Genie

by bloodsword

He used to think that the day when the world got flipped over and everything changed would be somehow biblical, announcing itself with thunder and storms, maybe even the finger of God Himself reaching down and touching the earth or something. But he was wrong, dead wrong. That day was a day like any other.

The day after, however, was something entirely different!

Djinn slowly rolled the fat coin between his fingers before lightly tossing it into the air. As he waited for it to drop back into his hand, he looked beyond the arcing piece of silver and over the the city that sprawled away from the foot of his perch. Rather, what was left of it.

This was the Q, the walled-off part of the York Supercluster where those exposed to the weaponized Medusa retrovirus were quarantined. It was a wasteland where food and water were scarce and enemies were anything but. Djinn's eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he smoothly snatched the coin out of midair.

Exposed; that was a funny way to put it. Like it was that sci-fi horror story about the zombie apocalypse started by an accidental release of a deadly mutagenic virus into the general population, turning everybody in a matter of days. Except this virus didn't turn people into zombies. It just killed them outright by unraveling them from the inside, frickin' Ebola on steroids.

Abruptly his fingers convulsively tightened around the coin as his extra sense told him that someone was approaching from behind.

"Djinn," a hard voice grated. Brow lifting, Djinn looked over his shoulder at the speaker.

Lean and dangerous-looking in a dark trench coat and torn jeans, the speaker smirked, a strange expression on a hatchet face that looked like it seldom cracked a smile.

"Procyon." Djinn turned back to his view of the city. "I've already kicked your ass three times this week. So kindly fuck off."

"I'll keep coming until I take what's yours," Procyon replied as shimmering blades of reddish energy appeared around his clenched fists. He whipped his energy blades through a complicated pattern before coiling into a ready position.

"It's okay if you don't feel like fighting today, buddy. Just hand me your shit and we'll call it a day."

Djinn barely fought off the urge to sigh. You can give a moron super-powers, but apparently you can't make them smarter. Yanking up the hood on his jacket, he made to swing off the edge of the roof he had made his perch and come to his feet. Only he disappeared instead.

The eggheads called it 'matter-to-energy-to-matter translocation', or M.E.M.T.. Djinn just called it 'going empty'. His ability to go empty was a side-effect of having every cell in his body bonded to high-powered nanites.

It's pretty natural to assume it was Medusa that changed the world, killing everybody exposed to it. But that wasn't it. It was the damn cure that changed the world. At least, the part of the York Supercluster that was in range of the 'accidental' release of Medusa and was turned into the Q.

As Medusa rolled silently through neighborhood after neighborhood in the early hours of the morning, Earth's emergency response system kicked into high gear and triggered a nanite cloud as a counter to the infectious, airborne agent that was killing its way through the streets. The nanites were supposed to halt the virus, neutering it while knitting the infected's DNA back together again.

Instead the nanites began rewriting entire DNA sequences in the infected, fundamentally changing them. The worse a person was infected, the more their DNA got rewritten.

Djinn had been bleeding out where he had collapsed, his morning coffee still in his hand and Medusa killing everybody around him, when the nanite cloud descended on them. He was the only survivor within a ten block radius. He didn't remember falling, or even the nanites infusing his body so completely that they replaced many of his tissues. The only thing he remembered from that morning, the day after Medusa got free, was waking up in a federal hospital under the care of government scientists. The same ones that had created both Medusa and the nanite counteragent.

"This is exactly what happens when you leave your fate with, ... y'know, people with early onset dementia and potentially Alzheimer's," the lead scientist had muttered when Djinn had groggily asked what had happened.

It was as the scientist turned away from him without truly answering his question, that Djinn had felt, outside of obvious frustration and anger, the stirrings of something different inside. Like he had more control over not only himself, but the world around him as well. Testing that feeling, he made a game-changing discovery.

Somehow, as they were rebuilding him from the ground floor up, those nanites had fused with his nervous system, giving him control over them. Those nanites, in themselves, had the ability to manipulate electromagnetic fields, the force that pretty much controlled all of Reality.

