Damien drew a deep breath.  He leaned back and stared at the ceiling, as if searching for inspiration.  Eventually he began speaking again:
       I don’t remember exactly when we got there, or how.  I think we came in on someone’s yacht.  Not sure.  At that time I travelled with a rotating entourage of babes that I picked up here and there.  Anybody I found interesting.  They left jobs, school, boyfriends to run off with me.  When I tired of them I sent them home – with the body of a beauty queen and a winning lottery ticket.
       We anchored at an exclusive, luxury resort on one of the smaller islands.  I may have been unconsciously trying to limit the damage I could do.  I really did want to visit Fiji.  We had no reservation, but the cute Fijian at the welcome desk had no trouble finding rooms for me and my half-dozen girls.  We got several new luxury villas along the water.  
       The front-desk cutie surprised me a little; she seemed to recognize something was amiss, even if my power prevented her from seeing what it was.  Maybe she thought it odd that the other woman working the desk with her was suddenly so attractive.  Or that she was on her knees, sucking off the bellboy.
       I don’t think I intended to raise havoc, particularly.  But I couldn’t resist fucking everybody up.  It was too easy, and too much fun.  By our second day there the entire resort had descended into sexual mayhem.  Fijians drink a mildly narcotic beverage called kava.  It’s pretty harmless.  On a whim I created a new variety, endemic to that island, ten times stronger and a potent aphrodisiac.  I got the entire staff hooked on it.  Pretty soon everyone was stumbling around like a drunkard, laughing and groping and fucking anybody.  I made all the women impossibly attractive too.
       The gorgeous maids forgot to clean rooms because they were busy sixty-nining on the bed.  The assistant manager got sucked off five or six times a day, sometimes as he was checking in guests.  Servers at the pool were too stoned to get orders right and too busy screwing each other in the kitchen to deliver them.
       The four-star restaurant discovered that guests didn’t care if the chef burned dinner and the stunning, stumbling waitress spilled it, as long as they served everybody free maja-kava as an aperitif.  The evening performance of traditional music and dance kept turning into an erotic strip-tease, culminating in the panting, naked dancers throwing themselves at the musicians.  Usually by this time the audience was so high on maja-kava that they were openly boinking each other anyway.
       Early in the afternoon of our third day, I was strolling in the tropical garden with a couple of my girls.  Emma and Kimiko, I think.  Whatever.  The other four girls were down at the beach front, showing off in their bikinis and making other woman feel inadequate.  We had already passed at least a dozen kava-conked couples, including most of the gardeners, drinking themselves stupid or fucking their brains out among the flowers.
       The arousal induced by my maja-kava tended to override inhibitions.  Amorous advances became difficult to resist.  In fact, the previous evening, I had overheard a couple of kava-high, half-naked maids set a competition to see how many rich, new husbands honeymooning at the resort they could each seduce.  They were fingering each other in the corridor while they discussed it.  
       It was a sort of contest.  They gave themselves extra points if they got to the wife too.  I may have planted these ideas in their minds.  I may have given them both bouncing, forty-inch chests, to make it a little easier.
       About then a hotel employee came stumbling toward us in her outlandish heels.  I recognized her as Sereana, the girl who had been manning the front desk when I arrived.  I liked her.  Fijian women tend to be pretty, and ample.  But of course I had ramped everyone up a few notches as soon as I arrived, so Sereana was looking damned hot.  Especially since I had reduced the hotel uniform, which was based on traditional Fijian garb, to a kind of wrap bikini and platform, bamboo sandals.  Sereana was probably high on maja-kava.  The alarm on her face over-rode it.
       ‘Everyone must leave at once!’ she proclaimed.  ‘There’s a cyclone.  It’s coming right for us!’
       I had heard about the storm, of course.  We had to navigate around it on the way in.  Fiji gets hit by a tropical storm every couple of years, they’re used to them, but this was a strong one.  It would require preparations, and evacuations of coastal resorts.  ‘Sereana, relax honey,’ I said.  ‘The cyclone is passing well to the north of the islands.’
       She shook her head.  Long black hair shimmered.  She wore a crimson flower behind one ear.  ‘No.  It changed direction.  It is moving south now, fast.  It will be here in a few hours.’
       I felt myself tense up.  As soon as she spoke, I sensed that something was wrong.  For the storm to hit us its track would have to make an abrupt, ninety-degree turn.  Do tropical storms change direction like that?  I had Sereana lead us back to the hotel office, where we could see the news.
