“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” - a Sith probably.

Aiden Lu awoke to the sound of fingers snapping in front of his face.

“Five more minutes…” Reflexively, he shooed the hand away from him, before scrunching back into his bed. Instead, he felt only cold hard concrete underneath him.

His eyes fluttered open to the sight of a man chuckling over him. “Five more minutes he says…”

The man looked like he was decked completely in SWAT gear with the difference that he didn’t seem to carry any firearms, instead, the numerous pockets and strappings he wore held bottles full of water, each made of a different material. Pockets of metal, wood, plastics and an empty one where the water had leaked out. ‘To deal with the Reality Bleed.’

Aiden grabbed his head as he heard the words in his mind but not in his voice.

“Who’re you?” the man asked.

“Aiden Bu,” Aiden reflexively said.

“Where’re you from?”

“Downtown Gregory,” he continued to say, “22nd Alleyway Street, 3rd Floor.”

A muted sort of realisation dawned on him as he realised that was his old address, from when he was still sixteen.

“Why were you at the site of a Gate Aiden?”

Aiden blinked as his body didn’t reflexively answer. Instead, memories flowed to his mind.

“I wanted to die,” Aiden Lu admitted.

The man shrugged, “Gate’s a bad way to go, no guarantee you’ll actually die, sometimes you get taken over by something else, if you do die then it’s generally not very pleasant. But hey more power to you.”

“Taken over by something else?” Aiden asked, the feeling that there was something in his body making him answer in ways that wouldn’t cause trouble.

The man extended a hand and pulled him up, “It’s not my job to figure out, someone else will check you out. If they find you have a Hume Level then you’re just a new Awakened.”

“Awakened,” he tasted the word on his mouth, before he hurriedly turned around, “Where’s the Gate?”

“Closed it seems,” the man said, “only reason I haven’t killed you yet.”

It was spoken so casually that Aiden felt like he misheard, taking a moment to process before he turned to the man.

“Little known fact about Awakening, if one happens right near the Gate then the Gate gets closed. It’s one of two ways to successfully close a Gate.”

“The other is an Awakened using their power on the Gate,” he cautiously replied.

“Bingo!” the man said as he slapped his back. “Damn you must be smart,” he said with a smile that did not reach his eyes.

Aiden took a step back, backing into the balcony wall, “You think I’m a fake.”

He shrugged, “I dunno what you are, but I’m keeping all options on the table. Until then do you want to be escorted to the safe zone citizen?”

Aiden looked around, eyes squinting as he realised his glasses were destroyed, towards the numerous buildings and apartments, all seemingly bleached of colour and marking. Appearing like bony white clay clawing at the sky.

He ‘remembered’ that this district did not look like this before the Gate opened.

“Sure,” he replied, choosing the possibility of a known threat over an unknown one.

“Great! Maybe maybe not shapeshifter from another dimension!” he said in a chipper tone, “Follow me!”

Cautiously, Aiden followed behind him out of the apartment. His stance was careful, keeping an eye on the soldier and the environment around him.

Yet the soldier seemed to move in a lackadaisical manner, not even looking back at Aiden to check if he was following or preparing a sneak attack. “For a person so worried about me being an otherworldly shapeshifter, you sure are casual about it.”

“Eh,” the man shrugged, “my stance on life has always been to not take the piss, either you’re a horrific monster from another world who’ll try to kill me from behind or you’re a normal kid. Doesn’t really matter doesn’t it?”

Aiden raised an eyebrow, “It kinda does. I might kill you.”

The man turned back and smiled, “I did say try.”

“You’re pretty confident, meta?”

“Yeap,” the man replied easily. “Got a piss poor ability too, nothing worth much.”

“What is it?” Aiden asked.

One of the water bottles flew out of his chest, floating around the man as he walked, “Liquid Kinesis.”

“That sounds powerful.”

The man scoffed, “I have a dumb condition though.” The bottle flew near into his hand, the cap caught by his fingers. Aiden was just close enough that he saw the water inside the plastic bottle rotating and the bottle with it, but the moment the cap was unscrewed, the bottle fell to the ground and water splattered, “I can’t control liquids if they aren’t in a fully enclosed space.”

“That…” Aiden paused for a moment, “Sounds like you shouldn’t be on a battlefield then.”

‘But there must be a trick to it. He at least thinks he’s capable of killing me.’

He shrugged, “We’re always running out of people so they send third rates like me every time a random Gate opens.”

Aiden looked him over from behind, he didn’t look like he was carrying any obvious weaponry aside from the water bottles, which he couldn’t even imagine fighting with. Not to mention his ‘memories’ say advanced weaponry of any kind tended to fail very fast inside a gate. ‘A hidden knife perhaps?’

“I never got your name,” the teenager said.

“It’s Freddy,” the man replied, “I suppose it was rude of me to not give you it as well huh?”

