Jeremy relented and agreed to travel with Jana. He walked back into his house, then after an hour, he walked back out, ready for the long trip to Iraq. He didn’t need to stress over his preparations too much since money and access to resources were hardly an issue when you could fly at the speed of sound.
Jana made a platform of ice for them to rest on, which extended past Jeremy’s psi-negation field so that she could move it with telekinesis. It was far from an elegant solution since Jana couldn’t fly as fast as either of them would have liked with the extra load in tow, but they figured it would do for the time being.
----------------------------------------
Now, both of them flew through the sky on their mobile plate of ice. Jana had to focus on flying it while Jeremy played Darkest Souls- a satire rage game he had just begun to play but seemed to be loving...in the masochistic kind of way.
Since he was apparently used to playing stuff while flying on mobile platforms, Jeremy had an entire setup all ready to use, with a massive battery bank to plug into his computer. He had also brought camping equipment, not knowing if it would be needed. Their journey was definitely going to take a couple of days, as they knew full well.
Jana just sat on the edge, looking down at the gradually warming scenery.
“So, that isn’t a console, right?” Jana asked, bored after Jeremy had gone a while without talking.
He looked up from his computer, laying inside a sleeping bag. “How can you not tell?” he asked, unconvinced that the girl knew too little to distinguish console from computer.
“I dunno, maybe because I don’t care all that much about games?”
“Then why did you ask?”
She rolled her eyes, shaking her head indignantly. “Because I’m bored! You got a problem?”
“Well, yes, it is just a computer,” Jeremy finally said. He looked down at the laptop. It wasn’t that strange that she wasn’t sure of it, considering it was brightly colored and pretty thick. Though, she seemed more interested in starting a conversation than asking a reasonable question.
“So...why don’t you use one?”
He pointed to the laptop. “Well, because computers are better if you’ve got money to spend.”
“Is that so?” she asked, looking at the ground below with an intrigued expression. They were quickly flying over a small American town, the last one they would pass over before crossing the pacific.
Jeremy chuckled. “That’s just my opinion, at least. There’s a lot of games you can only play on consoles.”
Jana looked back at him with a frown. “Why is that? Can’t you run just about any program on a computer?”
He raised his finger as he elaborated. “Exclusivity. Game companies want you to buy their consoles, so they only release their games on their own consoles, if possible.”
“Huh...but that doesn’t explain why you couldn’t, like, make an attachment to a computer that could run console discs...or...chips....or whatever consoles use these days.”
“I guess you could do that, probably, but there’s no need to go that far. You could just emulate the game way easier than somehow using the physical copy.”
“Emulate?”
“Like, downloading a game’s file, then playing it on your computer with a digital version of a console.”
“So basically what I was saying, right?”
“Yeah, kind of. It’s illegal in some capacity, though.”
Jana twirled her hair, in thought, for a bit. She suddenly stabbed at the platform, a knife of ice appearing in her hand for no other purpose than to express her thoughts. “Ohh, so that’s what they meant by an exclusive streaming license!”
Jeremy closed his computer a little to focus on the conversation. “What about an exclusive streaming license?”
“Well, I inherited the Psychic League from my dad, and I’ve been leaving some business decisions to more qualified people since they really confused me- Oh, look at that!” Jana pointed down just before they met the ocean, stopping the flying plane of ice.
Jeremy, not affected, yelled as he kept going and tumbled across the ice, smacking into the psychic barrier surrounding it before sliding to its bottom.
“Oh, jeez, sorry about that!” Jana said, flying upward faster than he could fall to move him back onto the platform.
He tiredly climbed back up, speaking hoarsely. “Oh god, that hurts so much...” He slowly rolled face-up, rubbing his head.
“Are you alright?” Jana asked, landing beside him.
“N-no, not really. But I guess I will be if...can you come closer?” He asked, motioning for Jana to come.
She walked up to him and kneeled. “Why?” she asked, after already doing it.
Suddenly, Jeremy threw the side of a fist at her shoulder.
