John was in a dark space. Well, his point of view was, at least. He realized his body felt… muted, somehow. He tried raising a hand into view, and nothing happened. There was no feedback from his muscles. What’s that called again? Pro-something… proprioception? That’s it.
Unfortunately, John remembering the word didn’t spark any change. Puzzled and increasingly panicky, he tried looking around. The same flat black void lay in all directions. On closer inspection, there were some miniscule dark red flakes hanging in the distance. John couldn’t discern any rhyme or reason for their distribution, save for a few random regions with greater density than the others.
Increasingly concerned, John tried looking downwards. Finally. Below his viewpoint, a large pulsating sphere of liquid swirled and gurgled. John instinctively recognized it as his mana. The crimson mass was intimately familiar, yet full of mystery. John willed his viewpoint closer and was surprised to see that it worked.
As he descended towards the churning sphere of mana, he noticed the flakes shifting around him. In particular, it looked like there were distinct trails heading away from the primary mass of mana. Two went downwards before splitting, while another two traveled away from each other diagonally and upwards. One final trail was much denser than the others and traveled almost parallel to the up and left trail. Realization struck. It can’t be…
John moved towards the densest trail. It ended maybe halfway along the other trail. John circled around the cloud of flakes at the end of the trail. Viewing the cloud from all angles, John almost believed it formed a rough heart shape. He spun and moved away from the cardioid cloud and the sphere of mana. Soon enough, he hit a boundary. It was an impassable barrier, and sliding around its bounds revealed it was in the rough shape of his torso.
Like a fly, John buzzed around the edges of this new space. He was increasingly convinced it was his body, made visible by his mana. He didn’t know what the flakes were, but he suspected they represented individual cells or tissues that had some traces of mana left over after from when he’d been shot. Curiously, they were still. That seemed bad, heart cells needed to move.
John looked back at the pooled mana in his torso. The pool had grown tepid. The mana barely moved and lacked the previous luster. Panic returned in full. John was dying, and for no discernable reason.
He flitted around the pool of mana, trying to rouse some sort of response. Moving his viewpoint through it did nothing, he just bounced off. He tried moving it through his body the same way he had previously, again to no result.
John’s vision began to fuzz around the edges, and his movement slowed. Desperate, he tried to combine the two previous methods. He moved into the despondent pool of mana while instructing it to follow him. Miraculously, it worked. A thin strand followed him. Success came as a blessing and a curse. The mana was spooling out behind him, that much was certain. However, as the mana gathered into lifesaving cordage the load grew greater.
John heaved, using mental muscles he did not know he had. Surviving the gunshots earlier had incurred a debt and now the Reaper was coming to collect. John had no intention of giving up easily. He hauled on the line, getting closer to his heart. He figured he was about four inches away, but that distance may as well have been uncrossable.
Screams of effort that would have longed deafened any observer rang futilely in the blackened space. John could only barely see the cluster of red flakes, his goal fading in and out of sight as seconds passed. He struggled onwards, but knew his effort was futile. He continued dragging the mana behind him, for what other choice did he have?
Unexpectedly, a shockwave rattled John’s body. The cloud of motes pinpointing John’s heart compressed. Is someone doing CPR on me? The motes decompressed, much slower than CPR should have been. That explained something John had bene wondering about. Time in this space moved slower than the real world outside. Which should help him.
As his heart decompressed, the mana he was hauling gained some luster back, became more pliable, and even seemed to surge forwards towards his heart. It seemed like his magic relied on his blood flow, which made sense if he had blood mana. His vision cleared a little, and he advanced another inch towards his heart before he slowed again.
Another shockwave came, bolstering his mana another time. He gained less ground this time, more like three quarters of an inch. John fretted. This was an unsustainable cycle. If he kept slowing down, he would fall short of the finish line, and would perish even if his heart resumed beating. The cycle continued as he predicted, before he finally finished a scant fraction of an inch from the cloud of motes.
John waited for his next opportunity. When the next compression and shockwave came, he made a herculean effort and heaved on his mana. He desperately willed it to disperse into the surroundings and make more of those flakes. The very tip of the tendril he carried entered the rough cloud, and a snap echoed through the space. Revitalized, mana poured from the pool at his navel into his heart. It flooded cells as it saturated his heart.
John’s perception spiraled down into the mana itself. It wanted to fill in as much space as it could, but he knew instinctually that he would need to guide it somehow. It couldn’t bd allowed to flow aimlessly, lest it leave one section unsaturated, and then he’d be in even deeper shit than before. John started from the center of his cardioid muscles. Half remembered anatomy lessons came back in force. He knew he had 4 ventricles to fill, and all the associated valves. He could almost feel those structures around him, but the mana’s need to be utilized was too great. Already it was spilling out of his control, so John picked a direction and began to move.
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Forging ahead, John passed through a space where the mana flowed easily and left no trace. He assumed this was blood and ignored it for now. The muscles were what he needed, not the fluid they propelled. If he allowed his blood to saturate, the small amount of mana he had available would likely dilute throughout his body, unable to help him survive this catastrophe. He hit a wall, where the mana started to leave duller red specks as it moved. John knew this area must be heart muscle, and silently thanked whatever was out there to hear him.
