novelraw Act 3, Chapter 2: Animation
Act 3, Chapter 2: Animation
Day in the story: 30th December (Tuesday), close to midnightThe first thing I did when the new soulmark settled within me was reach for its icon, stored inside the soulspace of my soul core. It was there in a new place, alongside the two I already had, looking like a puppeteer’s control bar.
There were rules, instinctively known by my soul. By her. Thanks to Anansi, though, I should have a pretty good description of them, right?
[Yes.] she answered, guiding my soul to understanding.
[That which is depicted may move, behave, or react in accordance with its represented nature, but only within the boundaries of its medium.
Core Principles:
Motion within the Medium: Art may move, act, or behave, but remains confined to its surface. A drawn fish can swim across a mural. A sketch of a bird can flap its wings, but it never leaves the surface.
Behavior must match depiction: The more accurate, expressive, or detailed the artwork, the more convincingly and intelligently it behaves.]
“Seems easy enough and simple enough to grasp,” I said, “but with Identity at play, my power has just tremendously risen.”
[Indeed. Would you like to do some experiments?]
“Would I!? Of course I would!” I shouted back. “And you might not like what I have in mind for that.”
[Oh no.]
“Oh yes,” I whispered, reaching for the roll of canvas I’d ordered a week earlier. It was big, meant to be used for traps like my fire sheet—without the need to sacrifice my bed sheets for that—but tonight it was going to be my little friend’s cage.
I reached for oil paints this time. I wanted it expressive and more structured. I worked on a white canvas with a limited, restrained palette, knowing from the beginning that contrast would have to come from value and surface rather than color. I began with the darker tones first—not true whites, but muted grays mixed from ivory, a small amount of pearl white, and a large proportion of titanium white. I blocked in the spider’s form using thin layers, applying the paint with a soft, worn brush so the edges stayed indistinct. At this stage, I was establishing placement and proportion, not detail.
I let those initial layers settle slightly—tacky, but not dry—before continuing. Oil paint behaves best when it has time to hold its shape without resisting the brush. Once the underpainting reached that point, I began building volume. I added paint more thickly to the raised parts of the spider’s body, using a stiffer brush and a palette knife to create subtle ridges. The legs and ears came last, with controlled, directional strokes that followed their structure, allowing the texture of the paint itself to suggest joints and tension.
It was then that Lio decided to appear and watch what I was doing. His gaze followed my movements, giving me a few additional points of view on the work—and on how the light caught it.
The lightest areas came at the end. I mixed nearly pure white with a small amount of medium to increase flow, then applied it sparingly—only where the spider would catch the most light. I avoided overworking these highlights; too much blending would flatten the surface. I didn’t wait for full drying between stages, only enough for each layer to support the next, so the transitions remained soft and integrated. The spider emerged through accumulation rather than outline, distinguished from the canvas by thickness, shadow, and the way the paint held the light. Its eyes were pure black and round, and the only thing that differentiated it from the fluffy jumping spider it was supposed to represent were equally cute rabbit ears sticking out of its head.
[So that’s supposed to be me?] she asked finally.
“I wondered when you were going to speak up. You don’t like it?”
[I like it. It’s just that I imagined myself bigger.] I laughed.
“I’ll make you something bigger to ride later, but tonight—” I reached for the painting with my aura as I stood above it, hands on my hips. “—tonight you’re going to be Anansi’s body.” I told the painting, and it accepted my Authority without question. Both identity and animation responded. I felt it, but the image stayed still.
“It’s not working?” I asked Anansi. “Ani?” I repeated when nothing happened.
She jumped then.
Hopped within the canvas. Then again and again.
She moved her limbs, even those that were merely a suggestion—a shadow behind the front ones. They came forward, moved, and waved back at me. Then she turned around, within the confines of the page, showing me her back, despite me never having painted it.
[How do you like it?] she asked within my soul.
“Me!? How do you like it?”
[It felt strange at first,] she replied, running to the edge of the canvas, where she stopped dead. [I can look out of the surface of the canvas, at you or the world, but when I reach the border I’m stopped in my tracks. I can’t move any further. I also feel very flat in here.] She added while her limbs pushed against the outline of the canvas.
“Wait a second,” I said, grabbing the brush and black paint. I painted a black hole on the page first, then grabbed lighter colors and painted a small ball.
I reached for both, and they responded, turning into the things they depicted. While the ball remained in its position—unmoving and waiting—the hole did something I hadn’t expected. It showed what was behind it, as if the canvas didn’t exist at all.
