“You stole my girlfriend, chi master. The only reason you’re still living is… .”
“You hated feeling so impotent watching The Masked Man do his thing? Or was it being demoted to a minor-league player now that some serious bad-asses are blowing into town from Galaxies X, Y, and Z, and showing you up for the poser you are.”
“Soren… . Don’t provoke him.” That was Naomi playing class teacher, getting her unruly students in line, from upstairs, a role she clearly excelled at.
“So, what can you do for me, dickhead, that will keep me from blowing you clear off this planet in a gale force wind the likes of which no one has ever seen?”
Soren stared into his chest as if he suddenly had x-ray vision. And to his surprise, he did. The laser-firing eyes were apparently just one of many gifts coming out of mating Victor’s mandala magic with his chi magic. He could sense the mandala shapes around his pupils protecting the tissue from scarring from the lasers, earlier, when doing surgery on Stealy, and now, while x-raying Player. Now he could feel them shifting configuration in his eyes once again to permit seeing along chunks of the EMF spectrum that he couldn’t ordinarily see.
“Take off your clothes.”
Player gestured with his hands. “They always succumb to my wiles in the end. Guys, girls, it doesn’t matter. I could have told you he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds in the face of my charisma.”
Soren gave him a “Cute, smart ass” look, as Player tried to save face by standing up on the table and disrobing. He pointed to his dick as he stared up at the balcony. “Seriously, you left this for that?” He gestured to Soren.
She just bit off the smile by swallowing her lips.
Finished grandstanding to save what was left of his battered ego, Player sat back down on the table. He seemed to like having his chest examined and touched. His dick was getting hard. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Soren said.
“It’s easily provoked. When you’re this much of a stud, doesn’t take much. How about yours? It work that good?”
Soren actually smiled, even if not all the way. Strangely, Player was growing on him. The guy wore so many insecurities on his sleeve it was hard to feel too seriously threatened by him.
“I think I can see how to extend your elemental magic. Instead of just earth, wind, fire, and air, you’ll have control over every element in the table of elements.”
Player smiled. “Cool. I’m sure I’ll resist the urge to test out my newfound powers on you, somehow.”
“I wouldn’t. Your newfound abilities will be tied to me. Anything happens to me, you lose them. Possibly even the elemental magic you could do beforehand.”
“Hey, wait a minute.” He lifted Soren’s still-scanning hand off his chest. Left hand to left hand—the gesture looked strangely intimate, like he was determined to be Soren’s boy toy, if only… . If only what? Did he fear abandonment that much? Naomi had given him the lowdown on him in case he needed to check his powers fast. Or was this something else? Was he happy to kiss his doctor’s ass—and whatever other parts of him—if it meant powering up? Just another Victor-psychology-wanna be?
“If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be pulling this off with a combination of Victor’s Mandala Magic and my Chi magic. So if something does happen to me, maybe you can make your way to him.”
“No, it does not make me feel better. I think I’d rather deal with you any day. Fine, I’m not sitting on the sidelines doing nothing while these sorcerers from other planets tear up our world.” He put Soren’s hand back on his chest. Flexed his chest muscles. “Nice, huh?” He twitched his eyebrows at Soren again. Anything to regain a sense of control, or at least pretend to his audience that he was the one stringing Soren along, and not the other way around.
Soren shot him up with a combination of nanites and Victor’s mandalas, letting both bleed from his fingers into Player’s chest, and from there, into the rest of his body. Once inside him, they’d migrate to his chakras and energy nodes and work not too differently than they were working inside Soren’s body. Only they’d magnify the elemental wizard’s magic.
It dawned on Soren that Player was the second guy in as many hours to make a pass at him. It was possible he was channeling way too much chi after the triumph with The Masked Man; that he just needed to dampen down before he added further to the Dracula effect, entrancing everyone, man, woman, and beast, for miles. He was feeling rather excited about the win, and now, with his surgical practice booming courtesy of Victor’s injecting his body with his mandala magic, he was riding even more of a natural high. Maybe after the surgeries, he’d dial it down. For now, the others… it might earn him a forced compliance he might not otherwise get from this testy group that didn’t take to strangers interfering with their dynamic.
