Taking a deep breath he pushed the doors open and a rush of steam and a medley of cleaning smells assaulted him, blinding him for a few moments before the mess of kitchen aides running around cleaning, mopping, sweeping, and performing various other tasks came into view.
"Damien honey," one of the elder kitchen ladies called out upon seeing him return, "come eat first before you go back to 'em dishes sugar." She paused, taking a leisurely drag from her long ornate pipe while she knitted. She'd been sitting at one of the many simple wooden cafeteria benches that dotted the massive kitchen, while her kitchen aides and many of the nuns ran around attending to their own chores. "Taking out garbage is a tough task even for a little warrior like yourself," she said with a chuckle sizing up the boy's disheveled state. She took another slow drag from her pipe as a few of the older nuns that were sitting around her, sewing new summer uniforms for the orphanage children, cackled in agreement. There in all her glory, smoking her evening pipe and laughing with her kitchen aides sat Ma LaCroix herself.
Damien smiled sheepishly, ducking a few passing head ruffles as he spotted the most heavenly warm plate of sausage and eggs sitting on the dingy lunch table that he'd ever seen. He smirked as he spotted Ma LaCroix's slight, coy smile.
"Hag," he joked with mock frustration. He knew the food was her peace offering for the hours of gossip and joking they had definitely been doing about him before he'd gotten there. Yet still he walked with a warm, wide smile on his face, giving greetings and well wishes to many of the adults in the flowing sea of workers.
"Snooze, ya lose bozo," Ma LaCroix joked with a chuckle, bonking Damien slightly on the head, "now eat your dinner sugar."
"Thank you Ma," Damien said humbly as he tucked into his food.
"No problem in the slightest m'love," she replied with a warm smile.
Ma LaCroix was an entity that had always deeply fascinated Damien.
She was one of the three founding members of the orphanage along with two other men, a vampire catholic priest known as Father Clyde, and a retired Lance Commander of the UWM, Lord Jurovi. The three had been running the orphanage for generations.
Though she came off normally as an unassuming old creole lady, ever since Damien was even a baby he could tell that she was much more. He'd always been able to see the auras of everyone and everything around him, the ones weak enough or close to his age at least, but that wasn't special. Anyone with a soul and at least 2 working brain cells was capable of doing the same by his age. No, there was something else that he couldn't explain that had always sussed him out towards her. Ever since the moment he laid eyes on her.
Damien had never been able to sense even a drop of aura from the old woman.
Originally though, he'd just come to assume that the orphanage leaders, a few of the kitchen aides, nuns, priests and soldiers on campus, were just magicless beings or something. He was certain the lack of aura he felt from them was due to it, at least until a certain day 3 years ago.
His jaw clenched with barely repressed rage as his thoughts finally had time to settle on what had driven Damien to such fury; the event that had immediately drenched even Jessica's own immense wall of anger at Damien's lack of critical survival skills...
***
Ever since the orphanage first opened over 200 years ago, there had been many instances of violence between the orphanage children. Try as hard as the orphanage staff had for centuries to solve this issue, attempts that became too invasive of the children's freedoms either only made the problem much worse or only worked for a few years or so. Inevitably, however, problems would always come back in some way, shape or form. So the staff settled on a set of rules that had proven to be the final form they would take, working absolutely under the threat of a new, final punishment; permanent exile from the orphanage to deal with whatever the outside world had in store for them by themselves, regardless of their age. Essentially, an implied death sentence.
This rule had struck the fear of god into the children despite spanning all ages from 0-18, and though it didn't fully solve the problem of campus violence, it not only massively reduced the violence, but it also made sure no one was dumb enough to attempt anything too sinister.
Again, at least that was true up until three years ago.
Damien recalled how Ivan and his gang had once been foot soldiers of a much larger campus gang that had been ran by an older succubus girl known as Mindy Pereira. She had been abandoned somewhere in upstate NY by her mother in a desperate attempt to save her from a Brazilian succubus prostitution ring her father had sold both her and her mother into when Mindy had turned 10. The girl had watched her mother get torn to shreds by the hellhounds the ring had sent after them while desperately hiding in the bushes. She had been about to be mauled herself, before she was saved and brought back to the orphanage by Father Clyde. But the girl had never been the same, starting as a recluse and eventually becoming one of the most feared of the orphanage kids.
As the story went, Ivan had been given an assignment from her one day in an attempt to rise through the ranks. There had been beef between her and a younger, frail fairy girl.
