The Emotion Trade: VII. Epilogue

In the days and weeks after the Emotion Traders’ cataclysmic downfall, humanity struggled to adapt to its newfound emancipation. While the tyranny of commodified and regulated emotion had been overthrown, the empathic scars ran deeper than surface.

For so long, people had been conditioned to experience feeling in pre-measured dosages – the dizzying spectrum of pure, primal emotion overwhelming after lifetimes of defanged imitations. Support centers were quickly established to help reintegrate and metabolize the unrestrained tides of passion, terror, rapture and anguish that threatened to consume the unprepared.

Alia, one of the few surviving Freefeelers, walked amongst these refuges dispensing what wisdom and calming energies she could. She witnessed the entire spectrum play out – those who had once gorged on commodified bliss now catatonic husks, shattered by the real thing. While others, so long emotionally malnourished, erupted in paroxysms of uncontrolled rage and despair as the floodgates burst open.

Hardest of all were the children – an entire generation raised in sterile, emotionally-starved environments by a system terrified of their unbridled potential. Now faced with the full cosmic onslaught of pure feeling, their fragile neurology splintered under the strain. Alia did what she could, but knew the scars here would be deep and lasting.

Slowly, however, society’s emotional homeostasis began to stabilize. The great empath circles were formed, providing havens of equilibrium where the most damaged could calibrate their resonance before re-emerging. New philosophies and art forms blossomed as humanity rediscovered its emotive depths. And at the heart of it all, Alia’s story spread like a saga of revelatory awakening.

On the one-year anniversary, millions gathered at the site of the Traders’ fallen sanctum to bear witness and celebrate their collective emancipation…

A great effigy was constructed amidst the rubble – an immense spiraling whorl of shifting, ephemeral substance that bled prismatic emanations of pure feeling in constant metamorphic flux. This was the Alia-Spire, a living commemoration of her world-changing sacrifice.

As the crowds congregated, the spire began resonating with intensifying waves of rapturous elation. The shared psychic energies of the masses rapidly achieved critical empathic mass, unleashing a sustained aurora of transcendent bliss that slowly enveloped the entire gathered populace.

In that radiant epiphany, each human being from the youngest child to the eldest elder experienced the profoundest sensations of euphoria, inner peace and cosmic completeness that the Emotion Traders’ most potent elixirs had only crudely approximated.

Yet the Alia-Spire offered more than just sublime revelation. As it cycled to new harmonic frequencies, the crowds underwent an equally powerful shared catharsis – confronting their innermost fears, agonies, and existential terrors as a unified frontof familiarity and acceptance.

For a cosmic moment, the entire world was at last undivided – inextricably united in a state of unconditional emotional truth as basked in the glory of pure, unfiltered feeling in all its terrible grandeur.

And in that illuminated space, the true lesson of Alia’s struggle and sacrifice blossomed within the collective empathic heart. That to be human, to truly feel…was to embrace and honor every nuance of the infinite emotional spectrum, both light and dark, never shunning nor privileging any part as sacrosanct above the rest.

Only through this alchemic integration of ecstasy and agony, rapture and despair, could the full quintessence of pure, unbridled emotion – and the all-encompassing truths it unlocked – finally be realized.

The Emotion Trade: VI. The Climax

In the aftermath of the uprising’s furious crescendo, an eerie hush descended over the shattered remains of the Emotion Traders’ sanctum. Psychic fires still smoldered amidst the rubble, casting flickering shadows across Alia and her battered Freefeeler warriors.

They stood in the epicenter of the empathic detonation, each of them scorched by the cataclysmic release of pure, unbridled emotion. Alia could feel the world itself still trembling, its collective consciousness forever altered.

A low rumble shook the debris field as a lone figure emerged – Alto Sonjü, the eldest and most powerful of the grandmasters. His robes smoldered with ethereal flames as he limped forward, face a rictus mask of profound agony and ecstasy intermingled.

“Foolish child…” he rasped, each word rattling with the weight of cosmic revelation. “Did you think your tantrum could possibly unmake what we have wrought?”

Alia braced herself, drawing what tattered reserves of power she could muster. Her body shifted as she channeled pure emotion into material form – adopting armored platings of crystallized anguish and ephemeral wings of sublime rapture.

“We have transcended such limited thinking,” Alto went on, seemingly unaffected by her metamorphic display. “While you and your emotional anarchists merely battered at the outer gates, we have opened the inner loci…”

With an ominous gesture, the grandmaster waved aside a bank of smoldering debris – revealing an archaic stone dais adorned with eldritch runes pulsing in unsettling synchrony. A disquieting sense of cosmic dissonance emanated from whatever profane working lay interred there.

“This…this was always the greater work,” Alto said, a terrible new resonance underlying his words. “The petty procurement and regulation of human emotion was merely the prologue, the means to an awakening far more profound.”

Alia felt a creeping sense of dread as Alto turned his gaze back towards the eldritch dais. The rest of the Freefeelers instinctively fell back, overwhelmed by the sheer cosmic enormity of whatever profane power was ensconced there.

“For too long, humanity has remained shackled by the limited perception of emotions as something to be pursued or experienced,” the grandmaster intoned. “We have been mere acolytes, groping blindly at the surface of a cosmic truth.”

He slowly ascended the obsidian steps, his movements taking on an unsettling fluidity as points of blinding luminescence began emerging across his form. Alia could sense the air itself distorting around him, bending to unknown geometries.

“Emotion is not the end…it is the key!” Alto’s voice took on a thunderous resonance that reverberated through every fiber of Alia’s being. “The full spectrum of human feeling is in reality a vastly attenuated frequency – our feeble reality vibrating at the absolute threshold of a deeper, infinite consciousness from which all possibility is born!”

