This orphanage was smaller than the last one. Well, it wasn't called an orphanage, but a 'group home', but Tanya always preferred calling things as what they were.
At that thought, Tanya stilled, and once again repeated her mental mantra. "I am Tanya Dosva, and I am six years old." As usual, the caretaker, a single woman for the eight kids in the converted church, gave her a concerned look, which was to be expected, given that she had telepathic abilities. Reminding oneself of one's name and age was not exactly a normal thought, but it was better than the alternative.
She should know, given how she was constantly bombarded with the normal, dreadfully boring thoughts of the other children. In this world, 'magic' was nonexistent, instead it was a mostly-normal world in the 1960s, only a decade and a half earlier than her first date of birth. The exception was in that 'psychic abilities' were very real, run by an Interpol-like NGO known as the Psychonauts. They were fairly secretive, but given that they intervened when a powerful psychic caused massive disasters in the Eastern European country known as Grulovia, there wasn't any realistic way they could go back into hiding after that, so they pivoted from their roots in research to their current priorities.
The only question was, what kind of organization were they? If you believe their marketing, they're basically super-spies that promote justice and halt the nefarious deeds of evil psychics, but that was far from a reliable source. If they had a psychic child known to them, were they the type to kidnap and indoctrinate them? Unclear. Worse, Tanya's status as an orphan opened up a perfectly legal avenue for such kidnapping. The fact that Miss Milla was telepathic but still mostly free was a promising sign, but far from definitive.
"Tanya..." Miss Milla said, scolding. "Come here and let me hug you."
Immediately, Tanya stood up and presented herself to her guardian, and was promptly picked up and placed on her lap before being embraced. "Always such a worrier." Miss Milla said with a fake smile. "You're still a kid, Tanya. You're too young to be worrying about careers and conspiracies. Just trust me, I won't ever let anything happen to you." When literal psychic spies were involved, Tanya held no illusions on how effective their amateurish psychic efforts would be.
Milla said nothing to that musing, only tightening the embrace.
--------------------------------
"Tanya, I'm here! The fire's gone, you can calm down now! It's safe, let me in!"
Tanya didn't know how long she had been shielding herself. Psychic powers, guided through the memories of magic from their second life, turned out to be able to emulate pretty much all of the various magical effects she remembered, although at a lower power level.
This was a boon, in the sense that it did not require infrastructure in the form of an Operations Orb. But also a bane, in that any loss of self-control had a tendency to manifest psychic phenomena, such as odd chilling sensations, causing others to hear voices, and objects moving through random telekinetic shoves. Tanya had plenty of self-control, of course, but while Tanya prided themselves on being able to handle any kind of potential guilt or moral concern that the Great War posed, as they had no other choice to survive in that hellish world… Tanya could not claim an immunity to what was then known as ‘shell shock’. Years of exploiting reflex enhancement formula, experiencing life or death situations, gambling with the lives of others… It was almost merciful of Being X to remake her as a baby again.
"Hmm, I've never seen anyone manifest a psychic shield for this long before. It's been hours, you say?"
"Yes. I woke up early and went to go get some groceries, no more than a half hour, the nice ma- nevermind, when I came back, everything was on fire! I heard their screams... their final thoughts... But then I realized I couldn't hear Tanya! Her thoughts can be so very loud when she wants them to be. So when the fire was over, I checked around and here she was."
While Tanya wasn’t thrilled to have accumulated even more years of being barely able to move and needing every small matter handled for her, it did allow her some time to regather herself. It did seem to give Miss Milla the impression that Tanya needed a lot more care and attention than any of the other children, when the opposite was true, but Tanya was not so foolish as to disregard the value of being the matron’s favorite when it came to assuring her charge’s safety.
Unfortunately, while Tanya’s self control was above all expectations of any age, much less the one this life was… that didn’t mean they could control their own dreams. One of the odd quirks of this life was that this new, psychic brain seemed incapable of producing pleasant dreams. Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. Some dreams were quite pleasant. That what was made them horrible. Fortunately, Tanya rarely recalled specifics of these dreams for very long, retaining only the barest outlines about half the time, only recalling which flavor of unpleasantness it was the other half of the time.