Jana, appalled he had misjudged her as gullible, quickly moved her other arm to block. Her muscles, evidently, weren’t all show. She caught Jeremy's swing in the palm of her hand, then pinned his arm to the ground like a paper with a weight atop it. “Come on, yo. You don’t think I’m that dumb, do you?”
He coughed. “I had to try.”
“Revenge isn’t always the answer,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Sometimes, it is.”
She nodded, then shifted her grip to Jeremy’s wrist, helping him sit up. “Yeah, maybe you can say something right every once in a while.”
Once Jeremy was back on his feet, Jana began to make the platform of ice descend.
He rubbed his head, taking a second look at the scenery. From the looks of it, they were on their last stop before crossing the ocean. They had been moving west with the intent to cross the Pacific, and they had already nearly crossed the town, hovering just a kilometer from the shore.
He had less experience with crossing long distances than his sister or Jana, but whenever he had looked to the ground, it felt like he was traveling really quickly. In reality, they had been on the road for four hours and were moving about as quickly as a plane, if not slower.
“So why, again, did we stop?” Jeremy asked after about a minute of nauseating descent had left them almost on the ground.
Jana began to hover the platform over a strip mall, and once it landed a moment later, she said, “Because we’re about to spend a dozen hours going over the sea, duh.”
“Right...You do know I packed food, though, right?”
Jana walked to a medium-sized store with a sign saying ‘Goods’ Will’. She looked through the glass window to see a stunned, confused girl with a Goods’ Will uniform staring at her from the other side. She waved at the girl then returned her gaze to Jeremy. “More importantly, I like browsing thrift store’s catalogs for fun.”
“That’s a...reason. Also, why don’t we stop by Hawaii if we’ll be flying so long?” He reluctantly moved towards the door and threw it open, walking inside. The closing door prompted the psychic to zip in before it shut, causing the glass wall to rattle disturbingly loudly.
Inside, the shop was sectioned-out, with a half-dozen aisles of clothes, a few more for silverware, (decade-old)technology, small cooking appliances, and a few miscellaneous nick-nacks for kids, and two more rows for furniture. All of it was obviously owned by someone else in the past, hence the store’s status as a thrift store.
Jana began nonchalantly floating about the one-room store, looking through their collection with curiosity, while Jeremy went to the restroom.
When he walked out a few minutes later, he found things about the same as he’d left them, with the employee from before staring at Jana from behind an aisle of clothes, obviously curious. Meanwhile, Jana looked like a kid as she floated about the wondrous aisles of junk, upside-down for some reason.
Jeremy walked to the employee first, needing a palette cleanser after talking to the hothead for a few hours. “Yo,” he said, greeting her with a laid-back wave of his hand.
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“Oh, h-hi!” the employee responded with muted excitement. She was probably the same age as Jana, or even younger, so Jeremy could understand the curiosity towards her peer. “Didn’t you travel here with her?” she asked.
He nodded, then whispered back. “Yeah. My sis disappeared a few days ago, so we’re going cross-continental to talk to ask a dictator for a favor.”
She blinked.
“My sister is Psychi,” Jeremy said, not waiting for the girl to piece it together.
“Oh! I...uhh...that’s interesting.”
“I’m sure it is.”
...
“So, my name is Jeremy,” he said, breaking an awkward silence. “that over there is Jana, the CEO of the Psi League, or something like that. I don’t really want to be here, but she dragged me with her because she got bored.”
“Because she was bored? Didn’t you just say you were going out to find your sister?”
He gritted his teeth. “Would you volunteer to go across the planet to talk with a dangerous dictator to maybe get some info on how to find your sister when you didn’t even need to be there?”
She looked at him with a confused expression for a few seconds before saying, “Of course I would.”
“With an ill-tempered super psychic?”
“Yeah? I mean, if I didn’t have something better to do.”
“Wh...” Jeremy trailed off.
“Like, it’s your sister, right? Shouldn’t you do everything you can to find her?”
Jeremy frowned, averting his eyes.
“W-well, I’m sure you have your reasons for not wanting to go through all that!” she said, quickly going on damage control.
He shook his head. “I wish I did...Well, see ya.” He jogged out of the aisle, waving at Jana. “Hey, Jana, I’m back.”
