After arriving back at psi-ops, I spend all my time not eating or sleeping, in the box. They put me in the weird scanner repeatedly, for indeterminately long periods that really starts messing with my head. I try to clear my mind and relax, but no matter how much patience I have or how determined I am to get them the test results they're looking for, I can only withstand so many weeks shut in like this.
“Ok, that's it. Guys?” I eventually call out.
Once they open up the door, Leona asks, “What is it?”
“I'm sorry, I can't. I have to move or I think my brain is going to start leaking out or something...”
Behind her, Mejja whistles appreciatively for some reason, causing Leona to turn back and glare at him before she pulls me out of the box and sets me down in a nearby chair.
I can feel my bruising is healed and I can walk again without trouble, but Leona still insists on carrying me anyway. “So, Seiko needs a break. What do you want to do?” she turns and asks, while Mejja retreats back to his computer.
“I... sorry, I have no idea. Just something. Anything.” I feel like any longer with complete lack of stimulation, and I'll turn into a vegetable.
“Alright, then let's... uhh...” Leona stops and frowns. What's wrong? “Hey, Mejja, what do you do for fun?”
Looking over from his computer, he deadpans, “This.”
“Right...”
“Umm, Leona? What do you do for fun?” I ask her, even though I think I can guess the answer.
She sighs. Of course it's, “Nothing. I don't really get to do fun.”
Thought so... Shit... “Alright, then how about a movie?” I suggest. That's always the low-effort go-to that satisfies everyone.
“Sure.” Then she pauses, with a slowly growing look of uncertainty.
She doesn't know how to do that, does she? “We can go to a theater,” I quickly speak up to help her out. “I don't know the area, but there must be some around here. You can look them up in maps.” What did she even do in the military when she wasn't fighting? And what about before that?
“Ah, got it.” She does so, and soon enough, we're heading out again.
When we pass the usual woman in the lobby, Leona says, “We're going to a movie, we'll be right back.”
“A movie...?” The woman looks confused.
We'll 'be right back?' I question similarly.
Leona carries me through the city, eternally lit in neon dusk colors without the sun reaching down below. I don't even know what time or day it is anymore...
When we arrive at the entrance to the theater, tucked into one of the endless skyscrapers, I try to wiggle out of her arms. “Put me down, people are going to stare.”
“What do you mean? They always stare.” From her look alone, it's dead obvious she has no idea what I'm talking about. With looks like hers, everyone around her must stare, all the time, I realize. Carrying me or not, it doesn't matter what she does, the response will always be the same...
I settle back down in her arms, and we go inside. Everyone stares at us. It's... actually kind of sad...
The employees show mixes of confusion and concern at my appearance, still wrapped up despite my injuries already being healed, and one even asks if I'm alright when we're getting popcorn.
I casually wave the guy off. I've spent so long in that box, I haven't gotten to remove my bandages.
We end up watching some cheesy romance movie for some reason, and by the time we come out...
“I don't get it, didn't she learn anything?”
“Nope,” I laugh and shake my head.
“I don't understand romance,” Leona sighs, “why would you choose the same type of person as the one who ruined your life before? Why would you expect anything different?”
“And didn't they leave the nice guy homeless in the end? What's with that? Why does only the military jerk get a happy ending?” I complain too.
“Seiko, is this what movies are like?” Leona asks, clearly worried.
“No! God, no! That one was terrible!”
“It is... unexpectedly comforting to hear that,” she admits. The way she says that makes me laugh, and we head back to her headquarters to continue with the tests.
At least I've gotten my head screwed on straight again, let's see how much more monotony I can take this time...
Thankfully, I make it to the end of the very surprisingly not endless scanning process before I lose it again.
----------------------------------------
“Fuck! Finally!” I moan, sliding my head to rest on my knees in a chair. God, you'd think crazy psion tech would work faster, how much schoolwork am I going to be catching up on? My friends don't think I'm dead because I never came back, do they?
Hell, I'm not going to get left back from missing too much school and end up a year behind everyone again, am I?
While I'm fretting and groaning, the best I can do is tell myself that it's worth it as long as I can get my body back to how it should be.
“Seiko Maka-san,” Mejja addresses me, as we sit down in a little meeting room off of his lab. “To start, let me summarize. You were born male, then your body turned female due to an unknown cause, but your mind was not altered at all.”
“Yes.” So far, he's just going over the information I gave him back before the ridiculous tests.
“You have come to us with hopes to fix your body and return it to its previous, male state.”
“Y-yeah.”
“Good, good.” The strange doctor(?) nods and makes a note on his laptop. “Now, I've finished collection and initial analysis of the test data from your scans.”
He folds his hands together, pointing out with his thumb and index finger, kind of like making guns with his fingers. He brings them up, pressing index fingers to his chin as he looks over something on his screen thoughtfully.
