Jana knocked on Jeremy’s door. “Can I come in?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She opened the door to see Jeremy sitting on the floor with a thoughtful, distant expression, chewing his cheek. She promptly walked to his bed and sat down.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I just wanted to talk, duh. I’d say you were bored without me, but Hatty hasn’t left, and I’m guessing you were talking with em’.”

“Yeah...Alright, we can call it a day here. We need to stew on this plan anyway,” he said to a nonexistent person sitting across from him. Jana could feel their presence, though that didn’t make it any less strange to witness. “Yep, cool. See you later after you’ve done whatever your vaguely described job is.” The presence disappeared, and Jeremy leaned back and looked up at Jana, just a few centimeters away from her legs. “What’d you want to talk about?” he asked.

“What I mentioned back there...” Jana said. “About my father.”

He nodded. “Yeah?”

“I never explained why he funded the project,” she said.

“Alright?” Jeremy said, clearly not particularly interested yet still listening.

That wasn’t a surprise to Jana, but she wanted to share what she was about to say, anyway. “My mother, for a long time, was sick.”

“Right.”

“And...nobody could save her. Even Parkarka tried, but she said it was a lost cause.”

“That girl you hung up on? Is that why you don’t like her?”

“No...” she grumbled. “What I’m trying to say was that nobody could even figure out why she was dying.” Jana thought about what she would say next. “My mother was a super-psychic.”

He blinked in surprise. “Really? I had no idea.”

Jana nodded. “Nobody knows. They kept it a secret...until the very end.”

Jeremy sat straighter, more attentive.

“Well, you would be one of the few people who know. I don’t know if Sam knows or not, but he might, too. Anyway...” Jana sighed. “I can only guess it’s the case, but...I think my father funded Project Unlimited to try to save my mother. He probably thought a new ability could be the breakthrough needed to do it.”

“And that never succeeded...” Jeremy said. “And...I think you said so before, but...your mother...”

She nodded again. “Dead. She was going to die anyway, but my father...” Jana shook her head violently, flicking her braid into her face. “You know the rest.”

He looked forward across the room. After a moment of silence, he said, “You know, I can’t help feel like you and my sis are similar.”

“You’ll need elaboration on that one.”

“Well...” Jeremy began. “Maybe not so much. The whole ‘crushed by a building’ thing just reminded me of the people who...” he sighed. “Yeah, no. Not talking about this here and now. Not in the mood.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jana said before leaning back and looking up at the wall.

“Hey, Jana,” Jeremy said. “Does anyone actually watch TV these days?”

“No?” she said, looking at the TV set up nor far away. “Like, I make a living off live sports, but there’s a reason the Psychic League tries to branch into other mediums and revenue flows. Why?”

Jeremy reached for the nightstand beside his bed and pressed the on button. “No real reason.” There was a girl being pressed for some sort of information by reporters onscreen. She wore a long purple and yellow dress and an awkward hoodie that covered her arms and neck, had her hair tied into a bun over her head, seemed to be slightly dark-skinned(or just tan, he didn’t know), and was very composed. Jeremy quickly changed the channel. “Here, Psychic League’s on right now.” He slid back onto the bed beside her. “I don’t watch TV unless it was convenient, but I figured you’d be interested in watching some-”

“Turn the channel back!” Jana said suddenly. “Quick!”

“O-ok!” Jeremy quickly changed the channel back, scrambling to press the button without actually picking up the remote. “What’s up?”

“That bitch! What’s she doing here?!”

“Huh?” Jeremy looked at the girl on TV. “Her?” Now that he thought about it, the girl looked not just familiar, but also foreign. He doubted she came from the middle east. “Who is she?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen her before! That’s that bitch who broke into your house!”

“Pancake girl?”

“Pancake?”

“I can’t remember her name for shit. It was something super weird?”

“Her name is Parkarka...” Jana grumbled. “She’s also the person who drove back the catastrophe…” She trailed off, the slightest bit doubtful. “She took all the credit, truth be told. Shitloads of people worship her as the new freaking messiah just cause she beat him.”