“Jump off the table,” he instructed Player.
Player did so without hesitation. Soren set a bottle of iron dust on the table, poured it out, to be exact, into a heap. “Now, assemble the iron atoms into a solid, a bottle say, or, whatever you like.”
The heap changed into sphere that started rolling. Evidently Soren’s table could do with a bit of leveling. “Nice,” he said.
“I’ll say. I just had to visualize it.”
“Now, listen, Player.” He grabbed him by both arms and squeezed. “You’re going to have to be very methodical with your experiments with each individual element. Starting small like this, getting a feel for each one, before proceeding to more complex compounds that include one or more components from the table of elements. If you don’t do that, you’ll be just as big a problem as one of these assholes from Dimension X we have to put down.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said as if he’d been pistol whipped. He didn’t like Soren speaking to him sternly or with too much force. All of a sudden Soren was the father figure he never had and was looking for approval from. Maybe because he was finally finished testing limits with him, and had accepted that he was loved enough not to be pushed away for his bad behavior and exiled, as someone must have done to him once. That could work for Soren. The harder he tried to please ‘Dad,’ the more he would take his time with his training, not rush it, as he would ordinarily be inclined to do. And Soren didn’t have the time to micromanage him; not with everything going on. He hugged him tightly and bent his head down to kiss the top of his head, as if he were an actual kid, instead of a man in his early twenties, or perhaps his late teens. Player took well to the tone change and bolted to the table to see if he could find more elements to play with.
“Next!” Soren shouted loud enough to be heard upstairs.
Natura came out of his bedroom trailing a donkey behind her at the end of a rope. Soren was still feeling a bit hang-jawed when she said, “Player, a little help?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. He took the sphere out of his pocket he’d made earlier out of iron, spread it out in a sheet to use as an elevator tray by simply concentrating on it, and spun a twister under it to substitute for an elevator’s traditional hoisting cables. He had already found a way to bond those paper-thin iron molecules together better than ordinary chemical bonding allowed for, or he’d have had to reinforce the metal with something else from the elemental table. Or perhaps he’d done just that when Soren’s eyes were off him, working with another element from the table of elements on one of Soren’s work benches.
Natura had to coach the donkey onto the circular tray, which it could get to only by jumping over the railing. But it did so—owing largely to her way with animals.
Once they were both on the ground again, and stepped off the “elevator”, Player balled the metal back up into a sphere and returned it to his pocket. “Nicely done, Player,” Soren said, figuring it couldn’t hurt to start alternating carrots and sticks with that guy from now in a behavior mod program to turn him into a decent human being again. Player flushed in response to the compliment. Crude tended to work better on that guy than subtle, no matter what response was desired, apparently.
�
�Sorry,” Natura said, “but I’m feeling a bit nervous about being operated on. The donkey calms me.”
“Not a problem,” he lied. The smile probably didn’t look any more genuine either. But things were progressing better than expected, so he could forestall fears of shoveling up donkey shit when this was all over. Definitely the least of his problems.
Now, what the hell to do with the animal whisperer, Soren? Like you have any idea.
She doesn’t exactly scream cyber-chick, and infiltrating her body with nanotech would be a violation of everything she is, namely, queen of the natural, unadulterated world, sans any kind of technology.
“Go for it, Soren,” Naomi said in his head. “I don’t think she’ll mind if you position it right. She could use the nanites to make the animals smart enough to talk back to her and have conversations with and make her own Dr. Dolittle world. She’d probably be delighted by that idea. And if you show her how to migrate the nanites and the mandalas to their chakras and nodes like you’re doing with her and everyone else… the animals will be capable of their own magic. She’ll love that.”
