March 27th​

Mike dropped me off at the office before heading off to the station for his own shift. There were more cars parked in the lot than yesterday, but thankfully I didn't see any news vans.

Walking in, I was surprised to find someone had managed to get partition walls and put a desk up at the reception area we'd planned yesterday. There was even a full sized screen standing in a corner, a dantian spinning in place on the image.

A dark-skinned, middle-aged lady sat at the desk and was working on something, but looked up as I entered. "Good morning." She glanced to a little board standing on the desk before back at me. "Miss Nicole Firen?"

I nodded slowly.

She smiled again. "I'm Tasha Weaver. Mr. Russell and Mr. Sidre hired me late yesterday to be the general receptionist and personal assistant for the three of you. I've started reviewing different apartments in the area and I've already determined a few that are relatively close if you'd like to review them yourself? Single family home rentals are a little more expensive and I'd need to know your requirements before I started looking into those."

I peered at her suspiciously. She just smiled at me. "Yes Miss Firen, I am an out-of-town hire if that's what you're wondering. The apartment search is just as much for me as it is for you."

I sighed. "Do you deal with reporters too?"

"That's one of my jobs, yes. Unfortunately, I don't have business cards for you yet. I'm expecting to get those in the next few days." She nodded. "But I have not been contacted by any news agencies yet and I believe your calendar is empty at the moment, but you have class at one. Mr. Russell is upstairs, however he is the only one in the office right now. There is an expected shipment of gym equipment this afternoon."

I stared, a little overwhelmed. "OK, thanks?"

She nodded. "If you don't want to see my choices for apartments now, would you like me to forward them to your school account? I don't believe there is a full network set up here yet so there isn't another account I could send them to."

"Yeah, sure." I answered hesitantly. "I need to go talk to Brent." I said to myself, looking around. The partition walls weren't blocking access out into the larger area thankfully, so I nodded to Tasha and walked towards the stairs.

"Let me know if you need anything ma'am." She called after me.

I found which room Brent had claimed for his own office on the second try and stopped in the entrance. "Who's Tasha whatshername?"

Brent looked up from his laptop, sitting at a desk I was fairly certain hadn't been there yesterday. "Tasha Weaver is an excellent administrator and while being a personal assistant is a little low for her qualifications, she felt the prestige of working for the Dantian Seekers would easily make up the difference. She's also already lit her dantian based on your research."

"And I assume that her from out-of-town remark means she's also from DARPA?" I frowned.

"Correct. The Seekers need someone to funnel all the public interest to rather than accost it's members randomly and she has the credentials needed to do so." He actually had a chagrined look on his face. "I had thought I could handle this by myself long enough to let you all grow more organically, but I admit I didn't expect this rapid of a response from the media either."

"Hold on." I left and grabbed a chair from the conference room, returning with it. "Alright. What the hell?"

"A little background, I used to be an assistant diplomat with the Department of State before I moved over to DARPA several years ago, so I have a number of soft skills along with the relative technical knowledge required to run projects with DARPA." Brent started. "And when I was chosen to be your liaison with the government, it's not like I didn't have other work I was doing. I've been spending an hour or two every night since I got here helping to transition that work to other teams."

"So you've been busier than you should have been?" I asked.

"Not just that. Danny isn't bad if he knows there's a problem to work on, but he doesn't have a whole lot of push to figure out how to build the Dantian Seekers from weekend warriors to a full-time activity. So basically I was hoping to guide him into realizing things he needed so he could ask for help on them. I was caught off-guard by how fast the media caught onto your paper and didn't think of warning you all about that."

Brent ran a hand through his hair, grumbling for a moment. "Really, I am decent at a lot of things. A jack of all trades. But one thing I'm not is multiple people. I only have so many hours in the day and since this is ramping up faster than Danny can keep up with, I'm going to have to start pulling in resources directly. Tasha is with Public Affairs and while I hate to load multiple things on her as well, I'm trying to as minimally as possible impact you all. So I don't taint whatever made you all capable of figuring the dantian and the alien out."

I dropped my head into my hands, groaning. "Danny told me on the day you showed up he expected to end up pushed aside since I was making pretty much all the progress with this. He figured I'd end up running everything." I looked up. "Please tell me he's not just coasting until that actually happens?"

Brent cursed himself. "You don't have your lead of R&D running everything, they don't have time for R&D then."

"You're going to have to be upfront with him about that then." I sighed. "Classes end at the end of April and I thought about going part time there. Dammit. Is there anything more the others can help out with?"