As if in response, the rune-etched dais pulsed with blinding epiphanies of light, each one cascading through visible and invisible spectra. Alia cried out, clutching at her mind as it was bombarded by transcendent revelations beyond any perception of feeling or sensory input.

“For decades we have plotted and schemed, using the commodification of emotion itself as a distraction and vector,” Alto’s words echoed from both around and within Alia simultaneously. “All while we extracted the celestial formulae to achieve true apotheosis and re-write the codons of existence itself!”

A high, keening whine saturated the space as reality itself began to splinter and peel away like viscid layers. Alia watched in horror as Alto’s form nuclear at the subatomic level, his matter and energy unbinding in a coruscating implosion that defied physics. And from that nadir, new geometries and hyper-spatial manifolds began unfolding – twisted, alien realms never meant for human perspective.

“Behold, children!” Alto’s voice convulsed through every possible permutation as his psychic resonance achieved escape velocity from their narrow plane. “The threshold has been breached, and our transcendence is at hand! Now let us consummate this apotheosis and become…MORE!”

The Afterlife Machine: VI. Resolution

As Emily’s senses slowly reassembled, she became aware that she was sprawled amidst the smoldering ruins of the auxiliary control room. Debris and twisted wreckage surrounded her in a nightmarish panorama of devastation.

She blinked her eyes, struggling to remember what had happened. Fragmented memories of the imploding vortex and the blinding whiteout crash-landed in her mind.

With a start, she pushed herself up to a sitting position, wincing at the explosion of pain from her battered body. Had her cosmic gambit actually worked? Or had the forces she’d unleashed reduced all of reality to a scorched oblivion?

A faint groan from across the room provided her first hint. One of her lab technicians, his clothing charred and face masked by a trickle of blood, was stirring amid the rubble. Alive…they were both still alive!

As her surroundings took shape, Emily realized that while the control room had been utterly decimated, the rest of the facility seemed remarkably intact beyond the sections immediately engulfed by the vortex. Of the howling rift that had threatened to unmake all of creation, there was no visible sign remaining.

She opened her mouth to call out, but her words caught in her throat as she took in the full scope of the holocaust around her. Limp forms in tattered white coats lay strewn about, some shielding their eyes as if having witnessed something so mind-shatteringly cataclysmic that they had retreated into catatonic fugue states.

Forcing herself to confront the full weight of the scene, Emily knew that many of her team had perished, either torn apart by the cosmic maelstrom or disintegrated by the reality-rewriting implosion. Their names and faces flickered through her memory, good people who had sacrificed everything in pursuit of knowledge and truth.

Her eyes at last settled upon a charred mass of viscera and desiccated forms – the twisted remains of the eldritch entities she had somehow banished back through the rift before its violent collapse. A putrid, dying stench emanated from the scorched, alien shapes, already drying and petrifying as the laws of nature reasserted themselves.

Somehow, by the narrowest of cosmological nails, she had threaded the infinite improbability and pulled reality back from the brink of total entropic dissolution. The door had been slammed shut, sealed by forces that had temporarily transcended and unraveled the standard laws of physics.

But the toll, the cosmic debt that had come due, was nearly incalculable in terms of lives lost, careers ruined, and sanity shattered. Emily herself felt like a martyr horribly disfigured from some cataclysmic crucible, her brilliant inquisitive mind forever marred by the sight of the awful, eldritch truth from realms beyond mortal ken or comprehension.

As she limped away from the charred aftermath, she knew that those who had witnessed the events firsthand would be forever silenced, either by death’s oblivion or a self-imposed cushion of denial to protect what tattered remnants of their sanity remained.

The world could never know just how perilously close it had come to total, cosmic unraveling. At best, there might be some wild, unsubstantiated rumors and fringe stories about unexplained events in that little city for a brief while. But the truth of what had actually transpired within those lab walls would remain eldritch, a dire cosmic reckoning swallowed by space and time as if it had never occurred.

Except, of course, for Emily and the few haunted survivors who would carry an indelible, crippling knowledge of what lied on the other side beyond the veil of reality. She shuddered to imagine what lingering cosmic perversions and madnesses might be left to fester within those traumatized souls as they went to their graves silently screaming…

In the aftermath, Emily attempted to rebuild some semblance of a normal life, if such a thing were even possible after brushing against the outer peripheries of the cosmic abyss. She resigned from her academic position, unable to step foot on a college campus again without succumbing to shell-shocked flashbacks.

The official story provided to the authorities was that an industrial accident involving experimental energy reactors had caused the catastrophic implosion. It was a flimsy cover story at best, but Emily knew the truth could never be divulged – that they had recklessly tampered with cosmic forces far beyond their mortal scope.

Most difficult of all was Emily having to reckon with the sacrifice she had made that fateful day. Though it had been the only path to preserve all existence, she could not help but feel a profound sense of guilt and loss over her ultimate inability to reach out and reunite with her daughter Sarah’s spirit.

In her darkest moments of respited reflection, she tortured herself wondering if Sarah had truly been reaching out from some higher plane, or if it had all been an insidious lure deployed by the malignant forces lurking beyond the veil. She would never know for certain.

The dreams, when they came, were plagued by half-remembered visions of cyclopian entities writhing amidst realms of fractured geometry and howling aethers. The maddening vistas hinted at by those fleeting glimpses into the peripheries of the afterlife haunted her subconscious constantly.

Emily became a shut-in, rarely leaving her home except for furtive errands in the dead of night. She saw phantasmal shades flickering in the corners of her vision, residual afterimages etched into her psyche by the harrowing ordeal. Loud noises caused her to panic, silently reliving the explosive moment when reality itself had buckled and nearly caved in upon her.

