Author: Tower Curator

 

“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.

 

 

Doctor Phillip Cross stepped away from the terminal screen with a sad shake of his head. They were getting nowhere. The small fog-emitting machine demonstrated exactly one anomalous effect and it was nowhere near the level of proper artifacts. The only unusual property of the fog machine was that it didn’t need to be refilled or charged. It could run perpetually and indefinitely—or at least for seven days, the longest they had tried thus far—and would emit the same level of white clouds of fog, never diminishing or even thinning out.

According to their instruments, its psionic energy emissions were between one-tenth and one-fiftieth of a proper artifact. Higher than the average object, but barely worth noting. A random pencil taken from one of the Carroll Institute lecture halls would probably read the same.

And the girl…

Invariably, artifacts caused mental changes in those bound to them. The degree of the mental changes varied. Not everyone came out like Sapphire. But the girl Delta brought in showed no changes in electrochemical patterns. That could just mean that she wasn’t bound to the potential artifact…

But Phillip had a hypothesis that the potential artifact, despite its anomalous effects, was simply too weak to actually bind to anyone at all.

That didn’t mean he was disappointed. If anything, this vindicated him and his theories. If this did eventually become a proper artifact, it would prove that there could be in-between states. Periods where the ordinary item wasn’t so ordinary but not yet an artifact.

Phillip’s eyes flicked up through the shielded glass. The girl—Mel, he found on his terminal notes—was obviously frustrated and agitated. She had accomplished nothing during these tests. Despite having Dyna as a witness, she was starting to doubt her own claims of creating physical objects.

That was somewhat disappointing. Phillip would have liked to witness such an event with his own eyes. Perhaps later on, should it actually turn into an artifact proper.

But for that to happen, it needed a constant influx of psionic energy—at least according to Philip’s models. It wouldn’t get that outside this testing. And the administrators were stonewalling his request to release the object into the custody of either Mel—the hypothetical owner of the artifact—or Dyna—the literal owner. The administrators wanted it kept in Psychodynamics and under observation.

Until he could get it released, they had to keep psychics nearby. Preferably the two who were around it for the initial instantiation event.

“Continue the experiment,” Phillip said. He wasn’t quite sure who he was actually talking to. Whoever was the senior technician. There were five others, all performing various duties and monitoring for any problems. As long as one of them kept things going, he didn’t care who it was.

Command given, Phillip stepped outside the observation room.

He had other tasks. Other duties. Other experiments.

Not to mention reports to write and petitions to the administrators to finalize. Ever since Henry ran off, his workload had tripled. It was almost enough to have him put in a request with management for a new secretary or assistant. But not quite.

His demeanor was apparently so disagreeable that it drove someone to defection. Repeating that incident would reflect poorly on him. Worse than it already was.

A few months ago and he felt like the administrators would have released the fog machine upon his first request. Whatever status he had possessed had clearly tarnished.

“Beatrice,” Phillip called as he walked through the hallway toward his office. “Schedule a session in the Level 3 Test Laboratories for… one week from today. Purpose: High-level psionic infusion of PA-0083. Request the presence of all available artificers and Mel.”

“Understood,” Beatrice chimed, then immediately started talking again. “Schedule conflict with Doctor Teeth for use of L3 Laboratories. Next Friday is clear.”

“Very well.” With Beatrice, he wasn’t quite sure that he really needed a new secretary. There were some things she couldn’t do—namely anything physical—but plenty that she was more than happy to provide her assistance with. “Schedule my previous request for that Friday.”

“Schedule made. Notification requests to relevant personnel sending now.”

“Excell—”

A few chimes that didn’t come from Beatrice echoed down the hall from the direction of the upcoming intersection. Phillip flicked his eyes up to the mirrors set at hall intersections to prevent the collision of people moving equipment around blind corners.

He immediately grimaced at the monochrome figure checking her phone just around the corner.

Phillip turned on his heel, spotted the nearest door, and made toward it. He only managed two steps before a grating voice called out to him.

“Doctor!”

Phillip forced the grimace off his face as he turned to the girl with black and white striped stockings, black and white striped… arm-glove-sleeve things—he didn’t know what they were supposed to be—and matching makeup. She stepped right up to him while he just kept his back stiff and tried to avoid looking directly at her piercing white eyes.

“Hematite? Can I help you?”

“Sorry to bother you,” she said, sounding completely honest. Holding out her phone, she angled it for Phillip to see a message on the screen. The notification that Beatrice just made. “You sent this, right?”

“Is there a problem?”

“I just…” Hematite slumped her shoulders. “I can’t do anything. Whatever you want me for, I’ll just be dead weight, right?”

“It was a request,” Phillip said, extra emphasis the word. “I am not Walter. I don’t have the authority to order you people around. If you don’t want to, then don’t. In fact, please don’t.”

“No?” She winced as if he had shouted at her—which he most certainly had not—and then looked down at the message on her phone. “So it was a mistake?” she asked, eyes turning watery for some reason. “Of course it was. That makes sense. I can’t do anything.”

Phillip watched her as she turned and fled down the hall, running with her phone clutched to her chest.

No one in their right mind would suggest, even as a joke, that Phillip Cross was a ‘people person’. At the same time, he doubted anyone would blame him for his utter stupor in this moment. Did Hematite want to go or did she not want to go? He doubted the world’s greatest psychologists could explain the girl’s thought processes to him. Mostly because the Carroll Institute employed several of the best psychologists around and they had all given up on figuring out Hematite.

Phillip didn’t enjoy interacting with the artificers. They could be interesting case studies or useful for their interactions with artifacts, but every single one of them had personality flaws ranging from annoying to incomprehensible. Sapphire was the former. Harmless, but a step too strange for Phillip to deal with. Hematite was the opposite, impossible to comprehend and dangerous.

She was a precognitive, but a fairly weak one. She would be a threat to nobody were it not for her artifact. Despite his position as head of the Anomalous Materials Research Division—and thus artifacts—Phillip wasn’t sure what Hematite’s artifact was or what it did. He had been brought into the organization after Hematite had been settled in. Despite his best efforts, all her files had already been classified beyond his ability to access. All he knew was that her artifact did something and that something was enough to give her a flawless operational record. Not even Emerald had a perfect record of successful operations.

“Beatrice,” Phillip said, now that he was certain Hematite was gone. “Unless otherwise stated, please leave Hematite out of any future correspondences I may request.”

“Understood.”

Nodding, more to himself than anyone else, Phillip continued on his way back toward his office.

Arriving with no further interruptions, he took a seat at his desk and immediately began work on a fresh proposal draft for the administrators. He had no reason to believe that it would actually go through, but if nothing else, outlining the course of an experiment in detail helped him think. He could analyze and reiterate upon his ideas, refining them. Inevitably, the administrators would grant him authorization to pursue artifact creation through the medium of Onyx. When that happened, he wanted to be ready.

“Doctor Cross?”

Pulling his fingers away from the keyboard, he glanced up. First at the clock on the monitor—he had been typing for an hour at this point—then to his open door. Hadn’t he locked it? Phillip honestly couldn’t remember.

“Ah,” he said. “Delta.”

“Dyna.”

“Yes, yes. I’m a bit…” He trailed off.

Onyx stood in the doorway, looking like she wasn’t sure if she should come in or not. She was a bit of an odd one. All artificers were, but Onyx had this odd habit about projecting either confidence or insecurity—often flipping between the two at any change in the given external situation. At the moment, she was displaying more of the insecure side, standing with shoulders drawn together and a thick silver case held in both hands.

That case was what actually caught Phillip’s eye. He recognized it immediately, of course. One of the shielded cases to insulate psionic emissions. They were sometimes used to store sensitive equipment. Other times, they would hold unbound artifacts.

In Onyx’s hands, Phillip suspected the latter.

“I’m a bit busy,” Phillip said, restarting his sentence. “But I can spare a few moments.”

“Sorry. I was going to let you know that I wanted to talk later on, but then I sat around waiting for Hematite for twenty minutes and she never showed, so I figured why not come by now.”

Drama between the artificers? Phillip didn’t particularly care, so he didn’t ask. He gestured to one of the seats on the opposite side of his desk in an attempt to get her to talk about whatever she actually came here to talk about.

Luckily for him, she seemed to pick up on that. Rather than take a seat, however, she placed the silver case on his desk and turned it to face him. It had two simple latches with no locking mechanism. A low security case.

“We talked about this the other day—or week?—ago. Right after the fog machine incident. You probably don’t remember because it was a bit busy then and you were focused on all that stuff.”

“You’re right. I don’t recall.”

“It’s the other project I wanted to bring to you.”

“Potential artifact?”

“I… I don’t think so.” She pulled out a randi reader from her pocket and set it down next to the case. “It has anomalous properties, but barely hits fifty on this thing.”

Phillip picked up the cheap plastic device, made at one of the 3D printers down in engineering. They were supposedly early edition prototypes. More proof of concepts than anything else. Yet Phillip occasionally saw them around the institute in active use. “This is hardly a precise measuring device.”

“It’s close enough. I don’t need exact decimal points down to the thousandth place to tell that my mirror is an artifact and this isn’t.”

“Mhm…” Cross looked down to the case, partially itching to open it, partially wary of what he might find. He had extensive psionic resistance training, but some artifacts held properties that would completely bypass mental resistances. No matter how much he thought about it, the Gravity Stone physically nullified gravity in a small area around it. “Danger level?”

“Uh… None?”

That didn’t sound confident at all.

Standing, Phillip moved over to a closet in the room and withdrew a different prototype. A mask. One covered in hexagonal mirrored tiles. A psionic insulator based off the Tartarus design. It had a lower threshold than the standard suits, but it was also far easier to put on. Unfortunately, it required him to remove his regular glasses.

With it on, Phillip returned to his desk. “For the record, I knew nothing about this project prior to this moment. It was not sanctioned or endorsed in any way.”

Onyx rolled her eyes.

Phillip ignored her as he popped open the latches.

Inside was a set of safety glasses, tinted slightly blue with circuit board-like patterns etched near its edges. The sensors on Phillip’s mask registered a marginal increase in psionic energy now that it was out in the open, but Onyx had been right. It was nowhere near other artifacts. More testing might discover something else, but for now, he doubted this was anything more than the fog machine.

“I was trying to make a device that would let me see into the other side,” Onyx explained. “I don’t have an engineering degree, or anything else relevant, but I thought I could avoid that with my power. Just make something out of nothing that would do what I wanted it to do. I didn’t think it was working at all until November showed up and basically proved it. For all I know, it was working the very first night I tried and just couldn’t tell until November tried them on, but it represents about three weeks of thinking about it.

“What really made me want to bring it in is that… it worked for both of us. Artifacts only work for their owner, right? But she put this on and could see things. I put it on and could see things.”

“November is an anomaly,” Phillip said, carefully picking up the glasses. “Nothing that holds true for it is likely to apply to anyone else.”

“Yes. Maybe that’s true. Maybe not. That’s why I’m bringing them to you. I figure you’ll be able to figure out a whole lot more than I could. And maybe whatever you figure out will help me with some… uh… completely unrelated projects I’ve got going on.”

Phillip gave her a quick look. “Should we expect more incidents like that of the fog machine going forward?” he asked as he placed the glasses back in the case. There was a slight temptation to don them himself, but he wasn’t a psychic. Artifacts would never work for him. Some might be disappointed with that, but not Phillip. It took one look at the collective artificers to feel relief.

“I… took some precautions. Maybe though. Hopefully not.” Onyx paused. “Any progress with that, by the way?”

“Not at this time. You should have received a message regarding an upcoming experiment. Assuming the fog machine is like your mirror, a large influx of psionic energy brought about by multiple psychics may provide it the catalyst it needs to fully instantiate.”

“I did get that, yes,” Onyx said, nodding her head. “But is it necessary? Mel really did make a cup of coffee and it was only me with her at the time.”

“Nothing else has produced results. If you have ideas…”

Onyx frowned, pinching her chin. “There must be something we’re missing.”

Phillip tapped a few times on his terminal, pulling up the live feed from the ongoing experiment. He turned the screen to face Onyx, who leaned forward and stared.

“You don’t have her touching the machine or the smoke?”

“We’ve tried that.”

“She was miming with the smoke when it happened, playing with it and pretending it was real. I’m pretty sure that was in my report.”

“Yes, it was.” Phillip sighed. “Each experiment to replicate the incident varies slightly. Trying to change a single variable at a time so that we might eliminate that as a possibility.”

“Have you tried outside? You didn’t when I was trying to help with the experiment, but I don’t know what you’ve tried since.”

“The administrators would prefer if the object remain under the control of Psychodynamics.”

“Maybe just outside the shielded rooms? There is a lot more psionic energy outside, isn’t there? Maybe that…” Onyx trailed off, closing her eyes in clear thought.

“Something wrong?”

“I’m just trying to remember if other people were around. There probably were. Maybe observation would help?”

“There are always observers.”

“Inside the chamber? Exposed to Mel’s illusions?” Onyx waved a hand at the screen. “This doesn’t do anything at all. We can’t actually see what she is trying. Just me alone didn’t help, but maybe several people?” She nodded to herself twice before waving a hand at the blue-tinted glasses in the case. “Yes. Isn’t that how the other side is supposed to work too? People think which forms things over there. That’s why things don’t normally look all that different with the glasses on. Everyone has thought about the buildings enough that they’ve solidified over there. The trucks weren’t over there because not enough people had been thinking about them. What if the fog machine works in reverse? Using Mel’s powers to make people think that something is here enough to actually bring it here. I might not count because I made that fog machine. Or maybe because I was thinking her powers did something else…”

She stood abruptly. “Which room is that?” she asked, peering down at the screen. Before Phillip could answer, she noticed the text in the corner stating the camera feed name, nodded to herself, and rushed out of the room.

Phillip started to stop her—interrupting an ongoing experiment could invalidate all the results—but decided against it at the last moment. They could always repeat the experiment later. If Onyx thought she figured something out…

“Beatrice, ensure she has access to the test chamber.”

“Understood.”

Phillip, swinging the screen back around to his desk fully, sat down and picked up the glasses Onyx had left behind once again. Onyx appeared on the screen after a minute and, following a brief discussion with Mel, sat down on the edge of the table. Both started staring at the fog coming from the machine. Aside from the fog, nothing was visible. Mel’s abilities were mental illusions. With her shielded away as she was, no one could actually perceive them.

Perhaps Dyna had a point.

Unfortunately, nothing happened on screen immediately. Phillip found himself turning the glasses over in his hands. It wasn’t long before he found a small switch at the back of one of the ear pieces. Blue LED lights shined out from the earpieces, illuminating the lenses and, especially, the etchings. With the protective mask still in place, he couldn’t wear the glasses, but he could hold them up to peer through them.

Phillip just about dropped the glasses.

His room looked different through the cheap lenses. Not just blue as one might expect from blue-tinted glasses, but filled with rock and stone. Around the door and along a small path to his desk, it was mostly normal, but the walls looked unfinished. Like they were still part of the old mining tunnels that the Idaho National Laboratory had originally been built upon. The mining tunnels that later became Psychodynamics.

Onyx had tried to make a device that would let her see into the other side. From November, Onyx, and Ruby, they had some early guesses as to how the place worked. Onyx had just explained it. Thought. Psionic emissions colored in the other side like it was a painting.

Few people came into Phillip’s office. When he had to meet with someone, it was usually in a laboratory or meeting room. His office door and the path to the desk looked normal, but not the rest of the room.

Phillip’s mind quickly came up with a preliminary hypothesis. He was not psychic. His psionic emissions were near zero—not quite zero, but close enough to leave the canvas blank. Other people, people who walked past his door or entered his office, paid attention to their immediate path and the desk where he usually sat, thus moving brush strokes across the painting in those locations while leaving the walls and rest of the room mostly blank.

Sure enough, turning around, Phillip found the wall behind him looking normal when viewed through the glasses. At least, it was above the desk. Below the desk, it turned to rock once again. Where people couldn’t see.

Onyx had created something that worked.

Not just that, but something he, a psionic null, could use. And he could use it through the protective mask. That rather implied that the image he was viewing on the lenses was somehow real. Not a psionic phenomenon transmitted into his mind.

Anomalous, but acting on its own without any psychic input from him.

Not an artifact? Or, at least, a nascent artifact.

Before he could investigate further, two sharp announcement tones sounded through his office speakers. “Doctor Cross, report to Test Chamber 3 immediately.”

Flicking the switch on the back of the glasses to the off position, the rocky depiction of his office vanished, replaced by a simple blue tint through ordinary plastic lenses. Not only was it anomalous, but it could be turned off? He wanted to investigate more now. It was something he could investigate personally, rather than vicariously through test subjects. That alone was a novel.

But following that announcement from Beatrice, he glanced back at the camera feed on his terminal.

Mel looked drained and exhausted, yet had a wide smile as she held… something. Phillip couldn’t quite see what. The problem was Onyx. The girl was jumping up and down in front of the camera, waving her arms.

Something happened.

Onyx’s plan—whatever that had been—had worked?

Regretting not insisting on more details beforehand, Phillip placed the glasses into the case and sealed it, stood and calmly walked out of his office.

This time, he double checked the lock on the door, ensuring it was set.

