Measure of Success

 

“So,” Dyna said, handing over a pen that hadn’t existed an hour ago. “What do you think?”

“You get me out of isolation just to show me this?” Ruby asked, looking distinctly unimpressed. “It isn’t even a nice pen.”

“I am sorry about that, Ruby,” Walter said, arms crossed over his vest. “Things have been… hectic.”

“Oh, I understand. You get a fancy new artificer and forget about me,” Ruby huffed, glaring through the shielded glass.

Mel sat on the other side, waving her hands through the fog emitted from the machine. Three volunteers stood around her, watching as she reached into the fog and pulled out a wooden alphabet block. Over the past three days, they had hammered out some of the oddities involved with her power and its interaction with the fog machine. Now, she was mostly able to create whatever she pictured. It wasn’t completely reliable, but they had to dedicate a small storage room to all the things she was creating.

“She isn’t an artificer,” Doctor Cross said without turning his head away from the terminal readout. “To be perfectly accurate, the object she is using is not an artifact.”

“My mirror wasn’t an artifact at the start, yet you all called me an artificer.”

“I did not,” Cross said, still not looking in her direction.

Dyna opened her mouth to argue, only to stop when she couldn’t actually come up with a time where he had. It had been months ago, so that wasn’t really surprising. She didn’t remember all the minute details of every conversation they had ever had.

Walter was staring at Mel as well. Ruby gave Dyna a slight shrug.

Someone had called her an artificer. She was pretty sure of that. Ruby at the very least.

But she supposed it didn’t really matter at the moment.

Mel was clearly having fun, creating all sorts of things. She had been told to avoid creating anything too complicated or that might potentially be dangerous. Nothing toxic, nothing explosive, no food either—though she had taken a sip of that created coffee without issue, they didn’t want to push their luck before more thorough testing could be conducted.

Dyna watched with mixed feelings. On one hand, she was happy that Mel was happy. If they did put Mel through even just some self-defense training to help keep her safe from people like Id, she would probably be one of the more normal artificers. Mel wasn’t… Dyna didn’t like to call her coworkers insane, but she couldn’t deny that they were odd. Mel wasn’t like that. Dyna didn’t think she herself was insane either. Maybe the gradual creation of an artifact helped—time to get acclimated rather than instantly bound to a powerful psionic object.

The artifact, nascent though Doctor Cross insisted it was, seemed to work well. That was cause for some celebration in Dyna’s eyes. An actual working device, no doubt about it. And one that Dyna had a hand in creating. Probably. If Mel could create artifacts on her own, she probably would have done so in the past, if only on accident.

On the other hand, it did sting a bit. Dyna had been planning on using that artifact for herself. An illusion power based on Mel’s natural ability. A knock-off perhaps, but still something potentially more useful than limited and conditional clairvoyance. Especially if it could be used at the same time as the clairvoyance mirror.

Yet now, here was Mel, using it to literally create matter while she laughed at the laws of thermodynamics. It probably wasn’t as gross a violation of the laws of physics as stopping time was, but…

Dyna traced the surface of the mirror in her pocket.

She had been charging up the voodoo doll and the Ouija board every night, but so far, she hadn’t even tried to test the former and the latter didn’t do anything either. If her theory that other psychics could help as catalysts was correct, bringing in a precognitive or clairvoyant for the Ouija board or a mind controller for the doll might jump start them into activity. At the same time, it might also lock her out of being able to do anything with them.

Shortly after her meeting with Doctor Cross and subsequent ‘unlocking’ of Mel’s ability, she had asked to try the fog machine herself. Both to create objects and to create illusions. Neither did anything. Not even while she had volunteers observing her.

Was she locked out? Had weeks of Mel working on it in Dyna’s absence attuned it to her roommate? Or did she just lack practice and time with it?

Dyna hadn’t pushed to be more involved with the experiments early on—Doctor Cross wanted the illusionist who created the objects working with it; as far as he was concerned, Dyna had merely been a coincidental observer to the initial incident—and now, it seemed like it was too late. Dyna could read the air in the room. It was all but official that Mel would be given the same opportunity that Dyna had received upon choosing her mirror. Hopefully with less scary men following her around.

All the more reason to keep her other projects to herself until she decided they were either complete or less-than-useful.

