The PulseTeam, Book Two: Evolution

Chapter Twenty-Three: More Problems

Part One: The Rule-63 Incident

Downtown Cleveland | Cleveland, Ohio
Saturday, June 3, 2034 | 23:50 EST

We're back into yet another fight. Again. How my team keeps getting into these situations, I'll never know. We were supposed to be doing some simple reconnaissance work. Observe and report, like I wanted to. But, as you can imagine, we've done it again. So...

Dammit, somebody just brought reinforcements. Namely, a so-called "magic-caster". Which means more reality manipulation and displacement. This should be fun. As if we didn't have enough of that on this team. Perfect. How did they get ahold of a warlock? Ugh, never mind. I don't even want to know.

This warlock comes in, guns blazing. Figuratively speaking, of course. He fires red aethereal energy from his palms and breathes a putrid, stenchy green fire of his mouth. It's like getting fired at with Christmas colors.

I punch him in his face as hard as I can, but it seems to do virtually no damage to him at all. None. Which should be impossible. In the second it takes for me to process my shock, I let my guard down, and I get hit with a sustained blast of the warlock's energized aether. It feels like two billion volts of pure electricity is violently racing in and out of every crevice of my body.

It stings. Badly.

After it's done, it takes about ten minutes, but I feel a tingle in my stomach that starts to grow into nausea. Uneasy on my feet, I drop to a knee so that I don't fall, and I say, "Magi, BattleAxe, LightSpeed! Magic beats magic, so blast him!"

Wait a minute, why the hell did my voice suddenly turn so high?! And why did this wave of nausea suddenly turn into sharp pain all over my body?! OW.

Damn, I feel this pain in my hips, my chest, my face, my arms, legs, hands, feet, and everywhere else in between. It's getting to be too much.

Alexa rushes to my side, and says, "My God, David! What's happening to you?!"

Disregarding her question for lack of an answer thereof, I ask one of my own, sensing that I'm less than a minute away from unconsciousness. "Is he down?"

"Wha--?" she says before I cut her off.

"Is the warlock down?!" I ask.

She quickly turns to look in my assailant's direction to find my answer, and definitively says, "He's about to be. Alura and Asune are putting the hurt on him as we speak. But enough about them, what about you?"

"I--" I pass all the way out.

The Monitor | Cleveland, Ohio
Sunday, June 4, 2034 | 06:00 EST

I wake up in a room in the medical wing of the Monitor in one of four designated rooms that I specifically designed to force my family's regenerative auras out of our bodies regardless of whether or not we're conscious. Everyone is gathered around me but they're looking at me very strangely, almost as if I'd been physically altered in some way.

"So, honey," says my sister as I sit up, "how are you feeling?"

"So far so good," I say, feeling my lips and mouth move, but hearing a voice that is not my own. "No pain anywhere, at least."

I also feel some weight on my chest, almost as if something is attached to my chest, but hanging. So I clear my throat and rub it with my right hand, and ask, "Why is my voice so high? It sounds like that of a female's. And what is hanging off my chest? It's annoying."

My team looks at each other with worry plastered on their faces, and then back at me. What happened to me?

"I want somebody to give it to me straight," I say. "What... happened to me?"