Kimia

For all the fanfare, Rigel's manipulation of lightning was, at a glance, remarkably simple. Lightning was a giant bolt of negative charge, so if you created a positive electric field, the lightning would dart toward it. Then again, altering a square kilometer of ocean took some raw power, and the blue of the Cherenkov radiation in the water was admittedly pretty. 

As usual, Keola was the one who showed the most enthusiasm for the display. Echoing his own excitement, his oxygen atom, still the backbone for a single molecule of water, had danced around the humid epicenter of the coming strike, and had twirled in excited confusion, twitching, waiting for the bolt. It had been close enough to the lightning bolt to come apart at the moment of ignition, transforming into plasma for a brief moment and existing on its own, before it found another oxygen atom and settled into a calmer state.

I couldn’t help but smirk. I envied him somewhat: he knew what lightning was and how it worked, but it still prompted a childlike explosion of joy to see it in action, probably more than ever, now that a piece of him was part of the bolt. Not that there wasn’t wonder for me, as well, but it expressed differently.

Rigel didn’t seem to grasp that he was messing with the subatomic. From what I could tell, it was all the same to him: positive and negative ions were just slightly more grabby or pushy matter. I was still trying to work out his mindset in that regard; the more I spoke to him, the more alien he seemed. It felt safer thinking these things, now that he had gone back to his apartment to sleep for the night.

As if detecting my thoughts about another man and becoming a little jealous, Keola made a show of casually walking over to talk to me. I fought the urge to preemptively roll my eyes at whatever babble he was about to let out. When he was too close to be ignored, I looked up at him from my scratch notebook and gave him a courteous smile.

“Wish I knew what all of that even means,” Keola said, pointing at the numbers I had scribbled and scratched through. I decided I’d see how sincere that wish was.

“Radiation gradients,” I replied. He tilted his head sideways.

“So, you saw the blue glow in the water before the lightning struck, right?” I asked. Keola nodded, still silent, but now staring at what was on the page, rather than at me. Possibly, he was trying to figure out what it meant before I explained it. I appreciated the effort.

“That’s Cherenkov radiation. Happens when something moves faster than light in a fluid,” I said.

“I thought nothing can move faster than light?” Keola replied.

“Faster than light in a vacuum. In anything else…” I paused, decided the extra details weren’t helpful, and continued, “Don’t worry about that. What I’m trying to work out is the mechanism: did he just ram a train of hydrogen particles into other water molecules to create hydrogen ions, or did he energize a few molecules at the center of the field with low-power radiation?”

To his credit, Keola didn’t make a joke of things this time. He didn’t know why I took alchemy so seriously - I hadn’t shared that particular horror story with anyone - and he often made a habit of trying to get me to “lighten up.” Seeing him now, I began to wonder if I had been going about talking with him the wrong way; maybe showing him the actual math would have gotten him to stop making magic jokes.

“How could you tell the difference?” Keola asked. It was a good question, one that I couldn’t answer.

“I really don’t know,” I sighed in frustration, “The way Rigel does this is…”

“Vague?” Keola suggested, after I had paused for several seconds.

“Kind of, but…” I scrunched my lips as I failed to find the right word, “Not exactly. Everything I’m seeing suggests he’s hyper aware of what he’s doing, he just doesn’t have the words for it.”

“He’s kinda weird that way, isn’t he?” Keola said.

A flash of lightning illuminated the silhouette of Gianna as she stood at the edge of the water. It had been an hour since she had so much as twitched.

“Not the same category as ‘weird.’ Weird doesn’t cover interdimensional aliens who don’t have words to describe their ability to alter matter and information through manipulation of quantum fields, without any concept of chemistry or physics, even Newtonian physics,” I replied. Keola’s look of confusion told me a joke was coming.

“I’m guessing Newton physics are like peewee baseball, while quantum fielding is like the big leagues,” Keola said. I laughed despite myself.

“Sounds…close, I guess,” I said. I didn’t know anything about baseball, but he had made the joke accessible enough.

Gianna

Keola had finally made Kimia laugh. Good work, surfer bro, I thought. Now that my mind was wandering, the meditation session was over; it was probably a good time for a break anyways.

"How's the academy, Gia?" Keola shouted over the waves as I walked over to the two. Kimia was working more equations by lantern light, as she often did after Rigel's light shows.

"Ohh," I drew out the words as I approached, "Working out, firing range, mostly studying and tests. Lots…and lots…of tests.”

I hadn’t meant to complain to them. A black woman in police academy wasn’t looked upon kindly if she even voiced her own opinion, much less complained. These two didn’t deserve to be my punching bags.

“Well uh…need a study partner?” He asked. I smiled; whatever else Keola was, he was a good guy.

“I’m good, Kee. So, I heard you made a microburst?” I had quickly changed the subject to avoid discussing why he wouldn’t be a good study partner.

