Pain. All Eric experienced was pain. If there had been less pain, maybe he would have begged for some kind of release. Maybe he would have hoped to die, for the pain to end one way or another. But every inch of his brain was busy, and it was busy with pain. It seared through every single one of his nerve endings, it seared his vision, it seared his mind and it seared his very soul.
Heat beyond belief. Then cold. The shock of it took away his breath and briefly his mind with it, like falling through the ice, his mind unable to deal with the immense changes on such short notice. But it soothed, even as it hurt. Slowly, thoughts started to form again, rising from the burnt wreckage.
Where was he? What had happened? The last thing he remembered was an explosion and the sensation of falling. Then the pain had taken everything. Now he felt like he was adrift in an endless ocean. Deep and dark, terrifying but also soothing in a way. It was cool, and he was happy to let the currents gently swim around him.
It was strange, the way the pain had slowly slipped away. His skin tingled in that way that a fresh scab sometimes does, the kind you want to pick at even though you know you shouldn’t. He looked around him. The darkness seemed to move slightly, like he was drifting further along in the ocean. Deeper, maybe? He looked up, expecting to see a sun or moon above him. A surface. There wasn’t anything, of course.
He realized he was dreaming. Well, dreaming or dead. But death, Eric figured, shouldn’t feel like your leg had fallen asleep, right? It was supposed to be pretty dang final, and ‘static-y itchiness’ was not how he would have imagined that. He dreaded waking up. If he woke up, the pain would be back, he realized. He’d passed out in a burning building. Maybe he was dying. That might be why he wasn’t feeling pain anymore.
Something pressed on his chest. He looked down, and realized he wasn’t so much naked as he was barely a person. Like an idea of a person. Nothing that could identify him as himself. In the middle of his chest was a fading handprint, glowing faintly red. It looked a bit like cooling metal. That was strange too. Weren’t you supposed to feel powerful when you were aware you were dreaming?
Eric figured he should try to wake up. Even if he didn’t have long, he didn’t want to just give up. No matter how much it hurt, he had to try to say goodbye to Tony and Serena. To his mom. He couldn’t let go, not yet. He needed to tell them how much they meant to him. Would they already be there? Would his mom be standing over him, worried? Would Tony be trying to wake him up? Would Serena say something funny to pretend she wasn’t trying not to break down? He didn’t want to see his mom cry, but he had to know. He tried to swim up for a second, before realizing that ‘up’ was not any more awake than ‘down’ was.
So instead he opened his eyes, and gulped down cool, fresh air. Contrary to his expectations, Anthony, Serena and his mother were nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was someone wearing a hoodie and a mask that looked… off. To his horror, Eric realized that, halfway down the person’s face, their skin just neatly transitioned into a mask, like it was fused together. He wasn’t even aware of the yellow, catlike eyes for a second.
“Wheahg!?” he said. He tried to scramble backwards, away from whatever creature this was. Was he still dreaming? Was this a proper nightmare? A fever dream, maybe? He only managed to move a few feet when he collapsed again. His arms and legs felt unusually weak, and the tingling was a lot worse now. His entire body felt sore.
“Hey!” the creature said. The voice was distinctly feminine. She held up her arms. “Don’t panic! Rue, why is he panicking?” She turned to another person, someone Eric hadn’t even noticed. The person that had been addressed as Rue looked strangely normal by comparison, wearing baggy jeans, a tank top covered in oil and grease, and a varsity jacket.
She scrunched up her nose. “You look disgusting. Your clothes are melting into your skin,” Rue said like she was giving fashion advice.
“Oh, shoot,” the other person said. “Penny’s having issues keeping everything together.” She stood up, and kept standing up. It was like someone grabbed the top of her head and pulled her like taffy. Suddenly, she was seven feet tall, and her skin and clothes melted away into a black-purple-ish goop. The only part of her face that remained somewhat recognizable were a pair of yellow, catlike eyes. “This will have to do,” Penumbra said. The creature’s voice was strange. It echoed, like there were several voices speaking at once, some normal and some like steel being raked across wet pebbles. “We’ll heal when we don’t have…” they looked at Eric, “an audience. How are you feeling, kiddo?”
