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<10/10/2013 - 13:00 | Cage High School (Library), Austell, GA, USA>

Despite everything I fought earlier, I found myself in this position, crawling back and grasping straws to relive a part of the past I chose to abandon. There are days that I hate low-level psionic powers, and there are days I find every factor of psionics fully fascinating. I'm a man who doesn't want to be directly involved in something I'm already part of, desired to stand on the top of a dividing fence, claiming each as my home.

What I want changes over time. Mental clarity is a gift I only have on certain days; confusion owns the rest. I figured this must be why I continued trying, again, and again, and again to get this right. I shut my eyes once more, focusing on the exact psionic signatures I knew I would need to for another blip of clairvoyance. This was my ninetieth attempt this week, my interest in psionic powers renewed again. However, like many times before, no matter how hard I tried or how patient I was, I received no information from my invocations, proving the attempt of clairvoyance to be a total failure.

"Nothing again!" I panted audibly, since this was already taking too much energy out of me. Even though I was failing to make clairvoyance work like before, each attempt still cost me a great deal of limited psionic energy. All I could do to stabilize myself each time was to drink an excessive amount of water, and listen to Lumina on a broken loop again.

"It's not going to work for you anymore Reed. I already warned you about falling out of practice. If you don't keep using clairvoyance for a long enough duration, it will cause psionic atrophy of that specific ability."

"But why must this atrophy be a permanent change?"

"I don't make the rules Reed. That's just the way it is."

I still had to consider myself lucky that losing one ability didn't destroy the other. After my ninth school year ended, we went through another terrible summer. I'll spare the details by saying I suffered no mental break downs this time around, but I lost count of how many times I screamed and cried with Lumina's distant absence. She wasn't the only entity I paused interactions with though. Given what happened with some negative foresights of clairvoyance, and the annoyance of its upkeep, I made the decision to stop using it... That was several months back. Now the ability, along with clairsentience is gone for good.

Not long ago, I tried to invoke both abilities only to find that I couldn't, and I celebrated their departure from the reaches of my Cora. I no longer had to spoil the ending of every day. I no longer had to worry about the break of privacy I conducted on everyone. I no longer had to feel the anxiety of something bad happening every day even though our connected school life wasn't all that unfortunate. I no longer had to mentally drain myself each day just for the sake of psionic upkeep. It was fun while it lasted, but clairvoyance only caused more trouble than it solved...

At least, that's what I thought. I would have preferred to have the ability to invoke clairvoyance only at my explicit leisure, to mark an important moment for astral scoping without being forced into it, but I never had that choice. My options were either, use clairvoyance every other day, or stop using it entirely. I would try to take breaks that were longer than a few days, only to struggle with clairvoyance after, though I still managed to get it working again with extra effort. Apparently, only the several months of summer were enough time to atrophy the ability, as Lumina mentioned. Even though nobody seems to have an exact answer on why or how, according to Lumina's law of psionics, when a specific ability atrophies, this loss in ability structure is permanent, even through the depths of Altiri resurrection.

I don't know why I want these powers back all the sudden. Maybe I'm just the type of person who wants to invoke abilities I know I can't. Maybe I just want to prove a point, my point - that losing clairvoyance this way should not be permanent. If I could just relearn it somehow, it would mean Lumina was wrong about permanent atrophy. She never technically said it was a certainty, rather - her assumption follows available data consolidated by facts obtained from the Scryers. Maybe, all I want is something I can use as concrete evidence to present to another human someday, evidence that Lumina exists.

Why? Because I want someone to talk to when I'm alone without her. I want someone who will listen to me, who will be there for me when I feel life isn't worth anything anymore, and who will keep my secret within a reasonable amount of shared silence. A true friend, someone I can communicate with when Lumina is away; not a replacement of Lumina, but a good platonic friend all the same. Is it really so wrong for me to demand this one thing into my life when I've otherwise been alone all this time? I already know Lumina is real; I don't need any convincing. But now that I think back, if she and I didn't meet, if I carried this solitude with me for half as long as I've been in high school, I don't think I would have survived, not as I am now. I would be somebody else, assuming I would even have the will to live on at all.

Lumina is the center of my world. She's the most important person to me. With her out of the picture, there isn't anything for me to talk about with anybody. Any small talk I try to roll out is just false carpet. Yet no matter what I do, people are so put off by the implausibility of our story that they'll pretend I don't even exist anymore. I can't link my mind with any other human. I can't share my exact perceptions with anybody else. I have nothing of value to anyone else when it comes to believing any of this, except for this one possibility I have yet to perfect. "I'll just have to keep chipping at it until something happens."

