“I can’t remember how long I have been alive. A century? A century and a half? And in that time… In that time, I’ve forgotten the face of my daughters. My parents. My wife. But never my friends. Those, I remember. ” — Riordan Havanna, the Red Knight, in a interview, 2080. Havanna is most known for bathing in the blood of the Sovereign Morrow during the Battle of the West.

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The stone was cold beneath his back. It always was. He glanced up through the crack in the stone, meeting the eye of the Regial.

“I’m not afraid you!”

Yet sweat darkened the stone around his armpits.

Two tentacles arched through the open space, down to the platform where he had earned his Chassis. He knew what was about to happen.It did not occur every night. Some nights.

Martin Soleri opened his mouth and bit down. Blood welled up through his mouth—

—and he woke up, his bed.

“Just a dream.”

“It was just a dream,” he repeated.

The repetition anchored the fact in his mind. He had fled the Regial, gained his Chassis. Were he to meet a Regial now, as he were…Martin didn’t fool himself into thinking that he could fight a Regial and win.

But he wasn’t defenseless either.

He moved into the kitchen. Put on a cup of coffee. Drank it. It amused him to think that the kitchen came with a actual coffe-machine and a limited reformulator, yet he had used the latter to a greater extent. The beans—the people in the arcology didn’t know what they were missing.

He downed the coffee and sat down in his couch. Mmhh.

The door banged open, and in strode Chevalier. There was a knock on the opened door. Wait. This wasn’t how it happened. The knock had preceded the action. A spear to the throat.

Still she entered, hefting that sword, that Martin now suspected was made of mattermetal. He spoke words, then she blurred into action.

The cut took him on the horizontal, across the jaw. Startled—know he knew it to be the flesh of Regial, and a exoauric to give it greater heft—the portal spun into being and he jumped through.

He willed the gate shut with a thought, but a sliver of metal penetrated, inching it up once more.

He vaulted through the snow of the Skyline habitat, intent on hiding. Then Chevalier spoke.

There was rage then. Enough to set the world on fire. There was- Martin Soleri woke up. Sweat beaded beneath his Chassis. His heart stuttered. His tongue arced over hardbitten lips. His head was cotton.

A petal of rose cast the surrounding room in clear relief. A raised section, which he slept on. The curving entry, which Martin had melted down into a figure ’s’, in case the water rose. He wouldn’t put it past Sviratham or this ‘Elder’ character.

He sat up, clutching his aching head. Water first. Martin followed the length of the curving corridor, up to the bray and surf of the water which surrounded the rock. The water tasted fresh. Not salty. He created another auric and pulled a globe of water up, gravity ceasing to exist for a figure of speech.

Now, should he put the water in one of the natural hollows in his cave or should he attempt to create a third auric and boil the water midair?

He ventured back, the globe of water following him like a puppy. Reclining on the raised section that acted as his bed, Martin considered the blue orb.

The rock in this cave…no, he wouldn’t risk it.

He created another auric, weaving strands from his Field, into the blue orb. Gentle…gentle…He imagined the molecules, the very atoms moving. Movement. Heat.

The Field-strings attached to the sphere pulsed——and the sphere shuddered, engorging, thick domes expanding on its surface before simply boiling away.

Huh.

He walked back and called up another orb of water.

This time he used not four, but one string connected to his Field. A serie of pulses moved from his string to the water; looking like gulps in the reverse and…nothing happened.

The draw on his Field was miniscule. It took more from him to hold the water up, then it currently took to boil it. He broke the endoauric. He touched the sphere with his gauntleted hand, withdrawing a stained hand.

His brow furrowed beneath his Chassis. Between the air outside and the sphere he had just touched…there was no difference. He pulled back his hand and willed a sliver of the Chassis away. A finger-width.

He plunged his finger in, withdrawing it in the space of a gasp. It was just lukewarm.

Martin flung his arm out and the water splattered against the wall. He reached out to create a portal far away from the dysmal cave, the circumference of which was promptly sewed shut with glowing thread.

The endoauric was forcefully dispersed and the thread spooled out a message.

“This is your first demerit. Earn two more, and you’re out.”

“That figures it,” he muttered.

He went out to gather a third orb of water. Back in his seat again, Martin considered the problem from another angle. He had to boil it, to make it clean. Probably. While the Chassis would ensure that nothing short of a Regial’s poison didn’t obstruct him…fighting with diarrhoea wasn’t a notion he entertained gladly. Where would it even go?

He put one hand under the sphere and a crown of fire burst above his palm and directly under the sphere. “No, no”…the white flames changed over the spectrum, becoming closer to dark tan and then a more normal orange.

He didn’t know how long he held the hand there——until he did, for a counter began ticking on the inside of his helmet. A quarter of an hour. He dismissed the fire and maintained the auric. This small of a endoauric could be maintained without overly stressing his Field, but were he to be surprised now…

After another twenty minutes he decided it was time. His headache was building into a demanding migraine and no amount of massages to his temples would solve it. Now, how to drink it.

He tried hollowing out small plates of rock, using the power of his anger. But what if the rocks themselves were dirty? He didn’t want to boil the water again.