“Y—you’re Penumbra,” Eric stammered. His voice croaked, his throat was sore. He reached up to touch it. “It hurts,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, that’s to be expected. You had to regrow a lot of your, uh, everything,” Penumbra said as they walked closer, kneeling in front of him. “Sorry for the scare earlier, looking presentable is hard when you’ve just been in a fire. Speaking of which.” They stood up and looked over the edge of the building. “Looks like the fire department has things under control.” Eric felt their yellow eyes on him again. “That was very brave,” they said, “and very stupid. Leave life-saving to the heroes, alright?”
Eric nodded and thought of his dad. “The, uh, the lady? Did she make it out?”
Penumbra nodded. “She’s a little banged up, but she’ll be fine. You saved her life.”
There was a small part of his mind, in the back of his head, that was proud of Eric. It told him that his dad might have been, too. Sure, he’d almost died and his mom was going to give him hell for it, but the important part was that neither of them were dead. Although… he looked at his hands. They looked a deep red, like he was recovering from burns, but not like he’d just fallen through a burning building. His clothes were ruined, however. “Why am I alive?” he asked.
“We did what we could,” Penumbra said cryptically. “And I can’t promise there won’t be any side-effects. We’ll be checking up on you, Eric McCoy.”
“H—how do you know my name?” he asked as he tried to stand up. His legs weren’t cooperating. Penumbra, a lot more imposing up close than it had been on the blurry pictures on the internet, did something truly horrendous. They smiled. They hadn’t had a mouth before, so a thin line appeared where the mouth should, and then the face split in half, revealing far more teeth than any living thing should have. They tossed something in his lap.
“Managed to save your wallet,” Penumbra said. They caught his look. “In case you didn’t make it. But it looks like you’re going to pull through. You’re looking less pink by the minute.” They turned to Rue. “Is he healing faster than we are?”
“Looks like it,” she said. “Whatever you did, it worked better than expected.”
“Um,” Eric said, “what did you do?” Penumbra and Rue both looked at him, and then back at each other. They seemed to have a wordless conversation that seemed to involve a lot of shrugs and eye-rolls.
“Might as well tell you,” Penumbra said. “Do you know what a symbiote is?”
“A creature that has a positive relationship with its host, right? Like a benign parasite?”
“Not a parasite!” Penumbra hissed with a voice like creaking glass. They coughed. “Sorry. It’s a bit of a sore point. Anyway, as you figured out, I’m Penumbra. Well… We’re Penumbra.” Eric looked at Rue, but she shook her head.
“Not me. This isn’t a “the team behind the superhero” type thing,” Rue said. “In fact… call me when you wanna talk about your project. I have work to do.” She jumped off the roof just like that, leaving a stunned Eric. He looked at Penumbra in confusion;
Penumbra shrank again, turned back into the short-ish woman with an undercut and a leather jacket, without the unsettling face mask this time. She was pretty, in a very androgynous way. “My name is Maxine,” she said and held out her hand. “You can call me Max.” Eric took it and she pulled him to his feet. She was stronger than she looked. “I’m bonded to a symbiote named Penny-slash-Penumbra.” Suddenly, her head was covered in the purple goop again. The voice that came out of her mouth was the unsettling one Eric had heard before.
“Hi,” the mask said, “I’m Penny.” The creature retreated, leaving Max with a sheepish smile and a little shrug.
“Together, we’re the superhero Penumbra,” Maxine explained. “Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, ‘why is she telling me all this,’ and the answer is… not easy.” She put a hand on his chest. “We put a very small extension of Penny into you. Think of it as… super-efficient white blood cells. It’s not really sentient, so it’s just putting you back together as best it can.”
Eric touched his chest. There was an alien inside of him. Why did that not bother him? He’d seen Alien plenty of times, so the thought of there being some kind of creature inside of him, even if it was benign and not sentient, was horrifying. “What now?” he asked. “Will something bad happen? Am I going to go zombie some time soon?”