Djinn freed himself from the hospital that very day, using his newfound control over EM fields to translocate, jump, and power through every obstacle the scientists threw at him. He wasn't the only one, either. Thousands of people found themselves with fantastic abilities following immersion in the nanite cloud. Thousands of ordinary citizens that were, overnight, now quite extraordinary.

Which, of course, was precisely the reason all the fighting began.

With a shimmer of quantum light, Djinn reappeared a wink later a good five meters behind the waiting Procyon. As soon as he was solid, thousands of tiny, rectangular plates of energy appeared around his entire body to fuse together and become a shimmering particle shield.

"That's right, coward," Procyon growled, still looking at the roof edge. "Empty your way out of trouble like a bitch."

"Spin your heel, dickhead," Djinn spat out. "While it's tempting to just push you off the roof and let you fall to an ignoble end, the Genie doesn't work that way."

Whirling around, Procyon brought his blades back up with a hiss.

"You backstabbing punk," he growled despite Djinn just having told him that he wouldn't attack him from behind. Like he said, the nanites didn't make morons smarter.

"I'm going to chop you into itty bitty, ..."

The monologue was abruptly interrupted by a scream floating up from somewhere near the building's foot.

"Hold that thought, fugly," Djinn said, brushing past a frowning Procyon to step back to the roof's edge. The shield covering his face shimmered then a bar of light appeared before his eyes, a refractive lenses that he could use to magnify images from far away, like a newfangled telescope.

"I've got four reds menacing a group of civvies," he reported, leaning forward slightly as he scanned the streets below. "Ah! I thought so. A grade two puppet master is a block away, directing traffic."

"A puppet master?" Procyon repeated, his earlier belligerence abruptly gone. He stepped to the edge beside Djinn to peer downward, trying to see what the more powerful enhanced was seeing.

"Right, I almost forgot." Djinn dropped his lenses to look over at the hard-faced Procyon. "A puppet master killed your brother, didn't they."

"Every one of those red bastards will burn," Procyon hissed, still staring down into the distant streets. "Not just the puppet masters. All of them!" Djinn slowly nodded in agreement before bringing the lenses back up and returning his attention to the streets below. It wasn't often he found himself on the same side as the asshole who kept trying to take his cache of food and water by force. But, since they were both blues, with this one thing they were.

Red and Blue: they were the two sides created by the nanite upgrade, the two sides that were involved in a three-way war with the feds that turned the Q into a wasteland. Were they as clear-cut as good and evil? Not quite, but it was fair to say blue leaned towards good and red, the opposite.

"Can you empty me to that puppet master?" Procyon tautly asked.

"So you can try a solo takedown?" Djinn asked then shook his head. "You know our law, Procyon."

"Protect the civilians first before anything," Procyon said with a grimace. "Sometimes our law fuckin' sucks."

"Amen," Djinn said with a wry twist of his mouth.

The feds had called them 'collateral damage': the hundreds of thousands of civilians that were caught within the forcefield barricade that created the Q. Not infected, nor upgraded by the nanites, they were ordinary people that suddenly found themselves in the middle of a warzone, doing their best to survive with suddenly reduced resources and no safe havens.

The blues, remembering what it was like to be ordinary, sympathized with that plight. So, in the early days of the war, they had enacted a series of laws that governed general blue behavior. The greatest of those laws, put quite simply, was 'protect the civilians first before anything'. After all, they didn't ask to be there. They only wanted to survive long enough for the barricade to come down, granting them freedom.

"Fine. Empty me in front of the civvies," Procyon said with a frown. "I'll hold them long enough for you to get down there."

Nodding, Djinn took a half step away from the other blue. Focusing his will, he let his vision expand to take in the swirling EM fields that surrounded them. Plotting a path, he then extended his conversion and translocation abilities.

One moment Procyon was standing there, anxiously shifting from one booted foot to the other as he stared down at the streets below. The next he was gone in a whirl of motion and sound. Sensing the other blue's new location by how he influenced local EM fields, Djinn nodded in satisfaction. Then he himself winked out of sight.

Procyon shifted as Djinn appeared beside him, his particle armor already resettling into place.

"Well, well," a low, rough voice noted. "Look who's crawled out of his bottle. The Genie."

