I suppose it was fitting that my rebirth would be in water. We are all, after all, born from the waters of the womb, so why should a rebirth start anywhere else?
Water is a really cool thing. I mean, it’s necessary for life, it expands when it freezes, and it shapes everything from continents to small forests. It’s the universal solvent, it’s the base of our all of our good measurements, from metric to Celsius. Without water, there is no life.
I can’t imagine a world without life, without change.
And yet, as I sat at the edge of the oasis the size of a football field, that is all that surrounded me. A desert of unmoving sands. I knew there was life out there, but it was invisible to me. I knew I would survive longer than anything else out there. After all, my rebirth had given me certain advantages.
I had first realized it when I woke up, completely naked, in the center of the oasis. I felt strength, clarity, when I was surrounded by water. Just being in the water, I could think faster, punch harder, and be better. Hot days and freezing nights came and went, and I learned I could stave off my hunger as long as I stayed in the water. A week passed and I eventually decided that I would have to eat. There were fish, there were plants, and I could survive in my sanctuary. With my increased speed, it was quite easy to catch a fish. Unfortunately, my affinity with water did not bless me with fire-making skills, so I pulled a Gollum and ate it raw. I would have thought that being in water would have strengthened my immune system, if it not for the fact that it felt different. I wasn’t just getting nourishment from it. I was getting information. Not memories, or the answer to the Ultimate Question, but…blueprints.
As I ate more of the fish, I wondered if I could do anything with these blueprints. Picking a random ‘strand’, I ‘implemented’ it within me. I winced, then screamed, as a searing pain flew across my entire body, save for my feet, which were in the water. For them, I only felt something like uncomfortable prickling. When the pain had ended, I found myself looking up to the sky, tears in my eyes, blood flowing from my bit lip. My skin felt…strange. Pulling myself up, I noticed that a thin layer of soft silver scales covered my entire body. Fish scales. I had used fish DNA to alter myself. Wondering if I could do more, I willed my lip to heal. Slowly, painfully, my lip mended and the trickle of blood stopped.
Remembering how my feet felt when I did the change, I submerged myself in the water and willed myself into my scale-less state. Instead of feeling like a drunken Magneto at a press iron convention, the pain had been reduced to something in between a paper cut and that sensation you get when your foot’s asleep.
So like any other person, I started fucking around. I guess that’s how I learned so much. I managed to figure out how to increase my height, my muscle and bone density, improve my senses, and increase my shoe size (with the stuff that comes with). Then I began to wonder what limited my abilities. I willed tendrils to come out of my forearm. In the water, they felt like a slow burn, but tendrils still came out. I willed them to move left, then right, biting my lip in pain. They did as I willed, but apparently, cutting off pain receptors meant losing control. I could, however, lessen the pain somewhat, reducing it to more manageable levels. Of course, out of water, I could only expect the pain to be far worse. So I knew it was easier to simply obtain blueprints for traits I would like, rather than going through the pain and concentration for biocontructs.
Swimming around, I found a lot of useful traits. Mosses and underwater plants provided me with additional food sources, so I could survive without food for longer periods of time, as long as I had sunlight. Of course, implementing the trait made my skin a bit green, making me look like a male Poison Ivy. After a couple days of experimenting, I managed to return to my pale white complexion. Except I sort of got rid of my freckles. Oh well. After a month, I had gotten all of the important traits from the oasis. And I was bored. I decided one month was a bit long to go without wearing clothes, so I made some clothes from a mixture of plant materials, slowly pulling it out of myself, underwater. It hurt like a bitch, but now I had real protection against the evils of nudity.
But I didn’t leave. I didn’t know how big the desert was, I didn’t know how many gourds I would have to make to have enough water to get out. I was stuck on an island of life in an ocean of death. So I stuck around some more. I played with my powers for another week before I realized I was thinking too small. Who ever said the only biological matter I could control was my own? Once I asked myself the question, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Was I going to be OP? I looked to one of the palm trees, leaning over the edge of the water, and willed it to grow.
Nada.
Well shit.
I decided to see if it would work if I was touching the tree. Once my palm was on the trunk, I willed my consciousness into it, willing it to grow. And with some creaking, the tree grew bigger, its coconuts grew riper, and I got turned…never mind.