Brent shook his head no. "They are your research team. They're not going to be the people running the medical equipment or making sure the gym stays in working order. They're not going to be the IT people that will have to source, build, and run the Seeker's actual network rather than running off a handful of systems I bought at Wal-Mart last night. This is going to take at a minimum twenty to thirty more people just for support positions to allow you to do research."

"Can't you just actually take it over then?" I nearly begged.

"No. Not and stay a liaison to DARPA and actually run funding. There has to be at least some degree of separation otherwise you'll end up with enough red tape to choke this entire group."

"Damn. Alright, when Danny gets in can we just lay everything out then and make him do all this stuff today, or at least as much as we can? Put jobs out, stuff like that?" I paused. "He is coming here today, right?"

Brent checked the time and closed his eyes for a moment. "I would expect he'd have been here already, but maybe he went into his office on campus. Let me call him." Brent put the call on speaker.

"Brent? Morning. What's up?"

"Are you coming into the office?" Brent calmly asked.

"I'm in my office on campus for the students here? Did you need something?"

"You realize this building is actually your primary office now and you're the only one that has signing authority for shipments. Nicole and I are both here, along with your new hire from last night. Perhaps you should actually meet her face to face?"

"Yeah, sorry. Didn't even think about all that. Give me a little bit and I'll be there."

"Sooner rather than later, Danny." Brent said before hanging up. He then looked at me. "I do believe the last great idea he had was to hire you with the job of 'continue doing what you were doing.' And then promptly decided to give you other work."

"Well, in the vein of 'continue what I was doing' I did figure out something yesterday after I thought about it." I offered.

Brent breathed out. "Go on."

"We're not giving ourselves enough credit on what these breakthroughs are doing for us. Being able to outlift anyone is neat, but there's more to it than that. I think we're holding ourselves back without meaning to."

I held up a finger. "My original lighting of my dantian, I ended up throwing myself thirty feet in the school gym and walked away with pretty much no bruises after landing outside the mats." I raised a second finger. "Second breakthrough, I took an Olympic style barbell swung at me and didn't actually break bones. I wasn't even really hurt by the time the paramedics were around." A third finger. "Yesterday, I was keeping up with slower traffic running down 63. I decided to be dumb and pulled a vault off a car, threw myself across the entire intersection, and stood back up without a scratch. Or winding myself." I listed off my three major moments.

"Heck, even in the training class, I literally put my fingers through the metal backing and didn't even scratch myself. It's more than just strength. It's also stamina and resistance like your skin is more than just easily broken flesh."

"How far does that go for you?" Brent's eyes were wide.

"I can still cut my hair." I laughed. "But I really didn't feel like testing it too far last night. I did figure out something for impact testing though. Mike freaked out a little when I did it at his apartment."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I can show you." I got up and walked back into the hallway with Brent following and stepped up to the ledge showing the first floor. The aisles were still blocking off the sections, the partition walls around the receptionist area just for show. I could see Tasha typing away on something.

"I'm fairly certain anyone could reasonably survive jumping, if that's what you're going to do." Brent said cautiously.

I took a breath. "Walking away from a jump at this height is easy. It's dropping this height and landing with your knees locked and not even noticing the hit that's a little crazy."

I'd done two and three foot tests for over an hour with Mike last night before he even vaguely was comfortable with letting me test larger falls. But after describing yesterday's accident to him and the hours of examples, he finally gave in.

"Tasha?" I called and she looked up. "Don't scream." I hopped off the edge and dropped the roughly fifteen feet to the ground even as I held my breath and cycled. I hit the ground pretty much heels first and physically felt just the tiniest of impact through my sneakers, most of it echoing through the energy spilling out of my dantian and breakthroughs. The impact there did lessen the energy available for a moment before my cycling refreshed it.

Tasha did scream a little still, even as I took a few steps in an unnecessary need to shake off the fall. I bent at the knees, but they didn't even pop from the stress of the impact. I looked back up at Brent. "I don't know at what level of breakthroughs anyone else is good for that though. Hell, I don't even know how to test for that."

Tasha immediately got up from her desk and ran over to start checking on me. I'm fairly certain Brent was just blinking at me from up there, as he shook his head after a moment. "You're OK?" he called down with disbelief.

"Yeah, no issues!" I called back up.

"You sure about that?" Tasha started poking at my back and hips. "No pain at all?"

