“You know how Mandarin has like fifty different words for tea? Tokh is like that, but reversed. They have one word for meat, but like eighty different contexts. You really don’t want to use the wrong one, trust me.”
The process of completing my mana circuit sucked big time. It left me a sweaty, trembling, and gross-feeling mess. A stranger being there for emotional support and some guidance helped.
I was left with the feeling that something had fundamentally changed inside of me. Vael told me it was less physical than it felt.
“Would you like to get cleaned up? I can try and put something together that might fit, although you’re… quite differently shaped.”
I nodded and wiped my sweaty palms on the shirt.
Bit of an understatement. She feels like she’s twice my size.
I stood up, and she led me into the master bedroom, which had a more substantial set of equipment in the attached restroom. I felt culture shocked with a lot of it, and some amount of sudden anxiety. My lingering just across the doorway threshold was probably telling.
“Would you like some assistance?” Vael’s tone was warm and non-judgmental.
“I know how to wash myself, thanks,” I responded sarcastically.
“Well, I won’t be far, give a shout if you do!”
I felt the breeze of her motion drift across my back. I hastily closed the door.
I’m a fucking… adult. I don’t need help wiping my ass.
A glance at the toilet was sobering. There were buttons. A lot of buttons.
...I probably don’t need help wiping my ass.
A shower stall stood with the door open, filled with spray bottles and bars and tubes. I turned. The sink was equally cluttered with another staggering assortment of products and tools and…
I’m not asking for help!
My reflection drew my eye once again, and the anxiety was back.
She was right.
What had been faint luminosity I could write off as a trick of the light, being reflected off strange-looking, new, yellow eyes had changed. Or finished changing. Whatever.
There was no mistaking the eyes of a User. It was the very first thing you saw, and for some, the very last thing. All of them glowed with the color or colors of their aspects. I was more aspect-color literate than your average baseline, but I wasn’t an expert in Users. I played one in video games, I knew the common and some of the rare ones because I’d read wikis and boards exhaustively to try and get a leg up on my competition in WoD.
Yellows… Yellows could be a number of things. Light, generally, Lightning. Sand. Some types of energy or force aspects. Toxins shared a spread of yellows, too. Sulfur was bright yellow.
This particular shade of light amber was stumping me.
Maybe something downstream of light? Solar?
Solar was something I could work with. Really work with. I knew my caster-types, and my mind flashed with the thought of my plasma aspect on WoD. I’d worked so hard to get it.
Solar and plasma were kinda-sorta-but-not-really comparable. Both were really quite well suited for blowing holes clean through monsters and other Users.
I’d had a lot of User versus kills under my belt. Some might say I was a bit of a freak, even.
I didn’t go around team killing or gross shit like that.
I didn’t humor dumbasses and didn’t take flak from other Users, though. If I thought I ran into a raider in a portal, I wouldn’t hesitate to smoke them if they even looked at me funny.
Fucking around in portals got you perma’d. WoD was a permanent death game, but mana medicine and healing-type Users existed there as much as they did in reality. The two combined could do things bordering on miraculous. To be permed could be a number of things, but related mostly to total destruction of a User, or dying in hostile terrain without backup or support.
I swallowed around a knot in my throat.
I’d never really stopped and thought about it, but people probably thought I was unhinged, between the kill count and the solo-diving. The truth is, they’re directly linked; solo divers don’t have backup or room to take extra risks. I hope something transfers over and I’m not having to reroll, only IRL this time.
I left the aspect question for another time. The girl in the mirror was… I squeezed the edge of the counter.
She was cute, but a hopeless mess sort of way. Black hair, fair skin, the amber embers. Hair just tickling at her shoulders, longer in the back than the front, and mostly straight with a bit of a wave at the ends that caused the ends to stick out like it was feathered. Her nose was hawkish in a familiar, familial way, but not overly so. A cupid’s bow I thought looked kissable, but what I did I know?
I had to look away. I wasn’t going to sit and navel-gaze in the mirror all day.
I don’t hate her, even though she is a puffy-eyed slip of a thing.
My fingers played with the hem of my makeshift dress. I was putting it off.