Jeremy snapped his right hand. “That’s why I didn’t know her name! Everyone just calls her Mrs.Foray.”

“...How did you not connect the dots earlier?” Jana asked, putting a palm to her head in annoyance.

“Well now I did! Look, it was your beef, so I didn’t try to pry.”

Jana rolled her eyes. She admittedly appreciated that he wasn’t nosy. “Well- Whatever, I don’t get it, why is she here?”

“Maybe she figured out where we were?” Jeremy asked. “I think we mentioned going to a dictator’s place.”

“Technocrat,” Jana mockingly corrected him, imitating Samuel. “But nah, I doubt she could’ve figured it out from just that...uhg, it was probably from when I beat the shit out of that dude.”

“But that doesn’t explain it, though,” Jeremy said. “Why would she follow us all the way here?”

“I think she has space flight or something. Her lumikinesis lets her repel the solar wind, and I guess she flies really fast in space. It’s why she’s got connections all around the place.”

“Huh...” Jeremy leaned back. “But like, why did she chase us down?”

“I dunno. Maybe she’s got beef with me? She probably thinks I’m somehow the girl who curb stomped Psychi for some shitty reason.”

“You were clearly not the one who did that!”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. The line of reasoning isn’t meant to make sense, but I don’t know what Parkarka wants with me. Knowing her, she’s going to ‘bump’ into me, then tell me an ominous threat, then...”

Jana suddenly began paying attention to the screen. As a reporter asked in Arabic, “[So why are you here, Miss Foray?]”

Parkarka spoke decisively, clearly quite serious.“[I’m here to speak to Jana Pontoon. She was involved in the incident with Psychi Purdue, so I need to speak to her, as one super psychic to another.]”

“Oh, fuck this girl...” Jana said, rolling her head back in exasperation. “I don’t think she’s going to let up,” she said hopelessly.

“Well,” Jeremy said, shrugging. “I kinda wanted to watch some Psychic League with the big CEO girl, but we can do that some other time. What do you want to do, now that we’ve done everything we can?” he asked.

Jana fell backfirst onto the bed. “Man, I dunno. I work on bursts, y’know. Once A job’s done, I’m a lost girl. Maybe we just fly back?”

Jeremy looked down. “Yeah, that’d be a decent option...Well, before we do that, I want to talk about Hatty.”

“What about them?”

“I asked about their memories.”

Jana thought for a moment. Under most circumstances, defeating The Catastrophe was the top of her thought process, but similar to Jeremy, she had a feeling Hatty was more important than she wanted to think. Slowly, she said, “And what did you learn?”

“It looks like there are six other people with similar abilities as them.”

“Six? In specific?” Jana asked.

“Yeah. It’s weird, but that’s what they said. Apparently, something bad happened a long time ago, and they got separated.”

“Alright...just how long ago?”

“I have no idea. They just said that it was a looong time ago.”

“Is Hatty really that old?” she said with skepticism.

Jeremy shrugged. “They don’t look that old, but it sounded like it was decades ago.” He had a feeling it was far longer than just a few decades, but...he wasn’t going to mention that. “Anyway, they said that this bad thing caused their amnesia, and they can’t remember much of anything beyond a few years back.”

“Alright...but why does any of this matter?” she asked. “It isn’t like this Hatty guy isn’t interesting and all, but I don’t see how any of this matters. I sure as heck can’t fix their problems, and I don’t gain much for doing it.”

Jeremy chewed his cheek, pausing. It took a bit of time for him to collect what he would say next. He wasn’t sure if Jana would take his word on it. She was business-focused and liked straightforward answers and solutions. Would she trust his gut feeling? “I get the feeling they matter a lot more than they’re letting on.”

After a moment of staring at him in thought, Jana nodded, crossing her arms. “Go on.”

“Like...you know how they told me that Psychi had gone to another world?”

“Yep.”

“When I asked them how, they just said they ‘just knew’’ that green light was foreign.”

“You know,” Jana said. “Now that I think about it, we’ve been working on a mysterious robed guy’s random assumption that your sister was sent to another dimension this entire time.”