"Hrm, I can't seem to penetrate the shield with my own telepathy either."
The issue was that these nightmares meant that the psychic phenomena were limited to when Tanya slept, and the power of the manifestations tended to match the emotional strength of the outburst… so the chills created frost on windows in summer, the hallucinations were screams of pain and rage, and the telekinesis tended to put dents in the wall.
For some damned reason, however, there wasn’t a single psychic that was famous for setting things on fire with their mind. Specifics on what psychics can accomplish is hard to come by, with the only real source being the official Psychonauts Comic Book, True Psychic Tales.
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"Oh no, you don't think she heard them too? She must have started shutting it out! She always was so fussy about her privacy, always repeating her name and age to herself whenever she suspected I could hear her thoughts. She's gotten pretty good at keeping her own thoughts in recently."
As such, it was quite a shock to find that the latest nightmare about the type 95’s influence, interrupted by the call of nature, had provoked a spontaneous emission of pyrokinesis in a very flammable orphanage. As such, Tanya resorted to their most well-practiced psychic power, that of emulating the mage shell to protect themselves from the flames.
"More than a talent, a practiced one. It's worse than I thought."
"Can't you do something? Maybe some gizmo?"
If Tanya had an operations orb, she would have been able to do more than just maintain the shield and oxygen formulas. She could be looking around, tune the shield to not block literally everything, leaving her in a world of silent darkness. But memories were ephemeral things, unlike the cold hard mathematics she previously relied on to protect herself. Thus, constant reinforcement was required to ensure protection from the flames.
"I will return to my truck. There, I can use the communication equipment to contact headquarters and gain insight from a more senior Psychonaut."
"Oh thank you, Mr. Nein. I know I may be being pushy, but Tanya's all I have left!"
After all, Being X would be so very smug if Tanya ended up killing themselves with the powers the bastard 'blessed' her with. At least it didn’t take long to shut out the incredibly distracting thoughts that bombarded her. She was well-acquainted with screams of dying children from the war, and she had no desire to repeat the experience.
"It's no trouble. Both of you have been through a very traumatic incident, and dealing with the dangers and unexplored frontiers of the human mind is what it's all about. Sometimes it means dealing with psychic criminals, sometimes it means helping a small girl who locked themselves in a closet. Metaphorically."
"I never thought of the Psychonauts like that before..."
From how much screaming there was before she tuned it out, she’d estimate it took her about four minutes to figure out how to do that. She wasn't entirely sure how early in the morning it was when the fire started, but it was late enough that she didn't feel any more exhausted than usual from lack of rest. Her stomach was begging for breakfast, but just because this life had plenty of food, doesn't mean Tanya forgot what true hunger felt like. It was ignorable. Her throat was parched, pleading for water, but once more, the hardships that Being X previously placed upon her made ignoring that desire easy. Her tiny little girl bladder was the thing that had woken her up in the first place, so it was no help in timekeeping.
"Well, if you need a change in career, we'd be happy to give both you and Tanya the psychic training you would need to control your abilities and use them for the benefit of mankind."
"Well, I don't think anyone's going to let me run another group home after this... and Tanya will need help for this..."
So how long was enough for the fire to have gone out? Perhaps an hour? Even if the fire lasted longer than that, Tanya’s bedroom would just be ash. Possibly hot ash, but it shouldn’t be immediately lethal. Has it been that long? Tanya recalled a few stories about how dangerous situations caused time to seem to go on much longer than in reality. For all Tanya knew, it had been only about five minutes more. Not nearly enough time for the fire to be over with.
"While he's doing that... Tanya dear, can you hear me? You've lasted long enough, and it's time to rest. Are you hungry? Mr. Nein brought some borscht with him, and it's very good."
