A chiseled tablet dating back to Egypt's eighteenth dynasty described the performance of a young father during a religious festival, in which he made puppets and dolls fly through the air without the use of his hands while he and his wives provided voices for the play. The tablet further claimed that he discovered this ability while entertaining his children.

This is the earliest known recording of psychic powers, and is circulated as proof that telekinesis is the father of all known psionic disciplines.

Taz leaned close enough to the window that her breath appeared as a hot, steamy patch against the glass, fading away quickly as cold rain pelted the other side.

She recalled, when she was younger, she used to pretend the spaces between the water droplets left on the glass were like roads, winding their way to the sill. She would try and find a route from the bottom of the window to the top between the dribbling drops, an especially fun game when she was on a long car ride.

Today, she had a different game in mind.

With a shallow breath, she turned her head to look across her room, and spotted the brochure sitting on her desk. Her eyebrows tightened a moment, and her thoughts silenced as she focused. She radiated a psionic pulse, perceiving her room in her mind like echolocation, before condensing it into a solid fishing line between her hand and the folded paper, and beckoning it with nothing more than a thoughtful tug, the brochure flew into her waiting grip.

‘The Phoenix-Paiute Academy for Extracerebral Youths!’ The brochure was titled, but Taz had flipped through similar brochures hundreds of times; she even had a small collection sitting in a box under her bed. This one, however, was special; it was a new edition and the two back pages were different from any of the others she had.

Flipping past the history, the benefits offered, the classes available, the campus map, she found the page titled: ‘Psychic Exercises at Home.’ This edition offered a quick course on hydrokinesis, and her eyes ran down the page again to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything.

Like all psychic powers, it started with focus. Water, however, wasn’t like the brochure, it didn’t have a solid form to ‘grip.’ Even with her mind, water was slippery and runny, so she had to teach herself an entirely new form of telekinesis to make it move like she’d seen in internet videos.

Her eyes blurred as she started her focus, and she felt her temples begin to burn as she concentrated. Water droplets stopped suddenly in their descent down her window, some staying in place, others quivering and leaking like a punctured water balloon when she lost focus on them.

Some rain droplets began to slide upwards at her command, but as more rain hammered down on the glass and joined with her work, the sheer momentum interrupted her process and sent it pouring back down to the sill.

She stopped, took a deep breath, and tightened her brow once again, trying to see as many droplets as she could, but the wider she expanded her vision, and the more she tried to grab, the looser her grip became.

Her window shuddered and the water droplets quivered, shook, and rapidly squeezed out of her grip until, with a dramatic huff, she gave up, and the enthralled water exploded off of the glass, and the downpour continued.

Taz exhaled sharply, her forehead hurting from exercising her psychic powers too hard for too long. She flipped the lightswitch while taking deep, relaxing breaths, the darkness letting her eyes relax before she flopped into her bed on her back.

‘One and one is two, two and two is four, four and four is eight…’ She thought to herself, a simple brain exercise that eased the simmering in her head.

Slowly she began to wind down, and the pain and annoyance subsided. She knew hydrokinesis was going to be more difficult… Maybe she was too excited and didn’t read closely enough, but the concept had sounded simple enough on her first few passes.

Water was hard to wrap her head around… dozens of individual pieces to make a much larger grouping of water, but even tiny bits of water were still who-knew-how-many pieces of even tinier bits of water. It was hard to picture what to grasp, or where to even start putting it all together…

At this rate, she wasn’t getting anywhere with the left-brain disciplines. Sure, she got telekinesis down with smaller objects, but that got shakier with something heavier than a few pounds. Not that she often needed to quickly summon something that wasn’t palm-sized, but she’d have liked to have been able to lift a gallon of milk across the aisle without almost dropping it halfway through.

Taz rubbed her eyes; it was way easier figuring out the right-brain disciplines. Even laying in bed on the other side of the house, up on the second floor, she could sense her mother’s presence walking from the oven to the cabinets next to the refrigerator. She was familiar with the space, she just needed to send a little psionic pulse through the house and she could detect brain activity around her.

Her mother’s mind was fairly quiet, her attention on a handful of simple, pleasant things; cooking and music, she guessed. It was briefly interrupted with a loud thought, and her focus on her home dimmed a moment as she felt… something.

She wasn’t sure what until she opened her eyes again.

Taz watched as a bubble, shimmering in the moonlight jiggled in front of her eyes, and a finger reached over her face to pop it with a quick tap. She blinked, and turned to her right, staring at the face of a pale girl, roughly Taz’s height, but with silvery hair that tapered into waves down to her collar bone, ending in hues of purples and blues, a seashell clipped to her hair.

Melodica gave her a small, annoyed look, and gestured to the door. “Mom’s calling you down for dinner.” She said with a labored sigh, and Taz blinked.

“Natasha, get down here! Don’t make me call you again!” Shouted a familiar voice, and Taz gulped.

“Ah! Thank you, Mel!” She swung her legs over the bed and passed through Melodica’s face before racing out the door.

“Enjoy it for the both of us!” Melodica called after her, fading from view as Taz skipped down the stairs.

