“So, this is the house?” I ask. We were on a very normal street in another small town, although much bigger than the one before. We drove the entire day to get here, all the while scattering the tracker.

We hoped they couldn’t really pinpoint our location as when attention is scattered the victim can’t notice anything related to the subject, but they might have workarounds that, like asking the tracker to write or point to the direction before he passes out.

On another note, the way my power now did the same scattering differed from spotlights, after my matrix fixed the backlashes now my tentacles that interact with the attention do so more slowly taking the attention apart bit by bit, that would give the tracker more time to point out where we are, but the effect seemed to be the same, we tested it after all, the inability to pay attention to me that spyglass showed was the same from Spotlight’s power, it just took longer to activate now, but whoever I was using it on didn’t seem to realize what was happening, or if they did they couldn’t pay attention to it.

“Hmhum,” Spyglass responds to the question from before, being the one that guided us here after LED gave the description of Doctor Rebeca, she was able to track her location down, not even LED having known where exactly she lived only the city.

“Okay, she won’t be happy to see us,” LED said seriously. “But she’s not an aggressive person, only mean looking.”

“I’ll go with you,” I told him. Curious to see the woman and also, it would be safer.

We approached the huge gate that enclosed the house all around, together with the tall walls it gave off the impression that whoever lived here really valued their privacy. What LED told us about coming here like this would piss her off must be completely right.

I always found it weird how the people in small towns liked to enclose their house with gigantic walls and electric fences, like it was a castle. Not that they had nothing to fear, I guess. But it being a norm was a little weird, or that was just because I grew in a neighborhood with much more open and inviting houses.

We knew she would be here because Spyglass’ power led us to here, so the only factor was how we were going to reach her; it was quite simple though as there was an interphone installed besides the gate and LED pressed it for a second and we stood around waiting.

The device picked up, and a voice rang out, slightly altered by the static. “Who’s there?” it asked in an indifferent tone.

“Hi, Rebe-”

The voice cut LED off mercilessly as the person behind it seemed to catch on who he was immediately.

“LED? Is that you? How did you find me? Fuck, doesn’t matter. The answer is no, okay? Go away.” She said quickly and angrily as the device clicked off, she having hung up as soon as she finished talking.

“Well, that’s about what I expected.” LED said with a conflicted look on his face.

“What we do now?” I asked him.

“Well, we insist.” He said with grim resolve, pressing the button again, this time for longer.

Nothing happened as we waited a bit. And then he pressed it two times now.

“Can’t she just ignore it?”

“You would think so, right? But from what I know of her she can’t, really.” he shook his head, “it got her in a lot of messes already.”

As if on cue after he rang it the third time, during the third ringing, she picked it up.

“I am not coming back,” she said sourly.

“I know,” LED said. “We just need to heal some members of our group.”

“It always starts like this, LED, but I can’t keep involving myself. I paid a high price to get out of it all.”

“I know. And you deserve it. We’ll be doing missions away from here, I swear it’s only this time.”

She stayed silent for a long while and I gave LED a look, wondering about the bit about doing missions away. But he just made a gesture that we’d talk later.

“Are they in a bad shape?” Rebeca finally asked.

“Yeah, one of them has only woken up for a few minutes in almost two days.”

Another long silence before she agreed, bitterness in her voice. “This better be the only time LED, but it can’t be here. DO you have paper?”

-

We were at the address Rebeca had given us. It was a pharmacy, it seemed, at a building that had other stores and what seemed like apartments on the top; it was quite small with only four floors and it was in what was the center shopping area of the town it seemed with the total concentration of electronics, furniture, decoration bookstores and anything else around.

We left Payback and Spotlight in the car and waited by the closed door. Spyglass was leaning against the car while I was leaning against the pharmacy wall as LED was just waiting standing up.

There’s not much conversation to have while we wait besides a remark or another between the three of us. Spyglass didn’t seem hostile to me anymore, but she hadn’t perked up, now seeming more deflated, with little energy to anything.

So I work a bit in my matrix, I’ve been trying now to get a understating for the whole of Spotlights power, if I analyze the matrix closely I can understand vaguely what each part does, it’s what I used to identify and move the part that detects and interacts attention to the tendrils I use on my matrix, and now I was trying to figure what each part does more in depth to figure out which ones were unnecessary, if I had to compare it to anything I guess it would be like a really complex program, maybe?

I didn’t really study programming, so I knew only a little of how actual program looked but the way the meaning of each section of fractals interacted seemed to me like pathways that would lead to expressions on the real world, I think I’m getting far from the program analogy, but I have to find the section that corresponds to what where and how the power does what I want from it, and then integrate that into a fitting part from my own power, maybe even altering it to fit properly.