Max shook her head. “Shouldn’t do,” she said. “Penny has informed me that it is essentially an extension of themself working on auto-pilot. Penny’s purpose is its purpose.”
“What is that, then?” Eric asked. “And if it’s a symbiote, what does it get out of the relationship?”
Max smirked. “Penny exists to help heal. Physically and… otherwise. And they thrive on strong emotions. As long as you feel feelings, that thing inside you won’t need anything for a good while. But like we said, we’ll check up on you regularly. For all we know, you’ll evacuate it through the normal way in a few days.”
“Oh,” Eric said. “Hum.” He took a step forward to the edge of the building and collapsed again. His legs had given out. “I don’t think I’m strong enough to get down on my own,” he mumbled. Maxine nodded, then stood up straight, and they were Penumbra again.
“Let’s get you down there,” they said. Picking up Eric with one hand under his knees and one behind his back, they jumped off the roof before he could protest. He had never been put in a bridal carry like that before (not even by Anthony) and he was too stunned to tell them to stop. After a brief moment of fear, exhilaration and weightlessness, Penumbra landed smoothly on the ground next to a fire truck at the front of the police station.
He heard several familiar voices. His mom, Serena and Tony all sprinted past the first-responders trying to hold them back, and he was barely out of Penumbra’s arms when three new pairs wrapped themselves around him.
His mom kissed him on the cheek over and over again, her face wet with tears of anxiety. “You’re safe,” she said, over and over again. “You’re safe, my baby. You’re safe.” Serena and Tony both mumbled something, but Eric had trouble making out their words. He could figure it out through context clues. They were glad he was alive.
“You should be proud, ma’am,” Penumbra said. “Your son saved someone’s life today.” His mom and friends pulled away from him and looked at him in shock and surprise. “He’s a hero.”
Elamimax A little on the nose, but it's a superhero story, what did you expect?
Anyway, this story is already 32 chapters long on my Patreon, and if you wanna just read like a full novel's worth of chapters real quick , consider going over there to get all of those and a bunch of other stories for very little, and it means a lot to me. Anyway, that's all from me today!
Pain. All Eric experienced was pain. If there had been less pain, maybe he would have begged for some kind of release. Maybe he would have hoped to die, for the pain to end one way or another. But every inch of his brain was busy, and it was busy with pain. It seared through every single one of his nerve endings, it seared his vision, it seared his mind and it seared his very soul.
Heat beyond belief. Then cold. The shock of it took away his breath and briefly his mind with it, like falling through the ice, his mind unable to deal with the immense changes on such short notice. But it soothed, even as it hurt. Slowly, thoughts started to form again, rising from the burnt wreckage.
Where was he? What had happened? The last thing he remembered was an explosion and the sensation of falling. Then the pain had taken everything. Now he felt like he was adrift in an endless ocean. Deep and dark, terrifying but also soothing in a way. It was cool, and he was happy to let the currents gently swim around him.
It was strange, the way the pain had slowly slipped away. His skin tingled in that way that a fresh scab sometimes does, the kind you want to pick at even though you know you shouldn’t. He looked around him. The darkness seemed to move slightly, like he was drifting further along in the ocean. Deeper, maybe? He looked up, expecting to see a sun or moon above him. A surface. There wasn’t anything, of course.
He realized he was dreaming. Well, dreaming or dead. But death, Eric figured, shouldn’t feel like your leg had fallen asleep, right? It was supposed to be pretty dang final, and ‘static-y itchiness’ was not how he would have imagined that. He dreaded waking up. If he woke up, the pain would be back, he realized. He’d passed out in a burning building. Maybe he was dying. That might be why he wasn’t feeling pain anymore.
Something pressed on his chest. He looked down, and realized he wasn’t so much naked as he was barely a person. Like an idea of a person. Nothing that could identify him as himself. In the middle of his chest was a fading handprint, glowing faintly red. It looked a bit like cooling metal. That was strange too. Weren’t you supposed to feel powerful when you were aware you were dreaming?
