If my high school computer science class had taught me anything, it was that recursion was a terror that no one really understood.

“Andalon did a plus!” Andalon said, in the now, delighted and radiant.

Having heard her performance twice over, I realized there was no getting around it. I was going to have to make sense of her gibberish.

I leaned toward her. “If you don’t mind, Andalon… could I ask you some questions?”

“Questions!” She bounced in her seat, bobbing her head excitedly. “Questions!”

I inhaled. “Okay,” I muttered.

I started thinking aloud about everything I’d seen so far. I also really liked the idea of using three-step procedures as an organizing principle.

Three was a very sensible number.

Although her explanation had seemed like gibberish, as I ran it through my head again and again, I couldn’t deny that parts of it were not entirely unfamiliar to me.

For instance: the shimmery-wimmery.

“No, that name won’t do,” I muttered.

With the help of the “wyrmsight” Andalon had gifted me with—that was the name I’d chosen, and I was sticking with it—I’d discovered that there were shimmery-wimmery weaves of light at work in each and every supernatural phenomena I’d seen, whether it was Letty stopping bullets mid-air, or Nina dusting an examination room in rime and snow, or the ultramarine transformation matrix woven through my body.

I looked at Andalon. “Let’s call them plexuses.”

She tilted her head in confusion. “Plessuses?”

“Yes. Singular plexus. It’s an anatomical term. It’s normally used to describe networks of blood vessels or nerves, but you can use it to describe any intricate, web-like formation.”

Pre-wyrmsight, I hadn’t been able to see plexuses with my eyes. I felt them more than I saw them, and—to the extent that I did “see” them—it was in my mind’s eye, much like the way we “saw” things in our dreams. Nina had said much the same about how she perceived the plexuses, so, either she had yet to develop my viewing ability, or wyrmsight was a talent exclusive to wyrms and wyrms-in-training.

And some parts are loud and tasty, and other parts are quiet and they tickle.

Andalon pointed in the air. “I said that! Andalon said that!”

I still did not understand the nature of Andalon’s sensory perceptions⁠. (Did she even have “senses”?) In her first few appearances to me, she’d seemed to only have been aware of things I was actively thinking about, or had thought about at some point or another—including ghosts like Aicken. After my tail had started to grow in, however, starting in the cafeteria, Andalon had demonstrated an awareness of the environment—well, my environment. That suggested that, however they worked, her senses were somehow coordinating with my bodily senses, possibly even operating through them outright.

So, she was aware of sensory details. And from what I’d seen with my wyrmsight, details of that sort definitely applied to the plexuses. The plexuses came in a variety of forms, varying in shape, color, brightness, texture, intensity, as well as in other factors that I couldn’t even begin to name.

“Actually,” I said, “wait a minute.”

“Yeah?”

“Do wyrms have any other special senses?” I asked.

She tilted her head to the side. “What’s a senses?”

“I mean, can they receive information in special ways other than wyrmsight?”

Andalon pursed her lips. “What’s information?”

Frustrated, I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, and then huffed. “You know the wyrmsight ability you gave me?”

She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Will I get any more abilities like that?”

She nodded. “Yeah, lotsa sees, lotsa sees.”

“Can you give them to me now?”

“If you eat more, yeah, but…” she looked downward, “it would make your sees all glooby, and I don’t think you would like that very much.”

Though I didn’t know what glooby meant, I had a feeling she was right in claiming that I wouldn’t like it very much.

“Can you give early access wyrmsight to other transformees?”

She shook her head. “Nuh-uh, they aren’t Mr. Genneth. But they’ll get it as they get wyrmly-er.”

I took that as a “no”.

So, in summary: I had wyrmsight already, and, at some point, I was going to develop some other weird senses at some point. I’d just have to play it by ear until then.

“It won’t happen for a while,” Andalon said.

Anyhow, next, there was the matter of the auras.

“Aura” was what I’d decided to call the plexus-like formations that I’d seen in people and animals. I wasn’t sure whether they were another variation of plexuses, or something else altogether. Though, from what I’d seen—and with some of Andalon’s insights—I was certain that the auras were connected to consciousness and the nervous system, maybe even the soul.

Was “soul” an empirically quantifiable property? I had no idea.

I was stepping into a brave new world of neuropsychiatry.

For now, though, whether the auras were visual manifestations of the soul picked up by my wyrmsight, or just ripples left in the wake of consciousness, what mattered was that I could use them as a diagnostic tool. I could see who was infected and where the infection was and how severe it was, and I could distinguish flesh-and-blood people from ghosts—the ghosts didn’t have any aura of their own. I could even use them to spot other Type Two cases—transformees like myself. A brilliant lacework of violet and ultramarine wove in and over and around the bodies of those who, like me, were developing powers and transitioning into wyrms. The energy adorned their bodies like tattooed runes. I wasn’t even sure whether the lacework was aura, plexus, a combination of the two, or something else entirely.