"I admire your persistence at least."

"Didn't you tell me that there were two other purged humans who could invoke clairvoyance? The Scryers put out information about this which doesn't leak any personal info, right?"

"Correct, although, if what I heard in the rumors were true, then these other two purged people would be of little interest to either of us."

"Why?" I must be missing something. "Did they fall out of practice too?"

"That isn't clear. The only info I have is what their exact capabilities were, or are, while they invoke their version of clairvoyance."

"Their version?"

"There are various forms of clairvoyance Reed. Remember? Your specialty is future-sight simple clairvoyance, while theirs is actually real time clairvoyance; it's another word for present-sight clairvoyance."

"So, I'm the only one who can see the future?"

"As of our learning anyway. It's not as if that ability is specifically locked only to you, but as for the rest of the world, they have specific psionic ability formats which nobody is aware of, because those powers are simply asleep inside them. The only way to awaken those powers are to purge a human individual and wait for them to hit their peaking period, and we won't know what if any abilities will float until then. Some purged humans don't learn any new abilities at all, aside from the telepathy, and we think it's because the actual psionic aptitude varies from person to person. Even with purging, some humans are psionically weaker than others."

"So then, I'm strong, as a scion I mean?"

"Stronger than average, but not by that much."

"How can you even tell?"

"There's an interesting ability that all us Altiri have, one that would be easy to teach you. It's known as psionic scanning, and it allows us to quickly read and determine a human's psionic aptitude point through a kind of special observation. It's hard to explain, but it essentially pertains to our sensitivity to the tiny and rarer frequencies of psionic energy that ordinary humans project out subconsciously, levels which would never-ever come anywhere close to reaching the amount of projection required for a Clair-sensing ability."

"... You've used this on other people around me, haven't you?"

"I'm sure I demonstrated it to you before, and you just forgot. There aren't that many people around you who have significantly higher psionic potential as an inactive scion, but there are some outliers."

"You mean Zero?"

"Yeah. Did you remember after all?"

"No, it's not that..." I understood what Lumina was going on about. Some people are more psionically fit for abilities and projection cycles than other people are. I do recall some conversation about the reasons and the process. Much of it has to do with both genetics and mental intelligence, which also includes emotional intelligence. I didn't give it too much thought before, but of all the random humans I selected around me to test my clairvoyance powers on, Zero was the one girl in the entire school who got my ability to work so well. My clairvoyance often revealed broken, fragmented images back to me, fragmented in the sense that each moment was easily visible, but broken apart in time frames. It was like glancing at a video that skipped every thirteen frames instead of going slowly. This effect went away more if I knew the individual better on a personal level.

Zero and I aren't that close friends though. She's simply someone I want to be friends with, but haven't made the proper effort to do so. Even so, she was the exception to any weakness presented in my clairvoyance ability. If ever I focused on her, at least after I learned how to control it more, the reception I got of her life around here was much better for some reason. I never subscribed to the idea that I knew her that well, so it can only mean one other thing, confirmed especially after Lumina's testimony.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Either way, you are correct. Zero has a fairly high psionic aptitude for someone her age, about 60% higher than your own. If she were to have been purged instead, then the abilities that would awaken in her would have either been much stronger, required less of her energy, or would have been far more dynamic and amazing than anything I've seen in you."

"Hey!"

"I'm not dissing you Reed. It's just a fact. Limited as humans are, some are psionically stronger than others. The fact that such variance exists at all leads us to believe in the theory of prodaption. The theory exists to explain that humans can adapt over a long period of time to become stronger or more capable in many ways, which can include psionic aptitude."

"So Zero is stronger than me in that, huh?" I sure wouldn't mind if Zero started using these kinds of abilities, unless it somehow brought her the same kind of grief it did for me. Guess it always brings back one quote; 'there's always somebody out there in the world stronger than you'.

"Zero and her sister as well. In fact, back when I was searching this side of Georgia for behavior information, around the same time I first became aware of you, I also became aware of Zero as well."

"You did?" When was this? Why didn't Lumina tell me?

