Darklight: Precipice

Part 3: Morning Routine

She rubbed the back of her hand across her still half closed eyes. There was light shining through the half parted curtains as the breeze through the slightly opened sliding doors to the balcony blew them gently apart. The sun was still low in the sky, it must be pretty early. But Natasha had a lot to do.

As usual Soran wasn’t there, his side of the bed had the duvet folded over to itself and his clothes were gone from the back of the desk chair where he had left them last night. It was normal behavior for Soran, he had had trouble sleeping for at least two years now. He had sought medical help for it but the doctors had told him it could be down to either his medication or some kind of mental trauma that he had endured. As both of the options were minefields that he really didn’t want to go in to, Soran decided to not bother fighting it and just accept the insomnia.

Natasha took a shower, put on a full-length black t-shirt dress with her black strapped platform shoes and a white woolen cardigan over the top. The low sweeping neckline of the t-shirt dress showed off her pale chest and the top of her cleavage. This was her usual style of attire for her working day.

She stepped out of the bedroom and into the living area of the apartment. Light was streaming in through the windows - it was going to be a warm day. The place that Natasha worked was the Bureau Of Environmental Affairs, the BEA. It was one of the first joint Human-Skry civic partnership projects. The BEA had use of Natasha’s unique abilities.

She took a seat at the small table that was positioned by the window and looked out over Precipice. 

Her powers.

She thought back to all the scans, tests and medical procedures they put her through after she had forced Vittoria Leon out of her mind. They had told her that Rammachandra had altered her DNA, implanting each cell of her body with an additional ‘partial helix’, implanting her with additional Skry DNA without removing any of the Human. They didn’t exactly know how she had done it, but Rammachandra’s experimentation had left Natasha with certain Skry abilities. She was considered a ‘partial hybrid’. She wasn’t like Soran - nowhere near, her abilities were severely limited thanks to her body now being able to harness some Arcane power, but the majority of it passing through her. She had no Arcane Cortex, rather her body harnessed Arcane Power as it flowed through her, like induced current in a wire or a solar panel. Thanks to this difference the amount of Arcane Power at her disposal was never strong enough to be a danger to her body, but as she had no direct control over it without an Arcane Cortex her powers were somewhat unpredictable and difficult to control. Natasha explained it as an ‘intuition, reflexive power’. It was Natasha’s unique physiology that gave the Skry and Utopia the idea for Soran’s inhibition system - dull the Arcane Cortex to reduce Arcane power.

Natasha’s abilities themselves were centered around the Earth element. She could manipulate the earth, use it to extend her senses and pick up environmental and geological anomalies. This is why she was useful to the BEA.

Lately they had been recording strange readings from Rammacandra’s old hiding place. The Forefather teleportation device that Draz had discovered was fully operational and the scientific teams had been exploring for four years, and there was still so much more to discover. There were strange crystalline formations within the ruins that held some meaning and technology that they could not quite yet grasp, and yet another of Natasha’s days was going to be spent studying these to try and unlock their secrets.

But it seemed to Natasha that she saw more of these crystals these days than her husband.