I squealed in happiness.
“Did you see that?” I asked her.
[Yes. I can still see both through your eyes and through mine now—and all the others you’ve placed all around.]
“Can you—” I started to ask, but she was already moving toward the painted hole, stopping at its edge.
[No. I can’t get inside. It’s like it’s now an edge of the canvas too. Let me try the ball.] She moved to the object I’d left for her, caught it easily with her front limbs, and rolled it around inside the medium.
“That’s so damn cool!” I exclaimed, withdrawing Authority from all of the paintings.
[It’s good to be back here. I felt really trapped in there.]
“Sorry about that. I’m going to make a three-dimensional body for you, but I’m not an expert sculptor, so I’ll need some help with that,” I replied, already thinking through possible paths. “Scratch that—we’ll start with two bodies for you, Spidey. One for Earth and one for here. I want you to be able to operate on Earth from time to time as well. But now I need to check how much Animation changed my combat capabilities too.”
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I looked at the palms of my hands, where—within the confines of my suit—wind rotors were painted onto them. As I looked, they responded, turning on and sending a very light breeze into my face, just the way I wanted them to.
“Damn. I know it’s almost nothing compared to making a body for you, but it feels so cool to have those blades turn on in my hand,” I said, turning them off and grabbing my spray cans.
**********
“I have no idea how this will work.”
[I have a feeling, but I want to see it play out nonetheless,] Anansi replied as we stood on the roof of my newly created building at the outskirts of my agora. Inside this ancient Greek–styled structure was a zone of no gravity where my items were stored, but that didn’t matter much now. Me, her, and even Lio were all keenly watching a fragment of canvas I’d placed on the ground just outside the woods.
On it was a depiction of a time bomb, with dynamite stacked underneath and fancy cables sticking out. I reached out and let it start the countdown.
Bold numbers—ten, nine—appeared on the digital clock I’d painted. Then it changed, ticking down to eight. Seven… two, one.
A violent birth of brilliance split the air open. The canvas detonated with a thunderclap that seemed to lag behind the light by an eternity and then crash into us all at once. A shockwave tore outward from the painting, flattening grass and hurling splinters of bark through the air as trees closest to the epicenter were snapped or shredded into flying debris.
The canvas impossibly endured for a heartbeat. The bomb was gone—erased from existence—replaced by a raging inferno that crawled across the page in living waves. Fire boiled and folded in on itself, colors too bright and violent to belong to paint, until the medium itself finally surrendered. The canvas blackened, curled, and disintegrated into drifting ash, the last embers winking out as the force of the blast finished tearing through the woods.
I sat on the roof, pinned there by the force, replaying what had happened in my minds.
“So the bomb exploded within the canvas, and the Animation made it turn into fire that ultimately consumed it—but before that, force, like every other physical effect, was released with all its might. Do I get it right?”
[Yes.]
I wondered why that wouldn’t have worked before. The rotors did, despite not being able to turn themselves—they assumed they did, they just didn’t show it. The bomb worked now because the identity required for it to function required a change of state that didn’t make it a bomb anymore, but a pile of rubble. It was at that point that Animation came into play.
Was I overlooking sound before, though? If I’d painted a mouth before acquiring Animation, would it speak—or just produce one sound, like my sound cards? Maybe in their case it was my perception that had hindered their use. Something I wouldn’t know now.
[Yes, but you can add mouths to your eye cards now and have conversations with people across the veil.]
“Yes, and I could add noses too, right?” I asked, but my creative brain quickly corrected itself. Smell was a chemical effect of particles entering it, and I couldn’t make anything non-physical or non-metaphysical enter a painting.
[No noses yet.]
“Nope. But I still have a lot of work to do to update my stuff,” I said, looking around. There were couches scattered around the crystalline, tree-web soul core. Work and art stations were randomly placed on the agora’s ground too, and while they kind of worked in an enclosed space—even under the open sky—now they stuck out like a sore thumb. “And I need to move this stuff into some of the buildings around here. I can’t have it standing out in the open like this anymore. It looks stupid. Who in their right mind would put a couch in the middle of a place like this?” I added, pointing at the fantastical rendition of an ancient plaza created inside my soul.
I walked into one of the buildings that wasn’t storage. It was spacious inside, built in the same ancient Greco-Roman style as everything outside—the architectural style I liked the most. Coincidence? I doubted it. It felt more like an unconscious choice by my mind, shaping everything to satisfy my sense of beauty. There was almost nothing inside, though, besides a few drawers and a single bed standing on a polished floor, with supporting columns on both sides and a skylight running the entire length of the ceiling, from the entrance to the back. It let in the light of the stars and the moon above. It must have once been one of the temporary bedrooms I’d made for guests of my Domain, but it had long outgrown its original purpose.
