“Smartass, if you’re here, please let me know.”
Jeb waited a good two minutes before it occurred to him.
“I can’t actually see or hear you right now, they took away my Myst,” Jeb explained to the air, eyes on the white canvass. “Use the sugar.”
His attention wavered for an instant, and suddenly there was tiny writing etched into the surface of the sugar.
Thought you were ignoring me.
Jeb gave a dry chuckle, imagining the fairy trying anything to get his attention.
Sorry, those jerks smelled me and thought it was a conspiracy.
“You were there?” Jeb asked, frowning. He’d figured the fairy had gotten dislodged when the beam of light had him tumbling through the sky, but maybe not.
It’s my fault.
Jeb digested that for a moment.
He was mad that those ‘gods’ had stolen his power, sure, but it wasn’t his power to start, and Jeb didn’t have aspirations of grandeur. Making himself a king or powerhouse was the last thing from his mind.
He didn’t need the power. If Jeb could still move tons of mass with his mind, he’d probably get a construction job and squander it building houses, settle down with a nice oil-lady and raise some kids.
The only moral way to use excess power was to squander it.
One thing sent cold chills down the back of his neck, though, and that was the idea that he was powerless, in a land where not having power could get you killed or enslaved.
There were plenty of people who had different views on the proper application of power, and Jeb knew that some of them had been even more dangerous than he had been at his height.
Jeb mentally prodded the burnt out star inside him. He could still feel it. He could see the gods. The CLG had called him ‘precocious’
Is it really dead? Jeb thought, idly tapping his chest.
Jeb turned his focus inward, scowling as he tried to force the cold lead weight in the center of his chest to burn. He inhaled, trying to draw Myst in and add it to the mix, but he couldn’t see or feel any difference, no matter how hard he tried.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jeb caught another message written in the sugar on the table.
Shit your pants?
Jeb blew out a breath of frustration. “No, I’m trying to get my Core working again.”
An idea occurred to Jeb, and he blurted it out before considering the ramifications.
“Can you help me with that? Fairies all have it from birth, right? You got any advice, techniques?”
For a while there was no response, then the white sugar shifted when he wasn’t paying attention, revealing a symbol, written big and bold.
$
Jeb sighed and buried his head in his hands
“Of course you want payment.”
Jeb considered quickly. Offering her regular payment in exchange for a certain duration would encourage the fairy to actively slow down his development. It wasn’t because she was evil, it was just how fairy-brain worked. He needed a payment scheme that encouraged her to speed things up.
“How about this. Every exponent of ten pounds that I can lift with my mind, I pay you a hundredth of that in pounds of candy? That’s a tenth of a pound of candy at ten pounds, one pound at a hundred pounds, ten at a thousand, a hundred at ten thousand, and a thousand pounds of candy if I can move a hundred thousand pounds with my mind.”
“Do you want a thousand pounds of candy?” Jeb asked, wondering if he was going to have to break into a Hershey’s factory or something.
…
….
We should get to work already. This is important stuff.
Jeb chuckled and plopped his chin into his hand.
Trying to kick your core into motion isn’t going to work. You’re focusing on an echo. A phantom limb. The sensation is still there, but the core itself isn’t.
“So what do I do?”
First thing, you need to See. Try to watch me while I eat my candy.
He stared until his eyes went dry, and the three remaining bars stayed completely still. Jeb lost his concentration and blinked for a moment, and another bar vanished into the ether.
Only two pieces of chocolatey confection remained.
Jeb forced his eyes to remain open, watering as they dried out. Jeb knew there was something there, and by God, he was going to see it.
There was a pain in Jeb’s eyes that had nothing to do with keeping them open too long, it was deeper than that, throbbing back into his skull, which felt tight, like it was about to split open.
Exactly like it had before he’d seen those self-proclaimed gods. Exactly like it felt when he first chose to raise Myst.
Jeb groaned as he felt his skull crack open like an eggshell, too weak to contain something powerful inside any longer.
Blood tickled his upper lip before dribbling down to his chin as the air above the candy bars began to waver.
Crack!
There was a sound that was both heard and felt, physical and metaphysical, as Jeb’s Core began to make itself known inside him, the ball of lead’s core was slowly gaining heat as it began to stir.
The shimmer in the air resolved into Smartass, her tiny mouth covered in chocolate and desperately straining to fit around the corner of a bar. Her belly was hugely distended, and she seemed to have trouble maintaining altitude.
“Took you long enough,” Smartass said, sheepishly hiding the candy bar behind herself.
Jeb ignored her, and wiped the messages out of the sugar, making it even again. He sat there, staring at the grains of white powder on the cheap pressboard table.
“Hey, I don’t think-“
Jeb
