I was positively giddy at the news, the first real smile I’d worn in ages plastered onto my face. It may have felt like someone was trying to use the muscles in my face as a bowstring, but that hardly mattered. Even Strenns saw my excited look, and even through his normal warm professionalism, it was easy to tell he was genuinely glad to see me recovering.

He pulled up a chair, the one he’d sat in whenever we talked, and sat at about eye level with me on the bed. I hadn’t noticed it until the day before, but he was pretty short. Probably five-six or so? That said, as I’d found out, he was pretty accomplished for his post, about rank three thanks to his passive mana use and some biotech that wouldn’t be possible to integrate without that little bit of that esoteric help. I suppose it made sense, though, he’d hardly had the time to go into one of the Academies, the ones with a capital A and pumped out pretty much any accomplished mages and qi cultivators and psions and true technomancers and any other conceivable profession that involved working with ‘powers beyond mortal ken.’

Most of them were insufferable anyway, a bunch of glorified military schools. I wasn’t really able to get carried away with my resentment, though, because right after the good doctor sat down, she walked in. Even without looking I could tell that this was the rank five, the entire room seemed to shrink down when she stepped through the door and I could see Strenns smiling nervously behind me.

With great effort, I turned my head to do the same, coming eye-to-eye with one of the most terrifyingly beautiful women I’d ever seen. Tall, taller than even myself, probably about six-three or so, and shaped like she was sculpted by one of the finest artisans in the system. She had deeply tanned skin and hair that refused to decide what shade of red was best, swirling through scarlet and crimson and auburn and more. And oh, those eyes, I couldn’t even meet them for more than a moment before I had to stop, but I still had a hard time tearing my eyes away.

Beautiful she may have been, but that’s the sort of beauty that came from power, and I’d seen enough to know that she was very much not my type. Probably not anybody’s, not anymore. While I was busy examining her, she seemed to realize that I wasn’t going to say anything unprompted, and her mouth curled down slightly in a pout.

“You are Sylvain, yes? My name is Katherine Weaver, the Coalition told me that you were exposed to something during one of their…” She eyed Strenns “projects, and that it might have planted something in you. Is this correct?” I nodded, still trying not to talk much.

“Then I’m here to take a look, see what sort of nasty you’ve gotten yourself into.” She said with a hint of uncontrolled curiosity and even excitement but quickly stamped it down. “By the way, you’re a Johansson, right? Aren’t you guys supposed to stick to mana and a few summonings? What’s one of you doing with the techs?”

I stared at her, taken aback by the sudden question and hidden accusation, and wondered if I should answer at all. Thankfully, she didn’t seem too set on getting an answer, and quickly dropped that line of questioning, hopefully without deciding she’d just find that answer for herself while she dug through my psyche.

“No matter, I’m not here to find out what sort of drama is going on in your house, only the drama going on in your head. Let’s get right to it, shall we?”

I nodded as vigorously as I could, watching her calm, measured strides as she walked up beside me. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting her to do as she reached down, but her placing one hand on top of my skull seemed about right. There weren’t any spells, no incantations or finger waggling, nothing at all to indicate when she had started beside the feeling. One second, I felt nothing, well, nothing I hadn’t already been feeling, and the next, she was there too.

It was almost like sitting in a dark room, thinking you’re alone as you talk to yourself, wander around, make yourself at home or whatever and then someone flicks a light on and you realize there was a person in there with you the entire time. Except, it was with my thoughts, so a lot less concrete than that. She started slowly, probably digging through the past couple days of memories and getting used to it all, at least, that’d be my guess from the flashes and snippets of memories I hadn’t called on and thoughts that didn’t feel quite like my own, moving steadily further back.

There were a couple I felt her sift through where I saw her face scrunch up in disgust or confusion, probably anything involving my ‘flare-ups’ but once or twice I also saw her start smiling, small and subdued but she was excited about something. That worried me.

Her excitement wasn’t long for the world, though, not after she made it to the events of my first day here. I felt her going through my final moments of consciousness, tasting the confusion and pain in reverse order, I saw her face grow increasingly confused as she came upon my angry, ranting thoughts about being mocked in Latin, something I spent a few hours doing that day and still hadn’t fully gotten over, and then she finally came to the reason.

The ringing came back in full, an angry constant gurgle that made only a single noise and rumbled in my skull, and I saw her own face warp in shock and then fear. Once more, words floated to the surface, a stagnant swamp of knowledge washing through my mind and apparently hers, too.

“Rank tall girl man them over post now. Recommend existence curiosity perfectly favourite.”

I didn’t see what she did next, since I had clamped my eyes shut when my passenger spoke up, but I did hear, even over the deafening static, her shouting and panicking, grabbing a fistful of my matted brown hair and digging her nails into my scalp even while trying to wrench her hand back. Why that didn’t wind up scalping me, or worse, I couldn’t say, but I was grateful enough.

The noise quickly drained away, though, and I once more opened my eyes to see the psion grabbing her own arm, desperation clear on her face. That’s when I realized that I didn’t feel her in my head anymore, that I was alone all over again.