But first, the bandage. I felt it out with my fingertips and slowly pulled it free. The sticky part didn’t hold my hair too badly. There were a few spots of dried blood. I felt the ridge of a small incision line on the back of my skull, but no stitches. It’d probably be fine.
I yanked the shirt off, finally, ignoring the sensations to the best of my ability. I entered the shower.
Temperature controls… Output selection… A million sprayers to choose from… Where’s the fucking timer? I don’t see a display anywhere on this stupid thing!
I turned the default output on and ticked the temperature down a couple of degrees. Strong jets blasted me all down my front and squarely in the face. I sputtered and spit it out quickly. It didn’t even taste bad, but drinking gray water was a no-no that everyone learned from a young age.
It might have been enjoyable if not for the constant uphill battle of trying not to knock into bits I wasn’t used to, skin that was entirely way too sensitive, and my halfhearted attempts to figure out what the bottles and bars were for. I didn’t read half the script on the bottles.
I found a razor. I attempted to use said razor. After the fifth or sixth time cutting myself with the water left on fine mist so I could drag out the timer, I couldn’t help myself. I let out a shriek of pure frustration.
A moment later, Vael’s muffled voice came through the door. “Kiera, darling. Are you ready for some help?”
“Fine. Fine!” I acquiesced.
I crossed my arms over my chest and turned to face away from the door.
The door opened, and I peeked over. Vael took one look at my legs, held a claw up, then left the doorway.
“Stay turned around, I’m coming in,” she called out from the bedroom, and I heard the clicking of toe claws on the tile floor approaching. I kept my eyes on the wall, and my body locked in position. Cold air swept in the shower, and I shivered.
I’m pretty sure the sound I made is classified as an eep when warm skin pressed into my back and butt. I thought I was going to die of embarrassment.
But she just hummed a catchy tune and wiggled some to the beat against my backside, and her arm reached past my shoulder to tap black claws on several bottles.
“How far have you gotten?” Her voice was soft.
“I’m, I’m wet? I don’t know what those are, and I kept cutting myself—” I trailed off.
She giggled behind me. “Well, getting wet is good. So let’s start from the top, then.”
She picked things out. Sometimes I had a choice in the matter. Which scent did I prefer? What did I think about hairstyles?
I was constantly reminded of the height difference between us. Forcibly. Her chest kept brushing and bumping into my head. What was I supposed to do?
I looked. Of course I looked. Then I looked away, embarrassed, furious, anxious, and certain I’d been caught. Vael didn’t say anything, or didn’t care, which was somehow worse.
The black on red pattern repeats.
Of course, she didn’t. Sul’vari didn’t have the same shame architecture humans did – no sex binary meant no social neurosis built around one. They were monosexed. Hermaphroditic, in plain terms, every one of them is packing both sets of hardware. Nudity wasn’t loaded for them the way it was for us. Neither was proximity, or touch, or other things that my hindbrain kept blaring alarm signals about. The clothing that showed everything, the casual contact, the way she’d taken my hand several times now like it was nothing. None of it meant what I kept thinking it meant.
Bathing with her help left my ape brain dazed and confused. Her hands were unhurried and didn’t shy away. There was more contact with her full hands on my skin than I thought I’d be able to tolerate, but if anything, it seemed to help. A gentle but firm competence. She corrected me when I made mistakes and gave me tips.
This thing for that, that thing for this. Not so hard, Kiera, you’re trying to not sand your skin raw.
At one point, I slid and fell back against her. She caught me with her hands and tail.
I broke down into a blubbering, incoherent mess. She turned me around and held me until the tears stopped. I don’t know how long we were like that. My showers had a three-minute timer at standard flow; the nicer showers at the public baths also had short timers. Even if I was using a quarter of the flow on fine mist, there was no way I’d been in there for less than half an hour. Just one more thing I didn’t understand.
For the second time in recent memory, I had my hair washed, and the tips of her claws on my scalp sent electricity shooting through my spine, and did more to patch up my mental state than it had any right to. I was pronounced clean and then introduced to the folding seat that wasn’t a toilet.
“It’s for shaving and grooming, Kiera. That’s the whole point.”
She had brought in a wand of suspiciously questionable shape with her and left it hanging by an attached strap this whole while. I was relieved to find it wasn’t a high-tech sex toy, but rather a Sul’vari nuhara.