“D...o you not trust them?” Jeremy said cautiously.

“Nah, I do. At least, I don’t see why not to. Worst-case scenario, we’ve somehow been duped real hard.”

“Huh...anyway, I think they’re important to all of this. They said that they might be able to piece things together if they found their old friends.”

“And how do we do that?” she asked innocuously.

...Jeremy looked to the side.

She sighed. “Exactly. It isn’t as if I doubt you. It’s just...we don’t have anything to work with.”

“Yeah...you’re right on that...then what should we do?” he asked, knowing what the answer was.

“Well...obviously, we need to get back to Canada...” Jana said. “But we can watch some Psychic League first.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

An array of rocks were held aloft above the arena, about fifty in number. They weren’t big, but if they hit someone with enough velocity, they could easily knock out them in just a moment.

One by one, they shot to the ground like bullets, and a man dodged each of them with sharp, nervous exhales and the bare minimum of movement. He stared at a flame lit over his hand as he did, seemingly not paying mind to the stones.

“Oh, the flame technique,” Jana commented. “I haven’t seen that in use for a while.”

“Flame technique?” Jeremy said.

“Focus is really important for some psychics, so sometimes it can be ideal to direct our focus to something like a flame. I’m not sure what his ability is, but it’s probably something like premeditation, letting him dodge everything before they’re shot. I dunno how he plans to end the fight, though, unless he plans on using his pyromancy.”

The man continued to dodge the rocks for another few seconds, and as he did, it became apparent that he was advancing toward the telekinetic on the other side of the field, his foe.

As he got close, they tensed up, then when he dashed toward them, several stones fell all of a sudden as the psychic moon-jumped away. However, the one with the flame grabbed the telekinetic’s ankle and dragged them down before they could escape, quickly pinning them down. That basically made it the end of the match.

“You know,” Jeremy said. “I know I said that one-on-ones would be more fun, but I see why Psychic Teamfight is more popular. One-on-ones are way too matchup-based.”

Jana nodded. “Psychic Teamfight adds so many elements to the fight. It also happens to be most similar to real-world fights.”

“Real-world fights? What do you mean by that?”

“Uhh...like, war,” Jana clarified. “Around the fifteenth century, psychics used to be fought with squads of psychics as the higher-ranked soldiers, and they’d break through enemy lines. It’d usually result in psychics fighting psychics six-on-six.”

“Right...” he said, vaguely remembering it from history. Psychic’s role in war had changed constantly and drastically throughout history, with them being mostly slaves at some points and mostly the upper class at others. “Wait, don’t we have psychic squads in the military today?” he said, remembering the fact.

Jana nodded. “Yep, they usually are. It isn’t like telekinesis is great in modern warfare, but a psychic barrier can stop a few bullets before breaking, Premeditation can predict bullets, and Recognition can sleuth out hiding enemies.”

“Oh, yeah. A lot of fps games make you play as a psychic with a barrier to explain your health bar, heh.”

“Honestly, though, Psychic Teamfight’s a bit controversial for that. I guess some dumbass parents think that watching people use abilities to fight for sport is too similar to war or something.”

“And my dad’d be one of them.”

The match continued, but neither of them were very interested in the subsequent rounds.

“So, I guess we’re going back home after this?” Jeremy asked.

Jana looked up and sighed, leaning back. “Yeah, I guess so.”

...

“Hey, Jeremy? Why don’t we do something nice before we go?”

“Like what?” he said.

“I dunno. I could clear the rubble in the slums?”

“Oh, I thought you meant fun. But sure, why not. And let’s make it more walkable while we’re at it.”

“And I can make a bunch of water for them.”

“You can do that?”

“I can make ice. Do you seriously think I can’t poof up some ice but liquid?”

“I guess not. You wanna go?”

Jana waltzed through the slums with Jeremy, flinging concrete into the air as she did. They were sharing a pair of wireless headphones, listening to music as they did.

