Hurricane #43: The Big Picture (Patreon)

You plunge back into the river—and back out—

Serrano took a sudden, startled breath, then choked, coughing up water. As the dream fugue state dissipated, sensation flooded back: the cold wet concrete, the chain still around her rear ankle. The mildewed undertone to the warehouse’s scent. The sounds of mild panic as Sark’s lab coat goons tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.

And what the hell had just happened? The moment burned so brightly in her mind it still threatened to overwhelm her, but in reality, she remained chained up in this damn warehouse. She remained surrounded by weird humans trying to drain the energy of her world and all the worlds of the storm goddesses she’d briefly met. This was a momentary reprieve. And worse, she could still feel the weight of the damn firewall, stopping her from connecting back to Ulohne’s power.

She furrowed her brow. It stopped her connecting to her Ulohne, but what about the others? What about this world’s Ulohne? Was that what she’d been feeling when she’d first woken up here? Back at the college, they’d theorized that only some worlds had a storm goddess who could counterbalance idiot industrialized mortals screwing with the climate, but maybe it wasn’t that simple. Things rarely were, after all.

Closing her eyes and trying to block out her surroundings, Serrano fought to reach past the storms, the water, the air, and to reach back to where she’d just been. She focused on the human goddess she’d seen. Was she this world’s Ulohne? “Talk to me,” she whispered. “Meet me.”

After several seconds, she could feel—a storm. A presence. Something powerful, as powerful as what she’d found on her world, but wary, distrustful. Wounded by humans for decades, unable to compensate the way Ulohne—Serrano’s Ulohne, that is—had been able to on her world. As this world’s storm goddess had tried to get a handle on it, she’d been overwhelmed by the power Sark had started sucking in from Serrano’s world to “help.” It was helping, in the short term, but it would unbalance the system in a different direction.

“We can help each other.” Serrano spoke aloud, stretching out her arm, palm up. “I can reach you.”

“What’s that mean?” one of the lab-coat humans said. It barely registered with Serrano. She could feel the hesitation—but she could focus on the storm now. She could see it, hold it, shape it.

Serrano felt someone take her hand.

The storms rushed over her again, and she howled in protest. Her eyes snapped open, and she gasped, staggering. Too much, all at once—

But all the superimposed images, all the storms: she could see them all clearly, reach them all. “I can reach all of you.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself, then started laughing. “I can reach all of you.”

She shook her head, snapping focus back into this reality, at the humans frantically throwing switches and typing on keyboards. She could feel the storm clouds overhead, and started pulling them together. Closer. Stronger. Tighter.

Heavy rain began pelting the building.

“Should we shoot her again?” That came from one of the guys with tranq rifles. At least a half-dozen were pointed at her. He was looking at one of the scientists, the one who she’d gotten to monologue at her earlier.

Serrano clapped her hands sharply, a literal thunderclap, complete with a dark grey cloud puffing out between her fingers. Bolts of lightning flashed between the cloud and each shooter. All of them went down, two catching on fire. Twisting around, she shot another bolt of lightning at her shackle, shattering it. She could feel the electricity, the heat, and it hurt—but it didn’t leave a mark.

“Yeah, shooting me would have probably been a good idea about, oh, two minutes ago.” She stretched, arms over her head a moment, back arching, and could feel her body expand. Just a little, but she still grinned at the feel, watching some employees run toward her and more employees start running away.

“How did you—I don’t—” Monologue Guy flipped switches at an increasingly frantic pace.

“Turn on the blockers now!” That was Sark, finally running over from wherever asshole billionaires go when they’re not harassing employees.

“They’re on! They’re on!”

“Then what—”

Serrano snapped her fingers, and sparks flew between them, a thunderclap sounding for emphasis. “Up here, Super Mega Genius.”

Monologue Guy looked up, frightened. Sark did, too, his expression less of fright than of confused annoyance.

“If you’d just stopped with all this once you saved your world, you’d still be a hero, and I’d have been able to get my world back in balance. But no, you had to keep on going to try and take all the energy from my world because, hey, it’s only another branch, right? And here’s the funny thing. You cut me out of the loop so you could drain my world completely, and if you’d just stopped with that, you’d have succeeded. But then you met me, and because you’re a greedy fucking bastard, you found a way to plug me into every other world with a storm goddess.”