“I noticed,” she said idly before putting a black-and-white striped tee-shirt over herself, flipping upright. “Do you think this looks good on me?”
Jeremy rolled his eyes. “What am I, your...” He shook his head. “Whatever...Yeah, if you really want to know, it looks kinda bland.”
“You think?” Jana said, floating another shirt in front of herself, this time a tank-top with pink and white polka-dots on a black background. “What about this?”
“If you want something that looks good on you, why don’t you try something white and sparkly, like your hair?”
“I didn’t see anything like that here, though...” Jana said, a little disappointed despite expecting it.
“Too bad, too sad. Anyway, can we get going, now?”
Jana touched down, her tennis shoes clopping on the linoleum as she fell into a gait towards the furniture. “Stop being such a party pooper, dude. I’m not as fast as your sister.”
“Meaning?”
“We still have nearly a day till we make it across to Aisa. I think you can sit and chill for a couple of minutes.”
“I thought you made puns once a week.”
When Jana glared at him, a blast of chilly wind blew past Jeremy, causing him to cross his arms. Realizing she wouldn’t leave, he set about entertaining himself. In the corner of the room, a TV was streaming a game of Psychic TeamFight.
The ten competitors onscreen were already in the midst of a hectic battle, with the camera focusing in on three psychics in red jerseys flanking the blue side’s leader, who had just one ally at his back.
Jeremy at least knew the game's simple goal was to knock the enemy’s leader unconscious.
One of the red side psychics ran a circle around the two defending psychics, summoning a wall of stone under their feet as they did, creating a makeshift barrier around the pair, while another of their allies seemed to turn invisible, then later proceeded to launch chunks of ice at the defenders from various angles, while the last one watched their flank and made a barricade of obsidian.
The blue defender deflected a chunk of ice with an invisible barrier, then formed a translucent tornado around them and their leader, scattering turf about. The leader began to shout commands to their ally while materializing steel disks and throwing them into the tornado, which then precisely shot the discs out at their foes with blinding speed, forcing the two who weren’t invisible to hide behind their respective barriers to a degree.
Jana scuttled up to Jeremy with a smug expression. “Did that interest you?”
He stepped back as she suddenly moved into his bubble. “I guess it’s pretty interesting?”
“You guess? That’s some high-level fighting!”
“How, exactly?”
“Not much of an expert in psychics, are you?”
“My sister wasn’t a pushover, and she wasn’t much of one either.”
Jana clicked her tongue. “That’s embarrassing to hear,” she said as if Jeremy needed consolation. “Well, you probably haven’t noticed, but there’s a lot that goes into everything they’re doing. Take, for instance, the tornado. To make one, a wind-controlling psychic needs to create a pivot for the wind, or else they’ll exhaust themselves quickly.”
“How can wind have a pivot.”
A toy helicopter flew into Jana’s hand. “It’s a circle. Anything moving in a circular pattern needs something to keep it in equilibrium, such as a vacuum.” She spun its blades with one finger, then stopped it by pressing on the blades’ center. “She is moving the wind around her by pushing it along four opposing directions while also condensing the air inside of it to keep the air spinning instead of flowing.” She moved the blades by shoving them to the left as they passed her finger. Then she moved them telekinetically, making the blades spin fast enough to make it delicately fly a few inches above her hand.
Jeremy scratched his head, perplexed. “But why can’t she just make it go in a circle?”
“Because circles are really annoying for psychics! Creating centripetal force by manually dragging things both closer to their pivot and towards their tangental line is difficult! Like...let me show you...” Jana began to focus on spinning the bladesin a circle as best she could, but getting all the blades to move in a circle without relying on shoves was apparently too difficult for her, causing the blades to spin a bit slower, despite the girl’s laser focus.
Jeremy blinked rapidly, looking between Jana’s silly expression and the helicopter with a confounded expression. “I don’t think I’ll ever get it, as a not-psychic person.” He quickly added, realizing Jana would probably take his disinterest personally, “But I’m sure it’s really impressive stuff. It looks cool, at least.”
