“Do you know who I am?”

“I have met you before, I think,” Lyssa replied.

“My name is Jackson. I’m the head of security.”

The memory returned as though it was always there, but it took effort to remember him. Lyssa frowned. Judging by the simper on the man’s face this reaction was an intended effect.

“My gift has no name,” Jackson said. “In fact there is an entire class of gifts like mine which has evaded study since supergene research began. Try reading my mind.”

“I can’t.”

“You didn’t try,” he said.

“It’s… complicated.”

“I see, yes I am informed about the unique nature of your situation. We’ve had a few official records of multi-gifted before. They’ve all been uncontrollable, and highly dangerous. Why do you think people don’t seem overly concerned about them?”

“I think people are concerned about gifted in general.”

Jackson laughed. “Things are a little different now of course.”

Lyssa had not meant that as a joke. Her current self could not joke at all.

“That will come to pass,” Jackson continued. “Anyways, you’re here to be trained. Whitworth seems to think you have potential to be Clandestine. Do you know what that entails?”

“No.”

“Frontline heroes save children from burning buildings. Support rebuilds the building. Clandestine arrests the arsonist.”

If she were in a different state, she might have flinched. Lyssa—the Primum—had successfully repressed the events of that day by simply ignoring them. That did not mean they had been forgotten. She still saw the desperate look of that man in her dreams, even if it wasn’t the Primum who dreamt it. The way it felt to turn that hapless man into ashes with her claws of flame was only months ago.

“Sometimes ‘arrest’ is a euphemism,” Jackson said.

Lyssa waited for him to explain. He did not.

She had been told to come to one of M.A.G.E’s many gymnasiums. Gift application courses raged in most of them. On her way here she got to see second and third year’s solve ever more complex situations. Collapsing architecture. Hostage situations. She even witnessed impossible quandaries, where a hero had limited options and had to choose who to save, certainly dooming the one they did not select. From the mezzanine windows it had looked like a dramatic play. There were even tears.

The room they stood in now was entirely white, empty of all geometry.

“You’ve seen your peers train to handle situations after they’ve developed,” Jackson said as he fiddled with a controller on his wrist. Architecture began to build. Floor panels slid open. The walls peeled back. The lights in the ceiling dimmed. An entire city block was being built before her eyes, and time accelerated from blinding noon to night. “You will also be learning how to handle the people who develop such situations.”

Machines were appearing. Not skirmishers or hulking monsters of metal, but people. Man-sized droids like the one they were supposed to save during the entrance practicum. They filled the darkening streets. Randomly generated conversation begin to intensify. The din of night life began to play in a convincing simulacrum.

“I am… unfamiliar with this aspect of hero work,” Lyssa said.

“Of course not. You can’t get a sequel if you actually addressed how the problem occurred. Nobody wants to watch Silkspinner snap the necks of the Enigmatic Eight, despite the countless thousands she would have saved had she done so. Anyways, good luck.”

“Wait, what do I-?”

Jackson walked backwards into a crowd and disappeared like a minnow in a river. Lyssa had not been given an assignment. It took her a moment idling in the middle of the street to understand that this was the point. A pair of headlights shone at her back. A car horn blared. She quickly stepped aside, letting the car past. The driver flipped her off before speeding up with a frown on his face, as if to make back the time he—or it—had lost by slowing for a second. The simulation was nothing if not robust.

Lyssa gleaned that she would have to navigate this faux New Langshir, where a plot laid waiting to be discovered.

Hitting the ground running then, she thought. She hated being made to work this hard. She hated being out here at all. You better be sorting something out in there.

--

The feeling was strange to say the least. The moment Lyssa put on that cursed crown she saw her field of vision shrink. The last thing she remembered seeing were those men, ungifted made powerful by the guns in their hands. It was easy to vilify them. But some sympathetic spark made her see their side of things. They saw gifted the same way—perpetually and indistinguishably armed. At least guns were an obvious statement.

She woke on carpet. It smelled like the ones from her grandfather’s house, which told her she was in dream, her mental dollhouse.

The dimensions looked tortured. A cold breeze swept through the corridors. The wallpaper looked ripped. Cracks ran through the wainscoting. And the light that used to pour through the glass dome in the ceiling had dimmed to the level of dusk. She grit her metaphorical teeth.

It didn’t make sense. She was doing well. She had them under control. Why were her thoughts so scrambled? A pervasive rot could be felt running throughout her mansion. It manifested as a migraine. Clearly there was something she was meant to do down here.

She moved. Her steps echoed. Izanami’s door was barred. When she knocked on it, a dull, solid sound returned. The realm was closed. Lyssa guessed Izanami had taken her place in reality. She moved on. Sethlana’s door was accessible, but the knob was searing hot.

“It’s not literal,” she said to herself. She forced herself to grasp it and open it. The knob had way more inertia than it should and she screamed as her hand had to linger on the metal for way too long. But she made it through and stumbled onto a truly inhospitable world.

The door emptied her on a slope. Magma bubbled and orange-black rivers flowed downward. Where it fled led to darkness. Where it inclined led to a volcanic peak. From where she stood she could make out a castle, made from mountainous amounts of obsidian. The Selves really were as independent as they were codependent. Lyssa winced as she massaged the calloused burns on her palm. She breathed the hot, dry air, slowly but steadily, and when she was ready she began to climb.