Martin tried unfurling the strands of his Chassis, an attempt to create ‘bed’ in which the water would lay.

The attempt actually made him sweat beneath the armor.

In the end he simply pulled the sphere down to a height of his head…and sipped with his mouth. Nothing had ever tasted as fine; no fluid had ever nourished him more. With each gulp he became more aware. The tin-taste of the water didn’t even bother him. It took him a while, but soon he could think.

All that work——the boiling, finding a way to drink the fluid—— merely to have water.

And what was he supposed to eat for food?

_______

The lizard stared back at him. He returned the favor.

Martin gazed down at the palm of his hand, the kindled flame which fluttered there. That anger might have such a beautiful color…

His eyes panned back to the lizard. Rats were nasty things. Choking one, drowning one, putting it on a stick, well, it didn’t seem that much of a crime.

On the other hand…

The brown gecko with green spots blinked at him. “I’m sorry friend. A guy’s gotta eat.”

The blast burned the lizard, the soil it was standing on, and a nearby fern. The damn thing didn’t die immediately, a keen like gunfire frightening away what other wildlife there was in this pocket world. It crawled away, scored and crying.

Martin Soleri knelt, and with a sharp tug, broke its neck. He flew, numb, back to the island he made his home and the pit of stone assembled from whatever refuse could be found around the rock.

Two sticks sat on either side of the pit. He ignited the driftwood he had gathered from the nearby beach and levitated the gecko over the fire. Smoke soon covered the dead animal. He levitated the corpse away.

Pretty sure black smoke isn’t going to make it taste better. He waited until the smoke had become clearer, lighter, than placed the gecko hovering over the campfire.

As his meal was preparing itself, he stared out on grey expanse that surrounded the rock that was to be his home for a week.It was quiet here. The camp was never quiet. Always an explosion going on. A scream somewhere in the background-fear to pleasure and if you were close enough to tell the difference, you were too damn fucking close.

The arcology, and the apartment he had been gifted carried with them sounds too. The bangs of doors opening and closing. Coffee-maker buzzing like an engine. The faint, faint hum of vibrations going through the walls.

But as Martin Soleri listened to the surf, the gentle lapping of water against rock, he felt the numbness transmute, turning into something approaching contentment. He could think here.

He levitated the barbecued lizard back to where he was sitting. Finally. He could eat. He ate from the side, the juices bursting down his face——and had ever a Chassis been used like this?

He must have been more hungry than he thought. The right side of the reptile was gone and—CHUNK.

A…short spear had landed on the rock. He levitated the lizard away and stood. A drone? A Regial? The spear had come from above his head and to the right.

He turned to that direction, seeing the wake being formed on the surface of the water. His enhanced sight made it as if the figure surfing along the water was close enough to touch. He relaxed; he knew this Proxy.

“Don’t!”

“Don’t eat the lizard!”

Berenice Sonnentag cleared distance from the water up to the rock with a leap, her shield, which she had used a surf-board surging up the same path.

“Hello to you to, ‘Nice.”

It would take a massive effort to exhaust a Proxy wearing Chassis, but Berenice was heaving.”The lizard…you ate it?”

Martin pointed and the half-eaten lizard rotated on the fire, back again.

“How much did you eat?”

“The left side. Nice, you’re scaring me.”

“Throw it away!”

“What-“

Berenice demonstrated then he wasn't the only who had trained. She spun around, releasing her shield and the nail-shaped missile smashed his meal to pieces.

“Great. Now I’m out of food.”

She walked up to him. He wasn’t as bothered as he sounded, she wouldn’t have done as she did without a proper reason.

“Remove your helmet.”

His helmet disintegrated, shimmering back to the Field.

She placed her thumbs on his eye-lids and pulled up. Her apprehension neither vanished nor did they increase.

She took a step back.

“Will you finally tell me what this is about?”

“Martin. You’ve been poisoned.”

He craned his neck, his tranquility warping. The water? No…the lizard.”I take it,” he said slowly,”that all animals in the pocket worlds have been created so.”

“Yeah. I checked six different animals in the pocket world I came from. Each were poisoned.”

Martin sat down.”What, how bad is it?”

“Nothing too serious. Fevers, maybe diarrhoea.”

He lay on the ground. Of course this Elder and Sviratham had ensured that there was nothing to eat. A whole week without food…

“The water?”

“Clear, as far I can tell.”

“No food, but water.” He considered it. He felt fine right now, but would he be so later? In a week?”A contest of endurance.”

“The pocket world I left. There were others there. They’d killed a boar, and they were puking all over the place.”

And all the same she had left them, coming for him. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She had manifested a pot in which she was throwing items.

“What you’re doing?”

“Purgative. It will make you feel like crap, but then we’re in here for the long haul.”

“You know how to make purgatives?”

“I know how to make a lot of things.”

She ordered him to get more water, handing him a bucket from her hyperstorage. Really, was he unprepared or Berenice adequately paranoid?

Filling the bucket with water, trudging back up to fire pit, it struck him. She had never really answered his question.