People around them watched in awe and nervousness as they walked past uncontested, the concrete following behind them in a cluster. Jana also repaired the road as she walked by, telekinetically moving stones in and out of them to increase the walkability. Once she’d picked up as many stones as she could carry, Jana lifted Jeremy up telekinetically, then brought him with her as she dumped a quarter-thousand tonnes of stone into a barren plain.

And they repeated this process quite a few times, but not without variation.

“Hey, Jeremy, you see how this building doesn’t have a roof?” Jana said as they flew back from dumping a load of stone.

“Sure...” he said, monotone in meditation. They had just emptied the building of a tonne of rocks, which had previously made it impossible to walk through.

“Look at this!” After a moment of focus, Jana caused ice to form into a roof, opaque with how thick it was.

“Won’t it just melt?”

“Nope,” Jana said proudly. “That’s my super-special ability, Permafrost.”

“It’s safe to say that it makes ice that doesn’t melt.”

“Wow, what a smart guy,” she said half-sarcastically. “Yeah, it does that.”

“Though I’d be pretty nervous about living in there. Imagine if the ice did melt and fell on me.”

“Your loss, bud.”

They continued doing the same thing, except where Jana found suitable hosts for it, she gave buildings new, icy roofs after clearing them of rubble. Jeremy was just along for the ride, as usual, but even though he wasn’t personally moving it all, it was satisfying to watch Jana clean up the streets.

They bounced with their step as they walked through the hostile streets, talking about this and that with enthusiasm.

Once Jana lifted a massive roadblock of stones, a leftover from a fallen skyscraper, Jeremy craned his head to look at the leftover destruction. Underneath its fall was a spot of rubble, the buildings and roads utterly decimated from the collapse, revealing dirt below.

“Woah, what a sight,” Jeremy said.

Jana nodded. “Yeah, it is one...” she said, pursing her lips. She remembered the building.

He seemed to notice, though. “I know we’ve been doing our thing for a while now, but I thought you didn’t want to go here again?”

She shook her head, sighing. “I didn’t, but...I can’t ignore this. Some things might make me scared or horrified but...like fuck I’m going to make a little PTSD stop me from doing what I ought to.”

Jeremy smiled at that, though not without reservation. “It’s cool to see you so gung-ho like you always are, but don’t push yourself, or I’ll smack you.”

“Like you could.”

They stayed in the ruined city for quite a while. It was nearly six hours later that Jana was pooped out of energy, totally unable to keep going. She fell backward, but a chair of ice suddenly appeared beneath her before she could do anything.

They may have encountered more resistance from the residents had they not been constantly on the move, but it hadn’t been a large problem, which Jana was happy about. She could laugh at idiots all she wanted, but being yelled at never made her mood better.

Jeremy fell backward too but realized too late that Jana wasn’t paying attention, her eyes closed. As he panickedly reached out to soften his fall, a chair appeared.

“Oh!” he yelped in surprise. “Cold” he commented.

“Welp. Tough luck.”

“You can’t by chance give me that cold resistance of yours, can you?”

“No...” Jana said slowly. Then, she furrowed her eyebrows. “Wait...give me your hand.” He outstretched his hand without much thought, and Jana grabbed his wrist in a strangely assertive manner. “What about now?”

Jeremy patted the chair’s armrest, feeling the ice. “Oh, wow. You actually did it.”

“Yeah, I totally forgot I could do that.”

“You just forgot about it?”

“I dunno, I just haven’t used it for a long time. Like, when are you going to be in a situation where you need to give someone cold resistance while you touch them?”

He bobbed his head. “Not often, I’d guess.”

“Yeah...” Jana sat up from her chair. “Follow me.”

Jeremy followed her to an area of rough concrete that was relatively open. She then swung her hand in an arc as she created a sheet of sleek ice over the area. Jana skipped onto the ice, then stomped her foot.

“I’ve now made a year-long skating rink. No maintenance needed.”

“Neat,” Jeremy said, walking into it. “Woah, that...” he stared down at the ice with a frown, his expectations not met. “Isn’t slippery at all, actually.”