Except, I realized with a great deal of fear, I wasn’t. I couldn’t feel anyone reaching in anymore, but I still wasn’t alone. I finally felt it again, so very much like when I looked into the Everything and saw it looking back at me, it was in my head then and it still was, and it had been disturbed once more. Even without a hole in reality for it to creep through, without enough power to scour a small moon clean, it was with me, and now, it had found somebody new.

Just like I could feel the Katherine in my head, that unseen guest in the room when the lights came on, I could feel… whatever it was with me reaching out. Except, it wasn’t a person in the room, it was the entire room itself. The walls and floor and ceiling and furniture, the pictures hanging and the fluorescent light, all of it was this thing and now that it had more company, it wanted it back. And so it tried to take it, the room that had replaced my own warped and twisted and grabbed Katherine, and I could feel her struggle and fail to cut our connection before she was back in my mind, yanked in by this thing from the Everything, something I’d later call the Every-Thing as if that weren’t confusing, but for now, I just called it horrifying.

She was brought back, more completely this time, if her sudden cease in struggles was anything to go off of, and then she, we were spoken to once more.

“Spoke as as other again ye. Abilities forfeited situation extremely my to he resembled.”

This ‘lesson’ was still thundering in my ears, but it seemed that whatever it was had gotten its point across this time, although I almost felt some disappointment in that last verse. Regardless, once it was finished ‘scolding’ the poor woman, the Every-Thing wasted no time in spitting her back out, and I felt my own mental room twisting itself and pushing her out through a wall.

Like a puppet with her strings cut, she collapsed, landing on her butt on the floor and gulping down huge lungfuls of air, staring up at me in sheer terror. The room was still for a long, horrible moment before she scrambled back away from me until her back hit the wall and even then, her legs kept trying to push her further away. Doctor Strenns was eerily silent during this, although I didn’t spare him a glance, too busy staring at the frightened psion as blood trickled down my forehead, streams of oily green tar pooling where the crimson red dripped onto my sheets and gown.

“What- what the hell was that!” She hissed, finally calmed down enough to think, apparently, but her voice was a whisper compared to her earlier shouts. “That was inside of you? What did you do?” Her voice was wavering, now, desperately hoping for some answers. I had none to give, and could only stare dumbly. The Every-Thing, cause of the problem, had apparently rolled over and gone back to sleep, or whatever the closest resemblance to that phrase it could be subjected to was, so it was only myself and her in the room, which was probably not normal.

That was when I started paying closer attention to her, realizing that her once supremely confident air and appearance had been thrown into disarray, the atmosphere of the room itself mirroring the turmoil she was no doubt going through. The air was sweltering and stuffy, and the walls seemed to be closing in at all times. She, too, had changed. Her right hand, the one she had placed on my head, was wrong too.

Before, it was flawless, her fingernails perfectly manicured and hands themselves delicate and smooth. Now, though, something just was missing. At first, it just seemed weird, but I couldn’t help but notice that little things simply didn’t add up, it was just too uncanny. The first thing to really stand out was the fact that it had lost all sense of depth. Everything from the tips of her fingers to a little past her elbow simply looked two-dimensional, unshaded, with a solid, single color. The tan had become a matte beige, there were no shadows cast or light reflecting, no curves apparent or any visible way at all to tell that this was more than a very hastily colored sketch of an arm, and it made me sick.

Then came the rest of the tiny details, her fingers had too many joints, or even no bones at all in there, her entire arm seemed to be wobbling, around the edges. I could only tell because I saw her bending them and could count the knuckles, there simply was no other way with that cartoonishly singular color. Everything about it was incorrect, and when she saw me staring for too long, she looked down at her own arm, too.

She looked like she was about to scream, drawing in a breath of air to start shouting for help, probably, but then the door was finally wrenched open and a nurse and a security officer burst in, quickly taking stock of the room, coming to the conclusion that he had no idea at all what had happened. Were it anyone else on the floor, in the psion’s position, I have no doubts that I’d be blamed, but he was just as aware as everyone else who she was, and more importantly, who I was not. From behind me, I heard the telltale groan of a man rudely awoken; apparently, Strenns wasn’t awake for the show that the three of us had performed, and the room was once more, deathly still.

The psion took a second to compose herself, pushing herself off the ground to stand at her full height, albeit with some hesitation, and even I could see her thinking, spinning a story together for whatever reason.

“It seems that your so-called security is little more than a joke. How is it, that in a supposedly secure facility like you claim to run, a hostile psion can not only work their way past every single checkpoint you had me wasting my time on, and do so absolutely unnoticed, mind you, and mount an attack when I am spinning a Bridge? The only time someone like me could possibly be vulnerable to such an attack, and yet you not only let it happen but also allow your own staff and those in your care to come under fire? Disgraceful.”

And what a story it was, completely unbelievable to anyone with more than three seconds of thought, but she had said it with so much raw vitriol and confidence that even I almost felt convinced, and I’m certain that her own natural command over the flows of thought only helped push the narrative onto that poor guard. What I didn’t understand was why.

“Honestly, I have no idea why the Coalition even allowed you people to treat one of our own at all. I’ll be putting in a transfer order for Mister Johansson immediately, in the likely circumstance that the attack was aimed at him.”

Ah. So that she can move me, I see. I should probably have worried more about what her reasons for doing so were, but honestly, I simply wanted to sleep.

And so I did.