You withdraw from your Chakra quickly, allowing the layers of intertwined powers to spin down and peel back and fade away. As they recede, your conscious self rises up to meet your physical body, allowing your eyes to open and your ears to listen and your blood to flow once again.

Along comes the sensations of sight and sound and touch - the very vibrations of the earth around you. You fill into your physical self like a glove, a very comfortable one at that.

The sensation of doing so is deeply satisfying.

When your vision comes back into focus, you watch as Lisa also rouse from being knocked out. She groans as her eyes wink open, then she looks around the room with understandable confusion. While she searches around her like a hawk, she attempts to wriggle around and move. But when she realizes that she’s tied up very well, she stops struggling altogether.

Then her eyes land on you, and her lips purse from annoyance as a result.

“You. I shoulda known you’d be that good,” she says. “Or I mighta had you shot while you slept.”

“I could say something similar about you,” you reply. “I could still do it.”

“Then why don’tcha?”

“‘Coz it isn’t up to me.”

“Coward.”

“Oh, so you’d rather just die, then? I could wipe you out, just like that. Then walk outta town like nothing happened. But I won’t. ‘Coz I respect the people in your town. Something you ought to do more of.”

Lisa scowls horrendously, but she doesn’t otherwise reply. It makes you wonder if she’s actually contemplating suicide. Maybe she’s wrestling with being a prisoner and coming to terms with it. Or perhaps she’s poring over some undiscovered third choice somewhere out there. Whatever it is, you can’t tell. Her thoughts and emotions are like glass - slick and impenetrable. Your ability to Scan her is almost completely repelled.

Clearly, the first thing she did on waking was raise all her defenses. Her full defenses.

Well, at least you can still tell how much energy she has, and which discipline, though a part of you wonders if that’s true at all. If she can hide whatever she wants, then she ought to be skilled enough to reveal whatever she wants.

In the end, you can’t trust what you’re sensing about her. But at least you still know her limits - she can’t possibly hide that while unconscious. Right?

It takes time, but her face settles back to what you would consider normal, at least minus the smile. Now her expression is mostly deadpan with hints of annoyance, and slivers of hostility.

“You wouldn’t mind untying me, wouldja?” she asks you.

There’s venom in her voice, of course. It’s almost like she’s tempting you into a fight. Either way, her being bound up or not hardly matters. All it is right now is a security blanket.

Best shed it off altogether.

“Do it yourself,” you reply, but with a hint of sarcasm buried in it.

She sneers, but you sense low levels of telekinesis weave through her. Though her movements are careful and slow, she manages to loosen the rope around her wrists. Once they’re halfway undone, she simply slips out of them, then focuses her energies on the rope around her ankles.

The same thing happens there, but she undoes the knots all the way through, then flings both cuts of paracord into the corner. Her face wrinkles in disgust at them.

Lisa then swings her legs over, sits at the edge of the bed, then massages one of her shoulders - the one she had been laid down on. She then rolls her arm a bit to loosen her aching deltoid. Soft groans escape her lips at the same time.

“Didn’t have to tie me up, yannow?” she says after a minute. “Not like I’m overpowering anyone anytime soon.”

“Wasn’t my decision,” you reply.

“And what was your decision?”

“Not my town, not my deal.”

Lisa gives a soft ‘hmph’, as though she had been expecting a different response. You shrug at her noncommittally. That’s the truth, and if she doesn’t believe it, then that’s on her… Her doubt makes you realize that she can’t read your surface thoughts and emotions either. So at least you’re even there.

Some silence sits between the both of you, most likely because the both of you are busy reading each other, gauging each other. Trying to figure out how to stay one step ahead of the other.

“So what’re they talking about out there?” she asks after a few moments.

“What to do with you,” you answer plainly.

You don’t need to tune your own ears to hear since you’re still connected to Noir. She’s still feeding you her perceptions through the Network. Though you have them dimmed and muted and numbed, they’re still there at the back of your mind.

You raise the volume a bit, just enough to hear what’s going on with Frank and the townsfolk. Someone yells out a resolution, to which the town votes. A chorus of Yeas and Nays echo into the air, one group shortly after the other.