“Yeah…” Keola cringed. He was about to make a joke about being clumsy or reckless, but he stopped himself, “I’m just glad no one got hurt.”

"Pretty sure he wanted to do it here so there was no one around to catch a lightning bolt," I said.

"Or see him catching one," Kimia added, not looking up from her notebook.

"Or maybe it's some kind of Rigelian ritual to go lasso the lightning on a desolate beach," Keola said. Kimia and I both looked at him with bewilderment.

"What? He's an alien. Who knows what kind of weird stuff he does when we're not around. Who's to say?" Keola added.

I should have stuck up for our mentor, defended his humanity. Keola hadn't meant to imply that Rigel was "the other," didn't understand that to some, the words "doing weird stuff" was code for "shun this person." I debated on whether to call him on it.

But Keola wasn't wrong. Every time Rigel spoke to us, it sounded like he was speaking a second language, or maybe a first language he had only recently learned to speak. Replying to him gave me the uncanny feeling of taking apart something invisible, putting the pieces in a box, shaking the box for several minutes, then asking a stranger to assemble the thing with his feet.

Did I come up with that analogy? Or was that an idea he gave me without me knowing?

"Wish we could just do his mind-reading thing," Keola said, echoing the uncanny feeling in his own way.

"If that's even a thing he can do," Kimia said.

I saw Keola roll his eyes, and knew he was about to say something stupid.

"Oh come on, why would he lie about that?" Keola groaned. There were stupider things that he could have asked…had asked in the past. Again, good job, surfer bro.

"Same reason people lie about anything: to make things easier," Kimia said. This version of the conversation was gentler than it had been previously, at least.

"It makes complete sense: matter makes everything, including memories, right?"

"The mind is more complicated than that."

"I mean, after all the crazy stuff he's shown us, every time he's claimed to be able to do something amazing and did it - bending freakin’ lightning - you don't trust him?"

“She’s not saying she doesn’t trust him,” I interjected. These arguments didn’t get as heated if the chain of escalating tension was interrupted.

“Yes. Thank you, Gianna,” Kimia said, putting her pencil down and looking up at the two of us.

“I don’t see the difference. You can’t trust someone you think is a liar,” Keola said. His tone wasn’t rising anymore.

“You said it yourself, Kee. He’s an alien. It’s likely he doesn’t see it as ‘mind-reading;’ if Rigelians have that phrase, it probably means something completely different than what we think of when we say it,” I said.

“And that’s assuming that information is the same thing to Rigelians as it is to us. I suspect that it’s not,” Kimia added.

Keola wasn’t great at admitting when he’d lost an argument, but over the months we’d all been friends, he had at least learned not to lash out like a caged cat at the endpoint of a conflict. He only got this heated when we were talking about people, I had noticed. The tension fizzled out as the silence stretched, and we all came to the unspoken understanding that, individual points having been made, it was time to move on.

“So…tests, huh?” Keola asked me.

We heard the distant sound of rain hitting the waves, felt the cool wind coming off the coast ahead of the storm front. The clouds had been meandering offshore for the last hour, but now they drew towards us like a curtain.

“Good seeing you all,” Kimia said, quickly shutting her books and shoving them into her bag. When we all stood up, she grabbed the large blanket, whipped it opposite from us to shake out the sand, then wrapped it around her in the same motion.

“Yep. I’m out. Next time, when we…I don’t know, build a castle from banana peels, or something,” Keola took several long strides toward his Jeep before he noticed I wasn’t keeping pace with them.

“Get home safe,” I called out to them.

“You staying?” Keola shouted.

“Yeah. I wanna…” I paused, trying to think of the words for what I wanted to do, “Do some experiments of my own.”

Keola shrugged, waved, then darted for his Jeep, just barely reaching the driver side door before the downpour caught him. The old thing coughed to life, and he tore away before he had even turned his headlights on. He was probably desperate to get his shredded soft-top beneath a roof.

I made myself relax, focus through the chaotic sensations. The lukewarm rain on my skin, the smell of churned saltwater, the sound of waves and rain competing for dominance, all of it was constant in its distracting influence. I could see the lightning flash, even with my eyes closed, and the wind whipped stinging droplets of water across my face.

It was oddly cold for mid-summer. Freezing, even.

My hydrogen atom tumbled through the gale, and I felt its every movement, discerning the places where the blasts of air collided with each other. I found what I was looking for: a vortex of saturated air, compressed by the irresistible currents around it.

This time, I’d get it. This time, I’d fly.

The small cyclone couldn’t retain all the moisture within when I spun it up. It threw the rain in all directions, stinging me with icy, sharp droplets across my cheeks and neck. My focus was waning; the irritating, freezing needle stabs made my face twitch uncontrollably.

“Maybe don’t try to control the storm,” Keola’s voice cut through the sound of the wind and rain, "Maybe try to lift yourself instead?"

