Bath stood at the threshold to Dr. Yin's room. He'd considered bringing Lisa along to influence the psychologist into leaving him alone, but decided it wasn't worth bothering her over. He knew that she was busy pulling together some plan involving the mailing list even as she tried to finish the work from both last and this week.

Bath didn't need to sleep, so he could stay up to get it done. Though Bath had told Lisa that he could eliminate her need to sleep, Lisa told him belligerently that sleep was her favorite thing in the world. Bath didn't agree, but respected Lisa's choice.

'She'll learn eventually...'

Bath felt long before he saw that Dr. Yin was sitting in the chair by her desk, typing away at her computer while waiting for him to arrive.

"Dr. Yin," Bath called out flatly. He walked inside and lay down on the couch, crossing his legs across the couch's left arm and resting his head against the other in a relaxed, carefree pose. "I see you've called me back for some more testing." Bath let a bit of his saltiness shine through this last remark.

Dr. Yin's mouth turned up into a half smile. "You spoke right away this time," Dr. Yin noted, walking over from her desk to the couch with paper and pencil in hand. "And even addressed me by name."

"Is that so remarkable?" They key difference was that last time, Bath didn't have anything to say. This time, he was mildly pissed off.

"I'm sure you're wondering why you're here again."

Bath gave her a look. "I'm wondering why I was here to begin with." He'd actually completely forgotten. 'It had something to do with the suite, didn't it? I made bugs or something...' Bath's mouth compressed into a line as he tried to remember the specifics.

"You're here because your Dean was concerned for the health of your roommates," Dr. Yin said firmly. "She could have elevated your suitemates' assault charges to a higher authority; instead, she chose for you to see me."

Bath's face became savage. "I didn't assault them," he stated coldly. "Their room was incredibly messy and then a lot of bugs appeared. How could they blame that on me?" It was all coming back now...the large and invasive essence bugs. Even if his suitemates did believe him to be behind the bugs, Bath thought that insinuating him for "assault" was a little harsh considering that the bugs did no permanent physical damage.

"I've actually received the assault report from your suitemates," Dr. Yin said. "Whatever you did with the bugs utterly terrified them. It sounded like something out of a horror movie, even assuming that part of the report was exaggerated."

Bath rolled his eyes. "Believe me, they were exaggerating."

Dr. Yin cleared her throat, then changed her line of questioning. "How have you been?"

Bath raised an eyebrow. "I've been well."

"Tell me more about yourself. You mentioned that you have a sister, Avery. Tell me about her."

Bath sighed, a soft smile working its way onto his face. "She's a few years younger than me. She's eleven right now, in 7th grade."

"She's eleven? Did she skip a grade?"

Bath's calm smile turned into a wide grin. "Yep. That kid's a machine: she learns at an extremely quick pace."

"Has that made you jealous?" Dr. Yin knew that Bath hadn't skipped a grade and presumed that he might consider Avery academically superior to himself.

Bath chuckled. "Jealous? Of Avery? No; I have high hopes for her. She's going to need all of that brain power." Bath's expression turned pensive.

"Tell me about your relationship."

Bath's smile became whimsical. "Avery is a very...pure person."

---

At the same time...

"Move!" Avery hissed under her breath as she ran down the field, keeping the ball close to her feet. She approached the goal, took stock of the positions of the goalie and defenders, then recklessly kicked the ball to her left. She sprinted after it.

Then, as planned, she dove forward, slamming her outstretched foot into the ball's side. It rocketed forward into the goal unhindered.

"Yet again, I win!" Avery chuckled gleefully to herself as she picked herself up from off the ground. Only a small bruise on her elbow; nothing to worry about. Her teammates all wore self-assured expressions, completely unsurprised. Avery was known to play dirty...literally. This was the third point Avery had scored this game; the two teams' current scores read 1 and 5, respectively. She'd almost single-handedly raised the team up through the district soccer rankings.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

As she trotted back over to the center line, the only thought on her mind was that she had to win. Why? her parents asked her that all the time. Avery told herself it was because she wanted to increase her prospects of getting into college--getting into Alens like Bath--by being recruited to play at the college level. This wasn't really necessary, considering the fact that Avery's grades were as fantastic as her brother's.

More fundamentally, Avery liked a challenge, lived to exert herself to the fullest both mentally and physically. Mentally survey the field, plan tactics, then physically carry out the resulting plan; this was how she operated.

---

"What is she like?"

"Avery's really sweet. She looks up to me," Bath said wistfully. He knew it wouldn't be healthy for Avery to look up to him, especially once she realized what he really was. After, how could a normal human compare to him? She didn't know yet, of course--but with the "Big WD" plan coming to fruition, Bath knew it would only be a matter of time. As it was, he was preparing the way for Avery to ascend within the nascent Church of the Dragon.