"Yeah. It was a little late into it all. When I decided to start monitoring you exclusively using my advanced real time clairvoyance, I noticed that she also went to the same elementary school you did, after your parents split. I was mostly focused on you, but at the same time, I used my psionic scanning technique to determine variance in psionic aptitude as well. Even then, she was the strong outlier. I was briefly interested in Zero because of her obvious potential should anyone ever decide to purge her."

"'Should anyone decide'? I don't get it. If she was the stronger target than me, why would I become the candidate for a purge?"

"You can't seriously be asking that question, right? We don't make our choices of purge based on psionic aptitude. Nobody has, except for the first few aggressor groups who worked on purges for experimentation, and even then, psionic aptitude was only a small factor. Anytime an aggressor group wants to purge somebody, the reasons are almost always personal."

"Right." It's not as if I forgot about the reasons. It just baffles me how someone like Zero hasn't been purged yet. A part of me wishes that she would be purged, so that she could meet some Altiri people and make amazing new friends through them. Being purged by Altiri, it has to be the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me in the universe! Look what all it has led to. "I still don't understand why when I lose an ability, the loss is permanent."

"Neither do we. Our top Scryers estimate that it involves some kind of physical and astral strain to the coexisting Cora sectors of each control node of psionic projection methods."

"You're using too many big words this time Lumina. Tone it down a notch."

Instead, Lumina paraphrased for my simple understanding. "The misuse of psionic energy can be dangerous. It can actually strain the brain, in a physical manner, just as it can somehow alter the astral body connected between your soul and the physical body you inhabit. If an ability atrophies, it's a sign that some part of the Cora sector of the brain, which is already tinier than we can imagine, becomes permanently strained, specific to certain abilities."

"I'm sorry, the brain becomes damaged?"

"Strained Reed. Strained. There's a bit of a difference. The brain itself is an organ, but the Cora sector of the brain is a sub-organ of the main control center. It can undertake too much stress and break down, just like the heart or the lungs. Even though psionic energy waves are not physical, this physical part of the brain, which also uses your physical biological energy to function this way can be affected by the strain psionic projection puts it through."

Never did I realize using psionic energy could be dangerous. "So I stress this part of my brain out every time I project?"

"Every organ undergoes small amounts of stress which it is designed to handle. Passive and subconscious projection do not cause global psionic atrophy, because it's just not enough to damage anything. But if a human learns how to invoke clairvoyance, even through normal and regular ability use, the amount of psionic load this puts on that part of their brain can then make that person susceptible to two symptoms. The first is potential atrophy of the ability after it has been growing stronger, though this only occurs if the ability is not regularly practiced and forgotten. The second factor that harms humans in this sense is their general aging."

"Aging." That's right, the Altiri don't age like we do. Maybe that's why they're able to continuously use psionic powers eternally.

"Yes, aging. One factor that does carry some weight in our purging decisions is the age of the target. Anybody younger than eighteen but older than twelve is fair game, since that is the period when their psionic potential will be at its highest. Unfortunately, when humans age higher, slowly but surely, the body breaks down, and this includes the brain in all its aspects. When the brain doesn't function as efficiently as it should, the psionic aptitude suffers as a result. The powerhouse of the body eventually produces insufficient energy for strong daily operations, and this includes the Cora sector of the human brain as well."

"Wait a minute..." I didn't want to go there. I won't jump to the conclusions yet. "Lumina? What are you saying exactly?"

"Reed? I know it's a very long way off from now, but someday, if you don't die in some freak accident or succumb to cancer, your human body will still age. Decades over time, you'll notice more difficulty in trying to make these connections with me work. Your powers will one day grow weaker, until the day comes where, you'll still be alive, but unable to invoke telepathy, unable to communicate with me at all. The average age for this in humans is about sixty, but it's a rough estimate."

She did it for sure this time. Lumina killed my buzz. "I'm going to lose telepathy one day, due to old age?" Sixty is still a long way away from now, but in this instance, it would mean the same thing as death.

"Yes. It's actually possible to lose it in the very same way you lost the clairvoyance, but I know you would never allow that to happen. But eventually, this will happen. It's a symptom of straining no human can avoid."

"Uh huh." Though Lumina kept going on about her explanation of psionic straining, the truth kicked me in the gut, stopping my calm breaths.

"Remember how I told you what consequences Altiri suffer when we purge an individual? The total energy requirement of such a process is so incredibly high, it removes our ability of long-range clairvoyance and using any additional purges super-permanently. And do you want to know why?"

"Because it's dangerous?"