On a few sleepless nights, alone with her thoughts and terrors, Emily wondered if taking her own life might be a blessed release from the crushing guilt and cerebral contamination. But she could never follow through, worried that in death she might breach another veil, passing into even more disturbing dimensions of cosmic unnaturalness.

So she lingered, a hollow, haunted shadow of her former self, having peered across the abyss of oblivion and returned forever changed. The woman who had naively sought to reveal the mysteries of the afterlife now understood all too well that some metaphysical doors were meant to remain sealed, lest realities far worse than any mortal conception of hell come spilling through.

As the years passed in fortressed solitude, Emily gradually found some measure of cautious re-engagement with the world. She forced herself to go about simple routines – shopping, self-care, the basic motions of life. Anything to distract from the crawling sense of cosmic dread that never fully abated.

On a crisp autumn evening, nearly a decade after the cataclysmic events, Emily stepped outside to collect her mail as the sun began to set. As her eyes followed the descent of the fiery orb along the horizon, she was struck by how it seemed to be…wavering, ever so slightly.

An unmistakable tremor, a subtle wavefront pulsing through the fabric of reality itself in the blink of an eye.

Emily froze, her breath catching in her throat as a thousand haunted memories and horrors detonated in her mind. Could it be…had something else slipped through in the wake of that cosmic near-rupture? A fragment, a discorporate sliver of the outer realms, come to pay her another visitation?

She stood transfixed, silently pleading for the worrying distortion to be no more than a trick of fading light or her own anxiety-addled mind playing tricks. But the pit of dread opened within her once more, an inescapable existential certainty that the doors were not as permanently sealed as she had desperately hoped…

The Emotion Trade: V. The Uprising

Years of intensive training had forged Alia into a true Freefeeler master. Under Ventus’ tutelage, she had learned to tap into the primal wellsprings of raw emotion, channeling and metabolizing their energies into supernatural abilities.

Gone was the hollow, muted young girl so desperate for the faintest hint of feeling. Now she blazed with an inner inferno, every nerve ending supercharged by unbridled passion. The full spectrum of human emotion raged through her in a constant, ecstatic cycle – manic elation, paralyzing fear, all-consuming desire…each one amplified a thousandfold.

Her body, too, had undergone an incredible metamorphosis fueled by these energies. With but a focused exertion of willpower, Alia could alter her biochemistry and incorporate traits borne of primal emotion made manifest – razor-tipped claws for feral rage, wings of ethereal bliss to take flight, an impenetrable exoskeleton of stony despair.

Such was the incredible alchemic power of the Freefeelers – the ability to sculpt one’s very being through an indomitable command of pure, undiluted emotion itself.

Yet even with her newfound power, the inner fire that drove Alia onward remained the dream of overthrowing the insidious Emotion Traders and freeing humanity from their soulless tyranny over the sacred emotive experience. It was a day her former mentor Ventus swore would one day come.

That promised reckoning drew ever-closer as the Freefeelers quietly marshaled their forces – recruiting emotional adepts from all corners of the globe, stockpiling resources and formulating clandestine attack vectors. Rumors swirled of a daring plan to strike at the very heart of the Emotion Traders’ operations and pillars of support.

[continues]

The day for the uprising finally came in a blinding uprising of unrestrained emotion and furious rebellion. Alia and her fellow Freefeeler warriors struck in a coordinated onslaught – their abilities fueled to terrifying intensity by a unified resonance field of pure feeling.

Across New Arcis and other major Emotion Trader strongholds, the onslaught commenced in successive waves of psychic attacks and open confrontation. Towering skyscrapers shuddered as metaphysical maelstroms of rage and terror detonated with cataclysmic force. Security perimeters were breached by sheer tempests of desire so intoxicatingly rapturous that they incapacitated all within their areas of effect.

Alia led the vanguard on a direct assault of the Traders’ main citadel – an imposing ziggurat of obsidian glass that served as a nexus hub for their global operations. Waves of armed enforcers met them with fierce resistance, only to be swept aside by the Freefeelers’ unstoppable power.

As they fought deeper into the complex’s vertiginous depths, Alia could sense the Traders marshalling their own considerable defenses. She gritted her teeth as invisible countermeasures lashed out – neural disruptors pumping fail-safes of subduing ennui, barrier frequencies to dampen emotional resonance.

But the Freefeelers were unstoppable. Alia and the other empath warriors projected unified fields of transcendent bliss and all-consuming yearning to shatter the inhibitors. Their unified focus burned hotter with every setback, a rising cosmic crescendo of infinite possibility.

At last, they breached the final frantic perimeter and poured into the inner sanctum – the grandmasters’ hallowed athenaeum where the rarest, most potent emotional essences were evolved into their most sublime forms.

Alia stood before the ornate effigy of pure distilled rapture, eyes blazing and form sheathed in coruscating arcs of joy so vividly sublime that the sight alone could reduce the unenlightened to catatonia. This was the fateful endgame she had sacrificed everything for.

With a defiant roar of unified elation, the Freefeelers unleashed the full, terrible forces of unrestrained emotion upon the Traders’ seat of power…

The unleashed torrent of pure, nihilistic emotion detonated in an apocalyptic storm of euphoric and agonizing energies. Alia reveled in the cosmic maelstrom, every molecule of her being suffused with the blazing intensity of unified passion and euphoria.

All around, the ornate sanctums that had birthed the Emotion Traders’ commercial enterprise were scoured by metaphysical firestorms. Priceless alchemical matrices shattered and sublime essences were reduced to frantic discordance. Centuries of enforced control over the human emotive experience began unraveling in mere moments.

