8 May 2021 - Day 1
The unfolding list in the message pounded the inside of my skull with every entry even as I barely held on, absorbing as much information as I could even though more entries than I could fathom kept flooding through. At this juncture, the luxury of coherent thought was rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
I understood that everything I knew was now changed. I could feel energy of a kind that modern man had only dreamed of was now flooding our reality.
Flooding me. Stretching me. The very limits of my conceptualized self were pushed further than my instincts could bear.
And somehow, somehow, people that didn’t have the faculties to choose or consciously decided not to, they were fueling part of this. I could hear their fading screams and almost taste the thick iron of their blood even as it helped to form the tenuous structure in my hindbrain that was functioning as the antennae for the messages of the ‘Grand Collective’. Their fading agony scraped at every exposed part of my soul.
As the last bar of the message scrolled through my vision, an unmistakable door opened inside of my soul, one that had always been there but completely out of reach and notice, and let it all flood inside. The lines of data unfurled, searing my brain as they organized and then exploded over and over like a child’s kaleidoscope. The dark and the bright and the freezing flames started to scour as my memory of the messages clung to the corners of my mind, CHOOSE!
“Sandra! CHOOSE!” I screamed, even as I pushed my soul towards that little part of me still connected to that flashing blue light. My stomach convulsed, expelling the last bit of breakfasts from my stomach. More to myself than anyone else, I kept screaming my own thought process just to stay afloat. My brain latched onto that moment where all of the data seemed to present itself in ordered columns, calm pipelines of unfiltered insanity. I spat on the ground before screaming, “SORT BY COMPATIBILITY! FILTER BY RARITY! FILTER FOR POSSIBILITY” I screamed even louder. The gamble of my inner nerd and years of IT work paid off.
The preliminary suggestions burned my corneas as they peeled my eyelids back, forcing me ever closer to the agony of the new shifting reality. The torrential firehose of power was seeking an outlet, any outlet, and it didn’t care if it scoured me clean from the inside out. My insides quivered as oblivion marched ever closer.
As I selected the first one ‘Alchemy’, my soul filled with the stuttering images juxtaposed from each other. Power and memories flooded my very being. Visions that were of experiences not my own scraped the inside of my skull raw. One of children playing on a seesaw, a fat kid on one side balancing out the two skinny kids on the other. Lady Justice, the blindfolded woman holding a sword in one hand and a scale in the other, superimposed the happy children, both the fires of loving passion and the freezing hail of evil balancing themselves on her scale.
The visions changed again, two children fighting with wooden swords that broke in their mock combat. Crying, they took their swords to their gracious mother who placed the broken sticks into a plain circle of raised dirt. Snapshots of the memories played themselves out, weaving a story. The mother concentrated, touched the circle with her hands, light traveling down her arms down her fingers and filling the circle, binding the broken edges of the toys back together, good as new. The images fled as the concept of Alchemy filled me, but it didn’t fill me all the way. The experience crystallized inside of my brain, seeping into my core as a physical object.
Acting on greedy instinct, I selected the next two at the same time: ‘Terrastria’ and 'Strength’. Knowledge of Mother Earth avalanched into me, filling in the cracks with immense amounts of fine sand, gritty dirt, jagged stone, metallic ore, and broken crystal. Images of human shaped stone golems laboring to tunnel into a mountain shifted to a new vision of a woman raising a house out of stone while her husband at war clad in shifting metal armor raised earthen walls to protect his comrades.
The symbol of ‘Strength’, characterized by a picture of Atlas holding up the world, the oldest concept of holding much and with great ease, enhanced Terrastria as a reflection of itself, took hold with visions of one day being able to move an entire mountain with my own will and maybe shifting it a bit with my muscle.
Alchemy formed a new structure within me, filling and settling in my spirit like woven concrete. Terrastria and Strength braided themselves together into a cord of empowered rebar, implanting in the center of Alchemy to make the entire structure even stronger. The visualization and symbology came together naturally as all of the sensations of pain gave way to a cleansing wash of newness and rebirth. My new abilities became real, burning into existence just behind my sternum.
They formed a solid core of real power that rested next to my heart.
Luckily, I landed just outside my puddle of vomit when the tide of power knocked me the fuck out. The normal range of sanity asserted itself as bits and pieces of energy entered my body. Pulling myself forward, I used the grass and loose dirt as handholds until I could cross the marathon that was the two foot distance to my wife. My legs were more a hindrance than a help, the boots dragging across the grass like leaden weights.
