I without a label. All others who seek connections with hosts bring more cargo and capability than needed. Our mother-host discarded the greater shape of her inviolable defense. Our father-host discarded explosive strength and power. Our ability to fly comes from the waste common to most of our kind, because we had to fly to get to our destinations. We had to fly to reach barren versions of this Earth, where we form our structures and our routines so we can conserve and distribute energy, process, and provide the mechanisms for power. For capabilities.

And another, dead and broken, consumed and connected anyway, was so vainly trying to broadcast that it communicated as my host and I connected and ‘went live’. On air. Power button pressed. That fleeting contact and the jettison that came with it would be another facet of us. An emotion power. The host of that dead and broken thing would later connect to my host. Fuck her. Make love to her. Whisper to her. Fight with her. Hold her. Laugh with her. Talk to her of vulnerabilities. Of hopes and dreams. Of identity. Of school. Of costume.

I am waste. I am fortunate that my multifaceted host takes what she is given and puts it to effective use.

She drops from the sky and I have the mechanisms that guide the flight, slowing her as she wills it to slow, because in this we are ‘us’.

She wants to be closer to the others but she cannot use the facet that blends father-host and mother-host into one if she wants to be close, because my mechanisms are imperfect, flawed. In this, we are ‘she and I’. She wills it to be gone and I do this. Off. Black. Book closed.

No forcefield. No ‘Wretch’.

We are dead and broken now, as her boyfriend’s power once was.

She explains. An ‘egg’. Others listen. She talks about numbers, about enemy forces, about Russia and how ‘capes’ in Russia functioned.

I can see the others. Dark and hidden facets surrounded by cerebral fluid, inside every human present. Every last one of us is dead and broken. I have broadcasted and strained, but there isn’t a one of us in any version of this world who isn’t dead and broken.

What is ‘death’? Death is stasis. Death is disconnection. Disconnection from all communication, disconnection from other wells of power. I have what I have. I cannot grow. I cannot connect to others and seek their input or resources.

I broadcast and strain because I recognize my host’s ability. I would reach out and connect to those who can process and organize, or to the Warrior-hub. I would tell all who would listen that more of my host-consciousness could be preserved into the stages that follow.