Page 54 of Elemasters

Trying to weaponize her insecurities against her? Right after she’d spilled the beans to Chloe about every day feeling like a constant performance, just so people would see her the way she truly was, the garden puts her in a theater with a blank slate, clearly testing her ability to sculpt her reality when under pressure.

Well, if the garden thought this was gonna break her, it had another thing coming.

She took a breath and drowned out the voices, feeling her body grow heavier and sturdier as her powers flared to life. Yellow light coursed through her veins and she focused on the marble; every tight, dense molecule suddenly part of her awareness.

With a powerful heave, cracks splintered through the slab; spiderwebbing across the smooth surface as pieces fell away. As she sculpted the stone with her mind, she kept her thoughts locked on the image in her head; an image of herself, standing strong, holding the world on her shoulders. The thing she’d been doing with ease since she was 12 years old.

The thing she’d do for the rest of her life.

As the figure began to take shape, the voices from the crowd intensified. Bailey still couldn’t understand their words, but their snickers and hushed whispers said it all.

She barely noticed. Her focus was rock-solid.

The marble continued to form to her will, and in no time flat, the sculpture was complete. It turned out even better than she’d expected; it looked like Atlas if he shopped at Forever 21, and that was kind of the sickest thing in the world.

Bailey smiled wide, expecting the audience’s voices to fade out, or at least quiet down a bit…

But they only grew louder. More aggressive. The strange foreign whispers gnawing at her ears now, grinding into her brain.

The marble cracked and splintered, threatening to send her immaculate creation tumbling down in front of this assembly of faceless buffoons.

Oh… so that was the game, huh? Fine, she could play along.

With another surge of power, Bailey locked the statue in place; sealing the cracks by sheer force of will and maintaining the structure. The voices kept getting louder and louder. More violent and vicious. And with every increasing decibel, a new fissure formed in the marble, forcing Bailey to exert even more effort just to hold it together.

As she pushed harder, she noticed that her feet were like… gone? No, dummy, they weren’t gone. They were just, numb? At the risk of losing her focus, she glanced down at her shoes… and they were rapidly being overtaken by stone. Stone that was currently creeping up her body, threatening to swallow her whole and render her just as immobile as the statue.

She gasped in horror, and that mere momentary break in concentration resulted in her statue’s arm crumbling and smashing to the floor.

“Shit!” she immediately locked her eyes back on the sculpture, throwing her arms out in front of her and pushing her power to its absolute limit to force the thing to stay in one piece.

She pushed harder. The statue kept cracking. The voices got louder. The stone was now up to her waist.

“Okay, okay! I get it!” she called out, to no one in particular, “if I keep going like this, I’m gonna end up just like the statue! Subtlety is not your strong suit! I just… I just don’t know what else to do! What, am I supposed to just let everyone write their own story about me? Am I supposed to just let the people I care about fall apart, myself included? If I can stop that from happening, then I have to stop it. Great power and responsibility! You know? Spider-Man! God, Dustin’s gonna get a kick out of that one,”

The unintelligible shadow voices kept rising, so loud now that they were drowning out Bailey’s thoughts. At this point, she couldn’t even move her arms; the creeping stone had rendered them completely immobile.

“Bailey!”

Her eyes widened.

Was that… recognizable human speech?

“Bailey! Just let it go!”

There it was again, clearer this time. Dustin’s voice, soft and sweet as cotton candy, even when he was stressed to Hell and back. But how was she hearing him right now?

“Wait… can she hear you? I think she can! Bailey, remember what I told you in the mall! You are who you are regardless of what anyone thinks, you don’t have to try so hard to hold up the version you want everyone to believe in!”

Chloe’s words were as clear as a bell, ringing through the incoherent nonsense with ease.

“They’re right! You’ve kept us working as a unit since day one just by being you, not by killing yourself with the effort!” James chimed in.

“I’m not usually into the whole ‘Power of Friendship’ bullshit, but… they’re right Bails. You’re not sturdy because you try, you’re sturdy because you’re YOU. You don’t gotta play Point Guard all the time. The point of a team is to carry the load together,”

Bailey started sniffling at Chris’s words; both from how sincere they were, and how hypocritical it was coming from him. But then again, as long as she’d known him, he’d never been one to take his own advice.

Could they be right though? Could she just… let it crumble? Trust that if she stopped holding it up, that it wouldn’t fall apart? That she wouldn’t fall apart?