DXD: The Grumpy Mechanic

My creations danced.

Despite themselves, even. Maybe.

The song was a sad one. But it was also one of the few familiar to both the lives I've lived, and I didn't have the heart to pretend positivity.

Sorry, kids, dad doesn't have a lot of happiness of his own to give right now. I walked over to stand next to the glass.

Well, no happiness that doesn't come from you, little ones.

Sad as it was, the song was beautiful. One of my favorites regardless of life and planet.

And the little ones seemed to enjoy it too, despite my worries. I was glad.

It's not every day you get to bend thunder to your will and make it sing. It's not like I had my wife or kids around either, for them to ask incessant questions and make me rush from one end of the workshop to the next and haul them away amidst laughter in a vain attempt to keep clumsy hands from destroying my laboratory.

Maybe I should've named them Dexter and DeeDee.

Or maybe not. Yui may have fit the stereotype, but Kenzo wasn't nearly enough of an introvert in comparison.

Within the medium, the creatures swam in concert, one long, continuous loop flowing like a river in a circle between the Tesla coils, made of two separate funnels swirling around each other in a double helix.

In that moment, I experienced a deep, fervent feeling swelling in my chest like I hadn't ever since my past life awakening. My breath felt tight.

My heart beat loud in my ears. These creatures were small and fleeting and had only the most basic of life's instincts, but they were wonderful and luminous and mine.

I tapped on the glass.

Yemo rose from the soul stream, big and bright and still in rhythm with the music, and came over to the source of the sound. And waited.

Alive, pulsing in concert with the many others trailing after him, and patient.

I really must stop projecting intelligence on single-cellular life. But I couldn't help it! Here they are acting alone, here they aren't, here they are behaving like a hive, here they are eating lightning, look at them dancing and looking for the faintest sign of their creator wherever they find it, oh Occam's Razor, wherefore hast thou gone? Why have you forsaken me?

I tapped again. They swarmed closer, Yemo leading the way as their dance got even more elaborate, somehow, despite not breaking rhytm with the thunder song.

They were completely in sync with my heartbeat actually.

Anam was the Irish word for soul.

Finally giving in to the impulse, I pressed my fingertip against the glass and left it there.

"I name you Anami. "

Yemo was there in an instant, a child cell detaching from him and shooting into and out of my skin in a rush to return to its parent. It tingled.

Then it tingled even better when Yemo divided again, then again and again, the child cells coming together more and more until I was looking at a vague likeness of my fingertip.

Children learn through imitation. Was I projecting again? Or was this more than an unconscious reflection of how subtle matter behaved? Wait a minute…

The process hadn't finished. The division continued.

The tip of my finger was perfectly reflected in their amalgam, and they still weren't finished subdividing and recombining, what were they-oh.

I was looking at a blue, glowing, perfect replica of my fingertip, down to the slightest detail of my fingerprint. "That's amazing.

"

I allowed myself the impossible thought that the way they flickered was due to my praise. Hearing my voice.

The way they communicated via vibration wasn't that different from hearing, was it? They wouldn't be able to dance otherwise. For a given meaning of the term.

Slowly, I pressed the rest of my finger against the glass, and more, until my entire palm rested on it. Little cells birthed littler cells that strung forward in a chain until theye were mimicking the Tesla bolts almost perfectly, streaking and winding in and out of the medium through the glass, tingling atop my skin.

I bent forward as close as I could, until I could see my eyes reflected in the glass. See them reflected in the reflection of my eyes, as they lived and pulsed and came together into a unified synchronicity of tiny individualities.

And there it was, finally. There they were, formed into the perfect mirror of my hand.

My heart felt like it might burst. "… Good job.

" I… I had proud, happy tears running down my cheeks. I could swear I could feel my words and my feelings vibrating through my arm and the glass and all the way to the heart of my little creations and their congregation.

"I'm proud of you. "

Something happened. Something amazing.

A wave of light rippled over the surface of the shining, mirror likeness of my hand. I could barely tell the little things apart anymore.

Then, without warning, the hand shot through the glass as if it wasn't even there and right into mine.

"Fuck me!"

I jerked away with a hoarse shout, reflex throwing me back from the glass but not enough to save me from a nasty fall. I crashed hard on my side, but I barely spared the flare of pain any attention.

My hand came alive with feelings, some old, some unexpected, some completely bizarre and unknown. My skin, my flesh, my nerves tingled increasingly as if I'd plugged my hand in a power socket, but it felt strangely good and my heart didn't scream as if about to give up the ghost from palpitations.

At the same time but separately, I felt like that time when I spent an hour with my hands on a Van de Graaff generator just to fill up with static and see what happens. But the feeling was localised below my wrist and what was happening now was not what happened then, and then the tingle reached my nerves and overlayed the neurons.

Humans can't feel their individual cells, I thought breathlessly as I stared at my hand, who spared no time in proving me wrong immediately with its skin and....

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