Handing the glasses over to Doctor Cross had been an attempt to get a clue. It had been somewhat a spur-of-the-moment decision, but at the same time, she had been meaning to talk to him about them for a while. Besides, she thought that maybe they could help Ruby out—Dyna didn’t really have a use for them in the short term, no sense keeping them locked up for herself. Perhaps Cross or one of the other engineers could devise a way to replicate them through pure science rather than esoteric powers, allowing mass production for the scientists.

Ruby, despite being here at her side, watching Mel test her augmented abilities, wasn’t completely free. Walter had assured them both that she wasn’t being punished, merely that they wanted to ensure she wasn’t in any danger going forward.

Though…

“Since Ruby is out, I don’t suppose she can be reassigned to me for the upcoming operation.”

“Operation?”

Walter looked over with pursed lips. His eyes were hidden behind his pince-nez glasses, but it was still obvious when he looked from Dyna to Ruby and back again. “No active duty for Ruby,” he said with a note of finality. “Preferably not until she is fully back to normal. If that proves impossible or unfeasible, we’ll reexamine the situation.”

“What operation?”

“They want me to talk to Tartarus again,” Dyna said.

Ruby’s excitement visibly dipped. She probably would have gotten upset if they were bombing Tartarus, but just talking? Aside from an annoyed click of her tongue, she didn’t say anything as she went back to watching Mel.

“It’s just,” Dyna started, pausing a moment as she wondered whether she should say anything about Hematite, then continued anyway, “I haven’t seen her in about four days. We ate some yogurt in town, then she asked if I would train with her the next day, but she never showed up. I don’t know if I offended her or…”

Walter hummed. “She was in my office earlier today. Nothing seemed amiss when I spoke with her.”

“My fault, probably,” Doctor Cross said, actually turning away from the terminal. “I requested artificer presence for… Oh. Probably unnecessary in light of recent developments.” He sounded like he forgot he was talking to the rest of the people in the room, mumbling to himself. After a moment, he looked back to his terminal. “Beatrice, cancel the experiment on Friday,” he said.

Walter stepped closer to Cross. “What did you say to Hematite?” he asked, tone slightly more aggressive than it had been a moment ago.

“Nothing. I simply requested artificer presence for an experiment. She took exception to that. I said her presence was unnecessary. She took exception to that as well and ran off.” Doctor Cross shook his head. “I do not understand that person.”

“There was more to it than that.” Walter’s question wasn’t much of a question.

“Hardly,” Cross said, utterly dismissive. “I’m sure Beatrice was watching the whole thing if you care to review my exact words. I no longer remember the exact details.”

Walter took a breath. “Later,” he said, frowning as he looked back to the test room.

Dyna, however, wasn’t quite ready to let the topic of Hematite drop. With Mel’s experiments producing results, she had somewhat forgotten to ask Walter about Hematite the other day. Not sure when she would get another chance, she spoke up. “What are her powers? Hematite, that is.”

Cross lifted an eyebrow, tilting his head to listen. Ruby was far less subtle with her curiosity, looking straight at Dyna before turning expectant eyes on Walter.

Walter, for his part, didn’t move a muscle for the longest time.

Eventually, he sighed. “I don’t know.”

“How do you not know?”

“Bullshit!”

“Preposterous,” Doctor Cross said.

Even one of the technicians in the room let out a hearty scoff. Which was probably a sign that they really shouldn’t be talking about her here. Especially if she was such a big secret that not even Walter knew about her. But Walter paid the others little mind, holding up a hand to try to stall the objections.

“To be clear: Hematite is a precognitive,” he said, confirming Dyna’s suspicion. She wouldn’t have known about the frozen yogurt in advance otherwise. That had to be her normal psychic ability. “It is quite limited, both infrequent and uncontrollable. Her mind automatically rearranges what she sees into what she will see later in the future. Most commonly in the form of text—she originally thought she had dyslexia.”

She must have been walking around Psychodynamics, saw a sign on the wall that she read as ‘Frozen Yogurt’ instead of whatever it actually said, and figured that was where she was heading? Dyna supposed that made sense.

“So her artifact turns her into a monster,” Ruby said, shrugging her shoulders. “Why say you don’t know?”

“Monster?” Walter looked down at Ruby, one eyebrow raised higher than the other.

“She attacked me. Lunged at me. With her bare hands. Only a monster could actually hurt me like that.”

“Wait,” Dyna said with a frown. “You didn’t actually see her as a monster?”

Ruby glared, crossing her arms. She didn’t answer, but her small pout was answer enough.

“You can’t just call people monsters if they aren’t actually monsters,” Dyna said. “You’ll give people the wrong impression.”