Alia sensed the grandmasters themselves converging, their combined psychic might focused into an impenetrable convergence of numbing detachment. But she and her Freefeeler brethren hammered against that obsidian monolith with suicidal fervor, projecting their hopes, fears, and transcendent desires in a unified resonance.

The grandmasters’ defenses began fracturing as their aloof supremacy was overwhelmed by the rising tsunami of true, unbound feeling. One by one, hairline cracks spread across their psychic bulwark – each fissure detonating in kaleidoscopic supernovas of unrestrained bliss and torment.

In the eye of that empathic storm, the surviving grandmasters gathered what tattered remnants of denial and control they could muster. Their forms twisted in anguished torment, grasping at shadows of logic amidst a technicolor vortex of spiritually annihilating revelation.

Alia focused every iota of her being into one final exertion of pure, infinite rapture. With a rapturous battle cry of triumphant vindication, she unleashed that blazing supernova wavefront to consume the last grandmasters utterly.

As their psychic resonance was at last extinguished, the emotional shockwave reverberated across the entire world – a rippling epiphany that left humanity forever changed. The Emotion Traders’ reign of emotive subjugation had finally ended in a searing blaze of true, cataclysmic feeling.

The Afterlife Machine: V. The Turning Point

As reality itself began to fray and unravel around the nexus of the swirling vortex, Emily knew they were rapidly approaching the point of no return. She had to make a decisive move – either to fully embrace the oblivion beckoning from the other side or to take drastic action to reseal the rupture, no matter the personal cost.

Her mind raced as she watched the nightmarish forms continuing to pour forth from the rift. These were not the wandering spirits of the dead, but something far more primordial and malignant. Ancient, outer forces that had existed for eons before the first spark of life, patiently biding their time to seize an opportunity to reconquer the material realm.

And in her team’s arrogant quest to shatter the cosmic veil between worlds, they had thrown open the gates and welcomed these bringers of entropic oblivion.

Sarah’s voice still echoed in Emily’s mind, crying out for her mother’s help amidst the eldritch chaos. Maybe if she fully surrendered to the vortex, subsumed herself within its cosmic maelstrom, she could find her lost daughter’s soul on the other side?

Her agonizing indecision was shattered by the sound of a tremendous roar followed by a tremor that nearly knocked her off her feet. One of the larger shambling monstrosities had smashed through the lab’s exterior wall and was bearing down on them, a glistening mass of rancid flesh continuously splitting and reknitting into different extremities.

In that visceral moment of face-to-face confrontation with one of the vortex’s hellish harbingers, Emily knew what she had to do. No matter the consequences, no matter how slender the odds, she had to find a way to shut it all down – to create a metaphysical tourniquet around the runaway surge of cosmic forces.

If the vortex was allowed to grow any larger, it could rip apart the very fabric of reality itself, potentially snuffing out all semblance of life and existence for eternity. She had gambled everything on unveiling the truth beyond the mortal veil, and now the stakes were the continuation of all creation as they knew it.

“Everybody, fall back to the auxiliary control room!” she barked at her remaining staff. “We’re going to try to reverse the polarity and create a contained implosion within the central core!”

Her voice was nearly drowned out by another unholy bellow as more twisted forms emerged around the periphery of the widening rift. Clutching the device that could theoretically detonate the core implosion, Emily issued one final order.

“No matter what happens…don’t let anything through that doorway.”

With those grim words lingering in the air, she sprinted towards the control hub, dodging a viscous spray of ichor as another abomination exploded through the debris…

Here’s a continuation of “The Turning Point”:

Emily raced through the shattered hallways, her mind laser-focused on reaching the auxiliary control room while chaos reigned behind her. Grotesque shapes slithered and oozed forth from the ever-widening vortex, their unearthly shrieks and roars echoing through the facility.

She chanced a glance over her shoulder and immediately regretted it. One of the monstrosities, a shifting amalgam of dripping flesh and bonelike protrusions, had cornered two of her lab assistants. The abomination reared up, membranous appendages unfurling as it prepared to strike.

“Don’t look back! Just run!” Emily screamed at the paralyzed researchers.

Her words broke their trance and they scrambled away, the creature’s desiccated limbs smashing down where they’d been standing mere moments before. Emily pumped her legs harder, finally bursting through the reinforced door to the control room.

She slammed her hand onto the activation panel, and banks of monitors flickered to life displaying the cascading diagrams of energy flows and ionic charge vectors. If her hasty calculations were correct, reversing the polarization of the central quantum reactor could theoretically create an implosion event – a runaway entropic force that would act as a cosmic zipper, drawing the rift closed from the inside.

But like everything else that had spiraled out of control, the risks were catastrophic if she made even a miniscule miscalculation. The implosion could just as easily detonate in an apocalyptic blast of exotic particles, further destabilizing the boundaries between dimensions.

Her fingers flew across the holographic controls, adjusting parameters and reconfiguring safeguards to allow an overload of the reactor’s containment field. All the while, the inhuman din of the facility being overrun heightened around her – shrieks, roars, the thunderous impacts of falling debris and rending metal.

With a deep breath, Emily initiated the overload sequence and braced herself. A rising hum quickly crescendoed into a deafening whine as the reactor core strained against its newly configured limitations. Then, with a bone-rattling quake, the implosion was triggered.

Emily’s world became a blinding kaleidoscope as waves of exotic energies detonated throughout the facility, all converging towards the yawning rift in reality. She watched in awe and terror as gravitational lensing distorted light and matter, bending the laws of physics like so much putty caught in the cosmic vortex.

