The First Words

 

Two weeks following Mel’s successful use of the fog machine, Dyna found herself seated on the floor of her insulated apartment room. The Ouija board sat in front of her, the wolf statue loomed over the ‘No’ corner, and the voodoo doll was slumped over near the ‘Yes’ corner with its crochet hands touching the planchette.

The planchette wasn’t moving.

Dyna didn’t really expect it to. In fact, despite that being something she was trying to change, it felt like it would be a bit spooky given the little diorama she had set up. Reaching forward, Dyna moved the voodoo doll away from the planchette and adjusted the wolf statue so that it didn’t quite look like it was staring at the board. That done, she leaned back and crossed her arms.

“How do I get you things to work?”

They were anomalies. Of that Dyna was certain. Much like the glasses she had handed over to Cross, the fog machine, or even the mirror before its ascension into a full artifact, they now passively emitted a fair amount of psionic energy. But they weren’t doing anything. They should do something. The glasses showed off the other world and shadowy creatures. The fog machine—though Dyna couldn’t utilize it—still emitted fog without needing a recharge or a refill. Her mirror had functioned as well. Even Ado’s goggles had done something, although she did admit that she hadn’t actually tested any emissions from them.

The objects in front of her?

Once again, Dyna felt like she was missing one small key element that would unlock everything for her.

And, unfortunately, she had a feeling she knew what that element was.

Other psychics.

Doctor Cross had gotten back to her with regards to the glasses. At the moment, the theory was that the mirror had worked without question because Dyna had no other artifact attuned to her at the time. Everything else needed another psychic as a catalyst. Ado’s goggles pinged off Matt, who had been in the same trailer. November did the same for the glasses. Mel obviously was the catalyst for the fog machine.

These objects were ready. They just needed that spark. Preferably a spark that didn’t tie them to whoever acted as the catalyst. Dyna wanted to use them for herself, after all.

The problem was that in scrolling down her phone’s contact list, accounting only for psychics, the list was distressingly short. It was basically just Mel, Matt, Ruby, Emerald, and now Hematite. The latter of whom was an extremely recent entry.

She had disappeared for a full week before popping up one day as if nothing had happened. Walter had not been impressed. Since they weren’t sure when she would be back—or even where she had gone—they had delayed the Tartarus operation for a time.

Not that Dyna was complaining about that.

Lowering the phone, she looked over the three items again. The wolf statue… she honestly wasn’t sure what it might do. What themes applied to wolves? Hunters? Pack-loyal animals? Intelligence, perhaps?

Maybe she should just destroy that one, if only to keep it from doing anything unexpected.

The doll and board had more concrete ideas. The doll might offer control over someone the same way a psychic mind controller would do. Alternatively, voodoo dolls were supposed to have pins pushed into them, which might transmit pain or worse. It was something Dyna had thus far been hesitant to do. There were too many unpredictable effects that might happen if she just started randomly stabbing it.

It should probably be destroyed as well.

But the board… The board was a way of gathering information. It was not liable to cause harm or damage.

Dyna got to her feet, dragged over a containment box, and placed the doll and statue inside. It seemed a waste to destroy them at this point, but she decided against touching them again until later. They were too volatile. She didn’t want her first real success to blow up in her face. Figuratively or literally.

Decision made, Dyna felt confident that she knew what to do.

Information gathering was common among psychics. Practically half of all psychics could count as information gatherers in some way or another. There were mind readers, emotion readers, clairvoyants, precogs, and more besides. But those were the big four.

She knew a few of each. None well enough to have in her phone, however, with the exception of Hematite. Still, people like Niko Hendrix—the precog who could predict anything that only had two possible outcomes—lived in the Carroll Institute dormitories. Niko lived just a few doors down from her. It would hardly be trouble to get into contact with him. His roommate, Jefferson, was an empath, able to detect emotions. Another form of information gathering.

Their problem was the same as Mel’s however. They would likely steal the artifact out from under her fingers. Even if they didn’t want to.

But Dyna had an idea. Artificers already had artifacts. True, they could bind with more than one, but it was apparently not very likely. It required the right artifact and physical touch.

Ado’s goggles had pinged off Matt without physical touch.

Sapphire was a mind reader. Apparently one of the most powerful readers known. Dyna didn’t have his number, but it probably wouldn’t be that hard to get. Besides him…

Dyna’s thoughts trailed off, distracted by a sharp buzzing noise radiating through the apartment. She cocked her head, wondering what kind of strange alarm that was. It didn’t sound like a fire alarm. It wasn’t loud enough. As the harsh buzz sounded again, and again, she realized it was forming the Shave and a Haircut pattern.

The doorbell? How old was it to sound like that?

Wondering if she should get some inspectors out to check for asbestos or lead paint, Dyna quickly slipped out of the insulated room, down the short hall, and stopped at the front door. She peeped through the peep-hole and promptly frowned.

