Dyna awoke to dim lights, a low hum droning on in the background, and a steady beeping that sounded like every electrocardiograph she had ever had. Which, she supposed, explained the dozen wires stuck to her chest, arms, and legs. It wasn’t the first time she had been hooked up to such a machine. Rather, she had lost count of how many medical tests she had been through. Carroll mandated regular health checkups of both the body and mind.

She had always been told that, should she awaken in such a situation, she should never remove anything attached to her body. That was mostly because an intravenous plug could cause damage if removed improperly, but also because who knew what things were hooked up to alarms. Triggering a code blue would just cause unneeded stress for the hospital staff and possibly take attentions away from other patients who were actually in trouble.

Dyna sat up and started looking around the bed for any buttons that might call a nurse, only to stop.

This wasn’t any normal hospital room.

The bed was normal enough. It was a mechanized bed capable of bending at both the back and leg sections. A stack of computers next to her were hooked up to the cables attached to her body, measuring her cardiac rhythm, blood oxygen levels, and psychic emissions—the latter of which read a flat zero. But beyond that was nothing but glass.

Glass walls, glass floor, and a glass ceiling. One of the walls had a glass door, but no obvious means of opening the door.

Beyond the glass was nothing. Nothing at all. Wires suspended the chamber within some kind of spherical room, but she couldn’t see any other details. The light built into the frame of her glass home wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the entire space.

Suddenly caring a whole lot less about setting off any alarms, Dyna climbed out of bed. Several of the ECG nodes fell off, held on by a light adhesive only. She quickly tore the rest off, allowing her to move freely about in her medical gown—someone had changed her since she could last remember. An IV plug in her arm stayed where it was, but the saline bag was hooked to a pole with wheels, allowing her to move about with it.

Not that there was anywhere to move to. It took five paces to get from the bed in the middle of the room to the doorway. There was no button and no handle, just glass. She thought to hammer against it, but movement in the corner of her eye stayed her hand.

A camera. Spherical with a clear protective glass, behind which an array of five lenses and a single red light pivoted to face her.

“Please remain calm.” It was the same feminine voice from the elevator. The one that Walter had spoken to in order to bring her down into the basement.

“What happened? What’s going on? Where am I?”

“An unforeseen anomaly during an experiment rendered you unconscious. You were brought here to recover in safety. Your current location is… classified.”

The way the voice spoke was strange. It wasn’t smooth dialog, more like it was reading from a list of possible responses, adjusting each sentence with parts of other sentences. Especially its last sentence, where there was a long pause before it said ‘classified’. Some kind of automated assistant? Everyone’s phones had something similar these days.

“Agent Walter has been alerted to your wakefulness and is on his way. Please remain calm.”

Hearing that a familiar face would soon be here did provide some measure of calm. Nodding to the camera, Dyna backed up and sat on the side of the bed. It wasn’t like there was anything else she could do anyway. Not unless she wanted to take the IV stand and start swinging it at the glass.

Given the near abyss below her, she doubted that shattering the glass would accomplish much other than send her into the abyss and anger her captors.

Captors? Were they captors?

According to the voice, she was here to recover after an incident, not imprisoned.

Closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose, Dyna tried to remember exactly what had happened. She could clearly recall being left in the room with the stone spike pen thing and the walls opening up. Each one showed a distorted version of the room she had been in. Some were simply mirrored, others were… worse. One looked like a slaughterhouse with chains and slabs of meat hanging from the ceiling. And she had been fairly certain that the meat had not been from animals.

She had tried to ignore them, but it hadn’t been easy until she started turning the chair to face away from the images. Even then, she had still felt them. If she knew anything about Carroll, it was that odd feelings were, more often than not, some kind of psychic influence and not mere happenstance.

Movement interrupted her thoughts. Not the camera this time—though that was trained directly on her—but rather out in the distance. A drawbridge made of glass extended out from the distant wall, stretching across the chasm and to her cell. Thick cables supported it throughout the extension process, coming from somewhere high above. Probably the same place where the wires holding up the glass cage came from.

The walkway connected to the cage, motorized latches hooking into the glass frame around the door. In the distance, white light flooded into the large spherical chamber as a panel in the wall slid aside.

Walter, wearing his sunglasses even in the dark room, strode across the walkway with confidence. Behind him, two… robots? No, their movements were smooth and fluid. Their silver suits just made them look like robots. Each one of them pushed a cart filled with various equipment. Some medical, which Dyna recognized from the many tests she had taken since joining Carroll, and some with less obvious purposes.

The door slid aside just as they reached it, perfectly timed so that none of them needed to slow down. However, the two behind Walter stopped at the threshold, letting him enter alone.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, I guess. Confused more than anything. I feel physically fine. Maybe a little hungry?”