“I just noticed that,” Jana said, scuffing her shoe against the ice. “It isn’t melted at all. But, if I form a small layer of water atop it...” The sheet of opaque ice suddenly began to glisten with a watery sheen. She took a step forward but quickly began running in place in a panic, struggling to move just a few feet away. “Shit, that’s slippery as fuck!”

Jeremy grabbed her hand for a moment, helping her get to a resting position as if the psychic needed help. “Be careful, you might fall onto your barrier!” Jeremy sarcastically joked.

“Oh, shut it!” she said once she was stable. “Look, have you ever ice skated before?”

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah.” Then, he felt a wind at his back, so harsh that he might’ve been knocked off his feet.

“Then try!”

“I don’t- I don’t have skates, though!” Jeremy panickedly said, trying to get a grip on the ice.

“You don’t need them on wet ice, idiot!” Jana said, taking a timid step forward before pushing to the side with her other foot and beginning a skating motion to propel herself forward.

As she passed Jeremy with a questioning expression, she watched him lounge for her hand, only to fall flat on his face. He stood up with difficulty as Jana shrugged at the other side of the arena, smirking. Then, he chased after her, beginning the skating motion with a vengeful expression. “Fine, if you won’t help me, I’ll just take you down!”

Jana flipped him two birds as she backward-skated away, her arms outstretched.

Jeremy’s attempts to catch her were quite in vain because as hard as he tried, putting his all into the simple act of skating on ice without falling, Jana had much more experience.

Jeremy tried to cut her off, but she skittered in the opposite direction like it was nothing, causing him to plummet off the ice. When he later tried to feign a cut-off before making a u-turn, expecting Jana to do the same thing, she fell for it, yet Jeremy just couldn’t keep up. No matter what he tried, he just couldn’t beat out Jana’s acrobatics.

He eventually slid to a stop, heaving from the sheer difficulty of it all. The rink was damn slippery. “You...you have got to be cheating...” he said between breaths.

“Pfft, so now you’re resorting to accusations like that?” Jana said. “I gotta inform you that I’m a very fair player.” Unless it got personal, that was. “You gotta get out more, my guy.”

“Look, I don’t exactly ice skate every day!”

“Neither do I.”

“I- aww, whatever, I got better things to do than explain why a beefed-up girl like you outpaces me!”

Jana chuckled, not mentioning that she didn’t even train her legs often. “Alright, I’ll give you another chance to beat me. This shouldn’t need too much physical exertion from you, twig.”

“And that would be?” Jeremy asked, watching as a small wave of water passed by his shoes, the rink being cleaned of water.

Jana smiled evilly as a ball of snow fell directly on Jeremy’s head, causing him to flinch, then look up, his eyes quickly dilating. It was beginning to snow.

To snow snowballs, that was.

The dark clouds above them condensed into balls of light snow and fell to the ground. As the bulk of them approached the floor, though, they all began to slow down, hitting the ground without so much as a splatter.

Let’s have a bit of real fun…

Jana easily caught a ball in each of her hands, then threw them one by one at Jeremy. He sidestepped it, then ducked the other one. “Wait, are you serious?” he said with an expression of disbelief. “Did you just make it rain-”

“You better get throwing!” Jana yelled, catching and throwing more snowballs.

He dodged them, grabbed two balls that were in his way, then threw them at Jana.

She scrambled to the left and returned fire.

They traded blows for a while, and eventually, Jeremy got fed up with losing and made a mad dash toward Jana. He ran left from one ball, then stumbled right, away from another one, then dove forward under a fast ball aimed at his torso, before using his momentum to swing his arm quickly, nearly catching Jana’s abdomen. She managed to twist her body clockwise, barely in time, the snowball flying beyond her, but she failed to notice that, although it had put his aim off, Jeremy had chucked not one but two balls from the same hand, the other splattering against her chest.

“HA! I got you first!” he yelled.

“You’re a dirty as fuck fighter, you know that!?” Jana said, her smile growing, with an edge of danger. “I guess I’ll need to up the difficulty!”

“I really don’t like what you’re implying...” Jeremy said, scrambling to his feet as he felt a chill in the air.