I could only speculate.

Overhead, the fluttering of wings drew my attention; a bird flew by. With my wyrmsight currently thickened everywhere—so that I could easily see auras and plexuses—I noticed that the bird had an aura of its own. It was a lot like the ones I saw in people, just not as colorful. I’d seen similar displays in one of the seeing-eye dogs I’d passed on the way here.

But that wasn’t all that I saw.

The bird was infected. The same spiky, rainbow razzmatazz plexus that I’d seen creeping through human beings infected by the NFP-20 fungus was also present in the bird. The bird swerved irregularly, flying like a drunken pilot, crashing into a window a moment after swooping out of sight.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I winced at the impact.

Leaning over the garden walls to my immediate right, I followed the bird with my eyes until it plummeted out of sight.

Below, a chilly breeze had whisked soupy fog in between the glass, steel and chrome of Elpeck’s sleek skyscrapers. Ceaseless noise echoed from the fog-hidden streets below. Traffic brayed. Sirens wailed. The noises reverberated into a sonic slurry as they bounced off the towering buildings. I’d heard the same noises last night while drifting off to sleep, and they hadn’t let up since.

Normally, the streets in and around West Elpeck Medical would have been flushed with pedestrians of all sorts. Now, though, they were barely a trickle. Meanwhile, for the automobiles, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic, most of which came from people trying to get to the hospital. There were ambulances everywhere, desperate to make their way to or from the hospital.

It was a troubled morning, to say the least.

Clenching my fists, I turned around and went back to my seat.

I had to do this.

“Alright,” I said, looking Andalon in the eyes, “Step One: I need to visualize the plexus. Does that sound about right to you?”

Andalon nodded in agreement. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

This might actually work…

“And what is visualize?” she asked, emphasizing the last word.

I stand corrected.

The particular details Andalon didn’t understand were fascinating in their own way. As a whole, they suggested that, whatever Andalon was, many of the concepts human beings took for granted were foreign to her. Considering that my best guesses for Andalon’s identity were—in no particular order—a helpful spirit being in seriously over her head; one of the Moonlight Queen’s understudies; a junior goddess on an internship; and failed deity from another reality, it wasn’t that surprising that she didn’t know what “visualizing” meant.

I clenched my fists again. “No, no.” I planted my palms on the table. “Stay on topic.” I took a deep breath and nodded self-assuredly. “Alright,” I muttered, “let’s do this. Step One.”

Rubbing my dead hands together to warm them up, I held them hands in front of me like I was grasping onto a crystal orb.

You gotta make the shimmery-wimmery before you can make it go woo woo.

I tried repeating what I’d done on previous occasions. I focused on the spot in the air and imagined music solidifying—but softly, not too much.

The effect was instantaneous. Metallic blue and gold coils winked into existence inside the orb-shaped region I imagined in my hands were surrounding. It was a messy, beautiful tangle that undulated and spun, confined within the imaginary orb. It was like a musical note given physical form. It even worked in much the same way. With a wind instrument, you have to blow and keep blowing in order for the note to play; with the plexus, I had to actively will it to be there. It quickly faded away as soon as I stopped thinking about it.

I rubbed the chin of my mask, making sure not to lose my focus on the plexus. “So… that’s Step One.”

“Yep!”

“Next up, Step Two.” I drew my hands away from the orb, clenching my fingers.

The plexus stayed within the imaginary orb’s confines.

“I… I guess I imagine it doing what I want it to do?” I looked at Andalon. “To make it do what I want to do, I let it get loud in my head, right?”

“Yeah!” Andalon nodded repeatedly. “Yeah yeah yeah!”

“Step Three,” I asked, wanting to get ahead of the game, “I let it go… yaah? The loudness passes out of me and into the plexus and then the magic… happens? Is that right?”

“Is that one of those rhetorlical questions, Mr. Genneth?”

I shook my head.

“Then Andalon says yes!” She shot her arms up victoriously. “You did it, Mr. Genneth! You did the thing!”

I took another deep breath. “I appreciate your confidence, but save your praise until I’ve actually done it. Words matter, but actions matter more.”

Andalon nodded.

“Is there anything you recommend for me to practice?”

She smiled broadly. “Andalon does not know!”

Fair enough.

I rubbed my hands together.

Angel, the lag makes that feel weird.

“Alright, what to try first?” I looked around.

I’d taken to calling my abilities psychokinesis because, you know—if it walks like a duck…—but that was just an arbitrary designation I’d given them. It didn’t mean that’s what these powers actually were. It was just a name. Heck, I didn’t even have a concrete list of what I could actually do.

I blinked. “Actually, I should do that right now.”

I counted them off with my fingers.

So far, I could move objects, as well as crush… crushable things. At heart, both of those fears were forms of force exertion, right?

