| Generated by Google Vids text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1 |
Mandica’s eyelids flip open. The harsh fluorescent lighting irritates her
eyes for a second before they dim. Everything dims, as if she’s wearing
sunglasses. It’s cold, and she knows that, but she doesn’t feel the familiar
sting of her body heat evaporating from her skin. She is just arbitrarily
aware of it. The man is scared, or the doctor, because he’s wearing a lab
coat. Reagan is there. He’s surprised too, but not scared. Mandica sits up
to see him take out his sonic weapon, and utterly destroy the doctor. Wait.
This isn’t a hospital, or if it is, a specific sector in it; probably in the
basement. She’s not in a medical bed, but a drawer, and two dozen other
closed drawers line the wall next to her. This is a morgue. They thought she
was dead, and she ought to be, because if they didn’t even bother treating
her, she shouldn’t have healed. She is not like these people.
Reagan steps closer to the mortician with his weapon, and keeps blasting
until he’s sure the NPC is dead. He looks back over to Mandy. She’s entirely
naked, the sheet having dropped down when she sat up, but she doesn’t care.
He’s breathing heavily. “I’m sorry you had to see that, but we can’t have
him submitting his periodic report.”
“How am I still alive?” Mandica asks him.
“I don’t know. You weren’t,” Reagan answers. “I came here to claim your body
so I could prevent them from finding you, under the pretense of being
responsible for your funeral arrangements, which I absolutely would have
done to cover your tracks.”
“There’s something in my back,” she says as she’s trying to reach behind
her. “It’s, like, hard and pulling at my skin. It doesn’t really hurt, but
there’s something there.”
Reagan walks over and checks it out. “It’s, uhh...well...” He gives her a
funny look, and then checks her back again. “It’s...”
“If you’re distracted by my bare ass, I’ll let you see it better later, just
tell me what’s there. Did a shard of glass get embedded in my skin?”
“I’m not looking at your ass, and it’s not a shard, but...it might be glass.
It’s glowing, though.”
“Glowing? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Here.” He takes out his handheld device, and snaps a photo of it, which he
then shows to Mandica. It’s not glass. It appears to be the Philosopher’s
Stone.
“What the fuh?” Mandica questions, having no words for this. It’s glowing
all right, which she can tell even from it only being a still image.
“Do you... You don’t think it’s real, do you? The Philosopher’s Stone?”
“Well,” Mandica begins. “People die and come back to life all the time. It
probably happens thousands of times each day on this planet alone. It’s not
entirely out of bounds for someone to invent a stone that can somehow heal
and resurrect. I doubt it’s anything that was made back in ancient times,
but it can certainly exist now, can’t it?”
“Can I touch it? I really wanna touch it.”
“How deep is it in there?” The extent of the glow, and the lack of depth in
the photo, make it hard to tell.
“It’s pretty deep. I don’t think touching it is going to knock it out.”
“Go ahead.” She sees him reach back there, and then she feels it. Oh, God,
does she feel it. It is, quite frankly, orgasmic. That was not in the
legends about alchemy. “Okay, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. A little goes a
long way with that thing. Jesus.”
Reagan looks down at the dead mortician. “Someone else might show up at some
point, We need to sneak you out of here. I’ll try to scrub the records. I
don’t know what they keep track of, though, since this is probably the first
true death in history.”
“Except it wasn’t,” Mandica points out. She swings her legs out from under
the sheet, and hits the floor with a thud. How embarrassing. Has she gained
weight? She tries to see her own reflection in the metal drawers, but
they’re not reflective enough.
“That’s true. Here.” He takes off the mortician’s lab coat, and hands it to
her.
It’s big enough to cover her, she just looks like she’s wearing shorts or a
short skirt now. “The others? Did any of them survive?” she asks.
“Jaidia is recovering, and should be able to keep her substrate. Malika’s
dead. I’ve not spoken with her yet. Ravensgate Rescuer is dead too. I don’t
have her contact information for the outside world, but I’m guessing she’s
pretty upset about it.”
“At least she gets a second chance.” She tries to push down on the door
handle, and ends up tearing the whole thing off. Maybe she gained
muscle weight. “Okay, are these buildings designed to be that easy to
break to better simulate mayhem, errr...?”
“They are not,” Reagan says, coming up to inspect the damage. “If you wanna
break something, you gotta be strong enough to do it.”
Mandica regards Reagan for a moment, then sticks her fingers in the hole
where the handle once was. She grips it tight, and pulls the whole door off
of its hinges.
“I’m thinking that stone is real, and it does more than bring people back to
life.”
Mandica very gently sets the door down on its side, and lets it lean against
the wall. “I probably should not have tested my newfound strength in such a
public place.”
Reagan looks over his shoulder at the dead NPC. “Actually, maybe that’s
exactly what you should do. Maybe you should do a lot more damage around
here, so it will look like some supervillain came by. It would explain him,
and where your dead body went, so we don’t have to locate and erase the
records.”
She sighs through her nose. “I’m new to this—whatever this is—I don’t know
what I’m doing.” She walks further back into the room. “Plus, someone might
be coming.”
“Well, I’ll handle that, if it comes up,” he decides. “You just practice a
little.”
Mandica decides to not do that. The door and the dead mortician are enough.
Reagan isn’t convinced, so he stays behind, and creates a bigger mess using
his gun. He then goes into the security room, and destroys the footage
before meeting up with Mandica outside. He was going to drive her back home,
but she does want to practice, so she asks him to take her out to the middle
of nowhere. He knows of an abandoned train yard about thirty kilometers
outside of town that was placed there for this very thing. She is not the
only person there testing her own limits. It’s an unspoken rule that you
don’t fight at The Depot. It’s for newbies who want to figure out how well
they designed their substrates in a more practical environment.
When they add it all up, Mandica’s abilities match with what Elysia had when
she was the Rescuer. Superstrength, speed, stamina, heightened senses,
spring-action legs for jumping. A lot of people have these things, but
Elysia was remarkably more powerful, and now Mandica has somehow taken her
place, thanks to this weird red piece of glass. Elysia herself shows up in
the middle of Mandica’s self tests after Malika called her, after Reagan
called her. Elysia is presumably in her normal body now, which is
still likely pretty formidable, and doesn’t seem upset. “Okay. Show me what
you got.”
