88 – Patching needed?

88 – Patching needed?

Telekinesis, and most of my other psychic powers, weren’t just good for killing things. That was something I needed to hammer into my thick skull.

Just floating in our room, swimming through the air like a fish was making me giddy. I held down my giggles though, Selene was sleeping, so I had to be quiet. I debated cuddling with her today too, but just seeing how she crashed into the bed right after stumbling out of the bath, I decided to just let her have some peaceful rest.

This pushed our foreshadowed conversation to the next morning which was quickly approaching. In the meantime, I just played around. Most of my brain power was relegated to helping out my mind cores in deciphering the slew of new genetic templates I had with a primary focus on the Swarmlord’s.

That fucker was unnecessarily complicated in its makeup, so despite working on it for a good while, the percentage barely crawled up to 0.1%. I’d need to do something to speed that up once we were done here, maybe just spawning a bioship’s worth of brains and a week relegated to just this would do, maybe not.

Speaking of interesting applications of my powers. What else could I do that I never thought about? My imagination was so damned limited, I only thought about replicating stupid anime movies. Could I split atoms with telekinesis?

I squinted at a single mote of dust floating through the air and grasped it in my psychic claws. I tried pushing further in and feeling out molecules and atoms with my aura, but I barely got down to the molecular level.

That could still be useful. I mean, my black flames basically ate away the potential energy that was stored in molecular bonds, so in a way, I was already making use of this. Though, I couldn’t think of a non-combat application for this thing.

I thought about biomancy next. What was biomancy, really? Was it just influencing biological functions? Manipulating living matter? Or even straight up controlling vitality?

In a way, I could do all the above, but only the first one through biomancy. I never really did anything with biomancy that wouldn’t have been possible to do through some technology.

I boosted self-healing, maybe added a bit of regeneration and some de-aging, but all those are things Mankind could do with weird sci-fi technobabble bullshit already. What made biomancy more than that?

Are the different schools of psionics even anything more than arbitrary designations humans came up with to describe something they couldn’t understand? That was deep, a bit too deep for my reduced mental capacities. Smooth brain time. Anyway, Biomancy so far was able to replicate things my body could already do, or add some enhancements.

Could I just ... change my body with it? Without using my eldritch shape shifting thingy? It’s not even shapeshifting, more like flesh morphing ... yeah.

Back to experimentation. I raised my palm, pointing my index finger upwards and stared at it. Soul energy flowed into it, and I wanted it to change. I commanded it to pull up the iron in my blood and turn the finger into iron.

I hissed, quickly shutting my mouth not to wake Selene as my blood-vessels burst and the iron inside was pulled to the surface of my skin and coated it in a film of metal. That wasn’t exactly what I was going for.

I shook my hand, shaking off the faulty finger and regrowing it as I reabsorbed the evidence of my failed experiment. A clearer mental image was what I tried next, I didn’t imagine iron from my blood going into my skin, only my skin becoming iron.

Then I pushed that image into being with the soul energy acting as the agent of my will.

The first thing I did after Selene went to bed was remaking my Soulbone skeleton. It was really a game changer when it came to my psychic powers, so even waiting this long was a bit of an oopsie. No matter, I lived, and so did Selene.

I wonder how the other two are doing. I thought, but quickly disregarded it with a shrug. I could feel Val still pulling on my Puddle for power and the joy radiating from his soul so there was little to worry about with him and Zedev was ... reliable?

He was by far the one who I had to worry the least about. If he had a problem, he could have notified me, anyway. I still had one of my tendrils in him so our telepathic link was stable even with him being a coghead and a non-psyker.

Meanwhile, I watched my skin turn metallic with a grin. It only took a few seconds for the transformation to complete, and this time, there was no accompanying pain.

My grin quickly disappeared when I tried to move my finger, and it refused to budge. It was like I had a cast of solid iron around the digit.

“Fuck.” I murmured, waving the finger around and trying to bend it with my other hand. Okay, abort.

I reabsorbed the finger and to my disappointment, the iron skin just dropped to the floor, my powers not being able to turn it back into bio-energy. Well, it wasn’t made with bio-energy in the first place so that isn’t much of a problem.

Going back into experimenting, I was about ten iron fingers richer by the time I managed to make the damned thing work.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” I hid my metallic arm behind my back and kicked the dozen iron fingers under the couch as I turned to a sleepy Selene standing in the door to the bedroom. She was staring at me, a curious twinkle in her eyes, but I could tell that getting some food and the shitty dystopian equivalent of a coffee won out.

“Okay.” She drawled, shaking her head as she walked over to fish out some of the dry rations they left in the room. Then she slumped down on the couch and returned her gaze onto me. “Soooo, what have you got in your hand?”

“Nothing.” I smiled.

“Right.” She looked at me dubiously. “Why are you floating?”

“Cause it's fun.” I said as I stepped down from the air. “Have you been practising flying?”

“Yes.” She averted her eyes.

“I could give you some wings, you know. Not the ugly ones Tyranids have, but a nice feathery one. You wouldn’t have to worry about learning how to fly with Telekinesis that way.”