Damien had only been slightly telling the truth, Jessica wasn't his only friend. He had once had two friends at the orphanage: Jessica, and the fairy girl, Anna. The three of them had been inseparable. Anna and Damien, having met much earlier bonding due to being social outcasts, had eventually inducted Jessica into their group, after they realized she wasn't playing a prank on them and genuinely wanted to be their friend.
One day, Mindy had spilled Anna's milk after she accidentally bumped into the fairy girl while laughing loudly with her friends and gang members. Mindy hadn't intentionally meant to knock into Anna, but the fairy's unusually weak constitution would've made her tumble over if strong wind blew in her face. Regardless, Anna's fall silenced the dining hall and Mindy's uniform skirt would be soiled with Anna's drink. Damien and Jessica had then immediately rushed to their friend's side, glaring daggers at Mindy. Neither 9 year old knew that in doing so, they had doomed their friend in an effort to protect her.
Even in retrospect, and many had tried to psychoanalyze the aftermath, no one could truthfully say they had seen her retribution coming, nor the sheer depravity of it. Bumping into Anna had been such a seemingly minor event, but the anger Mindy had manifested seeing two younger children seemingly more wretched than herself glaring her down fearlessly, she, the most powerful gang boss at the orphanage, while the seemingly weak idiot that had tripped into her hid behind them, was apparently too much for Mindy to forgive.
Damien and Jessica would later learn that Mindy had not taken that interaction very well and had been stewing on how to take her revenge on the fairy girl in the worst way possible. And so it would happen, one day, Ivan appeared at her door, begging to be made into a captain in her gang, and Damien had been told she had immediately burst into loud fits of laughter. She apparently had used Ivan's desire for recognition, as her opportunity to get what she felt was valid retribution.
And so it would happen that on that shitty morning, Ivan and his cronies almost beat Anna to death in the orphanage courtyard over an obviously staged, incited, petty argument. Their plan was perfect, knowing fully well that Damien and Jessica were not only apart from each other, but both were on separate parts of campus than Anna was. She was all alone, and that was when they struck.
Damien remembered somberly that was the first day he ever felt his own magic. After the children had found him, alerting him best as they could through tear soaked faces, Damien had promptly lost it. In a roar of fury, his body transformed into an exalted state. Oozing a domineering pillar of burning rose golden energy, his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes and eyes became shining sparkling platinum. His eyes deeply glowing with white hot energy. The children stared transfixed, it was as if in mere moments the older boy had evolved into an avatar of light.
Immediately, Damien had exploded forward, racing at the bullies screaming in a voice that sounded like an army of millions of voices simultaneously. He remembered his hands, radiating the same golden energy, deeply injuring two of the bullies upon contact. Blasting them away in a tremendous explosion of power, Damien remembered he instantly whipped around grabbing a third by the face. Damien remembered his hand dug firmly into the bully's head, drawing blood from multiple locations, as the older tried desperately to break the Damien's iron grip, failing miserably.
It was then that Damien finally blacked out to the rage.
Damien had been told sometime later that his hands then began to glow even brighter. He had apparently gripped his other glowing hand to the other side of the bully's head. While letting out a loud, chaotic multi voiced-laugh, Damien proceeded to promptly light the boy alight in a massive, unholy pillar of fire. With a grip unbroken, u bothered by the heat he was outputting, Damien delivered the judgment of God, directly to the older boy's head as the he walked bone chilling screams of pain, having lost the ability to annunciate words, begging for mercy.
At that point Damien had to stop eating.
This was always the part that made thinking about himself in any positive light, so hard.
Even in the nicest of words, whenever anyone had retold to him what he did after he had lost consciousness, they made no mistake to say Damien looked like he had no intention of stopping the fire.
The bully's life was only saved by the barest of margins, by a chance attack from Tyson.
The bully had snuck up on Damien. Taking advantage of the smaller, glowing, psychotic child, Tyson launched the strongest haymaker he could muster, directly into Damien's head.
Tyson, pushing himself to move as fast as he possibly could, made his entire arm glow a deep, majestic purple as it raced forward in fractions of a second. Clothed with all the power and magic the large boy had left to muster, his blow had landed perfectly.
Instantly it blew the three apart, launching Damien like a ragdoll through the gymnasium, landing in the orphanage lake in a thunderous explosion. While the burnt bully, who flew backwards, promptly slumped to the ground caught in Tyson's exhausted arms.