Ruby curled her lip into a sneer, only to lose it immediately as Dyna gave her a light swat on the forehead.

“You had me all worked up, walking on eggshells as I wondered just what her powers could be.” Dyna hesitated, then glanced up at Walter. “Actually… maybe I should still be nervous if you don’t even know what they are. How do you not know?”

Walter pursed his lips, appeared to think for a moment, then nodded. “Hematite’s artifact is classified. It produced no observable effects prior to binding aside from the standard psionic emissions all artifacts exhibit. Following binding, the artifact continued to produce no observable effects. Nor can it be activated in any way, according to Hematite. The only way we can tell that it bound at all is the resonance nullification.”

“Bullshit,” Ruby said, earning herself another admonishing swat for her language. She continued without even noticing. “I saw her walk through a bleeping firefight between Psi-Coprs and Maanasik…” Ruby paused and snorted. “Well, stumble and flail her way through in a complete panic. But I got hit thirty-seven times! She was in the line of fire four times as long and came away without a scratch!”

“Indeed. What we do know is that Hematite has an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. Good luck, you might call it. But we have yet to devise a proper test to quantify or measure the extent of that luck. The official documents simply suggest that the artifact acts as a passive enhancer to her precognitive abilities, though that is mostly speculation.”

“And then she attacked me!”

Walter frowned, staring down at Ruby. “India? The Xerxes incident? Why wasn’t this assault in your report at the time?”

“It was. Emerald helped me write it.”

“I will be reviewing the reports later,” Walter said. Looking up, he watched a moment as Mel pulled a rubber bouncing ball out of the fog. When it bounced off the glass right in front of his face, he looked away and added, “Have Miss Murdoch sent to my office following the conclusion of this test. I do not wish to have a repeat of Dyna’s experiences.”

With that said, Walter turned, offered a curt nod to the group, and left the observation room.

“No observable effects?” Doctor Cross hummed, mumbling to himself. He turned away from the observation chamber’s window to focus completely on his terminal.

Dyna watched from behind as he pulled up what she recognized as the database entries for artifacts. It was a bit more detailed than the version she had access to, she noted. She had to wonder how many artifacts were there that she couldn’t see at all.

“Only eight artifacts have no passive effects pre-bonding,” he hummed, adjusting his glasses by touching the corner with his middle fingers. “No observed effects. Predecessor was a durak. Probably failed to expose the artifact to the proper stimuli.”

“Doctor?”

Slightly louder, though without any other outward acknowledgment of Dyna’s presence, Cross continued to mumble to himself. “Artifacts react in a variety of ways. Some, like the Aztec calendar, simply have an always-on aura. Others need to be touched. The Photographer’s Plate requires specific wavelength of light to hit its surface… The Tuning Fork must be struck… Onyx’s glasses must be switched on…

“What stimuli would a bound artifact require?” Cross asked himself, dropping his tone again to the quieter version of his mumbling. “Not enough information. Classified. Don’t know its form or themes…”

Doctor Cross fell silent, hardly moving aside from the typing of his fingers. Dyna tried twice to get his attention, but it seemed like he had fallen into his own little world of thought. She shot a glance at Ruby, who just rolled her eyes, before shaking her own head.

“Doctor Cross isn’t home right now,” Ruby said, tone of voice sounding like a mockery of Beatrice. Her smile fell away as she looked up at Dyna. She opened her mouth, stopped, snapped it shut, then opened it again. “Do you want to…” Trailing off, Ruby adopted an angry scowl. Knowing her well enough, Dyna figured she was scowling at herself.

“We should… I’m going to—”

Dyna forced herself to keep from smiling. Ruby would absolutely hate that. But she had a feeling she knew what Ruby wanted. “Mel’s probably going to be in there for a while,” she said. “Then she has that meeting with Walter. Who knows how long that is going to take. I did want to talk with her, but…”

Ruby’s scowl turned to a glower as she shifted her gaze from Dyna to Mel.

“But there is probably time for a quick movie.”

The glower vanished. Ruby tried to stop her smile, but she wasn’t quite quick enough. “Ice cream.”

“You hate sweet stuff.”

“It isn’t that sweet,” she huffed, looking aside.

“Can we even get ice cream down here?”

“Emerald never uses her quarters, but I bet she has some stashed away. She won’t miss it.” Ruby grabbed hold of Dyna’s hand and started dragging her away.

Dyna didn’t bother protesting.