A certain monochromatic woman stood outside, with heavy makeup running down from her eyes. Artistically, not as if she had been crying. As Dyna watched, she reached up and touched the doorbell again, filling the apartment with that harsh noise.

“Alright, alright,” Dyna said, unlatching and unlocking the door. “Hematite?”

“You called?”

“No?”

“You were going to. Well, you were going to send a text.”

Dyna crossed her arms over her chest, frowning at the slightly shorter woman. She was fairly certain that she had been leaning toward asking Sapphire if he would come out here. He was a strange one, but she knew him ever so slightly better than she knew Hematite. Not to mention, Hematite somehow felt a little stranger than he did. And that was a hard bar to reach.

Hematite’s smile crashed as she took a step back. Pulling her hands up to her chest, she averted her gaze and stared down at her platform boots. “Oh no. I messed it up didn’t I? I should have just waited. Stupid,” she hissed to herself. “I’m sorry. I just… I’ll go now.”

Dyna rolled her eyes. She felt that she had confidence problems. Less in recent weeks, but still…

Hematite seemed to take the self-confidence cake.

And if Hematite disappeared again for a week, or longer, and this time Dyna was to blame…

Suppressing a sigh, Dyna swung an arm back into her apartment in a halfhearted welcoming gesture. “Do you want to come in?”

“No… I don’t mean to impose. I thought…”

“It’s fine. I was thinking about you for a moment there,” Dyna said.

Maybe Sapphire was unavailable. Sent off to Timbuktu or something. Dyna could see herself calling up Hematite if that were the case. Or even going for Hematite first since she didn’t have Sapphire’s number.

“You are a precog, right?” Dyna asked as she closed the door behind Hematite.

Hematite shrugged, still not regaining her earlier jovial attitude. “That’s what they say.”

“You disagree?”

“I sometimes get ideas in my head after seeing something. But they don’t always come true,” she said, motioning toward Dyna as an example. “They have to come true to be a precog, right? So I think I just have good intuition.”

If all she had was intuition, she probably wouldn’t be an artificer. “So you intuited my apartment from nothing?”

“Maybe? You were in the area the other day ago and said you had an apartment. It wouldn’t be a hard guess.”

“And how many doors did you try before mine?” There were only two floors to this apartment building. Maybe forty total residences. “Did you intuit that too?”

“There was foil covering one of the windows. I saw it outside. I figured that would be a good starting spot.”

Dyna pressed her lips together. She didn’t have an answer for that. It wasn’t that obvious given that she was up on the second floor, but… it wasn’t exactly inconspicuous either. “And the text you said I was going to send you?”

“That’s just how my intuition works.”

“Uh huh.”

“Kind of empty in here, isn’t it?”

Dyna glanced around. She had a couch with a few pillows and blankets thrown on top, a fake potted plant that she got specifically to make the corners of the room look less empty, and the circuit-board decoration sitting where a television normally would be across from the couch.

“I told you it wasn’t much.”

“Yeah, but that was days and days ago.”

“I still spend most nights at the dorm. Don’t really need much else.”

As Hematite let out a small hum and plopped herself down on the couch, Dyna wondered just what she was supposed to do now.

Entertain her for a few minutes then kick her out? She had come all this way presumably because Dyna wanted to expose her to the Ouija board. It seemed a waste to send her away without that. But how, then? Could she secretly do it? If she brought the Ouija board out here and just stashed it behind the couch, Hematite would probably never notice.

The fog machine had set off all the alarms. But Dyna had a small suspicion that the coffee mug had been the actual culprit behind that incident. All the objects Mel produced from the fog had drastically higher psionic emissions than the fog machine did. So the Ouija board might not cause problems.

Did she want to risk that?

Or did she want to take Hematite into the insulated room? It wouldn’t be possible to hide what she was doing at that point. Hematite had already seen the foil from the outside, though that could easily be explained away as an attempt at keeping the heat from the sun out.

What to do?

Hematite, hands clasped together on the couch, looked around. With the empty room, there was obviously not much to look at, leaving her to do nothing more than glance out then window then back to Dyna. “So…” she started.

“So…” Dyna said, still trying to make a decision.

Hematite’s small smile quickly turned to a strained grimace. “I… I made this awkward. I’ll just leave.”

Dyna held up a hand, stopping her before she could rush out the door. “In the text you said I was going to send you, did I happen to mention why I invited you over?”

“My intuition isn’t always that clear. I caught a glimpse of your name and then a jumble of letters that I think said ‘show me’ or something.”

That pretty much settled it. Dyna could only think of one thing that she had that she would show to Hematite.

Closing her eyes, hoping she wasn’t making a mistake, Dyna motioned. “Come here for a moment, please.”

“Oh?”

“You know what a Ouija board is?”

Hematite stopped abruptly, making a choking noise like she had just swallowed some of her own spit. Dyna looked back with a raised eyebrow, finding Hematite practically shaking.

“I know its a horror movie trope,” Dyna said with a frown, “but we’re not in a horror movie. It’s just a piece of wood with some letters burned into it. Besides, we’re not going to use it. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t touch it at all.”