John worked by instinct, guiding droplets of mana down individual muscle fibers to saturate individual tissues. As the curves in the walls of his heart filled in further, John knew which segment he was in. This let him move more deliberately, planning how he would fill in his heart with the mana he had available. He knew it would be possible with the mana available to him, but he would need to be careful and consider his actions.
Fiber by fiber, tissue by tissue, John made progress. Connective tissues accepted mana more easily than muscle did, and he made gains in the amount of mana he would have left. The end drew closer as the flow began to taper off. The last few segments of tissue and muscle filled in before his heart gave a tentative effort to beat. The mass of mana and muscle contracted, but it was all out of sync. John realized he would have to coordinate the tissues to do their job correctly. With one final act of will, and this was final, for John found himself truly exhausted, John triggered the correct sections for a systolic heartbeat and prayed that his body would take over. He found his viewpoint ejected from the mana and once again saw the heart from the outside, like a glistening and beautifully shaped planetoid.
Pulling back, the shape of his heart came into sharp relief. The mana filled it in entirely, even managing to spread along a couple inches of arteries and veins before petering out. His heart shuddered and beat once, more confident this time. The sound of the beat cascaded through his body, shoving John’s perspective back into the real world.
The transition was jarring. One second, he was watching his new heart work triumphantly. The next, he was lying on the ground, a concerned crowd looking down at him. An EMT paused, midway through placing defibrillator leads on John’s chest.
John grinned, “Hey! Don’t think I need that anymore! Thanks though!”
The medic laughed, “Well, I suppose you don’t, do you? How’d you pull that off?”
“Must’ve been magic,” John, winking. Don’t want to let everyone know how I pulled that off just yet.
John pushed himself up to a sitting position on the sidewalk. Looking around, he saw most of his party standing around, in addition to several unknown medics and bystanders from around the camp. He waved to everyone, then stood up, pushing the EMT away as he rose. It was easier than it should have been. John shrugged. It must have been a benefit of having so much mana in his body. John filed the thought away, something to investigate later.
For the second time today, John found himself surrounded by his friends and family after he’d nearly died. He was exhausted, but he could tell that there was something pressing based on the look in his dad’s eyes. John resolved to get some actual sleep as soon as he could, then braced for whatever the bad news was.
John sighed, “Dad, what’s going on?”
His father hesitated before speaking, “Police Commissioner Murtaugh, the man in charge of the organization and emergency response here, wants to speak with you, Case, and Jen. He agreed to wait when we found out that you’d passed out, but the conversation is kind of urgent.”
John laughed, “Well I’m glad that he was able to wait for the guy having a heart attack.”
Everyone winced, and John realized he’d soured the mood. Everyone’s faces fell, and his mother looked like she was on the verge of tears.
Mrs. Kenderson spoke up, “By the way John, what happened?”
John paused to consider how to relate what he’d seen. “There was leftover damage from when I got shot. Some of my heart cells had a lot of mana in them, but the majority didn’t. The ones with mana essentially became desynchronized with the rest of my heart, and it caused a heart attack.”
Jen paled, “Do you think that could happen to us too?”
“Maybe, but my mana had also made deposits in my arms and legs from where I’d used it. I think if you don’t flood anywhere important with mana, you should be ok,” John reassured Jen.
Case’s brow furrowed before he spoke, “How could you tell where your mana was?”
John clarified, “When I passed out, I woke up in this weird space. At first, I couldn’t figure out where I was, but the different spots where I could see mana let me figure out that it was a representation of the inside of my body. I could explain further, but we should probably go and talk to the Commissioner, yeah?”
Officer Kenderson nodded, “You three are going to talk to him, us adults have jobs to do. Also, y’all aren’t allowed to leave and get into more trouble for now, so don’t even think about it.”
Jen opened her mouth, but a gesture from Case stopped her before she could protest.
John hugged his parents and promised he’d take it easy before the adults left to do… whatever it was they’d come up with. His mom and Mrs. Kenderson were at least going in the same direction, so they were probably working in the medical area. He had no clue what his dad would do, but Mr. Kenderson was presumably going to help with the patrols and manning the perimeter.
John turned to Jen, “Have you met up with your parents yet? They’re around here somewhere, right?”
Jen nodded. “They’re in a meeting, my mom texted to let me know they’d come find me in an hour or so.”
Case was confused. “Jen, what do your parents do?
“They’re emergency management consultants. They help towns design their emergency response systems. They didn’t help with any of the ones around here, but they keep in contact with the emergency management folks in Raleigh. City officials called them in to help when the usual people were injured by some mage freaking out.”
John winced, “That blows. Let’s go find the commissioner, see what he wants with us.”
The group moseyed toward the tent they’d been brought to earlier. They came up short of actually entering it when they heard a man yelling. The one-sided conversation suggested his ire focused on someone safely on the other end of a phone line. John privately hoped that their little group would be treated better. From the sound of it, the commissioner was frustrated that nobody had figured out a better way to hold mages in custody than “whacking them on the head repeatedly.”
John wondered who the commissioner was speaking with. Was it the Groupmind, the federal authorities, or someone local? Ultimately, he didn’t have time to speculate with Jen or Case, as an aide waved them inside when the commissioner finished his call.