Brushing Sandra’s blonde hair aside with my clean hand, I rolled her over as I propped myself on my elbows and checked her pupils as I wiped the trail of blood from her nose. Her lovely blue eyes were completely gone. In their place were solid orbs of swirling purple, black and white, blazing with power that knocked me back.
“Hell no!” I cursed, yanking off a glove as her eyes closed and checking her pulse. It felt like a mouse’s heartbeat, drumming at a million miles an hour. Forcing myself to keep calm as I figured she was still going through the same process I’d already snapped out of, I took stock of my surroundings. The grass was at least twenty shades darker, a green so dark it was almost brown. The street in front of the house was all crumbly as if it had been left unattended for fifty years. My house looked even older than it already was, and that’s saying something as it was built in the early 1900s. The porch swing looked rotten and even the electrical poles lining the street looked as if they were about to fall over.
After a minute or two, enough strength returned to my body allowing me to get up and get a better look. The neighbors Mike and Isabella were still unconscious, Mike in the yard sprawled in the lawn and Isabella facedown on the porch.
“Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh fuck! No, no, no, no!” I half sprinted, mostly stumbled over to Isabella. She was holding baby Ellen before this all happened but I didn’t see any sign of the child. Thoughts I didn’t want to think kept racing through my head as gently flipped Isabella over. She started convulsing as her hands stopped clutching an empty blanket.
“No!” I screamed, barely picking up her sleight frame halfway off the ground and dragging her next to her husband. Taking the baby blanket with clumsy hands, I unfolded it, not believing my eyes as a bit of purple dust fell to the ground. Turning back to both of them clutching the blanket, I caught a glimpse that Isabella’s top button on her shirt was open and I saw something I had never seen before. There was a bold blue and green tattoo gleaming out of her top and curving a bit up the side of her neck.
Now, I’m no perv, but I had seen both of my neighbors at the county pool and I also knew that they were die hard religious people, so that tattoo was definitely new. That wasn’t there before, I’d stake my retirement on it. Good sense warred with insane curiosity and an overwhelming need to believe that I didn’t just watch a three month old baby disintegrate in front of me, my fragmented mind clinging desperately to a remembered phrase from one of the messages, ‘younglings require parental assistance to survive’.
Pulling back the top corner only of Isabella’s shirt, I saw a pulsating, almost 3-D image of her darling daughter tattooed into her skin. I felt the barest hint of relief when I spotted the tattoo’s curly hair, button nose, and rosy cheeks. Whirling around and thinking of their two year old Isaac, I turned to Mike and pulled his collar down a few inches. I breathed a sigh of relief, falling back to my knees as I contemplated some of what this meant. The kids weren’t dead. They were safe, or at least as safe as their parents could keep themselves.
Standing up, I walked back over to Sandra who had started to stir. I dragged her a bit closer to the house, running my hands over her checking for injuries. Her eyes opened to their normal gorgeous blue.
“Wha-, huh-,” she mumbled, clutching her head. Curling up in a ball, she turned to vomit into the grass.
“Hey! Babe! Are you ok?” I rushed, putting my hand on her chest to keep her down. “Look at me, babe!” Her eyes were red and watery but her pupils weren’t dilated and there was no trace of the freaky galaxy that her eyes were just a few minutes ago. I took in every detail, needing to see and feel for myself that she was all right.
“You ok?” she asked, pushing herself up until she was sitting, one hand on the ground to keep steady. “My brain feels like mush.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” I answered, coughing out just a hint of blood from where I harshly bit my cheek. “Did the universe shove itself down your throat and twist your spine just now? Cause that’s how it felt to me.”
“Uh, I guess? I’m not sure, I just heard your voice, it kept me grounded, let me know you were alive.” She flung her arms around me as she sobbed. “I thought I was going to die! But I heard you, heard you screaming and I knew you were alive and I couldn’t let you be alone!”
I hugged her fiercely, breathing in her lavender scent as I fought to keep the shakes and fear at bay. A tear of joy leaked out as I forced my breathing to even out. “I was so worried.” Pushing her back to arm’s length, I wove her hair back behind her ear and wiped her eyes. “Although it felt like I was dying and being reborn over and over, I think I got powers out of it, did you?”
Her face scrunched for a moment. “Uh, yeah, I did what you were yelling, the sorting and filtering thing.” She looked around and her eyes defocused for a moment. “How do I make it come up? There was a list and a foggy screen with my name on it.”
