You felt it. The resealing of the one they called the entity. You remembered feeling normal once again. While that thing had been out and free, you took a peek into its mind. It wasn’t a conscious decision on your part. Simply a facet of your ability. Uncontrollable. You can fight it off, but that takes effort. Too much effort. In a constant barrage of endless minds pushing into your own, they will eventually start to slip through. It was simply inevitable. Why bother fighting in the first place.

You wish you had fought this one off.

Humans, fundamentally, were all the same. That was one thing you had learned since waking up one day with your ability. From the very base level of neurons firing between synapse nodes, transmitting electrochemical signals throughout the brain in a complex structural pattern that forms instinct, active thoughts, emotion, and memory… all the way to the actual content of those thoughts and emotions. The content of those memories and emotions might differ, but the structure was the same.

This Hatman was no man at all.

I never experienced something like that before. If my power worked on insects, perhaps an ant or a bee, maybe that would have been similar. But it didn’t. For a few minutes there, before I specifically forced the sensation out, I caught a glimpse of what it must have been like to be a machine. There had been no desire, no purpose. Just doing. No memories either. It lived entirely in the present. Unable to plan, unable to remember past experiences. If something angered it, it would remain angry until something calmed it. The fact that it could get angry at all felt off, even.

It surprised me that my power latched onto it in the first place. My power didn’t work on non-humans. The doctors said the structure of their brains was incompatible with my very human-shaped brain. Even simian minds were too different. It had been tested.

But he was supposedly a collection of stray thoughts given form. Human thoughts, presumably. That was apparently enough for my ability to count.

So for me to get this Hatman absorbed into my mind… it was a good thing I had undergone so much training in maintaining my sense of self through invasive overlays. If I hadn’t, there might be two of the Hatman wandering around. I had felt it, momentarily.

The Hatman sought out psionic energy. Specifically, psionic energy emitted by most psychics. Even having been inside its mind, I wasn’t sure if the psionic energy acted as a source of sustenance, being some amalgamation of thought, or if the Hatman merely found it enticing for other reasons. All I knew was its drive to pull sources of psionic energy over into a world where it was easier for thoughts to unravel, where it would… consume them.

Sapphire pulled his fingers back from the terminal keyboard, letting his body go slack in the chair. More than slack, really. Like he pulled out of his body. It was just there to act as an interface between his mind and the rest of reality. When not needed, it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to stick around. He just dragged the body along on a string so that it would be handy when he needed to do something.

Something like make a report. His mission had been to spy on the other two humans. Tartarus, they were called. And yet, his report barely mentioned them. At least so far. Their gear was sufficient protection against his power. The same could not be said for the other individuals present in the vehicle.

Sapphire didn’t turn his head or otherwise move his body. He didn’t need to. Something about his power gave him an innate awareness of all nearby consciousnesses. Even when he wasn’t being them, he was still cognizant of them. At the moment, there were a number of oddities.

Ruby, he knew. He spent a decent amount of time around her. Sapphire knew exactly what she thought of him, but as two of the Carroll Institute’s limited number of artificers, she had still been forced to interact with him on occasion. She was, at the moment, ignoring him. Not necessarily because she didn’t have a scathing quip lined up the moment his actions or inactions did something to annoy her, but because she was preoccupied.

It wasn’t often that Ruby found herself at a loss. She had self confidence in droves and she knew it. Her ability made her nearly impervious to harm. Social matters were lacking, a consequence of whatever her parents had done combined with the Carroll Institute resetting her mind. She was aware of that deficiency and had been working with Emerald—and now Dyna—to try to get better.

But now there was a new problem. Every time she looked around, she saw things. Little things. Her eyes couldn’t see through the walls of the truck, but as they drove down the interstate, she kept seeing movement out there. She didn’t know what they were or what they wanted. They unnerved her. Made all the worse because they didn’t seem like a problem that would go away with knives, bullets, or even her fists.

Ruby tried to ignore it. This little vacation had been a disaster. It all started with that bleeping bowling ball. From that moment onward, it had been one downward spiral of failure after failure. Putting on a strong front was about all she could do at this point. And yet, her gaze kept drifting over to the side, moving away from those whose opinions she actually cared about to that other thing in the room.

You push Ruby away with a mental frown. Your body remains still and effectively lifeless. It had a pulse and some minor synaptic activity. Some automatic process kept the lungs working, if barely.

The object of Ruby’s attentions was interesting to you as well, however. It… wasn’t human. Like the Hatman. Unlike the Hatman, it didn’t have any desire to consume human-born psionic energy, for sustenance or any other reason. If it did, you would have raised the alarm immediately. That was one major upside to an otherwise inconvenient ability. You always knew when someone nearby was a threat. Sometimes before the threat even knew.