 

 

 

Dyna took therapy. Doctor Bellows, a psychiatrist who formerly worked for NASA. A nice man, if a bit formal. Dyna had one session a week, barring certain events, mandated by the Carroll Institute. She was supposed to deal with self-esteem issues and paranoia.

Watching an old woman standing on the sidewalk across the street from her apartment, taking photographs of everything around, had her paranoia acting up. She looked like an old woman. She had a walker with tennis balls on the ends. Her camera looked like something from half a century ago.

And yet… a tourist taking photographs in Idaho Falls? Dyna could see it if they were near the river or out in the wilderness, but on her street near her apartment? It wasn’t even a particularly aesthetic place. Just a brick building that had been painted white for some awful reason. A fairly sad-looking tree sat out front and—

“You’re wandering around on your own again? It’s dangerous. People could jump out at us at any moment. It happens to me a lot. A whole lot.”

Dyna’s hand snapped to her holster. She had a gun half out before her brain caught up with what just happened.

“Sorry,” Hematite said, shirking in on herself. “Sorry… I didn’t mean…”

Dyna’s eyes snapped around. She had been walking from the bus stop to her apartment when she spotted that old woman with the camera. The same route she had taken every day that she came here. With Hematite stepping out of an alley just to her side, she was starting to reevaluate her choice in route. Maybe she had become a little too predictable.

Though that might have been her paranoia talking again.

“You don’t really need to follow me everywhere, do you?” Dyna said as she secured her firearm. Since meeting Hematite two days prior, the woman had been uncomfortably present. She wasn’t sleeping in Dyna’s bed or anything, but when she left her dorm in the mornings, Hematite’s black lipstick and dark eyeshadow was there to greet her. “How did you even know I was here? And how did you get here before me? I thought you said you had something to do down in Psychodynamics.”

“I’m being paid to guard you,” Hematite said, eying Dyna’s gun with a wary gaze. “Which is the answer to all of those questions.”

“The operation hasn’t even started yet,” Dyna said, trying to keep her tone pleasant. Hematite hadn’t actually done anything to warrant hostility; as she said, she was just following orders. But Dyna had been hoping to get some more time in her makeshift workshop, maybe to try infusing psionic energy into the voodoo doll or the wolf statue. Hematite popping up out of nowhere put a damper on that.

Having interacted with Hematite a bit more, Dyna wasn’t sure what to think of her. She certainly thought that Ruby’s warning had been a bit… Well, Ruby didn’t get along with any artificer aside from Emerald. It wasn’t surprising that she would exaggerate faults. Ruby had warned against staying away from mirrors, but every bathroom had a mirror and nothing bad had happened so far.

That said, there were plenty of odd things about her. Even more than her outdated aesthetics. She had too many contradictions about her. Hematite looked like someone with zero confidence in themselves, and acted that way as well, yet Walter believed she could stand in as an adequate bodyguard. A replacement for Ruby while Ruby underwent her wellness checks. Hematite didn’t carry any weapon on her, at least not as far as Dyna could tell. A re-scouring of the artifact database produced no results when Dyna had tried to figure out what her artifact was. Her personnel file was basically just one big redaction. Even her height, eye color, and other obvious traits were listed as unknown or redacted.

Then there were things like just now. Her popping out of a side alley despite having had no reason to be here or any real way to get here from where Dyna last saw her at Psychodynamics. At least not a way to get here before Dyna. Emerald could have walked from the institute to the city in an instant, so it wasn’t a complete impossibility, but it was suspicious.

And now, Dyna wasn’t sure what to do. It seemed like her plan for the day was shot and ruined. Unless she could convince Hematite to go away.

“You…” Dyna floundered. Just telling her to go away felt rude and Dyna didn’t want to alienate someone she would not only have to work with, but trust as a bodyguard. She glanced down the street and spotted a small eatery that she had visited a few times. “Frozen yogurt?”

A quick snack. A few words. Then maybe they could go their separate ways.

That sounded good.

Hematite didn’t look like she agreed. She shuddered—shivered?—but slowly nodded her head after a moment.

“If you would rather something else…”

“No. Yogurt is fine,” Hematite said. She opened her mouth, made a slight noise from the back of her throat, then cut herself off before the noise could form into an actual word. Clamping her mouth shut, she started walking toward the frozen yogurt shop.

Dyna cast her gaze upward, momentarily wondering if there were anything she could do to help Ruby get back to normal faster. Shaking her head, she followed after Hematite.

“So,” Dyna said, taking a seat with her cup of vanilla drizzled with mango syrup. “Hematite, do you—”

“I thought we agreed on no silly names?”

“Jane,” Dyna amended. It just felt like such a plain name for someone so full of oddities. “I was wondering if you might share your artifact’s abilities and your own psychic powers?”

“Why?” she asked, looking genuinely confused as she looked up from her entirely untouched cookies and cream yogurt covered in crumbled candy bars.

“Tactics, I suppose.” Dyna didn’t think she was anywhere on the level of Emerald or even Ruby, she had gone through some training. Some of that training included tactics and strategies. Her initial reason for going through all that training had mostly been for self-defense purposes. That was pretty much still true now, self defense was just being applied a whole lot more than she really cared for. “It’s good to know what we can do if the situation gets tense, right?”

“I suppose. What can you do?”

Dyna shrugged. She kind of expected Hematite to already know—her file actually had words in it that didn’t start with R and end with edacted—but she supposed someone of Hematite’s temperament probably wouldn’t have looked it up. “I have a mirror that lets me see through other people’s perspective under certain conditions.”

“A mirror?” Hematite perked up, speaking loudly for perhaps the first time ever. Or at least since Dyna had met her. “I have a mirror too,” she said, reaching into her pocket.

She produced a small pocket mirror. Not the same type as Dyna’s. Hematite’s mirror was black plastic and square rather than circular. A bit thicker as well. Judging from some smudges around the sides, it could easily contain a few internal compartments for makeup. Either that or Hematite was just sloppy.

“Better not open it now, though,” she said, actually sounding disappointed.

“Why not?”

“I… don’t like my reflection,” she said, simply.

Dyna had to raise an eyebrow. Hematite’s makeup was light yet precise. Especially that eyeliner. Her lipstick looked professionally done for a photoshoot. The blending on her cheeks was natural and yet… not at the same time. That took careful work.

Hematite probably spent several hours looking at her face in the mirror every day.

Changing her face. All that makeup. Dyna felt a twinge of guilt. Ruby had warned Dyna against looking into mirrors around Hematite. She had taken that as some kind of poor power interaction they might have. What if it had been concern over self-esteem issues?

No. No… Someone else and Dyna might have believed that. Ruby?

Still, Dyna decided to simply nod her head rather than risk aggravating body issues.

Hematite had fallen silent during Dyna’s brief thought, hardly moving except to play with the little mirror. She flipped it up on its corner, balanced on the table, turned it so the edge was down. Then up on the next corner, then down again.

“Is that your artifact?”

“I… guess so?”

That response had Dyna quirking her other eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Hematite said, ducking her head. “Not used to talking about these things. They like everyone to be all hush-hush, you know?”

“Ah… yeah.” Dyna felt that. “I’m probably not very good at that. I’ve probably said a whole lot more to a whole lot of people than I really should have. In fairness to me, I kind of got thrown into the deep end without any preparation or training.”

“Oh I know how that feels. Even today, half the time I don’t feel like I know what is going on. One situation after another pops up and I have to figure out how to fix it?” She slumped down into her chair so far that Dyna suspected her bones turned to jelly. “If they weren’t paying me, I would have disappeared so fast.”

“The pay is nice,” Dyna allowed. It wasn’t what she was here for. More a means to an end. Currently, that end was learning how her powers worked. Hopefully. “You still haven’t told me exactly what it is you do.”

“Whatever is needed.” She nodded her head, paused, then added, “Whatever gets me paid.”

“Protecting me, at the moment.”

“Yep!” Hematite said, taking her first spoonful of frozen yogurt.

She immediately cringed with a loud yelp, slamming a hand into the bridge of her nose where she rubbed and rubbed like it would help with what had to be sudden brain freeze.

Dyna watched her with a small frown. She was avoiding the actual question. And with such an overblown reaction to the frozen yogurt, she had to be trying to distract from the topic. If she didn’t want to talk about it, she could just say that she didn’t want to talk about it.

Deciding to just let it drop for the moment—maybe she could ask Beatrice for more information later on—Dyna finished her yogurt in relative silence. She had time to figure out how best to handle and work with Hematite. The operation wasn’t due to start for a few weeks and even then, she wasn’t actually involved in the direct beginnings of it. There were people to contact, organizations and subcommittees to be made, equipment to procure or manufacture, and more preparations besides.

This was to be a larger operation. Not the haphazard events that Dyna had previously been involved with.

In that respect, it was actually refreshing. Something she had forgotten to bring up with Administrator Theta during their meeting was her dissatisfaction with the level of support she had received during the Hatman incident. True, they hadn’t exactly planned on the Hatman being there or his abilities, but she had felt hung out to dry up until the mobile operations lab had rolled up.

Even if it was just Beatrice being allowed to offer her full support, the situation would have felt better.

But she had brought up Beatrice and that argument had been shutdown before it could even begin. The administrators didn’t like Beatrice, that much was clear, yet they still relied on her for analytical prowess alone. Dyna knew that most data crunching went through her, generally between two humans. Human scientists took measurements, tossed it to Beatrice, then back to the humans for review.

Dyna knew Beatrice could do more. And that was probably what the administrators were afraid of. She could take over their jobs while still running data processing and the before and after bits. On her own, Beatrice could probably replace most of the staff down in Psychodynamics.

Which was scary in a way. Not in the Skynet deciding to destroy humanity sort of way—which Dyna vehemently did not believe Beatrice would do just based on how Beatrice acted when she had been let off the hook and subsequent conversations—but in a sort of ‘humans were just redundant’ way. Dyna wasn’t sure that was actually a bad thing. Instead of being replaced, it seemed like it would just free up a lot of time spent on menial tasks for more advanced research.

But she wasn’t in charge here. Beatrice was locked down.

And, unfortunately, with Hematite’s files so heavily redacted, a locked-down Beatrice probably wouldn’t be able to provide any real information. Dyna switched her mental note from asking Beatrice to asking either Walter or Ruby.

Either way, she didn’t feel like forcefully prying Hematite open. Maybe going around behind her back was worse, but…

Dyna shook her head and changed her focus. “I’ve got an apartment nearby. I was planning on spending the night there. You alright getting back to the institute campus?”

Hematite opened her eyes, but not fully. She squinted over at Dyna while keeping her hand pressed to the bridge of her nose. “You aren’t coming back?”

“Do I need to? Nothing is happening for a while yet. I don’t even have meetings tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Hematite said, slumping. “After I came all this way too…”

Dyna exerted a bit of willpower to keep from narrowing her eyes. Something about Hematite just rubbed her the wrong way. All the evasion, the oddities, the warnings Ruby had given her… and now fishing for an invitation to stay the night?

“I would invite you over,” Dyna lied, “but the place is bare-bones right now. The only furniture I have is a single couch and no extra blankets or pillows.” She glanced down at her phone. “The last bus back to the institute doesn’t leave for twenty minutes. You have time to get back.”

Hematite froze, stilling completely for a full second before she slowly nodded her head. “Yeah. That’s right. I better get moving. It is a bit of a walk, isn’t it?”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude—”

“No, no. It’s alright.” She stood, leaving half her yogurt still in the cup, and put her arms above her head in a long stretch. “I better get moving,” she said again. “But do you mind stopping by the training center later on? Tomorrow around noonish, maybe?”

“Sure?”

“Great!” Hematite said, flashing a grin. “See you then!”

With that, she skipped off. She had to be around Dyna’s age. Maybe slightly older. But she somehow looked younger as she ran away. Maybe she was younger but just had grown up a little faster? And she was an artificer; even having only been one for a short time, Dyna had seen plenty of strange things.

Ruby was right. All the other artificers were strange.

Still, that had been easier than expected. When she suddenly appeared, Dyna feared she wouldn’t be left alone under the ‘protection’ pretense.

Cleaning up the yogurt cups, Dyna left the shop and continued toward her apartment. She didn’t want to be obvious about checking for people following her, but at the same time, she didn’t want a repeat of Hematite popping out of an alley. She pulled out her mirror…

But she didn’t open it.

Ruby’s warning still hung in the back of her mind. With all the oddities around Hematite and that refusal to answer the question of what her abilities were, something struck Dyna as off.

Instead, she pocketed the mirror again, finished the walk to her apartment, and then dialed Ruby’s number.

Ruby didn’t pick up on the first ring, third ring, or even the fifth ring. Dyna hit the voice mail and immediately hung up to try again.

This time, Ruby did pick up. “What do you want?” she asked, sounding distinctly displeased. More unhappy than normal.

“Is everything alright?”

“Fine,” she said through clenched teeth.

Closing her eyes ever so briefly, Dyna started moving about her apartment. She pulled out the purchases she had made the other day. “Just calling to see how you’re—”

“You’re working with Hematite,” Ruby said, tone a harsh accusation.

“Walter brought her in on an operation that I really couldn’t refuse, yes.”

The more she thought about it, the more the voodoo doll just made the most sense to try first. Conceptually speaking, it had a strong theme and preexisting ideas established about what such dolls could and couldn’t do. It wasn’t genuine, but neither was her pocket mirror.

“Ruby?” Dyna asked.

“What’s wrong with me? You don’t want to work with me anymore? First Emerald and now—”

“Stop that,” Dyna said. “First of all, you were there when Emerald got the Korea assignment. She asked for you. She didn’t want to be with Alex. I asked for you too, just the other day, but Walter said you were still… recovering.”

“I’m fine,” Ruby said again, this time more of a whiny grouse than an angry hiss. “It’s the stupid scientists. They just want to poke and prod me. I don’t know why they want me. November is the better test subject, isn’t she?”

Dyna sighed, moving on to the Ouija board. That was another good choice. Maybe she could ask it what Hematite’s powers were. “You’re a human who is experiencing strange things. She isn’t. That probably gives them different data to work with.”

“It’s stupid. They don’t even let me go down to the training room on my own, but they let November walk around like she owns the place?”

“Probably don’t want to offend the inhuman entity; they want her cooperation.”

“What about offending me?” Ruby snapped. “I had to threaten to stab someone just to get them to let me answer my phone. They’re probably calling security as we talk.”

“Have you talked to Walter?”

“Not for about two weeks. We were supposed to have a meeting about my status a week ago, but something ‘came up’ and he was ‘busy’. And I just put finger quotes around that.”

Dyna winced. That might have had something to do with her. If she hadn’t wound up getting the Theta’s operation going, Walter might have had more free time. “I’ll see if I can’t find him tomorrow. Remind him of your appointment,” Dyna said, setting aside a small art piece. It was several thin glass panes—all at perpendicular angles to one another—standing upright to look like a city skyline. Laser-etched circuit-board patterns covered all the panes. LED lights built into the base would illuminate each pane and the patterns in a variety of colors.

She wasn’t sure why she bought that one.

“How did you know I was working with Hematite in the first place?”

“She came to brag.”

“Brag?”

“‘Oh, look at me. I went and ate a spot of frozen yogurt with Onyx. Shame you couldn’t go, dearie.’ Stupid bitch.”

Dyna wasn’t quite sure why falsetto-Hematite had an English accent, but figured that was just Ruby being Ruby. More importantly… Dyna glanced at her phone. “Ruby, that was only ten minutes ago.”

“No. It was about an hour ago.”

“I mean… The bus… she couldn’t… Ruby, what are Hematite’s powers? Precognition?” Based on that little snippet, that was her best guess at the moment.

“Something like that… I think. I only worked with her once and she wouldn’t tell me. Just things worked out for her. Except when I used a mirror to look around a corner, I caught her reflection. She turned into a monster and attacked me.”

“A… monster?” Dyna asked. “Was that a Ruby-ism or literal?”

“Uh… yes.”

“Ruby…”

“I don’t know, okay? I caught a glimpse for a split second. Next thing I knew I was regrowing my face. Told Walter that if I ever had to work with her again, I would cut out her eyes and shove them up her ass.”

Dyna… didn’t have anything to say to that. She just slid the circuit city statute off to the side of her kitchen counter with a slowly deepening scowl. Precognition as a base-line psychic ability with some kind of artifact-based transformation involving mirrors? Did it work off any reflective surface or only mirrors? It had to be the latter or she would have probably flipped out just walking past glass storefronts. How did she handle public bathrooms or even stores—plenty of stores had mirrors on display for a whole variety of reasons.

“Are you sure she attacked you and not something else?”

“I know what I saw,” Ruby snapped despite having just said that she wasn’t sure what exactly happened.

Dyna just let out a sigh. “I think I have something else to talk to Walter about tomorrow.”

If Hematite really did have some kind of mirror transformation that made her susceptible to attacking allies, that seemed like absolutely vital need-to-know information. Doubly so for someone whose artifact was a mirror.

“Ugh,” Ruby said. “Got to go. Security guys are here.”

“You didn’t actually stab anyone. Your frustration is understandable. Don’t let them bully you.”

“Bully me?” Ruby snorted. “From the way they’re dressed up, I think they’re the ones expecting to get pommeled.” The distinct sound of cracking knuckles popped over the phone speaker. “Hope those are good helmets,” she said.

The line went dead before Dyna could try warning her against picking a fight with the security team.