       There were four people in the office.  None of them were working.  An older woman, perhaps a manager, was making out with a maintenance worker in a big lounge chair.  She was almost middle-age but still smoking hot.  Her partner was busy freeing her tits from her bikini top.
       A younger woman was lying on her back on a big desk, atop scattered papers and ledgers, chatting with someone on the telephone like an idle teenager.  She was slowly running her free hand up and down one leg.  She had her knees crossed.  She was bobbing one giant sandal up and down while she grunted and sighed into the phone.  The phone conversation was evidently arousing.
       Another worker, a young white woman from Australia, was sitting at her desk in front of a television mounted on the wall.  A news reporter there was showing a map of the hurricane track, and urging everyone to seek shelter immediately.
       The woman didn’t appear to be listening.  She was slowly stroking her hair with one hand, while the other hand moved in and out between her legs.  She was smiling.  She hardly seemed to be aware of her surroundings.
       A big jug of maja-kava stood on a nearby table.  An empty jug lay overturned on the floor.
       We gathered round to watch the television report.  The storm had greatly increased in intensity in a few hours.  It had also made an abrupt right turn and was now heading straight for Fiji.  Our resort was on a north-side island.  The storm would hit us head on.  Kimiko grabbed my arm, frightened.  She was only eighteen.
       This wasn’t right.  I’m not sure how I knew, but the movement of the storm felt wrong.  I was drawing the storm toward us.  I could feel it.  It’s a weird side effect of my power.  Anton Wolfe says its something called integral field balance, but at that time I didn’t know anything about it.
       It took a while for that reality to sink in.  I stood there like an idiot for the longest time, watching the radar image of the storm.  Slowly, far too slowly, I came to realize that the storm was my problem, my responsibility.  I created it, I would have to deal with it.  I felt as if I had been slapped in the face – then punched in the gut.  I tried to decide what to do. 
       I made the maja-kava disappear.  Instantly everyone sobered up.  The woman making out in a corner of the office sat up, slapped the man she had been necking with, fixed her clothing and approached the television.  The others joined us.  ‘This is bad,’ the older woman said.  ‘We need to get everyone to the shelters, double quick.’  She began issuing orders to the others in the room.  Everyone seemed to know what to do except me.
       Fijians pass cyclones by taking refuge in natural caves or in shelters built to withstand any storm.  The resort had its own shelter, but it was inland, safely uphill from coastal floods.  There wasn’t nearly enough time to get everyone to safety.  I didn’t think I could evacuate everyone, even with my power.   And what about all the other islanders?  
       I nearly panicked.  The women with me were practically hyper-ventilating, which didn’t help.  ‘I’m scared,’ Kimiko said.  Her grip on my arm was almost painful.
       Sereana was looking at me hard.  She’s a clever girl, that one.  Went to school in Adelaide.  She said: ‘Maybe you can deflect the storm.’
       I don’t know how she knew.  But her challenge finally galvanized me into doing something.  I said, ‘Maybe I can.’
       I had them bring a deck chair down to the long dock that extended into the lagoon.  The wind was already rising.  The sky to the north was darkening, pulsing with purple clouds.  I told Sereana to take Emma and Kimiko inside somewhere and leave me alone.  I needed to think.
       So far I had never encountered a limit to my power.  I had changed the local weather often enough.  But deflecting a cyclone?  Never tried that.  Still, if I could draw it toward me without even trying, maybe I could drive it away if I was trying?  Trying was all I could do.
       There was another problem.  An unexpected moral dilemma.  Where was I to deflect the storm to?  The resort lay on a small island just north of Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji.  But the archipelago includes hundreds of islands large and small, many of them inhabited.  If I deflected the cyclone in either direction, avoiding us, it would hit other islands instead.  
       How was I to decide who faced danger and who did not?  And who was I to even make that decision?  I thought of myself as a god because of the power I possessed.  Yet for a decision of this magnitude I was unqualified and completely unprepared.  At once I felt intensely and humbly human.
       I was also horribly frightened.  I had almost forgotten what it was like to be afraid, even to be anxious, to feel any negative emotion.  I could fix anything, change anything, avoid or cure any problem.  I had been skipping around the planet like a half-mad playboy, floating on my own personal high of unlimited ability.  Sitting there in that deck chair, a wet wind blowing in my face, I came down in a hurry.