She cautioned me that it would sting a bit, but in a fairly mild way. I gave her a quick nod.
It mostly felt like a thin, wide band of slightly-too-hot metal that contoured to the skin and the occasional pinprick. The razor was a human friend’s, pure barbarism, something that belonged in an incinerator.
I had to agree. Lotion for the areas covered, which was way more than I wanted to admit. Thankfully, the device was child’s play to use, and I did the more intimate areas myself.
Post-bathing experience, and one that ended much better than it had started, I was instructed in the basics of wearing two different wraps.
It sort of felt like cultural appropriation, but Vael wasn’t having it. Wraps were as popular in human societies as they were with the Sul’vari, just not the cultures I was acclimated to living in. I protested that there was stigma about this, so she showed me how to wear it her way.
The thing about wraps that I grudgingly had to admit a newfound appreciation for was that they fit any body shape with very little adjustment and were extremely comfortable. Also: supportive in areas that needed it, when done correctly.
Back out in the main living area, Vael rolled out a padded mat on the floor and instructed me to take a seat.
“We’re not going to argue the point of being a User now, right?” She asked with a smile while settling into the same cross-legged pose she’d guided me into.
I dropped my eyes. “No,” I admitted. There was no getting around the fact that my eyes were glowing.
“Do you trust me?”
I looked up to see her usual mirthful expression. My jaw flexed.
“No, but what choice do I have?” I wasn’t trying to be an asshole, but this was X-3. Trust was for close family and friends, not strangers of a few hours, even if they had been all wet and…
She nodded, and the smile never left her lips. “Of course, good. In your game, how do you use mana?”
I wet my lips. “A lot of it is menu-driven, but you build techniques from scratch, and you can modify them on the fly. Once you’ve learned a technique, it’s a matter of refinement, practice, and continued effort to improve it. If you are using a controller or something, there are gestures, but with a DNI it’s more based on feel.”
She hummed and rocked a hand from side-to-side. “Not totally wrong, but it sounds like most of what you know wouldn’t be applicable.”
I huffed out my frustration. “I was afraid of that.”
She waggled a clawed fingertip at me. “None of that. The good news is that there’s a lot of intuition to being a User. Since I don’t know how much of what you know is accurate or not, I’m going to give you the very basics.”
I nodded slowly and tried to calm my nerves, as excitement was bubbling up inside of me.
“I’m going to teach you in the Sul’vari tradition. If you want to go to a human school later or something, that’s up to you. You get what I know and am familiar with.”
My mouth opened and closed several times, fragments of an idea and sentence starting, but jumbled. My mind was racing around faster than I could keep up. Finally, after a moment to put things together more coherently, I said, “I hadn’t thought of that. Just… Just being a User means I’d get automatic entry into many places if I wanted.”
“Is that what you want?” She prodded me ever-so-gently.
I didn’t hate school now, not as I’d had in the past. But thinking about going to a User school at my age. I wasn’t sure it felt right. Most human Users experienced awakening in their mid to late teens, some younger, some older. The curve dropped off sharply after twenty-five, outside of extenuating circumstances. The kind that you wouldn’t find in the city outside of some kind of mega-disaster.
“I…” I bit my lower lip hard and all but gnawed on it. Vael’s fire-aspect eyes were boring into whatever mine were.
I felt butterflies in my chest, a conflagration of emotions competing to edge one another out in a battle to the death. My cheeks were burning.
She didn’t look away. Not for a fraction of a second.
I had a lot of feelings about this new revelation and change in my status. One was standing out leagues ahead of the others. A tangled wad of concepts, images, feelings, memories, and media. The formed a shape I knew, but could I voice it out loud?
My mind drifted over my obsession in life leading up to this point.
“I want to dive. I-I mean, I want to become a diver.”
Her face didn’t change, but I thought that maybe her shoulders dropped some. Maybe it was just my imagination projecting my own feelings onto her. She took a deep breath through her nostrils and ran her claws back through her hair.
There was something in the undercurrent of her voice when she responded, and it was hard to pin down. Exhaustion, maybe? Or resignation? “I had a feeling you were going to say that.” A subtle shift, physically and vocally. “You do know that you don’t get three lives?” That teasing tone had returned.