Three ignored calls later and Dyna just sighed. Her thoughts slowly drifted away from what hopefully wasn’t a bloodbath and toward Hematite. From what Dyna had seen, gloating didn’t seem like Hematite’s style. Dyna trusted Ruby, but at the same time, was well aware of Ruby’s general temperament. What could have been a casual comment about yogurt might have sounded a whole lot more hurtful to Ruby’s ears. Especially with her prolonged isolation for testing and examination.

Two-faced or not, it sounded like Hematite was definitely stronger than she looked. Once again, Dyna had to shove aside disappointment in her mirror.

But that was just a temporary state.

Taking a deep breath, Dyna snatched the voodoo doll from the counter and headed for her shielded bedroom. She probably wouldn’t get it doing anything anomalous tonight, but she could certainly try.

 

 

Artifacts produced a wide variety of effects, but not too many of those effects were fully confirmed. Some were obvious. The Red Feather, said to be a feather from the mythological phoenix, caused spontaneous combustion to flammable objects in its immediate vicinity. Others were more subtle. The Writer’s Journal was a leatherbound notebook that, on its first page, had a small animated window looking into a small island that had yet to be located out in the real world. Aside from the animated window, no one had actually been able to get it to do something.

Some artifacts were too dangerous to experiment on. The Aztec calendar caused immense mental stress on everyone in a wide area. The Carroll Institute was not in the habit of murdering people, so the especially dangerous L-Level artifacts were mostly unstudied. The only way any of them had a description were because of events prior to containment or unintentional containment breaches, like that of the airport incident.

The passive effects of the items would generally disappear or become controllable once bound to an artificer. Although that wasn’t perfectly accurate. According to the database, less than ten of the four-hundred seventy-three artifacts had actually ever been used by an artificer. One of which was the Aztec calendar, used by Dyna herself, though no notes on its actual use had been documented. Probably because she had deliberately tried to avoid using it.

Of the remaining nine, seven were in active use by the current artificers. But not all of them had been used by the same person the entire time. Emerald’s pocket watch had a previous user, name redacted. According to the database, where the pocket watch stopped time for Emerald, the redacted user could cause a brief ‘rewind’ of time in a local area. It didn’t literally rewind time, but rather saved the states of everyone nearby constantly and, upon pressing its winding stem, would reset everyone to the saved state exactly 13.04 seconds prior.

So artifacts didn’t always work the same way for everyone who used them. Dyna felt that was an important clue. A little piece to the puzzle that might help her out in her own efforts to create artifacts.

While reading about effective superpowers was fun, Dyna found artifact history to be more in line with what she wanted to learn.

How an artifact came to exist in the first place.

A great many were unknown, of course. The Carroll Institute found and contained artifacts first and foremost, then studied their effects, then studied their background. But from the ones whose pasts were known, Dyna started to put together a pattern.

Most of the stronger artifacts, especially the L-Level artifacts, came from a known source. Not the same source, but the Hopkin’s Hat belonged to a man who spent his life hunting witches, executing them. The Architect’s Eyewear were glasses that belonged to the designer of the Knickerbocker Theatre, which collapsed killing a hundred people and injuring a hundred more; the architect later committed suicide. The Masquerade Mask came from a post in a Venice opera theater—nothing bad had happened there, but as part of the decoration, it had been around for hundreds of years.

All the most well known artifacts had been in positions to absorb psionic emissions. Regular, non-psychic humans emitted smaller quantities of psionic energy. It was well known that extreme emotions such as hate, fear, or joy, amplified the amount of energy. These items had absorbed psionic energy that was in tune with their themes. And that produced artifacts with related powers.

The Hopkins Hat had killed a few researchers—it was among the earlier artifacts discovered, before protective protocols had been drafted—always with asphyxiation or broken necks, usually leaving rope burns in the skin. The Architect’s Eyewear produced an aura of unease that caused everyone nearby to become irrationally paranoid about the structural stability of whatever building they were in. The Masquerade Mask instilled a sense of wonder in those who saw it, while also causing them to think that most events around them were simply ‘part of the show’, whatever that meant.

In the hands of an unnamed artificer, the Architect’s Eyewear gave them the ability to spot structural weaknesses in any man-made object. They could then exploit those weaknesses with frightening ease, destroying objects with little more than a slight nudge.

Dyna was a psychic. She might have had her doubts upon first arriving at the Carroll Institute, but most of those doubts had simply morphed into vague feelings of inadequacy. But as a psychic, she could output psionic energy several orders of magnitude greater than regular humans. Which was probably how she had crafted the mirror and the other partial artifacts that she had made.

There had to be something more to it, however, or the Carroll Institute would be flooded with artifacts produced by the mass of psychics around the place. She wasn’t quite sure what that something was, but had an inkling that it was her. Dyna.

She obviously hadn’t been present at those other artifact locations when they became artifacts. But she also wasn’t sure that proximity was needed. And if there were others out there who could accomplish similar things, even if proximity was needed, some other person could have filled in for her spot. There were a dozen clairvoyants and a dozen illusionists. Why not a dozen artifact inceptors as well?

Reading through the database confirmed to her that she was on the correct path. Especially if she could bring other people in on the experiments. With her pouring psionic energy into an object and another psychic to act as a catalyst, creating artifacts at will could probably be done quickly and easily once she had the practice.

And hopefully these artifacts wouldn’t be violently dangerous; she wasn’t torturing people or collapsing buildings on them, after all.

In fact, the L-Level artifacts were the smallest of the bunch, representing a tiny percentage. Still, some additional protections would probably not go to waste. Doctor Cross would probably be able to help with that, already aware of what she was doing as he was.

Dyna lowered her phone as the door to the Psychodynamics meeting room slid open. Walter, dressed as always in a black vest and red tie, stepped into the room. The large wood-and-brass table reflected in his sunglasses as he turned his head from one side to the other. Apparently satisfied, he fully committed to walking to the head of the table. “Have you been waiting long?”

“A few minutes,” Dyna said. “I was just reading on my phone while waiting.”

Walter hummed an acknowledgment as he leaned down to the terminal built into the table and started signing into the system. “I have made my displeasure about this operation known to Administrator Theta. I do not think it wise to involve you further with Id and the company she keeps no matter how much an expert in entities would benefit us.” He paused, and Dyna saw herself in his mirrored glasses. “I have been overruled.”

“That’s… not very reassuring.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. I would prefer if you remain wary of them and take everything they say—especially Id—with suspicion and disbelief. We don’t know their goals or motivations. As you pointed out to the administrator, we don’t know how happy they are with you given the outcome of the Hatman incident. They may have decided to forgo recruiting you entirely, making this contact not only dangerous, but also a waste of time.

“Even if they still have designs to bring you over to their group, they will certainly use any contact you initiate to their advantage. And likely to the Carroll Institute’s detriment. I would not be surprised to find them initiating another scheme to get their hands on an artifact.”

Having read through the list, Dyna was fairly certain that there were a whole handful of artifacts that would probably be harmless. At least on their own. But they would give Tartarus something to study and, if Tartarus decided to recruit a different artifact inceptor, then they might be able to create their own as Dyna was trying to do. After her experience with Maple and Ado during the Hatman incident, she didn’t believe that they were some chaotically evil organization bent on conquering the world. But their morals, especially those of Id who had casually invaded her mind, left something to be desired. Letting them run rampant with artifacts probably wouldn’t end well.

Of course, letting them run rampant with entities probably wouldn’t go over so well either. It was not lost on Dyna that Ado had thought it possible and likely even simple to devise a machine that would be able to pull Ruby—or other Hatman victims—back from the other phase of the world. That meant that she could probably flip a switch to make a machine that would send people over there.

At the moment, the Carroll Institute—or at least Dyna—only knew of two actual entities. The Hatman and November. Both were the subject of ongoing study. If Tartarus really had been investigating entities for as long as Doctor Darq had implied, they probably had a lot more examples to draw from.

That could be how Grafton’s cranial implants had been designed.

Keeping that in mind, Dyna could easily see why Administrator Theta wanted to poach Darq. Catching up while starting from scratch would be difficult.

“So don’t let them have artifacts,” Dyna said, nodding along with Walter’s explanation. “And probably keep them away from November and the Hatman. They’re surely going to want something in exchange for information. Unless you want me to actually join up with them—”

“No. Avoid Id as much as possible. For this operation, we are primarily interested in Id’s personnel. Darq especially.”

The screen in front of Dyna lit up as Walter hit a button on his side of the terminal. A list of objectives appeared in glowing green-on-black text. Dyna started to read, only for Walter to recite the list out loud.

“Our goals are to ascertain One: History. How Darq and the other members of Tartarus started working on psionics in the first place, how they encountered Id, how they started working for her, etcetera. Two: Personality profile. We’ve already started building this based on psychic input and your interactions during the Hatman incident. More data is always needed. Again, especially on Darq.”

“I really didn’t engage much with him.”

“Which is why we’re hoping to draw him out with this operation. Three: Goals and motivations. The administrators want to recruit as many of Tartarus’ personnel as possible, both to gain their knowledge and skills as well as to deny Id that knowledge and skill. Knowing why they joined up with Tartarus might be the key.”

“Makes sense.”

“Finally,” Walter said, nodding his head. “We want to find out if there are any other personnel working for Id. And, as a slight addendum to this objective, whether or not Id is the actual leader of Tartarus or merely the one we’ve interfaced with. There could be a whole board of managers much like our administrators that keeps themselves quiet.”

Dyna opened her mouth, but paused. That didn’t quite feel right. Dyna wasn’t sure why—she didn’t have any hard evidence or even strong anecdotes from Maple or Ado to confirm it—but Id felt like their leader.

Then again, based on how the administrators acted, Walter could definitely be correct. Id could even be the same as Walter. In terms of organizational lattices, anyway.

“So… I just call them up and ask?” Dyna asked after a few moments of silence. Presumably Walter letting the objectives sink in. She expected a bit more grandiose of a plan, but the question seemed a good way to move the conversation forward.

As expected, Walter chuckled. “Not quite. Before we get into the actual details, I would like to introduce someone.” He pressed down on a button on the terminal.

The doors to the meeting room slid open. A woman stood in the opening, looking unsure of herself as she flicked her eyes left and then right. A swath of brown hair partially obscured one of those eyes, hanging down over her face before sweeping to the right. She held her hands up to her chest as if she were freezing and trying to warm herself up.

Dyna had never found Psychodynamics at an uncomfortable temperature. As far as she could tell, no one else did either. A thin sweater might help if one was sitting too close to the air vents, but even then, Psychodynamics maintained a pleasant temperature.

If she was cold, she really could have worn a bit more. She wore a black shirt with no sleeves that didn’t quite cover her stomach. Underneath, she had a fishnet-style mesh that did cover her stomach, arms, and legs under her relatively short skirt. A jacket might have helped.

“Is this really necessary?” she asked, voice timid. “Isn’t she one of the actually good artificers? I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do…”

“Don’t sell yourself short. This is Onyx,” Walter said, gesturing toward Dyna. “Onyx, meet Hematite.”

Dyna stiffened at the name, only to quirk an eyebrow as Hematite visibly cringed.

“Just… Jane. Jane is fine. I told you I…” She took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. Thick boots with several buckles up the sides clomped across the floor to the nearest seat. She pulled it out, sat down, and promptly hunched in on herself.

Mousy.

Dyna had never before described someone as mousy. She had seen the description in books and other fiction before, but never thought she would apply it to someone in real life. Especially not someone with her fashion choices. Goth, was it? Not a popular fashion these days. In fact, Dyna wasn’t sure she would know the word if not for her vast library of old movies.

“Hematite is to act as your guard for the duration of this mission.”

“Not Ruby?” Dyna asked, before quickly looking across the table. “Not that I have anything against you. I’m sure you’re capable,” she said, not wanting to offend the woman who Ruby had warned her to be wary of.

Only for the dreaded Hematite to duck her head and mumble. “No. It’s okay. I wouldn’t want me either. You’ll probably get shot or kidnapped or stabbed or…” She trailed off with another sigh. “Why did I agree to this again?” With an abrupt movement, she slapped both of her cheeks. “Money, Jane,” she said with a far more aggressive husk to her voice. “Loads of money.”

What was it Ruby had said? All artificers were absolutely insane? Dyna still didn’t believe that was completely true. Emerald was fine. But Sapphire, Alexandrite, and now Hematite? She could easily see how Ruby arrived at that conclusion.

“Ruby,” Walter said, seemingly ignoring Hematite’s actions, “is still on mandatory leave while she undergoes testing. We want to be sure we, and she, know what happened to her, what effects her experiences will have on her, and how well she can handle it before putting her on anything resembling active duty.”

Ruby was mostly fine, as far as Dyna could tell. Restless—Ruby hadn’t been allowed outside Psychodynamics in weeks—but fine. She didn’t even jump at shadows as much as she had the first few days… much.

Maybe Walter was right. November was apparently working with her. Something about them both being half-over let them… do things.

Dyna wasn’t sure what. She had been distracting herself with artifact research, not entity research.

Looking away from Walter, Dyna stared at Hematite…

Who promptly flinched under the brief look.

Dyna tried to come up with something positive about the situation. Whatever tension and unease she had felt from hearing Hematite’s name was quickly draining away now that she was confronted with the actual person. As it was, Dyna felt she would be the one playing bodyguard to Hematite if the situation grew too intense. The most positive thing Dyna could think of wasn’t even related to Hematite. Which was that Dyna wouldn’t have to worry about being shot; Id wanted to recruit her, not kill her.

Hopefully.

Unless she really had made them upset with the kidnapping of the entities and the theft of their equipment.

What even was Hematite’s artifact again? Maybe that would make up for her… uncertain demeanor. Thinking back to the list of artifacts, Dyna’s mind was coming up blank. She had been paying the most attention to the history and discovery of the artifacts, not their users or even powers. Users was normally just a footnote with references to other documents anyway. A small bit of text easily glossed over.

“Hematite will perform adequately. I have no doubts about that,” Walter said. He pressed a few buttons on his terminal again, resulting in the display changing. “Now, operational details. This will be a bit more complicated than what you’re used to, Hematite.”

“Oh no.”

“And Onyx, this is your first real operation.”

“If she is just Jane, could I just be Dyna?”

Walter sighed. “These measures are in place for a reason.”

“It’s just us here.” Dyna paused and glanced up at the corner of the room. “And Beatrice,” she said before looking back to Hematite. “You trust her, right?”

“Very well. Jane and Dyna, pay attention. We’re going to start off with an act of deception…”

 

 

 

Following her arrival back on campus, Dyna realized that she had no idea where to go. A quick call to Beatrice resolved that problem.

She had figured that she would be directed down into the deepest darkest depths of Psychodynamics, deeper even than the Vault, perhaps. However, instead of taking the elevator in the administration building down underground and into Psychodynamics, the elevator went up.

The administration building had the appearance of a modern skyscraper—though stunted with only six floors plus the arboretum dome on top. The elevator didn’t even go all the way to the highest of the regular floors before stopping. Dyna stepped out onto the fourth floor and, following Beatrice’s directions, headed from the large open area where the elevator dropped her off toward a short hallway.

There were two offices in the hallway. One on either side. Dyna could see clearly into both of them; their walls were solid panes of glass. Even the doors were glass. A lot less privacy than she had been expecting from the mysterious administrators, but she supposed not many people came up to this floor.

In fact, there was someone else here. At the end of the short hall, near the doors to both offices, was a fairly extravagant desk. Matching the doors and walls, it was made from glass. Frosted portions provided tasteful decoration to keep it from being just a solid sheet. At the terminal behind it, a shorter man typed away. A glass plaque with frosted lettering identified him as Justin Joesph IV — Administrative Secretary.

As Dyna approached, he stopped typing on the keyboard. He looked up, clasped his hands together, and smiled.

“You must be Miss Onyx.”

“That’s…” Dyna sighed. She still felt like the whole alias thing was a bit silly. Even if it kept her name of records that she would probably prefer it far away from, everyone knew who she was. It wasn’t fooling anyone. That said, she nodded her head. “Yeah. I guess I have a meeting with Mister Theta?”

“The office to your left,” he said, pointing to his right with one hand while pressing a button merged with the surface of his desk with the other. The door of the indicated office let out a small hiss and slid aside. “Administrator Theta will be with you shortly.”

“Alright. Thanks,” Dyna said, stepping toward the room.

The door hissed shut behind her.

The office was large and open, but still had a vague division into three parts. The first, furthest from the door, was a long black-marble desk. A small terminal occupied the far end of it, leaving the rest smooth and blank. A matching black marble wall stretched just slightly longer than the desk—reaching from the window to about the halfway point of the rest of the room. Thin bars of brass were set into it at varying angles and the entire center had been carved inward to form a bookshelf, upon which a great variety of books looked like they had been arranged more for decoration than actual reading.

Where the bookshelf’s black marble ended, a new section of the room began. A meeting room of sorts. There was a long wooden desk surrounded by black leather chairs. One wall, made from wood, clearly had either a television or a projector screen recessed into the ceiling. Other than that, it was a fairly simple area, leaving little to distract from any meetings that might be held. The wall between could be extended to fully partition off the meeting room from the rest of the office.