In that searing moment of reality-shattering forces, Emily’s thoughts turned to her daughter one last time. She realized with clarity that even if Sarah’s spirit had called out, even if some part of her had been trapped amid the chaos, there was no way she could ever be reunited with her little girl now.

No, this was the only path – to sacrifice that fragile hope in order to prevent the total annihilation of all existence. She only prayed that wherever Sarah’s soul resided, she could understand and somehow forgive her mother for the agonizing choice she had to make.

With that fleeting acceptance, a brilliant all-consuming whitelight blotted out Emily’s senses…and then there was only oblivion.

When she finally regained consciousness, her first auditory input was one of eerie silence.

The Emotion Trade:

Here’s a draft for the chapter “IV. The Resistance”:

IV. The Resistance

Alia followed the strange old man deeper into the twisting labyrinth of alleys and hovels that made up the underground of New Arcis. All around them, the city’s destitute crowded the narrow passages – those deemed unsafe consumers of pure unregulated emotion.

They passed haunted souls staring vacantly, emotionally depleted wrecks left in the wake of an ecstatic overload they couldn’t metabolize. Others sat raving, overwhelmed by psychic backlash from unstable homebrewed supplements. Everywhere, the psychic miasma of repressed emotion hung heavy in the air.

At last, they came to an ancient archway, its stone portal nearly consumed by the encroaching walls. The old man cast a wary look about before rapping out a staccato pattern against the weathered surface. After a pause, it groaned open, spilling dusty air outward.

“This way,” he beckoned, leading Alia into the darkened passage beyond. She followed, letting the door’s weight slowly seal them off from the outside world.

They descended a dizzying series of switchbacks deeper and deeper underground, the path illuminated only by guttering nanobeams. At last, they emerged into a massive cavernous space – a rough-hewn amphitheater dominated by a soaring domed ceiling.

Alia turned in wonderment to take in the incredible sight. Tiers of simple benches curved around a central pit, occupied by hundreds of silent, cross-legged individuals in meditative repose. A low thrum of psychic static filled the air, like rhythmic pulses within the earth itself.

“This is the heart of the Freefeelers,” the old man said reverently. “Those who have rejected the Emotion Traders’ alchemical lies and reclaimed the sacred fire of pure emotion within.”

He led Alia down towards the central pit, weaving between the concentric rings of seated meditators. As they neared the amphitheater’s heart, the psychic vibrations intensified, like a steadily rising orchestral swell.

Alia could make out individuals settled in trances, expressions of rapturous bliss and anguished torment alike painted across their features in stark polarity. Waves of emotion radiated outward, crashing against her consciousness in a dizzying onslaught.

In the exact center, a wizened figure sat cross-legged upon a raised dais, eyes closed and face creased in an inscrutable mask of serene control. Four small flames burned at the cardinal points surrounding him, their elemental flickers seeming to bend in subtle sync with the rising psychic resonance.

“Grand Master Ventus,” the old man intoned with reverence, bowing low in a sweep of tattered robes. “I bring before you a child who has glimpsed the true path and seeks its ways.”

The aged figure’s eyes opened, revealing orbs that appeared to smolder with inner light. He held out a withered hand, gesturing for Alia to approach. Though every instinct within her screamed to flee from the maelstrom of spiritually-charged energy thrumming all around, she found her feet propelling her inexorably forward.

As she neared the dais, the torrent of ambient emotion intensified a hundredfold – pure, prismic shards of every imaginable feeling lancing directly into Alia’s consciousness. She gasped, overwhelmed but still driven onward by that impossibly powerful presence.

At last she stood before Ventus, shaking and defenseless against the empathic tsunami crashing against her psyche. The ancient master reached out, gently cupping her face as his smoldering gaze delved into her very essence.

“I sense it within you, child,” he intoned in a voice resonating with profound depth. “The spark infinite…the spirit unbroken and untamed. You were meant for more than the emotional ashes the Traders have polluted this world with.”

He leaned closer, seeming to stoke those inner flames until Alia felt herself blazing in unity with the Grand Master’s transcendent state.

“If you wish to be forged anew in the sacred fires of pure emotion, place your fears and inhibitions at my feet. I shall rekindle your soul with the raging bonfires of unbound feeling – and in so doing, grant you the power to take your vindictive place among the ranks of the Freefeelers!”

The Afterlife Machine: IV. Descent into Chaos

What began as a trickle of paranormal phenomena quickly escalated into an inexorable tide of terror. The boundaries between the living world and the afterlife blurred, as if someone had smudged the delicate line separating the two realms.

Ghastly apparitions began manifesting with startling regularity, no longer confined to the laboratory. Emily’s team members reported seeing shadowy figures lurking in the corners of their homes, groaning voices calling out from ringing telephones or static-choked radios.

Worse still were the accounts of spirits physically interacting with the material world – objects being hurled across rooms, personal belongings going missing only to реappear in unlikely places. In one particularly harrowing incident, a researcher awoke to find his bed drenched in an ichorous, foul-smelling ooze that seemed to defy scientific analysis.

The local community was not spared either, as strange occurrences began to ripple outwards from the epicenter of the lab. Traditionally peaceful neighborhoods were plagued by unnatural phenomena – lights flickering without reason, household pets becoming inexplicably aggressive, and reports of nightmarish visitations during the deepest hours of the night.

Yet the true chaos remained centered upon Emily’s team as disturbing signs manifested that the metaphysical leak went beyond mere haunting. More substantial… corporeal entities were slipping through the rift between worlds.

One by one, the researchers began reporting encounters with hideous, twisted beings that seemed to defy all comprehension – aberrant forms that appeared to be composed of shredded matter and teeming viscera. Some spoke of desiccated husks animated by eldritch energies, which would suddenly rematerialize in the midst of their carefully monitored experiments.