Looking to his right, Djinn spotted a lean, female form wearing a tight, head-to-toe bodysuit, complete with a streamlined helmet.

"Silver," he named her in a flat voice. "You reds are way too far past 332 Ave." Djinn paused to look over at the civilians. They were a motley lot, adults mostly, male and female, carrying a variety of weapons ranging from an old slug-throwing shotgun to a baseball bat and an axe. They appeared to be covering a handful of their fellows trying to access a hydrant.

A brow lifted. Had they found a working hydrant that still tapped into the city's water supply?

"If we knew there were only two of you bastards covering this block, we would've come a long time ago," another one of the four growled.

"Only when you outnumber us two to one, you venture out of your holes?" Procyon said with a snort. "You filthy reds are cowards!" His energy blades hummed into being and the lean blue coiled into a ready posture. "Why don't you leave the civvies alone and come tangle with your own kind?"

The second speaker chuckled as the other three exchanged smirks.

"We all know who the heavy hitter is here, Proc-sauce, and it ain't you," he said with a grin before looking over at the hooded Djinn. "What do you say, Djinn-rummy? Wanna try stopping us from whacking this sorry bunch of meat bags here?"

Djinn's energy field swirled around him for a moment, creating a blur of motion before it settled back into place.

"That's what I've always liked about you, Pulse," he replied in a conversational tone even as EM energy built up around him. "All the cute little nicknames you have for the people that have kicked your ass."

"I'm gonna love shutting that big mouth of yours, genie-boy," Pulse snarled, a visible aura of energy building up around him. Then, without further warning, he was firing his namesake from a clenched fist at the crouching Djinn even as Silver darted into motion, becoming a metallic blur racing around the battle's perimeter.

Shunting the energy pulse to the side in time to slam it into one of the other charging reds and knocking her flying, Djinn emptied just in time to avoid Silver slicing through him, leaving her cutting through shimmering space instead. A wink later he was behind Pulse and, with a shiver of his shield, he sent a wall of compressed air molecules smashing into the unprepared red. Then he was emptying again just as Procyon engaged the final red with whirling energy blades.

Stone flew as the red desperately pulled up pieces of the street in an attempt to slow the slashing blue. Once, twice he cut through slabs of paving and rock, sending the pieces tumbling away from each other. Then, with a smooth lunge, he was skewering the red through the chest.

Letting the suddenly limp body drop to the ground by willing his blades to vaporize, the lean blue turned towards the emptying Djinn who was popping in and out of view trying to get an angle on Silver.

"I got this, ... uuhhhh!" Shuddering with pain as fire burned through him from back to front, Procyon looked down to see a piece of glowing metal jutting from his chest. Trying to gasp in a breath around the bar of agony piercing him through, the injured blue looked over his shoulder to see the female red Djinn had knocked to the side with Pulse's redirected blast. With glowing hands, she pushed the piece of metal just a little deeper before giving it a twist, all while standing a good ten meters away.

"I see that you've forgotten that I can not only control others," a new voice said even as the female red's eyes glowed for a second as well. "But I can also make them stronger!" Then she was shaking Procyon off her impromptu javelin, letting him drop to the ground to twist into the fetal position as he bled out his life onto the broken pavement.

Winking out of the way of yet another one of Silver's charges, Djinn renegotiated his gravio-metric status and floated off the ground to catch sight of the new player. He felt his face immediately tighten to see that it was the puppet master he had initially spotted a block away. Apparently the string puller was tired of watching from afar.

The puppet master, a tall, lean figure in a long, dark coat, strode arrogantly into the intersection that was home to the ad hoc battle.

"You can call me the puppet master," he began, looking up at the hovering Djinn. He gestured towards the darting Silver and the unnamed red with the power to control metal.

"I see you've already met some of my colleagues. They can be my little puppets. They'll run when I tell them to run, they'll walk when I tell them to walk. When I'm done with them, just throw 'em in the trash!"

Djinn looked over at the metal-controlling red to see if she was reacting to the puppet master's sneering words, which basically called her a minion. His expression tightened when he found her unphased, moving her hands around to gather more pieces of metal as the civilians around the fire hydrant cowered back in fear.

