Note: I don't own anything
Chapter 1.1: New
Getting an apartment with no questions asked turned out to be way easier than I thought. I had to pick between a four-room apartment with two bedrooms and a studio apartment. Technically there were some other options, but the owners of these two apartments didn't care about verifying my identity, signing papers and other things that I wanted to avoid. The fact that both apartments were in the Downtown area was just a bonus.
But in the end, I decided to pick the studio. It was in the nicer part of Downtown, close to PRT territory, wasn't that much smaller than the four-room apartment, and I really liked that feeling of openness I got when I walked in there and looked around. It had a window wall opposite of the entrance, a double size bed beside it, a small couch, a plasma TV, a clock on the wall, right above the TV, a wardrobe near the entrance, a bedside table, a coffee table, a regular table with a comfortable looking chair beside it, a kitchenette, a fridge and pretty much everything else, except for a computer. The owner, Jeremy Fisher, was an old black man. He was quite a bit taller than me, had a shaved head, a lampshade moustache, and had a slight limp. He didn't talk much, which I really appreciated.
The rent was outrageously high, three grand a month, or a hundred dollars a day. People usually stayed here only for a few days while they were passing through Brockton Bay, so Mr Fisher was very glad to hear that I will be staying for a long time. I paid him six grand for a two months stay in advance, got the keys and a Wi-Fi password, and told Mr Fisher not to bother me for the next sixty days. I think it was obvious to him that I wasn't just a civilian, but he didn't bring it up.
After Mr Fisher walked out of my temporary base of operations I locked the door behind him and sighed in relief. I finally had a roof over my head, money in my pocket, and time to think. It was noon, which meant that I didn't sleep for more than twenty-four hours. I took my clothes off, threw everything on the couch and walked into the bathroom to take a nice, warm shower. About ten minutes later, when I was done, I dried my hair with a towel, grabbed the gun that I appropriated last night, sat on the bed and started to experiment with my power. I was already quite tired, so an experiment that would take only a few minutes at best and would tire me out completely was exactly what I needed.
I reached out for the soul of the gun and I could feel the beginning of a bond between our souls. I wasn't fond of it, and the only experience we shared together was last night's murder. It seems that this event, the emotions invoked by it, was exactly what kickstarted the bonding process. What I wanted to see is if I could accelerate it by soaking an item in my energy. Forcing too much energy too quickly into it may be dangerous for its soul, but I didn't really care if this gun got destroyed. Slowly and steadily I poured almost all of my remaining energy while observing the changes. The soul started to... inflate, like a balloon, and the bond started to develop rapidly. After a few minutes, I was out of energy and the bond was completely formed. Before I even noticed it I fell asleep on the bed, with no clothes on and with a gun in my hand.
I woke up on the floor eight hours later, and I still felt tired, but it was much, much better than how I felt before sleeping. It was already dark outside and I felt really hungry. After lying on the floor for a few minutes I finally got up and walked up the fridge. Obviously, it was empty.
"Ugh, fuck it, gonna order some pizza or something. Really not in the shopping or possibly-getting-mugged mood right now."
'The gun. You completely forgot about the gun.'
"Oh, right!" - I exclaimed as I rushed to the bed.
The gun was lying under the blanket that I dropped on the floor while I was sleeping. I grabbed it and reached out for its soul. It was just as stretched out as it was before I fell asleep, but it was half-empty inside. Looks like half of the energy that I left inside either leaked out or was absorbed. After looking a bit closer I found out that the energy inside was slowly leaking into the air. The bond was getting weaker. Slowly, I filled the soul up with my energy again, not stretching it this time, and pulled the soul out completely through the artificial bond. There was a flash of blue light and a small, weak explosion that suddenly pushed the air aside. It wasn't very violent, not nearly as violent as the explosions caused by manifesting a completely mastered Fullbring for the first time. The gun in my hand changed, but only slightly. The shape was still the same, but it looked a bit sleeker, with six easily visible dim blue lights on both sides of the cylinder, and an engraving on the side of the barrel.
{A Small Mercy} - it read.
Now I felt way worse than before. My own power reminding me about the shitty choice I made.
'Is it mocking me?'
'I think that this is just an imprint that your thoughts and feelings left on the soul of the weapon. Don't think about it too hard. More importantly, we now confirmed that even the smallest bond can be artificially grown to make a Fullbring.'