I change tactics to studying my own power instead; I had this one for longer and I as it’s my own I have an even greater understanding of it, I can tell that there're sections dedicated to each aspect of it, like how I stored the enhancing power in a section that my powers use as a blueprint for what’s used to enhance my body.

I feel a nudge on my arm, cutting me from my deep introspection and open my eyes to see that LED had nudged me. There’s another car parked behind ours, and out of it comes a middle-aged woman. She has long straight hair and half of it is purple; I find it strange as the entire time she sounded pretty strict, but maybe that was just her being angry at our presence here, but as she turns and I can see her face completely, I deduce that wasn’t the case at all.

The skin of half her face was a purple color, and I don’t mean purplish it was like the skin of a Hollywood alien, completely human in appearance, but just the color was something you’d never normally see on a human.

She walks over with a sour look on her face; I see she has multiple patches of purple skin on her arms and on her legs on the portion that appears from under her knee-high skirt and most noticeable on her whole left arm, the same side that her face is purple.

As she approaches, we all gather around her, and she looks us over. I see that her eyes are also purple under the frown she has.

“Well, you all look healthy enough,” she says in a dry tone.

“The injured ones are in the car,” LED says not affected at all. The woman sighs and goes to the door.

“Bring them over, lets finish this quickly,” she says unlocking the door. While she’s still under the sun, I notice the purple tint that her otherwise normal pale skin has, so something to do with her blood? I guess. That would mean some unfortunate things about her purple areas.

Rebeca goes ahead of us and I look with a raised eyebrow at LED he shrugs and we follow her to see where we have to put the guys, entering the pharmacy we saw her going through a door behind the balcony, leaving it open to us.

We follow through, seeing a room with four stretchers and some medical apparatus; I notice the purple liquid already in bags of serum, ready to administer to patients.

I wonder how she stays hidden if she clearly been treating people here, there’s a fridge not unlike the one’s blood banks use probably with much more of the purple healing liquid.

“So where are they?” she ass raising her eyebrows at the clear lack of patients.

“I wanted to scout the place before bringing them, I’ll go bring them now.”

LED tries to come together, but I stop him. Saying, “You’ve been putting on a tough front but they also hurt you pretty badly, she should probably treat you too.”

“Fine, you’re right,” he says and moves to sit on the bed. Rebeca approaches him and they talk in hushed voices, it’s not my concern so I just go fetch the boys.

When I get there, I see Spyglass is back on the car, looking at nothing in particular.

“Hey you’re okay?” I ask her, trying to nudge her to be more active. “Don’t want to go inside?”

“I’m fine, don’t need to go there.”

I nod, not knowing what else to say, and move back to get Spotlight. I decide to bring him first as He’s the most injured, going because they didn’t wake up much.

Putting him on the stretcher, the doctor approach. Rebeca had already treated LED while I was fetching Spotlight and when after I’ve settled him down she takes a vial and, putting a finger on top of it, starts rapidly gathering a purple liquid hat collects at the bottom.

“Oh, I thought it was only your blood.” I remark interested.

“It wasn’t initially but now my blood and the stuff have little difference, cells die so as I’m releasing it on myself all the time everything regrows as the purple version.”

“Hmm, can you explain to me how it works?” I ask

“One of those nerds, obsessed maybe? Sh eyes me for a minute but then shrugs.”

“The liquid when in contact with a mostly intact living organism will transform to replicate any cell composition, it ends up exactly matching the genetic makeup of the host, it only stays looking purple.”

“Fascinating.” I say interested, seeing as she transfers the liquid to a syringe and injects it into Spotlight. Spotlight doesn’t even budge for his part.

“So, will they become purple because of that?”

“Maybe internally, if they have any damaged tissue, but not externally no.”

“Hm, I see, so it doesn’t grow? Overtaking the body I mean.”

“Nah, it functions like stem cells, in the sense that after modifying they don’t revert and if they split it just as the type of cell they became. So, the patch of purple will always stay there, but it won’t grow.”

“And yeah, it seems they are better than normal tissue at whatever it is they end up becoming, but can you go fetch your other friend? Or have you already forgotten about him, huh?”

I sheepishly scratch my head as I go out again to take Payback. He wakes as I was going to take him out of the car and walk on his own, but accept my help at my insistence, so I lent him a shoulder.

Doctor Rebeca applies the same treatment to him, and when she’s finished, I ask her. “Could I take some as well?”

“Why, she frowns at me. You’re injured?”

“No, not anymore.”

“Why then, even if you want some purple or whatever, it only works if you’re already injured.”

