Burning Plains, Pt 6

The heat rises even more as a couple of hours pass by. Though you try your best to go to sleep in your hammock, you find that it's completely unbearable. You're sweating profusely while practically laying around doing nothing in just your underwear. Even Noir spends that time attempting to find the coolest corner to sleep - but there is no such spot inside here.

In fact, the heat is so omnipresent that it's hard to breathe. You literally gasp and pant heavily, as though you're clawing for more and more air.

You stand up, frustrated by your current situation. Dizziness immediately assaults your mind and body, and you're forced to shake yourself out of it. Once you're steady on your feet, you take a glance out the open double doors and immediately note that even more patches of dry grass have caught alight since you last looked. 

Alarmed by what you see, you step outside briefly just to get a better idea at what's happening around you. And to your abject horror, small fires are everywhere you look, specifically anywhere that isn't already burnt to a crisp. 

You hop back inside quickly, after you feel the searing heat of the sun on your skin. It's wild to you that even those few seconds are enough to cause you pain, for your skin to feel like it's about to catch on fire. It strikes you just how much more potent it is out here than where you used to live… and you want to know how it's even physically possible. 

Of course, things could simply be getting worse as the days go by, and quickly. But you shake that thought away as best you can. The last thing you want to imagine is the sun going into a supernova in your lifetime. What you end up doing instead is chide yourself for going outside without your hat and poncho on. You'd been so bothered by the heat inside that it totally slipped your mind. Foolishly.

You rub your skin a bit in an attempt to soothe the sting, and you promise to never do anything like that again.

An idea strikes you, however. If the sun's rays are this potent, then you could quite possibly use it to cook some of your food. And so you pull out some cuts of game wrapped in a woven grass bundle, then use your Telekinesis to lift a couple individual cuts outside.

They begin to sizzle mere moments after being out there.

You ruminate on your current problem, even as you spin the cuts around to give them an even cook. The biggest problem is simply that you're in an oven. Though you're not exactly overheated yet, you're sure it won't be long until you suffer some kind of heat stroke.

You take a sip of some water, fearful of that eventually. Though you realize that it hardly matters how much water you drink down now - there's little you can do to cool down.

You pull in one of the cuts of meat and inspect it. It looks rather cooked on the outside, and has a dark brown color to it. But when you squeeze it with your fingers, you find that it's still tender inside. Or, well, relatively tender considering how gamey it is. It honestly doesn't look very appetizing to you - for some reason grill marks make meat look more attractive.

Without them, they look… plain.

You send it over to Noir, who is currently beneath the tractor and attempting to make herself more comfortable. Sadly, she's failing to do so. But the sight and smell of your offering snaps her out of her frustration and digs in with gusto.

It's another few minutes before you bring in the second cut of meat, which is positively sizzling from its own fat. The cut has been cooked to a darker shade of brown, which you at least find a more appealing color. 

When you bite down, you note that it's not quite as juicy as you had hoped, and is more well-done than you like. As a result you spend a bit more time chewing on it than enjoying it. But it works and you're fed, so you can't complain too much.

No matter what, the proof is pretty clear - sunlight is potent enough to literally cook meat when hit directly. This must mean that fires have been happening out here daily, and for some time now. For weeks maybe? Months? You shrug, not having a definitive answer for yourself.

This is a massive problem for you, without a doubt. Assuming you can somehow survive the day today, how are you going to keep going with a sun this lethal? Not every farmstead is going to have an untouched safe zone like this shed… 

We need a giant fan or something, Noir projects through the Network. You can easily sense her frustration through her thoughts, though she also has no problems saying them aloud, too. 

This heat is killing me! Can't we go around this or something?

We could, and we should, you reply. I just don't really know where 'around' is. We could be in the middle of all this burnt land for all we know. Or maybe this is happening everywhere now - even where we came from.

You think about Noir's words for a moment though - specifically that about a giant fan. You could possibly find some sheet to use Telekinetically, and wave it up and down to cause a bit of air flow. But you find yourself wondering why you would even need to use a sheet in the first place…

Couldn't you, say, move the air itself? They are just particles after all, just like everything else. If you could move something solid, you could move liquids and gasses too. Right? 

You take a seat in the hammock and steady yourself as best you can, then carefully activate your Chakra. Since your body needs rest but your mind needs to wander, this is the best choice for you to make right now. By lowering your physical self to its minimal state, you can more easily weather the heat. Using less physical energy means a more resilient body, for the most part.

When you activate your Chakra and step into it, the physical world seems to lift and fade away as your inner self comes to greater light. Though this usually brings you great relief, this particular experience is vastly different.

Sadly, the world around you feels dead and empty because the flows of life are still and thin. All you can sense is yourself and Noir amidst a sea of death and destruction, which makes you feel truly lonely. Even the vibrations of the plant life around you are missing and vacant, thanks to the ever-consuming flames all around.