Then his hover became uncertain as a force pushed against his shields.

"It's really a pity you're too powerful for me to take hold of, Genie," the puppet master observed, a thin smile on his lean face. "With you in my hands, I could take control of the Q and everything in it!"

"There was something I could never figure out about you puppet masters," Djinn said in reply, emptying a couple times to keep the metal-controller from getting a bead on him. "Did the nanites grant you the ability to control other enhanced? Or did they make your neck stronger to carry around a head so swollen with ego, it looks like a hot air balloon?"

"Ha!" the puppet master laughed. "I wonder if you'd be so pithy after I use you to open a door to a different reality so I can escape the Q after I make the world burn for putting us here."

Dropping out of the air just in time to avoid getting skewered, Djinn refocused his EM field to make a molecule-thin plane of condensed air. A thought then sliced it through the metal-controlling red, separating her upper half from the lower with nearly no effort. A second thought made it change direction and come to a vertical halt in time for Silver to run right into it's edge, her speed and momentum doing all the work in slicing through her right down the middle, the two halves flopping onto the ground to twitch before going still.

"Looks like they weren't strong enough to avoid that," Djinn noted, not bothering to lift back into the air. Instead, he began to walk towards a suddenly uncertain puppet master. "Sorry, buddy, but I broke all your little wind-up toys."

Grimacing, the puppet master stabbed a hand out towards the hooded figure, a good head shorter but lean and athletic, moving with a terrible grace, like he was no longer human but a great hunting cat instead. Again Djinn felt something brush against his particle shield but fail to get through.

Then he was standing right in front of the puppet master.

"You string pullers are all the same," he hissed, staring up into the red's uncertain face. "Trying to control us and make us do shit we don't want to. The feds failed and threw up the barricade to make the Q instead. A place that now holds you as well, despite all your vaunted powers. So what makes you think you'll succeed where they didn't? Hmm?"

Djinn waved his hand in a negating gesture when the red tried to answer.

"Don't bother," he said, suddenly tired. "Nothing you could say would interest me." Then a hard swing with a compressed plane of air and the puppet master was toppling to the ground, missing half of his head.

"Damn, I hate fuckin' puppet masters!" he growled, looking at the corpse for a second. Then, remembering who he had come into the fight with, he turned to quickly jog to where Procyon was weakly moving.

As he knelt beside him, Djinn was about to tell him to hold on, that he would get his fellow blue help, when he heard a quiet sound coming from the stricken enhanced. Thinking Procyon was trying to tell him something, the hooded blue leaned in close. In doing so, he heard the dying man softly singing:

"Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit," Procyon sang in a voice that grew quieter with every word. "He took the midnight train going anywhere, ..."

There was a slight pause as Procyon coughed roughly, painting his lips with blood.

"Paying anything to roll the dice, just one more time. Some will win, some will lose, ... Don't stop believin', hold on to that feeling, ..."

The last he sang with bubbles of blood on his lips. Then, with a final shudder, Procyon was gone. Frowning, Djinn reached out and carefully closed his eyes.

"Looks like you finally caught that midnight train, city boy," he quietly observed. "And now you're anywhere but here!"

Standing in a convulsive rush, he turned back towards the handful of civilians still clustered around the hydrant.

"Trying to get that thing to work?" he asked in a loud voice. They hesitated before several of them jerked nods.

"Stand back," Djinn then directed even as he reached out with his sentient EM fields. There, he could feel the pipe that connected the hydrant to the water main. That same sense told him it was filled with debris from a collapse further along the line. If he could somehow remove that debris, water to the hydrant would be released.

A thin smile appeared on his face as the solution abruptly occurred to him. Why not 'empty' it? Then the debris was sitting in a wet pile on the ground in front of him and water was spraying wildly from the open hydrant.

Nodding in satisfaction as the civilians huddled around the hydrant with makeshift containers and buckets to gather what they could, Djinn turned and began to walk in the opposite direction.

"You're welcome," he muttered under his breath. Then the street was empty as he jumped himself and the bodies of friend and foe away, leaving it to the civilians. Just like it was supposed to be.