"So, you remember all of those lessons about how elemental powers were made?" Akuma said staring at Ember.
"Yeah," Ember replied, nodding. "It was a set of genetics testing experiments for the President of the United States of America that produced a disease that would start to mutate the human body to give them the abilities that we now find commonplace."
"Yup," Akuma said with a sign. "Nice job quoting your textbook. Also, your school needs to get newer textbooks." He reached into thin air and pulled out a large black book, which colorized into a familiar textbook. "Smoulder, Claire. 256, PFA, or Post First Apocalypse. Don't you just love how they had to clarify that? They even put the actual date, 2409 AD." He sighed. "Too bad that she got hit by an airstrike in 267."
Ember glared at him. "Something tells me you're responsible for that airstrike?"
Akuma barked a laugh again but started coughing after. He cleared his throat and said, "Whatever you want to believe. Anyway, there were two sets of tests. One right before the first apocalypse, and one a hundred years before." he paused and cleared his throat. "I was a part of the first set, which originally was a test to create a person strong enough to control all the elements, through a force named Remnant, a sort of liquid energy that has the ability to give you superhuman abilities. Everyone technically had a small amount of Remnant, and most of it was concentrated in your brain cells, until they figured out a way to extract Remnant from people and inject it into other people. The first person who was injected with Remnant was, for lack of a better phrasing, absorbed by it. He became that thing you saw, Remnant. He's still out there somewhere, just sitting as a skeleton out in the middle of a destroyed government facility."
"Destroyed?" Ember said, tilting his head like a confused puppy.
"The process of fusing Remnant to an unfamiliar body is dangerous even in small amounts." Akuma explained. "You've heard of the Tsar Bomba?"
Ember nodded. It was a large nuclear bomb from the 20th century that was, at that point, the most destructive device known to mankind.
"The explosive force from incorrectly binding 5 cups of remnant to a human is equivalent to the force created by ten Tsar Bombas." He snickered. "A single drop hitting the ground is stronger than a C4. So you can imagine what would happen if the government tried to pump a total of five gallons of the stuff into a person."
Ember thought for a minute. "How much force did one Tsar Bomba explode with?"
"About 50 Megatons of TNT. Why?"
"So 5 cups hitting the ground would be about 250 Megatons of TNT, right?"
"Yes," Akuma said, looking slightly frightened. "Sounds about right."
"There are 16 cups in a gallon, so 80 in 5 gallons."
"What are you getting to?" Akuma said, standing slowly.
"So the explosive force from 5 gallons of Remnant is the equivalent of 4000 Megatons of TNT exploding, right?"
"Yep," Akuma said, nodding. "Theoretically powerful enough to destroy the entire continent of North America."
"And that's what they pumped into you?"
"Nope," Akuma shook his head. "That's what they pumped into the guy, the one who became Remnant. They pumped about twenty times that much into me."
"And that's why you're immortal?" Ember said, looking more concerned than Akuma did when he was going on that tangent about the power of Remnant.
"Partially. And I'm not entirely immortal," Akuma said. "I just have the lifespan of the people that I have the Remnant of. So if I only got the Remnant from twenty people, I'd only live a total of twenty-one lifespans, because of theirs and my own. Because a single person only has about a teaspoon of Remnant that can be safely removed, a single cup requires 48 people, a single gallon requires 768 people, so the 100 gallons was essentially the lives of 76,800 people. So I'm able to live for a total of 76,801 lives, or around 7,680,100 years."
"And how old are you right now?" Ember said, knowing he was stepping into dangerous territory.
Akuma chuckled. "As you said earlier when you screeched, I'm 4,656 years old, so I have around 7,675,444 years left to live before I die."
"Unless you die unnaturally," Ember said. "Like a gun or a bullet."
"Not gonna happen," Akuma said with his signature bark-laugh. "Not only does Remnant boost your life expectancy, it also increases your muscle density cap. Like how dense your muscles can be at the top. It's really confusing, but all I know is that my muscles are so dense that you can shoot a machine gun at my abs and they will all bounce off."
Silence fell like a needle. In fact, you could probably hear that needle drop.
"Is that sarcasm?" Ember said, squinting slightly.
"Do you even know what sarcasm is?" Akuma said, cracking a smile.
Ember glared at Akuma, who burst out laughing.
"It's not sarcasm. It's actually a fact," Akuma said through his giggles. "It's been proven, and we should probably keep going."
Ember rolled his eyes as Akuma started violently coughing through his laughter.
"Anyway," Akuma said, clearing his throat. "I first discovered my connection to the Remnant person in a dream. He appeared to me like how you saw him, and he began to explain that I was destined to live forever. He taught me how to use my powers, and he gave me this." He pulled another book out of the air, this one encased in a black leather binding, one that creaked and protested opening as Akuma pried it open and handed it to Ember.
Ember glanced down at the book, and saw it was full of pictures of a young man. One with dirty blonde hair and light gray eyes, one with a smile that could reflect the sun. There were pictures of the boy at a dance. The boy at his graduation. The boy and a girl. The boy proposing to the girl. The wedding. The boy and the girl, now a man and a woman, holding their baby. Ember turned the page.
Then, the man's mugshot stared up at him, his eyes a dark gray and his hair a gray not different from what his eyes were on the prior page. A picture of a courtroom. A picture of a room surrounded by iron bars. Then several pages of a cinderblock room with barred windows and fluorescent bulbs, each picture from a different angle, sometimes with a different person here and there, all of them looking scared to death.