But even the desperate strike of a full blooded, juvenile ogre, was for nothing.
Damien had apparently burst from the lake dwarfed within a massive pillar of rose-golden fire, causing a series of thunderous explosions. His chaotic, multi-voice laugher had apparently never ceased as he raced back single mindedly to his hunt while the bullies stared at their impending doom, horror painted on their faces...
***
The boy breathed out slowly, his hands shaking slightly as he broke from his memories momentarily. The mental turmoil he felt after he learned what he did, how he had fought, had never left. Damien couldn't remember doing such a thing, but something the boy never said out loud, was that he didn't know if he would've stopped himself, even if he could. He remembered the feeling of so much glorious power surging through his veins, he could see farther and clearer, hear better, think faster, move quicker, and hit so much harder. Sadly though he couldn't remember the fight, he could feel everything that he came into contact with, so much more intensely even from wherever he had been within his subconscious. That unfortunately included the endless onslaught of much more polished, tempered magic and fists of the much older teenage mages composed of vampires, half-orcs, half-trolls, and the orphanage's only full blooded ogre, Tyson, that came crashing into Damien from all sides relentlessly.
Even with all that wild new power, Damien somberly recounted how he had eventually succumbed to their violent beating. As even as strong as whatever he was, had proven to be, his magic was brand new, wild and untempered. He hadn't known how to even weave spells much less control his aura to not pour out all of his maximum energy output constantly.
Every hit Damien dealt may have been punishing and heavy, laced with contempt and intent to destroy, but he couldn't even heal his injuries using his own aura, something the bullies were very capable of doing. It wasn't even a war of attrition, Damien had been all show, and before he had dropped everyone watching could tell. Damien's body had been aching terribly and overheating to the point that his eyes were blocked by the sweat and blood pouring from his pores and orfaces. He had been "seeing" by trying to feel for the bullies' constantly moving aura shapes, and lashing out wildly at them. Wasting precious energy with every missed blow. He remembered feeling horrible pain and exhaustion from just the weight of his own energy and the heat he was emitting. So when the punches and spells of the bullies would hit, the pain he felt would be magnified so much more. The amount of trauma the smaller boy was sustaining made his head ring horribly, causing golden blood to come cascading from his eyes and nose.
Emboldened by all the damage Damien seemed to be taking despite having downed 3 of his goons, and causing the rest of them severe injuries, Ivan and the rest redoubled their efforts. Their only chance to survive was to pummel the strangely bright, burning child into the dirt before he could touch them. All of them had remained deathly afraid of the boy's glowing hands. All the while, they had never known Damien's own magic was doing more damage to himself than they were to him.
'Thank god for that,' Damien thought with a resigned sigh, 'they would've definitely killed me if they knew all they had to do was wait me out.'
A bright star he was, but like all newly bright stars, Damien remembered sourly, he had burnt out very fast. Compared to even the weakest of proper mages, he'd always eventually lose if he never even learnt to properly cultivate his aura. No matter how much magic he would learn, it would ultimately be a useless endeavor. Magic was the art of controlling and shaping energies collected and manipulated by multiplying those energies by the base that was the mage's own aura.
An aura that was never cultivated and tempered was like multiplying all that fabulous energy by zero at worst, and an extremely small fraction at best. No matter how many godly spells or artifacts Damien could get his hands on, nothing would ever change that. It was a law of magic written into Taboo itself.
Damien remembered that as he was about to pass out for good, a wave of malicious and unholy energy enveloped the entire courtyard. Before he went out, he remembered glimpsing something that felt like Ma LaCroix, but the image his eyes bore witness to, was seared into his nightmares ever since. Deep oceans of ghoulish, dark-green power, wailing menacingly and loudly riveted from her seemingly frail, but impossibly tall horned figure. She was wearing a wooden, blood red mask, but from her eye holes emanated a silent yet haunting deep green glow and she was holding a tall staff made of bones with jingling bells wrapped around it. The only thing he could think as the dark enveloped him, was that he was staring death itself in the face. After waking in the infirmary, Damien would learn from one of the Priests attending to the orphanage doctors, that for the first time expulsion had been doled out, and Mindy had been the first to go.
Her gang would dissolve after half of its members would also get the expulsion charge. Children, ages ranging from 14-18 within the gang, were tried by a tribunal of the founders, and if found guilty? They were coldly, finally, expelled for their crimes.