I closed my eyes and nodded. My voice was unexpectedly steady. “I know the life, the statistics, the realities behind the media.”
Her response was another hum.
“Okay,” she said after a long pause. I cracked my eyes back open. She was smiling. “Sit up straight. Stop hunching over like you’re trying to hide something; you’re going to regret it later. Straighter. Now put the backs of your hands on your knees. Loosen your arms and shoulders.”
“Better,” she continued, “now close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Four and four, just like before. I’ll talk, you listen, and follow along. Try not to think about things too much, just what I’m telling you and your breathing. Ready?”
I nodded.
She began. “Mana is the energy of change. It permeates and flows through every surface, every substance, every living thing. The more intensely something is exposed to mana, the more it is altered from its previous state. The extent of change is a factor of dose.”
“Like radiation,” I offered.
“No, that’s a very human framing, and a common, pervasive misconception. Eyes closed.”
I grunted under my breath.
“I will explain why it’s wrong. Yes, you handle mana exposure and ionizing radiation similarly. Keep your distance, limit time, avoid ingesting source material. There are several key differences, and they’re important. Mana seeks to improve. Radiation damages cells. Radiation injury can accumulate meaningfully even at low doses, given enough time. Mana is nonlinear, and doesn’t induce meaningful change below a threshold determined by intensity.”
“Time, distance, don’t eat it,” I repeated back.
“Yes, if you’re a baseline. What is a User?” she probed me.
It’s like school all over again. I tried to remember how it was taught.
“Uhm…” I hesitated, not wanting to sound completely ignorant.
Is it a trick question?
“Keep it simple,” a gentle nudge.
“Someone who… Makes mana?”
“Right! The term is misleading because it originates from prior to your first contact. It’s not very accurate, but language is tricky sometimes.”
I nodded along.
“You’re a User. You have a mana circuit, which generates mana, and that mana flows through your body in loops. Do you know this?”
“Locus points, hands, feet, head.”
“Yes. And tail, for Sul’vari,” Vael added.
“Vael? Can I ask a stupid question?”
“You’re new to this, it’s not stupid, but go on.”
“I err… Thought I was pretty good at reading aspect colors. In my game, I worked towards forming a plasma aspect, and really liked being a mage-type.”
“Mhm?”
“I wasn’t really sure what my aspect was. I know some yellow hues, lighting, sand, and light. I thought about some others: toxins are sometimes yellow, reflexes, and some types of force. But the shade of my eyes is a little different.” I trailed off, opening my eyes to see her smiling. She arched an eyebrow at me.
“I thought maybe downstream from light? Solar?” I could hear hopefulness in my voice.
She covered her mouth and giggled. After a moment, she shook her head. “No, sorry, not laughing at you, it’s not as common an aspect as the ones you listed, that’s why you probably thought it wasn’t quite right.”
A rare aspect? Those can be useful…
As if she’d read my mind, she continued, “...not that it’s really rare, either, just not the thing people think of when they hear it.”
I held my breath.
“You have a lovely vitality aspect!” She beamed a dazzlingly white smile at me.
I felt my heart get shoved off a ledge to splatter on the street below. I think my facial expression must have fallen with it, based on Vael’s reaction.
Fucking. Support-type.
My throat and chest were tight. I had to bring a hand up—both hands, and I covered my face. I was crying again.
Vael was talking to me, hugging me from the side. I don’t even know why this upset me as much as it did, but it was as if someone shanked me and twisted the knife once it was fully seated.
Back line. Useless downtime-saver. Pity pay. Group shadow.
All the negative stereotypes were dumped on me like a pile of bricks. I didn’t even believe some of them myself, but I couldn’t stop the negativity from overflowing. I knew people would kill to be able to Awaken as a baseline as I had. Life aspects had some of the best career options outside of Diving, bar none. That’s why I hadn’t recognized it. Most were green. Most.
When the sniffling and crying subsided somewhat, Vael tried talking to me again. “Why is that bothering you so much, Kiera?” She whispered to me.
“I don’t even know, I just, I had this picture of myself in my head, blasting monsters as a solo diver like my character, maybe joining a good guild, if I could. I don’t—” I sniffed hard. “I don’t want to be the person who’s only useful between battles.”