“Screen? Self? Magic? Show yourself? Status? Show status?” My mumbling yielded the strangest result. A translucent screen appeared in front of my eyes.
“Uh, uh, show . . . characteristics? Characteristic status?” I wondered aloud. My hand moved through the floating screen as I poked at it. More cells of the floating table opened below, rolling down to reveal more information.
On a whim, I put both of my hands on Sandra. “Uh, show status to Sandra, my wife.”
She gasped as her eyes crossed. “Yes! This! This is what I saw!” Taking a minute, she furiously read through. “Show me the other one too, the characteristic one . . . .” Obliging her, I spoke the words, channeling my intent through my hands. It felt like I was opening up my soul to her. “Whoa!” she exclaimed. “This is, this is freaky! Can you change them? One of yours is kinda low.”
I removed my hands from her head and focused on my own Status. No amount of poking or prodding revealed any results, as if it were a static representation of me, a simple printout of who I am and what I can do.
“What about you?” I asked, eager to see the kind of craziness her screen would say.
“Show status to husband?” Nothing happened. “Show status to Grant?” Again, nothing. Reaching out, she put her hands on me and repeated herself again. “Ah hah!” she squealed. “It’s like moving a muscle I didn’t know I had but one in my brian.” A translucent blue window popped up in my field of vision.
“Holy crap! You’re loaded!” I remarked, reading her magical display over and over.
My wife got four abilities to my three. Yes, they’re not super-combat oriented but this compatibility thing must have resonated with her very well. All of her normal talents got translated into magical abilities that with a bit of planning could be incredibly useful, although I’m not sure how ‘Harmonic Senses’ relates to ‘Enhanced Senses’. It does seem like the traits and abilities match up one for one with the traits giving little hints as to how the abilities may work. Mine don’t seem to match up one for one although that’s probably due to the way they mixed together and actually do seem to work harmoniously.
“Characteristic status!” Sandra said proudly.
“Good grief,” I groaned, doing the math. “You got four powers to my three and 22.4 points to my 18.8!”
“Is that good?” she asked.
“I mean, I guess?” I said, happy for her yet a little disappointed in myself. My wife just took to these world-altering shenanigans like a duck to water. My guess is that it might have something to do with her bloodline though, that looks to be the source of one of her abilities and her enhanced dexterity. She even lost some weight after the ordeal, not that she really needed to; her skin gained an athletic glow and the stress lines from her high-pace job dealing with autistic children for years were now gone. The intelligent side of me decided not to point that out and just appreciate the healthier version of my wife.
I pointed out the relevant parts of her status screen as it floated between us. “Well, you have more points and powers, you’ve got epic mind powers from your experience with psychology and your career, probably a portal ability that came from your love of the fucking game Portal and maybe was enhanced by your ‘Planeswalker’ bloodline. Growing up on a small farm and years of passionate gardening got you plant magic and your music hobby got you some weird ass ‘harmonic’ something? What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her inner nerd starting to pop out. “It just felt right. I love music, always have. You know I play all the stringed instruments, and when I was picking out the options, it kind of just fit everywhere, filling in the cracks and making it all settle nicely together. Forget about that, you got some good stuff too!”
Our conversation was interrupted by a chorus of groans ten feet away. “Mike! Isabella!” Sandra yelped, hopping up and falling next to them. “Are you ok? The kids?!”
“It’s all right!” I said, pulling my wife back a little. “I checked on them after you. I came to just a bit before you did. They’re both breathing fine, and I think the kids are ok too. I’m not super sure though. It’s more than a bit weird.”
Mike and Isabella gasped awake at the same time, looking around with wide eyes. “Whoa! Whoa!” I barked, holding my hands up, trying to get their attention.
“Ellen! Isaac!” Isabella shrieked, looking around. One hand on the ground and the other clutching her chest, her eyes glazed over as the tattoo flashed when her finger grazed it. “Oh, oh! You’re safe!”
“Huh?” Sandra said. She looked around confused and then stared at me as if I had something to do with it. “Where are they?”
“I have Ellen.” Isabella said, pulling the collar of her shirt down an inch or two so Sandra could make out the tattooed face of her baby. “I don’t understand what’s going on but I was given the choice to save my baby and I took it.”
