As soon as Ian entered into the dark room, the door slid shut behind him, leaving him entirely in the dark. As far as he could tell, there was no light coming from anywhere. He had never been in a part of the ship that was this dark before, and he started to feel a little scared.
“Ian, can you hear me?” he heard the voice of Markus in front of him.
“Y-yes, I can,” Ian responded. “Where are you?”
“Step forward two steps,” Markus said, and Ian did as he was instructed. As he did so, he felt an icy cold breeze suddenly flowing past him; he started to shiver.
“Ian,” Markus continued, “what is about to happen will probably be unpleasant. It is a rite that all those who are chosen for the Shadows have to go through, and you are no exception. We have chosen you because we feel confident that you will be able to survive this, both mentally and physically. If, however, you fail to survive, we apologize for the error.”
Ian gulped. If he failed to survive? This wasn’t sounding good, and he began to sweat, despite the cold.
Suddenly, the room he was in changed from pitch darkness to being filled with a completely bright white light. The change was too fast for his eyes, and he had to shield them to adjust. As he did so, he noticed that the bright light seemed to have an intense heat to it, and that it filled the air with a strange weight. It became more difficult for him to breath, and he started gasping for air.
As he did, he felt himself being lifted in the air. His eyes had finally adjusted, and he looked down to see there was no ground beneath his feet at all, nor, when he looked up or to his side, any wall or ceiling. He seemed to be suspended in the middle of a bright white nothingness.
Panic began to overwhelm him, but he knew he had to get through this. He thought about the last time he felt such panic, a year ago during a spacewalking training outside the ship. He had become untethered, and started to float away into the dark void of deep space. His mind became overwhelmed with panic and fear of eminent death, but he managed to block out his emotions, and focus solely on how to recover, activating the emergency jet pack, changing his angle towards the ship, and propelling his way back. He knew he had to do the same now.
He took a deep breath and looked forward. Not seeing anything that he could do, he calmly stretched out his arms and legs, flexing his chest, arm, and leg muscles and attempting to maintain stability. As he did this, he could feel the warmth in the air seep into his body. His skin began to feel tingly all over, and his clothes started to disintegrate. Within a few seconds, he was left naked, and his hair was standing straight out, as if he was being electrocuted.
Instead of letting the strange feeling he was experiencing take control over him, he realized he had to be master over it. Ian started to focus, and he could feel a control over his skin that he never had felt before. It was as if he could control what was happening with the air around him. As he increased his focus, the electricity - or whatever it was - in the air suddenly began to flow at a much faster rate into his body, filling his organs with some sort of incredible power. As it flowed into him, the room started to dim again, and within ten seconds, he had absorbed all of the energy and the room was dark, save for Ian’s body, which was glowing like an X-Ray image.
Ian smiled. He had not only managed to deal with the light, he seemed to be able to control it. This feeling surging through his veins was like nothing he had ever experienced before. It was -- orgasmic, almost, maybe even better. He never wanted it to end.
As Ian was reveling in the ecstatic feeling, he heard Markus’s voice coming through again. “Fantastic, Ian. You have survived the rite, and have absorbed the Shadows’ Pulse. Now you can choose what power you want to apply that to."
A dozen large spherical shapes suddenly appeared out of thin air around Ian, looking almost like bubbles. Each one had images inside of a faceless figure, varying from electricity shooting out of the figure's fingers, to it unleashing a barrage of lasers and bullets from a series of weapons, to the figure being able to hover and fly around the corridors of the ship at breathtaking speeds. Ian titled his head to the side as he looked at all of the options, unsure of what they meant exactly.
"These are the powers that the Shadows need currently and are able to bestow upon you," Markus continued. "Whatever you chose, you will have seemingly superhuman abilities with, but your power can only take you so far. You have to put the hard work into developing it into a weapon. So, what will you choose, my son?”
Ian thought for a moment. Power? Weapon? This seemed too good to be true. He thought for a moment, then finally decided on a bubble that showed...
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