I was only irritated with him for a moment. After all, I was out here practicing at working through distractions. Keola certainly qualified for that distinction.

"What about your Jeep?" I asked, voice raised over the accelerating wind.

"It's a Jeep. It can take a little rain," Keola said, using one hand to amplify his voice and the other to shield his eyes.

"Rigel said not to use alchemy on ourselves. We don't know what it will do," I said through gritted teeth, slowly losing the battle to contain the whirlwind.

"Seems to me," Keola paused to collect his words, "Seems like not knowing what it will do is a good reason to find out!"

Before I could say anything in objection, I felt the air around me grow cooler. Keola began to glow; it was the color of a dull peach barely lit from within, but it was unmistakable.

"Whoooaah," He shuddered, "That feels weird!"

"What on…" I trailed off, dumbfounded. The crazy fool was really doing it.

"Feels like I'm fizzing," He said, glowing more brightly as he began to rise from the ground. 

I watched in disbelief as he clumsily did the thing I had been trying to learn for months. He flailed briefly, his body perhaps panicking that something was…lifting it? Pushing it?

"I am the wind!" He yelled, laughing maniacally. When he opened his eyes, they were full of wild joy, until he saw me. I must have looked like I was ready to hit him, because he cringed for a moment before settling into a contented, placating smile. Though his eyes were full of empathy, he had kept enough awareness of what he was doing to continue hovering above the beach. That might have been the more infuriating thing: he had the kind of unconscious focus that I was thus far failing to master.

“Want me to…you want to know what I did, to uh…” He said uncomfortably, still unable to completely hide the childlike, ecstatic thrill of being airborne. I forced myself to think intentionally. There was not a gram of pride on his face; he was not mocking me or talking down to me. I knew him. This was Keola figuring out he had something I wanted, and offering to share.

Still, I wanted to figure out at least some of it myself.

“You said you are the wind. I’m guessing some of that is literal?” I asked.

“Yeah! Feels like the wind is…going through me? Into me?” Keola said.

“I’m guessing…” I said, making up my guess as I went, “You’ve expanded, somehow. You’re pushing everything in you up and out. Then…” I thought, dismissing a thought as ridiculous, but bringing it back, “You’re letting the wind help. It’s raising you up like a kite.”

Keola looked around with a comical expression on his face as the wind began to die down. I laughed, amused despite the ridiculously dangerous thing I was seeing.

“Think so? Let’s find out. You still holding onto that cyclone?” Keola asked.

“You really don’t know what you’re doing, do you?” I asked. Keola smirked.

“Not really!” He said, looking around me as if he could somehow spot the invisible movement of air, “Still got it?”

 To my surprise, the flattened column of air was still in my control, having lost only a little of its ferocity. My hydrogen darted and vibrated in the air current, on the verge of breaking free, as I had briefly stopped exerting conscious control over it.

“Yeah,” I said, still looking down at the invisible thing, “You wanting a boost?”

“Actually,” Keola no longer looked elated. His face was an expression of discomfort, perhaps mild pain. He also looked a bit larger than he had a few seconds ago.

“Are you…going to explode?” I asked, imagining a balloon popping and regretting both my words and thoughts.

“I hope not,” Keola said, taking a nervous breath, “Need you to…uh…” He moved his finger in a lazy circling motion, suddenly looking like he was about to pass out.

Without thinking, I began to Move my hydrogen to the outer edge of the cyclone, pushing it beneath Keola. The rest of the cyclone chased the atom, forming a train of cool, thick, humid wind. In my mind’s eye, I saw it follow my command, swirling around Keola and drawing tighter. He jolted, eyes widening as he came back to himself. His expression solidified as he exerted himself, and I felt my hydrogen move closer to the core of my ersatz tornado. With a gasp, he opened his mouth to speak, but instead waved frantically. I released the air, drawing my hydrogen out. The cyclone dispersed, dropping Keola to the ground in a heap.

I was at his side before I knew I was moving. He rolled and got to his hands and knees, coughing out rainwater between deep, sharp breaths.

“You gonna make it?” I asked, unsure if I was more upset with him for doing something so reckless, relieved that he was OK, or thrilled that I had saved him.

“I think-” Keola started, coughing as he rocked back to sit, “I think we need to hang out more.”

I smirked and shook my head in amused weariness as he laughed and coughed.

Rigel

The man who fell from the sky shook with terror, mouth agape, limbs flailing. Breathless and freezing, his last thoughts before hitting the water were confused, incoherent concepts of being in the wrong place, attacked by an entire existence the man did not know.

Rigel had detected the man’s sudden appearance - and his dissolution - from a greater distance than he should have been able to feel anything. He knew what the man was, and what his presence here meant.

It shouldn’t have been possible. It wasn’t possible.

Worse, he had only just felt the man’s presence, and realized that if it had happened further away, he probably wouldn’t have felt it at all.

Rigel wrung his sweating hands. This might have been the start of an invasion.