“I don’t mind,” Aiden said as they reached the ground floor of the building.

He saw it soon, blurred as it was with his short vision, the green outlines of some kind of armoured vehicle. Freddy raised a hand and waved at it. A military four wheeler. Someone else might’ve been able to give a better description, but the only thing Aiden noted was how stripped down the vehicle looked, lacking guns and the glass was shattered.

‘A necessity,’ he thought. A Gate messed with local reality, the more complex a construct the more likely it was to fail, for the simple reason that there were more things to fail.

A guardsmen peeked their head out from within the vehicle. “Got a civ?”

“Yeap!” Freddy replied, “Might be a new Awakened, dunno, get him back for a Hume test.”

“Understood, hop aboard kid!” the guardsmen waved.

Aiden nodded, walking toward the vehicle before he realised his escort wasn’t following, he glanced at him.

Freddy smiled, “Just gonna clear this sector out, don’t do anything strange to the bois in there.”

He tentatively nodded, before he walked beside the vehicle, accepting the hand that took him in.

Freddy smiled as they left, his posture casual and relaxed. When they were out of sight, he turned around and strolled towards another apartment building.

There were numerous anomalies nearby, things he sensed with his power, and when he walked into the second floor, he saw them.

Dozens of pure white humanoids, their bodies like mannequins, bearing no mark or colour. Simply an expanse of featureless pale. Each strained their bodies, trying to move and fight against Freddy’s power.

“Hmm…” he scratched his chin, “Now that kid was the only one who didn’t end up like this… Possession types are pretty rare… ”

He jerked them around with his power, forcing them to move, “Bodies are still physiologically human… organs and stuff all in the same spots… Zenin would want me to take a sample…”

He looked around, “I only need a few.”

Whatever liquid was in their bodies began rapidly flowing in odd and chaotic directions, their flesh seemed to roil as if something was trying to force its way out, before eventually, one exploded in a flower of white gore. It seemed even their blood was bleached by the Gate. It didn’t matter, their physiology was still human.

One by one, they each exploded in the same manner, Freddy taking care to direct the explosion away from him, no matter what, he still couldn’t control liquids once they were outside.

Until only a few were left, controlling the liquid that was inside their bodies, he directed them to move with him as he looked around the Bleed area.

‘Let us review,’ Aiden thought inside the military vehicle, biting the nail of his thumb.

‘One, an indeterminate amount of time before, I went to sleep, when I awoke, I was in the body of my younger self.’

‘Two, I hold memories of this younger ‘self’ which parallel my own, but have several notable differences.’

Namely, the existence of superpowers, Gates, heroes and war. A history that seemed fantastical but accepted as fact by the previous inhabitant of this body.

“Whatcha thinkin bout kid?” the guard who sat before him asked.

“Nothing much,” he replied, “just thinking about what happens.”

‘A lucid dream perhaps? Or am I hooked up to the neural chip that Musk fella was working on?’ he pondered. The latter was unlikely, he was little more than a white collar worker, what were the chances he ever even sees such a thing in person? And development shouldn’t be anywhere near what was needed for this.

He bit his thumb, feeling the sharp pain and faint taste of blood. He was still there inside the vehicle as it moved. ‘Shame, it works in movies.’

Aiden released his thumb, a thin dot of blood on its print, he let it fall to his pockets. It seemed like he was stuck here for the near future, so he needed to take inventory.

“How’d you get caught up in a Gate?” the guard asked, apparently bored out of her mind.

He reached into his pockets, “Just was nearby and didn’t evacuate fast enough.”

“Pfft,” the guard didn’t seem convinced, “I know types like you, rushing into a Gate in hopes you get a power. I can see the appeal, not being a normal person, but more often than not,” hard blue eyes pierced Aiden’s black, “you die horribly and that’s just it.”

“Guess I got lucky,” he replied as he pulled out his wallet. His old student ID, some cash and coins and a debit card, just like in his ‘memories’. If his memory was correct then that debit card should be near empty.

In his right pocket, he only felt the shifting of something like sand, before he took out the small rectangular device that was his phone, with the notable exception that all the glass had disintegrated inside his pockets.

“That’s a shame,” she said.

“It’s fine,” he dismissed, “there is no one who would call me on it anyways.”

Hopefully the phone card was still fine. His glasses were destroyed, leaving everything more than a few centimetres away from him a blurry mess. More expenses to pay, more problems to deal with.

“So what’s the story behind the tattoo?”

“Tattoo?” he briefly searched his ‘memories’, finding no such thing. Aiden Bu had never inked himself, given that he had only recently turned sixteen and was mindful enough to realise it was a pointless expense.

“The one under your eye,” the guard gestured underneath her own right eye for comparison, “the one that looks like a white snake.”

Reflexively, he touched the spot with his hand, before he felt something move.

