I glided forwards carefully, looking at the plant-life at the edge of the effect.

I caught a whiff of something in the air, and Red Eyes flared up. I paused as something bad hit my system, and my poison resistance went into absolute overdrive trying to get rid of it.

“What’s happening?” The Mountain rumbled, hurrying forward as my blood vessels started turning blue and breaking out.

“There’s poison in the air!” I gasped, bringing up Wrath internally to juice my resistance. I was basically immune to just about all poisons; they couldn’t kill me, only weaken me for a while before I built up an immunity. But this was some very fast and lethal stuff. “It’s killing anything organic it touches! There are no seared or charred plants at all. If they absorbed the poison, it destroyed them right down to the roots!”

“You gonna be okay?” he asked, looking down at me.

“Gimme a few minutes!” I grit my teeth and let bioelectrical fun surge through my system, boosting the fight. “If I were a normal human, I’d probably be immolating and turning to ash right now!”

He looked at me, frowned, and crouched down to put his hand down on the ground and lift up the fine, fine ash that was there. Then he felt the holes left by the plants and the depressions in the ground.

With a glance at me I waved off, he strode quickly over to the small car that had passed us earlier. There had been two people in the car, as I recalled...

It had driven off into the ditch about a hundred yards past this blight. I breathed deep, feeling residual traces of the poison in the air either dissipating or breaking apart, I couldn’t tell which. There seemed to be a threshold beyond which it didn’t affect the plants, but it was still lethal to people.

Mr. Hill poked his head into the open window there. That was how the poison had gotten in. As I walked that way, I could feel it there, still hanging, but thinning by the second.

He let me take a look as I came up.

There were no clothes, only the remnants of them. I saw the rubber soles to shoes, eyelets, belt buckles, underwear straps, bra clips, earrings. No cloth, no meat, no bone, no leather. The false leather of the seats had survived, a petroleum product, but he’d popped open the dash, and any paper from, say, the guidebook to the car, was also gone.

I saw the teeth from zippers scattered on the seats, and shook my head. Mr. Hill had retrieved two rectangular sealed cards from the mess, and I glanced at the names and faces of two probably mixed-blood natives to the area coming home, a guy and a girl in their early twenties.

Then I frowned, and looked back in the vehicle sharply for something. Mr. Hill watched as I carefully looked at the little metal bits on the seat, and frowned.

“Mr. Hill, in this day and age, what are the odds that two people growing up don’t have cavities?” I asked him.

He blinked. “Dentists make a decent living for a reason,” he replied slowly, staring at the metal bits in my hands. “Not a single filling, eh...”

“Tear up the road and completely block it. Carve ‘danger’ into it. I’m gonna track down what caused this. You go into town. If you come across more cars like this... look for fillings.”

He nodded sharply. “Got it. Go.”

My blood was hammering down, neutralizing the poison and breaking it up. I kept a charge going through me as I leapt into the air, staying within five feet of the ground as I glided along quickly on the fifty-meter-wide swathe cut through the vegetation towards a hill in the distance.

Behind me, I heard the crack as The Mountain put his foot down, and shattered a line across the roadway. With a grunt and the skill of long experience, he heaved a whole section of it up and over, and then, just to be safe, one more to each side if some idiot wanted to go around. He propped up the asphalt of the middle section and using his finger carved out DANGER in two-foot letters for anyone coming.

Then he headed on down the road, but this time, he was bouncing along in big arcs, not caring to take it slow, eying the absence of plant life on either side of the road as he did.

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Hey, East Tales readers in particular...

If you're not reading this on Royal Road, you're helping pay a thief. Please read it in its original home, it's still free! I have not given permission for this story to be posted ANYWHERE ELSE.

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It was kind of a boulder dropped atop a hill, a landmark that had no purpose other than being what it was, a residue of the last Ice Age leaving a pebble behind as the glaciers retreated.

The sandstone was stripped of life right now, and the poison only grew more intense as I glided closer over the silent, ashen path.

As I settled down to the small mount, the poison was roiling in the air, a virtual wall of organic-destroying vapors that couldn’t possibly be natural. It was a psionic effect of terrifying lethality, powered by a Core that had ignited to life with speed and tremendously deadly force.

I felt it brush against my skin, down my throat, inside my lungs, and bioelectricity sizzled and my immunity fought it off.

Damn, this was nasty stuff. My eyeballs were tingling, reacting to the stuff.

I walked up the mound silently, and could hear someone sobbing as I drew closer.

I stepped around the boulder at the top and into its shadow, and saw a young tribal woman, close to my own age, dressed in the jeans and fringes and beads popular among them, darker of skin than a pure Tribal, but with the long straight hair of one.