“Y-You shouldn’t mess with ghosts, Dyna.”

“I’m not. I’m… Here.” Dyna pushed open the door and stepped inside. “Careful not to tear the foil when you walk on it.”

Hematite, who had removed her platform boots at the entrance, carefully stepped into the room with her black and white striped socks. Her terror seemed to have vanished as she looked around in obvious confusion. After running her fingers down the foil on the walls, she looked back to Dyna and tipped her head.

“Just an experiment I set up after talking with Doctor Cross.” Cross didn’t actually know about this, but that wasn’t technically a lie. And implying that Doctor Cross might know about it would hopefully lend some legitimacy to what she was doing which.

“What kind of—” Hematite froze after taking one more step into the room. Her eyes locked onto the Ouija board sitting in the middle of the room. Even as Dyna moved to close the door behind her, she still didn’t so much as twitch a finger.

Was she really that scared of ghosts?

Dyna shrugged. Ghosts weren’t real. There were suggestions that ghost sightings were a product of psychic influence in some form or another, but given that there had been ghosts since long before the Advent of Psionic Potential, that probably wasn’t completely accurate.

Maybe November and her ilk were the cause of ghost sightings. Or maybe people had been psychic for a lot longer than was commonly accepted. Either way, it wasn’t really worth thinking about and almost certainly didn’t affect the current situation.

Walking back to the center of the room, Dyna was about to launch into an explanation of what she was trying to accomplish here—hopefully talking would get the other woman to calm down—only to realize that there could be another reason for Hematite’s uncanny stillness.

Her power rearranged what she saw into what she would see, most commonly in the form of text. That was how Walter described it.

What was the Ouija board if not a bunch of easily rearranged text?

Dyna quickly interposed herself between the board and Hematite.

That got the other woman to blink. She started, stepping back and bumping into the now closed door in the process.

“Were you using your power just now? Your intuition?”

Hematite pressed a hand to her forehead, cradling a headache, and pinched her eyes shut. Dyna took that for a yes. After a quick shake of her head, Hematite’s other hand swept across the door until smacking hard against the doorknob. Not that Hematite seemed to care. She just grabbed the handle and opened the door, rushing out into the hall.

“Hem—Jane? Are you alright?” Dyna asked, moving a bit more carefully across the foil floor. With socks on, it could be slippery at times and she wanted to avoid accidentally ripping the material.

By the time she made it back, Hematite had one boot on and was in the process of tightening the buckles on the other.

“Are you alright?” Dyna asked again. “I didn’t mean to—”

Hematite snapped the last buckle in place. She stood upright and grasped the entrance door’s handle. Then she paused and looked over her shoulder. “I’m fine. It’s not you. There’s just something I need to take care of. I’ll be back. Maybe.”

Dyna didn’t get a chance to ask anything else before Hematite threw open the door and took off in a full sprint, managing to move much faster than Dyna would have expected was possible with those platform boots. She ran right past the elevator and pushed open the stairwell door, apparently deciding that it would be the faster method of getting downstairs. Judging by her movements, Dyna had a feeling that she wouldn’t be stepping down the stairs so much as she would be leaping down them.

Dyna didn’t follow. She didn’t have her own shoes on and, while the laces were already tied up and all she had to do was slip them on, Hematite would probably be long gone by the time she ran after her.

Instead, she closed the door. Hematite had said that it wasn’t something about her.

Moving back to the insulated room, wondering what it was that Hematite saw on the board that made her run off, Dyna started inspecting the foil around the door. She quickly found a small gash right around the knob where Hematite’s fingernail might have caught. It probably wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like the room was fully sealed. There was already a small gap around the frame of the door to allow it to open, around the window, and around the vent and light, and even some of the corners of the room were a bit sloppy.

Sighing, Dyna closed the door and then turned to the Ouija board.

Hematite had used her powers on—or at least near—it. That was probably what Dyna wanted from this little encounter. The question was, had it done anything.

Sitting cross-legged down in front of it, she decided there was no harm in trying.

“What did Hematite see?”

She reached forward to put her hands on the planchette, only for the planchette to slide on its own out from under her. With a slight scratching sound of felt against wood, it moved from letter to letter, spelling out a word.

Dyna, eyes wide, almost forgot to read the actual letters in her shock at it doing something.

Then, her eyes widened for a completely different reason.

She scrambled backward, fingers fumbling about in her pocket. She almost dropped her phone with how much shaking her hand was doing. Dyna swiped her finger across the screen, scrolling down her short contact list to the very last entry. Walter.

It rang once.

Dyna licked her lips.

It rang twice.

This was taking too long.

The third ring stopped as the line connected. Walter’s deep voice started to say something. Probably those silly passcodes.

Dyna didn’t even bother.

“I think Hematite is in trouble,” she said as fast as she could, eyes looking back to the board where the planchette now sat on the final letter of the answer to her question.

What had Hematite seen?

HER DEATH