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Essek sighs as the house begins to rattle once more.
He does not regret inviting Ashton Greymoore into the home he shares with Caleb Widogast. They are an excellent subject of study, so very generous in how far they allow Essek (and Caleb) to push in their studies of the dunamis infusing the genasi’s being. But obviously he pushed too far earlier, unsettling something within Ashton’s truly unique balance of power. And now the house is rattling as tremors shake out of a young demi-titan.
Thump! Screeeeeeeee. Thump!
And dunamantic forces randomly manifest, like a gravity well rearranging their furniture.
Fwumph
Or the opening of random portals.
The house rattles a little harder as a grumbling moan sounds from the laboratory couch.
Fortunately the lab’s wards are containing these effects to the house. For now. Essek has no doubt that Ashton Greymoore’s power could easily breach such containment.
“I gather the usual tea is not particularly helpful at this time,” Essek observes as he floats back into the room, a spare blanket and a hand towel draped over his arm.
“Nnnrgh,” he gets in reply, the flask of endless pain-relieving tea (a Blooming Grove brew, of course, enchanted by Pumat Sol to help discourage the use of alcohol for coping with their chronic pain) bouncing onto the couch as the gravity well quits adhering it to his patient’s side.
“I have brought a spare blanket for you. I can heat it, if you’d like. And a towel for your head, hot or cold as you’d please,” Essek informs Ashton, floating closer.
“Hot blanket, cold towel. Please,” they whine from their splay of misery on the couch.
Essek lays the blanket over him and heats it with a quick Prestidigitation, Ashton quickly latching on to it and burrowing in. Which makes it much harder to apply the towel to his head, but Essek persists.
It takes several tries to create an opening in the cocoon Ashton made of the blanket (Essek should not have started with that. A lesson for next time), hindered and aided as the gravity well comes and goes once more before rainbows of possibility bend his fortune. Another quick Prestidigitation and Ashton is all set.
They grumble as they settle, but they are settling. The radius of the tremors withdrawing to roughly five feet around the couch instead of the whole house, and gentle enough that Essek could probably walk through the area without any trouble. He keeps floating just in case.
With a little calm restored, Essek sets about straightening up the mess made of the lab. Ashton snores horrendously, but at least he has found rest.
The density well activates again, undoing the majority of Essek’s work. He sighs and begins again, moving things further away this time.
Just as Essek finishes getting everything out of range of Ashton’s (standard) gravity well, they startle awake, blurring red as they sit up unnaturally quickly, a blue afterimage still laid down. Ashton sways, blue and red for moment, before collapsing back down on their side, a slit-eyed glare catching Essek.
“How long is this gonna last?” they groan.
“I’m afraid I don’t know. This is an… unexpected side effect. One I will certainly endeavor to avoid in the future,” Essek says. Less for the chaos caused (if done within the Tower, only a high-power spacial manipulation could prove too destructive as most everything within it is conjured and thus of no consequence if broken), and more for the misery it’s bringing Ashton.
“You fucking better,” Ashton mumbles.
“If it is not too much trouble, might you describe what this state feels like to you?” Essek queries. Insensitive, he knows, but he is dreadfully curious and Ashton prefers blunt honesty to honeyed truths and holding back.
“Urgh, nerd.” The insult holds a note of fondness to it.
“It fucking feels like… like a vial of fizzy shit you put a cork on and are hoping it isn’t going to pop the fucking cork. I dunno what happens if I can’t, like, keep a thumb on the cork to hold it closed? If that makes sense. But I think it would be bad. Maybe not for me exactly, ‘cause the pressure’s out. But everything else? Probably really bad.”
Essek grimaces. It certainly does sound bad. So much of Ashton Greymoore’s power goes unused, untapped, that it is difficult to truly calculate the immensity of their strength, much less grasp it. And an uncontrolled, lively mixing reaction –because while Ashton Greymoore is not great with words, they wouldn’t choose reactive mixed chemicals as their example if it wasn’t the best fit– between a fragment of the might of the greatest earth titan of Exandria and a rough approximation of a Beacon’s dunamis is, quite frankly, terrifying. While the possibility of what could happen is, almost quite literally, endless, ranging from something as benign as instantaneous soil enrichment to the horrors of reality tremors, there’s no doubt that the range would be large. As in at the very least a city block large.
And anything Essek himself might try to separate the mixing powers back out could just as easily be the tipping point that overcomes Ashton’s efforts to calm and control the reaction.
A portal snaps open and the pot of stew from the stove drops onto the floor between them, some sloshing out over the sides.
“Hungry, are we?” Essek dryly asks, lifting the pot with magic and cleaning up the mess.
“I could eat.”
Another portal drops a loaf of bread from the cupboard. Essek barely catches it before it falls into the stew.
“Behave and quit trying to portal food onto the floor, and I will get you a snack,” Essek admonishes. They flicker red and blue again, which Essek will take as a win.
