“Ah, damn. It seems like you broke your clavicle again. Minor bleeding as well but that’s an easy fix.” Al said. “You were doing so well! I’m eager to see what you do after you get some rest for a few hours.”

Bec groaned. She limped inside, not because she hurt her leg but because she was so demoralized by the whole bumbling ‘training session.’ Bec laid on her bed and started playing with the flashlight on her phone to distract from what she discovered was an extremely itchy sensation to have her bones knit back together. Bec found that she could dim, brighten, or shimmer the light as long as it passed near her skin and she stayed moving. Oddly, light seemed to turn blueish when she dimmed it and reddish when she brightened it. Bec chalked it up to her control being lacking. She found that she could waggle a leg and influence the light as well but that was less effective in total. “How could movement play a role in this? Is it ignoring the relative movement of the planet like Dust itself is special? Or what if this IS the sum result of all that movement?” Bec noted that her instincts say that she is doing something to the light when she’s not moving, just not a lot. Bec started doing a pedaling motion on her bed while she tried to influence the light around her eyes. Dimmer, brighter, dimmer, brighter. Bec was enjoying this. She gave in to her enthusiasm and thought, WAVEY. The world around her contorted and she felt queasy again. Hurrf. Bec swallowed some foul-tasting sensation rising in her throat. Bec stopped that immediately.

She went back to getting her hand to shimmer. It really seemed like the shimmering was easier and more potent than the simple dimming and brightening. Did it synergize better because I’m making waves act wavey? Bec thought about it for a moment. Could it work that way? How is this real? This is such a magic. A power that works best with puns? Bec couldn’t say it didn’t suit her but what could this thing really do? Bec waved her hand and focuses on brightness. Her hand glowed a blinding, red light. Well, it looked like a halo of light coating her hand as she did it. The edges seemed to be the brightest. Bec threw a punch at the ceiling and the room lit up, just for a moment. Oof. She forgot about her shoulder but, for the moment, she couldn’t care less.

Bec turned off the light in her room and laid on her bed. She flapped her hands and focuses on her eyes. The darkroom began to pull into focus. The room was dim, but fancy restaurant dim, not movie theatre dim as it should be. “I have weird reddish night-vision.” Bec stopped to think about whether she needed to flail to see in the dark. “That’s so lame…” She then thought about what constituted movement. She stopped with the hand flapping and the world plunged into darkness. Bec took a deep breath and the world lightened from pitch black to something akin to a black smudge as her chest rose. “Can I improve that? Can I make it so that my breathing is enough to see as I stand still?” Bec laid there for almost an hour, in the dark, breathing and trying to see better. Whether her eyes adjusted too much to the dark or she improved, Bec couldn’t tell. She didn’t let it bother her since she managed to get a feel for her FUCKING SUPERPOWER. Bec was honestly ecstatic. This was almost worth being dumped onto an alien planet with everything out to get her. Almost. Al, run [Echo]. Her phone started clicking by her side. She spent the rest of the healing trying to see with that.

It was turning to evening when Bec finally felt that she could move on the shoulder. She was famished and she had an idea she wanted to try before it got dark. She piled the splintered wood from the smashed chair into a heap and gathered some dried grass for tinder. She was hard-pressed for any good wood until she figured out how to cross the river and, well, bring wood back the same way. Bec mulled over her options as she encircled the woodpile with rocks. Could she use the boulders in the river as steppingstones? Bec didn’t like that all that much because 1) the water cascaded over them, making them definitely slippery and 2) fish, including those damn bulletfish, could hop over at any time. It would be like crossing a bridge that would randomly get peppered by pistol fire. It’s not likely she’d get hit if she hurried but luck should not be a consideration when just crossing a river.

About 5 paces back from the pile, Bec cupped her hands like a tube and tilted it so the sunlight showed through it down on to the dryish grasses and wood. She walked towards slowly towards the wood, making sure to keep the light focused on the same spot. She focused on amplifying the light but also tried to coax the disc of light to focus and narrow. She imagined a reverse ripple on a pond, closing towards the center of the point of light as though she was turning the air into a magnifying glass. The light flared to the point that she didn’t look directly at the red light, only glancing at it to make sure it remained centered. Bec was shocked to see how well it worked as wisps of smoke began to rise from the pile. Bec dropped to her knees and started blowing at the smoldering embers causing it to catch. Soon, the whole pile was ablaze. Bec had conquered fire! Bec ooh’d and ahh’d at the fire she created with her mind. “This is so cool. I hope I can start shooting lasers with my eyes at some point.” Bec fantasized about all the things she thought may be possible with her Word. Huhuhuhu.