Ivan and his cronies, along with the other younger members of the former massive gang, had managed to skirt expulsion, pleading instead for a different punishment. Ma LaCroix, against her better judgment had conceded, however she had let them know soundly, there would never be a second chance for expulsion given to anyone again.
Damien looked up from his food, silently watching the old lady laugh and joke genuinely with her kitchen staff as they all subconsciously returned happy, content feelings coming through from their gentle intents.
He would later come to affirm that she was no powerless creature, far from it. She was one of the few grand blood witches, an arcmage of several forms of human and demonic magic. Even upon reaching the title of Baba Yaga, one reserved only for the most powerful witches of their era, she refused to stop her momentum in mastering the arcane arts. Her perseverance had long since attained her the pinnacle of her human cultivation, from there she eventually ascended into goddess-hood and immediately had delved deep into the powers and abilities it offered her. She was even rumored to have an art, and a very powerful one at that, though she'd never tell what it was.
"She's a goddess," Damien murmured to himself, still awestruck all these years later.
He'd learned that apparently any creature could reach god or goddess-hood through magical cultivation, though the exact process by which they did so varied immensely for each race. Which was why Ma LaCroix teaching Damien how to cultivate without knowing what he was, was unthinkable. Even so, specific cultivation stage-based powers achieved along the way to godhood, seemed to remain consistent among the creatures of the Mortal Realms no matter the method used.
Damien cringed slightly as he thought of how the first thing he did after being discharged from the infirmary all those years ago, was to immediately seek out Ma LaCroix and literally beg her, on his still heavily injured hands and knees, to teach him. And all he had achieved for his misguided efforts was messing up his painstakingly tended band aids, tracking blood all over her office carpeting.
While the old witch had kindly declined to teach him any demonic magic, any of the black magic arts she knew, or any method of human mage cultivation, where she was able to teach him, the old goddess was a literal godsend. She painstakingly taught Damien and Jessica many kinds of basic magic, spell forms and runes. She had also taught them basic magic circles, how to perform simple hand seals, and how to do daily basic mana purification for years. Jessica had progressed much faster than Damien eventually, in part because she had access to the many tomes the library held covering various kinds of werewolf cultivation, but also because of the abnormal amount of natural talent for magic she seemed to possess.
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Eventually, on his 12th birthday, Ma LaCroix even helped Damien create a secret spell, which she had promised him never to reveal unless it was absolutely necessary. The old goddess had seemed sad, she lamented that it was all she truthfully could do for him. But to Damien it was worth more than his weight in diamonds. Since no one at the orphanage actually knew what Damien was, they couldn't and usually just didn't want to, teach him any deeper forms of magic or even help him control the golden energy he was born with, despite the vast wealth of knowledge at the orphanage libraries.
Ever since magic had become commonplace on Earth, and the inhabitants of the Mortal Realms reached a universe wide economy, it had become painfully obvious relatively quickly, that teaching a mage the wrong cultivation method for their race would irreparably ruin their bodies forever. Not could, would. It was only ever a matter of time, but the effects were just as horrifying each time.
As he was finishing the last of his eggs, a warm steaming mug was placed in front of him. Before he even looked up, a big goofy smile broke out across his face.
"Sister Hua!" The young boy called out in merriment, looking up to see the tall smiling Asian lady's face. Sister Hua, of all the kitchen staff and the nuns and priests who helped run the orphanage alongside whatever few Dragon Class Lance Paladins that the United World Military or UWM could spare, was the closest thing to a mother that Damien had ever known. She had taken to the young boy as his primary caretaker ever since she first brought Damien to the orphanage as a small child.
"Happy evening, my little goose," Sister Hua said warmly to the boy. With nothing in her heart but barrels of tenderness and love, her intent radiated out warmly in a cheery bubble of joy that seemed to actually heal Damien's injuries softly. The boy stared at his now non injured wrists with wonder, turning it around slowly, checking if it was still real. Sister Hua giggled as she reached down to softly caress his soft brown curls. "Here's your wonderroot tea, my little goose, drink up."
"Thank you eomma," Damien replied happily, taking a deep sip from the drink, while Sister Hua kissed him on the forehead then proceeded to return back to her work, calling out to the aides and nuns she was working with to bring in the season's harvest before the snow came in that evening. Ma LaCroix and her aides also saw this as their cue to leave, hearing the chime of the evening bells ring loudly 10 times.
