[Alex's POV]
When Alex woke up, everything was black. For a second, he doubted the fact that he'd woken up at all. He couldn't see his surroundings. Wherever he was, must have been pitch black because he couldn't even see his hands.
"Where am I?" he asked as he tried to feel his way around, but couldn't feel anything. He couldn't even feel his hands, or his body. And Amon's powers were gone too. At this point, Alex was starting to panic.
"Thank God, you're alright!" he heard Otto sigh in relief.
"Otto?" he asked as he tried to pinpoint the direction the noise had come from, but he couldn't even figure out if he was standing up or lying down.
"Of course, the first person he calls out to is his girlfriend. Not the person who's been keeping watch by his side for the past two weeks," he heard his dad say. He sounded awfully jealous.
"Dad?" Alex asked in confusion. "But where are you? I can't see you at all! What the hell is happening?"
"Here, try this," a presence near him said. It was a comfortable and familiar presence. "Forget the way you used to see. Find a camera. Use them as your eyes. You unconsciously used the output system to speak already. You'll get the hang of it soon."
"Who are you?" Alex marvelled.
"That's Aurora. She's your mother, Alex," his dad said. "That's right, she's alive and saved you!"
This news would have been overwhelming, if Alex hadn't just now found his way to the camera feed.
"Wowa!" he exclaimed. "Now I see everything at once! Dad! I can see your back and your front at the same time! And… Is that Thomas in an astronaut suit? That's something you don't see every day."
Thomas snorted and waved sheepishly at one of the cameras. The next moment, Alex found a camera feed of his own body, lying motionless on a table covered with ice and steam oozing up all around him. He experimentally tried to move his hand, but the body that the camera showed didn't follow the motion.
"I'm not in my body anymore," he concluded and suddenly, everything snapped into place. He'd regained a sense of self and could see the system around him. That's when he saw her. The beautiful woman, with bright white hair and glowing blue eyes. She couldn't be called human. She had a ghostly appearance about her. Her floor-length hair waved behind her as if she was floating in water, yet it was impossible to say where her hair stopped and her body began. It all morphed together into a humanoid appearance.
"We need to talk," she said before Alex could ask if she was his mother.
"Ok?" Alex asked doubtfully as he watched the woman block all the output feeds.
"Am I in trouble?" he asked and only now noticed he had been speaking through an audio feed all along. Once she seemed convinced nobody would be able to listen in on their conversation, she turned to look at Alex.
"I am not your mother," she said. Her words hurt, but Alex said nothing. He suspected she was going to explain herself.
"We used to be childhood friends, back on Araboth," she said, continuously searching for words. "Araboth is the place were our kind, the Archaggelos live, very far away from here. It is a place of humanoid creatures with wings, and you were its prince."
At the word "prince" she seemed to remember that she was supposed to show him respect and kneeled with her head bowed low. A stab of pain registered in Alex's system. It would have been the equivalent of an aching heart if he'd been in his body. And because of that, he knew her story was true.
"Your people adored you. I adored you," Aurora continued. "Everyone thought you'd be the next king and I thought I'd be your queen."
She huffed a laugh and looked at her left pinky finger.
"I don't know how much of your Archaggelos side you've already discovered, but our kind can see fate's string. Unlike the earthlings, we don't have to search for our soulmate, because the string ties us together. There is someone for everyone. If we want to find our soulmate, we just have to follow the string of destiny. But the two of us were different. Our strings shot off of the planet, far beyond the reach that any of us could travel."
Then she wiggled her pinky finger, and Alex could feel it tug.
"Yet, our threads were connected," she said as she looked him straight in the eyes. She looked angry for some reason and it was starting to dawn on Alex that he might have broken her heart a long time ago.
"I've shown some very poor judgment," she said. "I've made a fool of myself. You never saw me like that. No. You had to fall in love with the one girl you weren't allowed to love. And when her mother found out, she was furious! She wrecked havoc on our planet and when you tried to appease her, she abducted you."
"Grace," Alex thought. He felt his appearance glitch and forcefully froze it. He didn't want Aurora to know how much her story affected him.
"I must say, at the time, I was glad to see you suffer. But I soon came to regret it. Without you, our world fell into ruin," she continued, her voice on the verge of breaking. "I did the only thing I could do… I followed the string that tied me to you in the hope to find you again some day. It was only when I met your father, thousands of years later, that I realised just how wrong I had really been. There really is only one soulmate for us, and without them, we are only half."
Then she looked up at him again, a determined expression visible on her face.
"I already regret my insolence, but please return to Araboth," she said. "Please don't punish the other Archaggelos for my mistakes. Please save them!"
Alex bit his lower lip.
"Aurora?" he asked and her expression changed to alert, like a dog hearing its master. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you create the body I'm currently using together with Mar?"
"More or less," she said, clearly wondering where he was going with this. "I needed a host that would be strong enough to contain your soul once I tied the string to it. So I took some of Mar's DNA and cloned it. Turns out that Archaggelos eggs are perfect incubators for human babies."
Alex cringed. He did NOT need to know that. He felt as if she'd explained how she and his dad usually had sex. Or wait, was that even possible? With both of them being different species? A violent shiver glided down his back as a hundred unwanted thoughts entered his head.
"What I meant," he said after shaking it off, "is that my string is tied to yours and dad's, right?"
She nodded.
"Then, could you please accept that you are my mother, at least until my human shell dies?" he asked as he took a step closer and crouched in front of her so that he could look at her on the same eye-level. Aurora frowned.
"I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but that might not be that long anymore," she said seriously as she pulled up the screen of his body again and placed a graph next to it. "Honestly, it's a miracle that your body has survived as long as it has."
"Yeah, you're right," Alex said and heaved a heavy sigh. "I hadn't anticipated that my powers would grow this much in such a short time. I'd hoped the new technology project would offer some relief, but it barely had. I need something big to invest my energy in, but I'm just not sure what that should be."
"Does the 'what' really matter?" Aurora asked seriously. "I think you're at the point where you just need to spend it on anything you can think of. Like, painting tree leafs pink instead of green, or add more stars to the sky. Not that you have to do those things specifically, but you get my point."
Yeah, Alex did get her point. And she'd given him a good idea too.
"That's actually not a bad idea," he mumbled and then said louder: "How do I get back to my body?"
She didn't answer for a long moment. Instead she looked down and pressed her lips together in a pout. She looked as if she wanted to complain, but thought better of it. If Alex hadn't been so clueless about his current whereabouts, he might not have noticed her reaction. She finally noticed that he was looking at her and gave him an apologetic smile.
"I'm glad I got to talk to you again after such a long time," she said sheepishly. Alex hugged her. It was the only thing he could think to do. He didn't even care if that meant there energy flows would get mixed up or whatever. She just looked so lonely when she'd said it, that he'd been afraid that she would vanish on the spot if he didn't.
"Oh mom," he mumbled into her hair. "We'll get to meet again. Don't you write me off just yet."
"Of course not," she said as she lovingly caressed his hair before her hand settle in an embrace on his shoulders and pressed a gentle kiss to the side of his head. "I take it you have a plan? How can I be of assistance?"
Alex chuckled and released her from the hug to look at her face. He got a feeling they used to get into trouble like this together when they were kids.
"It's actually REALLY easy," he said with a wide grin.