So I willed more and more things, until I changed the genetic code so much, it could hardly be considered the same species. Out of pure bemusement, I turned the surface of the tree blue. Then, I moved onto the fish. Another month passed, and I had created a dozen new species at the oasis, each interacting with one another in their own way. Hell, I made everything a bit more efficient. But I was bored again. I couldn’t explore the desert, for fear of losing my way back, and I couldn’t just sit there and hope for a rescue. Fuck, I didn’t even know if I was still on Earth. I was pretty sure some Saharan nomads would have passed by for a sip by then, so I was pretty much isolated. I knew I could explore the desert for quite some time, having given myself a way of obtaining energy from sunlight as well as skin that better kept water, but I would still lose water. Not to mention I felt like I was missing something.
Another swim was in order. But instead of doing it for science, I was just going in for shits and giggles. So I jumped in, and just…relaxed. I soon found myself drifting towards the center. I had never been to the center, because everything underwater refused to go or grow in the center. I just put it off as one of nature’s oddities. But from the surface, I noticed the ‘no-go’ zone was a perfect curve. Forming some gills, I swam around the curve, trying to find a mistake.
There were none. A perfect circle, where nothing grew. I even grabbed a crab and dropped it inside the circle, and it quickly scuttled out. Now I had to know what the hell was going on. Deciding to go with my gut ̶ and the Cliché Law ̶ I swam to the center. And I found it. There, on a marble pedestal, perfectly vertical, was a staff. It shone a blueish silver, but it wasn’t complex. Just a staff which seemed like it was missing something at the top. I shrugged and grabbed the middle.
I floated there, waiting, hoping I would not hear something like a toilet flushing. Deciding to take my loot and book it, I yanked the staff off the pedestal, and swam as fast as I could, before jumping out of the water and looking back, expecting to see a whirlpool forming.
“Gack! Air!” I gasped, "Stupid gills!" I fell to the ground, heaving. Concentrating, I removed the gills, grimacing at the pain. I picked myself up and grabbed the staff…only to see it wasn’t a staff. The pole was still there, but at the tip, three transparent prongs split off. Apparently they were pretty much invisible underwater. The ones on the sides had a sharp edge facing outwards, so it would slice if I swung. The center one was slightly longer with a pointed tip, designed to be a final 'fuck you' to whoever I pulled it out of.
“I wonder if this is glass.”
I swung the trident into a big rock, and found it lodged a good ways in, splitting the rock perfectly. Using my enhanced muscles, I pulled the trident out of the boulder, observing the clear material.
“Pretty cool. But why would you be made to look like that? I mean, it’s neat and all, but shit, is turning invisible in water the only thing you can do?” In response, the trident prongs seemed to get bigger, rounder…until it started dripping. Steadily, the flow increased, until there was a small stream going back into the lake, originating from the tips. They seemed to stick to the water like a young tween to run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic novels. That is some incredible surface tension.
I’ll admit, I’m not a sciency guy. But when I first woke up, I thought I was on some serious shit. Then I realized it was real, and I just thought that some people gave me some supervirus that liked humidity and just dropped me off in the desert to get rid of the evidence when the FBI kicked their shit in. But this…this was fucking magic. I know enough that you create something from nothing, or something from something else without a god tier fuck-ton of energy. And last I checked, this trident did not have a battery slot.
I shrugged. “Whatever. Now, I’ve got a way of getting myself water besides his damn lake.” I looked out to the horizon, where gold met blue. “And with water and a couple of dried fish, I could survive for at least five months. Hopefully, I haven’t landed on Tatooine, because if I walked in a straight line north, I should see some damn water. Or mountains. I don’t know, I almost failed geography. "
I gathered all the stuff I had made, from my crappy white clothes and cloak to the bone knives I made out of boredom. And of myself. I caught a dozen fish, cleaned them, dried them for a day, and wrapped them in cloth that I strapped to my back.
“It was a nice place.” I thought out loud, “But I’m not going to spend the rest of life here. I’ve got to go do shit. Build monuments in my honor, become the inspiration of generations, yadda yadda, you get the gist.” I brought my cloak around myself, but let my forearms get exposed to the sunlight. And I began walking.
Ten days had passed. Ten days where I walked in a single direction, without break, without sleep. Ten nights where I covered myself in all of the clothes I had made. When I was thirsty, I made water to drink. When I was hungry, which was rare, I ate part of a fish. Ten days without talking, without stumbling, without stopping. I knew there was a place where the desert ended, and if need be, I would walk for a year. And on the eleventh morning, I spotted a red speck in the sky. I tore of my cloak and tied it to my trident to use as a flag, and started waving it around. Civilization!
