Gianna

Move.

“Nothing has to be convinced to move. There is always motion, if you look deep enough.”

I couldn’t see the hydrogen atom I first linked with three months ago, but I knew it was still there, surrounded by too many others to count. Right now, it was part of a molecule of water vapor, a common union for a hydrogen atom.

It wasn’t difficult to move my hydrogen. I could have reached out and done that with a simple wave of my hand. The challenge was forming a cascade: creating movement that itself created movement. Like before, I took the motion that it already had, and gave it a nudge. It pulled the rest of its parts, which pulled the other atoms and molecules that wanted to stay in its vicinity.

I couldn’t actually feel the oxygen molecules that followed my hydrogen, but I knew they were there, too. Negative followed positive followed negative…

A light, cool breeze began to blow in the tiny room around me. The cool was the clearer sign that I was doing it right: it takes energy to exert energy. I heard the pages of the journal at my feet begin to ripple as the slow, thin movement of air began to pick up speed.

“All alchemy, at its core, is persuasion. Matter already does what I’m teaching you on its own; you are simply asking for a little more order.”

Those words on the page seemed to taunt me. Asking was never my strong suit.

Move.

The breeze grew cooler and faster as I glared at the book at my feet. A page flipped, then another, then another, then too many to count as the whole book was lifted by the moving air.

There. Now it was moving.

If there was one thing Rigel taught that I treated like gospel, it was the power of momentum. The more air that moved, the more it wanted to move, the more that what was left wanted to join into the forming cyclone. My heart raced as the room around me became ground zero for an indoor tornado. I was going to pull it off this time.

I reached out, squeezing as much of the moving air as I could and pulling it towards me, giving the windstorm the occasional push to keep it spinning. As it grew smaller and more dense, it spun faster, centrifugal force threatening to break it free from my mental grasp.

“No, nope. Not this time,” I grunted.

As I squeezed, I pressed down from above, like I was trying to fit an invisible spring into an invisible box. The tight swirl in front of me compacted to waist-high, then down to my knees as I moved it closer. Just a little more, and I could…

I took a step up, and the swirling air pushed to leave the confines I had imposed, shaking the cyclone in all directions. It almost knocked me off, but I regained my balance, focusing hard to hold the mass tight. I was going to get it this time. My heart raced as the jet of air at the heart of the mass buoyed me up, trying to flip me over by the extended foot. I leaned into it, balancing myself on the column of air, then brought the other foot to…

My phone rang. Startled, I lost concentration for only a split second, but it was enough to undo everything. The compressed cyclone burst outward, throwing everything around it - including me - outward in all directions. When I hit the wall behind me, I let my body slump to the ground. I wanted to grab the phone and throw it through the window, but the effort of containing the cyclone made it difficult for me to even crawl to the nightstand where the phone was sitting. I growled as I pressed the answer button, trying to ignore the sound of loudly chatting people in the background of the call.

“Ah crap, did I catch you trying to fly again?” Keola asked. His question was eager, innocent, and at the moment, infuriating.

“Mmhm,” I said, managing to bite my tongue.

“Sorry about that,” Keola said. He expected everyone to let things go the way he did, couldn’t imagine anyone dealing with stress any other way.

“Why’d you call?” I asked, scolding myself for my rage. It hadn’t been his fault.

“Oh. Uh…” I could picture Keola counting on his fingers, trying to recall what he had called to say, “Storm. Down at the pier.”

“Oookay?”

“Oh. Sorry. Rigel, he’s gonna…help us do…something? With lightning? I dunno, Kimia told me, but I was distracted, washing the ATV and I probably should have-”

“What time, Keola?” I grumbled. I gave myself a little credit, as I hadn’t completely snapped at him for interrupting and rambling.

“Oh! Gonna…storm’s forecast to start at 6, but you know beach weather. I’m just gonna hang out after shift. I get off at 4 today. I’ll get something to eat, or something,” Keola said.

I would have put bets on him having asked Kimia to come join him early. He wasn’t exactly subtle with his little crush. The thought of his awkward but well-meaning lovestruck puppy antics  around Kimia gave me a little good-natured amusement.

“Sky looks clear. I’m gonna study until it looks like it’s about to pick up,” I said.

“Ah, you got this, Gia. Your brain’s so stuffed with academy manuals, it’s gonna start leaking soon!” Keola said.

“Not all of our brains are as leaky as yours, Keola.”

“Hey. I resent that.”

We both laughed as he hung up. It was a rule among the three of us that we never said goodbye. It always made Rigel act weird, for some reason.