       Eventually I decided that deflecting the cyclone was the wrong idea.  I could probably have made it go away, but I was afraid to try.  Would there be some other consequence, possibly worse?  What if field balance triggered a tsunami, or a volcanic eruption?  The only thing to do was to let the storm continue on its present course – and to try to make it less of a menace.
       The damage from tropical cyclones arises from two forces:  how strong the wind blows, of course, but also how fast the storm centre moves.  The worst storms are those that crawl along, lingering over the coast for hours or days.  The slow pace of the storm gives the wind and tide more time to do harm.  I decided to try slowing the wind and accelerating the eye at the same time.  If the total energy of the storm were unchanged, maybe balance would be maintained.
       I didn’t have to wait for the storm to arrive.  Rain had already begun.  It soon became torrential, and driven by gale-force winds.  I was soaked to the skin in minutes.  The palm trees were already bent and howling.
       I sat there in my big wooden chair, trying to ignore the wind and rain so I could reach out to the storm.  It was like trying to sing while someone is slapping you.  And the task itself was daunting.
       For me, changing something is usually effortless, as automatic as blinking or lifting an arm.  This was like lifting weights.  Heavy weights, again and again.  I had to imagine exactly what I wanted and keep my mind focused on that image.  It required a discipline of mind for which I had not practiced.  Doing this in a shrieking rainstorm was even harder.  I closed my eyes.  I imagined slowing the storm, and speeding it up, at the same time.
       I was scared, wet, wind-lashed and miserable.  The deck chair jittered in the wind.  The resort was built at the head of a long lagoon, behind a low wall of old reef.  Were it not for that barrier I would have been blown away, or drowned.  As it was I could see the waves exploding against the outer reef like bombs going off.  Sand from the beach, driven by the wind, hit my skin like tiny bullets.
       Yet I couldn’t let up, even for a minute.  I tried to redirect all that extra energy into moving the storm centre along.  The storm fought my control like a wild horse bucks its rider.  I was violating the laws of physics, and something in the universe objected. 
       Still, after a time I could sense a change.  Slowly, slowly, the storm began to moderate.  The wind howled, but not as powerfully as it had.  The palm trees bent and swayed, but didn’t break.  Shingles flew off the buildings, but no windows broke.
       After an hour or two there was a calm.  The palm trees stood still and the rain reduced to a steady, warm drizzle.  Sereana came tripping out to bring me some water.  I was grateful, yet I told her to stand behind me.  She was damned sexy in that bikini wrap.  This was not the moment to be distracted.
       The wind came up again, but now I could feel that its strength had been tempered.  The cyclone, less a typhoon now than a tropical storm, moved across the island at unnatural speed, like a stone skipping across a pond.  It was back over the ocean again in a couple of hours.  I was exhausted.  When the wind died down and I could see blue sky breaking to the north, I relaxed, took a long drink of water, and passed out.
       Sereana told me that I slipped in and out of consciousness for almost three days.  When I came to myself I was lying in the bed in my luxury hotel room.  I felt awful: sore, weak, abraded.  My girls had taken turns looking after me.  One of them, Emma, was standing beside the bed, fabulously beautiful but dressed normally.  She said, ‘Damien, I would like to go home now.’  
       Damien stopped speaking.  He sank into the sofa as if spent.  He stared at the floor.
       Ava said, “You said Fiji was the low point.  Yet you overcame the storm.  You probably saved lives.”
       He shook his head.  “I saved the island from a storm that I brought on.  I was merely cleaning up my own mess.”
       “Can you know that for sure?”
       He shrugged.  “It doesn’t matter.  Fiji doesn’t matter.  The storm passed with little harm done.  What matters is that I sobered up.  I came to realize how much harm I had done, how much chaos I had caused.
       “I sent all my girls home.  I stayed in Fiji for a while, secretly fixing things.  Spending time with Sereana.  Then I went back to some of the places I had visited and undid my worst excesses.  As much as I could, anyway. 
       “But my recovery did not succeed.  As fast as I fixed my past excesses, I kept doing more damage.  I couldn’t stop myself.  I was like an addict who can’t stop using, even when he wants to.  The power is too strong to suppress.  I decided I needed to get away, find somewhere lonely where I couldn’t hurt anyone.  I spent a long time on a sparsely inhabited island off Greece, away from everyone, trying to get my head together.
       “Eventually I realized I needed a better way to keep myself in check.  My background gave me an idea.  I thought that by immersing myself in humanity, I might make myself human again.  Instead of avoiding human contact, I started seeking out crowds and cities, making a deliberate study of ordinary people.  I hoped that by keeping in tune with other human beings I could keep myself sane.  I was an anthropologist, watching people is natural for me.”
