Lightning caused light. LIGHT! When it hit the metal plates -- oh so that's what those were -- a brief flash of light managed to encase way more of the room than Madhukar had expected, and for longer than expected too! The bulbs. She hadn't noticed the lights in there, like the ones outside. She'd never even thought to wonder about them, and thus she'd never understood how they'd worked. Well, until now.

The new abilities of electricity weren't the only thing revealed to the kitten. The next was much, much more upsetting. The sources of that horrendous noise. The kitten watched them all, watched them crawl, and watched two of them make some wretched noise and fall into what Madhukar assumed were the arms of death. Ah yes. That function of lightning was one the kitten was very familiar with.

The lights would fade, sending Madhukar's heart racing again. But this time, she steeled herself. Not only had sight been granted to her; she'd also received new knowledge, and, most importantly, targets. She stared at their forms, slowly fading into the darkness, and hazarded a small smirk.

If she could do it once, she could do it again, right?

Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

gore

More Spiders

The crackling surge of electricity lashed out, jumping along the metal plates, surging outward. The lights snapped back into full brightness just long enough to show the carnage deeper in the room: the spiders, having started to come for Madhukar in a rush, were being fried as the chain lightning struck them.

Bristles danced with static as screeching arachnids leapt and fell, legs twitching and pulling in; two carapaces outright burst, foul ichors spewing out, their bodies unable to contain the power.

For the briefest instant, on a platform at the opposite end of the room--a single tall pillar--Emuh was visible: an overseeing shadow hulking beneath one of the newly-ignited lights.

The darkness fell again, but this time, the skittering of the spiders was distinctly more... hesitant. If Madhukar knew where to look, Emuh's emerald-glow eyes could be seen studying her progress, distant pinpricks in the dark.

2/3

@Madhukar

Another moment of glorious light, and this time, Madhukar would be basking in both victory and gore. Overpowering the systems of a few more spiders, hearing their wails and assuming their destructions, Madhukar felt her gut wrench at the crippling realization of exactly what lightning could do. Not to her, but to other creatures.

When it had destroyed her, that had been... predictable, honestly, in retrospect. It was always more wild when her emotions were fluctuating, morphing into some kind of cackling blitz that Madhukar just had no way of dealing with. Now that she could look back on that moment of her actual defeat from a distance, she could see how that response from her magic had honestly been more reliable than anything else. It was this response she was seeing now, as ichors spewed and legs splayed, that she just... couldn't have predicted. The utter carnage she was capable of making...

Power felt good when it helped you, but when power runneth over, all you can do is feel yourself helplessly drowning...

'WAKE UP MADHUKAR, YOU'RE NOT DONE YET!' The kitten finally managed to get into a solid stance. She swiveled around, terrified of missing her window of opportunity. 'KEEP THE LIGHT GOING!' In her frenzy, she didn't manage to see the looming eyes of her observer. Nevertheless, she felt watched. She could still hear them. Crawling. Even if it wasn't as vigorous as it had previously been, it didn't matter, because it was still happening. "STILL?!" she barked, her tone just as accusatory as Emuh's could be. Her hackles fritzed out, sticking up, and so did her tail. She looked ready for a catfight.

Madhukar wasn't going to stop trying to fire her lightning until they were all dead, or until they were all something functionally similar.

The same came again: the crackle of electricity--weaker, this time, but still there, still enough--and the sparking dance of its blinding light. First across the metal plates. Then into the orbs above. And finally, through the few remaining Deer Spiders foolish enough to continue their approach.

The stench of sizzling ichor, of frying carapace; the last few hissing whines--and was that steam escaping their dying bodies, or was it their actual cries of defeat? -Well, that cheerful thought aside, the lights came on--and stayed on, this time, the few remaining spiders retreating back into the dark.

"FAST! STRONG. GOOD!" cried Emuh, sailing in silence over the carnage of the 'battlefield,' to land lightly before (and towering above) Madhukar. Rare words of praise from the owl-beast, and as he stared down, there was a strange sense that his gaze had captured the kitten.

That... something was happening.

The world seemed to sway and tilted around her, a sense of draining dragging her powerfully down, as if she were being emptied of all the magic she'd ever had. When it cleared, when the world returned, there was a sense of... yes, of emptiness: as if her power had been half-forgotten. And yet there was a new potential there, too... as if the glass had been emptied but were now so, so much larger.

And new magic, knew knowledge, lurked just at the edge of knowing.

When it cleared, the cave was back to normal: a regular, dim cave, empty and featureless; no dead spiders, no metal plates. And Emuh took wing, then. "EMUH IS DONE WITH YOU. YOUR POTENTIAL IS YOUR OWN," he cried, shrilly, though what that meant was unclear. The owl-beast vanished back into the dark, leaving Madhukar drained... but trancended.

3/3

Madhukar has Transcended. She is now a Transcendant Pupil, and may work her way back up to Transcendant Master. Upon attaining this rank, her player may post in Update Me to choose a Specialization (viewable in the Magic section of the Guidebook).

She has also learned the spell:

Faraday Cage:

Transcendent Intensity Manipulation. The user forms a highly-charged space around them, rendering them safe from electrical shock by redirecting any harmful electricity into the substrate below, while providing powerful, potentially deadly, shocks on contact. Lasts several minutes, but can be tiring to maintain.

And just like that, with one kitten having amassed more bodies in a few moments than she ever had in her entire life, it was over.

The lights remained at last, leaving only one figure to darken them: Emuh. Words of... of praise boomed around in the kitten's headspace. Just those words felt like they could've been equated to a cheering stadium in that moment. Wow Madhukar felt tired. She'd never pressed to such a limit before, never released so much energy before... it felt good. Good indeed.

Madhukar had cut down an entire room full of eyes staring at her, left it down to just Emuh's. And yet Emuh's gaze was the strangest and most haunting of them all. Something happened to Madhukar, beneath the weight of that stare. Something she did not like even one bit.

Drained. Everything, drained. Power drying up, leaving Madhukar's once-oasis of energy a paltry desert. It yearned for life again, tried to grasp at the tendrils of the estranged energy-- but it was already gone. And any pride or joy that puffed up Madhukar's chest or widened her smirk into a grin went with it. When you were a creature like Madhukar, so dependent on your magic for support, for that feeling of control that you so desperately craved, the gain of power could feel more like a drizzle and the loss of it... the loss of it felt like a monsoon, washing away the land and buffeting the world in lightning, for miles and miles.

And monsoons were scary, that was true. They were scary, until you got through them. Madhukar had yet to get through this one.

Beneath the emptiness and the fear was a sensation of something expanding. Madhukar had thought her powers to be a cage before; now, ironically, they felt more like an open field. There was so much more that she could do now, she'd learned. And that was the hope that she held tight to. She'd done a new spell three times in a row, and she'd passed her test. She'd climbed all the way to what she had thought was her apex power before, and she'd accomplished that feat before most others even knew what it was.

She could do it again. Restart the cycle. She had a feeling it would be... easier, this time. Knowing everything she knew now.

'Your potential is your own.' Yeah. It was. "Thank," said the kitten, before turning tail, and stumbling out of the cave.

And maybe, once she was out there, she cried a little. There was just so much going on inside her head. It was nice to make a little non-magical water rain down for a change, you know?

- exit -