Author’s Corner: Here we are then, at the top of the page. Yeah, that was pretty much all I had. Enjoy the chap!

I looked down to the bag of marbles in my hand, and debated asking the girls to help me test them. However, that thought was quickly dismissed, for several reasons. If these things had a function like grenades, then it would hurt them far too much to ask that. Worse, if they did something like absorbing souls, then even being in a clone body wouldn’t save them.

Why is this the only one that didn’t come with a user manual!? I sighed, shaking my head. I was told how to activate them, but not what they would do. Looking at the marbles, they all appeared varied in appearance, just like a normal marble collection.

It was Sharon’s voice that broke me out of my concentration. “Wasn’t there something you came here specifically to do?”

“Huh? Oh, right! The experiment!” I had almost completely forgotten that after the appearance of the evil jack in the box and Magical Girl Celeste.

Focusing ahead of me, I released some of my psychic energy. Since I had not been using it with the fight just now, it was already recovered from bringing the girls in here. However, before I was willing to form it into a portal, I quickly made another batch of pills inside my grove. “I need to get a pill bottle one of these days…” I looked down into my hand at the twenty pills resting there.

Anyways, no distractions! I began gathering my energy to a single point in front of me, wanting to start with a small portal no bigger than my fist. Given how much effort it took to make the connection to the Toy Chest, I didn’t want to risk going all out and killing myself by making a portal too large.

To my surprise, the portal established itself fairly easily, no more difficult than the one we had used to come here. I was even more surprised to see a light pouring through the small portal from the other side. “Okay… that was easy… now to see where it leads…” I said as I gradually began to expand the portal. As soon as the pain in my head began to flare up, I tossed one of the pills into my mouth, grumbling because of how many I had already taken in one day.

Once the portal was opened far enough to see what was on the other side, we all looked anxiously in, hoping to see some strange new world. Maybe one inhabited by living toys, given the theme of the power. However… what we saw was the medbay of the Ariadne, precisely where the portal had been that brought us here.

Looking back, I had never even noticed that the other portal vanished when I created this one, since we had moved further away from it during the fight. “So… I guess that means no third layer…?”

“Well… maybe. There’s still one more thing we can do.” Celeste said, having thought of something.

“What’s that?” I looked at her curiously, sincerely wanting to know what else there was that could make the Toybox power more interesting.

“We could always just ask your parents. They still have access to the future, so can’t they just log in, or have one of their friends log in and look up the information about this particular power?”

...Wait… you mean all this time, all I had to do was phone my parents, and ask them to look it up?! How come we never thought of that during the last six months?! Sharon simply tilted her head back and laughed at the simplicity of it, while I sulked over the several months of trying to self-discover cool things about the Toybox.

Opening up my friends list, I wasn’t surprised to say that Jacobs was not registered as available. Either he downloaded into a new robot body and was killed, or he is still in NeoLife. Most likely the latter. I decided to call my dad, since he was the one that had previously been a psychic human. He was more likely to have contacts that could look up the information we needed.

“Hello there, boy!” He said in a rather energetic, albeit digitized, voice. “And what is the reason for this call, hmm? Decided to check up on your old man?”

Not really… I thought to myself. Usually, when I wanted to call to check in, I would do a group call with both him and my mom. “Not this time. I need you to look something up for me, in NeoLife, if at all possible.”

“Hmm.. Your capsule won’t recognize us as owners, so we’d have to find a previously unused one, which is rather hard these days. How about this, you tell me what you need looked up, and I’ll pass it to some online friends.”

“That works too.” It was the Plan B already, so I easily accepted that. “I need research done on a certain psychic power, known as Toybox. If possible, research on another one called Wild Voice would be appreciated as well.”

“Toybox and Wild Voice. Got it. Give me a little bit, and I’ll call you back.” After he said that, he disconnected the call, likely moving to contact his other friend.

Looking at the open portal to the medbay, I just decided to sit on the ground. “He’ll call me back. And since it takes a few hours for me to walk through that… I think I’ll wait.” It was already getting a bit late. Aside from Celeste, there wouldn’t really be any harm in leaving these bodies in the Toy Chest and simply logging out. However, Celeste would need a way out, meaning that we’d need to make the trip anyways. “Or…”

I disconnected from my clone body, and sat up in the medbay. Looking at the portal across the room, I saw the understanding expressions on their faces. Well, on Sharon’s and Celeste’s. It’s really hard to tell the expression of Yin when she’s in her bird form. The same as when I pulled them into the Toy Chest, I simply stuck my hand in the portal and had them grab on while I transferred them to my grove.

Once transferred over, I then pulled them back out of my grove on the proper side. “There, that takes care of that.” Now, the only body left in the Toy Chest was my clone. Really, I could have just pulled my clone out too, but this way I won’t have to go through all that trouble again if I want back in the Toy Chest. I’ll just need to open a portal and log in. Assuming no monsters spawn and kill my body before then. But if the Toy Chest appeared a long time ago, such as when mana spread, and only that one monster existed in there until now, it will probably be a little while before another spawns.

While I was waiting for the call from my dad, the three girls decided it’d be best to go get a shower. Unsurprisingly, it took a little over an hour before I got the call back from him.