As they left, Damien let loose a relieved breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Sister Hua definitely noticed his remaining injuries, she had even just healed the rest of them! But she didn't even slightly react to it. Damien didn't know whether to be relieved or to start panicking, but the moment left him feeling deeply unsettled. Secretly, he attempted to reach out with his aura to try and search for Sister Hua's own aura without alerting her. But, just as every time he had done so before, her body felt stone dry of both mana and aura.
However, he remembered soberingly, the same could be said about Ma LaCroix. And through his 3 years of training with the old goddess, he learned that it was literally impossible for any existing creature to not have aura, though not all of them used mana like he did. For Damien to not be able to even sense a drop of their aura, meant they were at a level so incomprehensibly strong that both Damien's soul and brain instinctively denied him the ability to perceive it, lest the sheer awe, magnitude, and complexity of auras of such powerful beings permanently fry his brain. Damien drained the cup to halfway before stopping, sipping cautiously as more thoughts he'd been repressing came back to him.
Firstly, like himself, no one knew what Sister Hua was exactly. She had just shown up, one misty, quiet morning, carrying a young, sleepy eyed toddler in one arm and wheeling a meager suitcase behind her. Ma LaCroix had met her at the gate while she was raking the crisp autumn leaves that usually fell at the orphanage's front gates. Silently she watched Sister Hua, who'd appeared to the orphanage carrying infant Damien while in search of a job, approach up the main path to the large orphanage gates. At first the orphanage workers thought the two had to be mother and son, especially due to Damien's eyes being slanted, hinting that he was at least somewhat Asian, but Sister Hua had constantly dismissed these rumors. Instead, she claimed she had found Damian in a chance encounter. She'd recount how she had spotted the toddler discarded under a bridge one morning, as she was wandering along the Hudson River in search of nanny work.
But something didn't add up to Damien, two things in fact. He could never explain it, but he had always felt a weird kind of attraction to Sister Hua. Not romantic, but instead, it was an overpowering feeling of belonging.
'It wasn't that hard to get so attached to her,' the boy thought sourly, 'yeah the others love me when I protect them, but they don't exactly hide the fact that they're all afraid of me.' Damien felt his vision begin to fog up, 'I'm more of a circus attraction than a person.'
His bottom lip quivered slightly as he wiped a tear from his eye, shaking his head before it could cause him to cry in public.
'Not again,' Damien thought to himself with a reserved sigh.
He had long since accepted his unwillingly imposed solitude, since the only people that didn't seem to fully mind not knowing what he was, seemed to be Ma LaCroix, Sister Hua, and Jessica.
'Much less awkward this way,' he thought regretfully, since after that fateful day, none of them had ever seen Anna again.
Picking up the tea, he stared at the rest of the remaining drink for a minute, swirling it around slowly before finishing it in one go, tipping it back like a shot. Damien had long since become incredibly suspicious of the wonderroot teas she kept giving him since Anna had left. He had drank the tea from the same cup as her many times before, so had been sure for a long time that it wasn't poisonous. Yet, for some reason, he felt a base, almost primal desire to drink the herb that didn't diminish with the years. Actually, the boy could swear he was sure it was getting stronger. And he was doubly very sure it wasn't a coincidence that it was the only kind of tea Sister Hua would brew for the two of them to share together. Nor was it probably a coincidence that the endless thoughts seemed easier to handle after he drank the tea; nor the fact that the strange itching sensation in his back he would feel from time to time and the rampaging dark inner rage he felt that day, seemed to disappear for days at a time whenever he drank it.
'There's something she's not telling me,' the boy thought to himself quietly, 'a lot of somethings, and she's probably long since been aware that I'm suspicious of that.'
Though he hadn't a shred of an idea what the reason for her feigned ignorance might be, and he certainly wasn't going to challenge his possibly divine surrogate mother and ruin their relationship, or far worse, learn what a chancla throw from a goddess could look like. He shivered in his seat at the thought of a sandal turning him into ash.
Damien couldn't help thinking the way he did, truly he tried but it felt that ever since he hit 10 years old, he could literally feel himself mentally developing and aging at breakneck speed. It was like constant agony. Whenever he abstained from the teas for too long, he would become debilitated in his room, unable to move from the constant pounding migraines.
He could feel the speed at which his brain received and processed thoughts had also super increased, leading to him being diagnosed with a myriad of strange cases throughout his life as local doctors attempted to make sense of the boy's strange biology, yet always failing. For an entire year after the Anna incident, he had been taken to clinic after clinic. After the local doctors turned up nothing, Sister Hua had even begun spending her own meager income, supplemented by the orphanage, to look for specialty clinics. Though Sister Hua would never let him know how much it cost, Damien had once found receipts of one such clinic visit. The amount he read, before taxes, made the then 11 year old vomit horribly from anxiety.