Eric figured he should try to wake up. Even if he didn’t have long, he didn’t want to just give up. No matter how much it hurt, he had to try to say goodbye to Tony and Serena. To his mom. He couldn’t let go, not yet. He needed to tell them how much they meant to him. Would they already be there? Would his mom be standing over him, worried? Would Tony be trying to wake him up? Would Serena say something funny to pretend she wasn’t trying not to break down? He didn’t want to see his mom cry, but he had to know. He tried to swim up for a second, before realizing that ‘up’ was not any more awake than ‘down’ was.
So instead he opened his eyes, and gulped down cool, fresh air. Contrary to his expectations, Anthony, Serena and his mother were nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was someone wearing a hoodie and a mask that looked… off. To his horror, Eric realized that, halfway down the person’s face, their skin just neatly transitioned into a mask, like it was fused together. He wasn’t even aware of the yellow, catlike eyes for a second.
“Wheahg!?” he said. He tried to scramble backwards, away from whatever creature this was. Was he still dreaming? Was this a proper nightmare? A fever dream, maybe? He only managed to move a few feet when he collapsed again. His arms and legs felt unusually weak, and the tingling was a lot worse now. His entire body felt sore.
“Hey!” the creature said. The voice was distinctly feminine. She held up her arms. “Don’t panic! Rue, why is he panicking?” She turned to another person, someone Eric hadn’t even noticed. The person that had been addressed as Rue looked strangely normal by comparison, wearing baggy jeans, a tank top covered in oil and grease, and a varsity jacket.
She scrunched up her nose. “You look disgusting. Your clothes are melting into your skin,” Rue said like she was giving fashion advice.
“Oh, shoot,” the other person said. “Penny’s having issues keeping everything together.” She stood up, and kept standing up. It was like someone grabbed the top of her head and pulled her like taffy. Suddenly, she was seven feet tall, and her skin and clothes melted away into a black-purple-ish goop. The only part of her face that remained somewhat recognizable were a pair of yellow, catlike eyes. “This will have to do,” Penumbra said. The creature’s voice was strange. It echoed, like there were several voices speaking at once, some normal and some like steel being raked across wet pebbles. “We’ll heal when we don’t have…” they looked at Eric, “an audience. How are you feeling, kiddo?”
“Y—you’re Penumbra,” Eric stammered. His voice croaked, his throat was sore. He reached up to touch it. “It hurts,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, that’s to be expected. You had to regrow a lot of your, uh, everything,” Penumbra said as they walked closer, kneeling in front of him. “Sorry for the scare earlier, looking presentable is hard when you’ve just been in a fire. Speaking of which.” They stood up and looked over the edge of the building. “Looks like the fire department has things under control.” Eric felt their yellow eyes on him again. “That was very brave,” they said, “and very stupid. Leave life-saving to the heroes, alright?”
Eric nodded and thought of his dad. “The, uh, the lady? Did she make it out?”
Penumbra nodded. “She’s a little banged up, but she’ll be fine. You saved her life.”
There was a small part of his mind, in the back of his head, that was proud of Eric. It told him that his dad might have been, too. Sure, he’d almost died and his mom was going to give him hell for it, but the important part was that neither of them were dead. Although… he looked at his hands. They looked a deep red, like he was recovering from burns, but not like he’d just fallen through a burning building. His clothes were ruined, however. “Why am I alive?” he asked.
“We did what we could,” Penumbra said cryptically. “And I can’t promise there won’t be any side-effects. We’ll be checking up on you, Eric McCoy.”
“H—how do you know my name?” he asked as he tried to stand up. His legs weren’t cooperating. Penumbra, a lot more imposing up close than it had been on the blurry pictures on the internet, did something truly horrendous. They smiled. They hadn’t had a mouth before, so a thin line appeared where the mouth should, and then the face split in half, revealing far more teeth than any living thing should have. They tossed something in his lap.
“Managed to save your wallet,” Penumbra said. They caught his look. “In case you didn’t make it. But it looks like you’re going to pull through. You’re looking less pink by the minute.” They turned to Rue. “Is he healing faster than we are?”
“Looks like it,” she said. “Whatever you did, it worked better than expected.”
