Tyler White
Life Mage
SUNY Downstate Medical Center, New York, United States

Family seeing family in the hospital wasn't too much of a problem. I told Marc to tell the hospital staff that I was simply a friend from out of town. They didn't have a problem with it and Marc led the way to his father's room in the Intensive Care Wing.

Everything around here was kept insanely clean and orderly and I could definitely make out the sanitation smells of alcohol in the air. When we got to his father's room, the curtain was closed and Marc pulled it aside so we could both enter.

His father, Thomas, was in terrible shape. He was hooked up to a spider web of tubes and wires and had more IV bags suspended in the air than I had fingers on my hands. Man, with all the chems they were pumping into this guy, his body must have been more medication soup than anything else.

"I know you said you could help him..." Marc told me, glancing at me before looking to his father with a hopeless face. "The doctors have tried everything though. I mean, you don't look like a doctor to me, but... I'm not one to judge."

Ha, I was even better than a doctor! Of course, Kritana and I had to come to some agreement before anyone did anything big. And if I just went ahead anyway without asking permission, well, we sometimes had a chat about it, but I'd make it up to him somehow.

"Just relax," I assured Marc as I approached Thomas in what would have been his deathbed. "I got this."

Given Thomas's current state, I estimated Kritana would have had his hands on his guy in less than a week, but that was about to change. I started by pulling the bedsheets aside, and laid my hands on his chest. Really, wiping away all the terminal cancer and junk was just as easy as flushing a toilet, or at least it was for me.

Let's get you back in action.

Gone. Not only did I just flush away all the cancer, infections, and other grizzly junk that had decided to make his body a condominium, but I restored his stamina and vitality. Essentially, when he suddenly woke up, it was as if all that had happened was he just woke up from a really long night's sleep. He was a bit startled, which was totally understandable. Not too many humans know about stuff like this, so it does catch them off guard quite often!

"Oh my god, what's... what's going on!?" Thomas exclaimed, suddenly looked around the room.

"Hey there, name's Tyler," I told Marc's father. "I'm a friend of your son. How are you feeling right now?"

Oh, he was finer than fine, but I enjoyed asking that question anyway. It made my job much more fun.

"I'm..." Thomas spoke, suddenly even more surprised. "Did... the treatment work?"

I looked at the vitals monitor jokingly. Oh, I didn't need that piece of machinery to tell he was fine, but it was fun to see the sudden and instant change in line graph vital readings.

"How did you do that!?"" Marc exclaimed, suddenly in total shock. "Are... are you an angel!?"

I snickered at that. Ah, as much as I wished I could do this all the time, well, things needed to die at certain times and I couldn't abuse my powers so that everyone could live forever.

"Not quite," I told them, still with a confident smile. "I happen to be the Mage of Life. I know some humans have become scared and frightened of us in recent times, but we're simply moderators and governors of some of the elements of the universe."

"You're... one of them?" Marc asked, very surprised. "I... never would have thought."

"It's okay, we've tried our best to keep things secret," I told them. "I'm sure you're familiar with some of the more recent incidents that have been going on and how what we do isn't quite so secret anymore. Well, I'm here to tell the story of things from our side rather than the media's. We're not bad people. In fact, many of the Mages do great things and the world wouldn't be the same without them. And yes, while I'm the Life Mage, there is a Death Mage too."

"But why?" Marc asked, still unable to understand. "Why have death?"

"Well, imagine for a moment what the world would be like if everything and everyone lived forever and never died," I told him, trying to make him comfortable with the whole life and death thing. "It might sound wonderful at first, but food sources would run out rapidly, masses of living things would be forever suffering in starvation, and the world couldn't support so many living things at once. There would be no room for it all and people and animals would be living in piles of each other everywhere. So, everyone gets a chance at life, but they've got to make the best out of it with the time they have. For some, life is short and long for others. Just like school or even a stay at a hotel, when time's up, it's simply a matter of checking out so another person can move into your room. If the balance isn't kept, very often disaster strikes."

"But what about starving children?" Thomas asked. "And war? And natural disasters? It is fair those people had their lives taken from them so unexpectedly?"

"Ah, I love these questions," I told him, kind of speaking with a bit of sarcasm there. "You bet I wish we could feed all those starving kids. But I wish I could stop a man and wife from having a kid if they couldn't feed them, too. Some do anyway even when they know the consequences. And as much as I wish war could be wiped out, well, as long as there are differences in human opinion, belief, and thought, well, you're going to have some people get so angry about those differences that they'll resort to physical violence. As for disasters, that too is the result of people getting caught in an ever-changing world that won't stick to one shape forever. But where a forest burns to the ground, a new one will form. Where an earthquake destroys a city, a new one will be rebuilt from the ground, newer and better than before. You also need to remember that in the grand scale of the universe, we're just a very tiny part of something so much bigger. But that doesn't mean that what each human does here isn't important. And you, my friends, have a role to play in that!"

Of course, I needed to get those IVs and monitor wires removed so we could get out of here. If the nurses saw this, they'd cause quite a stir. So I needed to get both Thomas and Marc out of here before anyone saw this.