He nodded and walked over to a classic, red-gold Asian-inspired table sitting beneath a painted scroll of some bald dude with a sword, a fox, and a bunch of ideograms I couldn’t read. In a moment, he returned with a clipboard and a pen that he offered to me. The pen felt comically small in his hand.

  After a moment of scribbling, I put a big ‘264’ on the paper. “This is my maximum energy right now. When I started, I only had one hundred and six. Each point equals about one calorie, or the energy required to raise a kilogram of water about thirty-five degrees. A decent low-powered fireflash, once you add in the power to project it to its target intact, costs me about ten points to be strong enough to ignite clothing. Fortunately, that’s a moron’s way to do it.”

  “What I do instead is ignite a few molecules of hydrogen in the air, and keep them stable through the flight. Much lower difficulty, and it expands when I split off the energy. It also makes a truly impressive-looking fireball, which will cause small scorch marks on most flammable objects or ignite pre-planted pyrotechnics, for about a single point."

  "It’s all about the presentation. I’m not a fighter; I’m a special effects artist with a grudge. The only difference is, I can pre-plant my tricks and set them off remotely or directly in real-time, without a way of remoting them. Any decent special effects artist could do the same, but they'd need a team and endless rehearsals to get it right, not to mention hundreds of thousands, if not millions. That's what my clients pay for. Basically, I am a budget-basement special effects studio to help newbies get the exposure they need to be taken seriously.”

  He nodded. “So the core is molecular control?”

  I nodded. “To some extent. That’s how I merge things together and adjust their molecular or crystalline framework in metals. Give me ten pounds of pig-iron, some charcoal, and unlimited energy, and I could make you a breastplate with a crystalline structure that could bounce an armor-piercing depleted-uranium tank round. Of course, the impact would still turn your internal organs into soup from hydrostatic shock, but the armor would look pristine. I don’t have the technical know-how to fix that easily. My power is great for materials science, terrible for biology. My own anatomy is a testament to that.”

  “Most alphas with access to the ether have an energy pool roughly equal to their class ranking times a thousand. It’s a general rule. If I were a Class Four, for example, I would have around four thousand energy and be able to regenerate about four hundred energy per hour. That’s where my namesake comes into play.”

  “With four thousand energy, given the right materials and an example of, say, an Enforcer helmet, I could replicate the helmet. It would cost me about three thousand points, and I could use the remainder to improve its tensile strength to the point where even Man-Ape would have trouble giving it the Samsonite treatment.”

  He watched me as I was cribbing numbers and formulas on the sheet. “You just figured that out off the top of your head?”

  I chuckled humorlessly. “I have had a LOT of lonely, hungry nights to figure it out. It’s either that or contemplate the series of life choices that led me to eating cold beans straight from the can. Cold is the same principle, since it’s all about molecular movement, but there are fewer shortcuts. I can shoot ice pellets like a machine gun, but they have to be tiny, and even a handful costs me a ton of energy. When I play the cold elemental game, I need a lot more pre-chilled props and hidden CO2 tanks to sell them. My greatest performance was 40% power, 60% stagecraft.”

  “Electricity is easiest to fake—everyone’s terrified of it—but it’s harder to control safely. Unlike an actual elemental, I have to pay attention to things like relative conductivity and set up the right sort of pathway to shoot it. It also doesn’t do much actual damage at my level, but it looks impressively violent and makes a great buzzing sound. Perception is nine-tenths of the law, and the other tenth is not getting electrocuted by your own parlor trick.”

  “So basically,” he summarized, “your power, your microkinesis, is based around manipulating molecules? Billions of them at once?”

  I nodded. “Sometimes. But I need to trigger movement in every single one of them individually. It’s computationally exhausting, which is why I lean on thermodynamics. Static electricity, heat, and cold are my best friends. That and kinetic energy.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked, his focus absolute.

  I shrugged, feeling the conversation veer into the kind of territory that gets you a personalized cell in a black-site prison. “Okay, this is getting into ‘lock me in a vacuum-sealed coma’ territory. My biggest solid mass creation is about an ounce. So, hypothetical: what happens if you throw a single sheet of aluminum foil, less than a tenth of an ounce, in front of a jet airplane moving at Mach 1?”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “It gets shredded. Turns into confetti.”

  “How about,” I said, my voice dropping, “if the sheet of foil is, for a nanosecond, immune to kinetic impacts? Or rather, every molecule in it is commanded to stop. Utterly. You have a sheet of foil that basically becomes a completely immovable object, a quantum razor blade.”

  He winced, a genuine flicker of pained understanding on his face. “It rips its way through the airplane like it wasn’t even there. Does that… apply to other types of molecular motion?”

  I nodded. “That’s the party trick. That’s how I appear so tough. Fire and cold might as well be warm and cool breezes if I see them coming, because getting rid of molecular energy is easy. I just tell the excited molecules to calm the hell down. It’s like being a cosmic bouncer for atoms.”

