Deep breath. Assess the situation.

I was outside, that much was clear. The temperature and the air quality were a dead giveaway, as was the rock that my head was propped against at an awkward angle. I didn’t keep rocks in my room, much less my bed. So this clearly wasn’t my house.

The sound of running water was another pretty good sign that I was outdoors. Brandy, Washington had a river running through the heart of the town. I wasn’t actually quite sure which river, but I hoped this one and that one were the same river, because anything else meant I was a long way from home.

Once I was fairly sure I could move, I carefully rolled over onto my back. The mud was soft, which made for a more comfortable resting place than, say, asphalt or cement. That said, I still didn’t want to be laying in mud. I gathered my strength and sat up.

What the hell happened?

And… why?

I pulled my elbows back behind me as far as I could, letting the muscles in my back wake themselves up and listening as my vertebrae popped. I stretched my hands toward the darkened sky overhead, leaning back to take a look at the stars.

I felt concerningly normal, given the circumstances. In dire need of a shower, but physically intact. Not sore, not even tired, after waking up in the middle of the night face-down on a riverbank. I’d call myself the picture of health if I could ignore the odd sensation in my eyes. Not that it hurt, or anything. It was just… odd.

I glanced between stars, noting that I could tell with uncanny precision exactly where my focus was at any given time. Staring into the infinite void of space would normally be a great way to just zone out, but I was staring at a pinpoint in that expanse and I knew it.

Blinking felt normal. But it didn’t feel like my only option.

I sighed and hauled myself to my feet. A minute or two in the river let me clear off the worst of the mud sticking to me, my jeans, and my long-sleeved shirt. My scarf was missing, I noticed.

My pinpoint of absolute focus flicked around the shoreline. I spotted stones, patches — no, blades — of grass, divots in the mud. It wasn’t that my vision was any sharper than normal, or otherwise improved somehow. It was more of a feeling. Where my focus landed, normally, I could certainly identify what I was looking at. But it was as though I was skipping the thinking part and I just knew, now.

Blinking. Blinking was up and down, vertical. I could feel something else, something… sideways? Something outward. A push, but not as uncomfortable as the phrase “something is pushing at my eyes” makes it sound. It was a reflex, almost. Another instinct besides blinking.

I set my focus in the midst of a patch of grass and pushed. A spot of blue light flickered into existence on the ground, exactly where I’d been looking. It unfolded, spiraling outward until the tendrils of light formed a solid circle, then flaring out and spiraling above the dirt. A dome, four or five feet across, of dull blue light.

I blinked a few times, and the dome remained. If this was a daydream, it was a stubborn one.

The sphere of light was opaque enough that I shouldn’t have been able to see anything within it from out here. I could tell what was inside anyway. Sort of. It was more like visualizing than seeing, but it was easy. Effortless, in fact. I didn’t even have to try to do it. The image in my mind was clear, regardless of how little of it I could make out from looking at the dome. In the dim of night, I actually had a better idea of what was inside the dome than of what I could see.

The patch of shoreline. The bit of grass in the center of the area. A sense of where the ground was closer to dirt, and where it was closer to mud, as well as a sense of what was crawling in it. I felt gross, and I wanted it to stop. And, well, it stopped. The bugs disappeared. Moreover, the mud dried out into solid earth. All plain, all neat, all as clean as the outdoors could be expected to be or cleaner.

“Damn,” I muttered. “I don’t remember dying.”

I flexed the strange non-muscle that had been added to my eyes again. The bubble of light began to unravel, becoming a tangle of strands of glowing blue that spun so quickly that the direction it spun wasn’t quite clear. The strands of light broke apart, fragments flying out of the sphere and decaying into mere specks. The specks faded from dim to dull to nothingness. Only as the last bits of light vanished did I feel that instinct I’d been using return.

So, I could only have one of those domes at a time, and I had to wait for it to fully collapse before I could spark up another one. That was an easy enough rule to remember.

I trudged onto the shore, shivering a bit at the brush of cool air against my soaked skin and clothes. The patch of dry soil remained, a perfect circle baked into the surrounding mud.

