The long black tentacle continued to lift the concrete block higher and higher, until it was more than five meters above the ground, and roughly three from the second serpentine appendage. The latter was positioned mirror-image to its twin, and although it was not clutching anything at that moment, from the way it swayed in midair it had every impression that it was about to do so at the first opportunity.

Both in appearance and behavior it was very reminiscent of a rattlesnake ready to snap.

Biting his lower lip Alessandro began to slowly clench his right hand, as if he were tightening his grip around an invisible object, and when by now the tip of his thumb nail was about to touch that of his index finger, then he acted.

Obeying the mental command given to her, the top tentacle let go of the concrete block, sending it plummeting toward the ground. Alessandro waited just a moment before clenching his right fist tightly.

As expected, the end of the appendage positioned just below forked into two separate prongs and then clamped like pincers around the piece of concrete just as it passed in front of him. However, this time things did not go according to plan. Instead of catching the block on the fly in fact, the tentacle sliced it cleanly through, crumbling it as if it were a cookie.

Fuck

Emitting a long sigh of frustration Alessandro walked to the point of impact and absently scanned the tiny fragments of concrete scattered on the floor of the shed.

Another failure, and now he had even run out of blocks. Despite his efforts, he still could not regulate the force.

He turned his gaze to his right and observed the long black tentacle, swaying silently a few feet from his face. Since he had discovered that he could summon almost anything as long as it remained connected to his body, those sort of prehensile appendages had proved very useful. He could use them as a means of transportation, to manipulate objects and even as weapons.

All it took was a thought and the end of the tentacle turned into a deadly sharp point, which darted straight down to the ground an instant later. Penetrating the concrete as if it were butter, the appendage then stuck in the floor for nearly half a meter before Alessandro drove it back to its starting position, leaving behind a deep circular hole.

He stretched out his arm and began to bring his fingers closer to the sharp tip, but just as they were barely a few millimeters away the end disappeared, being replaced by a human hand.

For a few moments Alessandro remained motionless, merely maintaining the contact of his own palm with the one he had just made appear in midair, and then he lowered his eyelids. Although he knew perfectly well what he expected to find, when he finally opened his eyes again he was almost tempted to think he was staring into a mirror.

For before him now stood a perfect reproduction of himself, so well crafted that even his mother would have been unable to distinguish which of the two was the original. Quietly peering at his own clone Alessandro tilted his head slightly to the side, and after giving the order in his mind, he watched enraptured as the doppelganger imitated him, reproducing his movements with the utmost precision.

Raise an arm, lift a leg, bend over, smile, every smallest gesture was executed down to the smallest detail. It was enough to picture in his mind what he desired for it to be accomplished. The only insurmountable limit was the long black tentacle, which, like a kind of eerie umbilical cord, united their backs, preventing them from separating altogether.

His first impressions had turned out to be wrong. The powers at his disposal were not incredible.

They were simply terrifying.

The ridiculous changes, which he had made to his appearance in the days immediately following his ingestion of the alien fungus, represented but a derisory percentage of what he was capable of achieving. Even engaging his imagination would still have taken months just to scratch the surface, of what for all intents and purposes seemed to be an almost limitless potential.

Unlimited. A dizzying term.

However...

No longer able to resist the temptation he had been carrying around since the previous night, Alessandro imagined what he wanted to accomplish, and then waited with bated breath for his request to take shape.

He was not disappointed.

Just the time for a blink of an eye and the clone whose hand he was touching suddenly disappeared, being replaced by a beautiful girl with blond hair and doe eyes.

Upset by his own creation Alessandro immediately pushed his hand away and took a step back. At that point, however, he closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Although he found it somewhat difficult, he had to keep his composure.

She was not real.

It was merely an extension of his body. Kind of like tentacles. They obeyed commands, but were not endowed with will any more than his foot possessed. A mental projection endowed with mass. That was all. On the other hand, it also had to be admitted that it was a damned realistic projection.

Obeying an impulse that was as irrational as it was childish, Alessandro curved his lips into a smile, but whether out of distraction or because his subconscious desired it, the girl in front of him reciprocated the gesture by immediately doing the same.

Astonished as if he had just seen a ghost Alessandro looked away instantly, only to make everything disappear, appendages included. Clearing his throat by giving a little cough, he then grabbed the lapels of his coat and pulled them down, making them fit snugly around his shoulders.

Although it had taken him two days before he plucked up the courage to do so, that morning he had finally made up his mind to leave the house without resorting to normal clothes, preferring instead clothes made from his own powers. At least from a technical point of view, he was walking around naked.

To say that that realization had initially terrified him would be an understatement, although as the minutes passed he had come to get used to them. After all, he didn't feel cold, plus they were absolutely indistinguishable from the clothes he usually wore, except that in at least one place they had to stay glued to him.

Effectively this remained his only limitation. He could recreate objects down to the smallest details and take on the most diverse forms, but he was unable to shape something and then part with it. A constraint of little consequence, if one took into account his overall potential.

The roar of a distant plane echoed above him, prompting him to look up. Perhaps he was still in time to observe it.

Moving away from the fragments of what was left of the concrete blocks, Alessandro reached the spot underneath where the large hole in the shed roof opened up, and he peered at the slice of sky he could see through it. A slight bending of his legs was all he needed.

Being very careful to calibrate the force, he took a leap that allowed him to bridge the abundant ten meters that separated him from the ceiling, and passing through the gap in the panels, he landed with a thud above the sheet-metal-clad roof.

It was a clear day with few clouds, so spotting the plane was not at all difficult. It was already several kilometers away and proceeding straight toward the horizon, where the sun had now begun to set. Sunset, that's right. Unfortunately, he had to return home. After he had found out the outcome of the last question in history, his mother no longer allowed him free outings after dusk.