Rigel

What Rigel’s students didn’t understand was that every breath of Earth’s air he took was wrong. Matter from his universe was different in ways he lacked the knowhow to understand.

He wished a smarter man had made the crossing. Even by the primitive standards of his people, he was not the scientific type. The differences in electron orbitals, interactions between subatomic particles and the local value of c would have been difficult for even the most intelligent of Earth scientists to ascertain. Rigel was not in their league, and he felt that separation.

Like all of the other special alchemists on Rigel C, he navigated the complexity of material manipulation by feel. He held this ability on Earth, as well, which was essential: he would have suffocated if he could not modify the properties of Earth’s oxygen into the subtly different version he breathed. This action had become automatic, fading into his subconscious, but still grinding away at his general state of wakefulness.

Keola often spoke of loving the taste of the salty air. He tried again to recreate the feeling his pupil had described, but somehow knew it wasn’t the same. Rigel knew the taste of salt - Rigelians had tastebuds that were similar to those of Earthlings - but there wasn’t the instinctive, spontaneous vigor that came of it.

The sound of Kimia’s old Corolla, specifically its squealing alternator belt, halted the train of thought. He turned and smiled at her as she waved. Perhaps she knew that he had been musing again; she was thoughtful and observant that way.

While he waited for her to make her way over to his patch of seaweed-covered beach, the mystery of his age compared to his three Earth pupils bemused him again. Time was relative, Einstein had said, but figuring out the conversion rate seemed impossible. A year on Rigel C was different in every way: it took longer for his former home planet to go around its star, but as the speed of light in the two universes was not the same, the foundations for measuring the passage of time could not be meaningfully converted. Kimia had told him that he looked to be in his mid-40s, but couldn’t tell if that meant that he would age like he was in his mid-40s.

“Early as usual,” Rigel said as Kimia set her notebooks down on a nearby picnic table.

“Yeah. Had some questions I wanted to ask about today’s lesson,” Kimia said. Her tone was almost an apology, like she expected Rigel to eventually grow tired of her continued investigations. He smiled, hoping to eventually get through to her that he loved sharing his knowledge.

“Please, you know you can ask,” Rigel said, and Kimia opened her green notebook. It was the one she kept physics notes in, Rigel thought; he tried to keep track of the notebooks she used - it helped him follow her trains of thought - but she had so many of them.

"So," Kimia caught her falling glasses and pushed them back up, "You said that…you said you feel the lightning before it strikes?"

"Oh yes. If I don't feel it beforehand, I can't affect it," Rigel said.

"And…how far in advance do you feel it?"

"Before it strikes?"

"Yeah."

“Hmm,” Rigel scratched the stubble on his chin as he thought, “It depends on the storm. I have more time to find the lightning if the storm isn’t so bad.”

“Rough estimate?” Kimia asked, scribbling something in her notebook.

“Maybe 3 or 4 seconds max,” Rigel said.

Kimia stopped writing for a moment and stared at Rigel, disbelief apparent on her face.

“That…” Kimia stammered, “That implies you can feel matter on a subatomic level.”

“Yeah?” Rigel said, one eyebrow raised.

“That’s big. Controlling atoms and molecules is one thing, but we don’t even completely understand the subatomic…well, we know a bit about electrons, but still.”

Rigel smiled and nodded, trying his best to encourage her enthusiasm. In truth, he still couldn’t tell when she was excited about something significant. He didn’t have the same base of knowledge she did. Sure, he was a special alchemist, and that was a source of modest fame for a Rigelian, but it wasn’t that disconnected from general alchemy. Kimia had told him many times that he might be the key to knowledge that was thought impossible, but having only been on Earth for three months, he did not have the frame of reference to process how vast a leap of understanding Kimia thought Rigel would lead her to.

“Can you control the lightning before it strikes?” Kimia asked.

“Oh, um…not really. I have to start the mental motion before the strike, but that’s more because it’s too fast to try to instantly react,” Rigel said.

Kimia frowned; perhaps it wasn't the answer she expected. Rigel wasn’t pleased with the description himself. “Mental motion” was a clumsy description.

"It's like…" Rigel gripped at the sand, then twitched as words came to him, "It's like this sand."

Kimia tilted her head as Rigel picked up a handful and let it drop through his fingers.

"I can feel the little pieces of sand, but not individually. What I can control is like the little bits of dried seaweed. More distinct."