I nodded. “There’s the billion-dollar question.”

“Huh?” Andalon asked.

“What kinds of forces can I exert?”

It was time to find out.

For my test subject, I eventually settled on a chair at one of the nearby tables. Like all the other chairs out here, it had an outdoorsy, wood-slat appearance, though I knew for a fact that it was actually made from a synthetic compound that had been molded and textured to look like wood. Like virtually every other plastic product on earth, it was of DAISHU make, which meant it was lightweight, absurdly sturdy, and biodegradable—provided you applied the appropriate patented enzymatic solution.

Basically: it was the perfect target for magic practice. (And let’s not kid ourselves here, that’s exactly what I was doing!)

I guess that would make me a wizard now, right? Or was this spontaneous spellcasting?

Man… if only Dana were here. She’d love this.

I exhaled. “Stay on topic.”

Right: the chair.

The chair was currently slid under the table, so, as a first feat…

“I will slide the chair out from under the table.”

I sounded like the world’s weirdest self-help guru.

Sticking out my arms, I conjured a plexus in the space occupied by the chair—blue and gold, as always. I didn’t know if I needed to stick out my arms to do this, but I felt like doing it, so I did.

And then I let the power flow. Really, it was just like blowing a note on my clarinet.

The plexus’ threads thickened. Their glow brightened as they began to swirl around, like a den of snakes chasing their tails.

“Move,” I whispered.

But nothing happened.

Frowning, I stopped the power flow, but kept the plexus in place.

I closed my eyes and huffed.

I’d forgotten Step Two.

Biting my lip, I tried again.

“Move!”

This time, I didn’t forget Step Two. I imagined pulling both the chair and the plexus, tugging them out from underneath the table. I gave the plexus a flair of purpose. This wasn’t just something that I wanted to move, it had motion stamped into its very essence, like a stretch of track in a racing game with had arrows on it that sped you up when you passed over them.

The psychokinetic light-filaments stretched away from the chair’s position. They undulated in helical waves as I let the power flow.

The chair skittered across the patio, traveling along the path the plexus laid out for it, the chair-legs scraping against the concrete. Halfway through, friction gained the upper hand; the chair fell forward with a light thud—but it didn’t stop moving. It continued to slide until it reached the end of the blue and gold path, and then friction won out completely, bringing the chair to a noisy halt… several feet away.

All of this happened in the span of about two seconds.

Holy moly…

“Stab me!” I muttered.

Andalon shot up like a missile. “Wow!” She floated a couple feet off the ground. “You did it!”

I mustered a weak smile. “Well… I’ve still got a lot more to figure out.”

I spent the next couple of minutes playing around with this new trick of mine. Objects would move along the path marked out by the plexus, provided that I’d imbued it with the right properties. The pre-fungus edition of the laws of physics reasserted themselves the instant the object or objects being moved left the plexus’ area of influence.

The more I tried, the more nuance I discovered, particularly in Step Two. I found that I could increase the acceleration factor by willing the filaments of light to be thicker and more densely packed. Inversely, making the network thinner reduced the amount of force they created. I also learned that there was no reason not to do Steps One and Two all in one go. Giving the plexus the desired shape, direction, and density at the very moment of its creation.

Honestly, there was an unnerving amount of logic to it. Setting up a moderately dense plexus several yards long—basically, a psychokinetic railgun—took about as much out of me as a super-dense weave of short threads. The “railgun” accelerated pebbles and clumps of dirt from zero to blistering within a count of three, launching them in the direction of the plexus—which, in this case, meant up and over the garden wall. I could also just smack an object with a dense weave of short threads, dealing a stronger, swifter blow, but at the cost of less control over where the object went.

I also learned that it was really, really important to modulate my strength. I’d been going into Step Three with the assumption that the psychokinetic force required to push a chair a couple of feet across the ground was at one end of the power-intensity spectrum and that the force required to launch that same chair skyward was at the other end of the spectrum, and that the separation between the two was wide indeed. It seemed the rational thing to assume. Unfortunately, part of being rational meant having to admit when you were wrong, such as when your assumptions about the power required to move a chair across a patio resulted in a car alarm wailing shrilly from the street below after launching said chair into the air like a bullet train going off the rails. So, yeah, I had my work cut out for me.

Still, progress was progress, and in this case, progress was pastries, which I bopped back into the hospital to get after about half an hour of my training session. My repeated usage of these powers was definitely draining my energy reserve, though I couldn’t be sure whether that net effect of the drain was to delay my transformation—perhaps by redirecting the energy driving it—or to add more fuel to the flame, more food equaling more change.

Only time would tell.

The wyrmsight really did make a world of a difference. Without it, I imagined it might have taken years for me to figure out some of these things.

Next up on the bucket list? Levitation.

In hindsight, that probably wasn’t the best choice.