If there was one thing I was glad for, it was that it didn’t take me long to settle into my new residence. It would be difficult to do so, actually, considering that basically everything I owned was lost in space or even outright destroyed. All I had to my name was the clothes on my back, the phone in my pocket, the watch on my wrist, and whatever I had in the bank. Admittedly, that might be a decent sum, but actually accessing it might be a challenge for a while, considering that I opened my account through the Mars branch, almost a decade ago, and had not once ever made any purchases, withdrawals, or deposits off-world since then.

I would have been about to do so, it took nearly a week to figure out how to submit the necessary paperwork to have my residence changed, but I got it done. As of three or so weeks before then, I was officially a ‘resident’ of the Inner Oort, and since the Soleil Bank didn’t operate anywhere near that distance from the Sun, my ‘local’ branch was changed to Sedna. No doubt, in their eyes, because of my job I had suddenly left the United Planets in the inner Sol System, passed straight through the Expansionist Federation in the outer, and settled firmly in neutral territory, not a part of either governing body.

I’m sure that much was understandable for them, as the only bank in either System that operated on anything larger than a single planet basis they’ve really come to earn their title as just ‘the Bank,’ and no doubt deal with people whose jobs are similar to that all the time. There’d be a problem, though, if I just popped back up right back in the inner Sol System, and on Luna no less. It may be simple enough to sort things out, but it would take time and until I did, I’d be basically stuck with the Johanssons.

I locked the door after I entered, watching through the window as Marcus walked away once more without many of the answers he so dearly wanted from me. I could tell that the next time we talked I wasn’t going to be able to get out of telling him more about the event that I already knew so little about.

I had to give him the bare minimum to even convince him to leave, though, and I’d said that whatever it was we had opened out there had left me with a corrupt core, which was partially true, I suppose. It would still be unprecedented, no empty had ever before gotten even a corrupt core no matter how they tried, even if they could still get all the problems that came with someone having theirs corrupted. But it'd still be almost believable, anything can happen and while it would be unprecedented, that was better than telling him exactly what I’d seen, and a lot less scary than telling him exactly what I’d picked up, too.

On that front, my ‘guest’ had been relatively quiet since we’d left, it hadn’t actually said anything for the ride but did make some very dissatisfied and equally head-splitting noises any time I tried to look up at the endless black sky. As horrifying as it sounded, though, I was slowly starting to get used to it. Strange moments where my head didn’t feel like it belonged to me alone anymore and a just about constant feeling of being observed were both things I’d probably have to get used to moving forward, and the occasional statement that made my head hurt just as much hearing it as trying to decipher it seemed to be almost worth it to have a being as dubiously capable at protecting me from my own mistakes and at others’ attacks. Almost, but not quite, not yet anyway.

There were better things to do than just resign myself to the very likely fate of having the Every-Thing with me to stay, the most important at that current moment was walking to the kitchen and seeing just how well-stocked they had left it for me. The answer was very. For what reason there was an entire walk-in freezer I could not say, nor was I sure why the rest of the kitchen would also be more at home in a restaurant than a cabin and it had the food stores to match. Considering the rather simplistic state of the rest of the house, I wouldn’t be surprised if this building was actually just a renovated diner or something.

Whatever the reason behind the kitchen and why they chose to fully restock it for a single person, I was glad, as it meant that I had no real obligations to leave and go into whatever constituted a town in this Dome besides to stop by the Bank that I had no doubt was nearby. With the decently sized fenced-in yard and the basement beneath, I had no doubt that I could hide away from most any family that came knocking.

First, though, I decided to put that kitchen to good use, then grabbed a frozen pizza to toss in the oven instead. As much as I would have loved to cook something up there and then, there were just too many choices, and none felt right. Still, if there was one upside to being too indecisive to cook, it meant that I could, at the least, keep practicing with this energy from the Everything. Seeing as no matter how much I pulled or squeezed or lit within myself ever managed to make even the slightest difference in this solid sheen of nebulous power, I had started working under the assumption that it was a functionally bottomless pool, and I’d yet to see anything to the contrary so far.

Instead, I was given an apparently arbitrary time limit to it, something I’d been noticing from the very beginning but never really put too much weight into. That was until the day when I cut the power I was sending out of my hand, allowing the violently pink dandelion to come crashing to the floor, and realized with no small amount of confusion that the tips of my fingers were missing and the rest, shredded. It was almost frightening how little pain there was, after every other mistake before then I was expecting some crushing agony as soon as I stopped my hand from ‘sinking’ any further, when instead it was simply cold, numb, and feeling far too heavy to be attached to my wrist.

It took one more failed experiment to find out that I could channel about a finger’s worth of energy constantly for three seconds before I had to stop, and it took nearly a minute for whatever body part I’d used to be safe to ‘submerge’ again. I didn’t yet know why I had the limit, something told me I could extend it with enough work, but I wasn’t exactly eager to explore too much further without a healer or two on hand even if I could apparently just passively regrow fingertips in the middle of the night like the second time I ‘drowned’ my hand.