The guard suddenly had her knife out, drawn in the split second when Aiden felt something move underneath his finger tips. A patch of cold, scaly skin that seemed to move, he followed it with his fingers, down his cheek, under his chin, past his neck and into his shirt collar where he lost it.

He found it shortly after however, crawling upon his skin, up his arm and onto the back of his hand, was a white serpent. It’s body was completely two-dimensional, yet it moved and writhed as if it were a living thing.

“That might just confirm it,” the guard said, her body still tense, “Hume Test is a formality now.”

“What is it?” he asked, studying the creature as it moved around his hand as he slowly rotated it around.

“Weird stuff happens with a human person, they’re probably a meta.”

Only slightly longer than his middle finger, it didn’t seem to breathe and appeared completely bleached and pale. As if someone had simply drawn the outlines of a creature and left it unfilled and without colour.

“You have no clue what your power is?” the guard asked.

Aiden shook his head.

“Then it’s probably your Status.”

Memories flashed in his head again, “Status?”

She relaxed slightly, letting the knife rest on her knee, “Status, your power working passively to show your Hume level. Think it was the Guild Master who popularised the term.”

Memories. Things he studied, a person he idolised and hoped he’d be. The Guild Master, the S Class whose power basically turned him into a living RPG character. Defended the Shino Pacific region for fifty years, creating the Guild with his power. Was later mortally wounded during the Battle of Five Evils and One, after which he was entombed within the Wonders of Daedalus to forcefully keep him alive so his power would still be active.

“Ah yeah,” Aiden replied with false recognition, for the memories and aspirations weren’t his, “since his power gave him a stat sheet didn’t it?” ‘He live streamed some of his battles, whenever it was possible. That was why so much is known about him.’

“Yeap,” the guard replied. “Civs probably don’t know much about it. Freddy talks about his all the time. Apparently, if he’s running low on Hume he gets really thirsty.”

He didn’t feel the snake on the skin it resided, only when he went to touch it. But its declaration was simple. He was a meta, he had some kind of unknown superpower. Some part of him wanted to revel at this realisation, to celebrate, the part of him that held the memories of the previous Aiden.

The one currently in control however, only took it in as another detail, as was the joy his body felt but his mind cared not.

“Guess I really did get lucky.”

The Hume Test came back positive. The baffling contraption they shoved him into showed a significantly higher Hume level compared to the average person. Confirming he was a meta.

There wasn’t much after that, he was given a stack of forms to fill which he dutifully did, and was ordered to meet a meta counsellor the next day. Aiden had a vague idea what for, enrolment to the Academy, after which he would be directed to use his power, whatever it was, to serve some beneficial purpose.

It was not all exploitation and bureaucracy however, he was given a new phone, even when he didn’t request it and was informed an initial allowance was deposited into his bank account. Some of it had already been used to prescribe him new glasses, though it slightly amused him that he never filled out anything regarding his prescription or which optometrist he went to.

He didn’t particularly care about all that, staying mostly quiet and only speaking when answering questions. It was past three when everything was done. There was a place he needed to visit, a place both parts of him wanted to see.

Contemplating walking for a moment, he remembered the distance between the government building he was dropped off at and his destination was a good few kilometres. Thus, he waited for a bus. He took his phone out to google the routes, only to remember that it wasn’t his Blackberry, but a flip phone made in some fantasy dimension. So, with only vague memories to guide him, he boarded the public transport.

It was unsettling how much the world resembled his past, back when he was still a teenager. The cars that were of older models, the storefronts he recognised. Yet once overhead he saw someone fly at supersonic speeds, the bus radio blared news of demon incursions in Yuro P and everything felt more… solid, sturdier. Almost every building was new and made to last. More than a few times, he saw construction work in places he remembered were filled in his old world. When Aiden didn’t study the strange living serpent tattoo, his eyes were glued outside.

He arrived by his stop in due time.

Stepping out, he saw the tall sign, a name he remembered well, for he frequented this place in both lives.

Saint Nicholas’s Children’s Hospital.

He strode in, greeting the nurse at the front desk who knew him well. He walked through the sterile white halls. ‘Floor 4, room 483.’

The destination echoed in his mind, repeating and repeating like a mantra. When he stood before the door, he almost hesitated to enter, before he mustered himself and entered.

She was there.

He had to come close, for she appeared like a blurry mess without his glasses, but she didn’t look any different from when he last saw her, laid on the hospital bed as if simply resting. His younger sister of thirteen years old, Jaiden.

Aiden didn’t notice his trembling until he collapsed into the chair next to the bed.

She was there. Just there. The simple truth of the matter did little to help the near incomprehensibility of his situation. Reborn in the body of his younger self but in a world devoid of the norms of his old. Something Aiden couldn’t have imagined. Yet in this world, his sister still lived.

It was here that the memories diverged.

