The Old Hydrokinetic (MCU AU) : #29 (Patreon)

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Disclaimer - All the usual Yada Yada Yada. I don’t own any rights to any characters in this fic save for my OCs. Don’t sue me.

Anywho, without further ado - read on.

Earth-6161 [May 2012]

Maldives

–Samantha Weber–

Odd. Beautiful. Wrong. Right. Truth.

Words floated around her mind as she found herself looking at what could only be described as a kaleidoscope of colors that hurt to look at. They looked and tasted wrong as well, something she never thought possible.

It had been a hasty decision, made by emotions she never thought she would feel again. Agent Eric was…tolerable, more than what she could say for the vast majority of people she had met in her long life now. God, she was old. Finding tolerable people like Eric was basically impossible for her, and the fact that she all but ran to find him once he disappeared from her senses was telling enough.

Maybe she should have thought better, but in that moment, she took out her anger on the one thing that was in her vision, which could have possibly done something to Eric.

As a result of that, she was now here, where she could taste colors. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced before. She tried to fight back against the machinations of that damned gem, but she had no idea how one went about doing that.

Ever since that day, she had never felt so vulnerable, so bereft of power, as she found her vision being assaulted by increasingly sped up colors that made no sense. Was it like this when people did drugs?

Before she could ponder on the question that would have never appeared in her mind in normal circumstances, she felt the scene in front of her shift.

The rainbow of colours twisted, shifted, and otherwise turned on itself before exploding, prompting her to instinctively call upon her powers, or at least she tried to. She could feel it, her ever present connection to water, and yet, she couldn’t call upon it to protect herself, to rain down fury on her enemies.

It felt muddled, watered down, as if something was trying to block her connection to water, but was only partially successful in the absoluteness of her powers, something she had honed over the course of decades.

The scene in front of her changed, as if someone was pulling back the view, eventually settling on a rather vivid representation of space with spiraling galaxies in the mix. She was transfixed by the sight, the beauty of it fixated in her mind.

She tried to look around, only for the view to change, zoom in on a particular area. As the scenery changed, she saw little dots, shining motes of light that varied from blue to green to red to black to gold, even. She instinctively, with a hundred percent certainty, knew that those motes of light were minds.

Alien Minds.

The thought would have been much harder to digest had it not been for her multiple encounters with aliens, most recent of them being the New York battle, though she would hesitate to call those aliens as sentient since she could feel no substantial brain activity from them when she killed them.

It felt as if they were just a received for some mind sitting elsewhere, and her theory was proven correct when Stark’s actions neutralised hundreds of the still surviving aliens in the city.

With a start, she realised that she was rambling. Even within her mind, she did not have the tendency to jump from thought to thought this much.

It was the gem, she realised. She could still remember the yellow glow of that damned thing as it floated in front of her and trapped her here.

As those thoughts finished, she found the vision in front of her had finally stopped, revealing a planet, adorned with fiery red spots that spewed what seemed like lava into the atmosphere, raining down fire upon the surface of the planet.

It was a hauntingly beautiful sight and yet, not ideal for the many motes of light that lived on and below the surface of the planet. 

Just for a moment, her thoughts went to one of the green motes of light and as if pulled, she found herself looking through the eyes of someone else, the vision being distinctively wider than she remembered having.

Just then, she realised what was happening. She had touched upon one of the minds in her vision and was currently seeing through their eyes and it was not pretty.

They were currently stumbling around, dressed in rags, looking at the burning sky as she found profound spikes of pain, despair, and numb rage entering her mind. The despair was so overpowering that she almost missed the hunger, the thirst, the scalding heat and more from what was clearly a person on the verge of death.

The experience was…not pleasant, to say the least.

In the last moments before she pulled out of the mind of the person, she found the vision approaching the ground, with the edges being pulled into darkness even before any kind of impact. Even before she found herself looking at the planet once more, she knew that the person was dead.

Intense hunger, thirst, and an overall hostile atmosphere had done them in. She could have dug around more, learned a bit more about said person, but it was all so jarring; she could do nothing but look.

As if an objective was achieved, her vision swam once more, hordes of bright lights that she recognised as stars swimming past her, as she found herself looking at a planet once more, only this one had sprawling green landscapes, with veins of blue crisscrossing the entire planet.

So, an Earth like planet, she thought to herself, as a veritable ocean of motes of lights of white greeted her vision. Knowing what was about to happen, she was much better prepared as she found herself seeing through the senses of an aquatic creature.

