Power Unchecked

The next day, I had steeled myself for what I had to do. It’s time to go see my son. Leia accompanied me in silence on the way to the College’s medical wing. We carefully navigated our way through the labyrinthine corridors of endless operating rooms, front desks and throngs of medical personnel, until we reached a cordoned-off checkpoint, flanked by mages in security robes, holding staffs. They let us through after they see Leia with me.

We finally reach David’s room. There’s guards posted outside too, particularly older and more experienced mages, it seems. What I see chills me to my core. There he is. He’s gaunt, with scraggly facial hair, skinny. My son. He looks like he’s dead already. Chapped lips, not breathing, unconscious. One of the doctors approaches me.

“Chief John, I’m sorry to have to meet you like this. We’re ready to bring your son out of suspended animation.”

I gently nod. What can I even say to him? No matter what I say, I’ve got to do something.

With a flash, a circular barrier around him disintegrates, and I see his chest begin to rise and fall. David’s eyes slowly pry themselves open. He hauls himself up into a sitting position on his hospital bed, blinking, taking his surroundings in. His eyes fall to me, standing there in my checkered button down shirt, my badge on my hip, and Leia, in her fiery-red-haired beauty, standing beside me.

For a moment, our gazes meet in total silence. The doctor, and one of the guards, watch apprehensively.

David’s eyebrows furl for a moment. He opens his mouth, but decides not to speak. He looks around the room again.

In his head, he thought “I don’t know where I am, but I don’t want to be here. Anywhere but here.”

He looks at me again. This time, I can see the thinly veiled anger in his eyes.

He thinks to himself, “I want to be as far away from him as possible.”

A blinding, purple flash fills the room, with a rending “WHUUPP”, sucking wind throughout the room, knocking over a medical cart and causing the doctor to scream in terror. I peek at David’s bed. There’s a slightly burnt, shredded hole in the bed where he was sitting.

He’s gone!

Alarms blare throughout the hall. I hear a crowd of footsteps sprinting down the hall. An entire security team of mages, doctors, and guards has converged on the room.

“WHERE IS HE?”, they shout. We’re quickly shepherded out of there in the commotion and brought to a meeting room. In it is Kalth, along with some rather scary looking mages and scribes. They grill me as to what I did, what David did, and what I saw. I don’t have many answers for them.

Many thousands of miles away, above a tropical continent, David flashes into existence, floating in the air above a vast jungle. He falls for a moment, then catches himself with levitation and takes a moment to look around.

Always a smart kid, being my son, the possibilities now available to him flutter through his mind. In the span of about a minute, he’s discovered he can teleport, and he can fly, too.

“Hmmm...”, he sighs.

He looks down at his hospital gown. “I don’t want to wear this”, he thinks. It disintegrates from view. Whoops, now he’s naked. He imagines a black, gleaming set of armor, like from a fantasy video game. Piece by piece, it assembles from the void onto him.

“No… maybe not like this.”

A grey-black mixture of light armor, plated shoulderpads and leather forms instead. Much cooler, much better looking. Lighter and easier to move in.

He puts his hand under his chin, deep in thought. Is this heaven? No, it can’t be. Dad is here. What’s up with that pointy-eared woman I saw next to him? His new girlfriend? Probably.

It’s clear I have superpowers now, but why? I’m pretty sure I died. I should at least test them out.

He starts small. “I want to go over there”, he thinks. With another purple flash, and a hole torn in the air, he pops up at the point he imagined. Nice!

He’s popped up over a tropical lake. Mangrove trees, birds, and freakish swamp creatures inhabit it. He looks down at this green, algae-covered swamp.

He snaps his fingers. Instantaneously, every drop of water in the lake vanishes into a cloud of steam. All the creatures, alligators, fish, snakes, worms, are left flopping and writhing in pain in the now crackled, dry mud left behind.

He raises an eyebrow. Damn, this is getting pretty serious. Maybe I can put it back.

He snaps his fingers again. A perfectly proportionate amount of clear, blue fresh water dumps into the lake, filling it to exactly how it was.

David decides to float his way down to the ground. It’s a wet, untouched jungle, mud sucking underfoot. Disgusting. He imagines having hard ground only beneath his feet. The mud instantly crystallizes into solid, compacted dirt, a firm “clunk” with every step. Very good.

He spies a small, leafy branch jutting out from a scrub palm. With a swift, air-blade cut, he takes it in his hand. “Time for the alchemist’s test.”, he ponders to himself.

With an orange-red circular ring of magic, the palm frond is transformed from its healthy green color into solid gold, from stem to tip. He decides to heat the end of it. It drips and melts, splattering onto the mud below. David is thoroughly satisfied.

Behind him, he hears great, plodding footsteps, tearing through the mud. He turns around to take a look.

It’s some sort of vast, horrible-looking wyvern, a snake-like creature with legs. It almost looks like a dinosaur. It’s hauling ass towards him, kicking up sprays of mud with every step.

Feeling no fear, David sizes it up. He remembers something from a cartoon he had watched when he was very young. “I was born with glass bones and paper skin. Every morning, I break my legs, and every afternoon, I break my arms. Every night, I lie awake in agony until my heart attacks put me to sleep”.

As soon as he thinks this, the wyvern screams out in pain, collapsing over itself face-first into the mud. It’s suffering unimaginably, writhing on the ground. He decides to put it out of his misery.

He raises his fist and clenches it. In one, smooth motion, the entire wyvern’s body is crushed into an incredibly dense sphere, which forms a glowing red spinning ball of energy, which shoots up into the air and explodes like fireworks. In his head, David had imagined turning him into a mixture of gunpowder and copper salt flakes. The explosion shatters through the sky, a beautiful blue color.

A rueful, happy smile fills his face. “Finally, something good happened to me for once”, he thinks.

He flies up into the air. “I need a map”, he thinks. A big projection of the local area appears in front of him. “Bigger.” Even larger still. “Countries.” Finally, he gets the world map he was looking for.

He spots Laios, where he was originally. He’s far, far away. The country he’s in is colored red. He wonders why. A blurb of text appears on the map. This country has been engaged in a holy war with Laios for a few hundred years. Each line of the text pops to life with a little fire effect.

David spots a large, populated city somewhat near him on the map. Instead of teleporting, he decides to fly there. Vast, dense jungles make way to rice paddies and clearings, crude dirt roads, and small villages. He arcs across the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, until a very crude, wooden-walled city comes into view. Encircled by muddy roads, countless peasants drawing carts and plowing fields, it’s ostensibly poor and barbaric.

He takes a moment to float over and observe the city from the air.

An arrow whistles by him. Hundreds of feet below, a lone, green-skinned, pointy-eared creature had taken aim and fired at him. A goblin. He was aggressively gesturing to his fellow wall guards to join him and fire.

David’s eyes turn down to meet this little, brave creature. “Come here and explain yourself”, he thinks.

The goblin is thrown up into the air, wailing and screaming, until he’s face-to-face with David. He’s thrashing around in terror.

‘Explain yourself’, David thinks, not even saying a word.

“SCARED! SORRY!”, the Goblin shrieks out.

“That’s enough”, David says, quietly, and deposits the goblin back down on the ground in a flash. The poor little thing passes out instantly from shock.

He slowly descends down to the ground in front of this little city gate. A troop of armed guards, Orcs, Goblins, rough-looking human warriors and demihumans have appeared to confront him.

David strides confidently towards them.

“KNEEL!”, he shouts.

At once, the entire group falls to a kneeling position against their will, writhing and gasping. A sly smile stretches across my son’s face.