A scrap of paper in the corner said in neat cursive "subject to fits of insanity if camera is removed from possession. Do not, I repeat, do NOT remove the camera from the care of" and then it cut off. Then more pictures, but in the middle of them all was one of an armored vehicle, and it seemed like the person holding the camera was being forced into it.
Ember turned the page, revealing pictures of five-star gourmet dining halls, lush bedrooms, humongous gyms, and ginormous libraries, all filled with the most beautiful books ever seen.
Some pictures showed the man, now well cleaned up and looking extremely fit. His previously scraggly gray hair now jet black and in a short-cut military-style haircut. The only thing that was out-of-ordinary was that the irises of his eyes were the same jet black as his hair. But his pupils were a vibrant white, one that was shocking enough to make Ember shriek in surprise.
"What's wrong with his eyes?" Ember said, still shuddering.
"They had begun the treatment," Akuma said. "That same liquid that I injected into myself, that's what they were using." He paused. "Just keep looking."
Ember kept looking. More pictures of the gorgeous rooms, but then the pictures cut off. Ember flipped several blank pages, and he could tell there was one final picture at the end, past all the yellowed and translucent pages.
On the last page, a final picture was shown through a cracked lens, of the man lying on a metal sheet, his entire body strapped down entirely to the table, several tubes with a glowing fluid Ember recognized as Remnant.
"Is this you?" Ember said as he slowly shut the book. "Is this what you went through?"
Akuma nodded. "I grew up fascinated with cameras. My father bought me one when I was only ten years old, a polaroid. I had just gotten a job recently and he thought I deserved a reward. One that I would have to use the money to sustain, of course. But because I was so good at what I did for work, it wasn't very difficult to have enough money for film. It had only occurred to me when I was about fifteen to buy an album to put the photos in, and only the really good ones. The corner store was selling large ones for the equivalent of five day's pay for me, so I worked extremely hard and earned it in three. The album was still crisp when I put the first picture in, I had perfected taking pictures of myself without someone else hitting the button, through a small timed pressure release system that would eject a small piece of plastic to press the button exactly five seconds after I set the pressure inside. It was a tiny invention when I couldn't afford a camera with a timer."
Ember's jaw dropped. "I don't believe it."
Akuma snickered. "Which part? The fact that I was a government experiment or the fact that I was a kid once?"
"Both," Ember said with a shrug. "I've barely known you for an hour and already I know your entire life's story."
"Except you don't," Akuma said, standing up, his face stone cold and hard as a, well, rock. He held out his hand and a black fluid formed on his palm before it converged, the center spiking upward and forming a sphere of the rippling fluid as it lifted off his hand. It floated there for a second before it began to grow and stretch into a large figure, twisting and molding itself into a torso, two arms, two legs, and a head.
The fluid hit the ground, now appearing both solid and fluid at the same time. It just stood there as Ember looked at it, slightly confused.
"Name a person," Akuma said with no expression on his face or in his voice, making Ember turn his head toward him. "A person you desperately want to see, but someone not blood related to you."
Ember didn't question it, and said, "Flicker. My girlfriend. She's probably scared to death."
Akuma said nothing, only nodded and stepped toward Ember, reaching out to grab his face.
Ember began to scream as a blinding pain seared through his entire body, running through his veins like poison, burning as it made its rounds throughout his body.
Akuma finally released Ember's face, and Ember crumbled to the ground, still conscious, but unable to move his body.
He watched helplessly as Akuma stepped up to the humanoid fluid mass and, using the same hand he grabbed Ember's face with, plunged his hand into the face of the mass.
The mass began to morph, taking on a shape similar to a feminine silhouette, before Akuma began to draw his hand out. When his hand had completely left the mass, colors began to coat the black figure, reds and oranges in the torso and legs, stark red in the hair, and olive skin in the hands, neck, and face.
The eyes of the figure blinked open, and there stood Flicker, confused and glancing around nervously at her surroundings.
"And now you see," Akuma said, "My power is-" He was stopped short when Flicker stepped forward and punched him square in the face, several snapping bones perfectly audible.
She cried out as she clutched her obviously broken hand and screamed at Akuma, "Where the hell is Ember?"
Akuma sighed and snapped, and Ember found he was able to move again. He stood and almost immediately, Flicker whirled around, her unbroken hand ready to punch, until she saw Ember.
Her face went through fifteen different emotions in a split second, from rage to surprise to confusion to surprise again, and finally landing on pure unfiltered joy. She practically leapt at Ember, wrapping her arms around his neck as she cried into his shoulder and wailed several thousand things about how much she missed him and that he scared her half to death.
Ember sighed as her body was pressed against his, her tears drenching the shoulder of his shirt. Her blubbering had just turned into joyful sobs, accompanied here and there by hiccups. His hand was laid gently on her back, supporting her as she cried her heart out onto him.
Eventually, she fell silent and was just hugging him, her breath slow and ragged from the time she was crying.
"I missed you so much," she finally said, her voice quiet, sore, and as ragged as her breathing.
"I missed you too," Ember said, his voice as soft as Flicker's was. "But now we don't have to miss each other. We're here."
"Unless the police find this place," Akuma blurted out, his voice obnoxiously loud in the almost silence.
"What do you mean?" Ember said, suddenly scared and quickly turning away from Flicker and toward Akuma. "Is this building, are we not hidden?"
Akuma shrugged and said, "It's not invisible, if that's what you're asking."
"If it's not invisible," Ember said, glaring at Akuma, "Then where are we?"
"That's easy," Akuma said with a smile. "We're in the underground city of Trigo."