Flicking his fingers forward to point at me, he says, “We have good news and bad news. First, the good news.”
He gets straight into it. “Good news is we did find psi traces on you, so we can say for certain that a psionic power was the cause for your change.” Alright, that's a good start.
“The bad news is, the traces we found weren't any we could immediately identify. They didn't show similarities to any of the psions in our registry, or any of our readings from past tremors, so we weren't able to identify the exact nature of the power that changed you. This means, we can't easily draw up a counter for it, to undo the changes that way. It will take us a good deal of time to figure things out.”
“Oh...” Well, expecting the whole answer to fix this just being stuck to my body would be too optimistic, I guess.
While I consider what he's told me, Mejja goes on. “Now, the more-bad news, is that none of that really matters.”
“Uhh, what?”
“Look here.” Wait, aren't you going to explain that last bit?! Barreling right on, he flicks up a big, holographic image over the conference room table. It's probably a scan, with a faint grayish, three dimensional outline of a person's body, very slowly rotating. The profile actually looks like Leona, I think, and a moment later, he confirms it.
“This is a scan of Vicca. The red and blue parts here are her psionic energy pathways. PEP for short.” As he describes, there is a ridiculously intricate system of bright red and blue lines, all laced together inside the holographic scan of her body. They swirl and curve and twine around each other, all radiating out from a couple spots in the center of her abdomen. The red a little more to her left side, and the blue a bit to the right.
I stare at it for a while, following different parts as they move out toward her extremities. It reminds me a lot of a diagram of the circulatory or nervous system like you would see in a textbook, but way more detailed, especially displayed holographically.
Eventually, Mejja thinks I've had enough time, and moves on. “The PEP moves energy through the body. Not physical energy, obviously. Psionic energy. You can think of it as something like spiritual energy, essential for every part of life.”
Mejja pauses for just a moment. “Something something souls, blah blah blah.” He waves a hand dismissively. “Jury's still out on exactly what the nature of the energy is, but it's definitely metaphysical in nature. The physical body has no impact on it. The body does rely on that energy system for survival though.”
“Mm...” Obviously, I won't get the big picture if even they don't, but he made his point. Psionic energy and powers come from the spirit, not the body, and keeps psions alive. Not at all surprising with how they just ignore the laws of physics at will.
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I nod a few times for him to continue.
“Good, now here's a scan of me.” With his words, a second hologram appears, pushing the first off to the side. It's much like the first, with those same intricate tendrils of color.
“Now, differences?”
It's not hard. “You only have one color, yellow.”
“Yes, and?”
I pause, glancing between the two. It's a little hard to tell with the color difference, but... “I think yours is a little more... dim? Like, not quite as many lines going out?”
“Good, good, one more.” I frown faintly. The last one isn't as obvious. I keep looking back and forth for a few seconds, before I see it.
I point as I speak. “It's centered in in your chest instead of your abdomen.”
“Perfect. Now, what do they mean?” That one's rhetorical, because he immediately begins to explain. “Color. To put it plainly, we use different types of energy. Our scanner represents them using different colors. They are unique to the individual, just as psionic powers are. Second is intensity – the amount of psionic power. She has far more power, and even has two different energy types she mixes together. Thus, she is a much higher tier psion than I am. Tier seven to be exact, while I'm tier four.”
I nod. Color intensity being power is pretty intuitive. Having two different types because she's so powerful though... Leona really is incredible...
Unexpectedly, Mejja makes a strange expression, waving his arms and going, “Why aren't you surprised?”
“Huh? By what?”
“Any of this?” I just blink at him. “I just told you Vicca's a tier seven psion, most people would be fleeing in terror by now,” he sighs. “Do you have survival instincts?”
“O-oh,” it's embarrassing when he puts it that way. “I already knew, she told me about that before. I mean, yeah, I was really scared at the time...” I scratch my cheek, trying not to look at Leona as I admit this. “But she's been helping me a lot ever since then, and she's nice, so I don't feel like I should be afraid of her, I guess...” I don't know if I'm really expressing what I mean. Underneath that earlier cold demeanor, it's pretty easy to tell that she's a nice person.
“Fine, I get that, but what about me?”
“What about you?”
“I'm a psion too! Isn't that a shock?”
“No?” When he gives me a look, I shrug. “You work at the psion headquarters. Isn't like, everyone here a psion?”
The man across the table facepalms so hard it looks painful. “No,” he sighs. “No, not at all. In the first place, psions make up barely five percent of the population, and because it's basically hereditary, pretty much every one of them is centered in the highest class of government and military high command.”
