Again, Chariot troubled me. Again, he'd hospitalized one of his fellow assets. Temperance may have issues with being reliable, creative, decisive, or even sane, but she was loyal, and her numbers were off the charts in many categories. This was now the second time she had been injured by his reckless idiocy, and that was two times too many for my taste. Something would have to be done about him.

I had informed him before that to me, he was nothing but a tool, and if he could not prove himself useful, he would be disposed of. I had thought I had made myself perfectly clear, but given the Exhuman's constant antics...not just in injuring his peers, but his egregious disappearance and cavorting with the Code-X locked in my cabin...no matter how much Miss Dawn tried to cover for him, I could read between the lines.

Honestly, this had been a long time coming. He was trouble from the outset.

I sat at my desk in my office, perusing personnel files which turned my scowl into a grimace. Even the inviting cup of tea steaming away before me--brewed by one of my new servants, just an ordinary human--offered me little solace.

I knew several of Chariot's failings were mine. Time had been short, and I had no intention of authorizing his transfer into the XPCA until he had properly learned discipline. I had intended for each of the Exhumans to learn loyalty under me first, and then proceed with standard XPCA training and drilling regimes at a regular base. There, they would be molded into weapons as useful as any other XPCA soldier.

Instead, the timetable moved up on us with that infuriating Code-X's assault on us. Convenient though it was in some ways, certainly Albion was an easier man to succeed than he was to persuade, it had thrown my plans for the Exhumans in my stable off-kilter, and that was simply inexcusable.

Still, somehow it seemed all the others had become useful and productive. Why was it only Chariot which constantly gave me headaches? The Exhuman was no idiot, he knew the consequences of irritating me. Or perhaps he merely did not care?

Either way, I had to decide if he was worth keeping, and if so, how he would be disciplined. Lack of fear or lack of care, the right punishment would solve both.

I took a sip of tea. It was a little calming, but that amount paled in comparison to the prospect of finally resolving my Chariot issue.

I had invested much into securing him and his compliance, yet if he continued to be a nuisance, it may save me trouble overall to cut the cord sooner than later. It wasn't like we were running out of Exhumans, I mused.

I leaned back with my tea and the tablet in my hand, scrolling through the data with an idle flip of my index finger. As the trends had indicated, Exhumans were becoming ever-more frequent. We'd had a run of good luck recently...or more specifically, excellent preparation and success of our propaganda units...and while the numbers were up in an absolute sense, the number of actual violent events was way down.

I had to wonder how much of that was the fault of the P-Force and New Eden. I had long suspected that giving Exhumans a choice, even a false choice might reduce the number of events. It was the difference between offering them a reality and telling them to accept it, and offering them two realities and asking which they preferred--the number who would reject both outright was a fraction of those who would reject one.

I suppose it didn't help that the one was a choice of death, but at this point I was really just splitting hairs.

The point was, Chariot was growing ever more replaceable, and was a little bitch like I'd never been burdened with before.

I smiled to myself as I got up. No, not never before. There had been one other even more impossible than he. The girl who started me down this entire path. I checked my wrist holo and made sure I had no further business on the day before heading to the gym, my servants performing their duties swiftly and silently as they should.

I felt like thinking, and so jumped onto a treadmill, setting a brisk pace and shallow incline where I could run for a few hours uninterrupted.

She'd shown up at my door as though she belonged there. My gate and the security cameras, nothing to her. Just a tiny brown girl in baggy clothes banging away on the door of an XPCA officer's private home like she was selling cookies. The only reason I even opened the door was to inquire how she'd managed to defeat my house's security so easily.

Instead, I got my first taste of her delinquent attitude. The first of many.

"You're an XPCA, aren't you?" she asked. She didn't wait for an answer. Never did. "Well, I'm an Exhuman, so take me in."

"Is that all? Please find a police officer and let him know. Thank you for your decision," I had said. I was younger back then, and saw the world a little differently. Come to think of it, it was in dealing with her that many of my perceptions of how Exhumans and the XPCA worked were formed.

I closed the door and found it blocked by a dirty sneaker attached to a brown skinny leg, and the face in the crack broke into a broad smile. "You misunderstand, mister. I didn't say arrest me, I said take me in."

After that, no matter how many times she was escorted off my property, no matter how I improved my home's defenses, no matter how many guards or dogs or cameras or unclimbable electrocuted fences, she was always there waiting for me when I got home. She did not speak, which troubled me, merely smiled deviously, as though every day were a game.

One day I woke and went downstairs and found the girl inside, dressed in a white uniform with a navy apron and yellow rubber gloves, her hair tied up. Stupefied, I had to ask what she was doing inside my house.

"I work here, stupid," she said, and went back to dusting. Sure enough, I checked with my housekeeping service and they confirmed there was a new girl working there today. I expressed my displeasure at having a stalker and a child in my house and they apologized and sent out someone else at once.

