you focus on your mind, your body, your soul, or all three. I tried to focus on all three for a while, but eventually, I cut out power expansion in favor of focusing on improving my body since gravity is already a hell of a force without increasing it too much. Power compression just fits my gifts too well. Right now I could create a microsingularity that could easily kill me, but if I focus enough on my body, I should be strong enough to survive it, and maybe pull it into an updated gravity punch.”
“What would that do?”
He grinned, “Punch Cthulhian in the face, and his entire body, all half a mile of it, implodes and is sucked into a space the size of a molecule. I imagine that he would feel that, and I’d feel a little better.”
“But if you could do that, you’d be at your peak, right? I mean, dimensional invaders, Kaiju, supervillains, nothing could stand before it, right?”
He shrugged, “Maybe, but we have beaten that stuff before. We aren’t winning the wars, but we aren’t really losing either, at least not anymore. That’s not what scares me.”
“What scares you?”
He sighed, “We have poked a hole into a dimension made up entirely of pure spirit and soul essence. Soul is by its very definition self-defining. I am worried, that whatever lives in there, in an environment of almost limitless power, might decide to find out where the hole leads.”
“Like the Beyonder. Secret Wars two. Umm… comic books.”
He shrugged, “Sure. I haven’t read that. So, now that I have your attention, your first lesson is breathing.”
I smiled a little, “Pretty sure I figured that out a while back.”
“Not that kind of breathing… can you tell what your current energy is?”
I concentrated. Without the accuracy of a quantum displacement meter, I couldn’t be exact, but right now I was a little less than a quarter full. I could honestly feel it, the same way I knew if a particular power use was going to drive me into power debt. “About fifty, I guess?”
He nodded, “Well, that’s why I am your teacher, your personal Mazer Rackham, except I am not Maori, you aren’t a child fighting the buggers, and our time is limited by my patience and your learning speed, not an interstellar fleet.”
I was relieved. At least he had some taste. That was a pretty good book, even though I disagreed with the kiss and makeup with murderous aliens philosophy of the rest of the series, and kids that age were idiots at best, no matter how high their IQ score was.