“No grogginess or lethargy? Nausea?”

“Not particularly. A little when I first woke up, but seeing this weird place gave me a jolt of adrenaline and any nausea I felt hasn’t returned.”

“Good. We weren’t expecting much. You’ve been unconscious for six hours, give or take a quarter of an hour.”

“Six hours?”

“You were sedated as a precaution. We found you unconscious in the test chamber. What is the last thing you can remember?”

Dyna told him, recounting the whole test. “I figured out they were illusions almost immediately, so I tried not to let them bother me. There were some pretty disturbing images.”

“Specifically, what is the very last thing you can remember?”

Closing her eyes, Dyna thought back. “I dropped the pen. At that moment, everything came rushing back all at once. Then nothing.”

Walter frowned, but nodded his head. “I apologize. I said I would warn you before we attempted anything dangerous.” He paused a moment, frown deepening. “To be clear, we did not expect this to be dangerous. Nothing like this happened before. We were caught off guard. I’m sure that doesn’t reassure you after the fact, but—”

“It’s fine. I’m fine.” Seeing Walter bowing his head in genuine apology weirded Dyna out. He was normally so stiff and stoic, the picture of calm confidence. She very much preferred the normal him to this sorry version of himself. “All’s well that ends well, right?” When he didn’t answer right away, she couldn’t help but feel a bit of unease. She glanced over his shoulder at the men wearing those silver costumes. “I am fine, right?”

“As far as we can tell. The two men behind me are going to get that IV line out of your arm and run a few quick tests. Simple medical matters, nothing more. You’ll be able to return to your dormitory after, unless they find problems.”

“They aren’t expecting to find problems, are they?”

“Not really. You underwent a few tests while unconscious, all of which came back without issue.”

“Good,” Dyna said with a long sigh. “Good. Then let’s get them testing. No offense, but this room is a bit unnerving.”

“It is meant to contain powerful psionic entities,” he said as he waved a hand at the two silver people. The door slid open as he did so, allowing them access.

“Powerful? Me?” Dyna scoffed.

“You might be surprised.” He smiled a calm, knowing smile. One that made Dyna raise an eyebrow. “Another time, after you’ve had some rest and time to mentally reset, I’ll show you pictures. Right now especially, we don’t want to cause any undue duress before these men give you a clean bill of health.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Dyna said, watching as one of the men opened up a thick case containing a large device that looked like… Well, it looked like a metal colander with several curly red, blue, and green wires stuck into it at random points.

Seeing it made her sigh. Having long hair wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was a pain to wash, a pain to dry, and a pain to keep tidy. She had dyed it a silvery platinum upon first learning that she was going to attend a school for psychics, but hadn’t maintained that dye in the past while leading to dark roots. Worst of all, a school for psychics had a lot of equipment that went on the head.

Like this psionic waveform analysis device. Every time she had been asked to wear it, taking it off had tugged out some of her hair.

Most of her contemporaries were bald or kept their hair somewhat short. A sacrifice she hadn’t quite been willing to make, though it certainly became more and more appealing every time she went through this.

“Why are they in silver suits anyway?” Dyna asked Walter, trying to distract herself from the beeping noises coming from both the colander and a hand-held device that the other was waving over her.

“They protect against psionic energy. As I said a moment ago, you released quite the burst of uncontrolled energy. Nobody wants to take any chances.”

“Shouldn’t you be wearing a suit then?”

“I’ve had extensive training to the point where I am effectively a null. Besides that, I thought it might help if you saw a familiar face rather than your own mirrored reflection.”

While Dyna could definitely appreciate the sentiment, she wasn’t sure if she should mention that his sunglasses were heavily mirrored to the point where she could have done her makeup in the reflection without any issue.

Deciding to just sit still and silent in the hopes that the tests would be over with quicker, Dyna closed her eyes and simply waited. The IV line always felt unpleasant coming out. Not painful, just unnatural. But it wasn’t the first one she had ever had by far and certainly wouldn’t be the last either.

In less than an hour, the silver-suited men started packing up their equipment. Neither said a single word during their work, not to each other or to Walter, but one of them held out a small tablet for him to take before they pushed their carts back down the walkway. Walter spent a few minutes after they left silently reviewing the information. Eventually, he nodded.

“I’m going to schedule you for a full CT and MRI. Nothing here indicates a problem, but best to be safe.” He tucked the tablet under his arm and motioned. “Your clothes are in a room outside the damping chamber. They have been washed and pressed. If you were concerned, a female technician was the one who changed you.”