He floats into the kitchen, stew pot bobbing along behind him until it takes its place back upon the stovetop to finish cooking, and sets to turning the loaf of bread into a platter of sandwiches. In the two weeks Ashton has been a part of the household, it’s become apparent that it takes a lot to spoil Ashton’s dinner. Whether that is the result of their titan leanings or simply a side effect to being a solid stone genasi would require a control subject to observe, and sadly, they have none.
“Your snack,” Essek announces upon his return to the lab, floating the sandwich platter over.
The platter slams into Ashton’s chest as the gravity well spins up once more, bread and cold cuts and lettuce and tomatoes adhering to whatever part of Ashton is closest.
“Yay,” Ashton sarcastically intones. And then peels off a piece of salami and stuffs it in his mouth.
Essek shudders at the lack of hygiene and internally bemoans the fact that Ashton will finish off the deconstructed sandwich platter like the heathen they are.
“Ah, I thought I seeensssssed soooome sssstraaaaange duuuuunaaaamiiiiiis,” Caleb says as he enters the lab, getting caught in Ashton’s suddenly activated temporal morass. “Aaaalsooo, youuuu shouuuuld not eat food that has splattered all over the place, Herr Greymoore.”
“It didn’t fall on the floor,” Ashton says through a full mouth with a shrug.
Caleb sighs, not nearly as appalled by the lack of manners and propriety as his partner.
A portal drops a very startled Gretchen into the room, the poor cat scurrying for the safety of under the couch.
“Rude,” Caleb says.
“I have very fucking limited control of this shit right now,” Ashton grumbles, offering a slice of ham to Gretchen in an apology that is readily accepted.
“How did this happen, Essek?”
The room vibrates in an imitation of Gretchen’s purr as she climbs into Ashton’s lap to share in the sandwich spoils.
“I’m afraid I may have prodded Ashton Greymoore’s dunamis and titan powers into co-mingling with… chaotic results,” Essek explains with a wince as rainbow sparks flash from Ashton’s glass.
“Mmm, and to try to untangle them could go very poorly,” Caleb muses.
“Indeed.”
The two wizards quietly contemplate the conundrum before them as Ashton and Gretchen continue to polish off the scattered sandwich bits, Gretchen flouncing away in a huff after getting caught in a temporal morass.
“A conscious activation of their powers might bring things under control,” Caleb muses, picking Gretchen up from where she winds around his legs.
“Or increase the intensity of the pulses due to their more active state,” Essek counters, scratching between Gretchen’s ears and getting a purr in return.
“Banishment would give us a minute to reassess,” Caleb points out.
“Possibly,” Essek says.
“Or would you rather this chaos for the next however-long-it-takes-to-clear?” Caleb bemusedly asks.
A portal drops a stack of tomes from the corner of the lab into the middle of the floor to topple over.
Essek makes a pinched and pained face, ears tilting down.
“Thoughts, Herr Greymoore?”
“I mean, I can fucking do it if you think it’ll help, but I’ll be fucking awful company for the next two days from the migraine when the titan form drops,” Ashton says with a shrug, then sneezes rainbow sparks.
Caleb turns a questioning gaze to Essek.
“Yes. Fine,” he agrees with a faint bit of exasperation. “Do you have the magic for Banishment, young man, or is it all up to me?”
“I can cast it, but I do like watching your somatics, Essek Thelyss,” Caleb purrs, eyes burning.
Essek feels heat gather on his cheeks.
“Get a fucking room!” Ashton heckles, breaking the spell.
“I will cast if necessary then,” Essek quickly agrees, awkwardly clearing his throat.
“When you are ready, Ashton.”
Ashton nods, and then the house quakes, causing stacks of books to topple, the shelves threatening to follow as everything rattles when their form swells into something larger and primordial. Simultaneously, reality bends and strains as their glass lights up with a swirling galaxy of dunamis as their fists flex to begin their battle rage.
Essek’s hands tense, magic gathering at his fingertips, as he waits out that first breath of potential disaster to see if this theory bears fruit and calms the monstrous power before them, or proves false and worsens things.
Thankfully, the quaking subsides and the dunamis settles into the black and white washout of Ashton’s gravity aligned aura. His form goes lax at the calming of the energies within him to their normal state, head thunking back against the wall (and probably leaving a few indents from his crystal tips).
Crack-thump!
“...You have killed my couch,” Essek sniffs into the silence. Not that it stood much chance against nearly a ton of demi-titan, but still.
“Like you can’t magic it better later,” Ashton retorts, eyes closed. There are scratch marks on the wall from where his head dragged down it.
“Caleb,” Essek pleas, looking to his partner. He stole that couch from his own towers when he left the Dynasty. It is, in his (not so) humble opinion, the best couch in the house. And Ashton has broken it in half.
“It will be fixed, Essek,” Caleb swears, pulling him in to kiss his forehead.
Essek sighs and laments his poor couch.