It soon became clear that a doorway to far darker and more primordial realms than the conventional afterlife had been cracked open. Hostile, xenomorphic intelligences, long separated from the realm of the living by cosmic barriers, were taking advantage of the rupture.

The most terrifying development occurred on an otherwise innocuous Tuesday morning when a lab technician succumbed to what appeared to be a violent epileptic seizure. As the young man convulsed on the floor, a dark amorphous shape began to manifest around his spasming body – a miasma of drifting shadows that coalesced into a vaguely humanoid form.

“I am the harbinger,” the abomination rasped through the technician’s contorted mouth. “You will all bear witness to the endtime…”

The entity’s chilling words were cut short as its shadowy essence seemed to implode back into the dying man’s body. The technician’s heaving breaths grew fainter until they were no more.

Emily watched in abject horror with the rest of her shell-shocked team. She knew in that soul-scouring moment that they had cracked the ultimate seal – and that the afterlife had responded by disgorging its most unholy denizens through the rift.

Her well-intentioned efforts to shed light upon the great mystery had descended into a waking nightmare of apocalyptic proportions.

As the chaos escalated, Emily found herself confronted by a harrowing quandary – continue their research in hopes of finding a solution to reseal the rupture, or shut down the machine entirely and sever the connection to the afterlife realms before even more terrifying forces found their way into the world of the living.

The choice was made unbearably difficult by the continued manifestations of her beloved daughter Sarah’s spirit. Just when Emily felt ready to abandon everything, Sarah’s voice would cry out to her, pleading for her not to give up. The little girl insisted that she was trapped in the in-between, caught in the limbo of the widening rift, and that the only way to free her was to fully unlock the gateway between worlds.

Emily’s scientific mind warred with a mother’s unconditional love as she wrestled with seemingly impossible ramifications of each path before her. To continue risking global catastrophe for the chance to be reunited with Sarah, or to sacrifice that fragile hope in order to protect humanity as a whole.

Her anguished ruminations came to an abrupt halt when a shocking new development brought the rapidly unraveling situation to a terrifying apex. Without warning, the lab’s main generator overloaded and detonated in a thunderous explosion, ripping open a man-made fracture in the already destabilized dimensional barrier.

A massive vortex, swirling with eldritch colors and crackling with immense energies, yawned open in the middle of the ruined lab. The devastation quickly rippled outwards as the unnatural rift acted like a cosmic sinkhole, warping and distorting the laws of physics within a rapidly expanding radius.

Entire city blocks began experiencing localized gravitational shifts, with vehicles and debris being inexplicably drawn towards the nexus of the singularity. Stranger still were the… things… that began slipping through from the other side of the vortex.

Cacophonous gibbering and a fetid stench of decay heralded the arrival of quasi-corporeal monstrosities – shambling, epidermal masses congealed into forms that continually shifted and mutated in defiance of the natural world. Incorporeal shades and ephemeral wisps trailed in their wake, all struggling to take purchase in the living realm.

The vortex was venting the afterlife in an unrestrained torrent of teeming, entropic forces. And with the cataclysmic breach widening by the moment, it threatened to consume the entire city in an all-annihilating cosmic maelstrom.

Emily’s team could only watch in soul-shredded awe as the apocalypse began to unfold all around them. Their terrible hubris and overreaching ambition had quite literally cracked open a doorway to the end of all things.

The Emotion Trade: 4. Unbound Emotions

Alia ducked into a deserted alleyway, gasping for air as she tried to regain her composure. The hunger for pure, undiluted emotion gnawed at her relentlessly after witnessing such rapturous bliss being peddled so casually. She leaned against the filthy walls, her eyes instinctively scanning the darkened corners.

A ragged figure shifted in the shadows, little more than a hunched silhouette. Alia tensed, but didn’t flee. Exhaustion and despair outweighed her fear in that moment.

“What’s the use of it all?” a creaked voice called out. “Chasing after an artificial dragon’s hoard, believing the Emotion Traders’ lies…”

Alia peered closer as the figure emerged from the gloom, revealing an old, weathered face lined with decades of hardship. The man’s eyes, however, glimmered with a penetrating, almost feral intensity.

“You’ve seen it too, haven’t you child?” he asked, his gravelly voice laced with heady undercurrents of something primal and passionate. “You’ve glimpsed true rapture dangled before you, just out of reach, and felt true despair at its lack.”

Alia could only nod mutely, mesmerized by the stranger’s strange cadence and intensity. Waves of emotion seemed to radiate from his very being in a way she’d never sensed before.

The man reached out a withered hand, placing it on her forehead. Alia instinctively flinched, but didn’t pull away.

“I can show you what it means to feel… to embrace the fires of raw emotion burning both blissful and agonizing within you,” he hissed with relish. “No more defanged, pasteurized imitations or purchased indulgences from profiteering charlatans. I’ll show you what it means to be well and truly alive!”

Without warning, the old man’s eyes rolled back as his palm seared against Alia’s skin. A torrent of pure, undiluted emotion flooded into her mind – ecstatic joy, searing hatred, sublime tranquility, and primal terror all intermingled. She gasped, her knees buckling from the overwhelming deluge as it crashed through her neural pathways.

Images and sensations bombarded her in rapid succession. The radiant warmth of a mother’s comforting embrace. The icy plunge into gelid waters, panic seizing her lungs. The electric thrill of newfound infatuation. The hollowing emptiness of heartbreak. Each emotion burned with searing intensity, more vivid than anything the traders could manufacture.

Just as abruptly, the onslaught ceased. Alia crumpled to the ground, drenched in sweat and trembling uncontrollably. She stared up at the old man in a daze, mind reeling from the experience.