Eventually, after exhausting a year and a half, and more money than Damien ever wanted to think about, they landed on a possibly magical strand of incredibly hyperactive ADHD. Some doctors, thinking it was a sign of awakening Lupinism or Vampirism, or that the boy was fae-touched, had prescribed him a medley of top of the line, expensive pills usually given to teens undergoing those processes, in a hope that one would help to stabilize his bucking pre-pubescent aura. And of course, Sister Hua silently, humbly paid the amount, without even a word of contest.
However, Damien remembered, he had never actually taken any of those pills. Sister Hua secretly took them from him the night he came back from the hospital with them, and had replaced them with a different bottle of rock candies disguised as pills. She had told him the wonderroot teas were all he needed and to lie if anyone ever asked him if he was taking the pills. They silently agreed not to mention it, but Damien never forgot that night. It was then that he had finally admitted to himself that, though it ate him up inside with guilt to be suspicious of his surrogate mother, if anyone knew what he was, it was probably Sister Hua.
Why she clearly wasn't willing to divulge that information though, was something he couldn't figure out.
'If only it was just the damn pills,' Damien thought angrily. Eventually he had stopped having the migraines, even after not taking the tea for longer than a week, but he still remembered, soberingly, to never attempt that again.
'Yeah, na,' he thought with finality, 'what comes after just isn't worth it.'
Damien had learnt one morning while cleaning the pool, that the worst of the torture of puberty for whatever he was, came in the form of countless thoughts, unceasing processing of any and all stimuli around him, both physical and metaphysical whether he liked it or not. He often didn't like it. He liked it far less when in a daze, looking at the world around him, he tripped into the pool and nearly drowned. Since then he also understood why the orphanage always had some of the water dryad nuns watching over pool cleaning.
The endless amount of forced, deep analyzing... mentally tortured him. Though as he grew, drinking the wonderroot teas regularly, he felt it slowing down more and more before eventually returning to "normal". Damien was eternally grateful for this but it had irreparably changed him. Making relating to other kids feel awkward at best and it made having crushes on girls his own age feel weird and forced. His increased antisocial habits didn't make his already prevalent problem of not being able to integrate with anyone any easier.
After he reached his 12th birthday, Damien realized that his hyperthinking brain had not so much grown silent, but had in fact separated itself from his main subconscious and consciousness. As with everything else that seemed to be tied to whatever he was, it was something Damien learned in the most unfortunate way possible.
One moment the boy was cooking pancakes, the next moment he was a robot, fascinatedly watching chemical reactions mixing with colorful arrays of golden energy through the dense fog of smog that his pancakes and the kitchens had turned into. He had eventually come back to reality while being rushed out of the building, carried by a frantic nun that had found the boy arrested in place, watching smoke mix with magic energy as fire raged around him.
Damien wanted to be angry at the revived litany of weird looks, constant whispers, and constant forced loneliness that followed his every moment around the orphanage grounds for months after that, but he knew it wouldn't be fair. He couldn't ask others to feel safe around him, when he didn't even feel safe sneezing at times, fearing he'd learn golden fire could manifest from his nostrils. The added fact that the fire had only singed his clothes and burnt half the kitchens, but the boy himself had been found completely unburnt, probably didn't help.
It felt like he was sharing 2 brains with himself, in the same head. In time he realized that he could almost... shift brains with the SuperComputer. It was what he named his second personality. In this form, he felt his body heat up significantly, but not overpoweringly. He was hyper aware of everything and all forms of energy moving around him. He could see incredibly far with crystal clarity, hear a pin drop from miles away, and his physical strength increased by orders of magnitude. But nothing came close to the amount of shimmering rose-gold energy and fire that came pouring out of his body beyond his control, at least at first it was beyond his control. Nowadays it pulsed in an aura around him, just taller than Damien himself. Yet, now it felt like the softest hug imaginable that could soothe any and all pain completely. But it also sang and chanted, repeatedly, endlessly, and loudly.
Damien shuddered as he recalled the sensation, the energy was literally singing to him, chanting in his ears. Songs of power, destruction, salvation, judgment, worship. He truly felt the longer he stayed in that state, while sure he felt unstoppable, he also felt himself going more and more insane.
