February–March 2026. No single. IO Fox spends the opening weeks of February on the one-year anniversary press run for FORCE OF NATURE, tires of it quickly, and wants to be back in the lab.
February
What he wants to be back in the lab for is Foxite, the pink crystalline scale that had been accumulating on cooler VDMH-1 hardware for months. He had been harvesting and archiving it as an unknown byproduct without knowing what it was.
Working late in the first week, he notices the crystals glow faintly pink when he moves or sings near them, and brighter when his heart rate rises, which suggests they respond to something a body emits. He records it and starts wondering about bioelectric fields. Because solid Foxite refracts light unpredictably, he dissolves it into a clear solution so he can watch the luminescence directly.
By the middle of the month the precision balance starts misbehaving. Readings shift by several milligrams while he sings or moves. He controls for vibration and air currents, and the anomaly survives every control.
Under the microscope, faint hexagonal lattices of light form in the solution while he dances, sings, or lifts, more or less complete depending on how focused he is. He repeats the experiment across February 22–24, trying to complete one of the patterns through motion, and on the third day one hexagon holds. His dumbbell becomes lighter so suddenly that he stumbles, and the solution flashes bright pink.
Quote
Emotion has altered gravity.
He names the field Varyon, “because it seems to make things vary in mass, luminosity, and response,” and calls its study Varyology. On February 28 he works out Varyolithography, etching hexagonal channels into Foxite so Varyon runs through them predictably. The VARYON Dumbbells date from that night as an idea.
March
In the first days of March he decides that the Dumbbells will launch alongside his next single, PWR UP PUP, as one release of science, music, and self-improvement.
After that, March is manufacturing. Foxite forms on any VDMH-1 hardware run long enough, but PWRCORE-1 is the only reactor in the world on a duty cycle that produces it in quantity, and even there the yield is small. The first production run is capped at roughly a thousand units before a single one is sold. IO spends the month refining the etch, sitting for a magazine profile and cover shoot that reintroduce him as an inventor rather than a singer, and posting glimpses of glowing hardware without saying what it is, along with behind-the-scenes clips of himself testing prototypes.
Next: Chapter 2 - RISE.