The colors were different, the angles were wrong, the sensations of limbs were alien, including the basal urge to just continue to swim.

Despite the sheer wrongness of the situation, she did not feel her mind changing in any manner, right up until she was thrown out of the body of the fish, her last sight being of teeth aligned in a pattern.

The condition fulfilled, she found her vision changing to another planet, with life on it. The motes of light were ever-present, just in different flavours. There must be a pattern to it yet it eluded her as she was held at the mercy of that damned gem. 

She found herself looking at yet another planet, rife with life, as her senses brushed against yet another mind on the planet. The gem clearly was a much more dangerous artifact than previously thought if it could do this.

Alternatively, this could all just be a hallucination, induced by the gem, which would be equally impressive.

The pattern continued.

She found herself facing a planet that had life on it. She focused on any single mote of light and found herself looking through said mind’s senses. Then, she either removed herself from the situation willingly or the situation did it for her because the mind she was piggybacking off of died suddenly.

Just for the sake of it, she tried to remain inside a mind to check how long before she was forcefully ejected, only to get bored soon after, as the mind was of just a bipedal animal that continued to chew on grass if that was its life’s purpose. The feeling of an impending barf made her withdraw from that particular mind almost instantly, leading to the next planet full of life.

The cycle continued.

Eventually, she found herself developing new abilities. With each repetition, she found she could find new information from the mind of the entity she focused on. Much more than just feelings of pain or current emotional distress.

Name. Age. Recent memories. And more.

She forgot how many minds she looked into, but after a considerable amount, she found herself capable of actually reading through their previous memories as well. The first experience was alarming, as she actually found herself gaining so much interest that leaving sounded just unpleasant.

It was only after the untimely death of that woman, by accident, that she found herself waking up in the mental equivalent of a cold sweat, realising just how close she had come to losing her identity, as the memories of over a thousand years lived in a vibrant society threatened to overcome her life.

The life that, until now, she had thought to be longer than most. Clearly, there were far longer lived species in the wider universe.

She was extra careful with the next one, reading through minds for a limited period before withdrawing on her own, as the gem moved onto the next.

She did not know its end goal, but over time, she learned to just make the most of it. Strategically, she realised that the governments back on Earth would sacrifice just about anything to get a chance at experiencing what she was experiencing. To gain valuable intel on alien life, all without any chance of retaliation in any format.

In a way, this was the perfect form of spying, with no possible method of retaliation available to the other civilisation.

Eventually, she found a method to sift through memories according to what she wanted, as if going through an index of a book. Through that, she learned some names of planets, of empires, their actions, their warcrimes, and more.

Xander. Kree. Skrulls. Thanos. The Black Order. Asgard. The Sovereigns. 

She learned of the basics of magic, of how multiple species relied on different methods to use this energy that was ever-present across the universe for varying purposes.

Some used it for creation, some used it for destruction.

Yet, the basics remained the same. A nascent spark present in either the mind or the body, that allowed this energy to flow into a being, allowing them to use it in either predestined ways, if their body was programmed that way, or for a variety of methods, if it was the mind that did the heavy lifting.

It was all very fascinating, leading her to believe that her powers came from an application of that energy as well, with her body being the anchor, which is why her powers were so intertwined with the concept of water.

Her body was instinctively using a variation of said energy to produce her powers.

She had no doubt that once–if, she got her body back in proper condition, she could also use magic after very little time. She had learned so much of the basics that it would be second nature to cast some of the magic she had seen other species cast.

With the knowledge of magic that used the mind as the anchor came the knowledge of the mind arts, and with that, she created a rudimentary counting mechanism, allowing her to keep track of just how many mind jumps she had been through.

Obviously, the previous ones were lost but after she learned basic mind arts, she realised she’d been through over a hundred different minds before she finally felt it.

The call back to her body.

With a sense of finality, she let herself enjoy the sensation of the sun hitting the current horse-like creature in all the right places before she was pulled back, violently.

Her eyes snapped open as her brain scrambled to discern right from wrong, her senses feeling too real. The shock of finally feeling the blockade keeping her connection to the powers disappeared as the ever familiar yet now somewhat alien sensation of water came singing to her senses.

The last thing she saw before her memories damaged her brain and threatened to turn it to mush was Stark’s shocked face before darkness claimed her.