ARIZONA, CONTAINMENT SITE "ROMERO-5" - JUNE 14, 2027. 2:24 PM.
Humanity has discovered something once unimaginable, but at a cost.
A cigarette slowly burns in an ashtray.
The room is cramped. Bookshelves. Stacks of scientific journals and documents.
An older man sits quietly at a desk, meticulously sifting through the pages of a document detailing 'Project Isorropía', a highly classified initiative researching a device referred to as 'A-1314', one of six in the world. He pauses, running a finger over a particularly intriguing entry recorded mere hours earlier.
Upon the realization of what the entry detailed, the older man's eyes widen. He stands up abruptly, knocking his chair over in apparent fright. He rushes out of the office, sprinting down the expansive corridor while reaching for a device attached to his belt.
"Evacuate the facility, now!" the man's voice barks into the hand-held device, a frantic, lingering feeling tinging every syllable. "This is an emergency!"
***
2:28 PM.
Sirens blare overhead as red light flashes side to side.
Somewhere deeper within the facility's confines, sits a device within an expansive room. It is massive, overstretching, bending and twisting; forever. The esoteric material culminates nowhere, as if at one point it had vanished into oblivion, yet persists nonetheless. Liquid is pumped to and from the machine, itself. But it's pumped elsewhere, too, from these tubes; things, funneling inwards, felt; then heard, processed, grinded, smashed, binded. Conveyer belts escape from the thing, left, right, centre, above; cauldrons, feeding countless things of indiscernible origin into it.
Labeled across the wall: 'A-1314-3'.
It is described as being an "anchor". An anchor that anchors and stabilizes reality itself. It's a device to counter any disaster, natural or otherwise. But, a device like that comes at a grand cost, now revealed.
Dzzzzzz. Crack!
***
Approximately seventy four hours before Containment Site "Romero-5" suffered its disaster, later classified as the Emergence Incident.
The room is dim; bright light pouring in from the guarded hallway melts silhouettes within the dark. The figures at the entrance are researchers, as is the person who operates the device. To a man, some wear the same expression: unease, while others, excitement.
Tongues move to form arguments and concerns. Voices rise and fall.
The monitor shows a slumbering young man, with the designation 'MV-1119' positioned at the top left of the screen. Sounds worm their way into his sleep. It's as if they are trying to force a bud to bloom in winter. One is a deep, rhythmical noise akin to a bothersome bell—a very terrible inorganic sound. Others are profane undulations that arrive and vanish without warning, disturbing the rhythm. And finally, voices. Many voices.
Within the massive machine, the young man sleeps alone in the electronic cradle. His hair, glossy like wire, sways to and fro.
An impossibly imperceptible silver thread slithers through the reinforced ceiling of the containment room, completely unbeknownst to the researchers, and slowly inserts itself into the young man's forehead.
Tightly shut eyelids gradually loosen. As his consciousness sharpens, so too do the sounds he hears. The aching pulsing comes from a device meant to wake him. Tubes are secured to the man's body with straps; as fluids are taken in and expelled from him.
A terrible noise compromises his hearing. Machines sound overhead, deafening and incessant.
The silver thread glows vibrantly, only to suddenly dim.
Just as his consciousness sharpens, it wanes. He falls back still.
***
At 2:30 PM, 6/14/2027, government satellites orbiting the Northern Hemisphere detect unprecedented spikes of what is now recognized as thaumic energy emitting from Containment Site "Romero-5", encompassing the surrounding state at large.
At 2:34 PM, all contact with Containment Site "Romero-5", as well as the entirety of the state of Arizona, is lost. Approximately 8.3 million lives are lost. Arizona, alongside some parts of neighboring states, is now covered in a dense frost, ice, and various other unnatural elements that seemingly simultaneously appear after the disaster, presumably caused by the exposure and destruction of 'A-1314-3'.
It is believed that the state is now uninhabitable for human life due to the unnatural and hazardous elements that now envelop it. Search and rescue attempts prove to be futile, and the government halts any sort of entry, citizen or otherwise.
Approximately three hours following the fall of Romero-5 and the state of Arizona, numerous reports flood in detailing bizarre happenings worldwide. Reports indicate people now have access to a "system", gifting people supernatural abilities now classified by the government as "thaumaturgy".
It is believed that approximately 37% of humanity gains access to such, with the numbers steadily rising.
***
Years. Seven years after the disaster that causes the complete loss of Arizona and gives humanity access to supernatural and unimaginable powers.
His tired eyelids part to reveal infinity silver irises that somehow glow vibrantly within the room, catching the sunlight in a place where sunlight would never reach. He has long, silvery white hair. White lashes. His body is slender, but not overly toned. He is short, no older than nineteen, maybe twenty. White eyebrows seemingly drawn by a single, uninterrupted stroke of a famed artist's brush. His pale skin, flawless, almost like a porcelain doll's. Any regular human would certainly mistake him for one.
The young man rips one of the tubes from his being, hissing as he does so; he glances around the room of confinement. Reinforced, one way glass is splayed out ahead of him, and yet, despite this, he can still see beyond it. A corpse hangs on the opposing side, seemingly skewered through by a jagged arc of ice, from the wall. The corpse wears long white attire stained with blood.
