Stumblebum drug Passthrough all the way to the second story room we had set our eyes on. It was a studio apartment above a restaurant, although clearly vacant for some time now. Whoever owned it must have neglected to report it to the authorities, because otherwise it would be full to the brim right now with refugees from all the destruction recently.

It's one thing to be against taking in the needy of the whole world, I thought, but these people are supposed to be our neighbors. They’re regular good folk, and they're sleeping on the streets.

It didn't sit right with me. Still, it got us someplace quiet and out of the rain to do our work. First, we had to place a tourniquet on our kidnapped villain’s bleeding leg. We didn't want him losing consciousness before I got what I needed out of him, after all.

Once that was done, we found a chair and tied him up. Stumblebum bragged aloud about his knot-tying skills while Sixes and I just watched. Once the super was properly neutralized I felt comfortable drawing a little bit closer. He might not have meant it personally when he threw a grenade into a sealed compartment with us earlier in the day, but I sure took it that way. I wouldn’t let him drop me through the floor now either.

Though I didn't want to be cruel or petty of course, right now intimidation was my job, and I didn’t want to half-ass any of this super-hero business. So, naturally, I opened my act with a strong show of power.

In just one touch, I transferred a memory of pain into his body. It was the worst pain that I had ever experienced by natural cause, both spread and multiplied over every inch of his skin.

Back when my parents had died, the rampager who killed them had flensed most the skin off my arms as I tried to get away from him. Then, my exposed muscle roared with blinding and searing agony as I made it out of the mall and into the winter wind.

You helped to unleash a rampager, I recalled. Only fair that you know what it feels like.

Immediately he began to struggle and scream, and I watched as the chair Passthrough was sitting in flickered in and out of reality, causing it to drop a few inches and solidify into the floor. Stumblebum quickly drew a knife to his throat and warned, "Try to escape and we'll cut this short."

Passthrough caught his breath finally and responded. "I... I wouldn't make it far."

I decided to start my questions easy by satisfying my own curiosity first. "How does your power work, Passthrough?" It had been bugging me all day.

He looked at me reluctantly, then shook his head. "You've already seen by best trick," he offered.

He meant the invisibility. "Indeed, that was nifty. But personally, I wanted to know if you could walk through walls yourself. Could you go through the floor right now if you wanted to? It would have been a very powerful skill to leverage, yet you never did in our fight. That struck me as odd."

Interestingly, his aura spiked in fear at that. So much so that being close to it began to cause goosebumps to prickle up along my skin.

"Unless you're going to start using your power, Headcase, then I could be doing this twice as fast," Sixes said. "No offense, but I'm trained in advanced interrogation. We just need to know who we're up against out there and where these out-of-towners are coming from."

None taken…

I waved him off. "Fine, I'll go faster." If he wanted to see results, then I would show them to him. Back to Passthrough I turned, still refusing to answer such a simple question, and I nodded tersely. "What you felt before was just the warm-up."

He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes as I moved around behind him. With both of my hands placed at the sides of his head, I took in a deep breath and began mustering my energy. I wouldn't use enough to knock him out, but just enough to make him rethink his entire life.

There was just one more trick I wanted to try first.

I could see his nervous system like an overlay on his body with my waking eyes, all full of color and motion. In particular I focused on decoding some of the signals moving to and from the motor cortex. One thing I knew about the mind was that influencing the senses came much easier to me than hijacking volition. The brain would accept some very strange and foreign inputs before it ever allowed me to take direct control of its outputs. Yet, if I learned exactly how it liked to communicate, I could slip something in past the defenses. That was what I was finding, as I poked and prodded with small twitches.

If I learned to speak the unique language of his brain’s patterns, then I could trick the body into accepting my own signal as if it were his. It only took time to adjust my frequency.

Sixes and Stumblebum were willing to humor me as I stood there, eyes distant, and did my work, assuming that I was getting ever-closer as the villain spasmed. In reality, all I was doing was figuring out the smallest little change I had in mind. Not to be wasteful of time, but to learn a vital truth.

I can influence the motor neurons. If only weakly.

Next time, as I flooded him with a wave of pain I had prepared, he was completely silent. I had seized up his vocal cords. With more practice, I might even be able to make them move against his will. But that could take hours. It was like trying to play a videogame with a massive and complex controller using unlabeled buttons. The learning curve was steep.

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Still, I could see the confusion and horror play out on his face as I fiddled with his brain. I went about mapping his fingers and limbs. Figuring out where I could send my electricity to cause which digits to contract or extend. Watching his movements, they looked uncanny.

"Stop!" he yelled, managing to wrestle control back for a moment as I got distracted playing. "Please... stop."

"Are you ready to talk?" I asked, pushing through any empathy I was feeling to keep a hard face. The cold rage I was drawing on did wonders to help me there.

His lips curled in, and his head bowed. Passthrough remained silent.

To Sixes I simply shrugged then. "I'm going to try something a bit fancier, then you can take over if you want, I guess."