Physical changes, then, would persist. Another clear-cut, simple rule.

Whatever happened to me, I was back in the land of the living, and I had a superpower. It seemed like a pretty fucking good one, at that. I’d half a mind to wonder why, but it wasn’t a productive line of thought. Why me? Because. Simple as that.

Not that there wasn’t something to it, of course. There was. We just didn’t have much of a lead on figuring it out yet.

My focus caught on something that was as out of place here as I was. A baseball bat. I pushed a point of light onto the ground beside it, waiting for the unfurling dome of my new power to give me a better look at it than my eyes could.

It was a wooden bat. It was soaked, but the river hadn’t quite done the job. With my dome’s acute sense of the thing, I could tell that there were flecks of blood on the striking surface of it.

Well, that was a pretty big hint, wasn’t it?

I could use the bat to defend myself, if it came down to it. If I wanted to carry it, that blood had to go. With a thought, I expelled every drop of fluid from the fibers of the wood, then dried up the ground it was resting on for good measure. I didn’t want mud soaking into the bat in the seconds it took for me to pick it up, after all.

I stopped short of the sphere of dull light, planting my feet before I crossed that boundary arc.

Superheroes. Or, well, superpeople, in any case. Capes. Zombies. Whatever. It had never crossed my mind that I’d be one of them someday, mostly because it was a morbid thing to aspire to.

My head was spinning. I couldn’t quite rationalize everything I was feeling. I couldn’t quite verbalize everything I was thinking. How could I describe a sort of grief that was directed at myself?

Easier to bring my mind back to the present. Easier to be distracted, in some way. In any way.

I held my hand up to the bubble of light, hovering just above the surface. I took a deep breath, then leaned forward. My hand passed through like the dome wasn’t even there. My awareness of that hand went up to eleven. I could still feel its relative position as part of my sense of where my body was. I could also tell, in detail, exactly what my hand looked like without actually looking at it. Visually, my arm dipped into the perfect sphere of light and disappeared. But in my mind’s eye, the hand was there, drops of water catching the light that was shed from every direction inside the dome. The black fabric of my sleeve bunched up, heavy with river water.

The light was insubstantial. There was no presence to it. I felt none of the warmth of sunlight or a strong lamp on my arm as it passed through the shell of the sphere and stayed there.

I set my thoughts to the water, carefully. Drop by drop.

Satisfied that it was safe to do so, I stepped fully into the dome.

Surrounded by dull blue light, I dried myself off. I was uncomfortably aware of myself, of every detail I hated about the way I looked.

Fuck it. Carpe diem.

My clothes peeled away into threads, becoming a vortex around me as my skin boiled and churned. I pressed my teeth together to block out the pain, and the pain stopped. Not on its own, really, but it seemed that was something I could control, too. I visualized myself settling back into one solid shape, and I felt the pins and needles of nerves firing as I gave myself back my sense of touch, no longer needing to anesthetize it.

I had long, black hair now. I was clean and dry from head to toe, and just a bit shorter. I had bright blue eyes, the light from my power only serving to make them shine that much more while I was in here. The threads from my previous outfit wove at my command into a new set of jeans, more black than blue, and an olive-green shirt with sleeves that barely covered my now-slimmed shoulders. In switching from long sleeves to short and generally sizing down a little, I was left with enough material to weave together an extra article of clothing, for structural reasons.

Not that materials are necessarily an issue, I realized. I turned my attention to the ground at the other end of the dome. Slowly but surely, a plant began to sprout from the point I’d chosen.

One bubble at a time, and physical changes persist. Those were the rules I’d figured out. As far as rules inside the bubble went, I hadn’t hit a wall yet.

I unraveled my dome and picked up the bat. Aesthetically, I’d prefer to soften up, but the practical appeal of muscle won out when I was rearranging my body. If I had to use the bat, I might as well be able to hit hard.

I didn’t really want to use the bat or the muscle I was backing it up with, but better to have than to need, right? After all, if I died again, there wouldn’t be another do-over.

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