ALL NOVEL Issue 6 – Radical Reactions
Having the door to my room get a hole punched violently into it, and something moving very fast smash into the ground, off the cement floor, into the wall, and actually crack it before tumbling up to the ceiling and back down to the floor, was enough to break my Meditation, yeah, loud and noisy as it was.
I opened my eyes, noting that there was no light, except that coming from a hole in the door over there.
I was much, much calmer now. The energy running through me hadn’t stopped being produced, but at least it wasn’t being discharged violently and constantly. I would have to figure out some place it could go, but for now, the excess going out the bottom of my feet seemed a thing.
That is a bullet hole. I considered all the ramifications of that, and my circumstances, and this energy flowing through me, the steady fluorescent lighting from outside my door, and made a decision.
Very smoothly, I circulated my Icefire, and reset my surface temperature to exactly that of the air around me. That done, I stood up slowly.
I felt very light on my feet, as if I weighed nothing, and despite myself, I found I didn’t have any problems balancing. The energy running through me was stimulating my muscles, so I didn’t lock up or cramp or anything as I rose to my full height, and didn’t even totter at all, finding my balance instantly.
Feet crackling and pulsing as I established a connection, I locked onto the ground, let some voltage go, released, took another step, and proceeded towards the door somewhat awkwardly. I almost tripped over the ruins of stuff in the dimness, but caught my balance somehow before I actually fell over. I made my way over to the door and peered out.
There was a hole through the door opposite me, and another one past that to what looked like the outside.
Yeah, that didn’t look all kinds of ominous.
My feet seemed to be pretty sensitive... I felt someone shift their weight slightly twenty feet to my right, and heard a door close with a click, soft shoes coming down the hallway outside my door.
Eight Red Eyes lit up in the back of my brain, and seemed to focus in that direction, getting brighter and more ominous as it approached.
The shoes walked right past the person standing there, and paused outside my door.
That was a pistol, looking very much like an old .45 design, maybe a little smaller and sleeker. The person wielding it had something wrong with their eyes and responses.
Like someone else was driving.
I didn’t feel any magic, which in a tech universe probably meant only one thing.
Well, I guess I knew what my first Feat was going to be for my Vizard Levels.
Give me Psense!
Base awareness of any active expenditures of psionic energy within sixty feet flicked on in my brain, and yeah, there was definitely something with its hooks in the mind of the nurse in the soft pastels and bearing a dangerous weapon outside my door.
I loathed mindbenders. They were part of the Tyrant’s Triad of controlling magic: Charm magic, Summoning magic, and Necromancy. Control the natural, control the supernatural, control the unnatural. They were the three greatest magical powers that gave Casters a bad name.
And psions loved them some mind control.
Without thinking about it, I pulled open the door, the locking mechanism being completely shot out, and stepped out into the hall.
The nurse turned to look at me, and I saw a reflection of surprise in her blue eyes even as her face didn’t change a bit, locked into a kind smile by her controller.
The threat level only spiked, focused on the weapon in her hand, and how it was going to move.
Her pistol instantly shifted over towards me.
She was moving in very slow motion. I stepped forward into the movement, reading it all the way, and reached up to her head, my hand spread as wide as possible as I let out the energy from inside me, which seemed to want to manifest as electricity.
The first thing I did was note her Kirlian Aura, and harmonize with it as much as possible. The Aura that didn’t match the body, however, was just a big bundle of interference, and I tore right through it like a bull in a china shop.
Her hair only poofed out a little bit as the controlling intellect took a whole lot of voltage to the psychic cerebellum. Their control over the nurse was broken instantly as the controller completely lost concentration, and the nurse dropped like a wet noodle.
I was very surprised when I caught her before she fell, and actually kept a grip on her face. Some sort of electron exchange was going on between our skin surfaces, giving me what amounted to a welded grip to her skull... and the energy going through me was working like bio-teke, leaving me strong enough to lower her gently to the ground.
There was a blur of wind motion, a ripple in the air as a holographic invisibility effect moved right past me, the force of the owner’s footsteps drumming against my feet as he moved past me into the open room across from mine, while the bloody Red Eyes were looking in multiple directions as threats from outside that wall swept back and forth across me... and there was a singular major threat over there.
My course was thataway, about thirty yards, and something dark and dire loomed in the back of my brain, urging me to move-move-move, or I might die!
I didn’t know if I could run, but whatever this stuff was doing to the very skinny arms and legs I had made me impossibly light on my feet and well-balanced. The floor was polished tile, but there was no chance of me slipping as I hit the door at the end of the hallway, turned the knob, and shoved it open.
There, behind that door, what looked like a supply closet or something. The threat is in there.
That looked like a nurse’s duty station, all corridors leading here. Brightly lit with warm lights, turned down for the night, and whoever was supposed to be on duty not there or hiding, or...
I didn’t skid to a stop in front of the door, I just stopped, electrons meshing, exchanging, perfect friction. I turned the knob, found resistance, and yanked all the tumbler pins up into their places through the steel of the knob, pulling it open.
