Challenge #141
Option #1: "The role of religion in the modern world plays a major part in the story."
Note: Someday, this needs a better title. Here, we actually start getting a taste for what this girl can do. I'm not sure how it comes across to someone that's not me. Let me know if it sounds weird or strained, or too repetitive.
Peeping Alice pt.11
Alice sits quietly watching her security monitors, bathed in the dull artificial light. The small office is tense, but silent as neither she nor Vincent seem willing to breach any topic. The steady click and slight static from the monitors creeps through the room making the air feel stale and unmoving. The morning was slow. There had only been two requests for access to the morgue, and although Alice tried to chat lightheartedly with the hospital personnel, everyone seemed busy elsewhere. Occassionally, Vincent would turn on and click through the channels on the small television in the office, stopping briefly on the news stations as he browsed.
It is a slow, boring job, just the type Alice had wanted when moving back from Las Vegas. She tried her best to stay engaged with the doctors and nurses and other city personnel that might come through, but they considered her forgettable. Access only, the means to the end, she checked credentials and monitored the storage, no one was ever interested in security personnel.
She waits not so patiently for the doctor on duty to take his break for lunch. It is then, Alice slips around Vincent and out of the security office, to head for the back room. Vincent for his part, keeps a watchful eye on the front entry, and office doors while Alice makes her way to the last row of drawers against the wall. With a deep breath held in her chest, she reaches out with both arms and places her hands, fingers stretched and palms flat against the door.
The metal door on the bottom shelf is cold to the touch, but she wills herself to keep her hands pressed against it. In her head, she stretches out her senses, and opens that part of herself that gives her a window to the recently deceased. Without opening the door, she can sense the cold stiff body of the woman on the slab in front of her. A slight warm breeze circles the room as Alice pushes her energy into the drawer, and starts a quick soundless prayer. For a moment, the air is still and Alice waits to learn what the future holds for the soul on the other side of the door.
She shivers unconsciously as her energy returns to her, making her skin tingle. With her eyes closed, and lips still moving soundlessly in thought and prayer she quickly deciphers what she received back. Quick images flash in her mind while she thinks, and uses her still whispering powers to create the path needed for the woman's faint aura to travel through the aetheric, finishing the cycle of its life.
Alice moves her hands quickly to the door next in the row above that one. Again she pushes her energy into the drawer, scouting for the remnants of the occupants life. She uses more of her own power at each drawer, and within minutes the entirety of the lab is swirling and tingling with a warm breeze, Alice at its center. She continues her steady move from door to door, passing each temporary residents remaining spirit onto their paths.
Almost every drawer is occupied, on a Monday after a busy weekend. By the time she reaches the last column of doors, she is working feverishly to keep her power in check, before it breaks the boundaries of the room. She thinks she has expended enough energy to search the remaining drawers as one, instead of one at a time, and sends what energy she can collect down through them. She feels a small trail of the wind around her follow her power down through the metal drawers and pass through and back into the room. The ends of her blonde hair is raised up and swirls around, tickling across her neck and chin.
The rush of power is enough to draw Vincent's attention from his post at the hallway. He quickly maneuvers into the room, eyes wide at Alice now in the center of the room with her arms raised and hair swirling in an unseen breeze. Her thin form is glowing with an internal light, her skin seeming iridescent.
Alice! He screams her name in his thoughts, trying to interrupt the energy flows swirling in the air and passing through her. He watches the streams of the aetheric auras moving along invisible pathways around the room, and through the walls. He pushes along her mental barriers searching for a way to reach her, without collapsing her mind. The energy is too much; her mind is full of images and emotions passed to her by the remnants of lives around her, and he cannot reach her.
"Alice!" He takes a quick step in front of her, hands reaching for her raised arms, pulling them down to her waist. They move, although with some resistance that Alice does not seem to be controlling. He tries to pull her close to him with her arms, but she will not move.
The room is swelling with the power in the room, and with Alice at it's center, there is a barrier of energy created around her, and Vincent quickly removes his hands from her arms repelled by the heat of her skin. He can feel the rising heat from her form even after he stops touching her. The energy in the room continues to swirl outward, grazing the walls of the large room looking for a place to escape.
Somewhere, she can feel him slowly trying to break down the barriers in her mind. Her prayers continue, but slower, she cannot stop them when she tries. The power is forced through her and around her, and when she works to contain it, it will not heed her. Even as some part of her continues unbidden to speak and manipulate the energy around her, she hopes that Vincent can work quickly. Worry seizes the still independent part of herself, as she watches the energy that has grown outside her control.
In an instant, her eyes snap open as the remaining parts of her power touches on something that does not belong to her, nor does it have the familiar feel of Vincent's magic. In her field of vision, she can only see a dark spot that covers the source of the invading difference. Vincent feels it too and pivots around to follow the line her gaze. As he turns, searching for the same spot in the distance, Alice's power quickly dwindles to nothing, the air empty and stale again.
"Vincent..." she manages to whisper before she collapses to the floor.