Jana and Jeremy stood in the Mansion’s entrance room, facing a newly arrived Samuel, who was once more flanked by two soldiers.

One looked quite young, carried only a knife for a weapon, had a large, blue and purple piece of cloth wrapped around his arm, and had what appeared to be an earbud in his right ear, which was strung into a backpack. The other wore no cloth, looked significantly older, and had an almost comically large gun on his back for whatever reason. He gaged the two with a stony expression, as though he was seriously pondering whether he could handle a super psychic. In fact, while he had no apparent signifier of his rank, it was immediately obvious that he was the farthest thing from a simple grunt. The former wore a white uniform, which signified his status as a lab soldier, and matched with his commander, situated in front of him, while the other wore a black army suit.

Samuel now wore an unassuming lab coat and seemed to have groomed himself a little since the last day.

The gaudily-robed Hatty had also joined them, standing beside Jeremy with an annoyed expression, unable to see anything happening.

Jana wore a black tank-top that was tucked beneath her three-hundred-dollar (durable)jeans and glared at the three imposing figures with attentiveness, focused on her task once more.

Finally, there was Jeremy, who had put on a white shirt that said, “May the Sarcasm be With You,” and athletic shorts to prepare for the incredibly important confrontation. He currently looked nervously between everyone and himself, wondering where the memo was sent.

Jana sighed. “Jeremy, did you really not have better clothes to wear? You’re messin’ up the vibes.”

“Not really,” he said. “Style wasn’t my first thought when I went with you, you know. If I’d thought about it, I would’ve brought my black cape and jeans and stuff.”

“You would have worn a cape?!” Jana asked. She then said, “Dude,” as though the word were a sentence. After a pause she said, “And you would’ve been wearing black, and that would have matched up with me, too! Don’t tell me you don’t have a black shirt.”

“I do have a few backed with me, but nobody told me fashion would be the name of the game!”

Jana sighed. “I literally only wear tank tops, and I still dress better than you…”

“I’m a fucking middle-schooler, deal with it.”

“Well, you should have lear-” Jana suddenly froze. “Did you just say you’re a middle schooler?”

“Uhh...yeah. I graduate in July.”

“Fuck.”

“Did you just now realize that?”

“Look, I thought you were a fucking soomore or whatever they call the...the tenth-grade people.”

“How fucking old did you think I was?! I’m flattered, really, but it isn’t exactly a secr-”

“Ahem.”

The two slowly looked to an unamused Samuel.

The elevator opened behind him. “Can we get on with this, or will you two seriously continue to devote yourselves to your comedy routine?”

“Err, yeah. Sorry,” Jana said, relatively stiff. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Then follow me.”

Jana and Jeremy did so, taking a stand on the massive elevator’s inside left, while the soldiers and Samuel stood on the right. Before any buttons were pressed, Samuel asked Jana, “It seems your money was sent to me successfully. I was not adequately prudent in my brief investigations into how easily traceable the transactions were, as is evidenced by how we have proceeded with the tour as of now, but I do wish to note that there are dire consequences for double-crossing me. I think it goes without saying that our being blood-related is functionally meaningless, as it always has been, and I hope that you understand that your actions can and will have consequences. You are not infallible.”

Jana nearly said something snarky about the speech, but didn’t have the gall to break the tension, so she said, “I know.”

He sighed, then punched a button into the elevator.

“Basement Floor One,” a prerecorded voice said as they began to descend.

The doors opened about thirty seconds later, revealing a sprawling laboratory, coated in blinding white walls. It was as quiet as a library, with bored soldiers overlooking scientists as they quietly discussed over computers and equipment. There were also large hallways and doors leading to other parts of the lab.

Samuel motioned toward the room but didn’t walk out. “As an official funder of my research, Jana Pontoon, you may have access to the vast wealth of knowledge my facilities dredge up, at a price. And I assure you, much of what we learn here will quite interest your current ventures,” the oldish man said, looking back at Jana with a smirk.

“What about the development of psychic powers?” Jana asked. “Do you have much on that?”

“I most certainly do. Now, this ‘psychic research facility’, dubbed the PSF, has four floors. This first one handles more general experiments, including a few which are relevant to the subject of psychics, but aren’t directly connected.”

Jana could sense how large and deep the PSF was through her Recognition, and the size had been shocking to her. Although it wasn’t very deep, it was located beneath the mansion’s large grounds, and definitely expanded far past the gates, making it a very large underground facility.

Samuel pressed a button, another voice said, “Basement floor two.” After a relatively short elevator wait, the doors opened again. This one led into a hallway, which in turn led to doors spread across the hall.

“This is the second floor, where we research psychic abilities through action.” He led them through the nearest door and opened it to reveal what appeared to be a high-ceilinged gym room.

A white-coated woman was holding a clipboard and watching as a focused girl with a rope tied tightly around her head molded a half-liquefied rock like clay. The group watched for a minute as the girl quickly sculpted the rock from the bottom-up, the rock solidifying each time she finished a section. It hardly took her a minute to finish the whole sculpture. She fell to the ground with a fugue expression once she finished molding it into the vague figure of a person and let it crash and crack on the ground.