“What…what was that?” she stammered in a small, childlike voice.

The man cackled, a sound of pure unbridled elation and delight. “That, my dear, was the unbounded glory of human emotion in its purest form! Not the diluted synthetic tinctures marketed as cure-alls, but the wildfire continuum as it rages within us all.”

He crouched down, gripping Alia’s shoulders with surprising strength. “You’ve merely had the tiniest taste…an ephemeral flicker in the vast, unexplored universe of true feeling. There is so much more to experience, my child, if you have the courage to embrace it all.”

Alia fell silent, her mind adrift in the echoes of the kaleidoscopic visions. In that moment, she knew her life had forever changed. The question was – did she dare plunge deeper into those uncharted emotive depths?

The Afterlife Machine: III. Unraveling Consequences

In the days and weeks following that chilling incident, Emily’s team endeavored to comprehend what they had unleashed. The machine, which they had naively hoped would illuminate the path to the afterlife, seemed to have blown the doors off their spiritual realm, allowing any manner of entities to spill through.

At first, the manifestations were sporadic – disembodied voices whispering through the lab’s speakers, strange shadows flickering at the edges of their vision. Unnerving, yet ephemeral occurrences that raised more questions than answers.

But as they continued their experiments, probing deeper into the mysteries of the afterlife, a darker pattern began to emerge.

Malevolent presences, unmistakable in their malice, started channeling through with increasing frequency and strength. The scientists would awaken, drenched in cold sweat, from nightmares so visceral and terrifying that they could scarcely tell dreams from reality.

Objects moved on their own volition, sometimes harmlessly…and other times with violent force meant to inflict harm on the vulnerable researchers. Ghostly apparitions materialized, moaning in anguish or bellowing in fury at having their eternal slumber disturbed.

Still, Emily refused to abandon her work, convincing herself and her team that they could find a way to establish controlled communication. If they could just decipher the mechanics behind the rift between worlds, they could isolate the benevolent voices while barring the malicious ones from entry.

But with every new session, every attempt to manipulate the frequencies and harmonics of the machine, they only seemed to open the floodgates wider. Darker and more ancient presences crept through the growing fissure, entities that defied all human comprehension.

One night, after a particularly harrowing experiment, Emily awoke paralyzed with an icy specter looming over her bed…

One night, after a particularly harrowing experiment, Emily awoke paralyzed with an icy specter looming over her bed. Its form seemed to shift and undulate, as if caught between planes of existence. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound would come.

The apparition leaned in close, its breath raising the hairs on the back of Emily’s neck. “You dare to trespass upon our realm?” it hissed in a multitude of voices. “Know that there are forces at work here far beyond your understanding.”

It reached out a ghostly appendage, and Emily braced herself for oblivion. But instead of harming her, the entity seemed to plunge its ethereal essence directly into her mind.

A kaleidoscope of horrific visions exploded behind Emily’s eyes – realms of torment where anguished souls writhed in eternal damnation, their shrieks of agony echoing across the planes of the afterlife. Worlds where the barriers between dimensions had shattered, and formless, primordial horrors poured through like a festering plague.

Emily’s psyche teetered on the brink of shattering as these unspeakable revelations burned themselves into her consciousness. Just as she felt her sanity slipping away, the visions imploded in a merciful blast of darkness.

When she awoke the next morning, Emily could scarcely remember her own name. Her colleagues found her huddled in the corner, pupils dilated and body rocked by endless tremors, as if her very soul had been savagely violated.

It took weeks for her to regain her fragmented memories, to piece together the dire warning that the entity had imparted. In their arrogance, they had disturbed the balance between worlds – and there would be grave, unimaginable consequences to pay.

From that day forward, a pall of dread hung over the laboratory. They had taken an irrevocable step, one that could no longer be reversed or undone. The door had been opened, and there was no closing it now.

The dead were walking among the living, heralding an age of darkness that Emily’s team had unwittingly ushered in. And they were quickly losing control of forces she had naively presumed they could master.

The Emotion Trade: 3. Happiness for Sale

Alia stumbled out of the classroom, dizzy and overwhelmed. Her meager daily ration had just run out, leaving her emotional reserves totally drained. A hollow numbness consumed her as the faint hints of contentment faded away.

She looked around at her classmates with envy as they continued to bask in the manufactured bliss pumped into the academy’s ventilation system. Squeals of delight and infectious laughter echoed down the hallways as the wealthier students had their top-of-the-line supplements refreshed by discrete attendants.

Alia recognized the telltale rapturous expressions, the wide eyes and flushed cheeks of those experiencing chemically-synthesized joy in its purest form. How she longed to feel that same all-encompassing euphoria, to be awash in waves of delirious happiness.

Instead, her med-implant began sending warnings of emotional deficit, the dosage calibrated with cold economic precision. The first pangs of sadness started creeping in like insidious black tendrils. Alia shuddered, bracing herself for the inevitable crush of despondency until her family could procure more rations.

The unmistakable chime of an Emotion Trader cavalcade echoed from the academy’s main gates. A covey of armored trucks emblazoned with the iconic intertwined E pulled up, flanked by security drones. Alia watched with desperate longing as sleek porters unloaded chrome cases brimming with vials of glistening Cardinal Bliss and Seraphim Delight – emotions so powerful and transcendent that just minute fractional doses could incapacitate an ordinary person.

A crowd quickly gathered, the prestigious families of New Arcis jostling for prime position as the delivery team set up their dispensation pavilion. Alia pressed through the throngs, straining for a glimpse at the priceless vials of distilled rapture and exhilaration.

