When I opened the door to my dorm-room, silence greeted me. Not a huge surprise, it was just late afternoon after all, so the others might still be in class. I was not quite certain about their schedules, especially as they changed quite often. I took a moment to consider what to do next and decided to bury myself in mundane tasks, namely, I got the scripts from the lectures I had missed out and went through them with a fine-toothed comb. My dual-major meant that I had more lectures than most and two days of missed lectures meant that I had quite a bit of work to do. It was not horribly complex, but I needed to assimilate it, so that I could understand it later.

At the same time, I considered different things, mostly the situation with Sophia. I remembered that day, the day I had left her behind, but the important question, namely what had I been thinking and feeling, that was washed out by time. I had simply buried those memories, not wanting to think about them, not wanting to process them, and now, my current perspective was tainting my memories.

I set my work aside and tried something else, my organic memories were subject to the incredibly imperfect recall system of the human brain, constantly reevaluating and rewriting my memories, so trusting them was impossible. But, Galatea was not suffering from that, while she compressed information, to safe data-storage space, what she remembered was impeccable, so maybe her memories could help me understand my memories despite the subconscious manipulation they had gone through.

In a flight of fancy, I sat down cross-legged, thinking that it was a suitable pose for meditation, and let myself delve into the shared space with Galatea. Sharing into her memories, her recording of sensory information was quite interesting. I had my own set of memories and was quite fascinated how different her recording was from what I remembered. Especially things that stood out in my memories with stark clarity turned out to be a lot less clear when viewed through Galatea’s impartial lense.

There was that image that was burned into my memory, Sophia looking at me with horror and fear in her eyes, but when I looked at it through Galatea’s memory, it was different, less pronounced, less stark. In Galatea’s memory she looked frightened, yes, but it was not the horror I remembered and it did not look as if it was directed at me, merely that she was afraid in that moment. And, remembering what had happened right before, the mental domination from that Psion, made her fear quite reasonable.

I went through the whole day, looking at Galatea’s recording and had to shake my head at times, at how different my memories were. My recollection was interrupted when a hand touched my shoulder, startling me from the depths of my mind.

“Hey, you are back.” I blinked open my eyes, needing a second as they were adjusting to the light. Tanisha was standing in front of me, smiling down at me.

“Hi, as you can see, I am back.” I answered, giving her a smile as well.

“Please, don’t just vanish again. I was worried.”

“That, I cannot promise, sometimes, emergencies happen. That is simply a fact of life and when time can be the difference between saving lives and not saving them, I will always hurry.” I explained, leaving my explanation very vague.

“So, where have you been? Who did you save?” she asked, looking very curious.

I had to chuckle at her enthusiasm, before answering. “Those are things that better remain secret. The cross-section between the normal world and the world of Powered intrigue is best left as small as possible. It is bad enough that sometimes there is spill-over from one world into the other.”

“You mean like the assassination of Clark Greene?” she asked, surprising me but I managed to keep my poker face.

“I have heard of that one, some rags even accused me. But yes, that would be a good example of someone trying to stand in both societies at the same time, causing problems for everyone. And that is the last thing I will say about it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” she blurted out, looking as if she was blushing.

“Do not worry about it, I am used to be the bogeyman in New Brunsburg, some of their news-outlets love to blame me for everything from the milk going sour to, well, assassinating a prominent public figure. I have no doubt that, if they continue like that, in a few years parents will tell their children to eat their vegetables or the evil Metis will steal them in the night, to bake them into pies, or something equally ridiculous.” I waved her concern away, at the same time laying the foundation for her belief that I was certainly not a vicious killer. Otherwise, the timing would have been more than a little suspect.

“That sucks, can’t you do something about it?” she asked, looking slightly outraged at my behalf.

“That goes back to the separation of the normal world and the world of Powered intrigue. Think of it like a play, at the theater. My role, so to speak, is to be the villain of the play, the evil force lurking behind the curtains, there to be fought by the brave heroes. And the heroes need to be brave and noble, beyond reproach for that to work.” I started to explain my personal philosophy of Powered Politics.

“At the end of the day, the immortal words of the Bard are even more applicable for Powered than for mundane humans, ‘All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players.’ We even dress up for our parts, or why do you think most Powered wear some sort of flamboyant costume?” I laughed, remembering the patriotically coloured Starburst, whom I had seen during enrollment.

“What do you mean?” Tanisha asked, looking a little confused.

“Most of the things the press reports about Powered conflict, the eternal game of chase between Heroes and Villain are no more real than the celebrity-gossip coming out of Hollywood. People are a lot more complicated than a simple label of Hero or Villain could ever hope to describe. And that is the reason that keeps me from changing the perception of me, I am a Villain, that is my role in this play we call life. It allows me a few extra freedoms, but at the same time, I have some responsibilities.” I thought back to the few actual crimes I had committed. Those had been freedoms I had used.

“I think it is even worse across the pond, with the US-Heroes being lauded as real celebrities fighting for truth, justice and the american way or some other dross. For that reason, scandals involving them are buried in some deep, dark hole, until they there is a reason to bury the Hero involved. At the same time, the opposite is true as well. If they need to bury a Hero, they will find reasons. Let me give you an example.” I stood, walking over to my laptop, booting it up to directly call up information.

“There was a hero, in New Brunsburg, his name was, or still is, depending how you see it, Skylar. He was the Leader of the Heroes’ League and, at least in my opinion, he was competent and effective. But he was in the way of influential people, so he needed to be deposed.” I called up images, mostly from my own storage as they had been mostly scrubbed from the web but they had been in the public domain at one point. The images showed Skylar in his uniform, at the tunnel-accident, coordinating with the masked Shadowbroker, another showed him talking to me during the rescue of that little girl I had found and a few more, similar shots.

They were, essentially, harmless, he was merely using all available power to protect civilians, something I considered heroic. I explained the context to Tanisha and she was humming with approval, smiling proudly when I got to my involvement in the different incidents.

“So, you would agree that there was no fire there, not even smoke? He acted in a responsible, heroic fashion?” I asked, waiting for her to nod before dropping the hammer.

There were hundreds of articles, all of them dragging Skylar’s name through the mud and a short clip from his resignation. The press-crowd in the room had been heated enough that I almost expected them to start throwing rotten fruit at the disgraced hero. Maybe the security had collected the fruit before, who knew.

“That’s outrageous! Do you think similar things happen back home?!” She exploded, looking ready to start biting reporters.

“Quite possibly, yes. It is politics, only with the added entanglements of Powered intrigue.”

She looked so outraged, I wondered if there would be smoke coming from her head any moment.

“But I think we went off a tangent there.” I looked at the clock, realising that I had spent longer in my meditation than I had planned. “Do you want to go get some food with me?” I asked, getting a nod in response.