**********
Three hours later, I was finally done redecorating. There were six temple-like buildings around my agora.
The one I visited first was now my impromptu hotel, called The Nest. I had the Domain divide it into smaller rooms, each with a bed and drawers for my guests. I’d think about adding more later. I also let paintings from my spellbook display directly on the walls in various places to make it feel nicer. It responded readily to my wish for skylights above each room instead of a single corridor, and now the entire roof was translucent, despite its classical architectural roots.
Building number two became my personal bedroom and workspace, which I decided to call the Art Palace. It too had a translucent roof almost everywhere, except near the front and back. The front stayed solid for symmetry, but near the back—behind my bedroom—was a small room where I kept the dragon egg’s necklace hidden. That room had no permanent entrances; a door would appear only when I decided to enter, and never otherwise. Besides the bedroom itself, with my makeup station and drawers full of clothes, there were other rooms where I moved each art station I’d had before and organized all my materials.
Building number three, which I called the Hearth, held only the couch for now, but it would become my main meeting hall if I ever needed one.
Building number four was the Zero-G Storage, and I called it exactly that.
The fifth and sixth buildings had no purpose yet, so I left them empty.
And now, as I sat at my painting station remaking a stack of cards, my thoughts drifted to the necklace I had moved into a more hidden place. It had to be at least partly responsible for the meteoric growth of my Domain’s power. It was a truly beautiful work of art—brimming with cosmic energy of enormous potential—and, as if that weren’t enough, it brushed closely against the thieving aspect of my nature. If anything could resonate deeply with me, it was that.
Liora likely played his part as well. In my mind, he embodied the freedom of art itself—always in motion, ever shifting, changing as styles do across the years, yet always present. Always ready to be summoned, to be gazed upon, and to offer a way to look back at the world through his eyes.
Together, those melodies harmonized with my soul, and that harmony felt like a clear sign that they were the factor. And I sensed this resonance wasn’t limited to mages alone. Something greater than magic seemed to be at work in the world. I’d heard the phrase often, spoken by all kinds of people: Something resonated with me. Perhaps it truly did. Perhaps all of us are constantly attuning ourselves to different melodies played by the universe.
That resonance had to be the source of my power—of my fire, my lasers, even my control over radioactivity. I’d thought about it long after my painting of the elephant’s foot killed the drake in a fraction of the time it should have. I’d forced the universe to act, but it bent beneath my Authority, amplifying the damage through the resonance within me.
I lingered on these thoughts as time slipped past more quickly than I cared to admit. Fortunately for me, while my minds wandered, another of my brains remained diligently at work—tending to my art tools, even as my thoughts reached for the stars.
Thanks to that, I could grab the new decks and head out to the part of my Domain that had already been shaken by an explosion.
I held a few new cards as my next projects. The theme was the same—explosions—but I needed to see how this different medium and smaller size would react when forced to expel an enormous amount of force.
The first was a replica of the bomb I’d created earlier, with a clock and dynamite underneath, but with a shorter detonation time. That card flew toward a tree in the distance, embedding itself in the bark, and after two more seconds it blew up with a small explosion. And by small, I meant much less powerful than what I’d witnessed before—but I’d expected that. Verisimilitude was still at play, and the bomb was simply too small in the picture to look real.
That made me wonder, briefly, about the nuclear reactors on the arms of my suit. They were small too, so they shouldn’t be that powerful—but the whole armor was futuristic in nature, so maybe that played a role. Or some strange interaction with resonance did. There were so many factors involved that only trial and error would give me a definitive answer.
So I threw another card—this one with a grenade painted on it, pin already pulled. It accepted my Authority as it flew toward another tree, detonating almost as soon as it reached its destination, with results comparable to the bomb.
Next came a card with a personnel mine painted on it. It detonated on contact, but once again the results were comparable.
Maybe the issue was that it was simply hard to compare the destruction caused by explosions. Or maybe they really were almost the same. Either way, the fact remained: they could do serious damage whenever I needed them—assuming I’d ever be comfortable throwing around something that could explode in my face if mishandled. I’d much rather paint and move away, but it’s better to have something and never use it than to need it and not have it.
And as if he could read my thoughts, at that very moment Jason called the phone I’d left on the desk in my Earth bedroom.