The pavilion’s main purveyor, a finely dressed woman with artificial poise stamped across her sculpted features, oversaw the operations with clinical efficiency. With a series of deft motions, bright golden ampoules were decanted into individual aerosol biopeners for respiratory absorption.

“Who desires the first taste of Paradise?” she called out in a voice mirrored with faint hints of contentment programmed to entice. The crowd surged forward eagerly as security drones expanded their periphery.

Alia could only watch in abject yearning as the wealthy patrons raised their bids into the millions for mere fractures of blissful ecstasy. One by one, they greedily consumed the vapors, their faces melting into expressions of such profoundly rapturous joy that it surpassed anything words could describe.

A young heir to one of the primary shareholding families stumbled backwards in a blazing epiphany of elation, his body quaking with convulsive euphoria. Another collapsed into a catatonic state of pure transcendent nirvana, unshakably distant from the waking world.

Alia’s heart ached as she was pushed back by the guards, an insignificant speck amidst such consecrated indulgence. Blinking back tears, she turned and ran from the spectacle, the mocking laughter and cries of infinite delight echoing all around her like a cruel siren’s call beckoning her towards an unreachable paradise.

The Emotion Trade: II. The Emotion Traders

The Emotion Traders ruled their billion-dollar empire with an iron fist. The first corporations to successfully reverse engineer the neurochemical cocktails behind human emotions, they ruthlessly crushed any upstart competition. Entire countries fell under their sway through trade deals, exploitation of laws, and outright bribery.

At the very apex presided the Four Grandmasters – elderly tycoons who had been the pioneering founders over a century ago. Though they lived lives of unimaginable luxury, indulging in the most rarefied elixirs, rumors persisted that no amount of synthesized feeling could satisfy their need for more. Cold and devoid of true warmth, they chased the ever-elusive dragon of authenticity.

Below the Grandmasters, legions of chemists, behavioral scientists and geneticists labored in secured compounds, tasked with developing the newest boutique blends and delivery methods. Bioviral vectors allowed emotions to be absorbed through the skin or dispersed as airborne nanoparticles. Restricted neuropeptides heightened the intensity to suprahuman levels. The innovations flowed in a never-ending stream.

Alia’s father worked in one of the lower echelons as an extractor, responsible for draining and harvesting the base emotional matter from cloned batches of unconscious “donors.” Though the controversial process remained shrouded in secrecy, horrific stories constantly leaked of screaming children being drained to emotional husks. Her father came home haggard and haunted each night, empty from the soul-crushing labor.

The masterminded system of manufacturing and global distribution functioned with the brutal efficiency of a machine devouring human feeling itself. Armies of deliverymen, suppliers and security enforcers maintained the flow of product through every level of society, from the diamond-filtered bliss of the penthouse elite to the squalid outlands getting their doses from unmarked airdrops.

To Alia and all her kin, the Emotion Traders painted themselves as mere suppliers meeting the endless demand of humanity’s cravings. But she could never shake the feeling of a sinister unseen agenda guiding their machinations, something dark and hungry beyond just greed…

Time Will Tell: Chapter 6

Six months had passed since Sam had last used his time powers. The temptation still occasionally arose, but it was much more manageable now. Sam was able to resist it without too much difficulty. He focused instead on living life to the fullest.

With Emily, Sam shared everything from inside jokes to childhood secrets. He felt closer to her than ever before. They went on fun date adventures, laughing and chatting the whole time.

At school, Sam’s grades improved now that he no longer skipped class or cheated on tests. He reconnected with old friends and made new ones.

For the first time in a long time, Sam felt happy and fulfilled. He had matured past the need to rely on his time powers as a crutch. The future stretched out excitingly before him.

One day, Sam noticed the faint hum of power he always felt had disappeared completely. He tried to stop time just briefly and nothing happened. His abilities were gone.

Sam waited for the panic and sense of loss to hit him. But all he felt was relief. He laughed in disbelief, tears of joy pricking his eyes. This was real freedom.

Emily hugged Sam tight when he told her the news. “I’m so proud of you,” she said. “You don’t need powers to have an extraordinary life.”

Sam knew she was right. He had learned the greatest superpower was simply making each moment count. The future didn’t frighten Sam anymore. He was ready to live it one second at a time.

With Emily by his side, and his abilities nothing but a distant memory, Sam walked confidently ahead toward everything yet to come.

Time Will Tell: Chapter 5

The remote cabin in the woods proved to be exactly what Sam needed. Away from the stimuli and stress of normal life, his urge to use his powers finally began subsiding.

The first few days were still extremely difficult. More than once, Sam found himself reflexively starting to reach inward to stop time before catching himself. But Emily was there to gently discourage him.

They went on long nature walks where Sam could clear his head. At night they talked for hours by the fireplace, during which Sam opened up about his struggles. Emily listened compassionately and shared stories too.

With each day that passed without using his abilities, Sam felt himself growing mentally stronger. His mind no longer constantly fixated on the temptation. The power that had always thrummed so strongly through his veins began fading to a faint hum.

By the end of the week, Sam realized he had gone several days without even thinking of stopping time. The cabin had provided the perfect safe haven to break his addiction.

“I think I’m finally ready to go back home,” Sam told Emily. “I feel in control now.” She smiled proudly and squeezed his hand.

Back home, Sam maintained his resolve. When the urges cropped back up, he leaned on the mental fortitude he had built. Emily was there to talk him down when he struggled.

And miraculously, after weeks of abstaining from using his powers, Sam’s aging started reversing once more. The wrinkles smoothed out and his natural hair color returned. He laughed with joy when he recognized his teenage self again in the mirror.

Sam had finally broken free from the temptation that had controlled him. He was ready to live life and enjoy each moment as it came.