ARIZONA, CONTAINMENT SITE "ARBIS" - 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 reality itself, rendering all forms of matter, particles, and energy completely static at a designated target. 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 "Arbis" 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 terribly 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.
[Consciousness is successfully implanted.]
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. He has been hearing them for hours.
[System is processing...]
Just as his consciousness sharpens, it wanes. He falls back still.
***
At 2:30 PM, 6/14/2027, government satellites orbiting the Northern Hemisphere detected unprecedented spikes of what is now recognized as thaumaturgic energy emitting from Containment Site "Arbis".
At 2:34 PM, all contact with Containment Site "Arbis", as well as the entirety of the state of Arizona, was lost. Approximately 7.8 million lives were lost. Arizona is now covered in a dense frost, ice, and various other unnatural elements that had seemingly simultaneously appeared 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 have enveloped it. Search and rescue attempts have proven to be futile, and the government has halt any sort of entry, citizen or otherwise.
Approximately three hours following the fall of Arbis and the state of Arizona, numerous reports flood in detailing bizarre happenings worldwide. Reports indicate people accessing a "system", which grants them supernatural abilities that is now recognized and classified by the government as "thaumaturgy".
It is believed that approximately 37% of humanity gained access to such, with the numbers steadily rising.
***
Years. Seven years after the disaster that caused the complete lost of Arizona and gave humanity access to supernatural and unimaginable powers.
His tired eyelids parted to reveal infinity silver irises that somehow glowed vibrantly within the room, catching the sunlight in a place where sunlight would never reach. He had long, silvery white hair. White lashes. His body was slender, but not overly toned. He was 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 mundane human would've certainly mistaken him for one.
The young man ripped one of the tubes from his being, hissing as he did so; he glanced around the room of confinement. Reinforced, one way glass was splayed out ahead of him, and yet, despite this, he could still see beyond it. A corpse hung on the opposing side, seemingly skewered through by a jagged arc of ice, from the wall. The corpse wore long white attire stained with blood.
Where am I?
Raising his left hand, he examined the palm; then, the back of his hand; and then, slowly, trailed his eyes up his arm. Unfamiliarity.
This felt nothing like his previous body. It was young. It felt too foreign.
[System has finished processing.]
The System. Intriguing.
Raising his hand, fingers splayed, he caressed the now sweltering air. Though the concept of a 'system' was foreign to him, it wasn't to his body, as if second nature. Before him, a flat, two-dimensional surface unfurled, filled with text. This was the system.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
[SYSTEM INTERFACE LOADED]
Designation: [MV-1119]
Ranking: [T1 - Initiate]
//: >
Core Attributes
Vitality: [Intact]
Cognition: [Lucid]
Resilience: [Stabling]
Dominion: [Undefined]
//: >
Thaumaturgic Abilities
[Defiance of Threads]
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 Divine]
"Gods are not born. They are made—through faith, through fear... or through theft."
After absorbing the remnants of the goddess's divinity, your very whole has been forcibly reshaped. You possess three derivative abilities:
Deific Healing: Mortal wounds regenerate unnaturally fast; however, the healing isn't exactly perfect, often leaving faint gold scars. Death by conventional means becomes unlikely, but damage from sacred or anti-divine sources is amplified.
Goddess's Curse: The mind is constantly compromised by fragmented memories, emotions, and impulses that once belonged to the goddess. Occasionally, her unforgiving voice seeps through. Seemingly whispering promises, threats, or information that better be left untold.
Corpus Sanctum: The body is unnaturally strengthened. Muscle fibers now possesses traces of divinity. Your strength reaches beyond natural limits—bones won't snap, even under extreme pressure, and your strikes hit with the force of a siege weapon.
//: >
Incoming Message:
"Congratulations! You— You were never meant to exist. Yet, here you are. An anomaly, a flaw in my grand play. I wonder, will you erase yourself, or will you erase everything else?"
______________________________________________________________________________________________
His gaze trailed slowly and attentively across the text. His status, his core attributes, and abilities. How delightful, he thought with an apparent hint of sarcasm, glancing down at his right hand and clenching it tightly. A piece of that bitch is in me.
Instead of being ecstatic, he was instead repulsed and irritated. After all, this wasn't his power, but something he was unintentionally given. It nauseated him to his core, to have any semblance of that woman's power in him.
Although...
"There isn't anything I can do about it now."
He'll simply have to deal with it.
What worried him more was the message sent to him through the system. ...Was there an existence higher than that wretched woman? And were they a threat? What did they mean by their play? There were many things that could've meant, but one thing was clear to him. They were definitely a threat. And likely the one who created this system.
He would worry about that later. Letting his right hand loosen and fall listlessly to his side, his gaze trailed up.
Despite the enveloping darkness, he seemed unperturbed. Peering to his right, he examined a massive reinforced door. Fortified and locked, it seemed unopenable, even with his body. He looked back to the reinforced glass, which seemed frosted over on the opposing side, then raised his fist. Striking the glass, a thud resounded. Again, then again. Slightly painful, it was. Uncaring, he remained. Golden blood marked his fist as, slowly, the glass began to fragment and split.
After about six strikes, the reinforced glass cracked further and shattered, raining shards into the adjoining room. The man glanced at his fist, noting how the skin peeled away, only to vibrantly glow and heal within moments.
He vaulted into the next room, his eyes examining the technology that surrounded him. It was all so advanced, so strange.
He looked up at the dangling corpse, then kicked the icicle that was impaling it, shattering it and allowing the corpse to fall. He stepped forward, removing the clothes from the corpse to wear them himself. They were quite oversized. Despite the ever-evident cold, he seemed unperturbed and unaffected by it.
Glancing back down at the corpse, he examined it, momentarily. The corpse itself was unrotting and fresh, as if the individual had died just hours before.
Spirits: invisible, incorporeal things. In his past life, he had encountered many. Once the body, or vessel, decayed and succumbed to natural elements, the spirit was said to leave. Yet, in this place, the spirit was trapped, for the vessel did not decay.
Reaching out with his right hand, his splayed fingers pulled and tugged at the existence that was dark, but present. And he placed it into his mouth.
[2/100]
Indifferent to the fact he had just consumed a human spirit, he stood up.
Turning on his heel, he approached the door, casting a brief glance around the room. Frost and dense ice were seemingly spread everywhere, consuming most of the room.
Despite such a thing, he seemed unperturbed.
Halting in front of the door, he reeled back his fist and smashed the door open, sending it spiraling off its hinges with a resounding impact.
Gazing past the doorway, an awe-dropping scene greeted his eyes. Light, abundant, shone down from the clouded skies, illuminating an expansive crater.
The entire expansive facility was cratered, save for a few rooms being left relatively unscathed, as if a nuclear warhead had gone off, leaving behind an eerie absence of life. And in the crater's very center, a tower of churning ice and frost rested 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 alerted a nearby researcher, who promptly rushed to the console in evident confusion and surprise.
***