Damien recalled the first time he had attempted to intentionally induce shifting into his SuperComputer after it had separated from him. It was the first time he was making contact with the energy since the kitchen fire, and he was determined not to make the same mistakes. This time, he was deep in the woods surrounding the orphanage. He had left a wooden doll that he enchanted to look and act like him to do his chores so no one would notice he was gone.
Damien reminisced grimly as he remembered how beautiful everything looked in ultra high definition. How slow everything around him moved, as he realized he could ramp up his perception speed until it was far far faster than the world around him. How glorious the shimmering golden energy looked, giving everything he saw through it a thin film of rainbow lighted gold as he spun and spun slowly... until he blacked out.
When he came to, what Damien saw immediately terrified him. He was laying inside a massive pillar of rose golden fire. It was pillaring high into the sky and had scorched the life out of everything in a 20 meter radius around him. At this point the chanting of the energy that was still pouring out of him, fueling the flames, sounded like thunderous war cries, booming in his ears. Damien recalled how he couldn't hear anything else over the chanting, he was panickily clutching his ears trying to get any kind of respite. None came, though he was sure he had been screaming for dear life at the top of his lungs. Damien recalled how at some point he had fallen back down to his knees, struggling to shift his brain back from the psychotic walking torch the SuperComputer had turned out to be. Through the intense pain and scream chanting, Damien struggled to keep his eyes open, determined to not black out a second time lest his flames go on to burn down the entire orphanage. Just as he gave in to the pain and passed out for a second time, he saw a dark figure standing above him with deep, golden eyes, that had the clearest, diamond blue hue he had ever seen. His last thought before he fell to the inrushing darkness, was ',those eyes... look like mine.'
Damien got up, having long finished his food, he walked absentmindedly through the crowd of kitchen aides, as he continued his reminiscing.
He recalled that after he awoke in the infirmary, the first thing he saw was Sister Hua sitting asleep in a chair next to him. He remembered looking down and seeing piles of used wet towels, he assumed had likely been used to keep his forehead cool for however long he had been there. He felt bad at the damage his selfishness had likely caused, and felt even worse that he couldn't get the image of the figure with eyes like his out of his brain. Even with his bone tired, surrogate mother sleeping next to him. Instead of thinking of her effort for him, all the boy could think of was if she was the figure or not. He couldn't make out if the person he saw was a man or a woman, and it had bothered him ever since.
So close, yet still so far.
In the following months, he recalled how he had thrown every waking moment he could spare into training to control himself as long as possible while connected to his SuperComputer. Ma LaCroix and Sister Hua were always within sight, coaching the young boy through developing his magic as much as either of them knew how. Ultimately, recently, giving him a blessed 1 minute of complete clarity in his SuperComputer state. Which was how, to bring the circle to a close, he thrashed the bullies not much earlier. Somberly, he went to begin washing the mountainous valley of dinged up fine china, also known as the day's dishes, where he could start upon his other favorite task, more thinking.
He thought back to the events just prior, Damien knew he didn't enjoy beating on the bullies, well maybe the first couple times sure. But it had become akin to a sad eventuality for him, a bothersome chore rather than a heroic duty, not to mention the bullies hadn't actually posed a challenge for him for quite a while, even when it was 7 on 1. The older boys were cruel and heartless, yes, but they had also long since come to the sad realization years ago that the races they were, simply didn't have favorable odds for adoption.
'Vampires, Orcs, Ogres, Trolls, Dwarves or,' he thought dryly, 'mysteries like myself or somehow even worse, halfies.'
Damien sighed, and to make matters even better, everyone knew that if a child wasn't adopted before 13, their chances of ever getting to know what parental love felt like, would dwindle to almost zero. That wasn't just true of their modern, vastly interconnected magical society, but even before the Second World War, before magic would become commonplace throughout the Earth, this truth stood untested. Teens did not get adopted very often. For very many reasons, that fact sadly only grew when the issue of magic and a menagerie of magical races was thrown into the mix. If an unfortunate case of an orphanage kid not getting adopted happened, their only path left was sadly, graduation.
There were usually only two options left for "graduates" of the orphanage. Upon the orphan's 18th birthday, the three heads of the orphanage: Father Clyde, Ma LaCroix, and Lord Jurovi, would sit with the birthday kid and inform them of their very, very, bland choices.
