I got home and after eating dinner and bathing, I couldn't fall asleep. The horse's stamina I gained from Penny coupled with my regeneration and the refreshing hot bath made me feel wide awake. Too many things swirling in my head. Too much unanswered questions. I had to make something useful to kill time. Take the worries out of my mind. I had to get busy.

My first impulse was to browse the PC. I put on the wireless headphones and turned on the music. Shuffle gave me "In the arms of an Angel" by Sarah McLachlan.

There's always some reason

To feel not good enough

And it's hard at the end of the day [...]

So tired of the straight line

And everywhere you turn

There's vultures and thieves at your back

The storm keeps on twisting

Keep on building the lies

That you make up for all that you lack

[...]

You are pulled from the wreckage

Of your silent reverie

You're in the arms of the angel

May you find some comfort here

I was sure my iPod's battery charged with my tears and misery.

With no will to play on the computer, I sent it back to storage and sat on the chair, arms limp on either side, head hanging back, eyes closed, listening to Sarah hammer her grief on the piano. Feeling the tears roll down my cheeks and damp my hair.

If only I had an angel.

Alas, there was none. Even though I was surrounded by people that cared about me, I was alone in my grief. I'd always be the outsider. And this bloody room is too gloomy and dark.

Light it up.

I had the enchanted water goblin eyes. Nanna said that so long they stayed near me, they would last for a very long time. Years. More even if I kept them in storage where time didn't pass. I looked up, there was a wooden beam supporting the roof. If I could hang an eye from there...

I took two aluminum disks from storage, each weighed eight hundred grams. I had only three more but these should be more than enough. I first created a gear system to rotate a silicon platform. I tied the Dremel to a gear with a hair scrunchie as the conveyor belt and the gears to reduce the angular speed and the stress on the rotary tool's motor and I had my own automatic potter's table. I did like Demi, but without Patrick. I paused the iPod and selected "Unchained Melody". Then I made the bowl out of metal like a potter would do to clay. I carefully shaped the inner and outer surface to a mirror polish.

While inside the influence of my power, I could shape the matter however I could imagine. That was the hard part. High heel shoes? Easy peasy. A helmet? Nope. The parts and pieces could also be welded perfectly since I caused the metal to enter a fluid state. I tried it with a small piece of aluminum. Focusing to keep it like a puddle of water, I poked my finger. It went through the metal as if it were a liquid. It could also be used to measure the range of my power. I made a stick of aluminum and used my power to move it like a snake. Only the five centimeters of the stick away from my skin obeyed.

I focused but I couldn't increase that range. I took the metal and shaped a small ovoid. I tried to make a sphere but that's what I got. Then I made the metal below the ovoid rise, moving more metal from underneath to create a pillar. The ovoid was well outside the reach of my power and it rose for another twenty centimeters before the stick bent and broke on its own weight, the part out of my influence clattering on the wooden floor.

Dangling yielded even poorer results. The ovoid fell to the ground right after leaving my influence, the metal under my control was unable to hold it in place hanging down.

I placed the first stick inside the bowl and split the ovoid in four, like tentacles. I shaped them to make a rough spherical socket where the goblin eye would rest inside the bowl. The light hitting the aluminum would reflect on the polished surface and come out through the mouth of the bowl. Or not.

Maybe I could poke holes in the bowl to let the light escape sideways, like one of those children's nightlights. Stars, comets, the moon. Turn the room's roof into the night sky. Feeling excited and childish, I did so, using the Dremel to cut and pierce the bowl. The stars were hexagonal but everyone knew the number of rays a star has in a picture depends on the support frame of the lens.

All that was left was to put the goblin eye in place and attach the bowl to the roof beam. After molding the aluminum prongs inside around the delicate glowing globe, I made a strip of aluminum, silicon scaffolding and climbed up. I bent the strip around the beam and sealed the ends together to form a band, and used my power to weld the bowl to the band.

Perfect.

I cleaned up the shavings, scaffolding but I kept the gears and the flywheel in a plastic bag. These would be very useful in the future. And that's how I now had "free" light to use my room at night without problems. It fed off my excess power and I had plenty. This invention was well worth the time invested. Maybe I should make a lampshade too.

Strike when the hammer is hot! Or was it the anvil?