Dyna tugged at her hospital gown with a grimace, not sure if she wanted to know why she had been changed. Having passed out, she could really only think of embarrassing reasons why it would be necessary.

Walter wasn’t commenting further. She decided that, as long as he wasn’t treating her differently, she didn’t really need to know.

With the silver-suited men and their carts gone, Dyna followed Walter across the narrow walkway. True to his words, there was a small antechamber on the far end where her skirt and matching black shirt were neatly folded on a table. Even her undergarments had been laundered and placed out.

The room clearly wasn’t designed as a changing room. There were a few computers and lots of screens, many of which displayed scenes of the glass chamber both from within the room itself and of the chamber from within the spherical empty space. The glass chamber had probably not been designed for medical purposes either. It just felt too bare-bones to be a hospital.

Dyna’s eyes immediately found the camera in the room. Every room in this place had a camera, but this one’s bright red light wasn’t on. It was a nice gesture, though she didn’t believe for a moment that a little red light was truly indicative of whether or not she was being watched. At least the lenses behind the protective glass bubble weren’t directly focused on her.

Shaking her head, Dyna set to getting changed. Melanie wouldn’t have cared to even look for a camera, let alone whether it was off.

Taking hold of her skirt, her fingers felt something odd. Not the smooth fabric, but something rough and stiff. She could tell that it had been washed. Yet it had something stuck to it. Brown and red, a muddy looking splotch right where her thigh would be. It took a long time to realize just what it was.

Paint.

Paint that was—that should have been nothing more than an illusion.

Dyna shuddered. Was it in her mind right now? Or was it real? If the paint was real…

Closing her eyes, Dyna did some calming breathing exercises. A deep breath went in through the nose, stayed held in her lungs, then slowly came out through her mouth. After a brief pause, she repeated the action three more times. Everything was fine. All the medical tests were fine. No matter what had happened in that room, it was over with.

As she peeled off the paint as best she could, she decided to not participate in that test again. Not until she figured out exactly what its purpose was and what it had done. To other people, that might be common sense. But she had gone through so many tests at the Carroll Institute that asking what every single one was for was an exercise in futility. Doubly so when, even as a supposed psychic, she hardly understood the science behind it all.

Dressed and calm, Dyna headed out to find Walter waiting for her. He was staring down at the tablet again, but looked up as she exited the room.

“What exactly was in the room?” Dyna asked. When Walter looked over her shoulder at the room she had changed in, she shook her head then held up her fingers. “I mean the test room.”

“What is that?”

“Flecks of paint that were stuck to my clothes. Paint that I thought was an illusion.”

Walter pressed his lips together, nodding his head slowly. “It should have been an illusion. That is part of what went wrong.”

“What? Someone accidentally created a mural of the room?”

“You created a mural of the room. This isn’t an accusation. It is just the truth. The room was lined with psychically sensitive fabric. Under all previous tests, it merely reflects what is in the viewer’s mind. To myself and all observers, the room merely looked like a movie set with green screens on display. Until we reached you after you passed out.

“At that point, the room had changed. The current reigning theory is that your mind brought what you saw to reality, likely using the psi-fabric as a convenient canvas to use. As I said, we have documented the room and have pictures, though I would prefer to not show them to you until after you have had time to rest.”

“Because I might do it again?” Dyna said, trying to not sound too enthusiastic. Every type of psychic Carroll classified affected only the mind. Either their own or others. Affecting reality, if that was what Walter meant, wasn’t supposed to be possible. At least not according to dozens of lectures that she had gone through.

Then again, she wasn’t about to argue if it meant that she did have some real reason to be at the institute.

“All the tests you’ve undergone, both while asleep and just a few minutes ago, indicate that there is little chance of a second occurrence.”

Dyna slumped, a motion that did not go unnoticed by Walter.

“At least not without further investigation. This is new territory. The theories and ideas are a mere six hours old. Go back to your dorm, rest up, get the scans done to ensure there are no problems, and we’ll reconvene at a later date. Preferably after the scientists have had a chance to go over all the data.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Then let’s get topside.”

Dyna had a small pep in her step as she followed after him. She wasn’t just a glorified experimental control after all. That alone left a giddy feeling in her stomach. Even with passing out and waking up in a fairly scary place, she couldn’t help but feel utterly thrilled.

Six hours passing meant that it was early evening. Maybe around sunset? She was hungry, but not particularly tired. Which might have had something to do with her medically induced coma. Either way, between the coma and the excitement, she doubted she would be able to sleep tonight.

In fact, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

Instead, maybe she could requisition one of the meditation rooms for a few hours.

Everyone else at Carroll thought hard about their abilities. Before this, Dyna hadn’t known what to think about.

Now, she at least had a clue.