The first day of training, Marcus rented a dance studio on the east side. The room was a capsule of glass and silver, ringed with mirrors that duplicated every movement, every flaw, every success.
Hardwood underfoot, cold at the start and warmer as it absorbed the friction of his shoes. No one else was booked until late afternoon; the calendar app said "Private Session: VALE" for five uninterrupted hours.
He locked the door, dropped his bag by the barre, and pulled the blackout curtains so the only light was fluorescence. Even in the sealed box, the air trembled with residual adrenaline.
He paced the length of the studio before beginning, body seeking out the edges, the corners, as if the Joker might already be hiding somewhere in the periphery.
He started with the voice.
He'd read that old actors warmed up with scales, vowel drills, nonsense tongue twisters. He ignored all of it. Marcus pressed "record" on his phone and began with the thing itself: the laugh.
First, a low hum—barely above the level of breath, more vibration than sound. He closed his eyes and imagined the Joker not as a character but as a condition: a pressure in the chest, a cough that metastasized. He let it build, running it from the soft palate up through the sinuses until it caught behind the teeth and wanted out.
He tested it—short, sharp, clipped. Then let it run longer, pitching up at the end, searching for the note that made the neck hairs rise. The first few attempts sounded wrong, parodic. He stopped, rolled his head on his neck, started again. Each time, he took it further, letting the sound mutate, break, resolve into something new.
Within twenty minutes, his throat was raw.
He reached for the water bottle, took a single sip, and spat it into the empty trash can.
He preferred the edge, the burn.
He could feel the voice in his trachea now, a stripe of heat running from clavicle to jaw.
He set the phone down on the barre, turned to the wall of mirrors, and cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Let's try it again," he muttered—not to himself, but to the room, or to the thing he was conjuring.
He went again, cycling through every timbre: a child's giggle, a deranged animal bark, a dry, rattling wheeze. Sometimes he laughed with no warning, then tried to cut it off instantly, to see how quickly he could transition from mania to absolute silence. He watched himself in the mirror, searching for the tells.
On the fifth cycle, he found something. A catch at the bottom of the laugh, a staccato that felt organic and alien at the same time. He repeated it, over and over, letting the resonance travel through his chest and up into the skull. The laugh began to change him—not just the voice, but the eyes, the line of the jaw, the set of the shoulders. He saw it in the glass.
He pressed stop on the phone.
The timer read forty-two minutes.
He replayed the recording, listening not to the sound but to the spaces in between. He noted where his breath hitched, where the laugh threatened to collapse into cough or scream. He critiqued it, rewound, critiqued again. Each mistake was a callus forming on the inside of his head.
He replayed the last take. The laugh at the end was unrecognizable—his own, and not his own. A predator's snarl, then a high, glittering cackle, then nothing.
He smiled at the glass, and the glass smiled back.
A sudden flicker: the world grayed, not all at once, but like a gradient closing over his eyes. The System HUD drifted into his vision, as clinical and cold as a surgical report.
TRAIT DEVELOPMENT: 65%
It hovered, then faded, replaced by a spinning wheel. He blinked, and the studio returned, but the afterimage persisted in the corners of his vision.
He blinked again, hard, to clear it. The glass walls rippled, then refocused. The mirrors returned, but the light was different now: too bright at the edges, the shadows too dense.
Without warning, the flash hit.
He saw a hand—his, but not his—covered in blood up to the wrist, fingers curled around the stem of a surgical scalpel. The gloves were white, latex, painted now with veins of red that ran in rivers down the lifeline.
A face hovered above the hand, skin white as milk, lips split in a smile that wasn't performative but compulsory, anatomical. The mouth opened. A voice, not his, but inside him:
"Smile for me, darling."
The vision cracked, and he found himself doubled over, hand white-knuckled on the microphone stand. His breath came shallow and wet, the rawness in his throat now joined by a tremor in the arms.
He forced himself to straighten, ignoring the shaking. He stared down his own reflection, daring it to flinch.
He pressed record again.
"Let's do it," he said.
He started with the laugh, but pushed it further—took it past the edge of comfort, past parody, into something that felt like violence. He let the body join in, hurling the laugh from the diaphragm, snapping his fingers, baring the teeth.
