Space is cold and lonely. This is a fact.


    The fact that space is cold and lonely becomes abundantly clear when you’ve been floating in space for nearly 6 months, as I have. I’ve been floating in space for almost 6 months. Fuck.


    Maybe I shouldn’t have been so impulsive, but truthfully, I’d do it again. They were pissing me off, and had been pissing me off for weeks. So I did the only rational thing and turned the entire complex into a pressure cooker bomb.


    You see, the benefit of reflective energy barriers is that they reflect energy both ways, regardless of which side of the barrier someone’s on. The other benefit of reflective energy barriers is that they are powered by reflecting things. All I had to do was release a tremendous amount of energy.


    Those barriers were for security, I guess. Surrounding the military complex’s six sides, as well as covering the sky and underground, it made entering and exiting the base a pain, but it was secure. Jokes on them, I guess.


    So after suffering through foppish bureaucratic nonsense for who knows how long (about 4 days), I snapped. You can’t just bring someone someplace, and then make them sit and wait with no good explanation besides “your magic is dangerous,” or “how exactly are you alive right now?” So I showed them what they wanted to see.


    In case you didn’t know, releasing energy like a supernova is an inherently thrilling experience.


    It’s liberating; watching energy barriers whine, flicker, and explode, the resulting pressure wave sending guards and office workers flying down the hallway. It was funny, watching those with some semblance of strength mount a defense.


    Standard bullets won’t pierce my skin, and magical weaponry gets dispersed by the sheer magnitude of energy I was releasing. Bombs and lasers add heat, but can’t hurt me. Sure, there were some attacks I had to dodge, but I was really playing the waiting game.


    It took about a minute for those interrogator scientists to realize the temperature was rising across the entire military base. They probably tried to turn off an energy barrier, but the place was already in lockdown, red lights and alarms blaring. I was just getting started.


    You see, energy is energy. It doesn’t matter if it’s magical in origin, it obeys thermodynamics. And here I was, adding energy to a closed system.


    Things didn’t get fun for a while. Some evacuation voiceovers, people running away or bursting into flames, and one smarter man simply begging me to stop.


    About 10 minutes later, the whole space was a sweltering sauna, the plants outside the broken windows drooping in the heat. I moved to the center of the complex, which was apparently a park. It quickly became a burning park.


    Another 10 minutes later, with everything around me in flames, metal melting, concrete cracking under the heat, it was finally hot enough to begin fission.


    Magical fission is a lot like nuclear fission. Under conditions others would call “extreme,” you slam mana together until it degrades into weaker mana and pure energy: heat and exotic types of light commonly called radiation, no nuclear fallout or heavy metals required. Just boom.


    So several minutes later, much of my mana exhausted, I still shone like a star (literally) in the center of what was once a military complex. The heat had long surpassed anything reasonable. Everything within the reflective energy barriers that wasn’t heavily protected was plasma: plants, buildings, people, you name it.


    I’m not stupid. I’d be in a bit of trouble (okay, a lot of trouble) if I was caught after literally evaporating a military base of the intergalactic federation. Especially if I was caught while drained of mana.


    So I did what any sane person would do. I started attempting magical fusion, something I had only hypothesized before without being able to test. It was probably around this point that the reflective energy barriers started to bulge outwards.


    Magical fusion is a lot like nuclear fusion. Under extremely extreme conditions, slam mana together until weaker mana creates stronger mana. And so there I sat, or rather kinda floated in a soup of plasma, experimenting with magical fusion.


    I succeeded. I slammed the residual environmental mana together until I had something as strong as my own.


    Then I started dredging the bottom of my mana reserves, feeding everything I could into that tiny, magical star. I kept compressing and compressing, using the physical heat to force every last drop of mana I could find into one tiny point.


    The second I succeeded at making a minuscule, magic based singularity (magic black hole? Magic hole? No. Mana singularity sounds much better) physics started getting wonky.


    Unsure of what to do with my newfound toy and the plasmatic ashes of a military complex, fully aware of the probably rapidly approaching army and heat reaching levels even I couldn’t withstand, I defaulted to instinct.


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    I ate that mana singularity. It was indescribably delicious, like the first mouthful of brain freezing ice cream a child ever tastes.


    What? Someone (myself) was whispering I could handle it. I was right. I could. I did handle it.


    You see, my magic is simple. All I’m doing is alternating magic and antimagic rapidly. By doing so, I create very thin, very strong barriers. It’s more like collisions get erased, or perhaps confused. Mana will microscopically collide with mana, or be erased in a burst of energy by antimana.