For the conical cover, I made a snap-on holder for my survival knife that would allow me to slice very thin sheets of bamboo fiber. The knife was the sharpest tool I had. I sheared slices thin enough that most light could seep through. I cut a lot of these bamboo strips and put them side-by-side on the floor. When I had enough, I created a slab of silicon and using a string and a pin in the center, dug a pair of circular grooves of different diameters with Decompose and my finger. I filled these grooves with aluminum and removed the excess, getting two hoops.

I could press the bamboo to the pseudo-liquefied aluminum and force the plant fibers to remain stuck inside the metal using Decompose. There was nothing between the fibers and the metal so it was stuck at an atomic level due to the imperfections on the vegetable matter. I would rip off the fibers before I could remove it from inside. After I attached all the bamboo fibers to the lower hoop, I trimmed their sides so it would have minimal overlap after they were bunched up to reach the upper hoop and did the same to the top. After attaching the cover to the body with eight sticks of aluminum and giving the whole piece a good polish with my power, the lampshade was ready to use. I just had to put an eye in between the two holders, one above and one below left for it.

I made two more to a total of three.

Happy with what I'd done and marveled at the hundreds of tiny pins of light across the roof, I knew I would have to find a way to make the bowl spin and that I could do what I had to do with the computer. Making the light fixture greatly improved my mood.

I updated my journal, wrote in some notes, and updated what I knew of my powers. Divine boons.

Decompose had two main functions. One, to accelerate the natural process of decay of matter or decompose it. From wood to peat, from dung to fertilizer, from uranium to lead in a flash. The expenditure of energy is mostly negligible for me unless it is radioactive material. I had no way to quantify how much energy something used or how much I had. Only forcing radioactive decay used enough energy to be a problem, and something locked me from stopping the power halfway.

I put a note on that part. "Safety measure or just BS?" I had to find out a way to remove that lock.

The second one was what I call "Chemical-kinesis" because the term "chemokinesis" was already claimed. I could move substances I touched or near my body, separating them from the surroundings, making them move independently and without reacting with the environment. I had to know the particular "resonance" of the substance. But once I knew that resonance, I could manipulate it or extract compounds if their complexity was lower than the source. For example, I could extract gasoline from wood or fat because there was a chain of eight carbons atoms inside the complex structures and the octane molecule was of lower complexity.

Resonance was the best term I came up with but it wasn't quite that. I could say it was like musical notes but not with sound. Pure elements like oxygen or iron had their own resonance. Compounds like water were chords. I could sense "water" and also know it was composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Complex compounds were akin to elaborate chords and something like a piece of a living being was like an orchestra.

There was one limitation though. I could isolate covalent compounds, molecules, or ionic compounds, salts, perfectly. There was the smallest unit of these I could picture and lock on their resonance. I had no such luck with metallic or crystalline structures. Bronze, for example, was just tin and copper to me. I couldn't lock on one "unit" of bronze, as I could lock on a molecule of water. I could manipulate either metal but it would ruin the alloy.

The same thing went for complex crystalline structures or polymers. even if they were covalent. I could manipulate silica, but all I could make was a fine sand. No luck creating quartz crystals for example. And the manipulation of a pure element always resulted in the lowest energy isomer. If I manipulated carbon, I would get graphite. No diamonds for me.

That was all for Decompose. I moved on to the powers of storage and limited repair.

The items that came from Earth with me could be placed in storage, and they would also be repaired to a pristine state while they were either there or in my possession. The process was slow, taking several hours. An article of clothing would regrow from a single thread over the course of a day, for example. That's why I always kept a piece of my clothes in storage. If some accident happened or they were stolen, I would not lose the item. And time did not pass while the item was in storage. I couldn't store living beings but the definition was a macroscopic one. I could store plant seeds and probably microorganisms just fine, but not larger lifeforms or animate ones. Tiny bugs were already out.

The containers could be stored with their contents if one specific rule was followed. If the contents would not spill from the container they would go with the container, otherwise, they would be left behind. So I could store a half-open bag with an object inside if the object was too big to pass through the opening. The plastic bags I stored my metal ingots had several punctures, scratches, and gashes, but since none of these openings was too big for the ingot to spill through, they would store just fine.

That wasn't free though. Storing foreign matter put a strain on my magic and increased the upkeep of my storage. It was negligible if I was healthy but something I should keep in mind if I ever strain myself again.