       “Did it work?”
       Another long pause.  “Not sure,” he admitted.  “Not sure.  Maybe?  Can a madman know if he’s mad?  I still can’t keep the power from getting out, not completely.  It’s like water in a leaky garden hose.  I can put my thumb over the end, for a while, but the pressure builds up and water spurts out somewhere else.”
       Ava had a thought.  “Your unconscious makes super-bimbos wherever you go.  But you haven’t changed me.  I mean, except for – ”  She indicated her traffic-stopping figure with a sweep of one hand.  “Why is that?”
       Damien said, “I’ve been concentrating on leaving you alone.  You have been kind to me.  You took me in, a wandering stranger on the street, and gave me a place to stay.  You’re a decent person, Ava.  You deserve respect.”
       Ava stopped with her glass halfway to her plump lips.  “I’m nobody,” she corrected him.  “I’m an oversexed college dropout surviving as a waitress – well, head waiter – and manager – co-owner actually.”  Her head reeled.  “Wait, wait.  My job.  The restaurant.  You’ve been changing that all along!”
       “Waiting tables?  You can do so much better than that.”
       She threw back long hair in exasperation.  “I don’t know anything about managing a restaurant!”  Even as she spoke, memories came to her: of teaching a reluctant new waitress how to be confident and sexy in the racy uniform; of negotiating an excellent price on cellar stock with a love-struck wine merchant; of convincing a talented sous-chef to stay with Tavish’s despite a better offer elsewhere.  
       Her beauty and feminine charm were useful in every case.  The adoring waitress was much more tractable after a few “training sessions” with Ava’s fingers inside her knickers; the ogling wine merchant kept agreeing to lower prices every time Ava pouted and passed a hand over her low-cut sweater; negotiations with the sous-chef proceeded smoothly once the sensation of Ava’s lips on his pecker became more important than current salary, future prospects, or pretty much anything.
       “I’m confused!” Ava cried.  None of those remembered events were real, she was sure of that.  Even if she was equally certain they had all happened that week.  She threw back another drink.  The room wobbled.
       “The problem is that you’re too close to me,” Damien said.  “You’re experiencing two versions of reality at the same time.  People I meet on the street can have their entire reality re-arranged without them noticing.  It’s some kind of boundary effect.  Anton Wolfe is trying to figure it out.”
       Ava got to her feet.  That was a mistake.  The room bobbed and dipped like a boat on the ocean.  “Thiz all impossible,” she pronounced, slurring a little.  “ ‘mpossible.  An’ anyway, if you’re not changing me, where is like, the power going?”
       Damien said, “Good point.  Let’s take a look outside.”
       They approached the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street.  Ava brought her refilled glass with her.  She stumbled in her heels over a pot of yellow roses.  “Would you min’ backin’ off with the flowers?” she complained.
       “Right, of course.”  Most of the flowers in her flat disappeared.  The piano did not.  Damien dimmed the lights so they could see outside without being seen.
       The street where Ava lived was busy.  Besides the Mercati’s shop below them, there was a corner store at one end of the block and a pub at the other.  The little parklet lay at the end of the block, across from the corner store.  Foot and car traffic were steady.  All the snow and ice on the street had disappeared.  
       A middle-aged woman in a dark coat and yellow trousers was walking back from the store.  She had a heavy white sack in one hand.  The woman passed behind a parked car.  She emerged on the other side as a head-turning package of sumptuous curves in an open leather jacket and golden yellow tights, topped off with chunky, platform boots of shiny black.  She was wearing something tight and yellow beneath her jacket.  It thinly covered a chest so capacious it would make closing her jacket a challenge.  Her dark hair was a done up in rings and loops about her head.  Even her plastic bag had transformed into a yellow-and-black leather carryall.
       “Ah!” Ava gasped.   The instantaneous transition was shocking.  The woman on the street was walking now with a lazy, hip-swinging gait, apparently in no hurry to get home.  She set one booted foot in front of the other as she walked, emphasizing the sway of her hips.  She pulled a mobile phone out of her satchel and snapped a selfie.
       “Everyone says that her husband is a lucky man,” Damien remarked.  “Though Lucy is more than a little self-obsessed.”