Of course, the next day, she was back again. When I called to complain, they told me, according to their system, this was an entirely different girl than yesterday. And from then on, her daily game became infiltrating my house as a house servant. No matter my demands for screening or changing agencies, every morning she was there.

After nearly a month of this, my sanity felt very spent, and in a moment of frustration, I called the girl into my office and demanded to know what she wanted of me.

"I told you," she said, "take me in."

"You are already in. It does not seem possible for me to keep you out. I am fairly certain that even should I shoot you--" I pulled my sidearm from its holster and put it on the desk in front of me "--that you would still arrive at my house the following day, utterly unperturbed."

"It's true," she said.

"Then what do you really want?"

She sat down in the chair opposite me without invitation. "Open your ears, stupid. Take. Me. In."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean what it sounds like. I need to live here."

"You are serious."

"Do you think I'd do the things I've done if I weren't?"

"But why? Do you seek to do me harm? With your abilities, if you wanted me dead, I am certain you would have no trouble of it. So what then?"

"I don't know," she said.

"You...don't...know."

"Look, take me in, or this never ends for you. That's all there is to it."

I stopped and looked at her seriously. She was a child. Hispanic, small, even for her age. What use did I have for such a thing?

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"You wish for me to adopt you?"

"Whatever works for you. Baby, prisoner, mistress…"

"You are insane and disgusting."

"...live-in servant. Doesn't matter to me."

"I regret inviting you to this conversation. It seems there is nothing for me to gain by reasoning with you. You wish for me to endure you all day, every day, to fix the issue of you appearing before me randomly? I would not trade partial torment for complete torment."

"So what you're saying is, you will only let me move in if I torture you more."

I froze. "I never said that."

"But that's where the logic goes." She grinned maliciously.

"You said you were an Exhuman?" I asked, and picked up my sidearm.

"Yes."

I checked the chamber, and then the magazine, and cycled the action to move a round from one to the other. "Then as an XPCA, I am within my rights to execute you. Goodbye."

The gun exploded and I felt my arm jerk with the force of the blast, but she, if anything, grinned only wider. I frowned nearly as much. A blank? I pointed the gun to the floor and fired again, the second report sounding muted to my deafened ears, but I saw a bullet-hole and explosion of wood fragments where the ground was struck. Was she then actually an Exhuman, and one immune to bullets?

I checked the chamber and magazine again and saw the rest of the rounds were, in fact, blanks, just crimped casings. Just the one real bullet then? Had she missed it? And how had she replaced the ammunition to begin with? I kept the weapon on my person at almost all times.

I began to grow nervous beneath her smile. I opened my desk drawer using my thumbprint to open the lock and emerged with a box of ammunition. Live ammunition. She watched with bemusement as I opened the box and slid out the tray. I pulled one bullet from the tray and saw the head was crimped with no projectile. A blank. Same as the next I pulled, and the next after that.

"How did you get into my desk drawer?" I asked.

"Not sure I want to answer," she said. "I believe I'm supposed to start torturing you more."

The drawer was undamaged. I connected my holo to the lock and it reported no unauthorized use. To be sure, I inspected the desk with a brief walk-around, and found no openings on any side.

I sat back down and poured myself a cup of tea, simply bewildered, and took a sip, before spitting it on the desk.

"Nice cup of hot cocoa?" she asked.

How? I lifted the lid of the teapot and the brown liquid stared back at me. The infuser was still hanging there, and I pulled it out. Empty, and stained brown. It had been full of chocolate powder, not tea leaves, but it also showed no signs of damage or tampering.

I set the teacup down and walked to the office door with the intention of throwing it open and throwing the girl out, but as I turned and pulled the knob, it came off in my hand. It had been loose for months now, and I hadn't had the time or motivation to have someone come fix it.

"That is just bad luck," she said, turning in the chair to look over the high back at me. "Or is it? Feeling tortured?"

"You are an Exhuman," I said, finally believing her. "What are you? Telekinetic?" I frowned at the doorknob in my hand. "Code-X?"

"Take me in."

"Never."

Her assaults grew more brutal by the day, but rarely was it anything as overt as that first day. I began to see her hand in everything, wherever coincidences lined up too perfectly to be explained. When a garbage bin dropped a banana peel in front of another officer who had just heated up a bowl of corn chowder, which I detested, and he slipped and splashed it all over me. When I got four flat tires on the drive home from the office, every day for a week, despite changing my route home every day after the first. When my pants split due to sabotage and I bought another pair at random from a store I had never before visited...and they split again immediately in an identical fashion.

Finally, I'd had enough. I had filed report after report on the girl, but the XPCA was unable to so much as verify the existence of the girl, and serious hints were being delivered that my new psychosis would hold me back from any further promotions.

I stepped off of the treadmill and held a towel to my face, seeping heat and sweat into its dark comfort. I'd given in to the girl, and, I was sure, under her manipulation of improbable influence, I started collecting Exhumans. At first, I didn't even know why, but the more I witnessed them, the more I realized they would be the ones to save the XPCA, under my leadership.