He spoke openly in front of our prisoner. "I'd have you use your power to help me, but yes, that might be good. Talking is half the battle, Headcase, and you're not asking him any specific questions. You have to apply the pain and then offer him an out. Basic behaviorism. Pair the stimulus and the reward close together."

Stumblebum laughed at that. "They really do teach you guys everything."

"Well, we have a lot to make up for," Sixes said, gesturing to the three of us supers.

Okay. I can show him that I can do this.

I patted Passthrough on the shoulder and he flinched. "Here we go again, sir." Even while the others were talking, I kept trying to see what I could experiment with here. Every moment was a precious opportunity to extend the horizons of what my power was capable of, but I also couldn't simply waste time. Carrion might burst through the ceiling any moment now… especially with how distracted I was. He could have been right on top of us, and I wouldn't notice. I had to do my job efficiently, therefore. No more experimenting.

"Why were you so afraid to answer my previous question?" I asked, carefully measuring my words. "Is there something you don't want to tell me?" This was a trick I’d learned years ago.

Saying my question so deliberately caused a memory to play across his mind, as in saying, ‘don’t think about the pink elephant’. Although this image was moving too quick and shallow beneath the pain he was experiencing for me to grab onto it, I had located where I could reactivate it, and that was the key. Since it was stored in a physical structure of neurons, all I had to do was give that pathway a good kick, and it would play for him like a waking dream. Only then could I see it clearly by intercepting the visual feedback.

Yet, all I saw was darkness. Complete and utter pitch dark.

No sound or smell, either. Just the feeling of breathless black…

There was a more complex context surrounding this memory, but without access to so many more of the brain’s networks, I couldn't piece it together. Though this villain's screams were muted, he still struggled like he had never struggled before as I made him see this. Something had him far more afraid than the agonizing pain I had inflicted, and I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Nothing came through but a feeling of tightness.

That was when it hit me.

"There's no way," I said to the others in disbelief, but it was true. "He's claustrophobic."

Passthrough absolutely could walk through walls if he had wanted to, but he was deathly afraid of his own power it turned out. It was as if the thing had been given to him specifically to torment him. Like so many other supers, he had been cursed as a price for the power given to him.

Checkmate. As I tuned out Stumblebum's maniacal laughter, I used this information to finish the job once and for all.

I wrapped my hands around his eyes and sent as much interference into his optical nerve as I could, essentially blinding him. Then, I followed up with the sensation of a crushing weight on his chest, spreading over his entire body. Finally, I projected my voice into his head, trying to force him to give-in as I did with a push. "You're going to tell us everything, or I'm going to make you stuck like this. My power can do that, and no one can reverse it."

He believed the lie because, deep down, he had always feared that was exactly how he’d die.

Pure, unadulterated panic seized Passthrough’s entire soul. I could hear him screaming out in his mind that he would do anything I wanted, but I still kept his vocal cords shut.

I kept going until the idea of what his bosses might do to him had completely faded from his mind. It had been playing since the start. That conflict was between his desire not to die here and now with us, but also the knowledge of what horrible things he had seen his villainous partners were capable of. It was a tough bet, but I had to make him fear me more than he feared them.

The rest was simply what my power did best. It convinced him to do what he had already secretly desired. Give in.

The amount of psychic electricity lancing between the two of us reached a fever pitch. It had become visible as the tension ratcheted up to new heights.

"OKAY!" Passthrough sputtered as I suddenly released him. "I'll talk! Please! Please just stop!"

I smiled to Sixes and swept my arms open. "He's... he's all yours," I said proudly. Yet, I was rapidly stricken with weakness. This was my moment to flourish and take in the pride of what I'd done, but I was getting absolutely sick to my stomach. The field of negative energy that I had generated between the two of us was so potent that it nearly turned my legs to jelly. In the end, there was nowhere for it to go but to settle into my guts like a ton of molten lead.

It couldn't be underestimated just how deeply intertwined the mind was with the rest of the body. Two master chess players could burn as many calories in a game just by thinking as someone running a goddamn marathon. The burden my power placed on me was thus like trying to swallow my own poison.

I walked briskly and confidently to the corner and promptly emptied my stomach. There was nothing else I could do at that point.

"You, uh, you alright there, Headcase?" Stumblebum called.

I gave him a big thumbs up. Not only was I alright, but I was also ecstatic. I had learned much more about my power. Already I had ideas about how I could further push these capabilities of mine for control.

No holding back, I thought. I can tell the difference between friend and foe. I don't have to fear using my abilities to hurt people now. Just as long as they're the right people.

There came a heavy slap as Sixes tried to wake Passthrough up as their head lulled. "We're going to start with the out-of-towners," he said. "Who are they, what can they do, and why are they here?"

Passthrough's face drained of all color. Even after everything he had just gone through, having had his worst nightmare leveraged against him to supernatural heights. Even after all that... he still hesitated at the thought of betraying these strangers.

"They're... demons," he said, and meant it.