As it came closer, I recognized the shape. An airship. My enhanced eyes allowed me to see what some of those on the ship looked like, and I had to stop waving my crappy flag for a moment.
“Well, shit. Where’s Toto when you need to bitch to someone about not being in Kansas anymore?”
Gryphons.
Yup, two of the greek legends themselves flew down from the ship that had stopped a good forty feet above me, landing in front of me in a cloud of sand. I was a bit disappointed, because their beaks were only at my navel. One was a solid brown throughout with a hawk beak, wearing bronze armor with three golden feathers tempered on the side of his helm, while the other was black throughout his cat body and lower bird body, but with a gray head, speckled with feathers of dark gray, while his bronze helm had two gold feathers on the side. And holy shit, their golden eyes were huge. Of course, they started talking to me in some freaky language that I could not understand, so I just shrugged and tried telling them with signs that I couldn’t understand them and I wanted to get on their ship. Sometime around when I made the walking motion with my fingers and the gryphon was making coos and bird motions with his claws I just sighed and gave up.
“I’m sorry guys, but I don’t understand what the fuck you’re saying.”
The two gryphons turned to one another, and the black one just facepalmed. Beakclawed? Whatever.
“You speak equish, strange one?” The brown one asked.
Holy Buddha tits. They speak English. Just roll with it.
“Yeah, sure. Let's go with that. I was wondering, could I perhaps take a ride to civilization?” The two gryphons looked at one another. The black one had a wary look in its eyes, but the brown one rolled its eyes and looked at my hands. Do they not realize how easy they are to read? I mused, It doesn’t take a genius to figure out if they see me as a threat. I guess since I’m so tall, I would be a bit scary, but without claws, I wouldn’t be much of danger. I also took some effort into building dense muscle rather than hulking muscle, so they would underestimate my strength. I don’t even know the limits of my own strength. I looked over the two, who seemed to be having an invisible conversation as they debated how dangerous I was. What I would do for a bit of their DNA.
After a few seconds of deliberation, the black one relaxed and they turned to look at me in the eyes once more.
“We are currently returning from our expedition to the Old Civilization’s ruins. We will arrive in the Gryphonic Empire within a few days. We will ferry you there, but you will pull your weight if you want to earn your keep. Our water stores are already dangerously low, and any help to get us home faster will be welcomed.” He let out two short eagle cries and a rope ladder rolled down from the ship above.
“Trust me,” I grinned, “There’s more to me that meets the eye.” Feeling show-offy, I tensed my legs and jumped. Not my full strength, but a lot, enough to surprise both me and the gryphons when I had already jumped a third of the way up. I heard the black one mutter “I suppose it must be part monkey” with my heightened hearing, but ignored it.
Once on deck, the crew turned to look at me with a mixture of disapproval and curiosity. The black gryphon landed behind me and maintained a stoic expression when I turned to look back at it, while the brown one landed on my left. He started talking to the crew in his usual gibberish, and there were a few tense words where several of the gryphons glowered. I could only assume that he forbade them from eating me. I already knew that my position on the ship was about as stable as a psychiatric ward prisoner in a straitjacket, so I decided I needed to get a few friends.
“Excuse me,” I put in as the gryphon finished, “You said you were running low on water, correct?”
It nodded. “It is difficult to make a trip into the desert in an airship and bring enough water without weighing down the ship. We have a purifying crystal, but there is no water to purify.”
I brought my hand to my chin in mock-thought. Then, with false realization, I snapped my fingers and unwrapped my cloak from my trident. A few gryphons stopped to look at it and marvel, its glass-like prongs mystifying. Cloak removed, I hit the staff on the deck and willed some water to trickle down the staff and spread at my feet. The crew stared in astonishment as the water kept coming, without reprieve, until half the deck was covered in water. The brown gryphon ripped his bugged-out eyes from the puddle to see my smug face.
A new world, a new body, new opportunities, I guess I should adopt a new name.
“My name is Tempest. Pleased to meet you all.”
Power discovered: Water Empowerment
Power discovered: Biological Manipulation
Power discovered: Water Generation
Perk gained! Show-off: You proudly display your abilities, giving you a 5% charisma boost.
Perk gained! Sun, lend me your power: You need less food because of the chlorophyll in your body, despite your flawless complexion.
Tempest has entered the game.
Player 2 has entered the game.
Player 3 has entered the game.
Player 4 has entered the game.
Player 5 has entered the game.