Aiden Bu, the one who previously held this body, lived a normal life, at least relative to what was ‘normal’ here. His parents were stern and cold, but ultimately loving.

They and his sister were caught in a Warp Gate several years prior, his sister survived the experience relatively intact, but Bu had to carry what was left of his parents in plastic grocery bags to the morgue. All the while his sister never woke up. Declared to suffer Reality Bleed, a kitchen sink diagnosis which was thrown onto every case where a person was corrupted by a Gate messing with how their bodies functioned. Eventually, the sheer despair got to him and he committed suicide.

Aiden Lu, the one who currently held this body, lived a wealthy life. His parents were rich, they had a large house, he rarely went hungry. It would’ve been a perfectly happy idyllic life if not for the fact his parents were abusive.

His father irregularly beat and berated him, often returning home from alcohol-filled gambling binges. Jaiden never got any physical harm, he made sure of it. As Lu grew older, he would report them to the Child Protection Services, getting both his parents arrested and he and his sister thrown in a mess of adoptions which eventually separated them. Once he was older, he did all he could to get a stable job, get his own apartment, eventually reuniting with his sister as her legal guardian.

Yet Lu had committed an unforgivable crime against her.

Suddenly getting a whole other human being to take care of was naturally taxing, he began working two jobs, taking late-night shifts to pay for her education and keep the lights on. Over the years as Jaiden went through High School, he rarely talked to her, often just crashing the moment he returned to their apartment.

Till one day, he received a phone call saying Jaiden fainted in class.

He didn’t see her until later that night, for he foolishly prioritised work over his family's health. This first mistake soon became abundantly clear, for a follow-up diagnosis later revealed his sister suffered leukemia.

He panicked at the beginning, first worrying about the medical expenses before the health of his sister, his second mistake.

And his third was veiled, not becoming clear till it was too late.

Perhaps spurred on by the situation, he began allocating time to visit her. Work didn’t suffer much, for he simply detracted a few more hours from his sleep.

Day after day, he would visit his sister in the hospital. Greeting and talking to her stoic and smiling self. It was not until a few months in, that he realised this was the first time he’d seen her smile in years.

For some reason that was unfathomable to Lu back then, his sister, dying of leukemia, crippled to a bed and unable to move much on her own, seemed happier than he’d seen her for years.

“It’s baffling,” Lu remembered saying, “why do you seem happier now Jade?”

Jaiden hummed as she drew in her notebook, “I’m just making the best of what I’ve got,” she turned to him and brightly smiled, “and we get to talk more now so that’s a plus!”

Lu threaded his fingers between each other, grasping tightly his own hands as if trying to squeeze the bones out of his flesh as he remembered his final and worst mistake.

In seeking to provide for the both of them, he did to his sister a form of abuse perhaps worse than the physical beatings he suffered. An abuse of distance, grown over the years from a mistaken sense of necessity. To know someone loved her but was never able to interact with her despite living in the same apartment. To be made lonely even when amongst family. To have a loved one become a stranger. If he were more capable, more competent, more willing to take risks and get a better job, then… then…

Then perhaps he would’ve been able to spend more time with her.

Aiden’s nails bit into the back of his hand, getting pushed ever tighter into the flesh, yet the sharp pain was naught but a distant cry in his mind.

From a purely rational perspective, the girl in front of him was not Aiden Lu’s sister, but Aiden Bu’s. She was a money sink given her constant need for medical care when their financial situation was still unclear. Her coma was what drove Aiden Bu to despair and effectively suiciding by the same method that took everyone else in his family. The girl in front of Aiden Lu, was not someone he really knew.

But she had Jaiden’s face.

The nails bit deeper, piercing skin and drawing blood.

‘I do not know her.’

But she had Jaiden’s face.

The nails bit even deeper, clawing bloody gouges across his skin.

‘She is a stranger to me as much as everything else in this world.’

But she had Jaiden’s face.

“There is no reason I have to help her,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

But she had Jaiden’s face.

He pried apart his bloody hands, almost reaching out to touch the prone form before him, before he recoiled, withdrawing his hand as if he had just touched a hot stove.

Aiden let out a deep breath and drew some tissues to wipe the blood off his hands.

The white serpent tattoo thing swam lazily on his skin, flicking its tongue at the droplets of blood but seemingly unable to interact with them. It turned its head to him as he wiped.

He met its stare, “Weird fucking world I’m in right now.”

The white serpent didn’t answer, only staring at him.

“Right, not a conversationalist I’m assuming,” he muttered as he tossed the stained tissues. The cuts were already scabbing, unnaturally fast, another reminder this body wasn’t his.

He leaned back in the chair, strength and will long gone, there was only a deathly lethargy as he stared at the unconscious figure in front of him.

“I wonder if I have the strength to bury you twice,” Aiden said.

Eventually, he decided he’d rather not find out.