“Yeah, me too,” Mike agreed, nodding as he pulled his collar down to show the tattoo of his son Isaac. The same blue green design flared as he touched it. “It was called ‘Strength of St. Joseph’. He’s the patron saint of fathers. Weird, how do I know that? I’m not Catholic.” He looked at me and I just shrugged. “The voice in my head said that parents were offered something like this, a greater gift as our children’s potential strength is channeled into us during times of need.”
“Mine was ‘Grace of St. Monica’!” Isabella said, not noticing as a pair of translucent wings flared out from her shoulders. Each had a coating of soft white flames that trailed off, giving the ivory wings underneath a too-bright glow. “I was praying the whole time, it kept me sane through the agony and it seemed to be picked for me.” Squinting in front of her, she held finger up and moved it laterally as if reading an invisible book. Her slightly nasal voice grated a bit on my ears. “Channel the innocence of a newborn to keep all evil at bay.”
Sandra grabbed Isabella’s hands, ignoring the wings as they vanished from sight so fast that I had to question if they were even there in the first place. “I’m just glad they’re safe!”
They hugged as I pulled Mike to the side. “Are you sure you’re good, that the kids are actually safe?” I asked. “I freaked out before y’all woke up cause I saw some dust where Ellen was before shit hit the fan. And then you both had glowing tattoos of your kids and I didn’t know what to make of it.”
“A Father’s Strength . . .” Mike answered, glancing around while rubbing the tattoo of his son. His eyes defocused as he read his own invisible status screen. “It affords me additional vitality and energy absorption to help keep him alive.” He grabbed the shovel and axe and placed them near Isabella. “Oddly enough, it constantly tingles but in a comforting way. It’s so strange, seeing this. I can feel my son close and safe in . . . . well . . . inside of my soul? Next to it? I don’t really know how to describe this feeling . . .”
Mike shook his shoulders and looked around in shock. I lightly hit him in the arm and made a motion for him to keep going. “Back to the weirdness, dude!”
Mike started. “Oh yeah. I don’t know what it told you but I got a bit more too. I got something called ‘Mental Hands' and ‘Shatterpoint’. It accredited the abilities of going to school for math and then being a math teacher. I can see weak points as well as move things with my mind as well as the best way to move things. The last thing I got was ‘Mechanical Aptitude’ due to my hobby of fixing cars and working on engines.”
We compared screens as the women talked. I internally complained about him getting one more ability than me but his overall characteristics points were lower than mine. He had roughly 15 points and his father’s strength didn’t seem to have much of a growth function like mine. It was missing the ‘variable’ part. It did look like his went the ‘superpower’ route instead of the magic route. That ‘Blessing’ thing though, that looked like a pocket ace, able to seriously boost himself in a dangerous situation.
“So what next?” Mike asked. His voice shook from the remembered pain of being imbued with unearthly powers. “I can’t believe we were put through that kind of hell and our children sealed off just so life could go on.”
Sandra and Isabella looked up at that. “He’s got a point,” I said before more questions that I didn’t have answers for could come. “I don’t know jack shit about this, but people aren’t given weapons unless they have a reason for it. Hey Isabella, what other powers did you get?” I asked.
“I can summon an Angel’s blessing, heal with Martyr’s Sacrifice, and grant armor with Virtue’s Light,” she answered confidently. She pulled up her status screen again. “Who came up with these names anyhow?”
Ignoring her question because I clearly didn’t have the answer, I focused on the important part. “Holy cow! You two are definitely equipped to keep your children safe!” I assured her. “You, Isabella, are basically a healer, a support buff maker; Mike will be invincible with you!”
Mike shook his head at me. “Of course you’re nerdy enough to be somewhat excited.”
I looked him dead in the eye. “Yeah, well, you should be grateful your kids are okay man. That was a seriously scary thing to experience.”
Shaking my head, I beckoned to Sandra, helping her get to her shaky feet again. “I think we should check on our neighbors. Y’all get that side of your house and we’ll get this side of ours.”
Mike and Isabella nodded as Sandra and I turned away. Taking a minute, I patted down every part of my body, unable to believe that I experienced that kind of pain without any kind of injury. As far as I could tell, nothing was broken and I didn’t see any blood. Although, being rebuilt with primal energies might mean that I’m all fixed, shit, it looked like I lost a bit of weight too. At least fifteen pounds were gone from my midsection even though I had a bit more to lose.
“Fucking desk job,” I grumbled, lightly slapping the extra padding on my stomach before strapping my weapons to their places and making sure my wife was good to go. Her hands were still shaking so I helped put the knives away. Handing her the nice oaken spear, I put my hand on her back and started walking to the other neighbors.