His posture changed: shoulders hunched, neck forward, the angles all wrong for a human. He caught it in the mirror—his own body, but the eyes weren't right, the tension at the jaw was something new.
He stopped, then did it again, and again. Each time, he tried to go blank before the sound began, to let the laugh possess him like a seizure. He made note of every tic, every involuntary smile, every time his hand came up to cover his mouth. He logged it. He let it sink in.
The System flickered again, this time at the edge of perception, like a warning light buried behind the eyes.
He heard the laugh now, not just in the room, but in the walls, in the glass, in the floor.
He laughed until his voice gave out.
At the end of the third hour, he sat on the hardwood, legs sprawled in front of him, back to the mirror. His skin was clammy with sweat, hair matted to the sides of his face. He drew deep, raking breaths, but the throat would not recover. It felt torn, like someone had reached in and sanded it with steel wool.
He found the bottle of water, drained it, and let his head loll back onto the cool glass.
Above him, his reflection hung upside down, the lips red and split from exertion. The eyes—his eyes—were black, pupil blown wide, rimmed in pink. The smile was there, but the rest of the face had stopped performing.
He stared at the glass, waiting to see if it would move first.
It didn't.
He gathered himself, wiped the sweat from his brow, and stood.
The mirrors watched.
He turned, took three measured steps, and tried the laugh one last time.
This time, the sound came out perfect.
It was only then that he realized: it was not his laugh anymore.
It belonged to the thing in the mirror.
....
He returned home after midnight, body a bundle of aches, voice spent to the point of rasp. The apartment was a black box theater: high ceilings, concrete floors, furniture chosen for function and not comfort.
There was a couch, a table, a mattress on a platform—nothing else but the grid of windows, a single strip lamp, and the TV. The city's lights bled through the glass, throwing the world inside into grayscale. It felt less like a home and more like a crime scene awaiting documentation.
Marcus dropped his bag, shucked off his shoes, and padded barefoot to the kitchen. He poured a shot of vodka, sipped it, let the burn wake up what nerves the day's training had not scoured clean. He sat at the table, fired up his laptop, and queued up the first video.
It was a panther documentary, muted. He watched the animal move, frame by frame, replaying the clip over and over. The cat stalked, body low, almost motionless, then exploded in a blur of muscle and fang.
He watched the shoulders, the flicker of the tail, the dilation of the pupils just before the kill. He tracked the way the eyes never left the target—not for a second, not even in the final leap.
He tried to mimic it, at first seated, then standing, then walking the perimeter of the kitchen. He let his body collapse into the gait, rolling each joint in perfect sequence. The glass in the cabinets trembled as he passed, a faint chime of risk with each step.
Next, he ran the snake video. The sidewinder moved with a different grace, all lateral compression and economy, but the logic was the same: nothing, nothing, nothing—then everything at once.
The strike came so fast the frame almost missed it. He practiced that, too, letting his limbs coil, then unspool in a whip of motion.
He watched an eagle next, then a video of a praying mantis. He catalogued the differences, but the common thread was obvious: every predator knew how to stay perfectly still.
He powered off the laptop, darkness returning. He stood, walked to the bathroom, and flicked on the light.
The mirror was tall and narrow, cut into the drywall with no frame, the edges left raw. He stepped into the rectangle of brightness, blinked against the fluorescent glare, and met his own gaze.
He started the stillness exercise.
He focused on his eyes, timing his own reflection: no blinking, no shifting, no change in focus. He let the rest of the body relax, arms limp at the sides, but held the eyes steady and unbroken. He watched the clock on his phone, trying for a full minute, then two.
The first attempt lasted nineteen seconds. The next: forty-three. The third time, he made it to just over a minute, but his left eyelid twitched at the end, a betrayal.
He kept going, round after round, until the face in the mirror began to feel like someone else's.
He stared, and the mirror stared back.
A duel of attention.
He noticed, after a time, that the muscles in his face were rearranging themselves. The lips relaxed, baring the teeth just a fraction. The eyebrows arched, not in surprise, but in challenge.
The jaw set at a different angle. These were not choices; they happened as if by muscle memory he didn't remember acquiring.
He stopped, blinked, looked away.
Then he tried again, this time layering in the laugh.
.....
[Okay, I'm thinking we could set targets going forward with power stones. I don't know much about what would be acceptable but we could figure something out. Let me know what you guy's think.
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