I finished up with Stacey and Robert and didn’t have any further interruptions to the class, finishing it without anyone else coming up with a strange problem or even making a breakthrough. My speech about waiting until you really felt ready had stuck, apparently.

Two of them had asked to stay and use the individual rooms for a while, which was fine. Robert had looked at the rooms with a question to his mom, but she’d just taken him out. I imagined he’d be doing a lot of writing in the next few days though.

After changing back out of my workout clothes and into my normal choice of loose long shorts and nearly sleeveless shirt, I wandered about the building for a little bit, just checking in on things because I could. Seth’s two new minions were settled well into their roles of whatever web domain work was needed, along with random other stuff as well.

The medical area looked more like a small hospital section now, with a couple of beds inside of screens, the various big pieces of equipment off to one side, and Brandon sitting at a desk, chatting with someone I didn’t recognize offhand. Arrayed on the desk between them was a bunch of different needles.

“Hey,” he spoke up, seeing me. “What’s up?”

“I’m just wandering at the moment. You guys?”

“Discussing different weapons of patient destruction.” The woman waved a hand towards the needles.

I gave her a strange look. “I’m sorry, I actually don’t think I know you?”

She just gave me a smile. “Amy Diaz. I was hired about a week ago for general nursing. I’m honestly hoping you’re not going to hurt yourself any time soon, as I don’t know what we could do for you, other than oral medication.”

Confusion cleared, I smiled back at her. “Yeah, I’m not really certain either. Let me know if you come up with any ideas.”

We chatted for a few more minutes before I left. The gym was clear, which left me little procrastination to do there, so I headed back to my office.

I logged into my computer after I sat down and sighed a soft smile. Another project, another piece of the puzzle— the full size still unknown. I pulled up an internal tracker in the system and put in an earbud, starting the recording from earlier to transcribe it over.

Just putting the data over wasn’t long, but annotating some interesting points on it took longer.

If Robert could convert himself over to water, what was the purpose of doing so? Did he get some benefit from making water energy instead of normal energy?

Were Danny and Melissa actually making fire and electricity energy themselves? What made them different from me—or any of the dozen other Seekers—that didn’t seem to pick up an actual energy type.

Electricity, lightning perhaps, didn’t seem to be represented in that base mix of energy in the air either. How do you get to that from what was there? The sense of concrete was like a weird earth, blood was a twisted water.

Something to test with Danny and Melissa, then, see if they could figure out anything interesting elementally, instead of just general power related.

I wrote up an email to them to help with the kid, in case I wasn’t around when his parents brought him by, and linked them into the project, along with Brent. Hopefully it wouldn’t take Robert months to make the shift.

That done, I closed out the framework of that project and looked over the others I had.

IrishDantians from the forum hadn’t gotten back to me with what he thought would be possible to reset his dantian and breakthroughs. I hadn’t actually seen him online since that last message, which worried me. But I’d assume he was just having other issues for another day or two, before getting really worried.

Melissa’s technique was listed with me as a student on it, and she’d grabbed Ash for his math brain, that project had pages and pages of force projections, equations, and guesstimated measurements of power usage for various attempts she’d made. I could follow maybe a quarter of the math before it started looking like a word salad due to the variables there. If she got it working, I hoped it didn’t require complete understanding of everything there. Or at least got simplified.

My own personal project about defining yourself was next. Different links of things I’d pulled up; from the psychology definition of self, “a person's experience as a single, unitary, autonomous being that is separate from others, experienced with continuity through time and place.” to a bunch of recommendations of just sitting down and writing out who you are and want to be.

I’d poked at a few of those, filling in some of it, but it wasn’t the easiest thing to look at yourself. Besides, if I’d done this last year, all these answers would be completely different.

I was about to continue messing with that when something changed. I looked up, trying to figure out what it was. No one had called my name, right?

I looked around the little office, nothing different.

Brent walked in. “Nicole?” He looked confused, but also worried. “The rain just...stopped. But the water’s heavier. The alien kicked another block.”

That’s what it was, the rain that had been more or less steady for over a month was no longer hitting against the walls of the building, providing the background noise.