“Um,” Eric said, “what did you do?” Penumbra and Rue both looked at him, and then back at each other. They seemed to have a wordless conversation that seemed to involve a lot of shrugs and eye-rolls.
“Might as well tell you,” Penumbra said. “Do you know what a symbiote is?”
“A creature that has a positive relationship with its host, right? Like a benign parasite?”
“Not a parasite!” Penumbra hissed with a voice like creaking glass. They coughed. “Sorry. It’s a bit of a sore point. Anyway, as you figured out, I’m Penumbra. Well… We’re Penumbra.” Eric looked at Rue, but she shook her head.
“Not me. This isn’t a “the team behind the superhero” type thing,” Rue said. “In fact… call me when you wanna talk about your project. I have work to do.” She jumped off the roof just like that, leaving a stunned Eric. He looked at Penumbra in confusion;
Penumbra shrank again, turned back into the short-ish woman with an undercut and a leather jacket, without the unsettling face mask this time. She was pretty, in a very androgynous way. “My name is Maxine,” she said and held out her hand. “You can call me Max.” Eric took it and she pulled him to his feet. She was stronger than she looked. “I’m bonded to a symbiote named Penny-slash-Penumbra.” Suddenly, her head was covered in the purple goop again. The voice that came out of her mouth was the unsettling one Eric had heard before.
“Hi,” the mask said, “I’m Penny.” The creature retreated, leaving Max with a sheepish smile and a little shrug.
“Together, we’re the superhero Penumbra,” Maxine explained. “Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, ‘why is she telling me all this,’ and the answer is… not easy.” She put a hand on his chest. “We put a very small extension of Penny into you. Think of it as… super-efficient white blood cells. It’s not really sentient, so it’s just putting you back together as best it can.”
Eric touched his chest. There was an alien inside of him. Why did that not bother him? He’d seen Alien plenty of times, so the thought of there being some kind of creature inside of him, even if it was benign and not sentient, was horrifying. “What now?” he asked. “Will something bad happen? Am I going to go zombie some time soon?”
Max shook her head. “Shouldn’t do,” she said. “Penny has informed me that it is essentially an extension of themself working on auto-pilot. Penny’s purpose is its purpose.”
“What is that, then?” Eric asked. “And if it’s a symbiote, what does it get out of the relationship?”
Max smirked. “Penny exists to help heal. Physically and… otherwise. And they thrive on strong emotions. As long as you feel feelings, that thing inside you won’t need anything for a good while. But like we said, we’ll check up on you regularly. For all we know, you’ll evacuate it through the normal way in a few days.”
“Oh,” Eric said. “Hum.” He took a step forward to the edge of the building and collapsed again. His legs had given out. “I don’t think I’m strong enough to get down on my own,” he mumbled. Maxine nodded, then stood up straight, and they were Penumbra again.
“Let’s get you down there,” they said. Picking up Eric with one hand under his knees and one behind his back, they jumped off the roof before he could protest. He had never been put in a bridal carry like that before (not even by Anthony) and he was too stunned to tell them to stop. After a brief moment of fear, exhilaration and weightlessness, Penumbra landed smoothly on the ground next to a fire truck at the front of the police station.
He heard several familiar voices. His mom, Serena and Tony all sprinted past the first-responders trying to hold them back, and he was barely out of Penumbra’s arms when three new pairs wrapped themselves around him.
His mom kissed him on the cheek over and over again, her face wet with tears of anxiety. “You’re safe,” she said, over and over again. “You’re safe, my baby. You’re safe.” Serena and Tony both mumbled something, but Eric had trouble making out their words. He could figure it out through context clues. They were glad he was alive.
“You should be proud, ma’am,” Penumbra said. “Your son saved someone’s life today.” His mom and friends pulled away from him and looked at him in shock and surprise. “He’s a hero.”
Elamimax A little on the nose, but it's a superhero story, what did you expect?
Anyway, this story is already 32 chapters long on my Patreon, and if you wanna just read like a full novel's worth of chapters real quick , consider going over there to get all of those and a bunch of other stories for very little, and it means a lot to me. Anyway, that's all from me today!