Jana just scoffed, then continued looking around the place while Jeremy idly watched the TV despite his reservations. It was easy to be entertained by it, at least, as the feats on display were flashy. The two blue team defenders were dodging blunt spikes of dirt that began to shoot up from the ground, hoping to throw them aside, while the no longer invisible cryokinetic, now in the only exit from of the recently made wall of earth, slowly made a cast of ice, where lava flowed down from between their partner’s hands, creeping across it towards the defenders for some unknown purpose.
Before he could get too invested again, Jana came back to him, displaying a strange object. It had a variety of colored wires curving from its rubber handle, each with different lengths and with round ends. “Hey, Jeremy, do you know what this is meant to be?”
He looked at it for a second, then took it. “Turn around,” he said tiredly.
Jana swerved around. He aligned it with her head, then encircled her skull with the object’s wires. “Ahhh-!” Jana straightened in surprise as Jeremy began to boredly move it about her head. “W-what is this?”
“It’s a head massager.”
Jana squeaked and squirmed under the strange sensation it sent crawling down her head, tickling her. “What...what’s it doing?”
“Besides making you yelp strange noises? It massages your head.”
“I noticed!” she said, as if unsure whether she was trying to be matter-of-fact or enthusiastic.
“Well, have you never seen one before?”
“Nope.”
“It was a fad in our schools at some point, so Psychi just had to buy one. We lost it some time back.”
“That’s a shame. It feels sooo good...Err, I guess.”
Jeremy pulled the massager out of Jana’s hair then threw it over her shoulder, landing it in her hands. “Stop being tsundere and massage my head.”
“Wha-do it yourself!”
“It only feels good if someone else does it.”
She rolled her eyes, accepting it as fact. “Whatever. Turn around then.” She returned the favor, massaging Jeremy’s head with a mean, impatient expression.
For a few seconds, they both remained quiet, Jeremy taking in the shivers of comfort. “This reminds me, what was up with your igloo? Why did you make one in front of my house for no reason at all?”
“I cleaned it up afterward, you know.”
“You threw it into a pile. But that’s beside the point. How come you randomly made it in the first place?”
Jana shrugged, pulling the massager out, then flinging it back to where she found it. She took a step back as she said, “I do it when I get serious.”
“‘Serious’? You know, even if that weren’t vague, it doesn’t explain why.”
“Because it sounds cool, ok! I like how it makes my voice echo!”
Jeremy closed his eyes as he scratched his head. It shouldn’t have been surprising at this point that Jana was somewhat vain, but it still made him chuckle. “Is that so?”
Jana turned around, silently pouting.
“Well, should we leave?”
Jeana turned her head back, an eyebrow raised. “We might as well buy something.” The head massager flung back into her hand. “It’d be rude to waltz in and not spend a few cents.”
Jeremy looked a bit conflicted, so he scootched closer to Jana. He whispered, “Just between you and me, I heard this company mistreats its employees pretty badly. I’d prefer not to support it.”
“Well, aren’t you the almighty moral one,” Jana responded before shuffling through her white leather purse and grabbing something. “Then I guess we can just leave.”
Jana began trotting towards the front door and threw that something at the employee Jeremy had spoken to. As he walked out behind her, Jeremy saw it was a small stack of cash.
He waved back at the dumbstruck employee as he left, walking back through the glass door.
“Come on, man, you didn’t say the line,” Jana said, looking back at Jeremy with a disappointed expression.
“W-what line?” Jeremy responded, confused.
“‘Keep the change’, duh!”
“Why didn’t you just say it?!”
“Because I’m the girl. It’s the boy who says it!”
“Where did you ever get that idea from?”
“I dunno, it’s just always a boy who says the line, last I checked.”
Jeremy sighed. “I get the feeling you’re just too lazy to socialize.” He stepped back onto the plate of ice and sat down. Once they were settled in, Jana raised the platform up, then slowly accelerated, moving towards the ocean.
Once she saw the two leave, the employee looked down at the bundle of cash with a concerned expression. It wasn’t as if she was going to complain about a thousand bucks, but...
Did they need to give her Canadian dollars?