    So my entire body is an explosive repulsion field, and if I trip up I’ll probably explode like a nuclear bomb, the waves of magic and antimagic colliding with each other rather than what’s around me.


    I wrapped that barrier around the mana singularity. It was the best idea I’ve ever had, if I say so myself.


    Impervious to the burning of the singularity, but unable to handle the mana it released, I exploded with yet another, fiercer, wave of magic and energy.


    What? I had never eaten a singularity before. How was I supposed to know it would flood me with rich mana and antimana like some fabled mana fountain?


    Imagine handing a very smart, well meaning, angelic child a theoretical philosopher’s stone. What happens to the child? They either learn to control their newfound toy or turn everything to gold like midas and die. But it’s a smart child, an angelic child, so of course they learn to control their power. All it cost was one Intergalactic military base.


    So there I was, wine drunk off power if you will, trying to fight off my own tipsiness to manage the output properly. And you know what happened? You won’t believe it.


    A reflective barrier failed. The ceiling reflective barrier failed.


    I got launched through the stratosphere at a significant percentage of the speed of light. So did the rest of the base, or as I like to call it, “military branded atomic soup.”


    But I, still reeling and probably not in a perfectly normal state of mind, had a brilliant idea in that half a second. Let’s open a wormhole.


    If I open a wormhole, the intergalactic federation cannot chase me. This is true, but this was also my mistake.


    I thought it was a joke when my aunt Deborah drunkenly told me never to open wormholes at high speeds. Well, she was always drunk, and I thought everything she said was a joke. I reevaluated some of it during my (approximately) 6 months of floating in space, but that’s besides the point.


    You see, apparently at relativistic speeds entering coordinates requires an entirely different calculation system.


    To put it simply, I accidentally launched myself to who knows where.


    My first order of business was getting my new little singularity under control. The little guy was an absolute torrent of energy, which wasn’t particularly compatible with, well, normal life, so I had to reign it in until the output was barely noticeable. That took a couple of weeks.


    Only then did I realize I was truly lost in space, as I should’ve crash landed like a meteor at home by about the 3 week mark. And then I remembered what my aunt had told me.


    I practiced swearing into the void for a while. Space would be a lot more fun if there was an echo, or rather any sound at all.


    I then spent another couple weeks agonizing over releasing an SOS signal as I freely floated through space. The reason was simple, I probably had a (very handsome) wanted poster from the federation plastered everywhere by this point, which made the likelihood of being picked up and promptly attacked very high (assuming I was in federation territory).


    About 1 month into my free-floating in space, there was a problem. I was hungry.


    Given the current form of my body, I shouldn’t be able to get hungry. So something had changed, and it was obviously my new mana singularity friend. He was hungry, so I was hungry. Not that I’m really clear on what would happen if he was starving, or starved to death. I assume I’d pop with a bang.


    There was a secondary problem. I was bored as hell.


    Still moving quickly at a speed that would probably jettison me straight through a space station was fine and all, but it’s not like the scenery changes quickly in deep space. It barely changes at all.


    So I gave up and started sending out SOS signals. Simple waves of mana and light, in regular patterns, hoping someone or something nearby would come grab me.


    So there I sat (well, floated), looking at empty space and sending out a signal as close to every 12 hours as I could manage.


    So I kept doing that. For nearly 3 months. Nonstop. God it was boring.


    With all the time in the world, I worked on my magic spells, trying things out, testing how my abilities had changed thanks to the mana singularity I was effectively now married to. It was enough to stop me from going insane, I suppose.


    Finally, a bit over 4 months since the incident as I will now call it, a massive spaceship approached, slowly gliding through the void and catching up with my speed and direction.


    A bit of knowledge for you about tractor beams. Tractor beams hurt, apparently.


    As durable as my body is, it is not made of spaceship, and is not the ideal target of a tractor beam. I was violently yanked towards an open hatch in the ship.


    Hungry, tired, my skin being yanked by the tractor beam, blinded by the newfound lights I hadn’t experienced for months, pure joy rose within me despite my discomfort.


    Finally! Other people, who had food and water and internet access!


    As the tractor beam pulled me closer to the hatch, I noticed an issue. I wasn’t moving towards the center, I was moving towards a corner. Swearing loudly, I tried to readjust, struggling and spinning in place. It didn’t work.


    With a loud bang, my head was slammed into the outside of the ship’s hull as my body ragdolled and was pulled into the hatch. Reeling from pain and the force of the impact, I felt my consciousness fading.


    Maybe some head trauma was revenge for roasting so many people? Who knows. I passed out.