Front and center, a respectful distance from the desk and meeting area, was something for more casual encounters. Two long couches and one small chair, all set around a low table. There was a potted plant that might have been fake in one corner and a few abstract statues on the table that might have come from that hobbyist shop.

A quick glance around for a familiar feature found nothing. There were none of Beatrice’s five-lens cameras anywhere in the room. Looking out the window, she didn’t see any in the hall or in the similarly-decorated-yet-subtly-different office across the way. Beatrice was apparently not allowed in here.

Dyna wasn’t sure where she should sit. There were too many options. The lounge-like area would have been her first choice, but maybe this wasn’t so casual a meeting. The chairs across the desk or around the meeting table could be more appropriate. The secretary had given her no indication and, looking through the large windows back to the hall, he wasn’t paying her any mind. With the way the terminal was off-center, he had his chair angled away from her in order to…

He was playing a video game.

Still, Dyna didn’t think she could be comfortable in an office like this. Working or visiting. It was… too awkward. At any moment, that secretary could turn around and see her standing around.

Best to find something to do.

The books behind the desk seemed like something she could at least pretend to look at while she waited. In truth, she was a bit nervous. Beyond nervous, even. While she approached the shelves, she didn’t even look at a single spine.

The whole bus ride back, she had been psyching herself out, realizing that she was psyching herself out, trying to calm down, and back to the start. It wasn’t her fault. The way everyone talked about them, from Beatrice to Ruby, made them sound like they were some omniscient council lurking in the shadows while keeping the Carroll Institute dancing to their puppet strings. Dyna knew that was ridiculous; people in real life didn’t act like cartoon villains. Mostly. The jury was still deliberating on Id.

Seeing his office actually put her at ease. At least somewhat. It was… normal. A bit fancy, yes, but for the office of an important person, she felt it was probably average at best. There were certainly some CEOs out there with far, far more opulent offices. And the window for a wall gave it an air of transparency. Like there wasn’t anything to hide.

Dyna doubted that there was nothing to hide. That was just what the design choices made it feel like.

A hiss of the door behind Dyna made her jump a foot into the air. She turned around to find… not what she expected to find.

From his deep voice, Dyna had expected someone more like Walter. Large, barrel-chested maybe, with muscles to fill out whatever clothes he wore.

Instead, Ichabod Crane stood in front of her. A scrawny man with tailored clothes that couldn’t hide how little muscle he had on his body. His nose, large and pointed, still looked small when compared to his ears. His ears would put those of a flying elephant to shame.

The door slid shut behind him as he stepped into the room, carrying a thin attaché case in one hand and a whole bundle of folders under his other arm. He stopped and smiled a kind smile when he noticed Dyna standing behind his desk.

“Ah, Miss Onyx. May I call you Dyna? Or would you prefer Miss Graves?” he said, voice unfitting in how deep it was, yet still familiar from the brief phone call.

“Yes please,” Dyna said. “I mean, the middle one, if that’s alright. Just Dyna.”

“Oh? I would have thought your preferences would align with a codename.”

Dyna gave a half-hearted shrug. It was a bit… cringe-worthy? Ruby and Emerald sounded fine. Like it was just their regular names. Dyna didn’t even know their real names—though Ruby insisted she didn’t have one. Alexanderite, when shortened to Alex, was fine as well. Sapphire was a bit strange, but… well…

No one would confuse Sapphire with anyone normal.

In comparison, Onyx wasn’t really a name people walked around with regularly.

Codenames were probably fine, but only when they didn’t sound awkward to use.

The administrator took her shrug for a full response. “Then, Dyna, if you would like to take a seat,” he said. With his arms full, he could only nod toward the lounge chairs toward the middle of the office. “I’ll be with you in just a moment.”

Dyna popped out from behind his desk immediately, hoping he didn’t think she had been snooping, and quickly—without looking like she was rushing—headed over to the seat around the low table.

“I apologize for my tardiness,” he said, taking her place behind his desk. Setting the case on top, he opened a drawer and started unloading the supply of folders from under his arm. “There were some changes recently. Very recently. Caused a bit of alarm among a few of my coworkers. I had to calm them down and set matters in order before coming here.”

“It’s no problem. I just arrived.” Though if she had known that he wasn’t ready for her, she would have stopped at the dorm first. She was still carrying her purchases around.

Hopefully he wouldn’t ask.

“Ah. Good. Good,” he said, sounding somewhat distracted as he read the front of one of the file folders. Rather than place that one in the drawer, he slid it over toward the terminal at the end of his desk. Work for later, Dyna assumed. “In truth, I’ve been wanting to meet with you for some time,” he said as he filed away the final folder. Looking up, the corners of his eyes wrinkled as he smiled. “Just haven’t had a good excuse until now.”

“You need an excuse to talk to people? Aren’t you supposed to be one of the top bosses around here?”

“That doesn’t mean I can simply ignore rules and protocols. I helped design most of them and, because of that, I know well the reasons they are in place.” He gave a wan smile as he stepped away from the desk and took a seat on the longer couch. With it being fairly low to the ground, his lanky body looked a few sizes too large.

“Make no mistake,” he continued, “the Carroll Institute has its enemies. With the rise of psychics, it pays to be more than careful. Wouldn’t want those of us running the place suddenly working against it. Anonymity, restricted meetings, extra training in the hardening of the mind, regular examinations and screenings to ensure everyone is still themselves… It’s tiresome, bothersome, time-consuming, and generally annoying, but helps to keep everyone safe.” Leaning in, he dropped his voice to a false conspiratorial whisper that took no effort to hear. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get a date when you’re obligated to perform full background checks and get their mind scanned to ensure they aren’t spies or otherwise compromised.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a turn-off,” Dyna said, not sure what else to say. Better to try to get the topic back on track. “So what changed today? I mean, I’ve been making off-hand comments about meeting with you guys for… months now. Most of those comments were less serious intentions to try to meet and more complaining about whatever was bothering me at the moment that I felt I could blame on other people, including today, so it just seems odd that Beatrice would choose this time to reach out to you on my behalf.”

“There was an… ah… incident that required me to ascertain the location and current actions of several of our operatives, you included. Beatrice was already on call with you, providing a convenient method of immediate contact.”

“Incident?”

“Well, I can’t say too much. A few of us had a bit of an abrupt change in scenery,” he said with a laugh as if sharing a joke that Dyna wasn’t a part of. “It is under investigation, but seems to be resolved for the moment. Don’t worry about it.”

That wasn’t something Dyna was sure she could do. What happened that would require them to contact her? Had someone been snooping around the computers again and, knowing she had done so in the past with Ruby, wanted to make sure it wasn’t Dyna? Had something happened to one of the other artificers? Was someone after her—or the others—again?

Her frown must have conveyed her thoughts. He held up a thin finger and shook his head. “It is resolved. Nothing to worry over. Nothing bad happened to anyone. Rather, I was hoping we could discuss a small matter of some actual importance.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I…” He trailed off, looking to his sides. Not finding whatever he was looking for, he glanced down at the floor then leaned forward until he was looking underneath the couch. He sat back with a frustrated frown, only to snap his long fingers. “Ah.”

Standing, Administrator Theta crossed the room, picked up the attaché case from his desk, then walked back. Setting it down on the low table, he flicked open the two latches and opened the top.

The first item he pulled out was a small pill-like bit of black plastic. He set it down on the table. “This,” he said, “is a tracking device.”

Dyna didn’t bother to hide her scowl. “You want me to swallow that?”

“First, no,” he said, laughing. “That’s wacky nonsense. It would just pass through your system. We want you to carry it with you until you agree to a minor surgical incision to allow for a subdermal tracking device.”

“Excuse me?”

“It isn’t anything nefarious. You recall what happened to Ruby recently? Disappearing from our reality and popping into another? You found her because a tracking device worked. We would hate for something similar to happen to you and have no way of locating you to bring you back.”

“That…” Dyna kept up her scowl, but she had to force it a bit. They could already track her phone, she was absolutely certain of that. Maybe they would have to let Beatrice off her leash a bit, but they could do it. Carrying around an extra device seemed unnecessary.

Yet it did make some small amount of sense. What had Walter said back then? Two methods of tracking Ruby had failed but a third had succeeded? If this, or the subdermal implant, was the same as that third tracking device… it probably wasn’t a terrible idea.

Maybe it didn’t sit right with her because of her apartment and the somewhat subversive experiments she planned on doing there outside the institute’s direct oversight. At least they were telling her about it. She glanced over to the transparent glass looking out into the hall, wondering if she was reading a bit too much into the open and nothing-to-hide image it presented. Some of the tests that she somewhat regularly underwent required anesthesia. They could easily have slipped in a tracking device without her knowing during one of those sessions.

They were not only telling her, but asking for her permission. And apparently giving her time to think about it with the pill-like tracker.

“I could… probably do that,” she said.

“Nothing to worry about. I have one, as do the other administrators. Walter, Doctor Cross, all the other artificers. It is a fairly standard bit of equipment for everyone’s safety.”

“I see,” Dyna said, picking up the tracker. She wasn’t quite sure where to put it. Maybe her wallet?

“Good. Next up,” Theta started as he pulled out a photograph.

Someone Dyna recognized.

“This man, Phineas Darq. Spelled with a q. We want to know more about him.”

Dyna slowly shook her head. “Everything I know already went into my report.”

“Yes. We would like you to find out more, if possible. You have means of contacting Tartarus.”

“Maple gave me his phone number,” she said with a mild grimace. “Assuming he hasn’t ditched the phone.”

“Great. Use that. I, personally, would prefer if you avoided physically meeting with any of them—”

“So would I,” Dyna mumbled.

“But Tartarus represents an extreme unknown. More so than other psionic research initiatives.”

“Because of entities?”

Theta nodded his head. “You, at the moment, are our only real ‘in’ with them. The method through which Doctor Darq sent his research on the Hatman has been dormant and unresponsive since the event. We already know Id is interested in you and would like to use that.”

“I’m not sure how appreciative they will be to get a call from me. I don’t think we parted on the best of terms. I kind of stole… uh… everything they had. The Hatman. November. That model heart—which nobody has gotten back to me about yet. One of their masks. And a disruptor. They walked away from that with nothing more than some broken equipment.”

“Then this operation will also serve to gauge their continued interest in you and whether or not they represent a future problem for you and the institute as a whole.”

Dyna folded her arms across her chest, leaning back in the seat. This, somehow, was even less appealing than carrying around a tracking device. It was not lost on her that they wanted her to have a tracking device before trying to contact Tartarus either. Did they expect her to get kidnapped? Nothing bad had happened last time, true, but there had been extenuating circumstances with the Hatman on the loose.

Then again, more hazard pay would be nice. Now that she had an apartment, getting a car was a slightly higher priority so that she could move between the institute and Idaho Falls at will rather than on the bus schedule.

And maybe… she could get some other concessions out of this.

“I want access to the artifact database,” Dyna said, nodding her head. It was what she had wanted earlier and that hadn’t changed. Doctor Cross had said that the administrators blocked his attempts at additional artifact creation experiments. She considered asking for that, but if denied, that might tip her hand a little too far and too early.

Dyna did not want to find herself under even more scrutiny while trying to create artifacts. Not if the administrators thought they had a good reason for stopping it. Unless she found out that reason and was able to argue against it, Dyna would try to keep her plans to herself.

Theta, for his part, hummed a bit in his deep voice. “What do you plan to do with the database?”

“Browse it?” Dyna said with a shrug. Realizing that that probably wasn’t a good enough reason, she quickly continued. “I mean, I didn’t exactly have a proper artifact selection process. Can’t I swap the mirror with something else?”

“Swapping is a question for Doctor Cross and Walter.” Tilting his head to one side, he asked, “Does the mirror displease you?”

“It’s… Yes. Yes it does. Half the regular clairvoyants here probably are better suited to do what I do with it. They would do it better, even, since they don’t have to carry around a physical object.”

“I see. As I said, you would have to talk with the specialists to know more. But…” He nodded his head twice. “Yes, I should be able to grant you limited database access.”

“Good,” Dyna said, trying not to smile too much. “Then I can try contact… Wait, one more thing.”

“Oh?”

“Beatrice.”

“Beatrice? What about it?”

“I want the ability to raise her… I don’t know what it is called, exactly. Operating level? Permissions? Her ability—”

“That,” Theta said immediately and without hesitation, “is something I will not be agreeing to.”

“But… why? She could be doing so much more.”

“Yes. That is exactly why.” Theta closed his case, locking the two latches again. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to let that one drop.” He stood up. “I’ll see to getting you access to the database as soon as possible. As for the information gathering mission, I will have a meeting with Walter later this week to determine the exact details and parameters of the operation. He will meet with you sometime after. Does that sound good?”

Dyna let out a sigh. She could probably say no. Contacting Tartarus was probably on the very bottom of things she wanted to do. But that would probably see her with no access to the artifact database. And that, she wanted. One out of two would have to be good enough.

“Alright. Just tell me when and where.”

 

 

Dyna wiped a bit of sweat from her brow as she stepped back into the small hallway.

The apartment was coming along nicely. Dyna had gone out and found a cheap place to rent. It had a single bedroom, a single bathroom, and a tiny kitchen, dining room, and living room that were all basically the same room. It had come with a fridge and stove, but no other furniture. Just a bunch of empty faux-hardwood floor.

That suited Dyna just fine. She didn’t intend to live here. Maybe she could get a cheap couch to crash on just in case she stayed late in town and didn’t have a way to get back to the institute. A stool to eat over the counter might be nice as well, though the only food she had on hand were slow-perishing snack-type foods that didn’t take much preparation.

Dyna was here for the bedroom and the bedroom alone.

She looked over her hard work. Matte-silver foil covered the walls, floor, window, and even the ceiling. It wasn’t a perfect seal. Dyna didn’t want to accidentally suffocate herself. There were cracks in the door and the air vent didn’t have anything over it. The overhead light was still in its place as well. With all the reflective surfaces, the light was actually a bit too bright, but she would have to deal with it.

Time to give it a test.

Dyna headed back to the kitchen, grabbed her things from the counter, and returned to the room. Entering with only her socks on her feet to keep the foil from tearing—it was stronger than regular aluminum foil, but she still didn’t want to damage her requisitioned material—Dyna placed her mirror down on top of a small containment case that was currently the only ‘furniture’ in the room.

Using the randi detector, she took a few quick scans. The mirror, when scanned directly, hit roughly its usual levels at seven-hundred ninety-two. Ambient scans of the room, aimed at random points, varied from fifty to seventy. Much higher now than it had been when she had started—presumably because the psionic energy released into the room from both the mirror and Dyna herself couldn’t escape as easily, causing it to build up. The door was open at the moment.

With the door open, a few ambient scans in the hall gave her levels just a little lower than those in the room. Thirty to sixty randi.

Taking care to avoid ripping and damaging the foil around the doorway, Dyna closed the bedroom door.

Dyna took a breath and waited. There wasn’t much else to do at the moment, so she leaned up against the wall and started browsing through some of the institute’s equipment library on her phone. While there was ongoing research toward replicating Tartarus equipment, namely the disruptor, most of the Carroll Institute’s equipment wasn’t exactly portable. The library listed heavy equipment that could technically be moved, but little that she would be able to toss into a backpack and carry out to the apartment building. Nothing useful for her goals, at least.

Still, it was interesting to know that the Carroll Institute had developed a machine that would turn psionic energy into actual flames. The Pyrokinetic Converter. It was large, cumbersome, and incredibly inefficient, but there was some thought toward developing the concept far enough that something like the Vault could be used as a power source for the institute. A small note mentioned that the project was on hold following the spontaneous combustion of the project lead. Dyna wondered if she could craft an artifact that simply produced constant heat regardless of whether or not it was bound to someone.

But that was getting ahead of herself.

A timer beeped on her phone, signaling a half hour had passed since she closed the door to the bedroom.

Knees a bit stiff—maybe a couch was a higher priority than she had thought—Dyna pushed herself off the wall and set to taking several scans in the hallway.

Fifteen to twenty-five. A significant drop. Dyna wasn’t sure exactly how efficient the room’s insulation was. As a psychic herself, Dyna would always interfere with the measurements unless she went and fully suited up in protective equipment. It might not be a bad idea to store a suit here, but she didn’t have one at the moment.

Still, it worked. That brought a small smile to her face. Maybe she would finally be able to get some progress made.

There had been no progress with Mel and the fog machine. For two weeks, Dyna had been down there with her, in and out of various tests to try to recreate the coffee mug. Or anything, for that matter. It was a frustrating exercise. It had been so easy that first time, doing it completely on accident…

It was even more frustrating in how much time it ate. It would have been a different story if they had anything to show for it. They didn’t. The fog machine and the coffee mug were still locked up down in Psychodynamics. Mel still got called down every other day, but Dyna had been allowed free.

Opening the bedroom door, idly noting an immediate jump in ambient randi levels, Dyna took back her mirror. She immediately opened the containment case it had been sitting on. Inside were a few items she had been collecting. First and foremost were the cosplay glasses that didn’t seem to do much unless November was around. Dyna had gone back to that same photography store and purchased a second fog machine. She hadn’t bothered taking it out of its box yet.

She wanted to call Mel over to try again, but if they hadn’t achieved anything in Psychodynamics, Dyna doubted they would get anything going here. Not to mention, Mel’s frustration with the experiments was apparent every time they sulked back to their dorm room. Bothering her with a makeshift laboratory off in the middle of Idaho Falls after she had been through Psychodynamics would probably feel like a severe downgrade, hurting morale even further.