I finished writing and because I wasn't still feeling sleepy, I put on my headphones, hit shuffle on the iPod and started to browse my databases and work on my projects. The first thing I did was to turn on the Apache webserver on the computer, set up the wireless network and access my self-loading page for the deific survey photos on the iPad. If I found something of interest, I could stop whatever I was doing to check.

I wrote all the journal entries I couldn't while I was recovering and avoiding using the storage. Then I browsed the geology books to freshen up on the ores and what I could expect from the shipment Aran bought. Next, I checked the metallic alloys pages from Wikipedia and found some very interesting combinations I would surely try tomorrow at the smithy. I stretched and kept looking at the aerial photos that refreshed every fifteen seconds.

This world was mostly uninhabited. Unexplored regions, forests, deserts, frozen landscapes.

Frozen landscapes...

I hit stop on the auto-refresh page controls and navigated back on the Safari history. There it was. A white snow-covered landscape. Full of dead trees and rolling hills. I took note of the image ID code on the browser bar and opened the same view on the computer.

I'm sorry, touchscreen fans, but no matter how many greasy fingers you can stick on your screen, it can't beat mouse-and-keyboard control. And those mobile browsers are all watered down. Hint: all fingers are greasy. It's like their natural protection.

I took screenshots and moved around, looking at the adjoining pictures. It was a big plain covered in snow. I kept going around in a circular pattern when I saw it. A city devastated by some sort of blast. The tall stone walls were broken and scattered, buildings, debris, partially hidden by the snow but not entirely covered. One pyramidal structure was standing but two of its faces were demolished. Some buildings behind it were half-broken but it was obvious pointing at the direction the shockwave came from.

Hesitating to see what it was, I moved the viewpoint in that direction until I saw it. A huge lake with elevated ridges on its sides, frozen. It wasn't too hard to see that this perfectly circular lake was a crater. I opened the Wikipedia photos on another tab and found the pictures of nuclear blast craters.

They matched enough to confirm my fears.

There be nukes.

Connecting the dots, there was the Death Snow, whether Nergal's champion and the Harbinger were the same person or two distinct characters, the uranium ore Marduk sent to his agents, and now this. The torbernite and my attempt at neutralizing it. What gave me the idea I could do that? Just because I could decay wood faster? And why I couldn't stop until it was all neutralized? Worse yet, the radiation came entirely to my body instead of spreading all around.

It was an insult on top of injury. Tarhun limited my maximum magical power to half my potential so I would overflow and leak magic all the time. He enchanted my eyes to make them impervious to magic so I couldn't use my power to cast spells. Why wouldn't he also tweak Decompose to work on the radioactive material differently from the other materials? There was a sense of wrongness I feel from irradiating material.

The cherry on the cake was the fact that my power worked on resonances for specific elements or substances. That was why I could not manipulate alloys, as the metallic bonds do not show as a single resonance but the particular metallic elements' distinct resonance. The uranium decay went through a half-dozen elements between lead and uranium. Logic would say that I would decay all the uranium into the next element and stop, but Decompose aggressively went forward and turned everything to Pb 206.

That was total bullshit. He was probably pressing me for that affidavit. The Dark One clearly advised against, but at that moment I thought he was antagonizing Tarhun. Not that he would be any better. Assholes, all of them.

What's the conclusion? Tarhun brought me here to be the janitor of this planet. To clean up the mess that the Harbinger left behind. I had no idea what to thin.

I was just seething with rage. I wanted to shout, to blaspheme against that stupid god. But yes, I couldn't even speak up against him as it would hurt the connection between him and his faithful.

I knew that the Dark One wouldn't show up to tempt me anymore. Tarhun would be an idiot to let his enemy reach me and I had a hunch that it had to do with that "Divine Protection" boon he put on me.

What did he expect? That I'd one day travel to that place and clean it up? Yeah, in a century or two, asshole.

Is it bad to call the head god of this world an asshole? Well, can't blame me for lying. Asshole.

What am I? A toy? Some sort of piñata waiting to be cracked by the strongest and most virile conqueror?

So it is known how angry I was, this line here was written and deleted over ten times because it had too much cursing.

Maybe I should just stop typing. And I can't shout because people are sleeping in the house. Including a baby.

So, good night, journal. I crafted one awesome thing and found two terrible ones. That's the rollercoaster of my life.

Even this month's name is full of bull.

And now I'm sleepy.