"I really doubt that it's a strong one though. Well, we can't test it here anyway."
I felt for the connection between my soul and that of my new Fullbring. The feeling was similar to the one I got from manifesting my watch, only it was... dead. The connection between me and my watch reminded me of symbiosis, while this was more like holding a phone with a weird, unfamiliar interface. I tried to reverse the manifestation, to dismiss my new fullbring and make it go back into a state of being a normal item, and I failed, just like I failed with the watch. I tried releasing it from my hands to dismiss it because it worked with the watch, but for some reason it didn't work here. The gun stayed in the same changed state, and the connection between our souls wasn't interrupted.
"This is not how it's supposed to work, at all. What the hell is happening?"
'Maybe it's broken.'
"Or maybe it is my power that is broken. I suspected that it wasn't a perfect copy after our experiments in the park, but this is just getting ridiculous. Can it even be called a Fullbringer power anymore? It extracted the knowledge directly from my mind and soul, so why isn't it a perfect replica of the original power?"
'Maybe It misunderstood something, or had to change it to make it work?'
"Ugh, whatever, if I can't change it back then I will just leave it here until I can test it. Maybe It will change back on its own after some time."
I tried one last thing, I tried to block the connection and it worked, but the gun still didn't change back. I put the gun on a coffee table and lied down on the couch.
An hour later, I was sitting on a couch, munching on a recently delivered pepperoni pizza and scrolling through PHO and other relevant sites, looking for changes between the original story of Worm and this new world I found myself in. I already confirmed that all the heroes and villains in Brockton Bay were exactly as they were in the original story, same powers, costumes and all. No genderbending, no unfamiliar Capes, no recent unfamiliar Cape deaths, nothing. The only difference I found so far was that Taylor Hebert was supposed to be released from the locker way, way earlier. After I was done looking through the Brockton Bay's parahumans, I checked the names of PRT ENE Director, Major and other important figures. No changes there either. I checked the Triumverate, the list of PRT directors' names, and I didn't find anything obviously different.
It was when I searched for S-class threats that I found something very, very interesting. Three months ago Jack Slash and Bonesaw went missing. The rest of The Nine went on a rampage, searching for them, and after they were defeated they either escaped, got captured or got killed. Then, a week after their disappearance, Jack's and Bonesaw's bodies were found on LA PRT's "doorstep". After that several ex-members of The Nine were seen in different cities all over the country, alone. The Nine were no more.
"It's great that the happy little murder family is no more, but this smells of Cauldron, and you can almost always be sure that what they do will make things worse."
'Check the info about Zion and the Endbringers.'
I checked the articles about the Endbringers first. No changes there, as far as I could remember. Leviathan, Behemoth and Simurgh, three big fucking problems for humanity to overcome. The last attack was by Behemoth back in November. It was when I searched for news about Scion that I found a stupidly big change.
.
.
.
"Zion is gone..." - I dropped the phone on the floor in shock.
'It's... great news, right?'
"I don't know. He could be dead, could've fucked off to some other Earth, I don't know! I sure hope that Cauldron didn't fucking capture him alive to harvest more powers!"
I started pacing back and forth around the room. I was panicking, and it was even worse than when I was falling to my death two nights ago. My thoughts were a jumbled mess of end-of-the-world scenarios.
'Calm down. He's been gone for two months and so far nothing happened.'
I could feel his calm disapproval at my reaction. It actually pissed me off. I wanted to break something, but I didn't own anything in this room except for my clothes.
"Fuck! I knew that I was probably stuck on a ticking timebomb of a world, no, world cluster, but this is different! Now it's a bomb that could explode any second!"
'Or maybe it won't explode at all, so calm down. You can't change what happened anyway.'
I could feel the calmness spreading from him to me.
*deep breath*
.
.
.
*sigh*
"You're right. Fine, whatever, I can't deal with this right now anyway. Alright, should we look for more changes?"
'I think that's enough for today.'
I picked up the phone. Thankfully, it was undamaged. I turned it off and put it on the bedside table.
"Yeah, I don't think I can handle more bullshit like this right now. Also, remind me to buy a phone charger tomorrow morning."
'Sure. For now, let's watch some TV to kill a few brain cells, finish the pizza and relax. Then we could go for a run, train to use our powers and maybe test out a new Fullbring."
"Okay, let's do that."
I grabbed a remote from the coffee table and lied down on a couch.
Author's Note:
Big reveal!