Dinner was a nice, simple reuben sandwich with a side of coleslaw tonight. It was good, but Taz barely minded the taste as she stared at the glass of water sitting next to her plate.

The kitchen table had a red and white checkered tablecloth thrown over it, and a vase of flowers sitting at one end. Taz’s feet tapped at the tile floor as she stared around the kitchen thoughtfully, at the window where the rain fell, at the cooling stove where she idly considered playing with the heat, but she knew that powers during dinner would just get her in trouble with...

Sitting across from her, her mother sliced off pieces of her sandwich with a knife and fork and popped it into her mouth. She was a dainty woman, though Taz ruminated that her mother’s focus on appearances were more annoying than they were worth… but they seemed to work out for her.

Anna Cooper was a pretty woman in her mid-thirties. Pretty was underselling it; her mother was a startlingly good-looking woman, which gave Taz hope that she had a similarly good future ahead of her. She had her mother’s blonde hair, trim frame, pleasantly pink skin, though her mother’s blue eyes contrasted Taz’s more bronze-y green eyes, as well as a small beauty mark below and to the left of her lips.

Taz didn’t have her mother’s height, either; she was stuck as a shrimp just barely peaking at five feet tall, whereas her mother was a few inches short of six feet. She also didn’t have her mother’s perfect vision, as evidenced by Taz wearing glasses, while her mother could read street signs down the road with nothing more than a brief squint.

“Is the water offending you, hon?” Anna asked, and Taz blinked. She was staring at her water glass, the water inside swirling in a slow circle, and with a blink, she clicked her telekinesis ‘off’ and the liquid began to settle.

“No, just… thinking.”

“That’s dangerous, coming from a psychic.” Anna said with a small smirk, and Taz puttered her lips.

She sipped her water and took a bite out of her sandwich, barely acknowledging the taste. “I was practicing hydrokinesis in my room.” Taz said after swallowing, and Anna paused mid-bite, her eyes flicking up to her daughter for a few seconds, before continuing her meal.

“Water control.” Anna stated more than asked, and Taz nodded.

“The brochure said it’s a psience that’s useful for everyday psionics.” Taz explained, her lips pursed as she examined the water in her cup. “You can use it to pull the water out of your clothes, and pull dirt out of it. You can make ice instantly, or water from ice, or water vapor if you wanna…”

“It sounds better for party tricks than anything else.” Her mother said, jabbing at her coleslaw with her fork.

“I-it’s not!” Taz said with a huff, straightening up in her chair. “There’s lots of useful ways to use it!”

Anna lowered her cutlery and looked her daughter in the eyes, making Taz flinch as she knew a very pointed question was about to be aimed her way. “Any more useful than building machines that clean water for you? You and others, for years?”

Taz tightened her lips together and sank into her seat, refusing to meet her mother’s eyes any longer. She pushed her slaw around a bit, glancing at her glass of water, idly considering boiling it as some sort of punishment, but then she heard her mother sigh.

“How was your practice?” Anna asked, almost resigned to the question.

Taz was quiet for a moment, staring at her drink a little longer, her fingers raising and her mind reaching out. She pictured a hole at the bottom of the glass and the water draining out, spinning in its container as it was sucked downwards, and with a bit of focus, applied the invisible push with nothing more than a thought.

The liquid began to swirl. There was no hole to fall through, but just thinking of how the water should move, she managed to grip the contents quite easily and turn it in a circle, and once that was done, she could relax her focus and maintain it with nothing more than a bit of attention.

“You seem to have a pretty good grasp on it.” Her mother chimed in, and Taz pushed her lips outwards.

“Yeah, but the water’s already in something. Rain is weird though, even when it’s on the window it’s hard to catch and hang onto. It’s like… I try to grab it and it just slips through.”

“Like with your fingers.” Anna noted, and Taz gave her a small nod.

“Yeah.”

“So how do you usually catch rain?”

Taz thought about it for a moment. “Well not with my hands. Usually in buckets and stuff, I guess?”

“Right.”

“But the really, like, good hydrokinetics can just pull rain into, like, a ball, sucking it into one spot while keeping themselves dry!” Taz huffed, tapping her plate with her fork. “And then they can turn it into ice, and throw it around, or, like, make cool shapes with it! Remember at the fair last year, the guy making ice sculptures out of lemonade?”

“I remember it ruined the lemon flavor and we were stuck licking ice for the next half hour.” Anna noted with a quirk of her eyebrow. “Is ‘hydrokinesis’ really a thing? It just sounds like a very specific use of telekinesis and thermokinesis at the same time.”

“Well a lot of the disciplines are like that! But hydrokinesis is, like, all liquids.” Taz explained, staring at the glass of water, focusing, trying to imagine balling it up and lifting it out, but as the water swelled at the surface and rose, it almost immediately spilled out of her psychic grasp, leaving her grunting in annoyance.

“I still don’t quite understand why you’d want to bother.” Anna shook her head, returning to her sandwich with a click of the silverware. “You could use this time to do extra credit work, or practice your music, or—”

“Mom, I really want to get good with my psychic powers.” Taz grunted, her body tensing up.

