Touched - Order of Odium: Book One

Michelle - 6

They had followed the same path to the room containing the artifact, but the room itself seemed much bigger somehow. What used to be a room the size of a large meeting room was now the size of a football field. It held the same guard station by the door and the usual two armed guards, but everything was spaced much farther apart than her previous visits.

'How did they make this room so big in such a small amount of time?'

Aleksander must have noticed the puzzled look on her face because he said, "The room is much bigger now, is it not? We expanded it to allow for more room for our experiments together! You have become good at summoning small objects to you, but we want to work bigger! And farther away! We want to see if there is a limit to what you can summon, okay?"

Michelle nodded, "Sure."

Through their experimentation together they had learned that Michelle could summon specific objects, but only if she had a good visual idea of what the item looked like. She could easily summon a random bowl or similar object, but she couldn't summon a specific item unless she knew exactly what it looked like. She didn't have to have a perfect memory or visual of the object, but she had to know more details than "a red bowl". She needed to know the size of the bowl, the general look of the bowl, etc... They had also found out that she didn't have to see the item in person, a picture worked just as well.

If Michelle just thought of the word "green" and touched the artifact, a random green object would appear. If she thought "green ball" a green ball would appear. To summon a specific object, she needed more info. If Aleksander wanted a "green ball with purple stripes around its center", she had to imagine that exact ball to summon it.

Along with becoming better at summoning specific objects, she had also become better at summoning objects from farther away. At first, she could only summon things that were in her relative vicinity, but she could now summon anything from within the building they all resided in, the Order's "Warehouse".

As they reached the table holding the artifact, Aleksander spoke up, "Today we are not going to worry about the size of the object you are to summon, rather, we are going to see if you can summon something from farther away than inside the Warehouse. Do you feel up to that?"

Michelle didn't care either way, the experiments were somewhat interesting, but doing the same thing day in and day out was starting to get boring. She almost missed being on guard duty. At least then she could talk to the other guard on duty and was forced to leave her room to get food or supplies and talk to anyone else doing the same. She supposed she could do the same thing now, but her heart wasn't in it. She hadn't known John for a long time, but they had clicked. Before he died she occasionally imagined them being together.

'Can't do that now that I killed him though'

She frowned to herself, trying to hide her expression from Aleksander. She didn't need any of his well-meaning but ultimately superficial "sympathy".

"Yeah, I'm good to go."

Aleksander reached into his pocket and pulled out his tablet. He enlarged the tablet with a reverse pinching gesture and brought up a picture to show to Michelle. It was a picture of a maroon red bike, with three blue stripes along the top frame.

"This bike is what you are going to try to summon today. The bike is located directly beneath us, where the people in the dark of this building live. I forgot the name for them."

"Most of the people I knew called them 'shaders'," Michelle said, trying to imagine how it must be to live in darkness like that all of the time.

"Ah yes, 'shaders'. You are going to summon this bike from down in the 'shaders' territory. We have had someone place it down there and mark it so that we know if it is the correct bike you have summoned."

Still holding the expanded tablet out for Michelle to see the picture of the bike Aleksander said, "Are you ready? Do you think you can summon from that distance?"

Michelle frowned thoughtfully and shrugged. "It couldn't hurt to try. Well, I hope it doesn't anyway."

Aleksander laughed too loudly. "Of course it won't! You are much better at this than before! We also know more about your limitations. You will be fine Michelle! Please touch the artifact when you are ready."

Michelle took one last look at the picture of the bike, memorizing as many details as possible. "Okay, I'm ready." She took a deep breath, thought hard of the bike and touched the box-shaped artifact.

A clattering noise sounded to her side and Aleksander started laughing gleefully. A red ten-speed bike with blue stripes on its frame was laying on its side to Michelle's left. She let out a sigh of relief. She hadn't expected anything bad to happen, nothing had since the accident with John, but these experiments still made her nervous.

"Perfect Michelle, perfect! Now let's check if the marks are correct to see if we have the correct bike." Aleksander walked to the bike and kneeled. He looked underneath the frame by the seat of the bike.

He stood up and turned back to Michelle frowning somewhat. "I am sorry, it is a red bike, but it is not the red bike that I mentioned. He pointed to some barely visible markings in between the blue stripes on the bike's frame."

'Well shit. Guess we've got to do some more training'

"Okay, but at least we know that I can summon stuff from down below unless you keep a surplus of red bikes with blue stripes here in the Warehouse. Wait, do you?" Michelle had no idea. It honestly wouldn't surprise her with how massive the Warehouse is and all of the other strange stuff they had inside. For all she knew, they kept a hangar-sized room with this exact style of bike for experiments like this.

Aleksander's laughing was so loud this time that it echoed throughout the room. "Michelle, Michelle! You are so funny! No, we do not have more bikes like this here."

Michelle noticed that Aleksander was beginning to tear up he was laughing so hard.

'He is one seriously strange man. I wonder if he was so eccentric before he started working here'

Aleksander wiped his eyes and contained his laughter to a minimum, a substantial feat for someone as "off his rocker" as Michelle's grandmother had liked to say.

"I am kidding Michelle! The bike you summoned is the one that we wanted! You did great!"

Michelle rolled her eyes, smiled, and said, "You jerk! I was wondering if you were messing with me or if you scientists kept a hangar full of bikes just that like somewhere here in the Warehouse."

Aleksander began laughing hard enough to bring tears to his eyes and Michelle couldn't help but laugh with him.

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