They sound relatively even to you. Maybe the Yeas have an edge? You can’t quite tell, not without turning more of your conscious self towards the incoming feed.

With Lisa awake, you’d rather not.

Either way, you turn your focus back on the psion in front of you, who stops trying to hear and instead raises her feet back on the bed. She then scoots backwards towards the pillows and leans on them casually, allowing her body to visibly relax. It’s almost as though she holds herself up all of the time, and now allows herself to simply let down everything.

You sense her defenses lower to some degree, and slivers of her thoughts and emotions waft into the air around you.

“They better not wanting to be killing me,” she sighs aloud. There’s a hint of worry in there, but you don’t exactly trust it.

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You wonder if you should tell her what they’ve been discussing, particularly leaving her here to die by herself. But you also wonder if her knowing that matters at all.

Though it seems to you that she’s partially given up, that her kicking back is also her giving in, you don’t believe her. You simply can’t. You have to believe that she’s saving up energy so that she can make some kind of move.

And even if she resigns herself to whatever fate the townspeople have for her, once you’re gone she’ll be free to do whatever she wants. If they decide to exile her, it doesn’t stop her from following after and… wiping their minds or something.

“Sadly, no,” you say with a disapproving sigh. “They don’t want anyone dead. The only ones who do want people dead are in here, with you.”

“Who says I wanted anyone dead?” she says. “If I did, I would’ve pointed my sidearm at someone too.”

You get a sense that she’s not answering you, not really. Rather, she’s testing out her defense. You can just about hear her playing with the tones in the words, all in her head, just inside of her surface thoughts.

It injects a level of doubt into you, about what to trust and what not to. But you’re able to push it away and resolve to not trust a single thing that Lisa says. Anyone who hides as much as she does… well, either she has problems or she’s up to something.

You bet it’s probably some awful mix of the two.

Instead, you chuckle lightly in response, which causes her nose to crinkle in annoyance. But it’s gone a second later.

“You and I both know that guns just aren’t our best tools,” you say. “They’re powerful, sure. They’ll end lives, sure. But they’re also loud and crude and just not subtle at all. What you and I have got is something way better than that, on just about every level. Which means you most certainly had your gun up, only most people didn’t see it. Well, at least one of us can see it, anyway.”

Her face remains positively still, though you can sense her frustration rise up ever so slightly.

Of course, you have no idea if she did do anything like that during your standoff, if she had summoned up lethal psionic energies. You were much more focused on everyone else around you. Their guns, too. And, of course, you were focused on developing your Temporal Acceleration. If she was doing anything shady at that moment… well, you have no clue.

But it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, or whether she believes you think it’s true or not. What matters is that she’s bogged down in those questions.

“Doesn’t mean it aint’ a good tool,” she rebukes. “Psion or not, it’s still something I like using. It’s still plenty enough damage to end a person facing you down.”

She makes a soft ‘bang’ noise as she fires a finger gun aimed at your chest. The recoil launches her hand up, as though the round is a truly powerful one.

You can’t deny how true her statement is. Having psionic powers might be a superior multi-tool, but the gun itself is still an extremely effective single-purpose tool. It’s highly capable of tearing into flesh and shattering bone and ripping up organs, and it hardly matters if the target is psionic or not.

Still, it’s not like psions are defenseless.

“You don’t think Telekinesis could stop bullets?” you ask plainly.

She looks at you with a shocked face, as though she’s never thought of a TK Shield before, but she wipes that away quickly as well. Although you want to believe her, most of you is certain that this is an act. Many, but not all, incoming shards from your Foresight confirms it so.

You wonder if she’s selling it hard because Telekinesis might be one of her stronger powers. Or it's entirely possible that she merely wants you to think that, to lull you towards a specific defense. Or maybe it’s like the questions you fling at her, where they’re designed to take up valuable time in your thoughts.

You ultimately come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what she has. There’s no way to guess, simply because of her nature. Instead, you focus on yourself, and resolve to remain as flexible as you can the moment she inevitably does make a move. If you can manage to redirect whatever she does, you might be able to counter her somehow.