"Do you miss her?" Dr. Yin asked, her face void of emotion as she finished scribbling something down on her clipboard.

Bath snorted. "Of course." And he meant it. Bath had thought long and hard about this fact. Why did he care for Avery? She was just one human of many; chances were, had he been adopted by another family, he would feel similarly about any child he spent enough time with. Bath had always liked children; most species stopped being children within a year, so Bath never felt anything lasting towards them. But with humans, for the first time, he felt...a bond with the two children he spent the most time with, Lisa and Avery.

"You answer everything in just a few words," Dr. Yin noted out loud. "It's hard for me to get anything out of you. Don't you have more to say about your sister?"

"She has a laugh like a rainbow."

Dr. Yin's face screwed up as she tried to make sense of the strange simile. "Anything else?"

"No." Bath didn't naturally think in terms of words, speech. He didn't feel the need to expend the effort to translate his feelings into a form accessible by this psychologist. Bath felt outside the office with his essence and detected the orientation of the office's clock hands. They were nearly at the half-way point.

"Isn't about time for me to take the survey again?" Bath said cooly. Taking a test was much preferable to answerig Dr. Yin's probing questions.

"You won't be taking the same survey," Dr. Yin said. "We're going to do a different exercise." By this point, Dr. Yin was fairly certain she wouldn't be able to justify giving Bath a poor score on his psychological evaluation. He didn't exhibit signs of sociopathy or schizophrenia and didn't have a criminal record. However, Dr. Yin was still determined to better understand Bath. He didn't mind silence and didn't like to talk; however, this wasn't because he was shy. Dr. Yin wanted to find out why Bath was so cold and reserved.

"Oh? A new kind of test?" Bath shifted on the couch.

Dr. Yin looked down at her clip board and rifled to the bottom of her stack of papers. Then, she proceeded to read: "A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?"

Bath narrowed his eyes. He had read about the Trolley Problem in school, though recognized that this was a slightly different variation.

"Who decided the only way to stop the trolley was to push the fat man over the edge?" Bath chuckled darkly. "What if I'm just as overweight; should I then be morally obligated to sacrifice myself?" Bath thought the entire question incredibly stupid. If there was a runaway trolley, he wouldn't really care. And if he did, he could just stop it without much thought.

A pointless question for powerless people.

"I haven't heard that response before," Dr. Yin replied honestly, a look of contemplation on her face. She proceeded to spend the rest of their time asking Bath his opinion on various other ethical thought experiments.

At the end of their session, after Bath left, Dr. Yin sat back and lay down on her couch with a perplexed expression. Out of all the questions she had asked Bath, he'd only answered one in accordance with a preordained response. She'd originally thought that he was trying to show off his intellect by providing alternative answers to the questions; in fact, she'd assumed that he'd studied them before. But as they continued, she came to realize that Bath genuinely thought about the questions she asked in a way that suggested he'd never heard of them before. He then dismissed any answers that he found dissatisfactory, instead posing counter-questions likely designed to waste time. However, in those counter questions, Dr. Yin began to find a pattern. A pattern broken by a question she inserted at the end, one of her own devising.

"There is a scenario in which you have a single choice. There is a platform. On one side of the platform is one-hundred people; on the other side is Avery. Without your interference, the platform will be submerged in lava. You can only rush to one side of the platform; this means that you can only save one of the groups, the one-hundred or your sister."

This was where Dr. Yin planned to make things a bit tricky.

"Your choice is the following: prevent the platform from descending, or leave the platform alone."

She had intentionally formed the possible responses--save all or save none--so that they wouldn't fit into the dichotomy proposed in the original scenario. She expected him to give some kind of witty response and critique the inconsistency between the question and the responses.

Bath had only exhaled angrily, replying, "Of course I'll stop the platform from descending." Little did he realize that, for the first time, he'd selected his response from the available answers.

Dr. Yin closed her eyes as she contemplated their session. In response to her question, Bath had decided to stop the platform, the much more difficult action considering the fact that the problem itself said that the only way to save the people was to choose one side of the platform over the other.

She'd hoped to better pinpoint the fact that Bath didn't seem to value human life and instead treated death like a joke, replying to the moral dilemmas in a mocking manner. Instead, he'd chosen to save the hundred people. Why?

Dr. Yin looked up at the ceiling, feeling as though she was missing part of the puzzle to the mystery that was Bath.

"Well, no matter." She knew he wouldn't be coming back.