She frowned, turning her attention to the thunderhead forming in the distance. He knew that answers like these - philosophical answers, she often called them - weren’t that helpful, but any other special alchemist on Rigel C would have used the same words. Kimia had termed the Rigelian perception of matter and energy as a “sixth sense,” but that wasn’t quite right, and Rigel hadn’t yet figured out a way to put that into words, and he wasn’t yet familiar with the more tangible descriptions that Kimia was trying to build in her notebooks.

“Can you feel the storm right now?” Kimia asked.

“Let me see,” Rigel answered. He looked to the billowing cloud, sending his material familiar across the ocean and into the stratosphere.

All was chaos, like a storm always was. If the normal sky was like a wild, energetic dance, then a thunderstorm was like a grand mal seizure in a crushing stampede. His familiar was pulled violently and abruptly between others like it, and Rigel made no attempt to fight back. Lightning was just as brash and impulsive, but it always had a general direction it was going. Trying to control the storm itself was a recipe for frustration or disaster.

“I feel it,” Rigel said, his gaze still locked on the thunderhead. Kimia scribbled some mathematical symbols, jotting question marks near some of them.

“Can you tell if it will keep developing?” Kimia asked.

Rigel thought about his answer. This storm almost certainly would reach an epic crescendo over the ocean. They weren’t all like this, though. A storm was a gathering point for forces of nature that had built up too much momentum to be slowed before a collision, but that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t grow smaller, settle to rest, or change direction on their own. It was why you didn’t try to control a storm: you never knew the ripple effects even a small nudge could tack on.

“This one, yes. Others?” Rigel answered. He took a deep breath, scratching an itch on his cheek as he let the hydrogen familiar fall out of the cloud.

The distinctive sound of an AMC straight six engine, too loud from a failing muffler, interrupted the study session. Kimia and Rigel gave each other amused expressions; Keola was here.

“I can feel the bad air from his Jeep,” Rigel said.

“I can smell it,” Kimia wrinkled her nose.

Keola

Gianna likes to rib me about being sweet on Kimia. She’s not wrong, but that’s not the main reason I always show up early to these practices. Usually isn’t.

Rigel talked a lot about the students back in his universe…crazy stuff to think about, other universes. The way that Rigelians learned to influence and retain memory was the same way they controlled matter. It was like teaching muscle memory, but telepathically, he had said. He tried to teach us in the same way after we agreed to be taken on, but it didn’t work so well, so he tried to adapt to the way we learned. Good teachers do that.

But I was always disappointed that he didn’t keep trying to do the telepathic muscle memory thing. I suspected that he never really stopped, that he couldn’t help but radiate knowledge, but he did stop trying to help our bodies interpret those natural signals he was putting off. Apparently, there were Rigelians who had difficulty interpreting “knowledge wavelengths,” same as us, so there was a plan B already in the wings when it became clear we just didn’t have it in us to be muscular radio antennas.

"What's up wizards?" I said from across the beach. Kimia turned and gave a thin smile, but I couldn't tell if it was embarrassment or amusement from 15 meters away. The two were silent, and Rigel had the look he got when he was calling his familiar back from a place it had difficulty leaving.

“I keep telling you, we’re not magicians,” Kimia said. She sounded irritated, so the smile earlier hadn’t been a pleasant gesture. I hadn’t yet mastered understanding the subtleties of her Persian expressions.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry,” I said. Her open notebooks told me that she had been deep into her investigations. A sudden gust flipped the pages, and Kimia gave up, sputtering and carefully closing the books.

“Hey, I know you’re…” I began to say.

“Please…don’t, Keola. You don’t know,” Kimia cut me off. The low, sharp tone of her words told me the conversation was over. I sighed and nodded. When you were getting smashed over rocks in the washing machine, worst thing you could do was to flail around trying to break surface.

“Uhh…hey Rigel. Lightning?” I said awkwardly. He was kind enough to limit his display of schadenfreude to a slight smirk.

“Yes. Looks like perfect weather for this particular lesson,” Rigel said cheerfully.

Something had been different about the professor lately. He seemed more…tired? No, that was the wrong word. His face had grown paler, but it wasn’t a sickly or exhausted color. The guy wasn’t easy to read, but then again, he was an alien. Did Rigelians tan?

“Been doing recon?” I asked. It seemed like a reasonable assumption; controlling the material familiars - I wouldn’t say that around Kimia - was more difficult when you sent them into a place that already had a lot of motion. They tended to get batted around, and it was a challenge to get them to be the ones giving the momentum.

And of course, I couldn’t resist a challenge.

“Careful, Keola. Remember the ripple effects,” Rigel said.

“No problem!” I said enthusiastically, trying and failing to reassure him, if the look in his eyes was any indication.