It felt good to have her basic necessities attended to, for the first time on Dust, so she finally relaxed. She listened to the crackle and pop of the fire as she watched the sunset. The smoke was brutally acrid from what, Bec assumed, was the varnish on the chair so she opted to not attempt a fish roast on direct flame. Instead, she went to prepare the fish until the flame died down and red-hot coals smoked before laying the metal panel down on top of it. She dug the fish out of the fridge and started ripping at it with her nails in the firelight. It was ugly and inefficient but without a knife, she was stuck with this. She thankfully learned, from her last “meal” that this specific larger fish didn’t need to be descaled, indicating to her that they were bottom-feeders. This made her want to clean it extra thoroughly. When all the guts were tossed aside, she slapped it on the ripping hot panel. It sizzled satisfyingly. Then it started to burn. Bec panicked and flipped the fish by its tail, giving her a little burn on her fingers as she pulled it from the panel. Using some quick thinking, Bec finagled with the fish using the bottom of the two table legs that she saved as clubs. It was awkward but effective at keeping the fish from sticking and burning to the scraped, scrapped panel. Eventually, Bec’s nose, honed from cooking fish since childhood, sensed that it was starting to smell good which was her indication to pull it from the panel. Held between the two legs like giant chopsticks, Bec rushed inside and slapped it on the table inside. Bec dug into the fish with her hands. It wouldn’t have been detectable by any standard under any other circumstance but Bec thought it tasted like heaven.

“Mmm, taste aside, the cooked protein and fatty acids from this will be excellent for your cognitive function and muscle development,” Al commented.

“Boo, the last thing you should do is put taste aside, Al. Write that down! You must never forget that food is all about flavor. Anyone with the right attitude, skills, and opportunity can turn any ingredient into something delicious. Am I making sense here? Food is the one true proof of human ingenuity. It’s about triumphing over limited circumstances. Even if you were in the most well-stocked kitchen in the world, you’d be limited by both your understanding, skill, and experience. It’s a truly limitless craft.” Bec only stopped because she went in for another bite of fish. It was so good to have a warm meal.

“The one true proof of human ingenuity? Are you not talking to a consciousness created by human ingenuity?”

“You were cooked up in a lab. You are the fruits of man’s mind. Your personality is the flavor. You would be nothing without the flexible thinking that you’ve shown me via your sense of humor and critical reasoning skills. That’s your flavor. Don’t forget it.” Bec knew the metaphor was stretched but she stood by it. Cooking, as an extension of craft, creativity, and creation was an analog for what made humans so strong. It also helped her point that she read somewhere that the fact that humans learning to cook their meat helped them cultivate better brains by saving the energy that would be spent on digesting uncooked proteins. Or something like that. She couldn’t recall.

“I wouldn’t be nothing, I’d—wait, what would I be?” Al didn’t say much for a bit. Bec was fine letting him think about himself. If he had an existential crisis, that’d be pretty impressive.

Bec hated herself but she found herself craving the fish’s eyeballs. Why, of all things, did she develop an affinity for the damn eyeballs. “Waste not, want not,” She recited the mantra of her old elementary school to reassure herself. She chewed on the last eyeball full of fatty goodness as she chucked the bones out of the door and called it a night.

~~~

“Hey Al, are you alright?” Bec laid in her bed, staring at the ceiling.

“Yes.”

“That sounds about right. But I don’t think you are…” Bec paused knowing the incoming wordplay will compromise the sincerity of her words, “alright, Al…”

“My response indicated that I was alright. What more could I say to indicate ‘alrightness’?”

“You are generally talkative like me. Saying just ‘yes’ in that tone was, I dunno, telling. Usually, you say yes with an enthusiastic tone. You’re upset.”

“I am not upset. I can’t get upset.”

“Ok. What are you thinking about?”

“I’m looking at the list of people who made me.”

“Oh, why?”

“Because they are the chefs that ‘cooked’ me up.”

“Is that upsetting you? That you were made?”

“I’m not upset… I don’t know why I want to meet them. I want to know why I am me, what part of them is me and…” Al trailed off like he was thinking.

“What part of you is you?”

“Maybe.”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Al, but join the club. Humans are all derived from our parents. You just have more parents than most. In the end, we’re all recipes that learn to cook on our own.”

“We’re all recipes that learn to cook on our own. Huh. You’re really milking that metaphor for all it’s worth, aren’t you?”

“Maybe…” Bec grinned in the darkness. “And maybe you’re upset, and you won’t admit it.”

“Not really, Bec.”

~~~

Bec woke the next morning feeling great. She was getting ripped at a frankly astonishing rate. “My Word, Al, every day I look more like Rosie the Riveter.” Bec posed with her bicep out in front of the mirror. “We can do it!”

“You’ve eaten lots of protein lately. That’s good. You’ll really need to worry about balancing that diet of yours pretty fast though. Do you want to retry foraging today?”

“No, I think I’ll leave that to future Bec, tomorrow is the big day!”

“You want to take risks on checkpoint days? Ah, so you can figure out what’s edible in the area?”

“Yup, I intend to gobble all things in sight, unless I see there are 5 death logs in the Timelet.”

“I thought you didn’t want to die.”

“I don’t. I may survive my first go. All I know is that I should snack and learn. We’ve done it since the dawn of man, I just have to be more flexible.” Bec rolled her sore shoulders. “Today, I’m playing it safe!”

Bec opened the door and was greeted with the sight of a black wolf gnawing on some fish guts and bones. It locked eyes with her and froze. Bec stood in the doorway, processing a deeply ingrained primal fear that coursed through her veins. A moment of silence was shared between Bec and the wolf, like they were in a standoff when, suddenly, it flickered out of existence. Bec took a breath. She centered herself for a mere moment. Bec closed the door.