She was still quiet, but a touch louder before, and she sounded a little confused to my ears. “Is that what you think the vitality aspect does?”
I bobbled my head up and down.
She slid around to my front, lifted my chin with an index finger, and carefully used her thumbs to wipe my tears away. She was smiling, but I wasn’t feeling it.
“Oh, you silly girl. You’re not on a team, or in a guild, or on a contract. You do exactly how you want to do, and if you get good at it, you’ll have plenty of offers—how you want them.”
I swallowed ruefully past the lump in my throat and was more bitter than I wanted to be when saying, “I know it’s a fool’s errand to train off-aspect—”
She pressed an index finger against my lips mid-sentence, silencing me.
“Mmf—” I tried to protest. She shook her horns at me.
“Nobody said anything about training off-aspect. You have a lot of misconceptions. I see we’re going to have to work past. It’s a good thing I don’t like easy projects, hmm?”
We started back over. She guided me through a mindfulness exercise. It was supposed to be the baby steps leading to learning mana flow and control. She gave me terms to put to the things I felt.
The warmth in my chest and limbs was my circuit flow, the mana of my aspect coming across as a feeling of warmth. She told me hers was similar, which made sense for a fire aspect. There was another new sensation, one of capacity, which was my pool.
She taught me a childlike game, holding two fists out, and having me guess which one she was flowing mana through. I could feel it, which was weird to learn. Feel might not have been really the right word for it. I could sense it, but it didn’t really cleanly come out to any of the five senses. This was explained as a sensation game.
I was introduced to the three-layer model. Sensation was one of the three layers. We tried exertion next. It was as if I was moving a muscle that didn’t physically exist; it took some effort to move, and I was clumsy moving it. I’d push some halfway down an arm, lose it, and it’d get pulled back into the central part of the circuit. I was reminded of trying to hold water. We only glossed over the last layer, intent. That was a lesson for later.
She ended with a demonstration of manifestation. She held her palm out, and a flame formed like she was holding the end of a burning paper, or something. I watched, and the shape of the flame shifted until it was a central mass with four—
Is that a person?
She made a crude figure out of flame, which continued to refine until it was a woman pole dancing.
“Do you want to try? Something simple to start with?”
I licked my lips, suddenly nervous once again. I’d never seen anything like what she’d just shown me.
I held my arm out as she had.
“Close your eyes; it can help with concentration when you’re first learning if you narrow your focus.”
Take some mana, and push it down my right arm…
I felt moisture on my forehead, and each time I tried, I’d get just past my elbow and lose my grip. This was harder work than it seemed.
“If your approach isn’t working, try moving it in other ways. There are schools and doctrines, but ultimately, it’s a matter of self-exploration and finding what works for you, and then refining from there.”
I thought about circuits instead. Not mana circuits, circuit boards. Trace patterns that formed paths, devices on that path to change or modify the signal. Create the path, apply a charge, and the current would flow. The sensation of warmth picked up, I had it going in a loop in a much larger flow than in my other arm!
That’s moving, but… What if I wanted to try to do something with it?
I didn’t have anything original in mind, Vael suggested trying to make a simple sphere light bulb.
My breathing picked up; doing this was actually winding me, even though I was sitting on my ass on the floor.
I could feel the locus in my palm. The flow was passing directly under it.
I wonder what Mom would say if she saw me now?
I wished I were wearing my bracelet.
“Kiera!”
I opened my eyes. Wispy glowing vapor was drifting up out of my extended palm, glowing the same light amber as my eyes. The vapors drifted out to the sides from a central point above my palm, before curling upwards and tapering down to points. Some trails were flat, some were more round. They were arranged in a ring.
Like a flower.
“You should stop before you exhaust yourself,” Vael cautioned.
It was so pretty, but I could literally feel the sensation of fullness in my torso dropping, and rapidly. I closed my hand and cut off the flow. A few trailing wisps of golden yellow rose up between my fingers.
Vael wasn’t smiling; rather, her eyebrows were drawn together, and her lips were pressed together. Her eyes were on my closed hand.
“I’m sorry? Was that bad?” I couldn’t account for her expression.