  “What about electricity and direct impacts?”

  “Impacts are the same deal, to a point,” I admitted. “I get hurt when there’s too much mass coming too fast, or I do something stupid that distracts my attention. A bullet is usually no big deal—I can handle the molecules in its path. A fist? A normal-sized one, I can slow down. But a fist the size of yours? A big old Mjolnir hammer? Someone throws a car or a telephone pole at me? I am pasted on the sidewalk just like any other normie, no matter HOW much energy I have.”

  “My power isn’t strength; it’s precise, microscopic control. You can’t stop a tsunami with a precisely placed sewing needle. I mean, if I have time enough to prepare, I can probably put a piece of aluminum foil in front of the fist, but objects that are already connected with molecular bonds are harder to separate and stop, and people tend to project their... self-ness into what they are whacking you with, which makes things a lot harder. Except for one thing,” I added.

  “What’s that?” he asked, leaning forward, his curiosity palpable.

  “Well, there’s a lot of air in between me and a thrown car. Only a few grams of air mixture, but if I can super-excite it, turn it into a temporary wall of super-dense, super-heated plasma… It’s not perfect, it costs a fortune in energy, and I’ll probably pass out from the strain, but the conversion works pretty well as a last-ditch ‘oh shit’ shield. In theory.”

  “What happens to the energy?” he asked, zeroing in on the core physics problem like a bloodhound.

  “Huh?”

  He looked at me closely. “The energy. What happens to it? When you absorb a kinetic impact or dissipate heat, where does the energy go? Conservation of energy isn’t a suggestion, it’s the law.”

  “Well, heat and cold both require energy to alter their state. It’s like accelerating and decelerating in microgravity. I’m the thruster. Electricity requires me to create friction, and canceling it out requires me to produce an opposing charge. I’m not destroying energy; I’m just… moving it around. Changing its form.”

  His brows narrowed. “An opposing friction charge? You’re thinking in terms of classical physics, but your power is metaphysical.”

  I shrugged, utterly out of my depth. “That’s how I have to look at it to make it work. My brain provides the metaphor; my power handles the reality.”

  He nodded slowly, and then asked me the question I had been dreading since this whole conversation began, the one that separated parlor tricks from world-ending threats. “Exactly how small a particle can you affect?”

  I sighed, the weight of the answer pressing down on me. “Pretty damn small. Now, before I start lying to you so that you don’t have me locked in a vacuum-sealed coma for the rest of my natural life, how about you ask me different questions? Like how my reset works. That’s much less apocalyptic.”

  He nodded, accepting the deflection for now. “I assume you can record a current state, a molecular blueprint, and then reapply it to an existing structure. Is that close?”

  “Got it in one,” I said, relieved. “That’s how I can replicate things, too. Improving things is easy, as long as I know what a ‘better’ pattern looks like. I work on a tiny, microscopic section, and when that section is set how I want it, I spread the pattern around like a virus, and my power handles the rest."

  "I had to plumb the depths of the internet and JSTOR to find the molecular patterns for different ratings and blends of steel. Memorizing biological patterns takes frequent and extended contact—it’s like trying to download a library through a dial-up modem. I experimented millions of times to find the best crystalline patterns for my needs. I was just lucky that my power handled most of the grunt work, allowing me to run simulations hundreds of times per second on a tiny scale until I found the perfect set of combinations and alloys.”

  “Not that it helps much,” I finished bitterly. “Just that experimenting cost me half a year’s worth of energy reserves, only to find I couldn’t create anything bigger than a razor. You want a five-molecule-thick layer on already-decent widgeteer armor that can distribute the force of a tank shell? I can do it. You want me to turn a suit of medieval plate mail into case-hardened carbon steel that can do the same thing? Try a real Tinker. I’m a cheap knock-off.”

  “So again,” he pressed, relentless. “The energy. Kinetic energy. Where does it go if you put that piece of aluminum foil in front of a plane?”

  I glared at him, a spike of genuine fear and frustration lancing through me. “I don’t know. I am not a sick psychopath that would ever actually do something like that. I stick to stunts and property damage. The kind that’s pre-approved and insured.”

  He sighed, seeing my distress. “Okay, fair. Where do you think it would go? Theoretically.”

  I scratched my head, the physics of it making my brain itch. “I don’t know? Maybe it would convert directly into heat and radiation and just… vaporize the plane? Sometimes the friction from bullets hitting a concentrated air shield makes them melt before they even reach me. Maybe it just gets shunted into the Ether or the Q-brane or whatever dimensional garbage disposal most powers use. My power doesn’t use the Ether, though. It’s all me. So maybe… it goes into me? I don’t know. I’ve never been stupid enough to try.”

  He nodded slowly, a look of deep contemplation on his face.