“I-” She looked thoughtful. “No. ... Not yet. I want to do it myself.”

“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow. I was just testing the waters really, expecting her to outright dismiss the idea of getting some bio-mods — ‘biological modifications’. “Anyway, check this out!”

I revealed my hand to her, and she just stared at it, more confused than anything.

“Why is your arm made of metal?” She asked.

“Nothing urgent, or anything that can’t be pushed back.”

“Well.” She took a breath, calming herself before she continued. “I have noticed something that I wanted to talk to you about, so I’d appreciate it if you listened to me this time.”

“Is this what you were talking about yesterday?” I raised an eyebrow. “That ‘something serious’? You certainly know how to make a girl nervous, you know that right?”

“Sorry.” She grimaced. “That wasn’t my intention.”

“I know.” I gave her an understanding smile. “So what is it?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you’d told me, when you ... you know.”

“Yeah?” I nodded.

“So, with that in mind, I’d like to ask you whether you still want to keep that ... morality of yours as it was?”

“Of course.” I frowned. “What would be the point of being alive if I became another Tyranid Hive Mind? There is no enjoyment to be had as an endlessly hungry eldritch thing.”

“Okay.” She nodded gently, looking me straight in the eye despite the nervousness clear in her expression. “I think you are losing that. I don’t know why, but with every day, you are becoming more and more detached. You were doing better right after that Necron kidnapped you, but once you remade this body, you were back to being almost emotionless.”

“That can’t be right.” I frowned. Thinking through the last few days. “I’m pretty sure I showed plenty of emotion when I was with you.”

“You did.” She said, disappointingly not blushing at my remark. “But only then, never with anyone else. You only showed empathy for me and to nobody else. Everything you did seemed to be based more on cold logic than anything else.”

“I was trying to be less spontaneous.” I said defensively, trying to think of anything that could prove her wrong. Was I really spiralling back again? What did I do wrong? Why? Was fate playing tricks on me? Was I destined to become a mindless monster despite everything I was trying? Despite trying to be better?

“And that’s good.” She placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it gently. “Being thoughtful and thinking about all of your options is good, but I feel like you were starting to entirely disregard life that wasn’t me or the other two.”

“That-” I grimaced, her words ringing true. “Why?” Why? Why was even just acting normal so hard? Couldn’t I just live my second life peacefully? Wasn’t it enough that I was dropped into the shittiest setting imaginable, but I also had to constantly worry about my entire self turning into something that was just not me?

I thought I was doing good; I was caring for someone now. Shouldn’t that have been enough?

A life as a failure, a death as a failure, and even death rejected me at the end. Then I was dragged here, shoved into a body so alien it could be the villain of a horror movie.

I thought this was my second chance, to be someone more, someone that mattered. Striving for that, I almost forgot that there wasn’t such a thing as ‘free power’ in this galaxy.

It was trying to twist me every step of the way, relentlessly working to pull me down into the abyss of its madness and I even played into it. Naming myself ‘Echidna’ the Mother of Monsters.

“Hey.” Selene said hardly, snapping me out of my brooding. “Calm down, you can fix this. We can fix this. “

I didn’t even notice there were tears running down my cheeks. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Why did I start spiralling? I was doing so well just a few weeks ago.

“Wait.” I opened my eyes and turned my gaze on Selene. She looked at me with eyes crested in worry. “You said I was doing better ... back in the cultist cave? When I had that base human body?”

“That was what it was?” She asked. “Yes, at least it felt that way to me.”

So this form does something to me. Something that is ... not dampening my emotions, I have plenty of those, but my empathy.

[Notice: Genetic sequences have been found in the Aeldari samples that lock down any form of empathy felt towards those they view as lesser than them while enhancing their sadistic tendencies. These sequences have been used in the ‘Psyker Form’ as they proved to be useful for enhancing the overall psychic conductivity of the body.]

“Fucking hell.” I swore. “Next time tell me about the side effects before I start using something!”

[The knowledge has been transferred into the main memory segment. You have had access to it.]

Fuck. I released a trembling sigh. So I’m just a moron, that’s it? “Alright. I think I have a way to alleviate this, if not fix it outright. I don’t know how much I fucked myself over with this already.”

“So?” Selene asked. “What is it?”

“I was using an Eldar body as the base for this.” I motioned down at myself. “And as it turns out, those fuckwits are genetically wired to be sadistic and to feel barely any empathy towards those they consider ‘lesser’.”

“Oh,” she said. “And you can fix that?”

“I hope so.” I took most of my mind cores off of their current task, and assigned them to purge the parts from all of my forms that I needed gone. It wouldn’t be that simple though, I relied on the Eldar psychology to enhance my waning emotions, so that part had to stay. “The worst thing that could happen is me just going back to using a simple human body.”

“Okay.” Selene deflated, tension I hadn't noticed draining out of her. “Good. I was ... worried.”

“Sorry for worrying you.” I grimaced in shame. I was supposed to make her worry less. What sort of partner was I?

“I’m just glad it turned out well.” She smiled, a genuine, brilliant smile that pulled on my heartstrings.

“So am I,” I murmured. “So am I.”

This can’t happen again. Never again.