“She has the rare Solidification ability,” Samuel explained. “But it seems she’s participating in the Headband Experiment.”

“Headband experiment?” Jana said, curious since she used them on occasion.

“We’ve posed a hypothesis that pressure around the head actually improves psychics’ endurance, focus, and multitasking. We have devoted far too little time to verify the effect on all the variables, but the results appear to be coming out positive.”

“Neat shit,” Jana said, taking note of the trivia.

They returned to the elevator, and Samuel sent them down to the third floor.

“The third floor,” he began as they fell, “Is merely a general storage floor.”

The doors opened, revealing a hallway that led forward, with many garage doors lining it.

“Moving on.” Samuel pushed another button, then quickly pushed a few more, for whatever reason.

The door closed, and they descended again.

The elevator took a while to stop, but once it did, the door opened, revealing what almost seemed to be a lounge room. There was a table with four stools surrounding it, a sofa, a sink with cabinets above it, and curtains draped over the walls.

“This is the fourth floor, where I keep only the most expensive equipment,” Samuel said, walking in.

“Like a stock table you bought from Ikea?” Jana asked, walking to and flicking the table, which was made of fake wood.

“No, not quite. This is merely a luxury room for head researchers to lounge and wait in, in silence.”

“Gotcha.”

Samuel walked to one of the curtains and brushed it aside. A large window behind it, showed a small room with a window on the other side, where an MRI machine laid behind. “While I would love to have acquired more machines like this, as they are quite imperative to researching psychics, but finding manufacturers of them capable and willing to transport them to my facility is horribly difficult, or so I’m told. Not to mention, many of them were wiped out in The Catastrophe...[Kaled, what in the world are you doing?]”

The soldier with the earbud was on the other side of the room, casually getting a drink of hot water from a dispenser, then pouring a pack of stevia in. The soldier had already been returning from the act and was only called out when he took a sip. He looked like a deer under headlights. “[S-sorry, sir, I just wanted a drink is all, sir.]” he responded in Arabic.

Samuel looked at him like he’d just done some horrid thing. “[Well, that would be alright, but why are you drinking hot sugar water?!]”

“[Huh? Because I...like sugar water?]” Kaled said nervously.

“[What are you, a monkey!?]”

“[If you think so, sir...]”

The older soldier locked eyes with Jana, both of them holding in laughter. Jeremy chuckled a bit at it, too, his eyes narrowed concernedly.

Samuel sighed in exasperation. “[Rediculous.] Let’s just move on.”

He led them through another doorway.

The room behind it had an iron, spherical chamber about the size of a person connected to various wires and devices, most of which led to a desk with a computer on it.

“What do you think this is, Jana?” Samuel said as he walked to the chamber, then flicked a finger against it.

“I dunno, a ball of steel?”

“No, I’m afraid not…well, it is but…Whatever. This is an old model of psycho-particle detectors, specialized for a particular function. I presume you’re familiar with psycho-particles?”

“They’re brainwave-reactive particles emanated from psychics which are the crux of psychic abilities,” she said.

“Yes, precisely. Psi-particles were all the rage not long ago, but the arrival of the catastrophe changed the velocity of scientific research toward psychic enhancement and development -growing the power already invested in a psychic. I can thank you for that cultural change, I believe,” Samuel said with a glance at Jana.

Jana nodded, crossing her arms. “The psychic league has always been about self-improvement and mental fortitude,” she said matter-of-factly. “But yes, I may have emphasized those traits a little more in the marketing.”

“Fearmongering,” Samuel said with a smirk, “is quite the effective marketing strategy, isn’t it, Miss Pontoon?”

She scowled at him. “You make ‘effective marketing’ sound like it’s every villain’s favorite flavor of ice cream.”

“I must always be the villain of the family, is that it?” Samuel said with a lick of spite.

Jana rolled her eyes. “If you’re talking about something my father did, I’m not the person to complain about it to. I barely know you, and I’d rather keep it that way.”

“Hmph, I would presume so. Still, I find it funny how that label seems to follow me.”

“I wonder why,” Jana said, nonplussed.

“Very well. I’ll get on with my explanation. In the last four years, a research breakthrough was made, but was overshadowed by a flood of research that preceded it. We learned that psi-particles emanate light in astronomically small levels.”

“Interesting?” Jana said skeptically.

“Most people saw it as ‘interesting?’” he mimicked her. “But nobody thought much more of it. I, on the other hand, picked up the topic of research the moment I learned of a follow-up experiment which researched the properties of the emitted light.” Samuel knocked on the metal chamber. “This bad little boy I bought directly off of the laboratory that performed the experiment after they had moved on to a wholly different field of study. It traps and detects the presence of psi-particles but it, more importantly, is made to detect their emitted light.”

“Uhh, cool. How is any of that helpful, though?” Jana asked. “It’s fucking light. What are you going to do with that?”

“Tsk, tsk,” Samuel clicked his tongue. “I’m less concerned with what the light does and what the light tells us. This machine is imperative to why I brought you here.” Samuel walked to the computer and took a moment to open a few programs. Once he finished, he walked to the other side of the sphere. “I modified this piece of equipment so that a person can walk inside rather comfortably,” he said, opening a hatch on the side, which revealed an opening large enough for someone to slip into. “Alright...Jana, would you like to walk in here?” he asked.