Soren nodded. He had no doubt Naomi was correct on both counts. “Can you beam the thoughts into her head, with accompanying images? Save me some talking. Plus, she’ll likely take it from you better. She’s definitely scared to hell of me.”
“Done.”
“Wow!” Natura exclaimed. “You can do that?! Hurry up, then. I can’t believe I was actually afraid of this.”
Soren smiled uneasily. He could afford to manhandle the other two. This one was decidedly more delicate. That included her nervous system and her chi system. Let’s hope you’ve progressed far enough with fusing Victor’s science and your own, Soren, in this short time. You’re really not going to live very well with yourself if you screw up this one chance to make a good impression on her.
Soren took a second to check himself for any residual stiffness in his body, any trapped tension. He’d been channeling chi for a while now, at a pretty high level. After a point, his body would start to reject it if he wasn’t perfectly grounded and centered. He was neither. “Naomi, I’m going to need your help relaxing and centering completely. I need to bleed off all tension before… .”
“Done.”
He was indeed feeling a lot more relaxed, centered, and confident. The tension he detected in his body moments ago was gone. “Thanks!”
“No problem.”
He proceeded with the surgery. Like before, he didn’t have to do much but let the nanites—repopulating their numbers inside of him to make up for the ones he’d lost—bleed into her, along with the mandala geometries, held together with a kind of energy magic Soren didn’t pretend to understand. As before, the sacred geometries migrated themselves with their complex patterns to the chakras and nodal points, along with the nanites. The rest would be up to her.
“Now, be patient with yourself and the animals,” he coached. “It might take longer for your magic to take shape than it did for Player. He’s a bit of a prodigy.” Soren knew he was listening in and hated to have the spotlight off him, so he figured it couldn’t hurt to play to his ego for now. Build them up, then tear them down, only to build them up again. Wasn’t that how the army did it? How they did it in the corporate world? Maybe Soren’d take a page from their books. Once again, connected to Naomi as Soren still was, he could feel Player perk up with the flattery.
“Okay,” Natura said meekly, gesturing to be lifted onto her donkey. She seemed at times like this to be age-regressed. Maybe her animals had long ago become a comfort to fend off emotional abuse; her only refuge. And when her armoring was down, the hurt inner child came out. Maybe it just needed to feel itself in a safe environment so she could continue to heal her inner child until it found its way into a more permanent integration of her adult psyche with its parent, child, and adult facets. Well, it gave him a play book to work from with her that was different than what he was using with Player, but Soren supposed that was the nature of raising kids. Like it or not, he had slipped into a parental role with all of them, including the bad-ass Stealy, who he was sure would continue to test limits. She wasn’t done with him yet on that score.
“That it?” Soren shouted upstairs as Natura took her donkey over to the kitchen so he could graze on every vegetable and fruit in sight. “I hope these people know that this food doesn’t come cheap!” He sighed. Maybe he could task Stealy with pilfering them some more. Not like he had an exactly honest way to earn a living right now.
“You forget about me?” Lar said, leaning over the balcony. He was the oldest one of the lot, perhaps the oldest one in the room. He looked like he was in his late twenties, but then again, who knew? Most of them, if asked, would probably just lie about their ages and their pasts anyway, and do so, so convincingly, that not even Naomi would be able to spot the lie. Such was the way it was with traumatized youth. It was just easier to remember a past that went the way you wanted it to, and invest more into that fantasy psychically speaking than into the truth, which was just too horrific to face.
“Come on down, Buddy. I’m sure we can do something for you.” I’m sure we can’t. Honestly, guy, I’m not about to put you in harm’s way. You don’t exactly have spiritual warrior written all over you, unless you plan to wage war with your books.
Lar tried to work the ladder and managed to get caught up in it. It was too much of an obstacle course for him. Ordinarily, Soren would have to restrain a chuckle, but he must have been well locked into parental mode now, because he was nothing but helpfulness, working to untangle him. “It’s a bit tricky, that ladder. Sorry about that,” Soren said to save his ego. Though the long-way-from-being-entirely-reformed Player had no trouble snickering at Lar’s expense. Soren threw him a look to settle him down. “If you need more busy work, Player, I’m sure I can find some for you.”