But regardless of what happened after, Dyna still considered the fog machine a success, if a transient one. But maybe it held some small clue.

The mirror, Dyna felt she had done entirely on her own. She had been given it, then through constant infusion—likely helped by her belief of what it was supposed to do—had crafted it into a proper artifact. Theoretically, she should be able to manage that again. But Mel, and November to a lesser extent, showed her that an alternative might be possible.

There were other psychics at the institute. Dyna, unfortunately, didn’t know too many of them personally. As someone who had no real demonstrable ability, she hadn’t exactly been welcome in most of the cliques that formed up around the campus. After receiving the mirror, she mostly spent her time with the artificers and doctors of Psychodynamics.

But surely there was someone around willing to come try to use their powers around her and a suitable artifact.

Dyna let out a sardonic laugh as she looked around the room she had created.

It didn’t exactly look welcoming. In fact, it looked more like the kind of room a serial killer would have to keep blood off the walls. Convincing someone who didn’t already know her…

Ruby would help in an instant. Emerald probably as well. Maybe she could rope Sapphire into it? Except they were all artificers with their own artifacts already. Would that make it easier to make a second, similar artifact? Or would it interfere?

Why didn’t she know any regular psychics?

Stowing the potential artifacts back into the case, Dyna locked up and headed out. It was getting late and she didn’t want to miss the bus back to the institute. She would figure out who else at the institute might be willing to help later. Until then, she could go back to what she had already been doing in her room—working on a project alone—just with the added security against setting off all the institute’s alarms if she actually managed something.

Maybe the added distance would help keep November from devouring her stray thoughts as well.

Out on the street, Dyna walked along the sidewalk. Her new apartment was in a fairly old section of the town. Lots of brick buildings, most of which were only a single story high. It was roughly on a dividing line between a residential neighborhood and a more commercial district. If commercial meant one small department store, a movie theater that looked like it would still use hand-cranked wheels of film, a few restaurants, and a gym. The latter building was actually a decent amenity, one that Dyna would probably end up making use of if she felt the need to move around while out here.

There were another few shops, much smaller than most around the town. One looked like it dealt in old furniture and appliances. The other was… Dyna honestly wasn’t sure what they sold. It was simply called Tuesdaes and had a wide variety of art supplies in the windows, but it wasn’t solely dedicated to art. There was a large wooden spinning wheel and loom, cubes of clay, presumably for pottery, advertisements for a large walk-in kiln, a foundry for metalwork, and even classes on glass-blowing. It seemed an all-around ‘create-things’ store, but also sold actual creations. Strange malformed statues of twisted wire, giant glass carboys filled with brightly-colored liquid, regular paintings of varying quality, and more besides.

Dyna had been meaning to check it out, but she had been spending all her time prepping her artifice room. Most days she left the apartment too tired or too late to even think about heading over and taking a peek.

But, checking the time on her phone, Dyna decided she could spend a few minutes browsing through shelves. Doctor Cross had said that the more unique the item, the easier she would be able to affect it with her power and turn it into a proper artifact. Dyna doubted she would find anything more unique than the creations of hobbyists.

And it did bring up another interesting idea. If she couldn’t find something that felt like it suited her, perhaps she could just make something herself. Maybe a glass marble that she hand-crafted herself or woven leather stamped in arcane patterns.

Ignoring the light chime of a metal bell over the door as she entered, Dyna looked around and decided to stick near the front of the store. The back looked like where they kept all the supplies and equipment—which could be useful, but she was more interested in the unique creations on display around the front half of the store.

Most items she passed by without too much thought. Paintings, glass pipes, and large sculptures didn’t warrant too much thought. Dyna was trying to make equipment that she could carry around and use. Paintings perhaps could be rolled up and made portable that way, sculptures could not. Pipes went ignored simply because there were so many of them.

Other things, Dyna tried to consider what concepts they might embody. A small glass tiger might be aggressive fragility while its red color could be hunger or blood? What kind of powers would that translate to? Or the over-sized tie pin shaped like a stylized art deco Empire State building? What would that be? Rigidity? Geometric patterns? Man-made structures?

The fog machine had felt right to her. And it actually did something, if only once. But for that, she had been going about in the opposite direction. Rather than browsing aimlessly and wondering what something might do, she had a power in mind—illusions—and had been searching for something that would fit that. Doing things that way again might be easier than her current method.

A small part of her wondered if the Carroll Institute offered instructional courses on art history. Identifying concepts of random pieces of art sounded a whole lot easier than it was. Then she needed a class on relating concepts to artifact abilities.

Dyna didn’t exactly have a whole lot of artifacts to pull inspiration from. Her own mirror, described as a tool of a legendary spy, allowed her to know when she was being spied upon. Emerald’s pocket watch allowed her to step outside the flow of time—which seemed quite straightforward. Then there were things like Ruby’s gemstone, which appeared to be a simple ruby. How did that relate to letting her heal her body while storing her mind? Maybe her artifact shouldn’t count given that Ruby had been experimented upon by her parents until the ruby functioned for her.

Sapphire was the owner of the Control Rod, a puppet master’s tool of manipulation. It did something to his natural psychic power, though Dyna wasn’t sure what, exactly. Beyond that, it also let him float? To control his own body as if it were a dancing marionette.

Alex had the Music Box. What it did, exactly, Dyna couldn’t say. She hadn’t asked and had never been told. The same applied to the other two artificers, Aquamarine and Hematite. Dyna had no idea what they did or even what their artifacts were.

The only other artifacts that she actually knew about were the glass vase and conical brown stone covered in hieroglyphs from her artifact selection—neither of which she knew their function—and the Aztec Calendar. The latter, she didn’t know what it would do in the hands of an artificer, but it did create an aura of harm and pain while unbound.

Maybe that was the actual problem. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to turn a wooden carving of Fenrir into an artifact, it was that she didn’t know what artifacts could actually do.

Stopping abruptly in the middle of the woodwork aisle, Dyna pulled out her phone. She connected to the Carroll Institute Internal Database and attempted to pull up a list of all the artifacts in the vault.

A bright red banner saying that she lacked permissions to view the content covered the screen.

With a scowl, Dyna dialed a number.

“This is Beatrice.”

“I’m an artificer, right?”

“Confirmation code?”

Dyna sighed. “Onyx three-five-five-five. You know who I am.”

“Confirmation accepted,” Beatrice responded, ignoring the latter part of what Dyna said. “You are classified as an artificer.”

“Then shouldn’t I have access to the artifact database?”

“Please hold.”

Dyna scowled. Picking up the carving of Fenrir, she moved along. Maybe it wouldn’t be an artifact, but it might still liven up the apartment. The utterly bare walls and lack of furniture really was disheartening at times. While she was holding, she picked up a few other things as well for the same reason. A glass ball whose insides looked like a galaxy, a laser etched sheet of metal with some magical circle on it, a completely dull knife made from glass but designed to look like crystal, and a small wooden puzzle box.

After thinking about it for a moment, Dyna put the puzzle box back. There were enough creatures from beyond running around. She didn’t need her vast knowledge of horror movies bringing more.

She did, however, pick up a crochet voodoo doll. It was clearly designed to look cute with its button eyes and cross-stitched smile. It was probably an insult to actual voodoo practitioners everywhere, but Dyna well knew that artifacts didn’t need to be genuine or even realistic to work. Her mirror wouldn’t have ever done anything if that was the case.

The voodoo doll actually got her thinking about other paranormal items. Would a Ouija board let her communicate with dead people? Or maybe just read the minds of psychics in text format? Maybe tarot cards would let her become some kind of precognitive?

Unfortunately, despite walking aisle to aisle, Dyna didn’t find anything like either. So, she headed up to the checkout stand with her small collection of mostly-decorative but maybe-artifact items and quickly paid for them.

It wasn’t until she got out of the store that Beatrice finally got back to her.

“I apologize. Your access to many parts of the CIID has been restricted. Attempts to restore access are restricted.”

“Great.” Dyna walked down the street toward the closest bus stop. It was a bit further from her apartment than she would have liked—the Carroll Institute bus really only stopped at a handful of locations throughout the city—but it was still close enough that she didn’t mind the walk. Exercise was good, after all. “Who do I have to talk to in order to get that fixed? Walter? Doctor Cross?”

“Access is restricted by order of the administrative council.”

“Them again,” Dyna said with a mild groan. “And how do I meet one of them? Is that even possible? I’ve got like ten bones to pick with them. Probably more if I sat down and thought about it for a few minutes.”

“To maintain objective control over the Carroll Institute and related functions, the administrative council avoids interactions with known psychics.”

“I’m not going to mind control them. I literally can’t. That’s not my power.” Dyna paused a moment and thought. “And what if an psychic goes to the same grocery store as them? How do they avoid that? What do they do, hide out in a bunker all day and never leave?”

Dyna could just imagine a dozen old men seated around a large wooden table in a dimly lit room. They were probably never seen in full, even to each other. They would start up video calls with their faces entirely cloaked in shadow, only giving off a vague outline on the screen. Some cigarette-smoking man probably annoyed the rest of them given how unpopular smoking was these days.

“Beatrice?” Dyna said, trying to avoid laughing at her mental image of the Carroll Institute’s own little Syndicate. “Are there some forms I can fill out or something?”

“Please hold.”

“Hold? You should know if there are forms—”

“Codename: Onyx,” a silky smooth voice cut in. It was deep and masculine, a far cry from the somewhat clipped tones that Beatrice spoke in. “I am told you wished to meet?”

Blinking twice, Dyna’s fingers fished her mirror from her pocket. She didn’t like strange things happening all of a sudden. “Who is this?” she asked, flipping the mirror open. Everything looked normal for the moment.

“Administrator Theta. Would you kindly come to my office upon your return to the Carroll Institute?”

Dyna’s mouth went dry. Had Beatrice called him? Or how did he know? And what happened to not meeting with psychics? She had a whole list of grievances, but for some reason, that list shriveled up as she thought more about this sudden intrusion into the call. This was one of the heads of the institute. Doctor Cross and Walter’s superior. The one they reported to and the one who gave them orders. Dyna… actually wasn’t sure if she really wanted to meet with one. Her asking Beatrice had been half a joke, not expecting anything to come out of it.

Somehow, he had heard about her request to meet and had agreed to it. All in the span of a single phone call. The Syndicate-like picture she had in her head didn’t go away at that. In fact, this only strengthened that image. This was a man who could probably make her pretty miserable at the institute. Assuming he didn’t give her the boot.

No. They wouldn’t do that. It would be too easy to imagine that Dyna would sign up with Id almost immediately.

Still, it was unnerving. Here he was, wanting to meet with her the second she got back? At the very least, Dyna figured the administrators were busy sorts of people and a meeting would have to be scheduled weeks if not months in advance.

“Miss Onyx?”

“Ah… Yeah. Sure.” It was probably best to not ignore him or avoid the meeting. Besides, she really did have grievances that the administrators probably wouldn’t resolve, but at least she could bring them up. “I was just heading to the bus stop now. Be there… soon?” she said, butterflies swarming through her stomach.

“I will look forward to it.”

 

 

“So,” Dyna said, motioning with a hand. “Welcome to Psychodynamics.”

Mel managed to take her eyes off the steel insulated cases that held both the actual physical coffee mug that hadn’t existed a few hours ago and the fog machine that Dyna was hoping to see returned to her at some point. It was really only the second time she had looked away from it. The first having been when the black vans showed up with the containment team.

Psychodynamics’ main lobby was as grandiose as ever. Brightly lit and covered in brass and fine wood. All of which was made all the more impressive given that it was underground. The flurry of activity going on probably helped distract Mel. Silver-suited men moved about with purpose. Most coming straight toward her and the containment team.

“Psionic energy levels elevated,” Beatrice said after two announcement tones. “Class C personnel, please remain within shielded sectors of the facility.” Another two announcement tones dinged immediately after. “Doctor Fether, report to Emission Monitoring Station immediately.”

Dyna let out a long sigh as she watched the two men carrying the shielded case rush off in the direction of the intake bay. If all else failed, the institute better reimburse her for that fog machine. It hadn’t been that expensive, but it did sting that it was being taken away like this.

She needed to line her entire room with foil to hopefully keep such emissions under wraps. Then she could try again.

Though she wasn’t ready to give up on the fog machine just yet. It worked. Or something. She still wasn’t sure if it was an artifact or just the half-state artifact like the goggles or her mirror in the early days. Whatever the case, she wanted to at least test with it a bit before it got locked up in the Vault.

To that end, she knew who she had to speak with.

“Come on,” Dyna said, starting off in roughly the same direction the case had gone. Her destination was the observational side of the intake bay.

“Where are we?”

“Psychodynamics, I just said that.”

“Yes, but where?”

“It is underneath the Carroll Institute.”

“Why?”

“Because it is a secret laboratory and that is what you do with secret laboratories?” Dyna shrugged. “Actually, I think they wanted to separate most of the stuff down here from the surface. Physical distance for insulation purposes. Though you would be forgiven for thinking it is because of mad scientists with people like—” A door slid open in front of Dyna, presenting just the person she wanted to talk to. “Well, people like him.”

A bald man with rectangular glasses stepped out of a side room, paused as he looked over the group of Dyna, Mel, and two silver-suited men, then turned back to Dyna. “Delta. Excellent recovery time. You’ll put Emerald to shame like that. Though you could stand to make your report. Speed is of the essence in situations like this. Tell me, what was the object, its condition, location, and surroundings like?”

Dyna sighed and waved a hand. “This is Doctor Cross, head of artifact research.”

“Head of the Anomalous Materials Research Division,” Cross corrected in his distinct Russian accent. “Under which artifacts are a subdivision.” His eyes flicked over to Mel. He squinted. “Hematite? No…”

“This is Mel, she—”

“Malachite? Was that even one of you people? Bah.”

“Mel,” Dyna said again. “Melanie. She’s not… There are only seven of us. You could stand to learn our names, you know.”

“I know the names of the ones that are around often. Emerald. Ruby. Sapphire. Hematite. You.”

“You call me Delta.”

He stared a moment before nodding, apparently finding nothing wrong. He opened his mouth, but two announcement chimes interrupted him.

“Doctor Cross, report to Anomalous Materials Intake Bay Two immediately.”

“Walk and talk,” he said, moving down the hall while tugging on a pair of thick gloves. The gloves reached up to his shoulders, having to be hooked into place against his laboratory coat. “What are we dealing with?”

“A…” Dyna sighed again. “A fog machine. Electronic. Roughly ten centimeters, five centimeters, five centimeters. Takes in a special fluid and, after being charged up, emits a bit of white fog. Mel here is a psychic with the ability to craft illusions. The suspected artifact seemed to make the illusions a little more real than we are used to.”

“So she is an artificer.”

“I don’t… think so. I mean, I don’t know how… I just barely bought the thing. Less than five minutes. It was one of a few dozen, I didn’t feel anything from it at any point… I was going to use it for my own projects,” Dyna said, trying to convey some meaning in her emphasis.

To his credit, incompetent though he was at recalling her name, Cross looked over and nodded knowingly.

“I don’t know how it could possibly act as an artifact so soon. I mean, my mirror took a month or so. And I’ve been working on another thing that I was thinking about bringing to you for the last month, but… This went from mundane to setting off all the alarms in less than five minutes.”

“Wonderful,” he said, sounding a whole lot more pleased than Dyna felt. “Let us see what we are looking at then, shall we?”

Another door slid open at the end of the hallway. The two silver-suited escorts stopped at the door, but Dyna, Mel, and Doctor Cross all headed inside. A few technicians were operating terminals around the observation room while, on the other side of some shielded glass, suited men worked on extracting the contents of the containment cases. They first removed a coffee mug, which they promptly set into a small shielded transparent case that looked rather like a platform with a glass cake dome over the top. The fog machine followed from the other case, this one went onto a pedestal surrounded by sensory equipment.

Shooing one poor technician aside, Doctor Cross took over a terminal. Despite his thick gloves, he managed the keyboard with expert precision.

“It’s still there,” Mel whispered. She did not sound like her usual confident self at all. Following her gaze, Dyna found her eyes locked onto the coffee mug on the other side of the glass. “I swear I’m not doing anything.”

Dyna motioned toward the suited men in the separated room. “Those outfits they are wearing can block just about any psionic emission.” The Hatman couldn’t get through them. If he couldn’t, Mel certainly wouldn’t have a chance. “The glass is shielded as well. There is no way that you are in any way affecting them, not even if you were trying your hardest. The fact that they could pick it up or even see it at all is telling.”

“I don’t… You didn’t slip in a coffee mug while I was distracted…”

“A full cup of hot coffee? Where would I have gotten it from?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s real,” Dyna said. “Don’t know how to explain it myself. That’s this guy’s job.” She pointed a thumb at Doctor Cross. “So, you know, try not to panic or anything. Everything is under control.”

“What if I made my friend?”

“What?”

“My friend. My imaginary friend.”

Mel motioned to her side as if to craft the illusion to demonstrate. Dyna remembered that faceless little boy with the solid black pits in place of his eyes just in the nick of time and grabbed hold of Mel’s hand.