Years ago, that statement would have prompted further argument from her mother, but at fifteen, Taz had remained steadfast in her devotion to her birthright, and her mom had grown weary trying to convince her otherwise.

They both ate quietly, Taz more slowly than her mother. Her mom’s reuben was always good, but her mind was elsewhere; namely, in her drink, which was twisting around in unusual ways, making the surface roil and bubble.

Wordlessly, her fork rose up from the side of her plate, and awkwardly jabbed at her coleslaw; imprecise, but it caught a few shredded bits of cabbage, and she pushed her lips outwards, hovering the fork closer to her mouth while keeping the water swirling. The glass briefly slid her way, and she had to keep her two focuses separate, pulling one while spinning the other, and she took the meager offering of slaw into her mouth and now focused on chewing, swirling, and returning her fork to the table.

Her fork quivered in the air, her water was rippling unevenly, and she realized she’d been chewing the same mash the whole time she was concentrating, but then her fork was at rest and she could swallow and swirl without either choking or spilling her drink.

She exhaled sharply out of her nose… all the videos she’d seen of telekinesis, the practitioners could spin around a number of objects and have what seemed like a dozen tasks happening at once; here she was struggling to feed herself and spin some water while she chewed…

“You’re getting quite good at that.” She heard her mother say gently, and Taz looked up at her over the tops of her big, round glasses, and though she privately disagreed, she nodded.

“Yeah, I guess so.” Taz mumbled.

The water glass was practically taunting her at this point. She had a whole cup of the stuff and she could barely manage to pull out more than a sopping spoonful that immediately fell apart.

She hadn’t realized how quiet it had gotten, but she was aware her mother was staring at her. It was hard to miss thoughts about her when they were right across the table. She wasn’t actively trying to listen to her mom’s thoughts—since that usually got her in trouble—but she could sense her general mood.

Annoyance, dismay, a little bit of disappointment… but her mom wasn’t vocalizing anything, and her frustration was interrupted with a few bites of her sandwich, and after some thought, many of her pricklier emotions subsided with the feeling of sympathy and concern.

Taz wasn’t sure what her mom was getting worked up about, she was just stirring her water and eating. She heard her mother give a soft sigh, and set her cutlery down to lean in closer, staring at her glass.

“What about a sponge?” Anna asked suddenly, making Taz stall, then glance up curiously.

“A sponge?”

“Like a big mind sponge?” Her mother pressed, glancing up at the ceiling. “Sucking the water into one point rather than trying to grab it with your hands. Water sticks to itself, so… pull it all into one point rather than try to pick it up.”

“Oh.” Taz blinked, and stared at her water glass. A mind sponge, huh…?

She’d never thought of something like that before. She stared at a small spot in the center of the water glass. A sponge… suck it all in, like there was a hole in the center the water wanted to get sucked into. The water in her glass shifted around a little, but nothing seemed to really change, until she tried lifting that imaginary hole up.

Water poured down the golf ball-sized globe of water as it rose up above her glass, and her eyes widened, her moment of disbelief making the water waiver and dribble back into the glass, but she redoubled her concentration until her head began to burn, and she extended her hands towards the glass, making motions like she was scooping more water up into the ball.

Slowly water rose up to fill the sphere, which grew as she imagined that drain-hole getting bigger in the center, and she let out a long, loud breath.

“Okay, shut up shut up shut up, hold on!” She yelled in a near soprano, concentrating on the sphere, trying to imagine that water getting sucked into the center, forced to congeal to a single point, the ball dripping off excess, but not faster than she could fill it. A golf ball turned into a billiard ball, and she let out a quick, astonished laugh. “Oh my god mom you’re so smart!”

Anna cleared her throat, clearly pleased with the praise, but spoke with a warning in her tone. “Thank you, honey, but maybe not on the dinner table? If you drop it—”

“Sh-sh-sh-sh…” Taz whispered, her glass about three-quarters empty now, the billiard ball now the size of a grapefruit, the water shimmering and wiggling in her mental grip, straining to keep its size and form.

“Tasha…”

“H-hold on… I almost got it all!” Taz insisted, and then a small spot next to her left eye itched, and she moved her hand to scratch it, and the water fell into the glass, onto the table, all over her food, and left her jumping back with a squeak, her itch forgotten.

She stared at the wet stain spreading across the table cloth, then up at her mother’s ‘I told you so’ look.

“Uh… I…” Taz gulped loudly, approaching the table with her hands outstretched. “Okay, I saw a psychic pull water out of a shirt once, I think if I just picture the same thing and try really hard—” A hand planted on the table in the center of her vision, and she glanced up at her mom, who gently shook her head. “Or, uh…”

“I think that’s enough psionics at the table, Tasha.” Anna said with a gentle sternness. “If you want to practice more hydrokinesis, do it in the bath. For now, you have a wet sandwich to finish and I have a bit of laundry to do.”

Taz hung her head, but couldn’t keep the giddiness in her tummy from bubbling. “Sorry mom…”

“It’s alright, honey. Get everything on the kitchen counter—with your hands—so I can throw this in the wash.”

“Yes, mom!”