*******
Thomas - Grant’s younger brother
I might have to change my opinion of I-95. Normally this interstate is jam packed every damn time I want to go anywhere but this morning, this morning . . . I’m flying. With barely any cars on the road this cool Saturday morning, my new-to-me 99’ Suzuki motorcycle and I were bonding as man and machine should, at eighty miles an hour without a cop in sight and epic hits by Journey playing in the background.
My older brother Grant didn’t know I was coming, his wife hates impromptu visits because she likes to clean before visitors show up but I’m family, which means I don’t care about shoes not being in the shoe rack or a few dishes hanging out in the sink. Besides, it’s been a while and we’ve both been busy, aaaaand, I’ve got two tickets to the gun show at the Expo Center in Richmond this evening and I’m pretty sure he’d love to go. The wind whipped at my leather jacket as I deftly zoomed around some white minivan with a frazzled looking mother and her brood of children.
“Asshole,” I grumbled to myself, sliding into the center lane and then into the left to smoothly dodge an eighteen wheeler listing a bit too close to the wrong lane. The wall of green trees to my right blurred as I hit the gas. The left lane is for passing, not for holding everyone else up at fifty miles an hour. Can I call a mom in a minivan an asshole?
I can if she’s being one.
The shifting message completely blocked my vision, the blazing words etched into the visor of my helmet almost completely blinding me as I tried to slow down. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the speedometer drop quickly as I braked and steered just off the road only to be clipped by someone else as I slowed down to thirty miles an hour.
Agony hits slower than you think, almost as if the experience happened to someone else but you’re still technically in the driver’s seat, kinda like being the camera for a crash test dummy. The sensation of weightlessness is what I noticed first, the absolute freedom from gravity that would result in something not very good happening in just a few moments.
Luckily, my helmet stayed on my head and my leather jacket combined with thick jeans and boots would mitigate some of what was to come but I could still hear my mom and my last girlfriend whispering their nagging warnings in my brain. “Thomas, they’re not safe. Motorcycles are death machines.”
Seriously, the only thing those two women could agree on.
The car I didn’t see clipped the back of my motorcycle and sent me over the guardrail down the hill into the forest, my thick clothing preventing most of the cuts and scrapes but doing nothing to prevent the sickening snap of a jarring stop against a tree. My hands were forward to brace the catapultation that was my virgin flight but they were dry sticks before a vengeful dog with a hankerin’ to chew.
All I could think about was how cool it would be if I could Jedi mind trick my way outta this one, or maybe have some kind of forcefield to prevent my bones from killing me on the inside as well. That’s when it hit me, the few moments or minutes or hours that I came to out of the blackness and looked down. My left arm was bent in several places that had absolutely no business being bent that way, red hot fire lancing up and down from my shattered wrist and broken upper and lower arm. The collarbone area was also screaming at me, but it was overshadowed by the feeling of intense nausea that forced me to lean to the side of vomit. My boots did absolutely nothing to prevent my right foot from being shattered into fifteen extra pieces. My vision faded in and out, completely messing with my sense of reality to the point where I didn’t really believe what my eyes were seeing.
Great. Pre-death hallucinations coupled with multiple spots of personalized torture and not even a freaking sandwich to go with it. Fucking highway. It’s all because I was having too good of a time, wasn’t it? The agony up and down my left side took a backseat to the infusion of nuclear white pain that lanced into my brain.
Great. More hallucinations. Shit looks like a video game. Am I fading? Did the colors change? Aren’t I supposed to have an out of body experience right now, maybe look at my broken body as my soul floats twenty feet above? Or am I too stubborn to die right now, seems like the pain is both going away yet increasing in intensity. Wow, what a trip. Not one I’d recommend. In that moment, another hallucination appeared, my cracked visor glowing as the remnants of the first message messed with the hallucinated message changing in front of me.
This is not how my just over two decades worth of church going said it would happen. One old guy in a tweed suit postulated angels gathering the souls of the faithful and then some other old fart in a Hawaiian shirt banging on a shoddy podium proudly declared that souls gloriously ascend to the hereafter. Fucking liars. All this is is an insane amount of pain, weird status messages from dead people and myths, and something about a lot more dead people.
Why is it so hard to think?