“Let’s not,” she said as fast as she could. The Hatman and November were more than enough entities running around. They didn’t need Mel generating more every few seconds as she crafted illusion after illusion. “Let’s just avoid using our abilities until we get the okay from Doctor Cross… Okay?”

“Yeah…” Mel sounded dazed. “Okay.”

Dyna pressed a hand to her forehead. “Damn it. You are going to be Malachite, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’ll tell you later. Just…” Dyna turned, found the five lenses of the room’s security camera, and stared straight into the red light underneath. “Is Walter around?”

“Agent Walter is en route. Estimated time until arrival: Twenty-two minutes.”

“Walter?” Mel asked.

She knew him, but not as the head of artificers. Just as one of the Carroll Institute recruiters. Dyna’s recruiter, specifically. “He can answer any questions you might have about artificers. He’s sort of in charge of us. And… Oh dang it. There are probably going to be people after you now and Id and… I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”

“Perhaps not,” Cross said from behind Dyna. “I will be more thorough, but preliminary analysis indicates that the object you have brought to me is not an artifact.”

He sounded… annoyed.

“But the mug. It didn’t exist. I swear, we both saw— Is it like the mirror was at first?”

“Unknown. We need more examples of your… early work to compare. But I am quite confident in stating that this is not an artifact proper. Perhaps it will be one someday. Perhaps not.”

“But… It…” Dyna trailed off. She didn’t know what to say. And that uncertainty over her words gave her a moment to actually think.

Maybe she shouldn’t say anything at all. If Doctor Cross called it a completely mundane fog machine, it would probably be the quickest way to get it back into her possession. And it was special. It had to be. That mug had definitely come from nowhere.

Though if it wasn’t displaying any odd properties at the moment, did that mean that the artifact anomaly that popped up on whatever sensors or satellites operated around the town had come from another source? No. That couldn’t possibly be. It was far too much of a coincidence. Mel made the mug real and then some other artifact popped up?

Dyna started to shake her head, but glanced up to the camera again. “Beatrice, was that artifact instantiation event centered on the bus stop?”

“Analysis continues. Event center point is difficult to determine due to incomplete sensor coverage, poor satellite resolution, and general abnormal shape of such emissions.”

“Structures, vehicles, flora and fauna, and especially people all absorb psionic emissions. Mostly people,” Doctor Cross said with a sad shrug. “The large burst that happens with rapid artifact instantiation does not always appear centered over the artifact. If we could pinpoint it more accurately, Emerald and the singing boy would likely have returned from Korea by now.”

“So you’re saying you don’t know. Could there be another artifact out in Idaho Falls? Or did the burst come from one of us maybe? Emitted from a psychic instead of an artifact?”

Cross didn’t answer, instead glancing up to the same camera that Dyna had been using.

“Waveform analysis is 71.949% consistent with known artifact instantiation events.”

“Is that high or low?” Dyna asked.

“About average. No two artifacts are the same.” He leaned down to the terminal’s microphone and pressed a button. “Get a team back to Idaho Falls. Sweep the red area for any additional sources of high psionic energy.”

“What…” Mel started. She stopped, trailing off as everyone looked back at her. She had been quiet up until now. Probably a bit overwhelmed. Taking in a breath, she started over again. “What about the mug? Could I touch it again?”

Doctor Cross stared at Mel for just a moment. Privately, Dyna wondered if he was trying to figure out who the strange person was after having forgotten that Dyna had already introduced her. But, without a word, he turned back to the glass window separating the two rooms. After a thought, he leaned down to the microphone again, pressed a different button, and said, “Move the cup to the psychoscope.”

“Psychoscope?” Mel said, tone vaguely unimpressed.

Maybe she was getting a little more used to what was going on.

“It’s a device for rapid analysis of psionoic energy. Not as good as the psionic spectrometer, but it works for preliminary decision making with regard to artifacts.”

Dyna, having heard that tone from Mel before, had a feeling she thought the name was silly rather than was wondering what it did.

Neither Dyna or Mel bothered explaining that to Doctor Cross. The room simply fell silent as the suited men on the other side of the glass put a cake dome over the top of the fog machine and then maneuvered the mug onto the recently vacated sensor-covered platform.

After a few minutes of spooling up the sensors, tapping a few things on his keyboard, and waiting for the results to appear on the screen, Doctor Cross sucked in a small gasp.

“What?”

“What is it?”

“That,” Doctor Cross said, “is very interesting.” Stepping slightly to one side, he pointed out a series of graphs that Dyna actually somewhat understood these days.

“That’s higher than my mirror,” Dyna said. “Which might make sense. Whatever else happened, that mug didn’t exist an hour ago. It is a complete psionic construct. Matter pulled from the mind?”

“Likely not mind,” Cross said. “The matter may possibly have come from that other side.” His grin faltered and his tone shifted to one of annoyance. “I’ll have to consult with Doctor Teeth.”

“So I really made that? It’s real? Is it going to disappear?”

Doctor Cross looked back to Mel, eyes narrowing. He probably couldn’t answer the latter two questions, so he focused on the first. “You did that?”

“She’s an illusionist. I tried to explain—”

Interrupting Dyna, Doctor Cross looked Mel up and down. “We’ll want to keep you for observation. And experiments. We’ll see if we can replicate the event. If it produces the same psionic emission, we’ll know for sure whether or not an artifact caused all this or if it was you.”

“I get to do it again?” Mel said, sounding genuinely excited. She perked up, straightening her back and widening her eyes.

“We’ll see. Beatrice! Get Teeth to the psionic spectrometer. We’ll begrudgingly get his opinion. Then get a shielded test chamber set up.” He paused, looking straight at Mel for a moment before adding, “and get Livermore too. He can do a preliminary examination of your psychic abilities.”

Announcement chimes dinged over the Carroll Institute Announcement System’s speakers. “Doctor Teeth, please report to Materials Analysis Laboratory four.” Two more dings immediately followed. “Doctor Livermore, report to Psychic Evaluation Department please.”

As Beatrice made her announcements, Doctor Cross leaned down to the microphone again. “Pack up the items. Prepare for transit to the analysis laboratory.” He straightened his back and turned away without even glancing over to see if his orders were received. “Mal—”

“Mel.”

“Mel. I would love nothing more than to jump straight into the experiment. However, I have been unduly informed that failing to follow protocol will not be tolerated.”

He didn’t look over to Dyna, but she still had a feeling that he was talking about her.

“Okay?” Mel said.

“Glad you agree. Follow me, please. Doctor Livermore is a nuisance, but he’ll be able to ascertain the exact limitations and ramifications of your abilities in the shortest amount of time. Please cooperate.” He started toward the door, but paused and looked back to Dyna. “De… Dyna.”

“That took a lot of effort, didn’t it?” Dyna said, crossing her arms in annoyance. She wasn’t exactly angry with Cross for forgetting her name. She wasn’t Harold. And she had mostly gotten used to being called Delta by him, even if she didn’t understand why. No, she was upset that it didn’t look like she would be getting that fog machine back anytime soon.

Of course, Doctor Cross didn’t even blink at her annoyed quip. “You were present during the event?”

“I was on the bus stop bench next to Mel, yes.”

“We’ve already got analysis on you, though the situation may warrant another pass. Please remain on standby. In addition, we’ll want you observing and perhaps participating in the actual experiment. I’ll have to consult with the other doctors beforehand, but I believe that is a highly likely outcome.”

“It better be the outcome.” If she wasn’t getting her fog machine back, she at least wanted to see the results of her actions.

Doctor Cross nodded his head. With that dismissal, he headed out into the hall. Mel hesitated a moment, but after a gesture from Dyna, followed after him.

Dyna didn’t go with them. She didn’t really want to meet with Doctor Livermore. Watching endless prodding and humming might teach her something, but her presence was just as likely to steal his attention. He kept sending her requests to test out that amplification chamber again, but she really didn’t want a repeat of the previous incident.

Besides that, she had a slightly different goal for the moment.

Heading down the hallway, Dyna changed floors and moved to the artificer quarters. Ruby should be around. Maybe Sapphire as well. Neither were really her destination. She just wanted a little privacy.

Entering her fairly spartan quarters—she preferred her regular dormitory room—Dyna approached the wall. She looked up into the five-lensed security camera’s red light and frowned.

If she had to cover her whole room in tin foil to keep this whole debacle from happening again, she would. Although…

Perhaps…

Instead of buying a car, maybe she could rent out a small apartment in Idaho Falls. Turn it into a little psychic workshop. She could fill it with items that she was trying to turn into artifacts. And if she could properly shield it, it wouldn’t matter if there was a big artifact instantiation event. Or rather, it would be good if there was an artifact instantiation event. It would likely mean that she succeeded.

“Beatrice… is there anywhere I can get—I can requisition large quantities of psionically shielded material? Enough to cover a small room with. And maybe some sensors that aren’t hooked up to… well, you?”

“I can direct you to the necessary supply rooms. May I ask why?”

Dyna blinked, somewhat caught off-guard. Was Beatrice one to ask questions like that? Maybe because Dyna specified that the sensors not be hooked up to her.

“Just an experiment of my own I want to try. Nothing dangerous. Don’t worry.”

 

 

 

Shopping with Mel was something that Dyna wouldn’t soon forget.

Dyna didn’t do shopping in person all that often. When she went to a store, it was usually to pick up something specific that she really couldn’t wait on delivery for. Everything else, she ordered online. Clothes, snacks, supplies, toiletries, and everything else she needed got loaded up on a truck and shipped out to the Carroll Institute.

Prior to her enrollment at the institute, the only places she really went shopping were grocery stores. There just hadn’t been enough money around the house for window shopping.

Dyna sighed as she sank into a seat at a small café in downtown Idaho Falls—not Bacchus; Dyna hadn’t been back to that café. Not since Id’s mind-controlled minions found her and chased her across Idaho Falls. It was something of a shame. She could definitely go for one of their pastries at the moment. Lacking that, she just got a simple strawberry-kiwi smoothie for a quick bit of sugar.

She ran every day. They weren’t short runs either. Assuming there wasn’t any scheduled training or research, she usually spent at least a few hours in the gym working out on her own before moving on to her side projects. And yet, somehow, walking through the streets of Idaho Falls had her feet aching and thighs burning like she had just gotten done with a marathon.

“So with all that in mind,” Mel said, unloading three large clothing bags into the seat opposite from Dyna. “My power does not affect the primary somatosensory or posterior parietal cortex.”

Despite her exhaustion, Dyna tried to focus. Chatting with Mel was half the reason she had asked her along. “Those are the parts of the brain dealing with tactile perception.”

“Yep. So my illusions can’t actually ‘touch’ anyone,” she said, sliding up next to Dyna, apparently deciding the other side of the table was too overloaded with her purchases. “Doesn’t affect the middle and superior temporal cortex either. So no sound. It is purely visual. And my visual processing center goes crazy when I use my power—my words, not the doctors’—but my own vision isn’t affected beyond being able to see my own illusions even though I should basically see nothing more than sparkling dots in a void of white.” She shrugged, eating a spoonful from her sundae. “No idea what is going on there exactly. It’s the current subject of Doctor Weizak’s research. You might try asking him if you want more information.”

Dyna made a note of Weizak’s name. Between discussions about fashion, Mel had provided a fairly detailed description and analysis of her own ability. Far more detailed than Dyna had ever asked for in the past. Dyna honestly wasn’t sure how much knowing the details behind Mel’s power would help, but it definitely couldn’t hurt.

Unfortunately, she had yet to find anything that might potentially become an artifact related to her powers. Most of the places they had visited were clothes stores. Dyna had forced Mel through two different thrift shops, but she hadn’t seen anything in either that really jumped out at her.

They had yet to look at vehicles. Dyna didn’t know if she really planned on buying one or not. She had the money, but just wasn’t sure if spending it was a wise decision or if she should buy something else or save it entirely for later on. Still, it would definitely have saved them some walking and, maybe more importantly, would have offered a place to dump their purchases thus far.

As she finished her sundae, Mel glanced down at her phone. “Last bus leaves in thirty minutes. Shall we head over? Or did you want to look at cars first?” she said, definitely not reading any part of Dyna’s mind.

She didn’t have that ability.

“No. I probably should do some actual research before buying a car. Not really a thing to do on a whim, is it?”

“Less fun, but more wise,” Mel said with a nod of her head.

Leaving the dishes on the café counter, Dyna gathered up her own box. She didn’t have the armfuls of clothes that Mel had. Just two pairs of new shoes. One comfortable set of tennis shoes for working out in. The other were thick boots for more… serious work.

On her way out of the café, Dyna had been about to head off toward the nearest bus stop, only to pause as she noticed a store across the street. A photography store. The kind of place that sold cameras, lenses, maybe even film. She was a little surprised to see a brick-and-mortar store of that type when so much camera equipment was available online these days, but this was Idaho Falls.

“We have a bit of time,” Dyna said, nodding toward the store.

“Cameras?”

“Lenses, specifically,” Dyna said. That might feel right. It was just an inkling in the back of her mind at the moment, but a lens seemed like it went hand-in-hand with illusions.

It was a surprisingly modern store. Or, maybe that was giving it too much credit. It didn’t look like something ripped out of the seventies though, so that was worth praising. It had clear display stands atop metal counters, giving the merchandise a clean look. Most of what they had were simple cameras. The kind that had essentially been rendered obsolete by cameras on phones. The larger and more advanced cameras, along with lenses, were all stored behind large glass doors along the walls.

Mel hung back near the entrance. It was the first store that she hadn’t looked at home in. An employee wearing a teal blue shirt walked up to her, probably to ask her if she needed any assistance, but she only pointed over to Dyna, who caught the whole interaction out of the corner of her eye. After telling the employee that she was just browsing, Dyna proceeded to do just that.

Nothing stuck out to her. She wasn’t expecting the feelings of ill omen that she had gotten from her mirror when she chose it. While she didn’t have any proof or evidence, she was fairly certain that those feelings only happened because of the proximity to actual artifacts. Actual artifacts exerted some sort of calming influence over her, moving away from them made her feel unpleasant.

But nothing in the store really looked all that great either. The camera lenses were all thick cylinders, ranging from the size of a small soda can to large telescopes that could probably take high resolution photographs of Jupiter. They were invariably black with ridged sides and barely distinguishable from one another in any way aside from their sizes.

This was what Doctor Cross had been talking about when he mentioned that unique things would feel better. Mass produced camera lenses that all looked the same might as well have been the same. There was nothing artifact-y about any of them.

With a bit of disappointment, Dyna turned to leave.

One of the display stands stopped her in her tracks.

It didn’t have camera equipment. Rather, it was a small square box, roughly half the size of a standard phone, though quite a bit thicker. The gray box itself was barely notable in comparison to what it was emitting.

A steady stream of white fog erupted from its nozzle straight up into the air before it wafted down around the display stand in lazy, curling wisps of air.

A miniature fog machine.

Dyna was fairly certain that she would have noticed it on the way in, meaning that the employee must have gone around and turned it on. Or maybe refilled it. Dyna didn’t know exactly how fog machines made their fog, but was fairly certain that it took some kind of liquid.

It stuck out to her for reasons other than the obvious stream of fog, however. It wasn’t unique craftsmanship—there were a dozen boxes of the fog machines just underneath the display stand, ready for sale. Rather, it was its meaning that jumped out to Dyna.

After all, what were illusions but smoke and mirrors?

Dyna had a mirror. It wasn’t related to illusions in the slightest. But a smoke machine felt thematically appropriate.

Dyna picked up one of the boxes, took it to the counter, and bought it. It was fairly cheap. If it didn’t work, she wasn’t out much. And if it did work…

Giddy, excited at the prospect of having something new to work on for a while, Dyna headed toward the store exit.

“Thought we were here for lenses.”

Dyna paused, trying to come up with some excuse. They were too expensive? The fog machine wasn’t even in the same category of products. Dyna didn’t even have a camera, so picking up lenses for them had been a bad thing to say in the first place. Finding no good reason for the change in purchase, she simply shrugged and told most of the truth. “It wasn’t the lenses I needed exactly, but the concept of changing how things are viewed. A lens literally bends light, but this obscures it and should work for… Well, this is all part of a project I’m working on for Psychodynamics. It’s why I was asking all those questions about your power.”

“Psychodynamics is where you’ve been training instead of the regular lectures and meditation halls, right?”

“Yep.”

“Psycho, relating to the mind. Dynamics, a branch of mechanics dealing with motion under the action of forces.”

Glancing over to Mel, Dyna raised an eyebrow.

“I looked up a few things after you first started mentioning it. Sounds like telekinesis. That what they’re working on?”

“No, I don’t…” Dyna trailed off. It was very possible that there were artifacts down there capable of facilitating telekinesis. “Maybe? I’m not. I’m just trying to pin down exactly what my abilities are.”

“I thought you were a clairvoyant of some degree.”

“That’s just the thing,” Dyna said with a sigh. “It doesn’t feel quite right. The other psychics down in Psychodynamics do not have your standard psychic abilities. We’re outliers or anomalies. Weird things that warrant additional study and specialized training. But clairvoyance? A quarter of the initiates are probably clairvoyant to some degree.”

“Clairvoyance isn’t special enough, is what you’re saying?”

“Not for down there,” Dyna said with confidence. “I’m not really supposed to talk about specifics, but the others in Psychodynamics have weird abilities.”