You didn’t classify the other inhuman consciousness as a threat. Perhaps later, after it had time to adjust. Most of the time, it was occupying itself by exploring its body. Poking its face and even eyes. It didn’t seem to react the right way to the latter.

Normal people would feel pain from touching their eyes. I wasn’t sure how I knew that, but I did. I didn’t feel that pain. It was strange, having a body. I couldn’t quite put it into words. Beings on the other side began fully formed, but not as a physical form. The only way to change was to… integrate other beings. I myself had integrated a number of others. I never counted. No one did, as far as I knew. We just… did. It was how we grew, how we learned…

How I knew bodies were supposed to feel pain.

I wasn’t actually sure where this body came from. I knew what I had been trying to do when I shoved into that field of stars. Having watched that man walk from one side to the other, I figured it must work in reverse. Yet I had not expected to get an actual physical body out of it. Was I like the one they called the Hatman now? He had a body, yet could still be seen on the other side.

No, the Hatman was a monster. Twisting us into… things. Draining us of everything that made us… us. I wasn’t like that. Probably.

Was I? I didn’t think so. At the very least, something I had integrated with gave me the ability to communicate properly. That was something none of us had ever observed in the Hatman. Communication was rare among us. If we wanted to know what another of us thought or knew, we often forcibly integrated them. There was no point in dragging it out through slower methods.

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Could I still do that? I glanced around the moving room, trying to ignore the novelty of a room that moved in favor of focusing on the other beings around me. Most had no presence in the other side. The only one who did was the small one. I could probably integrate her… but I might be the one integrated in the end. Not to mention, I doubted any of the others around me would be happy with that action. I didn’t know what they would do, only that I wouldn’t like it.

Words would have to suffice.

Concerning, Sapphire noted as he forced his hands back to the keyboard to make a note. That one was definitely one he would be assigned to. If only to keep a watch on it. Integration, Sapphire learned from its time inside his head, didn’t exactly destroy other entities. It subjugated them, absorbed and, as the term stated, integrated them. The entity here had never been integrated, though he supposed no active entity had been. Simply because they wouldn’t exist as a separate entity if they lost such a voracious event.

Memories of a dark world of immaterial thought welled up in Sapphire. He had three distinct sources of those memories. One from the Hatman, who had really only been cognizant of its surroundings in an abstract manner. One from the less hostile entity, which was the clearest. And one from Ruby, who tinted her memories with expectations of reality.

Entities, as far as he could tell, spontaneously appeared over there, providing a fresh supply of integration subjects—and occasionally becoming integrators themselves. Maybe they were shadows of powerful psychics. Maybe something else entirely. That was a question for scientists and researchers. His job, at the moment, was to conduct a threat analysis.

Based on this entity’s thoughts of absorbing others—even if she decided against the idea at the moment—represented a threat. The Hatman, feeding on others, did not decide against it, obviously. That meant that any other entity from that world of thought would potentially instigate hostilities. It was simply their nature. If there were more spatial anomalies, as Dyna phrased it, more might emerge from that other world.

You looked around the trailer with your own eyes, leaving your body slack after typing out the latest segment to your report. You weren’t quite sure what you were looking for. A way to test something, perhaps. Something stuck with you, ever since the Hatman escaped its initial confinements and your mind took on its thought patterns.

The world itself felt… thinner than it had before. Ruby could see—or otherwise detect—entities on the other side. You couldn’t. But the Hatman had been able to force people and objects over into that other world. Erase them from reality and reconstitute them as beings of the mind. You had seen how he had done it to the weapon the opposing organization had used to subdue him. You had seen how he tried to do it to the woman wearing protective gear.

Reaching out with his actual hands, Sapphire pulled a pen from a holder in the wall. It was a simple pen. An average ball-point blue pen encased in a shell of fiberglass and gold-colored metal. A label on the side held the Carroll Institute’s logo and name, along with a phone number and email address. An ordinary sight around the institute. Inside the mobile trailer, there were probably a dozen identical pens.

Sapphire closed his hands around it and thought back to what he had learned and observed from the Hatman. It just took a push. A little twist to squeeze it through the thin barrier between the physical and the mind. When he opened his hands again, the pen wasn’t there.

“Facility Alert: Unknown psionic waveform collapse detected.”

Everyone in the room tensed at Beatrice’s announcement. The soldiers shifted, weapons already at the ready. Doctor Teeth, unwilling to remove his protective gear at the moment, twisted and looked about as if he might be able to spot what happened. Dyna and Ruby both drew weapons and started scanning the environment as well. Even the entity and the injured boy, though far more subdued, started looking around with narrowed eyes.