The first choice was to leave the orphanage as a full adult. The orphanage didn't want to cast their kids to the wolves, but at a capacity of over 800 kids at a time, spanning all races and all ages, keeping every graduate would've bankrupted the orphanage long ago. Instead, the orphanage would give the graduate however much they could spare, usually it was never more than $500. Then they would wish the graduates good luck as they would leave the orphanage gates, and attempt to survive in the real world on their own terms.
But with the rampant threat of cultist groups, demon worshipers, actual demons and much much worse, it wasn't very surprising when many that survived would return after only a week or two. Usually they were very haggard, looking much worse for wear than when they had left, and desperately begging the orphanage to give them a job so they could at least feel safe behind it's tall, iron gates again. Those ones usually didn't go outside much after returning, and adamantly refused to go anywhere alone, though they would never explain why. The older adults seeing this would just share sad, knowing glances, and not question it. However, seeing the states their old friends were reduced to after just mere weeks in the outside world, gave many of the younger orphan's terrible nightmares of what would happen to them, should they themselves fail to be adopted.
The second choice was constant room and board, 3 square meals a day, state of the art facilities to train body, soul and magic, a wealth of knowledge, resources and connections, upwards social mobility and it was backed by one of the most powerful organizations to ever exist in the Mortal Realms. The downside was, to get any of this, the orphanage grad had to sign away the next 10 years of their lives to the United World Military. This would entail 10 years of semi-active, to fully active duty. It meant always having to be ready to deploy to whatever horrific event was spontaneously occurring anywhere on Earth or on any planet in any realm, at a moment's notice. Even when on vacation. Sworn to uphold universal peace within the Mortal Realms, the UWM was a true last ditch effort to avoid a full scale, universe ending war after the irrefutable existence of magic, magical creatures, vast intelligent life in 2 half universes, gods, and god with a capital G, became commonplace after WW2. Every world nation that wanted protection from any flavor of rogue mages, monsters, or even the occasional super being or god summoned from wherever that wanted to life wipe their country, was to make annual contributions to the UWM in the form of money, artifacts, magic, technologies, food, and most importantly, new recruits. Nations that joined the coalition were still allowed their own militaries to protect their own domestic interests since the UWM fought the terrors of the entire Mortal Realms and even some of the Divine Realms. On all fronts, on all battlefields, at every hour, the UWM would be there.
'It's a real good thing many cultures and countries consider collecting titles in the UWM to be a high status symbol,' Damien thought as he dried his hands. Having apparently finished all the rest of the dishes in a trance-like state, Damien proceeded to collect the rest of his things and his coat. 'Their mortality rates are so high among their weaker ranks, that it's a guaranteed death sentence if you can't make at least Sargent within 3 years, if you even last 3 years.'
Damien didn't really enjoy thinking about these things. Realistically his own chances weren't looking much better. Magical racism was alive and well, but so was good ol' reliable racism. Even if whichever prospective couple that came along didn't racially discriminate against him on some level, which was rare, the eventual elephant in the room would appear. No one knew what he was, non magically or magically. Even if the adopting couple had his best interest at heart, ironically that's what would usually stop them from taking him. Joining the UWM was the best bet he had.
Every family on Earth wanted to boast a powerful mage that had won achievements and recognition through obtaining titles and ranks in the UWM. The UWM was the greatest defense of the Mortal Realms, and earth was her homeworld. It assured that no matter how horrifying the battles the UWM fought, it would always have a surplus of recruits. Especially since the possibility of even attaining godhood was much higher the more one rose the ranks. On their own, godhood was many leagues beyond a pipe dream for the vast majority of mages in the Mortal Realms, despite the countless ages and talents, even if technically anyone could achieve it. If a UWM soldier eventually did ascend, going on to becoming a Lancer or higher, they would instantly become world famous celebrities. No matter their country of origin, their families would instantly rise to the highest ranks of their nobility. Sadly, knowing how best to properly train that future divine celebrity was paramount to having a shot at achieving this goal...
Damien knew that unless something drastic in his life changed soon, the lower ranks of the UWM was the brightest his future could get. Life would be so easy if he could just attain Godhood before he hit 17, he could join the UWM at such a high rank he'd never want for anything again, but that was far too much of a pipe dream to even waste his dish washing time thinking about.
"If they can't figure out what I am," the boy muttered to himself as he left the now mostly empty kitchen and began the cool, nighttime trek across the snowy-filled, great courtyard to the benches, "then I need to start getting proactive about that, and soon."