Where am I? How'd did I get here?
Raising his left hand, he examines the palm; then, the back of his hand; and then, slowly, trails his eyes up his arm. Unfamiliarity.
His body feels almost wrong, as if it isn't exactly his own, yet at the same time, it is. Maybe, it simply feels too foreign. He can't pinpoint why he is feeling this way.
His gaze is soon drawn upwards at a vibrant silver thread protruding from his forehead and arcing towards the ceiling wherein it continues past it.
Raising his hand, fingers splayed, he swats at the thread, in which his hand passes through it.
However, before he can continue messing with it, information suddenly spills through the crevices of his mind, causing him to reel his head back in evident irritation. He pauses after a moment and looks in front of him at a two-dimensional screen of text suddenly splayed out before him.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
. . . [T0 - Novice] . . .
//: >
Vitality: [Peak] — Strength: [Peak]
Cognition: [Stabling] — Memory: [Fractured — 3%]
Resilience: [Fluctuating]
//: >
[Defiance of Fate]
Immune to any form of precognition, prophecy, and deterministic control.
[Spiritualist]
[Progress: 1/100]
Due to the your origins, you have an affinity towards spirits. Occasionally, you may see and communicate with spirits, possibly influencing, or even going as so far to consume them.[Made ████]
After absorbing the remnants of the ███████'s ██████, your very whole is forcibly reshaped. You possess three derivative abilities:
-> Healing: Mortal wounds regenerate unnaturally fast. Death by conventional means is unlikely, but damage from sacred or anti-divine sources is amplified.
-> ███████'s Curse: The mind is constantly compromised by distant memories, emotions, and impulses that once belonged to the ███████.
-> Corpus Sanctum: The body is unnaturally strengthened. Muscle fibers now possess traces of ██████. Your strength reaches beyond what is considered mortal.
//: >
________________________________________________________________________________________________
His gaze trails slowly and attentively across the text. My origins? His status, his core attributes, and abilities. How delightful, he thinks with an apparent hint of sarcasm, glancing down at his right hand and clenching it tightly. Why do I feel so, so deeply angered by this?
Instead of being ecstatic, he is instead angered and irritated. It is as if his very essence is instinctively repulsed by it. After all, this isn't his power, but something he is given. It nauseates him to his core.
Although...
"…There isn't anything I can do about it."
He simply has to deal with it while he figures out what is going on.
To be frank, he is very much more worried about his lack of any memories.
Letting his right hand loosen and fall listlessly to his side, his gaze trails up.
Despite the enveloping darkness, he seems unperturbed. Peering to his right, he examines a massive reinforced door. Fortified and locked, it seems unopenable, even with his body. He looks back to the reinforced glass, which seems frosted over on the opposing side, then raises his fist. Striking the glass, a thud resounds. Again, then again. Slightly painful, it is. Uncaring, he remains. Golden blood marks his fist as, slowly, the glass begins to fragment and split.
After about six strikes, the reinforced glass cracks further and shatters, raining shards into the adjoining room. The man glances at his fist, noting how the skin peels away, only to vibrantly glow and heal within moments.
He vaults into the next room, his eyes examining the technology that surrounds him. It is all so advanced, so strange. He feels like a child witnessing something entirely new and unimaginable for the first time.
He looks up at the dangling corpse, strangely indifferent, then kicks the icicle that is impaling it, shattering it and allowing the corpse to fall. He steps forward and removes the clothes from the corpse to wear them himself. They are quite oversized. Despite the ever-evident cold, he seems unperturbed and unaffected by it.
Glancing back down at the corpse, he examines it, momentarily. The corpse itself is unrotting and fresh, as if the individual dies just hours before. A silver strand akin to the one protruding from his forehead seems to be protruding from the corpse's.
Spirits: invisible, incorporeal things. Once the body, or vessel, decays and succumbs to natural elements, the spirit is said to leave. Yet, in this place, the spirit is trapped, for the vessel does not decay. He feels almost attracted by it, unsure how exactly such knowledge of an otherworldly existence befalls upon him.
Reaching out with his right hand, his fingers swat at the thread, only for it to suddenly dim and fade.
[2/100]
Indifferent to the fact he has just consumed a human spirit, he stands up.
Turning on his heel, he approaches the door, casting a brief glance around the room. Frost and dense ice are seemingly spread everywhere, consuming most of the room.
Despite such a thing, he seems unperturbed.
Halting in front of the door, he reels back his fist and smashes the door open, sending it spiraling off its hinges with a resounding impact.
Gazing past the doorway, an awe-dropping scene greets his eyes. Light, abundant, shines down from the clouded skies, illuminating an expansive crater.
The entire expansive facility is cratered, save for a few rooms being left relatively unscathed, as if a nuclear warhead goes off, leaving behind an eerie absence of life. And in the crater's very center, a tower of churning ice and frost rests still, cascading sunlight pouring down on it.
"Interesting."
***
In an undisclosed facility in the southern Nevada desert, approximately 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, a flashing red light on a vibrant console alerts a nearby researcher, who promptly rushes to the console in evident confusion and surprise.
***