Consoling himself with the fact that once the weekend arrived things would be different, Alessandro turned his back on the waning sun, then let himself fall into the hole in the roof.

As he had already experienced, the landing turned out to be surprisingly light, and his body absorbed the impact with the ground without any apparent difficulty. Rather than a flight from the fourth floor, it felt to him as if he had skipped a couple of steps on his way down the stairs.

Giving his clothes a dusting he proceeded to the entrance of the shed and retrieved from the ground the Smartphone, which he had placed more than an hour earlier next to the gap in the wall. Apart from the one sent to him by Marco while he was still on the bus, there seemed to be no incoming messages.

Fortunately, he thought. It usually meant trouble at the store or some other similar emergency.

Reassured by the news, he slipped his cell phone into his sweatshirt pocket and went outside. Exactly as on arrival there was no one in sight. The road, only a few meters away from the half-rusted fence that surrounded the shed, appeared deserted

He had just slipped into the narrow passage between the metal panels when a sudden call made him stiffen

''Hey, you!" blurted out a male voice to his left. ''What are you doing!

However terrified, Alessandro still managed to turn his head in the direction of the noise, and what he saw at that point made his blood run cold.

Two uniformed security guards were advancing along the sidewalk on the side of the road, heading toward him.

''You can't go in there,'' the colleague of the one who had spoken earlier apostrophized him. ''It is private property.''

Without even wasting time to respond, Alessandro turned on his heels and began to run in the direction of the fallow field at the end of the road.

"Hey, stop!" the security guard shouted after him.

Alessandro, however, had already reached the edge of the fence, and making a sharp turn, disappeared behind it. Being no more than a dozen meters apart, the two men took but a few seconds before turning the corner in their turn.

However, when they finally found themselves on the other side, the only thing they saw was an overgrown overgrown field that stretched for hundreds of meters before ending in front of the sound barriers of the bypass road.

With the exception of the thorny bushes that lined the fence along its entire length, and a few shrubs scattered in patches around the green area, there were no places to hide, yet no trace of Alessandro remained.

The two guards were still busy staring in dismay at the barren landscape before them when a sudden movement from one of the bushes nearby caught their attention.

There was no doubt about it. Someone was hiding in the branches.

The guy on the right, a man with a prominent abdomen and a neck set into his shoulders, immediately brought his hand to the holster hanging from his belt, but his colleague stopped him before he could draw his weapon.

''Don't worry, we won't do anything to you,'' he announced loudly.

''In fact, we just want to ask you a few questions,'' the other echoed, but without taking his hand off the holster.

''Go ahead and come out.''

No sooner had he finished addressing that appeal than the bush moved again, and as the two men waited with tense muscles for the intruder to come out into the open, a large reddish cat with tigerish fur emerged from cover, and pawing confidently went to sit on the tall grass, right in front of the guards.

Caught totally off guard, the fat guy stood motionless staring at the little feline. Judging by the expression on his face, he seemed to have fallen into a state of shock.

"Do you want to ask him for his papers?" the colleague asked him in a joking tone.

The man huffed in frustration, and albeit with obvious reluctance, put the safety back on his holster.

"Where the fuck did he go?" he blurted out, rising on his toes to see farther than his short stature would allow.

''You say he went around?

''And how, by digging underground?" retorted the other skeptically. ''Not even Usain Bolt is that fast.''

''Maybe he's hiding somewhere in the brambles,'' speculated the colleague, as he adjusted his baseball cap on his head. ''Shall we go and check?

The guard seemed to reflect on it, but after taking one last look at the field illuminated by the colors of the sunset, he shook his head.

''Nah, never mind,'' he replied testily, making a dismissive gesture with his arm. ''He was just a junkie anyway.''

He turned, retracing his steps, although before following him, his colleague decided to linger a few moments longer, just long enough to cross his gaze with the cat who continued to peer at him in silence.

''Hello kitty,'' she whispered, winking at him.

The cat remained impassive in his seat, sitting on the grass watching the two men walk away, and when the pair had turned the corner, a wide and unnatural smile rippled across his feline muzzle.

The trip back home was not a pleasant experience.

It was something simply fantastic.

It was still true that he still had to get used to running on all fours, but thanks to his rehearsals over the previous days, the feat did not prove to be overly complex. After all, compared to the wolf form, (undoubtedly the one he loved most, being his favorite animal), there was not that much difference.

The only element that troubled him a little was size. Indeed, there was no denying that the world as seen from thirty-five inches tall looked quite different, although it was equally true, that whizzing through gardens, streets and sidewalks in that form so different from what he was used to, gave him indescribable pleasure.

He felt powerful, fast, and above all, free in a way he did not think he had ever been before.

He loved it. He loved it to the point that when he arrived at Turati Street he was almost sorry to have to resume his usual appearance. Unfortunately for him, however, he had no choice. By now the sun was about to set, and unless he intended to spend the rest of his life in cat form, it was not convenient for him to disobey Elisa.

Hiding behind one of the large hydrangea bushes that crowded the flower beds at the back of the apartment building where he lived, he therefore regained his human features, and after a quick fix of his hair, he prepared to go home. He was about to set foot on the driveway that surrounded the building, when a sudden doubt flashed through his mind.

Was he really sure he hadn't forgotten something?

An expression of pure panic materialized on his face the instant he began to reflect.

The Smartphone!!!

In terror, he immediately shoved his hand into his sweatshirt pocket, at which point he certainly did not need to withdraw it to understand what had happened.

He lowered his eyelids and extracted his clenched fist and then raised it in front of his face, then loosened his grip on it slightly. As he watched the cascade of microscopic silver fragments plummeting toward the grass, Alessandro let out a deep sigh.

Stardust