TUG 1.01 - Psychedelic Plants

Welcome to the first chapter of Thorn Under Glass, a litrpg superhero novel. Despite setting this in a superhero universe, a fair warning that the setting of this particular novel is very isolated from the outside. This makes it closer to post apocalyptic and superhero novel. 

Her dress is the dark scarlet of blood just beginning to dry. A red so deep it is almost black. No doubt it shows up well on TV, for all that I no longer care.

She crosses her legs under the scrutiny, my eyes automatically flickering to watch for threats as her stockings glide past each other with the barest hint of sound.

I know she is no threat, but my eyes flicker into corners anyway.

I breathe deeply, and let it out. I wouldn’t say there are no threats anymore, but few enough. Not enough for me to feel the constant level of tension I do now.

I speak.

“My doctors think it might help to get my story out.”

Her eyebrow rises, an obvious calculation in her movements as she responds.

“And you disagree, Brian?”

“That’s not my name anymore.”

“Sorry… Thorn. So do you disagree?”

“Not really. I feel ambivalent about it. I don’t think it will hurt, anyway.”

“You are familiar with what I do, and my powers?”

“Yes. A therapist, but with the ability to assist recall. To help me remember.”

She leans back, the lines of her face scrunching together as she writes.

“Yes, with a bit of empathy thrown in.”

She looks straight at me.

“You are not doing this to help with your mental recovery, are you?”

“No, or at least not exactly. I suspect I might gain use from your power with my own, but… well my mind is taking care of itself just fine.”

“I noticed you checking me out for threats. Observing and looking for exits as you were lead in. You keep your back to the wall when you eat. You have obvious signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as well as other related symptoms.”

She didn’t ask a question, but the implications were easy enough for me to infer.

I smiled briefly.

“Yeah, I know, but I have a good reason not to worry about it too much. However, you are here to help me deal with my memory.”

I looked at her, my eyes hard.

“I have a stipulation. You can record me as I talk about using my powers, write down notes on that if you wish. However, you will not keep any record of the specifics of how my powers work. I will tell you about them anyway, I want your powers to be working at full for my own benefit.”

She looked vaguely puzzled, her eyebrows rising in genuine confusion as they rose toward her brown hair, where it was was tightly wound in a bun.

“The specifics?”

I just smiled mirthlessly.

“We all have our secrets, and you will learn mine soon enough. Trust me, it will be quite obvious.”

I settled back in my chair.

“Now then, where to begin… I could start at the first day in the Bubble, and I am sure I will go back to that. The chaos and confusion are certainly memorable, but first lets go back to the day I was reborn and became who I am now.

=++=

A young man, me, in his twenties, stumbles step by step through a field of grass. I am starving, my ribs pressing against my skin like they are anxious to find their way out. My skin is pale and clammy in the heat. I have long been used to the omnipresent light and heat, but now, as my body consumes itself I am beginning to fall apart. I sweat, but I am cold. My arms are tired, my legs are tired, my steps are uncertain, though they continue between stumbles.

I cannot let myself fall, I know this. I am not sure I would rise again. I wasn’t hungry though, I hadn’t been hungry for a while, but I knew I needed food.

Trees are present in the distance, but I didn’t see any among the tall grass. I am on a section of field that is less downtrodden than the rest. As it should be, for I soon see signs that it is a road. In fact I see a literal sign.

The sign’s faded from light and weather wearing it down, but I can make out Brentworth Orchards from the indentations in the wood.

I look around. No trees close by, nothing to match with the words orchard. My thoughts are fuzzy, but eventually I see more.

Now I know to look for them I can discern an old farmhouse in the distance. It is shades of brown and dun, mixing with the dust. Not as much rain has been reaching this area lately, for all that clouds are flowing overhead. The slumped remnants of a barn carry only the faintest suggestions of red beneath a mound of dead vines.

The odds of any food remaining unscavenged in the house is minimal, but it is my only hope. I let my feet take me off the road the grass crunching underfoot on a more direct route to the house. My feet have long since grown calloused enough to ignore the rock and briars that would stab through softer flesh. I haven’t worn shoes in… years.

My steps through the grass stop when I stumble over wood.

A tree, barren and dead, is on its side in front of me. Its clawing branches and twigs are entangled in the creeping grass and old dead vines. I look for fruit, even as decrepit as the tree is.

I see no fruit, but I find another tree, in the same condition.

I keep searching. I don’t find fruit, but I find a tree stump.

It is not cut smooth, but instead a jagged edged wound of wood stressed beyond its capacity.

It chills me to see it. My foggy thoughts catching hints of what it might mean. Another tree stump, broken and shattered like the first brings me to a halt.

My knees give out.

My mind was a tumult of different feelings. Maybe, just maybe, all these trees had died before the Bubble and they had been smashed out of frustration.

