Friday, May 27, 2011

Chapter 1: Part 9


This is about when I started paying attention again, because I remembered I promised to treat my characters with utmost respect, and I didn't really do that by ignoring everything they were doing.

As soon as the quake started, Alteus reached out with his thought and did his best to suppress the movement of the ground underneath the city.

"I'm sorry, Siri, I'm going to be a bit occupied for a bit. This is what I meant."

"You're just stopping the ground from shaking? What about the water equalization?"

"This is the simplest solution, now let me concentrate."

Siri reached out with her awareness, and (just in time) remembered that non-guardians tend to have glowing eyes when pushing their psychokinesis to the limit.

"Allow me," said Siri, with eyes glowing yellow. Siri reached out to the struts anchoring the city to the sea floor. She temporarily broke them. The entire city shuddered and then stopped shaking. It started floating up very slowly.

"What are you doing!?" yelled Alteus.

Siri ignored him and rejoined the struts one by one, adding constructs of raw thought that would isolate the struts from vibration if there was too much, while continuing to keep the city in one place. She did this without even exerting a hundredth the power that Alteus was.

The city continued not to shake, even though the ground was shaking around it.

"What did you-" Alteus started, searching around for the point of Siri's modification to the city. "Oh, I see."

"Instead of trying to modify the ground around the city, I just modified the connection of the city to the ground. This also prevents the water-air equalization mechanisms from going out-of-whack. Sometimes you don't need raw power. You just need to be creative."

Alteus looked awed, and Siri made a mental picture of the look on his face to show him later.

Alteus raised a hand with a puzzled expression on his face. "You don't by any chance know Iris, do you?"

"The guardian of the universe? I wish."

"She's always telling me the same thing."

"I didn't know a guardian would need to adhere to a philosophy like that," said Siri.

"I don't think she has to. She chooses to. She would have enough power to fix the entire ground below us, and probably stop us from having these earthquakes altogether."

And it was only then that it occurred to Iris that something was seriously wrong.

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