Hold the thunder (Chandre/PVT)

Chandre sat in a rocking chair in a lavishly well decorated room with scarlet rugs inlaid with gold trim, ornate frames holding onto subtly shifting paintings. Light seemed to ooze warmly from the walls, casting gentle shadows in a soft grey. Chandre herself had put on a worn face, she seemed older, hunched, fine wrinkles played gently on her face as she rocked back and forth, her gnarled fingers busily clicking away with a pair of knitting needles, and the only other sound in the room was a soft violin. The music filtered in from everywhere and gave only the subtlest of echoes, as soft as the shadows cast about the room. The entire place seemed inviting, warm, luxurious, but at the same time homey, gentle and relaxing. Chandre always felt it important to set the stage and play the part when she worked, which is why she seemed elderly, sat in a parlor, she was creating in what could be easily misconstrued as common knitting. It was generally grandmothers who knitted, their old, time tested hands creating something of complexity from simple motions, so she played her part.

She worked on something so much more than woven yarn of course; the threads she tugged and manipulated were the harvested and cleaned neural tissue of a Menos Grande. She had removed moisture from the rope thick tissue, rendered the living cells with her own malleable cellular structure, and had it wound into little spools from which to draw. While she worked, she didn’t move knitting needles, but her fingers in their visage, making connections at the microscopic level so fine it defies observation. She worked tirelessly at it, the blueprint in her mind tracing and retracing every step of the process, wanting this thing to be singularly beautiful and powerful. She dutifully made the connections and interconnections, the delicate circuitry could so easily go wrong if she maneuvered in error.

She was uncertain how long she had sat and rocked there on her chair in this lavish parlor, clicking away, stopping only to eat when her Vetruvian Homme creations came in to ensure she ate properly. Still, it didn’t matter, with a final few motions; she stopped and viewed her work. She handled it delicately, a white lace glove, the patterns intricate, featuring lightening iconography, starbursts and strange, asymmetrical paths that seemed to spiral around the glove like the helix in DNA. As she stood up from the chair, she seemed to leave the visage behind, her face and body shifting to that the of lady waxwork hollow, pale skin and red dress, fire dancing about her shoulders like a fur coat. She slipped the glove on, it fitting immaculately, though that meant very little to a creature that could change her shape to fit whatever she wore.

One final step. She said to herself as she stepped from the room, the warm glow fading, the music dying, as if disappointed in not having anybody to observe them.

Chandre wore a new face today, something she had picked up on her way into Canada. It was a broad shouldered man, somewhere in his 40s, receding hairline only served to accentuate his rugged looks. The face had wrinkles, but wore them like badges of accomplishment, and the hands were calloused and well used. The name tag on the overalls read ‘Jeremiah McMorgan’ which was the name of the nighttime supervisor at the Niagara Falls hydroelectric dam. Chandre had chosen Jeremiah as her main way in for his access to the plant; he could meander basically anywhere without so much as a second glance from the skeleton crew that ran the place in the evening.

The real Jeremiah McMorgan was her guest in the Cathedral that lay nestled between the Garganta and some other dimension she had really not been interested in naming. He was asleep, comfortable, drugged and being monitored to ensure his continued good condition. Chandre had always taken good care of those whose identities she performed as, no telling when they may become useful in the future, and really, it’s just good manners.

She looked at the electrical system in front of her, relatively simple and uninspired compared to her biological machinations, but foreign enough to give her pause as she riddled out what she needed to do. At night, the demand on the grid was much lower and a number of turbines were deactivated, cut from the dams’ water supply to allow for maintenance, or just to not over-burden an aging electrical system. She had already placed her glove in a junction point of the thick, rope like wiring that acted as the highway for all of this raw electricity. At the moment it was uncharged, waiting for her to flip the right switches. Before she did so, however, she had made one of her Vetruvian Homme creations in the likeness of Jeremiah, had it working elsewhere, interacting with other employees, giving the supervisor an alibi for what she was doing here. Getting the man in trouble for her art was easy enough to avoid, and maintained his viability as a future face to wear. What she was about to do would just be attributed to some small amount of negligence on the last operator’s part mixed with the inherent failings of a decades old machine.

With everything set, she flipped the last switch and alarms started to blare as the turbines were fed water from the dam. She had activated all of the turbines that were on standby, running the Niagara Falls power station at full capacity, which was a tremendous amount of power. She herself had felt the raw fury of a major metropolitan electrical grid first hand, and knew it had enough bite for her purposes. The gauges and read-outs read dangerous levels, and Chandre melted away as the workers rushed into the control room, eager to shut this strange, spontaneous activation off. It took about ten minutes for everything to be shut down fully, and Chandre found it safe enough to remove her device from the wiring it sat in.

The neural fibres that the lace glove was made of seemed to shimmer in the light, newly glossy, slightly more rigid, and a touch heavier. The ‘fabric’ of the glove didn’t flop listlessly anymore; it could be stood and posed as if made from wires, though it still felt soft and comfortable on her hand. It seemed to vibrate a little as she wore it, the hairs on her arm standing on end and her skin tingling. She looked around the place, eager to test her new piece. There were humans rushing about that would serve adequately, electrical accidents happened all the time of course. With the gloved hand, she reached down and grabbed hold of the safety railing on the gantry she stood upon, and let fly the electricity under her new found command. She had targeted a young man who was busily working at a junction box on the end of one of the freshly deactivated turbines. He went flying backwards, his clothes bursting into flames and steam rising out from his jerking body as he slumped lifelessly. Chandre could see the slightly glowing metal that had carried her attack, a jagged zig-zag of heated steel and wire that traced the path her power had carved. If she had a face that could do so at the moment, she would have grinned happily.

Bon. She said to herself, happy to do the rest of her testing elsewhere, leaving the screaming sounds and charred scents behind her as she stepped through her portal home.