At least, that’s the best you can hope. Could end up a slug match, you never know. Even the shards from your Foresight reveal all kinds of possible outcomes, too many to pick and choose and maneuver through. Every tiny choice counts, and numerous tiny choices lead in different directions.

It certainly worries you that so few of those shards reveal calm and peaceful moments. Could mean that your future is going to be rather colorful soon enough.

A chant erupts from outside, and it’s loud enough that you and Lisa can hear it. The words are muffled, but it’s clear what many seem to want. Perhaps more importantly, what they’re saying bleeds through the wood. They’re muffled, but you can hear them plainly.

The blood runs from your face as the words pass through your ears, even as Lisa’s face contorts into a rather smug and satisfied smile.

You hear Frank yell at everyone to calm down. Then you hear his boots click and clunk their way towards you, and stop just outside the door. He greets you solemnly as he enters the room, then immediately after looks squarely at Lisa with a hard grimace etched on his face.

“You’re free to go,” he says. From his tone, you can tell that he did not want to say those words in the slightest.

Lisa however looks absolutely joyful, without the least bit of surprise. She swings her legs back over the edge, then pushes herself up on her feet. Her grin hardly leaves her face, even as she wordlessly walks out of the room.

“How? Why?” you ask Frank as you leap up from your chair. “I thought the town wanted to exile her!”

He turns back towards you with his eyes dark and dull.

“They’re all free to go,” he says, avoiding your answer. “The township has decided to split into two, according to popular vote. And the half that demanded to go southwards also internally voted to include Lisa, Carl, and Chris into their ranks. Said they would help keep them safe…”

He looks back through the doorway, just as Lisa ducks out of the Lodge. You hear some cheering to celebrate her freedom, though you sense that most of the crowd are already dispersing.

“Well at least they’re leaving,” you reply. “Means that half your town’ll still be here. At least you’re not leaving, right? At least you’ve got the good half!”

“That’s just it - we can’t exactly stay now.”

Frank sits down on the bed’s edge and exhales at length. It’s clear he’s worn out by everything, on every level. This has been his only moment to stop and think and rest. But the moment he feels is as heavy as before.

“At half our people, and at half our guns, no way could we fight off another ganger attack,” he says. “And from what we’ve seen, they’ve only been getting bigger and bolder each time. We wouldn’t last the next. And if we did, we wouldn’t last the one after that. We’ve gotta move, too.”

That same heaviness seems to press down on you now as well. It isn’t just because of what Frank’s told you just now. It’s also because you realize that Lisa outmaneuvered you.

You had been expecting to fight her all this time, maybe fling broken concrete and shattered glass at each other. Actually bring the building down on your heads, that sort of thing. But it turns out that wasn’t her move.

Her move wasn’t to confront you at all. It was to manipulate the townspeople, to manipulate their vote. What began as the majority of them wanting to exile her, ended with half of them embracing her instead. Realizing what she’s done frustrates you deeply.

Of course, you have no idea how she performed it. You couldn’t read her energies with any semblance of accuracy. Hell, you could barely tell she was using any at all. Though you could make an educated guess…

A Network, maybe?

No, a Network, definitely. A hidden one, just like yours. She must have used that to Orchestrate their vote and secure her freedom. If not that, then something like that.

A curse escapes your lips - you should have expected this kind of misdirection from her. You should have at least expected her Network to be stronger than yours, and for her to be far more devious than you first thought. She’s the town mayor, after all. Those kinds of thoughts and energies likely come naturally to her.

“At least we do got a bright side,” Frank continues. “I told them what you told me about your dad, and that he’s got a community just like ours, and he’s taking them to some kinda safe haven up north. So that’s where we’ve decided to go, too. I mean, if he’s got a kid as good as you, then he can’t be half bad himself, right?

“Anyway, It’s gonna be a hard road, we’re all sure. Real dangerous for regular folk like us - we’d be up against who knows what out there, and not all of us are gonna make it. So some of us were hoping that you could come with us, help keep us safe, help make sure most of us make it where we’re going.”