The woman inside was very dark-skinned, stumbling to her feet awkwardly, looking a bit frazzled, with bottles and boxes scattered around her as if she’d fallen down and flailed about, trying to stop herself.
She was a huge and massive threat to me. Death loomed up behind me, dark and ready to reap.
Her dark eyes grew wide as she saw me. She clutched the shelves for support, threw her arm out at me, and psionic energy gathered as her eyes lit up.
Give me Sun Save/1, Moment of Perfect Clarity.
Give me Steady Focus.
Give me Improved Unarmed Strike.
Power Feat, I qualify, fuck the world, give me goddamn Mettle!
Her telepathic attack slammed into my forebrain as I jumped at her.
She wasn’t bad, and certainly a telepathic attack of that caliber should have liquefied the brains of a person my outward age.
It ran right into the razor edge of my Concentration Score, which at this moment was an absolute minimum of a 26. It split to either side of my mind, doing me absolutely no harm whatsoever as I expended the Sun Save. Both of my hands reached her face, bearing her over backwards towards the wall as I grinned fiercely into her eyes, and I let go all the voltage between my hands.
I didn’t know what Level she was, and it wasn’t low, but I did know that 2d6+whatever my Con score was to the brain was bad. There was a lot of voltage moving in between my palms, and I was pretty sure I was a lot stronger than she was.
She had made that nurse her puppet and pawn, perfectly willing to get her killed to accomplish whatever she needed to, and she’d been about to point a gun at me.
I fried the brain she no doubt thought so proudly of, and she couldn’t even scream or struggle. I bore down on the natural electricity in her brain, and overloaded it all, cooking her as lights in her eyes glowed green-white, her skin blackened and burned, and her entire body twitched with the convulsions of what I was doing to her.
Her Kirlian Aura snuffed out, and so did my discharges. The Red Eyes behind my brain faded away to barely nothing, looking in other directions. I pushed myself up and away as the last nervous twitches escaped from her.
Fucking mindbenders. I didn’t know if that other nurse would ever recover from what was done to her, but I couldn’t do anything about that.
I did know that for some reason I was a hot tamale, and I now had to make a decision. That invisible person had clearly been a target, and had been parked outside my room like a guard. He’d be here very shortly. Did I trust him, his intentions, and the security he could provide, or did I make my own way?
I focused on my own Kirlian Aura as I stood up, ran some very, very gentle voltage up and down myself, and frowned.
I reached up to my left breast, and touched the incision on its underside. A tiny metallic module had been inserted up into the fatty tissue there.
In addition, there were very tiny things here and there inside my blood, gleaming and blinking.
I grit my teeth, and electricity snapped, electrons repelled, and the shit inside my blood fried and died, heading for my kidneys to be processed out, while the little nodule in my breast was cooked and expelled out to the floor with a clink and a clatter through the incision made to put it in.
Well, that answered that. I was pretty sure both things were tracking elements I didn’t want, and while they might have their reasons for doing this, that didn’t mean I would agree with them.
I hopped backwards, and closed the door I had left open for the moment. Scant seconds after I did so, I heard the crash of the door to the hallway that had automatically shut slam open.
“Shit!” sounded out as the man looked around and saw no sign of anyone. He moved away quickly, talking to the air like he was on coms, while I turned my eyes to the dead woman staring blankly up at me.
She was wearing some form of combat clothing under her pale purple nurse scrubs. She had probably walked right into the hospital, brain-pushed everybody to ignore her as she changed, and came right on up here past all the security.
Naturally nobody would know who she was, which meant nobody here would be looking for her.
I was wearing a hospital gown with my butt hanging out of it. Hoi, might just be able to do something about that problem while behind a locked door...
And I had a thought. Still had Masteries to expend, too.
“Least Invocation Mastery/1: Vampire’s Veil!”
Something spun around in my Pact, knowledge of how to pull on those strings of power wound into my soul, and pulled out a bit of a magical effect. My eyes glittered despite themselves at the strangely new yet familiar sensation, and some residual edges of anxiety seemed to loosen up and fall away.
I had a direction for magic. It might not be something I could access with my Matrix, but it was there. Just had to figure out how to tap it outside of this Weave...
My fingers twitched and ran through an unfamiliar pattern slowly, pulling and twisting deftly. I looked at my fingers, and realized I was going to have to take a new skill, Weaving, if I wanted to pull this kind of thing off adeptly. Pulling on threads of power and weaving Invocations into something...
Vampire’s Veil was a fairly minor passive effect, the very same effect that allowed vampires to not reflect in mirrors and not leave shadows. For almost all intents and purposes, a useless effect, and a way they were revealed as not being human.
Except in a technological world, where it meant they couldn’t be seen by things without a living soul, which included just about every kind of camera and observational sensor system out there, as well as robots and AI’s and such things.
Worlds with psi also tended to have scattered weird science/super-science, so this was definitely going to be useful.
Now, I just had to get out of here...