“No, that’s not it. My power can analyze other powers that I come in contact with.”

She regards me in that same assessing manner she seems to use a lot. “And will that impact my power?”

“No, not in a single way.”

“Well, fine then,” she says and I thank her as she prepares another syringe, thinking that as much as she shows suspicion she’s awfully trusting, or was she getting something from her assessing looks? Doctors interact with a lot of people after all. Well, doesn’t really matter.

She approaches me and injects me with the purple liquid; I feel it entering my veins and surprisingly I notice I can make a tether with it as well but before I can do that to fully copy her power my matrix activates.

Her power was traveling across my body initially, not doing anything but something must’ve activated because my matrix entered a high spin, as if super interested in the sudden invader. And it analyzed the power acting on me quickly and something seemed to just click.

Paying close attention, I saw how the matrix stripped away a bunch of things from the power too quickly for me to see exactly what they were and then now much reduced Matrix to the place that controlled my mutation, I’m pretty sure where the healing comes from, my power heals me reconstructing my body after it suffers trauma bringing together with its new adaptations to fight whatever is that happened to me.

The mutations my power can draw from seem almost infinite and are all biological. Rebeca’s power works in a manner very similar, substituting the flesh of any injuries. It seems like an upgrade and my power gladly took it. The transformation ends with my matrix adapting the places the new powers connect to itself, changing the channels that drive effects of the power and everything connects

It’s the first time something seemed to align so perfectly and I could tell that this would be a permanent change, my power changed the parameters of reconstruction of my body, simply by finding a better counterpart than normal flesh, so it was possible to integrate things in myself permanently.

But well, I was using Spotlight’s power practically permanently I just wanted to integrate it completely, so that it occupied less space and less attention, also because it was extremely trying using way more energy than staying hours with an active transformation.

Now spotlight powers was like a foreign member stitched to my matrix, a Frankenstein of two powers. So, I follow the example of nature, or supernature. And discard from it all the bits about taking power from the core and delivering it to the different ‘actions’ of the power. It reduces the size of it by about a fourth, also making it completely useless.

To use it, I need to hook the cables again per se. And I decide to not try to be what I’m not. And I change my matrix where it holds the blueprint of transformations, where I integrate the sense enhancing parts of LED’s power, even before I could completely copy powers, and putting it there I probably could adapt my body to detect attention.

Similarly, I divide and integrate to the best of my ability the blueprints of how to manipulate attention. I’ll test it as I go along, but for now I’m satisfied. The power is now like a primitive organ transplant instead of a Frankenstein monster.

The matrix is like a representation of how the powers can alter reality, a program of how the metaphysical interacts with the real. At least that’s how I thought of it. I felt immensely satisfied having integrated two new powers and taken some strides into mastering my power.

I open my eyes and see the doctor and Payback looking at me, and then I feel my matrix activate and then I feel the attention on me, I don’t see it with my eyes like before, it’s a completely new sense. And I can tell that I can deactivate the transformation or keep it going.

It drains me, but in a much less troubling way than just using the power as it was from Spotlight. But if any attention is going to activate it, I’ll need to learn to control it to not activate or change the matrix again, but for now it was good.

“You got the doctor's power?” Payback asks me.

“Ah, yeah, it was such a good fit that my matrix just did it all on its own.” I say, my enthusiasm with the subject showing in my voice, “it even made me realize what I needed to alter Spotlight’s power to fit better, it isn’t as draining anymore.”

“So, you were a copycat.” She says “is it permanent?”

“Ah, yeah, sorry,” I say, imagining the reaction already. But she just shrugs again

“Good, I won’t need to heal any of them again.”

“Well, that’s not the case yet, my matrix did it’s automatic job so now I’ll heal like you do, but to heal others I’ll still have to work on things,” I say thinking back to the tether that I could build to her. I do so now, not knowing how long it would stay available.

“Wait, you saying you’re going to get purple?” Payback ask, a grin on his face.

I raise my eyebrows, “yeah, I think so actually...”

The doctor barked a laugh, “relax boy, you get used to it, Dunno if purple will look good on you though.”

“Ha, I doubt it,” Payback laughed as well. “This guy is getting blown up all the time. He’s gonna be a purple baldie in no time.”

“Well, probably.” I say, only shrugging. A different skin tone is much less than what I could tolerate for power. And maybe it would even change again, seeing as my power grows and grows.

Payback looks me up with a grin, “A purple alien will really bring up our teams’ image.”

I pass a hand over the small fuzz growing on my head from the last two days, and glance at Rebeca’s half purple face, at least now I don’t need to worry if getting my head blown up would kill me for good, it’s just going to grow back purple.