“You might want to take a step back, because it’s survival mode time!” Jana said, outstretching her right arm dramatically. “Gatling Gun Style!

“Excuse me?”

The snowballs all around them suddenly became static in the air, hovering, then began to spin in a circle. “Vectors in: check! Vectors out: check!” she said as their speed increased dramatically, moving around the rink.

Jeremy watched as all the snowballs began to orbit them at two hundred miles an hour, so fast they became a blur. Anyone dumb enough to walk into it would be pelted by snowballs moving at half the speed of sound. “So this is what they call a snownado...” he muttered.

“And you’re in the eye of the storm, buster,” Jana said as a stream of snowballs diverged from the snownado, then circled down above her in a spiral. “RUN, BOY!” she yelled maniacally, pointing at Jeremy with a finger gun.

“I don’t like the sound of any of this!” he yelled, watching nervously at the snowballs quickly spiraled down to Jana, encircling her, then shot at him at an eighth the speed of sound. “Shitshitshitshit!” he yelled, dashing to the side as they sped past him, accompanied by bulletlike sounds.

A solid stream of snowballs moving faster than a person could possibly throw them chased Jeremy down as he dashed to the other side of the rink. He watched Jana carefully, her finger pointing just to the left of wherever she was firing, which happened to be toward where he was. Suddenly, she pointed significantly further to the left, and he planted his feet in anticipation, barely dodging the last few before springing back right. Clearly, Jana was simply giving him the...chance to avoid the balls.

Not that he was so sure he could survive very long against her gatling gun.

He kept dashing back and forth, eventually landing just at the edge of the rink, his back against a tornado as the fastest natural ones, and a gatling gun(slowly) edging closer and closer to him.

“Uh-oh!” Jana said cheerily. “Looks like you’re against a rock and a cold place! Whatever will you do?”

“Erm...” Jeremy kept looking at Jana’s hand, waiting for her to make a move, but she simply approached him with the stream of bullets, nearing ever closer. “Uhh...” he ducked underneath it, then leaped to the side and scrambled into a mad dash away from the bullets.

“Alright, Jeremy,” Jana said, slowing down for a moment, “Tag me, and you win.”

He heaved as the beam of snowballs picked up speed once more. “How the fuck am I meant to do that!?” he yelled, dashing toward Jana, then to the side.

Another spiral of snowballs moving counter to the other spiral surrounded Jana, then she pointed her other finger at him. “You aren’t, but I’ll admit, you’re great target practice! Now, double the snowballs!”

Jeremy panicked and began weaving between two slow yet chaotic streams of snowballs, ducking, diving, and somehow remaining untouched. He kept doing so, and quickly realized that Jana’s aim and speed had degenerated since adding the second stream, her expression in concentration. It was fully impossible for him to approach any closer than he already had, however...

He looked behind Jana and smirked, chuckling.

“What are you-” She glanced behind herself before realizing her mistake nearly immediately.

However, Jana was gullible with so much of her mind dedicated to upholding the grandeur of the snowballs.

Jeremy dashed toward her the instant she looked back. The dual tornados faltered for just a moment, and he used the moment it took for them to start back up to leap through them.

He safely slid into her personal space, tapping her ankle with his shoe.

“Fuck.”

In a cataclysm of snow, the thousands of balls sputtered in all directions at a quarter the speed of sound, all of it quickly enveloping the surrounding area in a thick sheet of vaguely round-shaped exprints.

“Fuck, you actually got me,” she said. “Well...” Jana looked to the side as Jeremy smirked up from the ground, covered in snow. “I can’t even be mad. That’s just embarrassing.”

“Dude, no sweat,” Jeremy said, standing up and swiping snow from his pants. “My life didn’t feel threatened in the slightest.”

“I wouldn’t let you die, whataya’ talkin’ about?” Jana scruffed his head, shaking snow off his hair. “But congrats on getting one over me, finally.”

“Twice,” he corrected her smugly.

“Yes, twice. Though punk-ass tactics, but twice either way.”