Matt knew. He saw that strange boy in the far corner of the truck fiddling with a pen. Then… It was a bit hard to believe, even for himself, but he saw that pen turn into a ghost. It sounded insane. It probably was. A pen turned into a ghost? Even after having had a few things explained to him, he was so lost and confused about everything that had gone on that he didn’t even know where to start in unraveling it all.

All he knew for certain was that the Hatman was being dealt with. By professionals. At least, these people looked far more professional than the people in the other truck. They had proper tools and doctors, their truck was far larger and fancier, and they had more people. Including people with some guns. If all else failed and they had to run again, guns did work to slow down the Hatman.

Matt wasn’t sure if he should say something though. He wasn’t a professional. And that boy in the corner, who he was fairly certain had floated into the seat, creeped him out. The way he moved wasn’t right. And his eyes didn’t focus on anything in particular.

The others in the room didn’t seem to like him either. Two of them seemed to notice the ghost pen, though. The other strange woman who all the people here were just calling ‘entity’ at the moment, and the little girl with red hair who Matt was sure he had killed with a trap he couldn’t even remember placing… yet here she was. They both had ghosts overlaid on top of them, which was probably how they noticed.

I remained where I was, barely moving, ignoring Ruby’s words. It was possible that the announcement wasn’t about me, but the timing was too coincidental. I probably deserved all Ruby’s ire. Experimenting like that was going to get me written up. Not to mention thrown into a testing chamber where I would do nothing but push things through the worlds for weeks on end.

And yet, I stared at my empty hands. Some psychic abilities came easily to me. Any time my mind took an imprint of another psychic’s mind, I knew how to use their power. At least for a time. Be it illusion projection, clairvoyance, or alternate methods of mind reading or even mind control. Artificer abilities didn’t work. Perhaps I could force them to work if I had the artifacts, but touching artifacts other than my own burned. A purely psychosomatic burning, but it caused pain nonetheless.

There were some abilities that were strange to me, and unusable despite my best efforts. Two of those abilities were sitting in the room with me.

Ruby’s power gave her a perfect and acute knowledge of every aspect of her own body. Anything that she considered her. It fed into her artifact’s ability to repair her body as if they had been tailored to work together. Knowing what I knew about her past and parents, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. Nevertheless, it didn’t work for me. It didn’t give me perfect knowledge of my body and it didn’t give me knowledge of her body. It was just a blank spot.

The other ability I had no capacity to use… wasn’t fully classified or understood. The Carroll Institute was, understandably, hesitant to put too much focus on it for fear that its owner would use it against them.

A fear that Sapphire agreed with, based on what he saw in her mind. If she thought they did something to her whether or not it was true, it was entirely possible, likely even, that she would act with hostility. His input in the matter had shaped some of the policy.

There was another fear that she might accidentally simply erase reality itself. Sapphire doubted that one, though couldn’t deny that it was possible, just unlikely. Having been inside her mind, he knew that her sense of self and knowledge of how the world was supposed to work was fairly concrete. Still, it had a few of the administrators contemplating simply killing her to eliminate the threat.

They were held back by another faction that worried that her death would destroy reality in much the same way.

Sapphire had no input for that group.

Class X Will Imposition. That was what it said in the most classified of documents. Sapphire didn’t technically have access to them, but nothing could be kept secret from him for long. Walter knew. Thus Sapphire knew. Walter knew that Sapphire knew, but he also knew that Sapphire wouldn’t spread it around. Besides Walter, Sapphire was pretty sure that knowledge of the true power of Dyna Graves was restricted to only the highest echelons of the Carroll Institute’s administrators.

Everything odd about her had been explained away through other means. Generally artifacts. The psionic cascade that first brought her to Sapphire’s attention? Anomalous artifact activity—possibly artifact cross-contamination during the compatibility tests. Emerald failing for the first time in her life? Enemy artifact usage. So on and so forth. Every single thing had an official explanation. Sometimes, those official explanations were even the actual explanations.

You didn’t glance over to Dyna T. Graves. Still, you were aware of her. You were always aware. She didn’t think she was a reality warper. Every strange thing she had experienced was simply how the world worked for her, thus there was never anything deeper to cause her to question too much. In fact, she was starting to get an idea that her power was that of artifact creation.

If she thought that hard enough, would it become true? Would she lose her Will Imposition?

You weren’t sure about that.

But now, having interfaced with two separate inhuman entities, there was another question on your mind.

Reaching forward to the keyboard once again, you typed out a coded message into your report that only the intended recipient would be able to decipher.

Is Dyna Graves human?