The Star 17

Two days later, deep in a gully of what Cole began referring to as the shorty forest, they finally found a large running water fall. It was glacier and snow fed from the foot of the nearby 'barely mountain' and the deep pool beneath was just shy of freezing cold.

In a sudden request, Corvinus said, "Let's stay here for a couple of days. It's safe and we can relax before heading for the settlement on the other side."

Sonny said, "I don't have any objections. But if it's so safe, why hasn't the settlement claimed it?"

Yessamin said, "Do you think those bugs are so easy to deal with for most? If I wasn't constantly turning their attention away from us, you and Cor here would have been pulling eggs from sting wounds and healing us every few hours. Ugh, just thinking about it makes me nauseous."

Giving a bland but faintly amused look at Cole's perking tail, as the guy busied himself setting up the tents, she added, "Besides, I'm looking forward to peeling out of these rigged suits you made us. They work well enough for the creepy crawlies and keeping us scratch free of those plants but they don't breath well...

"Hot water...Please! It's not a genuine complaint. But that weird hot and cold thing you do to clean us, it isn't very refreshing."

Chuckling, Sonny gave a courtly bow and said, "A bath fit for a queen shall be yours but momentarily, my lady!"

Returning a faint smile, she gave a subtle curtsy with an imaginary dress in hand and replied, "T' would be most appreciated, kind sir."

The last half of the day was spent in indulging small luxuries that traveling denied. As a form of practice, the young adept even had Corvinus help him set up an earthen shelter around their tents. Any sudden blisteringly powerful storms or roaming wildlife wouldn't cut enjoyment or rest short this time.

Mildly tired but not ready for rest, Sonny broke out a bottle of the 'super alcohol' in an attempt to make it even more like a pleasure outing. Seeing it, both Cole and Yessamin's eyes lit up. Corvinus' rising disconnected depression suddenly took a pause at the the sight as well.

With all eyes glued to him, Sonny felt a little pressured. "Well, you said you wanted to relax. It's not going to do me a lot of good just taking up weight in my pack."

Yessamin snorted. "What good couldn't it do you? But, your generosity will always be remembered... She shuddered after saying it, as if her vow had been heard by a higher being intent on enforcing it."

After that, recollection of the evening became blurry. Truths and stories were shared but scarcely recalled. Camaraderie then kindness and comfort finished off the day under the bolstering and plausible cop out the hazy fog of intoxication provided. It gave many permissions to tell painful truths and play them off as dark humor or to make beautiful lies with the chance to conveniently 'forget'. Both were done to give and receive what was needed and wanted.

Long into the next morning, all woke up in need of some healing. Some old demons had been cleared away but a couple new ones had come to take their place. Fortunately, they weren't quite as strong or deeply rooted, merely small regrets and and boundaries that were tested before they were ready to be.

Sonny felt uneasy but mildly accomplished seeing less frown and more weary, still slightly hung over cheer. Noticing, Yessamin ambled over to where the young adept sat in a light trance while staring at the waterfall. Sitting beside him, she held his hand and stared at it with him.

After the passing of some silence but before either Cole or Corvinus would come to investigate, she said, "I hope you never have to know the dark side of what I was forced to become but I see you know the light side of it well enough. That kindness in you, I pray this world, this universe doesn't steal it. Equally, I hope that I don't end up hating you for unburying the ghost of it in me.

"Let's get back within that circle thing that Corvinus sets up. You've attracted the bugs. And, I don't feel mentally prepared to sit out here with you while Cole burns our last canned ham from Chris' stash."

Standing up with her, he said, "You mean that ham flavored salt and fat block called canned ham?"

With a wry quirk of lip and brow, she said, "You dare mock the rare delicacy this fine lady hath conjured from her own secret hoard of treasures!?"

In feigned shock, he grabbed at his chest, "I would not! Were it even the sweetest tasting of poisons. Er' would I, even if it were to slay me... with congestive heart failure."

She rolled her eyes and went to make sure Cole wasn't sneaking too many 'tastes' before everyone had a chance to get a share. While she was swatting at the feline man to get him away from their cook fire, Sonny went to check on Corvinus, who had apparently decided to laze away. He was determined to greet the guy eye to eye without a single visible drop of the hesitation and conflicted feelings he was experiencing.

It turned out to be unnecessary. When he went to shake the sleeping form, it collapsed into a magic circle with a note in it. As he read, he switched from panic to suspicion before shifting down into sheer confusion.