       Another woman came along.  She was lanky and thin, dressed in a white jacket and loose slacks.  Except now she was deliciously slender in a stretch-fit, white minidress and thigh-high white boots with tall heels.  Her perfect legs went on forever.  Her open jacket was rimmed with white fur.
       She almost bumped into a balding fellow emerging from the corner store.  The man ogled her openly.  She didn’t seem to mind.  Their conversation quickly become flirtatious.  She toyed with the lapel of his jacket.  They walked on toward the pub with his arm around her.  The man now had thick black hair. 
       A couple of twenty-something women headed down the street, probably on the way to the pub.  They were dressed casually, ripped jeans and hoodies.  A moment later they were each wearing skin-tight, shiny stretch pants, one in red, the other in black, and patent-black heels.  The filled out their leather pants, and the half-length sweaters above them, deliciously.  Walking arm in arm, each with a hand on the other’s leather-clad ass, they paused to meld their full, red lips into a long kiss before continuing on their way.
       A pair of Asian girls approached the store.  They were probably exchange students at the university.  One was suddenly wearing tiny short-shorts, patterned dark hose and funky, thick- soled shoes.  Her partner was also in shorts, along with over-the-knee socks and fur-topped pink boots.  They both had glossy black hair hanging to their belt lines.  The were wearing backpacks shaped like teddy bears.
       Ava watched the street, round-eyed.  Every woman that came along, whoever she was and whatever she looked like, instantly transformed into an over-built hyper-hottie dressed for a club.  The women shone with sexual allure.  Men became taller, fitter, better looking.  The whole street was as sex-charged as a pick-up bar.  Yet nobody seemed to notice anything unusual.
       “Course,” Ava breathed.  “It’s spillin’ out ont’ the street.”
       Damien shrugged.  “The power leaks out.  I can’t stop it.  Too strong.  And there’s another drawback.”
       “Wha’s that?”  She watched a gorgeous teen swing down the street in a cobalt blue, bodycon microdress and extra-high heels.  Her complexion was flawless.  Her hose sparkled.  She would easily be the prettiest girl in her school, and her entire school district, and probably the north of the country.  Yet she was talking on her mobile, chatting with someone, as if her appearance were perfectly ordinary.
       “Wait for it,” Damien said.
       Someone shouted, outside.  Cars stopped.  A pair of large, hoofed animals ambled down the centre of the street.  One paused to nip grass over a low garden wall.  They wandered into the parklet and disappeared around the corner.
       “Were those – were those zebras?” Ava demanded.  She swayed on her heels.
       Her half-mad flatmate nodded.  “It’s usually zebras.  Or baboons.  Integral field balance, again.  The universe compensates for the changes I make by making changes of its own.  Those compensations appear as large African wildlife.”
        “Why don’ you wish the zhebras back t’ Africa?”
       “Tried that.  It’s such a major change it produces giraffes.”
       Ava put a hand to her forehead.  “Still not drunk enough,” she decided.  
       She noticed the drink in her hand.  Perhaps unwisely, she drank it in one go.  She lost her balance.  The room bobbed and weaved.  She steadied herself by leaning against the window.  
       “Waitaminute,” she said, gesturing with her empty glass.  “Las’ night.  All that bizarre weather.  Tha’ was you!”
       He nodded again.  “I was up at the University.  We were trying some experiments.”
       “But, there was, I mean, I think I saw – like, a flyin’ lizard thing.  Dinosaur.  Ter-row-dakil?”  The last word proved impossible to navigate.
       For once it was Damien who was surprised.  “A pterodactyl?”
       “That’s it!”
       “Oh crap.  How am I going to explain that?”
       “You’ll havta – make somethin’ up!”  That line struck her as hilarious.  She slumped against the window, giggling inanely.  But then she noticed her vast living room.  It was easily big enough to house a basketball court.  With ample room for spectators, changing rooms and a lobby.
       She said, “My flat’s bigger too, innit.”
       “Well, I could hardly have made it smaller.”
       Ava was cooking now.  “An’ the Mertaci’s store is righ’ ‘neath my flat.”
       “Yes.”
       “So like, their shtore’s gettin’ bigger too.”  
       “Of course.  It’s also doing very well.  I helped a little with that.”
       Ava’s face lit up.  “Oh, I have an amazing idea!” she exclaimed.  She pushed herself away from the window, standing up straight.  That did not go well.  The room danced.  She took a half-step, stumbled, then lost her balance and fell heavily into a comfortable stuffed chair.
       “I don’ ‘member this chair,” she mumbled, before collapsing into sleep.