All I can do is bob my head numbly at the sudden lecture. Does he think I'm stupid? Everyone knows this... However, it ends with a big surprise that I don't know. “Vicca's here dealing with the psi tremor business. Normally, I am the only psion in our branch.”
“Oh. Woah.” I let out a big breath. “Alright, yeah. You surprised me now, happy?”
Mejja just snorts, and gets back on topic without deigning to answer. “Where were we...? Right, the intensity shown by our scanner relates directly to the energy levels inside your PEP. Last, and usually least, we have these.” He points out the places where all the energy gathers.
“These are energy cores, where psionic energy comes from.” He tilts his head. “Or where it gathers together. We haven't figured out which yet. But that's not important. Usually this isn't relevant to anything, but hey, there's a first time for everything,” he shrugs and actually looks amused.
“Energy cores are located differently in men and women. As you can see, in the chest for men, abdomen for women.”
I blink up at the floating diagrams. “Oh, wow. Alright.” That's kind of interesting, having such a difference between the two sexes in psions.
Wait. “Even though the PEP has nothing to do with the physical body?”
“Precisely,” he snaps his fingers at me and actually looks impressed. “You could say it reveals the gender of the soul, more or less.”
“Mm, alright...” So psions have gendered souls...? While I consider that, I catch Mejja staring at me, like he's looking for a response again. But... why?
Leona elbows him lightly. “I told you you should explain the other part first.”
“Fine, you win there,” Mejja shrugs. “Here's a scan of another staff member.” As he said, a third joins the first two. It's much darker, the muted blue color spreading throughout dull and diffuse by comparison. A much weaker psion, I guess.
...
Wait, didn't he just say he's the only psion here? Then who is this scan of? He said a staff member, right?
“There it is,” Mejja says, pointing at my face. “This is the psionic energy pathway of a non-psion. As you can see, the psionic energy is still there.”
Woah...
“Now, this is it, artificially brightened by increasing the scan time and intensity.” With a tap, the image brightens, the blue flaring up until it matches the strong blue shown in Leona's scan, though the hues are different. It doesn't just brighten though, it kind of smears around, like an overexposed photograph, blurred from a low shutter speed and motion blur.
Actually, if their scanner machine works like a big camera for psionic energy, that's probably exactly what it is.
“As you can see, it's blurred from the subject moving throughout the scan, but it can still be usable for some of our research. Anyway.” He flips it back to normal, color fading to its original muted blue.
“Now, what do you see here?”
“Well... light blue energy, obviously, less of it, and, uhh, female.” I tick off the three things we've been going over.
“Yes. From the intensity here, this person is a tier three psion,” he notes. “That's why we can read it like this, any lower and we can't even see it without artificially amplifying the output.”
“Huh...” Wait, one part of that doesn't make sense. “You called them a tier three psion, but just before you said they weren't a psion. Which is it?”
“Both,” he shrugs. “Bad definitions and technicalities, unfortunately. Tiers measure psionic energy, yes? And as you've just seen, everyone has psionic energy.” With a grin, he intones, “Technically, everyone is a psion.”
“That's, uhh.... ok....” I mumble.
“Don't worry about it too much,” he somehow waves off my world-shattering realization. “Like I said, it's a useless technicality. Even if the energy's there, they can't use it. So they aren't really psions.”
“Oh.” I get it, that's why he can brush it off so easily, it really doesn't matter.
“Based strictly off of energy, about ninety-nine percent of the population are tier three and below. Actual psions are some portion of tier threes, then everyone tier four and up. Those are the ones who have enough energy, and can actually control it.”
“Right.” I return a simple nod. I've learned more about psions in the last five minutes than in my whole life up to now, and it's pretty cool, but my thoughts are quickly returning to my own predicament. Applying what I've learned, I start to get a bad feeling...
“Wait, you've told me all this, but... My whole issue is with my body, right? How does all this stuff about psionic energy pathways and energy levels relate to me? Some part of my brain is screaming that he's leading up to me being psion, but that can't be it, I can't do any psionic stuff.
Then maybe it's-
I freeze up. He mentioned the PEP showing the gender of the soul. Don't tell me, my soul isn't...!
“Yes, that's what you should be asking,” Mejja replies to my last question while I'm spinning in panic. “The reason I explained all this, is so you'll understand when you look at your own scan.”
I gulp, looking up. It's hard to breathe. I don't think I'm ready.
“Ready for the bad news?” I don't even respond, I just keep staring as he flicks the image up into the air above us. It's... dark.
“Tier one, here it is artificially brightened. Thanks for holding so still during the scans, the detail is the best I've ever seen. Which is important because, well...” Then he hits it. The other holograms fade away as my scan expands to fill the room, color brightening dramatically so we can see the details.
As he said, the lines are nice and crisp, without any motion blur. But that's not the point.
“What...?”