Tearing off the top half that was a private message filled with vaguely hinted at secrets of his true self that he'd one day understand, he handed the bottom half to Yessamin and said, "Does this make any sense to you?"

After scanning through it once, she dropped it in horrified realization. Confused and concerned, Cole picked it up and read it too.

The feline man said, "Ah... it makes sense. No wonder I got myself killed."

Yessamin looked gradually less visible as she slowly started fading away.

Somewhat angrily, she said, "All the pain, the anguish was all part of virtual induction!? I don't know if I want to laugh or scream. Fortunately, I wont have to remember. Same for you. Just recognize that we are in a deep level of something called The Weird. It's basically fully immersive vir-"

Cole looked at Sonny and finished, "It's virtual reality. I would have figured this out ages ago but... your damn entanglement power. When you're around, the line between real and not real gets really screwed up. Never mind. You'll figure it out eventually... Come on man! Catch up. I can't leave until you do."

The young adept closed his eyes and started visualizing the ever more complete, more complex fractal spiral blooming in his subconscious. In a vaguely familiar sense of falling yet rising layer by layer, he kept going. In his own perception, it took nearly an hour before the feeling ceased and was replaced with the physical sensation of being slightly cold, nauseous and a stranger in his own skin.

***

"See, I told you. It's like falling asleep for a nap, over before you know it," Uno's chipper voice delivered.

Seeing him rise up suddenly and stumble off the reclined chair that was a little too big for him, even with adjustments, she added as she hurried to his side, "Whoa, whoa... take it easy. You won't remember it like that but you were actually down for a couple of days, years mentally."

Groggy and slurring, Sonny said, "Get me to a toilet..."

With impressive speed, Uno practically side carried him to a stall and closed it.

She even managed to reach the outer bathroom door and close that before Sonny evacuated his stomach of slimy but tasteless goop. Judging by the pale look on her face, she didn't deal well with sick. That served Sonny better than she would ever realize.

Flushing the toilet while making more loud sick sounds, he released the building pressure threatening to rupture him from within. A few unconscious bodies flew out of him along with a bathroom drenching slop of black mud speckled with supernatural gems. The slew of released energy caused a blackout.

In the resulting darkness, Sonny followed the advice on the note. He pulled the people into his 'snow globe' artifact before putting it away and supernaturally cleaning up the mudslide into his personal space. By the time Uno poked her head into the bathroom to make sure he was okay, he managed to choke out a shaky and unsure affirmative with nothing out of place.

In an effort to gain equilibrium faster, he took the small breathing space of time to stare off into space and organize what he knew. It was a lot more than before awakening and a lot more than he thought he should. The merge between him and his greater self had begun. For a soul, personal experience and perception were more important than communal reality to begin with. The strangely deep and pervasive virtual reality simulation had been a perverted blessing in disguise.

He must have nearly disrupted induction and awakened many times but always fell short of the mark, getting pulled into deeper layers of the massive simulation. It dawned on him that it was a psionic network that probably stretched all the known civilized universe. It was likely the glue that let the complex and overreaching spread of humanity and their close cousins remain connected and on the same page.

Whatever layer he had managed to reach of it was not where he was supposed to be. It belonged to a different order of users. His best fuzzy guess would be people trying to keep a model of current and potential future events. If so, he believed he tipped them off to one of the greatest discoveries the Blue Zone had seen in ages or ended up causing someone to waste untold fortunes of resources on a fairy tale.

If it was a potentially predictive model with any degree of accuracy, one thing was for sure. There was no outmaneuvering the core of the Alliance government. They would always be several steps ahead of anyone but the strongest of precognitive mutants.

"You're wrong," an almost whisper thin mental communication of a young girl's voice said.

"Wrong about what?" he thought.

The girl's voice replied, "We do not allow secular powers to know that much. They would destroy all that is in their greed."

He didn't get a chance to commune with that voice any further. "I need to get you over to medical. You went deep into... induction. There could be some lingering, uh, minor issues. If you're going to get sick again... please try to hold it, okay?"

Chuckling weakly until his stomach spasmed painfully, Sonny said, "I think I'm good for now. Even if I made the noise, I doubt there's anything left to come up."

Looking queasy herself, Uno said, "Please stop... Oh, here are your things. We can get the induction suit back later."

When he looked inside the shiny tin, everything was in order but the memorial diamond looked faded, less real to his vision than it should.