She took a deep breath and sighed. Shaking her head, she stood up and offered me a hand up.
“No, it’s not bad, not exactly. You didn’t do anything wrong,” She reassured me.
Now it was my turn to frown. “Then why the face?”
“You effectively skipped half a dozen steps and did something that should be well beyond a beginner. That was far closer to a proper construct than it was simply a manifestation.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” I was thoroughly confused.
She rested a hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently. “It’s not a question of morality, it’s neither good or bad, right or wrong, it simply is. But what it represents is a strong potential for danger.”
“For myself, or others?” I was less concerned about putting myself in danger than I was about potentially harming others with tinkering. Sometimes you get zapped on the workbench.
“Both,” she replied, and drew her hand back.
It had been several hours, and I’d worked up a decent sweat during what was the most unique workout I’d ever done. Vael turned and busied herself rolling up the mat, then she asked me, “So, are you hungry yet? It’s getting late. Would you like some more mana food?”
My stomach rumbled. I had worked up an appetite I wasn’t expecting. I was also stiff and sore, aching in places I wasn’t used to. I itched my back while trying to think of an appropriate protest.
“Yes, please…” I was on the back foot here; this wasn’t my home, my food, or my money. I was a guest, but I didn’t want to be a rude guest, either. I also just… didn’t know Sul’vari culture very well.
Dinner was a beans and rice bowl, both exploding with flavor and extremely filling. Ellen stopped back in to check in on things, and we properly met for the first time.
“Sweet peepers, hell of an upgrade,” she told me. She didn’t stick around. Work was apparently busy. Vael had a few odds and ends dropped off via drone. A toothbrush, a few other personal toiletry items for me.
I was fading pretty hard by the time everything was done. I chewed a few stomach tabs and washed them down with some water, then made my way back to the guest bed. Things had felt slightly off between Vael and me after eating. She was still warm, still present, but some of the… wattage, I guess, had gone out of the room. The smile was there when she looked at me, but I felt like she was seeing past me, or something. I recognized the look. Someone going through the motions while their head was elsewhere.
I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my business, and I didn’t have the ground to stand on.
Falling asleep was a bit of a pain, between the unfamiliar space and bed, and indigestion. I passed out at some point.
I woke up a couple of hours later, sweaty and uncomfortable.
Really uncomfortable.
My abdomen was cramping something wicked, and I felt bloated, like I was gassy from dinner. A particularly sharp cramp sucked the breath out of me, and I curled up into a ball on my side, which seemed to help. The pressure shifted lower, and my guts clenched. I let out a groan; there had been a heat on my lower back, and it flared suddenly.
A ring of flames was spreading and licking at my back just over my butt. Another cramp, even worse than the last one. I hugged my knees to my chest. I wanted to call for Vael, but between the cramps I was having, I had to gulp rapid pants of precious air.
A third cramp, harder still. I had the urge to push with my lower abdomen, even through the cramping spasms, overwhelming in intensity. So I did. My pulse thundered in my eardrums. The fire blazed hotter, but the feeling like my insides were going to tear apart lessened dramatically, along with the pressure. I pushed again, more burning, but an overall improvement.
I got a good breath in and groaned loudly. The light flicked on. Vael had rushed in. I had to push again.
There was a wet, horrible squelch sound, and I saw spots in my vision. Relief and a surge of adrenaline came back in force when my body remembered that breathing wasn’t optional. I smelled and could taste metal on my tongue. I reached a hand back to feel where the burning was still pulsing, but at a much lessened intensity. My fingers came back wet with blood.
I felt… wiggling behind my back.
Right now, I didn’t want to move; things were improving, and my eyes were burning with the sweat that kept dripping into them.
Vael had been frozen at the door, flames tickling at the fingertips of one hand, a hand that was formed into a finger-pistol in a way that would have made me laugh in any other circumstance.
“I’m okay, feeling better now,” I croaked over to her.
She approached slowly, doing her near-motionless floor-glide thing once again. The flames flickered away, but her eyes were rooted to my backside for long moments.
Finally, they looked up to make eye contact with me. I gave her my best attempt at a smile.
Her voice was tight when she asked me, “What did you do!?”