"Because, in the process of using that much psionic energy, more than a single Altiri is designed to handle, the process strains our Cora sectors, scarring our brains in ways we cannot even see. In the price of a purge, we suffer a kind of brain damage which locks us out of these abilities in the future. The Scryers think it has an effect on a shared astral brain, to explain how or why these abilities don't come back even after resurrection when presented."

"That is one new level of craziness... So, this clairvoyance thing, I'm not getting it back now, am I?"

"I won't tell you no, because there isn't absolute scientific proof the Scryers are correct in their assumption. This is a conclusion made based on what we've never seen happen before. You've amazed me so far Reed, but I doubt this is within your capabilities, re-learning a lost ability like that. I won't have any problem if you continue to try it though, so long as you are careful."

"Why? Isn't it dangerous for me to blindly project psionic information and waste all that energy for nothing?"

"When I said be careful, I meant about your water supply."

"Oh." It's not something I worry about anymore. Drinking a gallon of water a day is automatic for me now, as I have to. If I finish contacting or hanging up on Lumina, or recently attempted invocation of any Clair-sensing ability, and I don't drink water, the room spins a little and I feel lightheaded and weak.

"Remember what happened to you last time, when you used clairvoyance that many times in a close period and nearly collapsed?"

"Yeah. I managed to come to my senses, but I wasn't sure what was going on at the time, not that I had much time to think on it."

"Listen to me Reed. If you keep practicing psionic projection, even random blind projection that gives you no useful information, you can apply that as a kind of projection practice, making it even easier for you to contact me in the future. Think of it like a global means of practice. You know how you have difficulty reaching me after the summer ends when it's cold enough?"

"Yeah, because it's been a while."

"If you stay familiar with your projections, you'll gradually stay strong in your aptitude, even for telepathy, and it will be easier the next time."

"So you're saying I should keep this up, even assuming I'll never learn clairvoyance again?"

"Yes, that is what I'm saying. However, it's also important that you keep up with your water supply at the same time. I can't stress to you enough how deadly it can be, especially to a human, if you dehydrate to the point where you inherit too much of a sudden psionic load, and pass out. The effects can strain your Cora sector so bad that it fully shuts down and fails."

"That sounds bad."

"The Cora sector of your brain is still a core part of the body's vital functions. Damage to the Cora can also invoke pathway damage to the brain stem. That controls your breathing, heart rate, and basic consciousness. So yeah, that's bad."

"But, dehydration is the only factor that can cause that, right?"

"Essentially, yes. In theory, it can also be caused if a human were to, for instance, successfully invoke human-to-human telepathy and sustain it for 0.4 seconds. This would happen because the telepathy cost to potential energy ratio would tack on a psionic load of over 99% for its duration. Of course, the initial energy requirements would never be met, so that scenario isn't something to worry about. The thing is, because you are human, there are certain abilities that you cannot invoke because of those energy requirements. At the same time, your inability to reach those abilities, which in this instance would outright kill you, would also protect you from that kind of danger. So, the only way for any psionic projection to be dangerous, is if your body and brain struggles too much or for too long to maintain these projections. Dehydration will do that."

"Why do psionic abilities dehydrate us? That's something I never understood."

"Now you're just asking questions I don't have answers to. Like, why are the laws of physics one way, and not another way?"

Chuckling, I let her off the hook upon realizing I wasn't really in any real danger after all. "I guess. When somebody ever explains how the hell your planet has a vastly and inversely different gravitational field of strength outside and inside its atmosphere, maybe then I'll play Scooby Doo with the mysteries of the cosmic equations."

"Some things just are the way they are, and we can't change them. All we can do is find workarounds to anything that might pose a problem."

"Tell me about it." I know firsthand just how right she is. There are laws in this world, laws of physics, laws of psionics, and laws of basic existence. We cannot control or alter these rules, we can only try to make them suck less. I for one am not enjoying the rule about telepathy not functioning past 59oN. So, I'll move up north to a state with a lower average temperature setting; that will be my workaround.

But still... I've got time before I need to worry about all of that. "Well, this whole clairsentient-whatever practice is lame now. Want to catch up with me and a movie?"

"How could I ever say no to a movie night?"

"I think, after all the both of us have been through, we deserve the time to each other. That's how I want to spend the rest of my life, you know?"

"That's right. So long as we both keep spending our time together, loving each other forever, I don't think too much will get in our way."