Wait. “What?” I cycled in, the energy in the air had changed. Now the sense of water had become as strong as earth and fire. Somehow it also had an air, a wind, element to it? “What is the strength of the world’s soul?” We couldn’t take another grow to match.

Your world has cleared the second block of the [Initiate’s Realm] and begins to regain its balance.

“Regain its balance? What does that mean?” I asked but didn’t truly try to push the question to the alien. Or wait for Brent to try to answer. There were no windows in the offices, so instead I was up and out in a flash, dropping through the hallway to the first floor and out the door.

The sky above was still dark and gray, but not a drop of rain was falling. Indeed, the clouds were whipping so fast across the sky that it looked like ripples in a pond. The entire sky seemed to move and crawl.

“The clouds are going southwest,” I pointed out. “And there’s barely a breeze right now. Upper atmosphere must be insane right now.” I looked up at the sky again. “Maybe we can get the satellite imagery to track that down.”

“Wait, Nicole!” Brent tried calling out, but I was already running back inside.

I bounced up to my office again and pulled up old links, hoping my school credentials hadn’t actually been dropped. Links probably existed in the Seeker search as well, but I knew this program.

Thankfully they hadn’t and as Brent made it back up to my office with Tasha in tow, I was getting the GOES-22 loaded back up. My jaw dropped as I stared at the screen.

“What?” Brent asked, voice a little peeved. Probably at my running around.

“If this is regaining balance, I do believe Mother Nature is absolutely pissed at us,” I answered, turning the screen around.

On it, the satellite covering the west coast of the US was pulled up, the last view I’d been using when I’d been doing a project, now over two months ago. On it, massive cloud cover and storm cells were being pulled offshore into the Pacific Ocean in real time.

When the rain had started, I’d joked about the weather patterns being completely screwed over. What had happened was rain chances had increased by magnitudes, but not completely drenching the entire planet. A ten percent chance of rain was guaranteed rain, but the deserts ‘only’ had like a seventy percent chance.

This though? We all watched in various stages of shock and awe as the entire cloud cover across North America was pulled away into the south Pacific at speeds that were likely several hundred miles per hour. The edges of the radar showed storm cells being pulled in easterly into the massive swell from Asia and Australia as well.

“You know, that looks like a hurricane spin,” Tasha mentioned, voice trembling a bit in horror.

I shook my head and just watched, a little worried as it proved to be fairly true as clouds continued to be pulled into the storm. If it was centered in the Pacific though... I pulled up a second window, flipping to another satellite. Over Europe and Africa, already the near-complete cloud cover was missing, edges of it showing flow both east and west towards the Pacific.

I grabbed the ruler tool and measured, then rolled the timeline back to figure out how long the clouds had been moving. Maybe half an hour. Circumference of the Earth was nearly 25,000 miles give or take whatever the lava had done... “Maybe four hours.”

“Until?” Brent asked.

“Until all the clouds and storms are pulled there. God only knows what’s going to happen once it gets there, though,” I answered.

I flipped back to the Pacific Ocean view, where the storm really was starting to pick up a rotation. I grabbed the ruler tool again. “Almost six hundred miles across already. Holy shit.”

The link shortly thereafter died, probably as the entirety of the human population started trying to figure out what was happening.

“So, what do we do?” Tasha asked, looking between the two of us.

“What can we do? A super hurricane like that building up? Batten down the hatches maybe?” I cursed, looking at that last image before everything quit loading. “Brent, can you find anything out?”

He nodded. “I’ll try. I expect we’re going to get a lot of people looking to us for answers though.”

“I’ll go back downstairs,” Tasha replied. “Danny’s dealing with the school. Do you want me to call everyone in?”

I shook my head. “Not unless we can figure out something we need to do. Let them know to try to figure out somewhere safe where they are.”

“Come on Nicole, I’ll see if I can get into an NGA feed.” Brent pulled me from my seat and we went to his office.

He did manage to find one, and we sat there watching the feed while a whole lot of scientists freaked the hell out. Really useful information over the few hours until the massive amounts of water in the atmosphere was drawn into one place.

A huge swirling storm that ended up nearly 2,500 miles in diameter, just churning in the south Pacific. There were any number of little islands that were probably lost at this point. But in yet more avoidance of any known meteorological understanding, the storm seemed almost pinned in place.