Pushing him through the hall in a wheelchair that had seen much better days, Uno said, "See, all returned safe and sound, as promised."

"What about your guesses? Want me to verify?" he said.

He got the impression that she was trying intentionally to be comical in her absurd guesses. If her goal was to get him to feel a little better, she succeeded. From the time he spent in the deep model of reality hidden in the surface VR, he recognized her as a good person stuck doing unsavory things. She was his first verification of that other place's authenticity.

"Where's Glenn?" he asked.

She stopped wheeling the cart. "How do you... He's on vacation."

Imitating the brightest and most guileless smile he could, he said, "Sorry, I know we little hatchlings, or whatever the staff calls us to dehumanize and create distance, aren't supposed to know instructors' first names and all. Your boss lady accidentally said it when she was bring me here. She was pretty mad. I won't repeat it again."

Letting out a tension relieving sigh, she said, "Has anyone told you that you like to go straight for the darkest and most morbid conclusion possible?"

"Yes. But do you know what they can't say to me truthfully? That I'm even wrong most of the time," he said wryly.

In a chipper voice, Uno said, "Buuuut... You're not always right. Silver lining, right there."

While they were loading him into the scan tank, Uno and the doctor were comparing a lot of professional jargon filled notes. He caught that the incisions on his neck for some 'medical equipment' were more ragged and wider than they should be. She tried to be covert about it but Sonny caught that an unspecified someone had tried to put a controlling coupler on him. He had not taken to it well and it had to be removed on the spot.

Despite them trying to talk coded, he didn't miss that it hadn't been an approved decision. Judging off of what he knew from the VR simulation, Glenn had been responsible for that and more besides. He'd never get an answer from them. So, it would have to remain guesswork.

At least there was one question he didn't have to ask. He knew exactly where Grant was and how he was doing. He'd just seen the version of the man stored in his snow globe artifact flow out in an ethereal state and merge with the boy one that was less than 300 yards away. Drifting on some swift and unknown current to much greater distanced locales, that happened with all of his snow globe residents save one.

Reaching out, he reassured a young and somewhat less intimidating Corvinus that everything was alright. They just weren't in a place where the Centerland Soldier could be released without causing problems. The version in his snow globe had been snatched up from some kind of dangerous place.

And in the ensuing time of the doctor's monitoring, memories of his adventures in a place called Amoril vaguely returned in a hazy and distant kind of way. Though they were far from clear or complete, he got the general idea that he fixed some things for his greater self. There was definitely important things he felt he should remember but also felt like there were probably important reasons why he couldn't, based on the sketchy and riddle-like notes left by the Regen/Corvinus.

Within the decidedly unhormonal, emotionally uninvested and fairly naturally asexual form of a seven year old, Sonny put all his experiences and emotional memories on the table of his mind and sorted them out. When he was finished, he startled the doctor by suddenly laughing for no explainable reason. He apologized and explained that he just remembered something funny.

When it came down to it, due to being a soul oriented supernatural being, there really was no limit to who possibly, even what, he could be romantically attracted to. But physical attraction, that was all on the chemistry of the body. And that, was all dependent on the person whose ideal was accepted. The strongly torn and self agonizing crap he went through was not because he was unable to accept, it was because his pattern was desired to be 'masculine'. Not necessarily on purpose, that meant an ideal that encompassed the traditional male.

Regen was a woman who obviously liked men and wanted a man that liked 'her'. Apparently, Corvinus had some serious issues. The combination ideal was a guy who fit both ideals visually and emotionally/ romantically but physically only desired women. As he came to grips with that, he wanted to pull the old Corvinus back and smack him in the back of the head a couple of times.

Although he was unaware consciously, Sonny had accepted his supernatural heritage a lot more than his greater counterpart. It was Their very nature to be what was needed but confused people made confusing results. The young adept resolved to not become romantically attached to confused people.

It was kind of a dumb resolution to have because feelings never really listened to logic but it did give him the impetus not to actively seek self torturing situations. Because he could respect the power of the fluid physical form his nature gave him, he could respect without fearing that power the way Orison had. He also wasn't nearly as attached to his physical form as someone who had lived a long time with one static 'people suit'. Sentimental perhaps but not attached.

Working that out wasn't all just about feelings. There were some very practical and survival oriented reasons for it too. Understanding the self and ones own powers were a cornerstone to exercising every last bit of potential to its utmost. And the challenges he was fairly certain he would soon be facing might take all of what he had if not more.