“I’m good.” He put his fist over his mouth to stifle the rest of his amusement, making sure everyone could appreciate the mock show of self-containment.
As it turned out, Soren’s chi-magic and Victor’s mandala magic mated so perfectly that it locked in the self-dissolving, self-destabilizing energy patterns of the mandalas almost immediately. No long-term experimentation needed, which was a good thing. They were even more on the timeclock than before. So much so that Soren wondered if he really had time to indulge Lar’s fantasies about joining them out in the field.
“If you get those mandalas and nanites to migrate to his mind, Soren,” he heard Naomi saying in his head, “he can take his scholarship to the next level. He might be even more of a boon to you with deciphering your own library than I could ever be; with picking apart Victor’s Mandala magic, any artifacts we get our hands on. There are libraries of books, what’s more, backing up most wizards that will read like Dutch to us if we don’t have our own Cypher. Perhaps that can be his new cool, superhero name, to help sell him on the idea of playing inside his own arena.”
Soren sighed. He wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea. It meant Lar, the third wheel, interjecting himself into Soren’s and Naomi’s personal time, where no doubt it would not be appreciated. He was looking forward to one sidekick—that came with far more perks—not two. But he couldn’t deny her reasoning contained more logic than rhetoric.
“So what do you think, Lar?” he asked. He had to help Lar out of his clothes because he was getting tangled up in them. How does this guy make it through a day without causing permanent injury to himself? No wonder he was given to teamwork.
“What do I think of what?” Lar replied, trying to assist with his own disrobing, and somehow managing to make things worse. Buttons wore on him like some new-fangled technology that no one could seriously expect him to master in one sitting. Of course, for all that, he’d gone with a button-down fly rather than a zipper, probably for fear of catching his dick in the zipper, a dread that was likely based on experience.
Soren waited for Naomi to beam her earlier suggestion into Lar’s head the way she
’d beamed it into his. “Oh, that,” Lar said. “Well, I rather like that idea, but I was hoping to be out in the field with you guys, seeing some action, you know.”
It was all Soren could do to keep from saying, “Perhaps once you’ve mastered pulling up your zipper.” Maybe raising kids would cause him to mature as well. He had certainly never exercised this much self-control before.
“Right now, I don’t think we can win the battles ahead without you acting in that capacity, Lar, as Cypher. I don’t like our chances at all if he’s not there to rescue the rest of us. Maybe, with time, we’ll find someone who can share the workload with you, get you out in the field more.” With Naomi’s help, Soren made sure to beam the thought into Lar’s head to avoid provoking Player by saying the words out loud—God forbid anyone think Player was not the most important person on the team.
“Well, I suppose, if it’s more of a temporary thing,” Lar said. Still disrobing, he was down to his shoes now.
The thought alone of his navigating those shoelaces… . “You know what, why don’t you leave the shoes on?”
“Yes, I think that’s for the best.” Lar was starting to climb up on the table in his underpants. Soren moved quickly to put an end to that idea. “Why don’t we do this with you standing right there?”
“Capital idea. I’m not overly fond of heights.”
Lar had a lithe-enough figure that Soren was tempted to send the nanites on a secondary mission to add some muscle. But he left that thought alone for now. He’d finally convinced Lar to embrace his library-geek persona; the last thing he needed was a beefy version of him convinced that he was now empowered to go into the field. And there weren’t enough nanites in the world to counteract his klutziness; not without overriding his base personality.
Soren released the nanites and the mandalas into Lar with a touch, as he’d done with all the others. Lar enjoyed his touch and Soren’s helping him get dressed again. Now that Soren’s chi was dialed back down, this time the response was more of a kid who’d never received this attention from his parents, and was rather enjoying it.
Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1) Page 12