When I found Temperance and then Jack, the need for some kind of name distant from their previous lives became apparent, and so the girl had become Magician, a fitting title as she bewitched me into her whims.

She was dead now. Chariot and the others lived on in her legacy, and I still never understood why she had made such demands of me. Perhaps she was insane, and her objectives were as meaningless as they appeared.

But a part of me suspected otherwise.

I went back to my office after a brief shower and change and found the door open. Perhaps it was just reminiscence on Magician, but the fact that somehow, she'd escaped even death to come here and torment me one last time was the first thought which crossed my mind.

Instead, the chair spun and in it sat the Exhuman Code-X. I frowned. This was not where she was supposed to be. And in her lap, pointed at me, a standard-issue XPCA sidearm, similar to the one on my hip.

[Hello, douchebag,] she said into my mind.

"Hello. Get out of my chair."

She waved the gun a little at me. [So you can hear me. That's something at least.]

"Final warning. Leave now, Exhuman."

[I found this weapon just laying around downtown. Amazing what people will abandon on a street corner, just sitting there all by itself in the hands of some XPCA asshole.]

Before she could react, I had drawn and fired, placing a bullet in her at center mass. The mess on my chair was unfortunate, but I would take the blood of an Exhuman on it over an Exhuman any day. With a pained gasp, she crumpled and fell to the floor, and I began to circle the desk.

She popped up on me and fired back, hitting me in the shoulder. I dropped her again, clinging to the blood spreading across my arm, and trying to kick the gun away from her body, but she'd fallen on it. When she stirred again, I shot her again, in the back of the head, and struggled further with the furniture and the damn blood-soaked Sino girl now half-lodged under my desk with my one good arm holding a pistol.

I could guess why nobody had responded to the shots going off. This was a Code-X in my office. I simply didn't have enough hands to move her effectively however, and her gun had fallen somewhere I couldn't locate in the few seconds I had between her revivals.

After much of this, she stirred again, and I pressed the trigger only to hear a click without a boom. I swore as I realized I hadn't been counting bullets, and reached for my holster to change the magazine.

She shot me again, in the leg this time, and I fell over, my gun bouncing uselessly out of my hands as I slammed against the floor.

[Now, that wasn't very nice,] she said, and spun the chair around just so she could sit in it over me. [I think you owe me a little apology.]

"Exhuman filth. Get out of my chair and GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!" I bellowed at her.

We were so very close, as well. Again, this damn Exhuman had moved up my timeline on me before I was fully ready. R&D had been working on the tech needed to defeat her at my insistence the instant I'd learned about her. If only I had access to the prototypes.

[Sheesh, stop yelling. You're getting spit on me, and honestly, I prefer the blood. Red is definitely my color.]

I tried to stand and thought I might manage. My leg injury wasn't so bad, a clean pass-through in my thigh, which had fortunately not nicked the artery. What prevented me from standing was the Exhuman, who kicked me in the face and then ground her heel into my bullet wound, making my breath come out in small gasps and white lights flash in front of my eyes from the pain.

[That is for Lia,] she said. [And this,] she punched me in the injured shoulder, and then jammed her finger into the bullet hole. I could do nothing but gasp and gape as my eyes rolled into my head in agony. I could still hear her in my mind, clear as anything over my own scream. [This is for Athan. Don't you ever fucking kidnap one of my friends.]

She pulled her thumb free with a squelch of my own blood and I fell down gasping. The world around me swum in and out of view, but I realized I was being forced onto my back.

[Now, you're going to tell me a couple things, and if I like your answers, I'll leave and never bother you again. If I don't, we're going to give you another hole, and then I'm going to be the first one to take its virginity. And I am not a gentle lover. Got it?]

The only reason I could understand her was that she was speaking directly to my mind. I certainly wasn't in any state to respond. She seemed to understand this and frowned as she advanced on me.

[Tsk. I'll have a couple of your servants pick you up and bring you to your bedroom. Clean you up a little. It won't do for you to die on me. Pretty obnoxious, trying not to kill humans, honestly. And generally, it's not like I care, but something about you...I can't read. And that pisses me the hell off.]

The door opened, and two of my servants walked in, clumsily, and without smiles.

[So we're taking you up there, and then you're going to tell me everything you know about why my powers don't work on you...and then you're going to tell me everything you know about Mage. And you're going to talk because if you don't...I did such an incomplete job last time I cleaned out the XPCA top brass, and you just know I hate leaving a job half-finished.]

I groaned and blacked out as they moved me carelessly, out from the time they hoisted me. But before I went, there was one glimmer of hope, the tiniest of schemes which just might pay out.

The bedroom, she'd said. It was where the prototype was, where I'd last been toying with it. If I could only get my hands on it.

And then I was violently jarred into non-being by my own servant.