Unlike Gianna and Kimia’s familiars, mine was an oxygen atom. It was a wild thing, always trying to pull at every other atom around it, always dragging something along with it. Never wanted to be alone, but it wasn’t lonely, it was just…magnetic? I’m sure Kimia would have a better word for what it was always doing.

The feeling of moving the familiar was like that of a full-body workout isolated into the mind. “Tense and release, push, then feel as it pushes back.” Every release gave me goosebumps, like setting the weights back down after a set.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Rigel looking on as I guided my familiar into the cloud. Kimia was also watching, but whereas Rigel’s expression was concerned and vigilant, Kimia was all intrigue.

“Woo!” I whooped as my little oxygen friend took a full broadside. Whatever had slammed into it had pushed away with all its might. My little guy was now on a ride.

“What?” Kimia asked, sounding concerned.

“Oxygen is highly affected by storms, Keola,” Rigel warned.

“Oxyg-” Kimia’s breath hitched, “Idiot, you just sent an electronegative element into an ionized environment!”

I didn’t know what that meant, but her disapproval was obvious enough.

“I mean,” I had to pause, as the sensations from my familiar were getting much stronger, very quickly, “We were gonna have to do this anyways, right?” I couldn’t keep the straining out of my voice. Now that I was losing control, I was trying to regain it with my body instead of my mind. Overcoming that instinct had been one of the first lessons Rigel had given to us; you didn’t do alchemy by flexing your quads.

My familiar suddenly grew heavier. The weight felt like being yanked forward in a tug-of-war. I grunted and groaned, fighting the storm and myself, trying to push through a growing feeling of white noise in my head.

“Heavy,” I choked out.

“Must be picking up more oxygen atoms, forming new allotropes,” Kimia said, with something like pity in her voice.

“It’ll come apart on its own. Just hold onto it, ride it out,” Rigel said, keeping his voice cool and professional. I wasn’t picking up his calm by osmosis like I needed to.

“Hrrrgh,” I groaned. Overwhelmed by the white noise, what I did next was pure reflex.

The air around my familiar grew frigid as I contracted. I felt the molecule snap as I Split it in two. Relief only lasted an instant: my familiar had become too light. A stream of light fired through the cloud, expanding it in all directions and sending rain and hail pouring down onto the ocean below.

“You created combustion in a rain cloud,” Kimia explained. The concern had disappeared from her eyes, and now she wore a look of mild, disbelieving amusement.

“Lay flat and cover your eyes, now,” Rigel said.

Something in his voice demanded to be obeyed, but I stupidly fought the instinct. It didn’t take long to see what had panicked him. Kilometers out, the rain disappeared, and a depression was blasted into the water beneath it, which began to roil. I had seen this several times on hot days, but usually only on my trips to Las Vegas, and then only during the rare summer storms.

The falling rain had just evaporated, no doubt thanks to my induced explosion. I threw myself to the ground a split second before a hurricane force gust of humid air blasted over me, pelting my head with bits of seashells, dried seaweed and litter.

When the wind died down, I touched a sore spot on my head, coming away with a dab of blood. It wasn’t terrible; I had done worse to myself on the rocks while surfing. I’d just get some peroxide from the Jeep…

…which had just taken a bit of a beating. I had put the soft top on - rain coming, and all - and now it had a few dozen tiny holes.

“Guess I deserved that,” I said quietly.

The three of us watched the big wave roll in. I briefly wished I was out there to ride it, but had enough sense not to say that aloud. Kimia dropped to the ground and scooped up her notebooks hurriedly, barely getting back up in time before the water surged towards us, touching the grass that had been ten meters from the shore when I had arrived. Kimia scowled at me, and I cringed my apology.

Rigel looked unaffected. He said he’d been a professor in his universe; maybe another one of his dumb students had done the dumb thing I just did. With a sly grin and a raised eyebrow, he made his message clear. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it.

“You’re using the forces of nature. They are not toys. Use them with purpose and with care.”

******

The man who took the name of our home planet had been the first, but he had done it by accident. That was the failing of those at the pinnacle: they could never really learn.

It was just him and his three students, I was confident of that now. I had been tracking him for six months, and had seen no sign that he even spoke with anyone else, much less taught them alchemy.

"Thank you. You've shown us a place where anything is possible…and soon, we will hunger no more."

Being on top was not the same thing as being powerful. Usually, the place of the rulers at the summit of their species was an accident of fortune, aided by careful application of suppression of all others.

We wouldn’t pull people from Earth to become corpses on Rigel, like he did. We would simply travel.

And feast.