Mel let out a long, thoughtful hum. “Abilities that utilize artifacts?”

“Yeah, it’s…”

Dyna stopped walking. She froze solid, staring at Mel as the older woman kept walking. Paranoia started creeping into the back corners of her mind. She could feel lit like a burning sensation inside the base of her neck. The therapists told her to ignore it; even if people really were after her, going into a panic over it wouldn’t help matters. But she couldn’t help it. She was trying to think of just when she might have slipped. The whole reason Mel knew the name of Psychodynamics in the first place was because Dyna wasn’t used to keeping secrets like that.

Had she slipped on artifacts too? Or had someone gotten to Mel? Id? Dyna already knew that Id was interested in artifacts and with Grafton on the loose again, they could mind control other people. Mel should have had the same training that Dyna did that let her throw off Grafton’s control at the airport, but maybe Ado upgraded his implants to be more powerful.

Dyna pulled out her mirror to check for anyone watching her, but just as she opened the cover, Mel came to a stop, casually shifting the weight of her purchased clothes to her other arm.

Mel looked back, canting her head to the side. “Your friend, Emerald I think, mentioned it the night I first met her.”

Dyna took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“Scare you?”

Pausing for just a moment, Dyna decided on a completely different reason for why she abruptly stopped and had probably looked about ready to sprint off. “Artifacts are supposed to be a secret. If I messed up and told you, I’d probably get in trouble. But if it was Emerald—” Dyna shrugged. “—Not my problem.”

“Throwing your friend under the bus there. I think she was distracted with you having a bit of a panic attack.”

“Trust me. Emerald can handle it.”

With a simple hum, Mel turned and kept walking. Dyna followed after, taking a few quick steps to catch up to her.

“That mirror is an artifact?”

Still having her mirror out, fog machine and boxes of shoes under her other arm, Dyna glanced down to the reflective surfaces and decided to nod her head. “Since you already know, they’re just mostly mundane items that help us concentrate a bit. The technical details are… well, more technical.”

Mel went silent. At least until they reached the bus stop. The bus was still a few minutes out, so they sat down on the bench and set down their purchases.

“What would an artifact do for me?”

Dyna didn’t answer right away. She didn’t have an answer. There were only a half dozen artificers, which wasn’t a good sample size on its own, and she barely knew what half of them did. Mel…

“I’m not sure if you could use one. All the others down in Psychodynamics have weird powers, as I said, who often can’t use them all that well. You can use yours just fine without any help.”

“So it wouldn’t give me a big power boost? Let me manipulate hearing, smelling, touch, or taste?”

“No idea.”

“Well, let’s try.”

“I don’t think my artifact will work for you,” Dyna said, closing her mirror. It was bound to her. Although she didn’t know everything about artifacts, she did know that they bound themselves to people with certain psionic wavelengths, amplifying them. And they couldn’t be transferred to anyone else without undergoing that decoupling process. Even if she handed the mirror over, it wouldn’t do much other than act like a mirror.

She wasn’t quite sure why the goggles had worked for November. But November was an anomaly all on her own. Trying to figure out anything to do with her was probably worth opening up a whole new department down in Psychodynamics. In addition to the one they had already opened up for her.

But Mel wasn’t looking at the mirror in Dyna’s hand. Her eyes were on the freshly purchased fog machine. “You were going to use that, right? To try to focus your ability into something like mine?”

“Well… yes.” Dyna hesitated for a moment, but… there wasn’t any harm in it.

The fog machine wasn’t an artifact. Not yet, at least. She had just barely purchased it. Nothing would happen. And hopefully, satisfied or disappointed, Mel would drop the subject of artifacts. Emerald’s fault or not, Dyna didn’t really think that she should be talking more about them than she already had.

Popping open the cardboard box, Dyna slid the little lump of plastic and metal out into her hand. It was a small rectangular box with a nozzle at one end, a small port for a charging cable, and a little screw-off cap where one would presumably insert the fog fluid. Which was also in the box, contained in a little eye-drop-looking bottle.

Lots of electronics came partially charged. This one seemed to be no exception. Pressing a small button started up a faint whirring noise that might have been from an internal fan. Since it was working, she squeezed out a bit of the fog liquid and handed it over to Mel.

It looked like a fairly good purchase from a purely fog-generating perspective. In moments, it had a healthy cloud pooling in the windless air around them. Hopefully it would be just as good at acting like an artifact too.

After staring at it for a minute, during which she swept her fingers through the fog coming from the nozzle, Mel looked up. “How do you use it?”

That was a good question. One Dyna was still trying to figure out for herself. “All the artificers seem to use theirs in different ways. Try concentrating on it? Using your powers on it?”

“It doesn’t have a mind.”

That might matter a whole lot less than Mel was thinking given what Dyna knew about artifacts. Artifacts didn’t manipulate just minds, but the rest of reality as well. But Dyna shrugged. “On me then. I give you permissions for small things to test your ability.”

Maybe it would even be useful for Dyna. She could easily imagine Mel somehow imbuing her powers into the fog machine that would later on allow Dyna to utilize and express similar powers. In fact, maybe it would be a good idea to have Mel concentrate on the fog machine every once in a while.

Artifacts were, after all, created through psionic energy and how people thinking about the objects perceived their concepts.

Mel did use her illusions. It started out small as Dyna had suggested. First, the smoke changed color, passing from white through the entire rainbow. It looked rather like there were hidden LED lights just inside the nozzle. A quick glance at the packaging showed no such feature, so it had to be an illusion.

The LED nature of the illusion faded as the fog itself started changing color. Even the extended wisps far to far away from the nozzle changed, looking more like it had been dyed with chemical pellets.

The fog formed into shapes and patterns that couldn’t possibly be natural. A bouquet of rosy red flowers, a newton’s cradle with shiny reflective marbles, to a cup of brown coffee that Mel picked up, spun on her finger far faster than a cup would normally spin without spilling, and promptly took a small sip.

Dyna started to laugh at the mime show as Mel spat it right back out in a spit-take spray worthy of any slapstick comedy.

It should have been nothing more than an illusion. Maybe droplets of fog if it maintained its consistency from the fog machine. Instead, hot droplets splattered over Dyna’s face, making her flinch back. She wiped a finger down from her forehead, thinking with a grimace that Mel had just spat all over her, only to smell it.

Coffee. That rich, slightly acrid aroma that some people liked but Dyna found generally distasteful.

Mel was staring down at the cup of coffee in her hands, wide-eyed with a tremble in her fingers. The fog machine slipped out of her loose grip.

Dyna caught it out of the air, pulling it close to examine it. It didn’t feel any different. She detected no unnatural sensations of calm. But then, bound artifacts wouldn’t feel like that. Emerald could smell bound artifacts, but Dyna had yet to be able to sense ones other people had claimed.

The smoke stopped with a touch of the button. Now white again, it quickly dispersed into the outdoor air.

The cup of coffee remained in Mel’s hand. Slowly, almost like she was scared, she took a drink from the mug.

Dyna’s phone buzzed in her pocket.

It took real effort to tear her eyes away from Mel, not wanting to miss a moment, but the buzzing in her pocket continued several more times.

She pulled out her phone.

Her heart dropped at the messages.

WARNING: Artifact Instantiation Anomaly detected in your area.

ATTENTION: Onyx moved to ACTIVE DUTY.

ATTENTION: Priority Objectives Updated. Please review and acknowledge.

PRIORITY 1: Investigate AIA detected in your area.

PRIORITY 2: Safeguard potential artifacts from outside threats.

PRIORITY 3: Ensure safety of public from harmful artifact emissions.

PRIORITY 4: Remove artifacts from public presence.

PRIORITY 5: Safeguard interests of CI.

END OF LINE

“Uh… oh…”

 

 

November sat on Dyna’s bed, hands planted on the faded floral pattern of the covers as she looked around through the thin cosplay glasses. She kept giggling. Little titters of laughter that really only served to annoy Dyna. It was like she was seeing something through the glasses that she found amusing despite Dyna not being able to see anything at all through them.

“You did good work here.”

Dyna crossed her arms. November’s words didn’t carry the inflections of sarcasm, but it was hard to tell with the woman. She wasn’t human. She was just an amalgamation of human memories and ideas given form. It was theoretically possible that she didn’t actually know what sarcasm was.

Maybe. Dyna was just now trying to get more into the science of psychics and psionics. Research papers about entities was effectively nonexistent given how recently they came to the Carroll Institute’s attention. Dyna didn’t have access to most of the research and what she did have access to was general to the point of being useless. She knew more from firsthand experience than most of what she had read.

“Can we go back to the part where you said you ate my thoughts?”

November looked down with an expression on her face. Dyna wasn’t quite sure what that expression was supposed to mean, with the furrowed brows but genuine smile. “It’s nothing big. Psychics release their thoughts far more easily than the average person. Given my presence here, several of those thoughts have tried integrating me.”

“And some of them were my thoughts?”

“Indeed.”

“What do they… How do you… How do I stop it?” Dyna decided to focus on what felt like the most pressing aspect of the situation. “I don’t like the idea of people eating more of my memories. I’ve lost enough as is.”

November shook her head. “I don’t think that is how it works. You’re not losing anything. From my own experiences and what I’ve been reading here, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are just excess psionic energy with a bit of an imprint from the psychics.”

“Alright. Assuming that is true, how do I stop it?” Dyna asked again, this time giving a different reason. “I don’t like the idea of people peeking into my memories. This is supposed to be a secret, you know? I worked hard to keep Beatrice and Ruby out of here and now you just waltz up knocking on my door, already knowing about everything?”

At Dyna’s gesture, November removed the glasses and set them over on the desk. All without getting up from the bed.

Dyna immediately reached over and picked up the glasses, putting them on immediately to try to see what November found so amusing.

She didn’t see anything at first. The room was just how it always was. November had spent some time giggling at the ceiling, but Dyna didn’t find anything different about it, amusing or otherwise. Looking back down, she just about tossed them off to the side again, only to freeze when she saw the thing seated on her bed.

“Oh.”

It looked like someone’s shadow brought into the third dimension. Stretched and elongated just enough to trigger that sensation of uncanny valley. The shadow’s features didn’t help much either. It didn’t have a face. Not really. More like a mask that someone had painted over after having heard a vague description of a face. The mouth was a thin line that didn’t actually look as if it could open, there was no nose at all, and the eyes were deep black holes that stretched into the ‘head’ far further than the head’s size should have allowed.

A few months ago, Dyna would probably have screamed and ran away. She generally liked her horror movies to stay inside the screen. The stringy-haired ghost-girl sitting on her bed was still probably going to haunt a few nightmares, but knowledge really was power. Dyna knew what November was, she had heard a similar description from Ruby, and she knew that November probably didn’t mean her harm despite those comments about eating her thoughts.

Just to check, Dyna lifted the glasses up to her forehead to find the oddly familiar face of November’s human form looking at her with a smile. She slowly lowered the again.

“They work?”

Now that the initial shock of seeing that thing on her bed was wearing off, Dyna actually started to feel excited. Maybe they weren’t quite what she had been hoping for—she had been expecting to see things like November all over the place or even a whole other world with subtle yet extensive differences—but they were doing something now. She could see the actual November.

“I think they need a bit more tweaking.”

“Wait… this is supposed to be an artifact. You didn’t just bind with it, did you?”

“I don’t know what any of that means.”

Dyna opened a desk drawer and pulled out the randi level reader. A quick scan of the glasses displayed a number only two higher than it had been before. Far too weak to be considered a proper artifact. But they were doing something and November had seen them doing something?

“I’m not sure I understand my power at all,” Dyna sighed.

“What you want comes true.”

Dyna shook her head. “That’s not how psychic powers work.”

“Ah, because you are, of course, the foremost expert in the subject. And not just some initiate who is repeating what they heard in a lecture despite having seen the odd abilities wielded by your friends.”

“Well…” Dyna trailed off. “Yes? I mean… Okay. I get your point. How about this: That isn’t how my powers work. If they did work like that, I would be the coolest psychic in the world with the coolest power. And not… you know, me.”

“It is hard for humans to change who they are, isn’t it?”

“You think it is easier for you?”

“Of course. Every time I integrate another one of us, I change a little bit.”

“Isn’t that just like humans? We gather knowledge and experience through action, changing ourselves by learning and growing. You gather knowledge and experience through eating other… thoughts, thus changing yourself by learning and growing.”

“Well, with the right phrasing, I’m sure anything is possible to explain away.” November brought her hands up to her face and started mushing and pinching her cheeks and forehead. Every bit of contact she made with herself caused elevated static activity all over her fingers and face. “I suppose I am far less malleable at the moment. Though if you put those glasses on again…”

Dyna set down the randimeter and put on the glasses once again.

The shadowy figure that was November performed a similar action, bringing its arms up to its head. Instead of mushing its shadowy mask-like face around, it started changing. It didn’t become more human, that was for sure. A nose appeared on its flat face. It didn’t have holes for someone to breathe through, but looked like that same inexperienced artist looked at their drawing, thought something was missing, and having heard about a nose but never actually saw one, decided to add the general contours.

Dyna lifted the glasses to her forehead to find November’s human form unchanged and her hands in her lap.

“I think…” Dyna said, wanting to change topics, “my power is actually to make artifacts. But these don’t seem to act like normal artifacts do, so maybe I’ve got a bit more control over it than I thought? Except I can’t seem to control it consciously at all.”

“Well, that’s a step in the right direction, I suppose,” November said. As she spoke, Dyna dropped the glasses back down over her eyes and frowned. Despite the changes to its face, shadow-November still didn’t move is mouth while talking.

It was probably time to discuss this with Doctor Cross. Dyna doubted the glasses would be secret for long anyway. November…

Dyna wasn’t sure how November was allowed out and about. She had no qualms with telling other initiates that she wasn’t human. Most probably didn’t believe her, but she was still going around saying things that the Carroll Institute probably wanted to keep under wraps for the time being.

Out of curiosity, Dyna aimed the thermometer-like device in November’s direction and took a quick scan. The reader on the back didn’t display any numbers, just three dashes. Too high to be measured by the portable device? Probably. Dyna got the same result when she pointed it at herself.

“To answer your original question: No.”

“Question?”

“About stopping your thoughts. I don’t think there would be a way to stop it. Maybe some specially designed equipment could stop it or a device to capture your thoughts and contain them before they escape into the greater world. But I have seen no evidence that such things exist.”

“But they can be created?”

“Perhaps. You created those,” she said, nodding toward the glasses on Dyna’s face.

Dyna quickly took them off. Eerie as it was to see November’s true self, watching her talk in that form was even worse. The lips didn’t move and the motions were all wrong. Not to mention, she kept gesturing. Yet her limbs lacked hands or feet. She had these ends that tapered off into a shadow. Hardened to horror though she thought she was, the uncanny valley wasn’t so easily shoved aside.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing,” Dyna said, looking down at the lenses. She flicked off the switch behind the ear, cutting off the blue glow. Then, curious over whether they would still work or not, she quickly put them back on just to confirm that no, they did not work while the switch was off. Which felt a bit ridiculous, given that she knew all that switch did was turn on a small LED.

“That’s what you’re doing right now, isn’t it? Figuring things out?”

“Well, yes. But… Other people know how to use their powers almost innately,” Dyna said, thinking back to Mel’s story of her childhood. Perhaps too innately in that case. “Mine seems to be fighting me every step of the way. I thought this would let me see things… well, things like you all over the place. Unless this place is just empty, it isn’t working the way I thought it should.”

“It isn’t. Empty, that is. There are others watching me right now. I could see them with your creation, but maybe I’m just a little more in tune with them. If you work on it some more, you might get it working fully. You don’t learn to play the piano the first time you sit down and touch one,” November said. Her eyes drifted off and she let out a small hum. “I think I’d like to learn an instrument.”

“I’m… sure the institute can find a piano somewhere for you,” Dyna said, half distracted as she focused on the first part of what November said.

Practice.

She needed practice.

And maybe something with a simpler effect than seeing into some alternate reality that she had only been aware of for a few weeks. Something more verifiable too, with obvious effects that she wouldn’t have to run to the local friendly inhuman monster to check if they were working or not.

That local friendly inhuman monster slowly stood from Dyna’s bed. “Yes. I think I will go talk to Doctor Teeth about procuring an instrument and an instructor. Perhaps a harpsichord. I’m not exactly sure why, but I feel I have an affinity with harpsichords. Maybe it was something I ate.”

“Good luck with that,” Dyna said, holding back a scoff. She wasn’t disparaging November’s desire to learn an instrument, merely the idea that Doctor Teeth would help her out. Of all the researchers running about the Carroll Institute, Dyna liked Teeth the least. So far. He was a bit too self-absorbed and ignored actual injured people in favor of examining… well, November.

November just shrugged. “He should be quite agreeable. At least once I agree to sit still for one of his inane tests.”

“Make sure you get it in writing. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he ‘forgot’ about your harpsichord after the test.”

“Excellent idea,” she said, nodding her head. “Farewell, Dyna Graves. Keep up the good work.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure.” Looking down at the glasses as November stepped out of the room, Dyna put them on once again. She flicked on the LED and started looking around.

November took her shadow with her, leaving nothing behind that Dyna could see. No other shadow monsters hiding in the corners or hanging around outside her window. Whatever amused November was still nowhere to be seen.

