Mr. Noodles wailed about human skins and delicious meats, angrily flailing gargantuan limbs. The smaller skinwalkers wisely chose to depart, rather than get pulverized by the thrashing, serrated appendages of the persistent giant.

[We better move before he makes pepperoni out of us.] Alexa poked Martin, drawing him out of his thought-management paralysis. [The invisi-cloak might have hid us from his perception, but it won’t protect us from becoming pizza via collateral damage!]

In that very instance one of the titanic limbs struck a nearby ruin and it began to topple down onto the group. Martin’s perception split. He saw Alexa’s dark face in front of himself and the falling building through Cottie’s eyes. A jagged, steel beam was heading right for her head.

Martin dove into his power and took total control of all four bodies in that instant. The four teenagers moved like a single organism, in near perfect synchronicity, narrowly avoiding the beam and stepping into a broken window as the wall fell atop them.

[Impressive coordination, Mittens!] Alexa praised. [Keep it up! I like being alive!]

Using mental threads of the brain-spiders Martin coordinated all four humans to quickly move away from the giant skinwalker while keeping everyone together, constantly, perfectly positioned under Cottie's invisibility cloak. This would be utterly impossible to achieve, had they acted as individuals.

As the four-human-amalgamation escaped the smiting limbs of Mr. Noodles, Martin started to feel mentally drained. Control of four people was a very tiresome job. If he added any more his power would probably burn out just like Ember’s.

[Head back to your house,] Alexa specified, wincing as Mr. Noodles continued to loudly topple and decimate buildings somewhere behind them.

[Why?] Martin asked.

[Dinner! Also, we can maybe drop your sister off at home, because she's an uncooperative butt. She couldn't even catch and examine one gym teacher as her SCA mission briefing required! For shame. 0/5 stars. Would not hire again!]

[Right. Why didn’t you tell me earlier that you hired her?] Martin sighed mentally.

[I didn’t personally hire her! The SCA did. They generally go by the nearest agent with the highest aptitude score. Ember had the highest recorded grades in the Academy and perfect mission success rate.]

[Hmm. I see.] Martin replied. [I didn't know my sister was such a tryhard.]

[You don't have to try as hard if you can just make a thousand copies of yourself, live out a thousand extra lives.] Alexa noted. [Now, how would you rate her sister-ness?]

[Not very high. Wait, why am I rating her?]

[I bet she wanted you to be more successful... more like her.] Alexa glanced at the mind-controlled body of Ember. [I always wanted a big sister, you see. I think I'll take her off your hands.]

[What? How?]

[Minion numero trio,] Alexa smirked.

[Are you for real?] Martin demanded.

[I'm very for real,] Alexa affirmed.

[Why so many secrets and lies? When are you going to stop misleading me?]

[After the Superstate falls,] she explained.

Martin sighed. Alexa was humming to herself mentally and thinking about something green.

The longer Martin controlled the bodies of the three girls, the more he inadvertently learned about them through their mutual connection. Most of what he learned he didn't want to know.

He didn’t want to be a puppeteer, didn’t want to know people’s personal thoughts, didn’t want to dominate anyone in this manner! Alas, he had no idea how to mute their thoughts while he was controlling them.

Ember was still passed out and her super power felt completely fried, gone. Her fractal web was dim, just like his once was. Her power was no longer awake, impossible to access. Martin feared an inevitable time when she came to and realized that she was no longer a superhero, just a girl with potential for being one. Would she be stuck forever as a mundane human? What new power would she gain if any? Would she have to go through the Academy again? Martin didn't know the answers. He knew that heroes could burn out, but they generally got killed by their enemies when it happened.

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The worst, most embarrassing thing was that Martin knew what Ember was dreaming about. He couldn't turn off the flow of information from her mind, lest he lose control of her body. Ember's nightmares featured flashes of Alexa making out with Martin as Ember rushed to save him, but kept getting held back by some kind of an impediment. A bubble of slowed down time, a sudden fence, a gust of storm wind, a rushing river, legs that refused to work, a crowd of old people, a flock of birds and etc. The same nightmare scenarios repeated over and over in her head, some featuring Cottie as the impediment.