"Nope." I answered her. Purposely falling to land like that was still a little bit of an adrenaline rush because I knew it should hurt, but it didn't.

"So, thought then." Brent called back down. "Can you jump back up? Your able to stand with multiple times your own weight, so what's a good jump look like?"

"Don't put more crazy ideas into her head you idiot!" Tasha yelled from next to me as I laughed.

"I didn't think of that." I mused.

Tasha carefully smacked my arm. "You could have seriously broken most of your body with that stunt. Don't do something else that could harm you. You might have hairline fractures in your legs that another major drop could finish the job. You should be headed to the hospital. Hell, one of us should be driving you there."

I pulled my leg up into a standing split, not the easiest thing to do in even loose jeans. "It really didn't hurt me. Trust me."

"Brent, if she's going to do something this stupid please come down here first so we can rush her out if and when this turns out bad." Tasha shook her head.

"Alright, alright." Brent seemed a lot more accepting of the crazy than Tasha was.

Once he was down and waiting next to me, I crouched down and touched the ground. A good jump had the leg's full strength behind it. Just jumping with only slightly bent knees wouldn't give anywhere near the same height. "Ready?" I asked, getting one positive answer and one grump.

I cycled my energy again, trying to direct the overflow of energy into my lower half more than just in general. Looking up at the open air entrance back to the offices upstairs. I jumped up as straight as I could, trying to add just enough forward that if I got up anywhere near close enough I'd be able to reach something.

I shocked myself getting my head just slightly high enough to see onto the second floor and grabbed out, pulling myself up a little more.

"Damn, you managed it!" Brent called from below me as I hung there for a second. "You OK?"

I swung my lower body forward before coming backwards even harder and did a half circle back, throwing my leg into the window and pulling myself in. "Yeah, made it. Couldn't quite just jump in though."