Good work?

“What are you wearing?”

Dyna froze, startled for a moment. Turning, she found Mel staring at her from the open door to her room. Mel, for all her faults, wasn’t the kind of person to just barge in. At least not without a courtesy knock and long pause. November must not have closed it on her way out.

“Nothing?” Dyna said as she removed the glasses, flicking off the LED in the process, and dropped them into the foil-lined drawer of her desk. Using her bare heel, she slid the drawer closed. “Did you need something?”

Mel gave her a flat stare for a bit too long of a moment before she shook her head. “That woman left?”

“You didn’t see her leave?”

“I heard the doors opening and closing, but I was hiding in my room. Something about her… It’s not right. And this is coming from someone who had an imaginary friend without a face as a child.”

Dyna started to nod. She honestly wasn’t sure if she could or should say anything about November. The only instruction she had received regarding the matter was simply an informal note to not discuss it. With November herself having either missed that memo or ignored it completely, it was probably more suspicious to avoid the topic altogether.

But that wasn’t what stopped her nodding.

Mel looked different.

As an illusionist, and a powerful one, that wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary. Mel could and often did make herself look different. Sometimes she would be the most beautiful person around. Other times, she opted for a more incognito look. Her clothes changed through so many different outfits that she couldn’t possibly have room for them all in her closet. Dyna, having gotten used to her, wasn’t always the most attentive person to all the changes. But now, she had a thought.

“Could you make a large illusion? Not necessarily your imaginary friend, if you don’t want, but just something big and obvious.”

“Sure?” Mel said with a shrug, then nodded her head off to the side.

Dyna followed the motion to find an entire jungle of flowers where her bed had been. Lilacs, daises, lilies, roses, and plenty more that Dyna couldn’t even begin to name. Their colors ranged from pure white to a near black violet and everything in between. She didn’t have bad allergies, no more so than any average person, but Dyna was still feeling a small sting in the far back of her nose making her eyes water a bit.

Shoving that feeling out of her mind, Dyna tried to focus on the illusion itself. All the Carroll Institute’s training on how to detect mental intrusions. She combed through her mind, checking over each crevasse, feeling what was going on without trying to fight it off.

“What parts of your brain are active when using your power? Do you know what parts of my brain you’re activating? How is the psionic transmission waveform structured? Do you—”

The flowers shimmered, fading back into Dyna’s regular old floral covers on her bed.

“What’s all this? I thought you figured out your ability?”

“Well, maybe. But I had an idea and I think you can help me with it.”

An obvious effect. Something she could test on her own. Maybe even something useful. Illusions. It didn’t have to be anything too special. Even if Mel’s illusions were far superior to what was slowly percolating in Dyna’s mind, it wasn’t the artifact that she was after, it was the practice.

Practice with creating an artifact that did what she wanted it to do.

“Want to go into town?” Dyna asked. “Maybe look around the strip mall and shop a bit?”

She needed an object. Something to bind the concept of illusions to. She wasn’t quite sure what that would be just yet, but Idaho Falls was an old timey town with plenty of antique shops. One of those shops had to have a perfect object.

“And,” Dyna added to sweeten the deal, “maybe we could look at cars too.”

“Cars?”

“I came into a bit of money recently. Waiting around for the bus every time I want to go anywhere is annoying. So cars? My treat?”

“You’re going to buy me a car?”

Dyna blinked. “I mean the rest of the shopping trip. Maybe some clothes or books or whatever. Within reason. I didn’t come into enough money to buy multiple cars.”

Mel put on a pout, but it was so obviously forced that she couldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds before it turned into a smile. “Yeah, let’s go shopping. That sounds like fun.”

 

 

 

Dyna sat in her dormitory room. It felt like months since she had been able to just sit around and relax. In reality, it had only been about one month. A month filled with debriefings over every aspect of what had happened in Wyoming, testing to ensure that there were no lingering effects from being in close contact with entities, regular training sessions, and more besides. Every day was long, hectic, and exhausting. Even if those days consisted of sitting around in a meeting room listening to other people give their input on events.

And yet, Dyna couldn’t really complain. Not after she saw the deposit in her bank account. The Carroll Institute paid all its psychic initiates. All of them, including Dyna, were considered Human Test Subjects for experimental medical procedures and were given salary accordingly. After being confirmed as an artificer, that salary got bumped up a bit. But after Wyoming… Dyna had asked Walter if there wasn’t some mistake. Someone had clearly had a brief spasm and their twitching thumb hit they keyboard too many times and added an extra two zeros to her deposit.

Hazard pay, he said.

Although Dyna wasn’t sure what she wanted to spend her newfound wealth on—maybe a car? She should probably send some back home to help her mother out too—she still got a bit of a dopamine spike every time she glanced at her account. It was enough to make her seriously consider asking for a similar assignment. It had been a stressful few days at the time, but a few more stressful weeks and she could probably retire in her early twenties if she was careful.

Not that she really wanted to do that. Not now. But having a fall-back plan would be nice.

Now, she sat at her desk in her dorm room, focused on what she did want to do.

Dyna had six tablets set up around her. Three had long passages of dry text displayed on their screens. The other three had gone into sleep mode. Technically, she didn’t need so many, but it was just easier to pull over a whole separate tablet and be able to open up relevant tabs there while keeping her other tablets open to different documents.

Her current subject of research was that of artifice. Essentially everything Doctor Cross knew about artifacts, their use, their creation, and anything else he thought to write into his many, many lengthy dossiers on the subject. A few of the tablets had ancillary materials written by other scientists, but Dyna had discovered that most of that was just confirming what Doctor Cross had already written. He was the foremost expert on the subject.

Unfortunately, the creation of artifacts was the most mysterious part of them. Everything else could essentially be analyzed in the laboratory after acquiring an artifact. The creation was almost entirely speculation. Educated speculation, but speculation nonetheless.

Artifacts, Dyna read from the Carroll Institute Internal Database’s overview on the subject of their origins, authored by Doctor Cross, are thought to require a number of elements present prior to their creation. An item may become an artifact when it embodies simple or singular concepts. They should generally not be able to be broken down into other conceptual items. If you point to an object and ninety percent of people will give the same or similar answer as to what you are pointing at, it could be a candidate. A bowl, for example, is always a bowl no matter its orientation or what part you point at. A car, on the other hand, might receive the answer of a car, or it might receive the answer of ‘window’, ‘door’, ‘wheel’, ‘engine’, ‘seat’, and so on and so forth.

Concepts are thought to be decided by undercurrents of psionic energy generated by the masses. The more meaning a local group of psionic energy sources (otherwise known as ‘people’) can attribute to an object, the more likely it is to undergo [REDACTED]. Following [REDACTED], manifesting as an artifact in full. This infusion of psionic energy can be gradual or rapid, but the actual moment of artifact instantiation occurs in a single moment. Instantiation releases a known psionic waveform emission, typically of a power great enough to detect through satellites equipped with the proper detection tools (see CI-ENG-98011).

The actual thesis on artifact origins went into a bit more detail, but unfortunately, not much. Most of what Dyna had been able to find was specific to finding and detecting artifacts, not their actual creation.

It was a bit frustrating, but Dyna wasn’t sure how much it actually applied to her.

Based on her experiences in Wyoming and with the mirror, she didn’t need a group of people unconsciously aware of an object to turn it into an artifact as the overview seemed to describe. She just needed herself. It was probably the same process beyond that. She was still infusing an object with enough psionic energy to instantiate an artifact. It was just all her mind doing so.

Dyna pulled out one of the drawers of her desk. The interior was completely lined with foil. It wasn’t a perfect seal and the foil wasn’t quite the properly treated foil that Ruby had made in Wyoming, but she thought she got the formula mostly correct from what she remembered. It helped that she didn’t actually have to sneak about. She could probably have just asked for proper protective equipment, but there was value in working on her own.

She was trying to learn. Not just about artifacts, but about psychics and entities and even mundane engineering. Seeing Ado’s creations and how easily the woman just knew what data she needed to get to modify those disruptor guns into actual weapons against the Hatman was something that Dyna wanted to do as well. That was to say nothing about actually creating a disruptor in the first place.

But that felt a long way off. Dyna was focusing on what she could do now.

And now, she pulled out a pair of glasses. They were transparent, completely clear from earpiece to earpiece, and made out of one single pane of… fiberglass? Dyna wasn’t exactly sure. It wasn’t glass-glass, but it wasn’t plastic either. Whatever it was, the lenses had faint patterns laser-etched into the sides, creating a circuit-board-like pattern. A small battery-powered LED light just behind one of the ears could be switched on to give the entire glasses a faint blue glow. The edges and laser-etched parts glowed far brighter.

It looked cool. Not really something anyone would wear in their day-to-day life. And it didn’t actually do anything. While it looked like some holographic headset display from a science-fiction movie, it was just a prop she had found online. A decorative bit of gear for costume work. Cosplay, Halloween, or whatever else someone might want decorative goggles for.

For over a week now, Dyna had been pulling the goggles out every single day and just… focusing on it. Trying to think at the goggles felt weird. A bit awkward, actually. But she thought it was working.

Dyna wanted a pair of goggles that would let her see what Ruby and Matt could see. That other side. It had worked before, temporarily, using Ado’s goggles. She was hoping to make the effect a little more permanent with these goggles. Ado’s goggles had been designed to do something—Dyna still wasn’t sure what, but with Ado’s milky eyes and the fact that she wore them in the first place, it only made sense—these cosplay goggles weren’t designed for anything other than looks. Theoretically, it shouldn’t matter. After all, the mirror had been just a mirror with some extra parts glued on and a short story wrapped around it all.

That had been enough for Dyna.

Taking a short breath, Dyna closed her eyes, put on the goggles, and opened them again.

Nothing changed. Just like the day before and the day before that. Dyna’s room looked normal except for, after flicking the switch behind one ear, the faint blue tint. In itself, that wouldn’t be that bad. Ado’s goggles had caused a warping effect that made Dyna nauseous just thinking about it. If that disappeared from this version of the goggles, Dyna wouldn’t mind at all.

The problem was that there were no other anomalous effects. Standing up and walking over to the window of her room, Dyna peered outside, looking for something out of the ordinary. She lifted the glasses up and looked again. A door being open with the goggles where it was closed without, someone standing around where they shouldn’t be, the entities of the other world, if that was possible. Dyna looked for anything.

And found nothing.

Returning to her desk, Dyna pulled out a small device. It looked like an infrared thermometer. The kind someone might use to tell their temperature when sick. But instead of measuring thermal degrees, this measured ambient randi levels. The unit of measurement for psionic energy. Pointing it at a random spot in the room got her a simple twenty-one. Technically, she should have measured the room before trying anything, but she knew from past days that twenty-one was about average.

Taking the glasses off and setting them on the desk, Dyna pointed the randi level detector at them and depressed the scan button. After a short moment, the device beeped. Thirty-two. Elevated randi levels, so there was definitely something there. Something happening.

Just to double-check, Dyna pulled out her mirror and performed a quick scan. Seven-hundred sixty-six. Quite a big jump from the glasses. Knowing, however, that the mirror had been nearly undetectable between when she first received it and when Doctor Cross officially classified it as an artifact, she was undaunted.

Having seen the charts of her mirror, a thirty-two was actually quite high. Her mirror had been doing strange things while having a randi level of only seven.

Unfortunately, the glasses still didn’t seem to do anything.

Maybe it was time to talk to Doctor Cross again. She didn’t want to. Technically, this wasn’t something she was supposed to be doing. Cross might not get her into trouble since he also wanted to investigate artifacts and their creation, but he might not have much of a choice. Within her room, Dyna had taken reasonable precautions toward keeping this all a secret. From the protective foil lining to making sure to disconnect all her tablets from the network after downloading all the files she wanted, Dyna was fairly certain that nobody knew what she was doing.

Bringing Doctor Cross into the secret… Well, as the saying went, two could keep a secret only when one of them was dead.

Dyna picked up one of the tablets again and started skimming through the contents. She doubted she would find anything that would help at the moment. The files she really wanted to see, documentation on her mirror and how it had become an artifact, were classified beyond her ability to access.

She had considered calling up Ruby again to try to steal the files like they had with those of her mental history, but that would probably leave a big trail behind. Emerald had warned her against trying something like that again, that she wouldn’t always be around to tidy up loose ends.

A knock at Dyna’s door interrupted her research. She quickly tossed the glasses into the foil-lined drawer of her desk as she called out, “Come in.”

Melanie opened the door, poking just her head inside. “Working again?”

“Learning,” Dyna said, swiping a file closed on the tablet. The rest had all gone into sleep mode and would require a password to open. “Something up?”

Mel’s smile darkened. “That… woman is here again. Asking for you.”

Dyna couldn’t suppress her grimace.

That woman was the entity.

She didn’t have a name. She didn’t want a name. Names, as she said, were human things. Although interested and excited to be in the human world, she didn’t want to be a human. She didn’t even want pronouns. Not just feminine pronouns, but anything. Dyna had tried using alternatives, but that only made her more upset.

It made referring to her somewhat difficult.

Unfortunately for her, human or not, she lived in a human world. Humans, for better or worse, needed ways to refer to others.

The Carroll Institute database file for her was reference ID 63211. Because of that, a few of the scientists had taken to referring to her as November. Not to her face, figuring she would wind up upset, but privately.

Someone must have slipped, however. Even though it was the very start of April, she had taken to scowling anytime someone mentioned any month.

Dyna sighed, stood, and headed out of her room. Mel stayed behind, waiting in the hallway where our bedrooms were. She didn’t particularly like November. None of the regular initiates did. Dyna wasn’t quite sure why she was allowed out without supervision—possibly because the Carroll Institute wasn’t the completely heartless black-ops organization that Ado thought it was—but she essentially had free access to any of the campus.

In an effort to learn, she had been attending every lecture, class, and research opportunity the institute provided to regular initiates.

Dyna frowned at her, standing in the open doorway. Static coursed over her body. Her eyes looked like windows into an old television tuned to an invalid station. Her hair, dark and longer than it had been a month ago, didn’t quite sit still despite the otherwise motionless pose she had.

Mel could create an illusion like that. Some people probably thought she—or someone with similar abilities—had done so. But people delved into their training to try to detect mental manipulations and came back finding nothing. As day after day went by, people started to realize that she was just naturally like that.

Whispers around the campus seemed conflicted on whether or not they liked her presence. In a campus filled with people of fantastic abilities and power, the odd one out still wound up ostracized.

“Hello, November.”

The woman narrowed her eyes. A faint flash of pure white overtook the black-and-white static snow for just a moment before returning to normal. “I don’t have a name.”

Dyna shrugged. “When visiting a foreign land, you should follow the local customs. We even have a phrase for that. When in Rome… Frankly, it’s annoying thinking of you as that woman or the entity or whatever else.”

“I would rather people not think of me at all. It’s dangerous.”

“Should have thought about that before wandering around where everyone can see you. With your distinct appearance, I would be surprised if everyone here didn’t devote several hours of the day discussing, wondering, and generally thinking about you.”

“Yes, but if someone were reading their thoughts, I could be anyone. Some random person.”

“There are very few random people with static coursing over their bodies.”

“Ascribing a name to me grounds me,” she said, ignoring Dyna’s comment. “It cements me further into the world.”

“And that’s… bad?”

“Half of me is still on the other side. I’ve had to subsume several others since arriving here. I succeeded. Easily,” she said, looking mighty proud of herself. “But were I to fail, I would likely simply disappear from here. If my existence is too concrete, they might make it over here in my place.”

“That’s… You’re in constant danger of just dying or something? Have you told the doctors?”

November shrugged. “It’s how it is. I’m not concerned for myself. I’ll end up someone else eventually.”

“But you’re concerned for us?”

“The Hatman could do what he did because he got over to this side. Something else taking my place is more likely to be like him than like me.”

“Ruby?”

November waved a lazy hand. “Barely a sliver over there. She might not even notice being subsumed, aside from losing out on being able to sense what is going on over there. Although, knowing what I do of her, I wouldn’t be surprised to find her fight back with a vengeance if a stray thought tried to integrate her. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her doing the subsuming. In fact, depending on the exact nature of her ability, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that she couldn’t be integrated. Not that I have tried or anything. And I don’t think it will be a problem for too much longer. Her weight on this side is dragging the other side back.”

“She’s getting better?” Dyna sighed, glad she didn’t have to worry about Ruby that much. Though that still left November. “I hate to break it to you, but everyone has a way of referring to you. November among the scientists. The initiates, I think, call you Snow, though that is hardly a universal name. Just the most popular one passing through the various cliques at the moment. You can’t stop it, no matter how much you go around asking. Shouldn’t you try throwing your weight fully here? That’s how it is working for Ruby, right? Based on what you just said…”

“I’m not a human. I was never one. I don’t really want to be one. I can’t say for sure what I was originally. Maybe a stray thought from some psionically powerful woman. Maybe a collective thought brought into being through a corporate boardroom.” She shrugged again. “Trying to be more human isn’t my goal here.”

“And what is your goal here?”

November simply smiled. “Those glasses you’re working on, can I see them?”

Dyna narrowed her eyes. “How do you know about that?”

“You, Dyna Graves, have a great number of stray thoughts,” she said, smiling enough to show off her teeth. Sparks of static-like snow danced about between them. “May I come in?”