“There’s no such thing as gods!” Sark sounded angry, but also unsettled.

She raised her arms again, and felt power flood into her, more power than she’d ever felt before. But this time, it didn’t overwhelm her. It filled her, expanded her in ways far beyond physical—although she could tell she’d physically grown, too. The rain outside grew still more fierce, battering the warehouse so hard the walls vibrated, and the wind rose into a sustained roar. And she was the rain and the wind and herself, all at once. She sucked in her breath, grinning wildly. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold this in much longer.

“Why are her eyes g-glowing?” Monologue Guy stammered.

“Yes, there are, Brendan.” She raised her hands, and the roof of the warehouse began to tear in the wind, rain starting to spray inside. “And we don’t like it when you steal from us. We don’t like it at all.”

Before he responded, the storage tanks—all of them—began vibrating, and alarms started going off, one after another.

“What are you doing?” That was Monologue Guy, voice high-pitched with fear.

When she answered, a thousand other voices echoed around the warehouse. “Taking back our storms.”

Sark ran up to her and started physically punching at her foreleg, even though he didn’t even come up to her knee. “Stop it! You idiot, if you destroy our control systems—if you release all that force here and now—it might literally destroy civilization!” He punched again with what she suspected was all his strength.

“Of all people, Brendan, you should understand the big picture, shouldn’t you?” She looked down, locking gazes with him. “This is just another branch, too.”

Fear finally registered on his face.

She looked up again, and let the power take her.

This time, the world didn’t blur. Instead, it snapped into hyperreal focus: saturated, vibrant, every tiny detail in perfect clarity. And suddenly all details were tiny. She grew so fast it felt like she might burst into a thousand shimmering storm clouds. It was painful, orgasmic, terrifying, joyous. Serrano burst out of what was left of the warehouse’s roof almost before she was aware of it, and when she caught her breath, she stood taller than any of the power plant’s buildings save a water tower. The sun had set, but thanks to the river of lightning coursing down from far above into what she now saw was a collector dish, the light remained closer to dusk.

Serrano looked down around her paws. She felt feeble squirming under one of her toes, and knew—somehow—that was Monologue Guy; she looked around for Sark, absently scrunching that toe until the squirming stopped. Ah, there was the noble savior of the world: nobly running away. A dozen terrible things to do to him flitted through her imagination, but none of them felt terrible enough. No matter. He’d stopped being relevant.

Sirens around the city joined the alarms around the plant. From this vantage point, she could see the warehouse was considerably bigger than she’d thought, and there were identical buildings around it. There weren’t dozens of tanks, there were hundreds, if not thousands. Many remained empty. She needed to empty the rest—and capture it all.

The city was built by a river, Courtney had said. She could see it, now, already angry and rising. Releasing all that storm power would turn the river into a raging sea. It’d scour more than just this city right off the globe. And even with all the power of the storm goddesses—with power that likely eclipsed any being across all the branches of reality, and with the natural tendency to think of mortals as individually immaterial, fleeting beings—Serrano herself was still mortal. It hadn’t occurred to her until just now she might not survive this whole thing.

Well, no. She just hadn’t admitted it to herself until just now. She gritted her teeth. Like it or not, that wasn’t relevant, either.

A voice that definitely wasn’t one of the storm goddesses came back to her for a moment. That isn’t a plan, Serrano, it’s a sign reading PLAN GOES HERE.

“Dammit, Sarah,” she muttered aloud.

All right. She needed something that would channel the power as she released it, and she had to figure that out first.

—nothing can hurt a large enough storm—

Okay, maybe, whichever goddess you are, but how did creating—or becoming—a giant storm help matters? The whole point was…

Oh. Of course. The energy had to be released, but she couldn’t let it just flood outward. She had to move it upward, get it off the ground.

She could do that. Right?

Serrano raised her arms, and the rain and hail started pelting her, the wind started swirling around her giant body, and she began swaying as if to unheard music, heavy paws lifting and dropping in rhythm.

And with each step, she grew. And grew.