I would much rather stick to safe, easy experiments and work my way up from there. In fact, I even thought that to be the reasonable choice as I sat down on the plush carpet in the den, settling into a meditative stance. After once more taking a long moment to just explore this new well of energy, it still hadn’t quite set in that I had energy now no matter the cause or the type it was, I held one hand out, palm upwards, and pushed a little out with no real clear image in mind. What I got could also be accurately described as ‘without clear image,’ I was certainly not expecting the amorphous lump of glass to spring forth from nowhere and then immediately drop to the floor, but then, I wasn’t expecting much of anything.

That marked another in a very long string of failures to actually get a look at my own energy, something properly visual rather than the instinctive knowledge that this Everything Energy was just a complete, solid block of riotous order that soaked every bit of me that I got from meditating. I wasn’t too upset, though, since this was one of the milder failures. I’d learned not to have the idea of actually trying to see the stuff in my mind when I gave it the order to act, my trial lasted all of a fraction of a second before the shimmering, rippling air decided that it didn’t like what I was doing to it very much at all and ruptured loudly enough to shatter a monitor beside the bed and send a room full of various equipment scattered everywhere. There was also possibly some bleeding from the nose and ears, but honestly, that was one of the tamer injuries.

I continued trying for a little while though, simply giving a bit of that energy the go-ahead to exist and see what it would do without any conscious input. I didn’t channel for long, and each intermittent burst of power produced wildly different results. I ended up with a short brown-out in a house that should be literally incapable of such a thing, a snow-globe without anything inside but various shades of the color orange that I was scared to try and open, a patch of carpet that sweated, and a few other things that weren’t quite as interesting.

I wanted to try practicing control after the carpet thing, but that’s when the alarm for my meal went off. I started walking out of the living room, barely made it three steps before stepping on the lump of glass I forgot was there, and then half-hobbled the rest of the way after I smashed my knee into a hardwood coffee table. I fumbled over to the oven, a clunky Pre-Expansion design that further convinced me about this being some Bed & Breakfast that the Johanssons acquired through whatever means, and opened it wide. I was blasted with a wave of warmth as the convection oven relinquished my prize, and after sliding it onto a cutting board, I set off back to the den.

“Agh- Damnit!” Only for my bare feet to once more find their way onto the lump of glass I managed to forget about all over again. Of course, the thing was shaped in just the right way to dig into the sole of my foot and send me tumbling all over again. The first thing that I did was try and correct my plummet, only to jerk down in an entirely different way and launch the still steaming pizza across an entire room. Normally, this would be just a bad footnote in an otherwise good day, but when the molten food smeared itself across the carpet and made it start screaming it became anything but normal.

“What the hell?” I asked nobody in particular, as I scrambled to my feet and rushed over to the stain of red and cheese that was currently sobbing before shoveling the ruined pizza into a loose heap over the formerly sweating carpet. When all that did was muffle the noise to some disgusting gurgle I shouted, “Stop it, just stop!” It probably wouldn’t have changed anything had I not pushed out a bit of Everything in time with my command, but since I did, the results were immediate and apparent.

My entire hand almost immediately dipped, becoming hazy and shimmering in an instant, and the tips of my fingers once more became numb, almost gone. That alone was enough to snap me out of my ‘casting,’ but the damage had been done. Instead of a messy, smeared pile of steaming hot cheese and grease and bread all atop of a screaming carpet, I had a solid mound of absolutely frozen ingredients atop a deeply frosted rug, and small shards of ice had even been ripped from the air around it.

Not unlike a few other times, the temperature of the room was spiked into the ground even as the chill soaked into the floor, and I could see the patch of ice radiating outward from it all at a concerning pace. A light mist was rolling outward, and I could hear the crisp, light snapping and crunching of flash-frozen carpet fibers. Thankfully, air and polyester both made for poor heat conductors, and the localized blizzard wound up extending only about a meter in any given direction. When the dust settled, the den had become cold enough for my breath to frost, but I was afraid to turn the heater on in case the floor started screaming again.

I may have torn my hand away right after I had flash-frozen my meal, but it hadn’t made much of a difference. I examined my hand, or more accurately, the unhealthy red it had become and tried opening and closing it, only to fail. The tips of my fingers were still numb, but I doubted that was also the work of my ice burn. Yet again, my hand ‘sank,’ leaving my fingers cracked and gnarled, but eerily unbloodied. I waited a moment for my passenger to fix it, but like the last time my hand spent too long ‘submerged’ there wasn’t a peep.

I stood up, wincing at the splintering ice beneath me, and ran to the bathroom with my arm cradled against my chest. I spent the next little while running my hand under lukewarm water, it wouldn’t fix my digits, but it did help the frost damage, even if the burning chill refused to abate. With the other hand, I rooted through the bottles of pills and potions that had been left for me, looking for something that may help. I grabbed a vial of something shining a dull pink and dumped it onto the back of my hand, rubbing it in and feeling the concoction immediately set to work.

The sickly color of my hand faded wherever the alchemical medicine was applied, but my fingers themselves remained stubbornly wrong, although a second inspection showed that they didn’t seem like mangled plastic recreations of a real person’s, just mangled in general, but there still was not a bit of pain. The grey tinge they had was gone now, too, although I knew for a fact that the pale, but still humanly possible, white wasn’t the color my skin originally was and oh did it look weird.

Helplessly, I glanced up at the mirror in front of me, but what I saw looking back made me forget my finger-based worries for a moment.