Cottie on the other hand, had no dim fractal web in her head. She was just a human girl. The terrifying Enforcer had no power to lean on, no possibility for an awakening. Martin was truly impressed with her now. Her body responded faster, easier than the others. She was very fit, as fit as a 14 year old could get had they chosen to discard their humanity, given up their childhood to become some kind of a gun-ninja. Martin realized that it was easy to control her because she was trained to obey.

Occasionally, Cottie's mind flashed with images of her memories of the Equalizer compound located somewhere high up in the mountains.

Ten thousand gray-robed child-soldiers moved in perfect synchronicity of a strange, repeating dance, beneath the azure glaciers. Kick, sit, twist, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right.

It was the most incredible thing Martin had seen in his entire life. He knew that all of these children were trained to eventually go out into the world to observe villains and heroes. They were ready to strike down any super who was about to stray too far with their power, to end them before they turned against humanity.

The Equalizers had incredible unity in their silent dance. Martin had experienced the Temple Compound of Eminence Equality as if he himself had attended their training. But why? Why were they so dedicated?

Another memory flashed in her head as the answer. It was seemingly stitched from various recordings of the event, perfectly fused by Cottie's mental strength.

Martin saw a city in flames and a man made of fire laughing in the dusky, smoke-streaked sky. The burning man was igniting police cars with rays of fire. A villain. A girl that looked like she was made of blue ice flew into the villain, trying to take him down. A hero.

Their bodies entwined as they collided and the world warped with a blinding flash. A mushroom cloud rose, vaporizing everything in sight, toppling skyscrapers and leaving shadows on walls where people once stood.

Martin saw a little girl with deep-blue hair and emerald eyes in a sky-blue dress who was hiding out in a bath filled with water for many hours. She breathed through a metal straw while everyone and everything around burned, turned into ashes as a cascade of power resonance rippled through the devastated city again and again until both the hero and the villain were no more.

He understood Cottie!

The Equalizers had become carriers of Void weapons of their own volition. They were all children orphaned by super-caused disasters! Many of the Equalizer acolytes had nothing left but passionate animosity for the careless supers that took everything from them. They were humanity, united with purpose to hold back what they saw as walking disasters.

Last but not least, Alexa was the hardest to manage. Martin wasn't sure if he was controlling her at all. Her movement and thoughts were incredibly erratic, mind constantly flashing with odd ideas or jokes. Somehow, she had piggybacked on the skinwalker communication system, seeing what Cottie saw.

Alexa had a name and a narrative for every rock, house and skinwalker in 2424. Martin could not even tell if she was an awake super, as her brain-spider Tickles was constantly bogged down with trying to process an endless, illogical story that had no beginning or end.

In Alexa's universe of wild imagination everything was alive, everything had feelings. It was a beautiful, ridiculous, abstract absurdity. Unlike Cottie, Alexa treated her brain spider like a best friend and a one way conversation companion. Martin tried to listen to her story and found himself immediately lost.

[See that traffic light over there, Tickles?] Alexa thought. [Her name is Matilda Wickers Trafficlight. Matilda helps people by being a good traffic manager. She is always soooo incredibly busy managing traffic, so she never has any time to herself. None whatsoever! Matilda doesn’t want to admit something very important. She has a very big secret that separates her from other traffic lights. She is actually in love with a wasteland wraith named Dixon Joulers. Someday they’ll go on a date in a coffee shop, served by the last man in the world and...]

Martin really was hoping to find out if Alexa liked him or what sinister, villainous plots she was concocting, but no. He learned that the West-North wind was called Bob Dockler who was just trying to make it home for lunch and that Mr. Noodles was a pizza restaurant owner in his past life who made the best Fettuccine Alfredo in town.

This waterfall of utter nonsense just kept coming until Martin completely stopped paying attention to Alexa’s thought channel. He simply had no patience left for listening to her gibberish.

While trying to tune her out completely, he accidentally dove deeper into her subconsciousness and found nothing at all there, except for an empty, dark, unfriendly nothingness that seemed to stare back at him trying to evaluate, label and sort him out as if he was just a handy tool, a useful device of some sort.

The nothingness peered at Martin without eyes, observed all of him all at once and found him wanting.

Martin mentally backpedaled away from the infinite nothingness, retreating as far away from what he saw as possible, trying not to think about it.