What am I even looking at?
“Exactly my response!” Mejja throws his hands up in outright exasperation.
Within the faint, floating profile of my body, there are strings of color. Reds and blues and purples. Greens, oranges, every color of every hue and shade, mixed and tangled. Knotted and shredded into bits and dots all throughout my body. No tendrils, reaching out from the center, no intertwining system spanning through me.
It looks like a crappy AI got creative trying to replicate a 4D rainbow.
“Yes, so.” Mejja waves his hands at the ridiculous display. “First and foremost, it is not a mechanical or system error. This scan is definitely correct, I have a dozen others just like it from our observations, and I cross-checked them all to ensure the scanning unit was functioning properly. They all check out, this truly is what your psionic energy pathway looks like right now.”
I'm still staring while he delves into the important parts. “So, first I should point out that damage to your PEP is possible and we have recorded cases of it before.”
He points up. “See all these different colors? They are the traces of the psionic power which changed you. The damage it did your PEP is extreme, as you can see. Fortunately, we have seen pathways self-repair when damaged before, so it is within the realm of possibility that yours will eventually repair itself as well.”
“That's... good.”
“Yes. It does pose a few problems right now though. First, is the part you were interested in. Obviously, with the damage as it is, you have no energy core. We can't tell your gender.”
“Right...”
“And secondly... Well, the power completely shredded your PEP. If we ran the same process in reverse, we would damage it even further. That's why for safety, we can't do anything until it repairs itself.”
“Well...” I get it, but still. Shit. Basically, if and when they figure it out, they still can't fix my body until I've healed.
“Lastly, this part is... Well, I can't say it doesn't concern you, but it's nothing you have any power over. To put it frankly, I have no idea how you are still alive.”
“...”
“As I mentioned, your PEP is critical for dispersing energy throughout your body to keep you alive. Yours is clearly in no state to do anything of the sort. As such, you should be very, very dead. I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no idea how you are surviving through this right now. To give an analogy, you are still alive and healthy despite having no blood in your veins.”
Mejja plants his hands on the table in front of him. “It makes no logical sense based on any of our knowledge of psionics, but we can't refute the evidence in front of us. But as I said, the hows and whys are more of an academic interest, not something you need to concern yourself with.”
It seems that he's finished saying his piece, because the room goes quiet. I keep staring up at the nonsensical image of my insides.
Even with all the excess information, I slowly manage to digest things as they're actually relevant to me.
To put it plainly, even my spirit, or soul or whatever - it currently doesn't have a proper gender. Beyond that, they can't fix my body with what they've learned, and even if they could, it would have to wait until I heal. So despite it all, there's just... nothing to do?
Mejja confirms it. “For now, you'll just have to wait. Looks like you're getting by alright, so all you have to do is keep it up while you heal and we work things out. As such...” He stands and circles the table, passing through colored portions of the hologram as he goes. Stopping by my seat, the green haired scientist extends a hand.
“Seiko Maka-san, I would like for you to join us.” When I don't immediately respond, he goes on. “By that, I mean you would be employed part time. We wouldn't interfere with your schooling, of course. Your duties would essentially be allowing us to observe and study you, since you present so many unknowns worth investigating.”
“That...” Is that good or bad...?
“There would be very little in terms of requirements and responsibilities, and the pay is exceptional,” he notes, lifting a brow. I'm... sure it is... Just that is really tempting, but he keeps adding on more. “Naturally, the position would afford you psionic and military connections, which would give you leverage with your school's administration, keeping them quiet about your current issues, if it came to that.”
What he's saying... if I had their backing, I could get the school keep things secret from my parents if word got out and I really needed to. I did mention I'm hiding it so I don't get disowned... It's not much of a backup plan, but it's something. Which is a hell of a lot better than what I have now.
Even without that, I'm sure the money would go a long way toward financial independence, if I end up needing to support myself after all.
I'd have a ton of other problems if I lost my parents' support, but it would push starving to death a little further down the list...
Extending my hand, I take his. “Sure, that doesn't sound too bad,” I answer, still pretty rattled by all this.
Then, Leona suddenly comes and chops me painfully on the head. “Ow, ow, ow, what was that for...?” I grumble through my teary eyes.
“Seiko, don't just go agreeing to important things without getting them in writing,” she scolds me. Oh, right. As an adult, I can actually sign contracts and stuff now. A literal job with psi-ops isn't just some vague verbal agreement made with a handshake...
“Mejja, get someone to write up the contract so Seiko can read it over before agreeing to things without even knowing all the terms,” she practically growls at him.
“Of course, of course,” he waves her off placatingly. “That was the plan all along, I just wanted to know if he was open to the idea or not before going that far.”
“Good, now Seiko, let's go get you more food while he does that.”