That void chills you somehow, even despite the feverish heat your physical body is suffering from.

Instead of concentrating on what isn't around you, you do your best to sense the things that are - your presence butts up against the building itself, and the objects inside. Instead of seeking thoughts and emotions, you instead seek the vacuum where they cannot exist.

And it's in those spaces that you find the inanimate world. Such as the tractor, the shelves, the tools, the seeds. Not just their packaging or their outer shells, but every part and bit and piece inside too.

You're able to 'see' everything around you as they are, or at least the very edges of them. And it's overwhelming to some degree. There are so many parts and bits and pieces that your mind feels… tight. And that's not just your budding headache talking. 

Oddly, it's through this observation of anti-psyche space that you realize how Telekinesis is able to affect objects - it's through forcing the edges, or portions of those edges, to move. If it's solid, the whole thing goes, along with any parts inside. Well, to some degree anyway.

It's certainly possible to move the whole tractor only if you grab it by its axle, or push it Telekinetically from behind. This could also result in you breaking off the axle itself, or damaging the frame and leaving most of the tractor where it is. But if you want the whole thing to move more efficiently, you basically would have to wrap your mind around the entire object, then shift it around with Telekinesis.

A light seems to flare up in your mind as you come to these revelations and realizations about how some of your powers work. You can't help but reach out with your Telekinesis at the wheelbarrow off to the side in order to test these new thoughts and suppositions. You do your best to lift it up just a little bit, along with every tool piled inside. 

Thanks to your Chakra, you can easily sense the edges of their physical forms and grasp them individually.

As a result, nothing rattles or shakes or moves even a millimeter, even as the wheelbarrow itself rises up higher and higher. You even rotate it slowly, so that it spins upside down, then back up right. The entire time, its contents hardly budge.

You then set the wheelbarrow back down on the ground and let it go Telekinetically, along with most of the tools. But you pull one one amidst the pile - a simple shovel. This you grasp from all edges securely, then fling it out the door as fast as you can. 

It flies out with a heavy WHOOSH, and clears half the farm in an instant. In fact, it flies further than you can keep hold of it, and vanishes out in the fields somewhere. You sense its wooden handle catch aflame, as its edge is eaten away.

A part of you wonders if you could reach out telekinetically to snag it back somehow, if you stretch a bit and pour a bit of extra energy into yourself. But another part shrugs. It's not as though you need that shovel, so you leave it to its fate.

What you do instead is pay closer attention to how the handle itself is burnt up. You can feel its edge worn away, as the sheer heat causes its individual oxygen molecules to separate. Fire has somehow always fascinated you, and seeing it work "up close" is a kind of revelation that leaves you speechless.

You're able to sense other molecules rise up after the oxygen is violently ripped away, as the wood is consumed.

Though you don't know exactly what's going on, what you're most excited about is the simple fact that you can sense these particles at all. Or at least, the edges of them. Specifically, you can see the hotter air moving and zipping around faster than the air around it.

And an idea immediately forms in your mind what to do.

So you draw yourself back to where your physical body is and observe the particles of air around you. You know it's made up of different elements of course, of nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide, and so on. Not that you can exactly tell them apart - all you see are the edges of things, after all. 

At first you attempt to pull air into the shed with your Telekinesis. And that attempt is certainly somewhat successful - you're able to bring the air in for a bit, causing a very slight breeze. But it isn't exactly a very pleasant breeze at all - it's rather warm and uncomfortable, and does little to cool your skin.

What you really need is an air conditioner - something that will cool the air down. But you have no idea how those things work, and their mechanics are probably too complex for you to do with your Telekinesis anyway. 

From what you remember in your old classes, air is hot when its molecules move quickly. You could attempt to condense the air in the shed to slow it down, and perhaps make it cooler in the process. Or less hot at the very least. And so you pull in air again, but this time into a somewhat Telekinetically-sealed shed. It takes you a great deal of effort to actually do this, as grasping at these tiny particles is hard. Very hard.

In fact, you can only shuffle in so much air at a time, and have to fill the shed slowly. It's an odd sensation, a bit like filling a hole with dirt, but using every fiber of your being to do so. Though in this case you don't have much of a shovel and what you have feels more like a spoon.

Still, it seems to work. You expend quite a bit of energy over the next dozen or so minutes, especially at first. But you're able to overstuff the room with air. Though it's far from cold, it's enough for you to sense a vast difference in temperature, physically speaking. By having so much of it in here, the particles are forced to slow down significantly, and as a result the room is somewhat cooler than before.

Your body has finally stopped sweating, and your breathing has become less labored. And perhaps more importantly, Noir has been able to find some peace, and is snoozing lightly from under the tractor.