Incoming call from Jordan Hulett

I accepted the call, speaking up. “What’d you find out?”

“Well, let’s start with Wild Voice. According to my friend, that one’s a much simpler power. Simply put, it has the ability to speak with anything that has a soul. That includes plants, animals, monsters, whatever. Now, they may not always respond, but if they do it’s like a universal language. Taking it a step further, people with the Wild Voice ability can strengthen it until they can not only speak with, but command these creatures. Naturally, they can’t make something do what it can’t naturally, like moving trees and whatnot.” He explained Sharon’s power in detail, and I nodded. This was all pretty much within my expectations. I had figured that there was a higher level than just talking to creatures.

“Now, as for the Toybox. This one is… unusual. Only about one in every hundred thousand people will have access to this power, at most. And not many people have a high opinion of it, since it’s one of the shortest range teleport powers available to psionics. However, it also has a wide variety of uses, according to what I was told. The biggest downside to it is that the portals are not linked in size and shape, so they aren’t very safe to go through.”

“The most popular ability of the Toybox is called the Toy Chest. It’s a pocket dimension linked to every Toybox user in the galaxy. The more people open the Toy Chest, the larger it becomes. Of course, monsters still spawn in there sometimes, but not usually anything too powerful. Now, it also has a peculiar effect known as ‘Space Lock’ around any portals. This makes the area around the portals extremely hard to pierce with conventional means.” So far, he hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know, but he wasn’t done yet.

“People often use this space lock to interweave portals into large shields that can deflect many attacks. They can also serve as platforms to walk on, but aren’t usually used for attacks, aside from using indirect attacks through them.”

“Now, from what I’ve heard, there is a later form of the Toy Chest ability, known as the Toy Prison. Rather than making a portal into the Toy Chest, you trap someone in their own little pocket dimension. This space is separate from the Toy Chest, and each prison is its own little world. However, the strength of this prison is dependent on the strength of the one that used it. The more powerful the psychic, the stronger the dimension is. If a weak psychic used it, then their prisoner could smash through the dimensional walls and exit at the same spot they were trapped.”

“If the prisoner can’t escape on their own, the only hope for rescue is if the psychic chooses to let them out. They have an instinctive link to all of their established prison cells, and can choose to open one any time they want, so long as they have the power.” Now this was sounding like an awesome power. Of course, I obviously am a long ways from being able to do this. I can barely make a flat portal to walk through, let alone send someone entirely into their own little pocket dimension.

“Okay.. that’s neat.” I took the chance to voice my opinion. “Anything else you can tell me?”

“Hmm… There was a bit about the portals being usable like telekinesis. But I can’t think of anything offhand. I’ll have my friend keep an eye out for more information, and get back to you if he comes up with anything.”

“Thanks. This should help me quite a bit with the training.” After saying a few words of goodbye, we ended the call and I looked back at the portal to the Toy Chest. It seemed that in order to advance my Toybox power now, I would need to practice weaving the portals together to make those spatial constructs.

“Learn anything…?” Yin asked, walking back into the medbay with a towel wrapped around her. I could see that her hair was still wet, so she obviously just got out of her shower. Did she walk all the way here like that… I wonder how many nosebleeds there were.

“Ah.. yeah. Something to train for. In the meantime, let me get a look at you--I mean I need to study your body… Well, that just didn’t sound any better.” I said as I watched Yin’s face heat up slightly. “Would it help at all if I said I wanted to study your aura for purely academic reasons?”

“No…” She said, slowly walking over to me, one hand holding her towel up. “Druid stuff?”

“Druid stuff.” I nodded my head. “Bird form, if you’d please?” I tried to keep my expression neutral, and pay no attention to what I saw when she dropped her towel. It’s nothing I hadn’t seen before, and thoroughly enjoyed at the time.

“Alright.” She spoke softly, now standing in front of me in her stormbird body. I hadn’t properly taken the chance to memorize her aura yet ever since she evolved, since it felt like an invasion of privacy. However, I also felt like I should do so, just in case something happened.

“While I’m at it, do you want me to give you a psychic power too?” I asked curiously, putting a hand on her head. She seemed to enjoy that, closing her eyes slightly and tilting her head into it.

“Like you and Sharon..?” She opened one eye to look up to me. “Okay.”

You know, while Yin is an awesome woman, an amazing companion, and a badass combatant, she is a terrible conversationalist. However, the simple answer was all the permission I needed. From personal experience, I knew that enabling psychic powers wouldn’t cause any real harm to the patient, so I didn’t bother knocking her out like I had done when modifying Sharon. Instead, while going through her aura, I simply changed that one little part in her head that would allow her to wield new, untold powers.

I was honestly rather curious what Yin would get, since my own power and Sharon’s were vastly different. I let her stay there like that for a few minutes, gently petting her head even after I was done studying her aura. It was only a little while later that I reluctantly pulled my hand away, letting her log back out into her main body. “Go see Celeste to find out what kind of power you have. It’ll be about time to turn in for the night after that, I expect.”

It had already been a pretty long, and mostly painful, day. I took one last look at the open portal, and mentally closed it so that I could also retire for the night.