She was crying into her knees at this point, not seeing me, her attire perfectly fine even while not a sole living or ex-living thing was enduring close to her.

I saw a sparrow flit in, and in midair it literally came apart, bursting into neo-flames and disintegrating into fine ash before the parts could hit the ground.

I sighed aloud, and she jumped, looking up sharply, and then gawked at me in disbelief. What was I, a pale-skinned outsider, doing here?

“You’re a mutant, and your Core just ignited,” I informed her, staring at her dark eyes. “Did you figure that out?”

“I-I-I,” she blubbered, still gaping at me in disbelief.

I stepped forwards, knelt down, and took her hands. She clutched them in disbelief, staring at me... and the flashes of blue igniting under my skin and fading away at the power of the poison assaulting me.

“You need to control this Right Now,” I told her, staring into her eyes. “It’s a Core Technique. You know you can do it. The Tribes have been doing it for decades.”

“H-How?” she burst out, nearly a scream. “They’re dead, they’re all dead-!”

“And more will die, if you can’t control this!” I assured her, gritting my teeth as probably every blood vessel on my face turned blue. “You’re exuding a massive area of flesh-eating poison. It’s trying to kill me. Please don’t keep trying to kill me while I’m trying to help you.”

She stared at me, the colors playing across my face, and swallowed as I clutched her hands. She took a deep, frightened breath, and gasped, “What do I have to do?”

“I’m going to help you locate your Core.”

Because of however I’d been stuffed into this body, I didn’t have a functioning Core, or I definitely would have worked some psionics into what I was doing. Maybe I could form an artificial one later, who knew.

But that hadn't meant I couldn’t invest some Ranks into Psicraft, just for this purpose.

“I’m going to show you where your Core is.” I transferred her free hands to my own, held up crackling fingertips. “What we are going to do is Awaken your Core in the traditional manner, not the uncontrolled manner of a Wild Talent like yourself. When that happens, we are going to redirect your Core away from this natural ability of yours and along more moderate channels that have to be learned to open correctly.

“Take a deep breath.” She stared at my crackling fingers. “Okay, I’m going to touch you, and my power is going to go down into your Core, and then find a different way out. You need to shove EVERYTHING in the Core that you can, all your willpower, into that channel.

“It’s going to feel like every zit popping and blister being lanced you’ve ever felt, only on the inside. If you don’t do it, you’re going to keep putting out this poison, and everybody around you will die.”

She exhaled, clutching my hand even harder. She would have drawn blood, but my DR was much too high for that.

I pulled her forward effortlessly, and drove my fingers into her gut.

Follow the Kirlian Aura... there! The Core was big, seething and popping with agitation and emotions, putting out some matter-transmuting power of the worst kind, while surrounding her in a field that made her immune to the same. It was literally connected to every pore on her skin, radiating out of it.

I instead drove my Wrath up and along a nerve meridian in a certain direction, blazing it up into her chest, over, into, and down her left arm, then out her palm.

With a scream of guilt and horror, that entire seething ball of power followed the line I’d pointed out for her, getting sucked back inside her as it did so, ten thousand tiny currents burning into one long one, and she screamed again at the pain as she drove it up into her chest, her heart almost stopping, and then it plunged down in thousands of icy razors inside her arm, and out her hand.

I flipped her hand open just before the mindblade manifested.

It was a long one-sided knife, screeling and humming as it coalesced out of nothing and locked itself into existence. Her hand naturally grabbed it as her eyes rolled back, and she almost fell unconscious from the abrupt backwash of pain.

I grabbed her chin and kept her upright, tingles from my fingers jolting her and keeping her conscious as she trembled and spasmed through the Awakening.

I couldn’t help Mr. Hill, who would require an actual psion, but this Mutant Core was already up, and showing it a new channel was simplicity.

The poison in the air basically evaporated as the power manifesting and supporting it was cut off. I exhaled in relief myself, as even what I was fighting inside myself came apart as the broadcast power driving its impossible lethality went away.

I pulled her forward into a hug, mindful but not scared of the white and gold long knife in her hand. She started sobbing again as she clutched her knife, and my shirt was rapidly soaked.

It was fine. That was what Prestidigitation was for.

“Hey kid.” The gruff voice from the speaker on my collar made me frown. ‘Kid’ meant he thought someone was listening, or he’d call me ‘girl’.

“Old man?” I asked right back, and the girl broke off her sobs to listen.

“You remember those guys I ran into in the jungle back then?”

“Yeah?” I asked, frowning.

“Found a little popgun. Looks just like one of theirs.”

“You always wanted one for your collection.”

“That’s true.”

There was a click as he signed off.