I didn’t think so though. Shreds of the edges of the trees were in long strips. And for all they were brittle and dried now, they looked to have been living wood when they were broken.

And it was in this moment that I was transformed.

I know that people say emotion is the key, that it unlocks something, or we reach out to something. Some say we break through a barrier inside ourselves, and others have more mystical interpretations. All of those, I cannot say if they are right or wrong.

However, they also say that our emotions let us determine part of the nature of the power we awaken inside.

And that, reviewing it now under your power, I would say is true.

My emotions were a chaotic mix. My dominant emotion, looking at the ruin before me, was that I just wanted to survive. That was it. However, so many other emotions flavored that thought. I had already survived for years, I wanted more. I wanted to be able to continue, to grow, to rise to the new challenges that always seemed to come my way no matter how long I might be stuck in the Bubble.

I was afraid too. Afraid that the people who chased me away from the garden I had worked on so hard might find me. Afraid that there was no food left in the house. That whatever I did people might be able to take it from me again, even if I found some. I just wanted to be able to grow a garden and eat and not worry about the world trying to kill me.

A host of other emotions were there too. Rage that people would destroy food to deny it to others, and a wish to be able to make them feel the same despair. An urge to give in and die, even as some other part of me roared in primal denial, that I would never give up, never be willing to stop.

That primal force was all that had kept me going many times now. I didn’t even fully understand what it was until it rose in that moment.

And then, the world opened before me.

Almost all of this was lost before. I could only remember flickers of images, impressions, and a simple feeling of a question.

Now I can see it.

The world opened and I could see more. More than the world, entire dimensions passed by like strips of film pressed against each other. They were infinite in length, but thinner than the edge of a ray of light. Even now as I am in that moment I can feel it, how the barrier between this world and a million others is more fragile than frost on a blade of grass.

I saw a tree made of fractals. It propagated out in its vastness to fill multiple universes, penetrating between dimensions as easily as a root through loose dirt. Its leaves were wrapped around galaxies and stranger formations I have no name for. It siphoned energy from universes as they were born.

And from the scene came a question. Is this enough?

And my mind, my soul, what ever part of me watched in that moment, answered no.

And so other aspects were shown to me.

A tiny multi-cellular plant wrapped itself in a warp in space becoming even smaller until it consumed the potential matter and energy in quantum-foam. It split, its potential to be more becoming reality as what was once one was now two.

It was not enough.

Another plant extended its branches out around a star, its mirrored leaves carefully angling to burn away competing plants. More diaphanous leaves were buoyed on the solar wind, keeping it in place. Millions of years passed as it grew to maturity and burst into seeds. Their parachutes caught on the solar wind and swept them away.

It was not enough.

A weed made of gas and forcefields rooted itself in the gelatinous hydrogen of the semi-liquid surface of a gas giant. Beside it vaster plants reached up into the soupy atmosphere. The burning heat and fierce magnetism blew it about, but it simply changed these energies back into forms it could use. Other plants died and were whipped away by the stress, but it endured. Other life forms swam through the murk and ate away at the plant, but it endured. It regrew, and prospered, and spread seeds, and when the world grew cold as the core stopped spinning and the heat died. It endured until the end.

It was not enough.

The fiery outer sphere of a star, just beneath the corona, lilies floated on the surface. Mirror bright excess heat shot down into the star as lasers to keep them afloat. Flowers of plasma bloomed on tangled magnetic stems above them. And far above that birds lived upon the matter that was blasted away into space.

It was not enough.

On an on, it continued. Even now with your help I cannot say how many there were. It could be billions.

However, the visions shifted. It moved away from plants, though they remained a theme, a note of growth ever present.

However, now I saw systems. Not plants, but ways that growth itself could be achieved.

A gardener, but he was connected to a system that in turn connected to others. He was not just a gardener, though he could grow and destroy plants. However he was more, or rather, the system he wielded was more.

As if sensing my need the vision shifted.

Not on the man, but on the power which let him do anything. Grow, create, destroy. He was linked to others, but even without that he could eventually do anything.

This… wasn’t quite enough.

A man was marooned, alone, on a desert world. A star system captured between dimensional energies. Lost except for the power of the system he held. He grew plants, endless days passing by. Plants acted at his command to entangle animals, dangerous plants withered away to dust, and he persevered.

He faced dangerous survivors, some mad with isolation, others just hungry for what he possessed. And then he met others who he could live with.

A thousand years, a million, an untold age as he made the world a paradise, preserving a civilization he had created himself. With the system he survived feeding upon the dimensional rift until finally enough energy had gathered and he, the world, and the star transported away back to the place from which he had come.

This… this was enough.

And now, feeling the emotions of that moment, the man’s triumph as he returned home with all he had built. I realized why it was enough. It was an emotion that underlay everything I experienced in the Bubble. Even if I had long given up on it, I wanted to come home.