Yup. Now it’s worse. The fire that I can’t see has spread to my entire body, as if little firecrackers were surgically implanted by psychotic doctors and laughing Igors with rusty scalpels and then set off one at a time while more were being shoved into open wounds. Then for shits and giggles, those hallucinations decided to stitch the wounds closed by blowtorching the skin together.
Wow, this is not fun, but somehow my brain has disconnected me from actually experiencing it. My body is lighting up in full technicolor, the red must be the injuries and the white is the sensation of pain, wow, there’s a lot of both. Blackness faded in softly and then out again as another message forced its way past my soul.
I didn’t care. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Every moment felt further and further between the next one, the way math class lasts for eternity when you’re ten years old. Father Time Himself holds the hands of the clock still and laughs at your pain as the teacher drones on, mindlessly repeating the same thing that he’s taught for decades while you endure the unending torture.
Suckers. Screw you mind message thingy. The list pounded in my head forcing part of my brain to acknowledge its existence, only then allowing it to fade into another. And yet, I still didn’t want to die.
Something inside of me clicked as my anger and nascent will to live reared their heads, a hidden trapdoor in my soul creaked open allowing the flood of extra-planar energies to completely wash through every sub-particle of my body even as I watched dispassionately. So many colors. The blackness came back and left with the same fervor.
So, because I’m ‘partially’ dead, I guess, I don’t get a choice? Again, I say fuck you Universe. Although the pain does seem to be getting worse, the technicolor tie-dye influx of power forcing itself through every bit of myself was dragging back my intractable soul. As more and more power flooded through me, the pain refocused on the broken parts of my left side. Instinct took over, forcefully shifting the torn and jagged pieces to their original places, forcing me to become whole.
Some part of me watched like an outsider as the blaring red of my skeleton resolved bit by bit into a healthy white, even going so far as to start reinforcing the rest of my bone structure on a whim. A fragmented flare of an old movie flashed in front of my eyes, a crazed man resetting his own bones and the glimpses of them healing back together as he then fashioned a knife out of a separated piece of bone.
While I focused, the other two sections of the messages began to imprint themselves on my soul, the words dissolving into visions. Strands of memory forcibly wove the healing energies together. Images of a slender man eyeing a firing squad with disdain, a blue forcefield springing to life to repel a hailstorm of bullets while he laughed. Another vision flew by, a young woman wrapped around her baby as a thick red dome covered her, keeping out the prowling jungle cats slavering for fresh meat. As the ‘Projected Will’ part began to fade into the background, I caught one last impression, a large man sealed in translucent purple armor, laughing as all kinds of magic bounced off of him while he plowed through a horde of fleeing soldiers.
More impressions flew by from a different source. The ‘Pizo-retentive’ flavor drumming itself into my body from every angle introduced me to a new kind of agony, of a billion teeny hammers slamming themselves into every cell from every angle. Yellow starbursts of pain ricocheted through me as my soul was forcibly shoved back into its container as more visions rushed by. A young boy with an extra set of eyes, a monk I’m guessing by the robes and the fact that he and his master were atop a lonely mountain temple, diligently punched sand from a large trough, day in and day out. The same boy, poking a tree, completely punching a hole through it as the stored combined hits of his sand punching focused outward. Another vision overtook the first, a man bearing two shields absorbing hit after hit and storing the energy, then using it to heal his exhaustion and sew torn flesh back together, over and over.
The acid trip ended suddenly with me being brought back to full consciousness. Without thinking, I shakily stood up without any pain and looked around. My body tried to betray me but as the moments passed, the shakes began to ease.
I noted the worst part. Yup, my bike is in three shredded pieces twenty feet away from me and my helmet visor is cracked, but at least I don’t feel any pain. My hands lifted as I watched in wonder, the memory of my twisted left arm and the agony of my injuries fading in the bright sun as I trembled. Slowly pulling my gloves off, I examined my fingers. Each digit moved as they should as my eyes filled with tears. Blinking them back, I removed my helmet and my jacket, touching every part of my skin to force myself to believe what I was feeling and seeing. I wasn’t injured.
I was whole.
What was even weirder than suddenly recovering from a devastating crash and experiencing a primordial tsunami of energy was the tint of blue in my vision. “Uh, shit, uh, window? Powers? Messages? Status? Full status?” The blue finally resolved itself into a translucent window right in front of my eyes even as I constantly moved my arms to make sure that I wasn’t actually injured. Leaning my back against a tree, I let out a shaky breath as I read. “It’s like a damn video game.”
“Oh dear God.”
********