I turned and confused to watch Tasha stomp over to the computer for a moment. She typed something, looked over at me and just shook her head. "The record for a high jump is 8 feet. At a run. You just did that from a damn standstill." She called out, before shaking her head again. "This is honestly crazy."

~~~

Danny showed up shortly after and Brent sequestered them off while I pulled a chair downstairs to do some research on my own, sitting in a corner of the receptionist area. I glanced over Tasha's apartment choices, but other than figuring if they were within the salary I was being paid, I wasn't sure what was best. I could probably ask Mike or Danny later about the neighborhoods they were in, at least.

I then spent a good hour or more flipping through different websites on impact testing, reflex tests, and all sorts of other things. Most of them didn't look scalable to test for activities that should cripple people normally. I sighed and finally closed the searches.

"Problem ma'am?" Tasha asked.

I looked up at her and shrugged. "Trying to figure out how to test all those things that we can probably do now, that normal medicine and science say wouldn't even be good to try. I'd rather not just have a series of ledges to jump off of. For one, someone would definitely try something outside their ability. For two, that drop earlier wasn't high enough for me to say it was near my max."

Tasha boggled at me for that statement. "It wasn't?"

"I don't know how you'd get from where I'm at to the alien, but remember all the stuff that's been tried on him? I'm still fairly certain it'd work on me, but there's every good chance we can get to where a terminal velocity fall isn't fatal. Or noticeable. And that probably isn't even scratching what Zhaohui can do." I shook my head at that. Not like there were any skydivers anymore, but I bet BASE jumpers would find it thrilling to just fall from any building without a parachute.

Tasha paused, imagining for a moment. "That sounds...interesting. So, do you think I'd be good for a two foot fall like you did earlier? What do you think is inside the boundaries for someone with just their dantian lit?"

"Honestly, I don't know. You can feel the impact getting absorbed in your power, but I'm really not willing to test what happens if you overload the absorption. I can tell you how to safely at least feel the absorption though." I smiled.

Tasha tilted her head at me. "Oh?"

"Yeah. Mike's made his first breakthrough, but we figured a simple way to at least feel it out that shouldn't hurt anyone unless they're really dumb about it." I stood up and motioned for Tasha to do so as well. She did and I frowned. "Kick your heels off."

She did so, losing a couple of inches in height. Woo, almost down to my size! "Alright, you're just going to basically bunny hop on your toes and land on your heels. Keep your legs straight and knees locked when you do so."

I demonstrated, only coming a few inches off the ground with my own hop before hitting the ground. After the fall earlier, this was really nothing but I could still feel the impact as almost nothing physically and a ghost of it in my energy.

Tasha repeated it and stared at me. "There wasn't any more feeling than just a normal step?" She did it again, coming down on her heels as heavily as she could. "I can feel the push in my dantian. It feels like a ripple or something, weird."

"As far as I can tell, it's redistributing the energy. All that force you're landing with still goes somewhere, it's just the dantian's energy is absorbing it like shocks. Which is why I wouldn't want to see if you do more than what you can absorb. You'd probably hurt yourself or your dantian. Or both. Or explode. Who knows."

"Hey Nicole!" Brent's voice called from above, and I looked up to see both him and Danny watching. "You have a moment?"

I blushed a bit at the unexpected audience. "Yeah, sure." I looked at Tasha first though. "If you're going to test this, only do so until it pushes your energy back like half. And please don't just try walking off the desk."

"I'll be careful." She nodded. "I've got other work to do as well, anyways."

I headed upstairs to find Brent and Danny back in Brent's office. Brent waved to the extra chair probably stolen from the conference room and I sat.

"So, sorry." Danny said. He looked like he'd been verbally beaten. "Brent's spent the past hour outlining all the things that goes into keeping a big project running and honestly why I suck."

"I didn't put it that way." Brent said mildly but didn't exactly argue it from where he was sitting.

"But I'm not wrong, either." Danny replied with a sigh. "So yeah, if I want you to keep figuring things out, I need to make sure everything else is out of your way to do so. So, sorry. I kinda thought it'd be more like you'd figure stuff out and then show us, then go figure more things out."

"You're forgiven." I answered him. "So what does that mean then?"

"I'm going to need a lot of help." Danny laughed self-deprecatingly. "But I'm going to start trying to put together stuff to get more people and gear. Brent's going to double-check it all, but I'm going to have to burn some midnight oil to try to catch up."

Brent nodded but before he could say anything there was a shudder in the air and ground, just barely able to be felt. Brent's eyes went wide. "The power in the air got heavier?"

My eyes widened. "What is the strength of the world's soul?" I pointedly asked at Zhaohui's presence. Brent and Danny quickly repeated me.

Your world has cleared the first block of the [Initiate's Realm] and grows to match.

"Initiate's Realm again." I breathed. "Grows to match?" I purposely took another deep breath as Danny and Brent both looked a little panicked but not sure what to panick over.

The power in the air was definitely thicker and better mixed now, but I could still parse out the individual energies. I had a stray thought we should try to teach this too, before I figured out what the difference was. "Earth and fire. There's a lot more earth and fire in the power."

"Tasha! Start searching news sites, figure out what just changed! We didn't get hit directly this time!" Brent yelled, already turning to his own computer. Another small bumpy rumble went through our feet. "Fuck, earthquakes? Here?"

"Oh god." I heard faintly from downstairs about ten minutes later, only to hear Tasha's voice keep rising. "Oh god oh god oh god."

I bolted out of the room Danny behind me as a wild eyed Brent just kept trying to figure out something from his system. "What is it?" I called down to her.

Tasha looked up, her eyes wide and nearly completely white. "California." She scrambled for a remote on her desk, swapping the screen over to something else. A live video.

"-ing it the big one, quakes are shaking up and down the California coast. We're not certain exactly what's going on, but reports of chasms opening up in the major cities have been confirmed by limited drone footage." The reporter on screen was pale. "We've lost most ground based communication already with our sister station in San Diego, but satellite uplinks are still working."

The screen changed to a eye in the sky view, being buffeted around like mad from something. Already, there was a massive amount of destruction with buildings cracked and rends deep into the earth. Black smoke rose from fires and the depths.

"Questions towards the alien are just coming back with the earth growing, but this looks more like dying to me." The reporter's voice said as an overlay. "Yes, I'm blaming the damn alien." He then got quiet as the drone footage shook for a moment as a skyscraper shook from a nearby rift growing even wider, then the drone cut out as debris filled it's camera. "Find another upload, somewhere!" the reporter's voice was panicky.

The three of us just stared as the reporter came back on screen, not at all calm, but tried to continue on anyways.

"It's not just California." Brent's voice said with quiet horror. "I connected back into the DARPA network and used that to hit the geological survey. It's every fault worldwide. But they're all separating." I turned and looked back to see Brent standing up woodenly from his desk. "Every one of them is separating, even the subduction zones. There's been panicked reports already of magma flows."

"Oh god." I repeated Tasha's prayer. Earth and fire. And then had a worse thought. "Yellowstone?"

"If Yellowstone had gone off, we'd already know. I can't even fathom what's going on."