Tanya will outlast this cataclysm, like she did Being X's constant tests and disasters. Maintaining the shield is becoming easier, perhaps she can spare the concentration to count. Ichijiku Ninjin, Sansho-ni Shiitake, Gobou-ni Mukago-ni, Nanakusa Hakusai, Kyuri-ni Tougan. Ten. Ichijiku Ninjin, Sansho-ni Shiitake, Gobou-ni Mukago-ni, Nanakusa Hakusai, Kyuri-ni Tougan. Twenty. Ichijiku Ninjin, Sansho-ni Shiitake, Gobou-ni Mukago-ni, Nanakusa Hakusai, Kyuri-ni Tougan. Thirty. Ichijiku Ninjin, Sansho-ni Shiitake, Gobou-ni Mukago-ni, Nanakusa Hakusai, Kyuri-ni Tougan. Forty. Ichijiku Ninjin, Sansho-ni Shiitake, Gobou-ni Mukago-ni, Nanakusa Hakusai, Kyuri-ni Tougan. Fifty. Ichijiku Ninjin, Sansho-ni Shiitake, Gobou-ni Mukago-ni, Nanakusa Hakusai, Kyuri-ni Tougan. One minute.
“Tanya! Please… I’m here…”
Just fifty-nine more to go and it's probably safe.
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Tanya had always suspected that the Psychonauts were hiding a lot when it came to their operations, always placing their best foot forward to the public eye. The fact that their official propaganda came in the form of a child-friendly comic book did not endear them to Tanya’s discerning eye.
But as it turned out, what was hidden was not, as one would expect, the typical atrocities endemic to espionage organizations, but the rank incompetence that arises naturally when you get a bunch of literal science hippies and ask them to make a spy organization!
The Grand Head of the Psychonauts got the job from nepotism, being the nephew of one of the founders, the one that was constantly drunk and endangering every mission he deigned to take, up until said nephew finally made one good decision and axed the alcoholic. Several others in the staff were yet another of the founders, deranged and completely believing that he worked in several menial positions, using his teleportation and what must be some variant of the decoy formula to accomplish them all simultaneously.
Tanya will admit that the man was at least competent in all of those roles. He was great with hair. Psychonauts facilities were essentially military bases, and as such it had on-base housing for the ones with families, or just children. As such, Tanya spent the last three years either in the Basic Braining Facility or the Motherlobe, which was the central operations center for the organization. Grand Head Zanotto, about a year into Tanya’s residence in the latter, made his second good decision of the year and created a fake summer camp for the man to run entirely by himself, somehow managing to delude the madman into staying over there rather than mucking up the main organization. Of course, then he ruined that decision by making the mental hospice into a real summer camp a few months after that once it actually became summer, exposing what would no doubt be dozens of psychic children to the shattered old man.
Still, Tanya may have a caretaker worth the name, but there was only so long Tanya could resist having her own mind's secrets plundered and then put into one of those Psychoisolation prisons for being crazy without having the shield of being one of the founding members. If Agent Boole wasn't one, Tanya had zero doubts that he wouldn't be given the option to occasionally leave his cell to do some beekeeping with the reclusive Ms. O'Peia, who is the most normal of the 'Psychic Six'. He also occasionally caused fires when he was overwhelmed, but that didn’t make it into the comic book. If Tanya didn’t learn how to divert all of her loose psychic energy into a passive mage shell during Miss Milla’s Basic Braining, she had no doubt she would have a nice padded room in one of the other cells.
"Welcome to the Whispering Rocks summer camp!" Miss Milla said exuberantly to the collected children, whose ages ranged from the three year old Lily Zanotto, to the twelve year old Tanya. "Over the next two weeks, we'll all be learning so much about each other, and what it means to be psychic. It's nothing to be afraid of, children. Everyone has nasty impulses, and unkind thoughts. Each of you have probably had something bad happen because of your abilities. Perhaps you heard a thought that ruined your image of someone, or saw someone's horrible memory, or even accidentally lashed out and hurt someone who didn't deserve it." Milla made a sad face, clearly faked to emphasize her point. When her eyes glanced over at Tanya, it became more genuine. "It's alright though, what's in the past, is in the past, and together, we'll learn how to help others with our gifts, by first helping ourselves." After a pause, she started to float in the air, dancing over the group. "But that doesn't mean we can't stop and have some fun along the way, yeah?"
Ah, that was the plan. Tanya didn't really want to be at the summer camp, but Miss Milla forced the issue. The point was to use the excuse of teaching how to plunge more deeply into the minds of others, as a pretext to plunge into her own mind.
This will be the most dangerous two weeks of Tanya's third life, to be sure.