She shook her head, looking at him with wide, skeptical eyes. “The fuck’re you trying to do, coat me with gamma rays?”

“Unfortunately,” he said, “I have not experimented with the lethality of anti-psychic lasers. Though, other facilities supposedly have. Apparently, psychic barriers deflect all but visible light. That is beside the point; would you just please walk in?” Samuel pleaded, rolling his eyes. “You’re going to be fine.”

Jana rolled her eyes as well but reluctantly walked past him into the chamber. “Now what?”

“I’ll close the hatch, run a quick test, and then you can walk back out.”

“Ok...” Jana said as he closed it. She figured the scientist was just using her for data but couldn’t see the possible harm in it.

He quickly skipped to the computer with an excited smile, ran a program, then after a few seconds passed, and what appeared to be a bar graph appeared on the computer, he yelled, “You can come out now!”

The hatch flung open and Jana waltzed out.

“Everyone interested can look here with me,” he said, making room for them to look at the graph.

One bar was red, another green, and another blue.

R: 70%

G: 21%

B: 93%

A small square of color in the corner of the application was a pinkish-purple, and labeled:

Color: Pinkish-purple

“What’s this?” Jana asked.

“Your color,” Samuel said simply. “You are a pinkish-purple psychic.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Nope, not at all, girl.”

“Don’t call me girl, boy,” Jana said, particularly disliking the word when he said it.

“Whatever you want,” the old man responded sarcastically. “But either way, the ‘color’ variable doesn’t mean much. It is a vestigial part of the program.”

“Yeah, you’re confusing me even more. You said this was important.”

“Let me get to that.” Samuel then explained, “So, psi-particles release light, but only a very specific range of light: Red, Green, and Blue. What I learned is that each persons’ psi particles have their own spectrum, the ratio at which they release each of these colors.”

“Strange shit.”

“Yes, very strange shit. We scientists love strange shit, and that’s why I bought this machine.”

“But I still don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

“I’m getting there. We have to sift through more fascinating and strange ‘shit’ before anything I’m talking about makes sense. You see, I have recorded the colors of hundreds of different psychics and made records of their abilities. What is so fascinating is that I can predict roughly the type of abilities a psychic has by reading their color.”

“Now we’re talking,” Jana said. “Can you predict emerging abilities?” Jana asked.

“Yes, though, again, only generally,” he responded. “For example, with your high B value, it is most likely that your abilities will correspond with energy manipulation rather than mind or reality warping. Furthermore, if you were to gain a new ability, it would most likely be a kinesis or enhancement-type ability. You also have a high R value, so you may gain a precision, intelligence-gathering, or mind-affecting ability.”

“Which means that green is that ‘reality warping’ you mentioned?”

“Yes,” he said before moving to the doorway. “But we will discuss that, and why those abilities are so rare, on the final floor.”

“I thought there were only four?”

“That’s the point.” He smirked.

Everyone began walking out, but Jeremy remained and asked, “Could I ask you a question?”

Jeremy had been entirely ignored up until this point. He had seemed rather absent from the conversations, and they had taken him for bored or confused at the technical explanations.

Samuel poked his head back in with curiosity. “I love questions. What is it?”

“Could you test a non-psychic?”

He paused, narrowing his eyebrows briefly. “Yes, of course! Even non-psychics release psi-particles. Do you want to be tested real quick?”

Jeremy nodded, and they filed back in. Jeremy slipped into the hatch. Samuel closed it, then walked to the computer. He quickly reset and ran the program, and they all watched as it recorded his psi-particles.

The graph pulled up:

R: 78%

G: 97%

B: 9%

Color: Yellowish Green

“I guess the numbers don’t say anything about power,” Jana said.

“N-no...” Samuel said breathily, staring wide-eyed at the numbers. “They do not...do not correlate to power...o-only abilities.”

“You okay there, geezer?” Jana asked. “You’re breathing kinda hard.”

“No, I’m alright,” he said, a hand on his chest. “I-I’m just a little old. This happens sometimes.”

“Sucks to suck, huh?”

Samuel didn’t respond and slowly walked to open the hatch for Jeremy. He hopped onto the floor and went to the computer to look at his colors. “Huh, I’m really green,” he said.

“Erm...Jeremy, was it?” Samuel said. “I assumed you weren’t, but just in case I misunderstood, you aren’t a psychic, correct?”

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah. My sister is, obviously, but I never had powers like hers.”

“Hmm...” He paused. “Yes, well...perhaps it is possible you do have psychic abilities.”

Jeremy froze and Jana scrunched up her face skeptically. “What does that mean?” she asked.

Samuel fidgeted his hands as he walked out of the room. “I will answer, but we will continue this conversation on the next floor.”

“Freakin’ stickler for procedure...” Jana muttered, following along with everyone else.

They entered the elevator once more, but this time, Samuel said, “Fifth basement floor!” then punched a code into the elevator interface.

The elevator began to silently descend.