Are You Even Human

It's dark. The air around me is hot and wet, muggy beyond just the already-thick Georgia air. It clings to me, pressing with a tangible pressure, stagnant and unmoving. There isn't even the slightest of breezes, not even the barely perceptible movement of indoor air. There are no vents, no openings, no way for the air to get in or out.

No way for me to, either.

I struggle, trying to move, trying to look around for light, but my body is an incomprehensible mass of discordant flesh. I realize that my blindness may in fact be due to the fact that I don't have any eyes, so I make some. I make countless. But there's still nothing. It's still dark. Of course I had no eyes. They don't do anything, after all.

Where am I? Why can't I move?

Oh. I don't have very many muscles, either. I shift and shape myself, fighting against the clay of my flesh, struggling more than I ever have before with forcing myself into Lia's body. I don't think I get it quite right, parts of me squirming uncomfortably and refusing to change. But eventually, shuddering and sweating, I struggle to my feet, the ground warm and soft underneath them.

Where am I?

I struggle my way forward, my legs heavy and my steps unsteady. Staggering, I catch my weight on a nearby wall, its surface hard and smooth. I feel my way forward by leaning on it, using it in place of a cane until I suddenly reach the end of it, cutting my thumb on the corner. It hurts, but only until I reshape the torn flesh, making it no different from before.

Seriously, what's going on? Where am I?

I remember yesterday. I remember fighting an Angel, I remember getting interrogated, I remember getting carted off and drafted, I remember falling asleep in my new bed. Did I get kidnapped? How? Why? By who? Maybe someone's power went haywire and caused this somehow, but I don't feel anyone else's power around me. It's just me.

"Hello?" I try to call out, my voice a wet croak. There's no response. So I carefully keep staggering forwards, carefully finding another wall that isn't quite so sharp. The next one I touch feels like the floor: warm and pliable. Like flesh. That strikes me as probably not normal.

Where the fuck am I?

I pick up the pace, following the wall as best I can. But I can tell that it keeps curving inwards, keeps turning me right over and over until I touch the hard wall a second time. Just to make sure, I make my way to the edge and carefully run my thumb over it again. Just feeling for… yep. Something wet, about where I expected it. Blood. It's the same spot I cut myself the first time.

This is a fairly small room, and I didn't find any exits. Shit. I need to find a way out of here. I can't let myself get stuck, I have too many things I need to do. I need to get out, I need to get out, I need to get out, I—

I gasp as my eyes shoot open, and this time there's light. I'm in my bed, or at least the bed I was recently assigned. I'm also a disturbing mess of tumor-like growths that seem to be trying to grow more limbs out of my limbs. It's uncomfortable, so I force myself back into Lia's body. It's frustrating, but not difficult like it was in… my dream, I guess? Hmm.

I force myself out of bed, doing a quick stretch based on someone else's habits for a moment before I catch myself and scowl. Right. I should look into this. I'll probably be more comfortable showering at night than in the morning (I'll probably be working up a sweat here at the military training camp), so I just toss some clothes on and step out of my room, leaving Christine to sleep.

It's about four-thirty in the morning. If this was boot camp, that'd probably be around the time we'd be expected to wake up anyway, but breakfast here isn't until six a.m. and our classes apparently don't start until seven. Which means I expect someone will be wondering why I'm up and about sooner rather than later.

"...Recruit Morgan," an armed, uniformed man addresses me as I turn a corner.

Perfect.

"Hello," I say, stopping and giving him a polite nod. "Question for you. Does anyone here have a power that affects dreams?"

Better safe than sorry, right? No way I'm going back to bed without asking.

"Ah," he hums. "Odd dreams, huh? No, there's no one here with a power like that, but it's very normal for people with new powers to have unusually confusing or vivid dreams. It doesn't mean anything."

I blink.

"...People with new powers having weird dreams is a notable trend and you don't think it means anything?" I ask incredulously.

He gives me a flat look.

"It doesn't mean anything bad is happening to you," he clarifies. "Maybe it means something else but that's for the eggheads to figure out. All you have to care about is that you'll probably get weird dreams every other day or so for a while, which usually peter out in a couple months to a year."

Hmm. An unexpectedly detailed answer.

"Do you have powers?" I venture.

"Yup," he answers. "Now head back to your room, alright? You've got time for a bit more rest."

And I'm oh-so-sure he wouldn't want to have to insist.

"Mind walking me there?" I ask. "This is all kind of a lot, and it’d be nice to ask some questions to someone with experience."

"Sure, this all isn't easy," he agrees amicably, matching my step as I turn to walk back to my room. "What's up?"

"The dreams you get," I ask. "Are they like… floating in a void, falling slowly, looking at something weird?"

"Yep," he nods.

"Is there like, a weird presence there? Watching you?"

He gives me an odd look.

"...Sometimes," he admits. "Not usually."

"Are the weird power dreams ever about anything else?" I ask.

"Nah, that's the gist of them."

I nod, frowning. For some reason, I suspected as much. This dream felt different, substantially so. It felt more real, and it certainly didn't involve any apparent communication with a higher being or whatever the fuck that dream I had a few days ago was. Anastasia, Christine, and I all remembered having similar power dreams, but this was nothing like that. It was almost completely the opposite, even: claustrophobic, heavy, and personal. I was so certain that no one was there other than me.

No more time to push for details, though. We're at the entrance to my room.

"Well, thank you," I tell him. "It definitely makes me feel better to know other people have dreams like this."

"No problem, newbie. All us powered folk have been there. You get back to sleep, alright? They're gonna work your ass off today."

"Will do," I nod, fully expecting to stay awake, and I head back into my room to think. I've ruled out the possibility that the dream was caused by someone on the base, or at least someone on the base that the soldiers here know about. That leaves the possibility that there's someone on the base we don't know about, the possibility that I have two kinds of power dreams (which is apparently abnormal) and the possibility that it was just a weirdly lucid normal-ass dream.

I don't want to assume it's the latter, because discounting either of the former possibilities is potentially dangerous, but at the same time I know it's very likely the latter so it's probably not worth being too paranoid about it. I'll just mentally file it under 'potential disasters to look into further if additional portents are beheld' and move on, I guess.

I hop back in bed, not really feeling like sleeping but not wanting to move around too much and wake Christine up early. With nothing to do, I just play around with my shapeshifting until the alarms in our rooms automatically go off and scare the ever-loving shit out of me, causing me to shift into a combat form and rip my shorts. I awkwardly shift back and put on new clothes while Christine blearily wakes up.

Or… doesn't wake up, I guess. She just curls the pillow around her head and keeps trying to sleep. Oh boy. I walk over and poke the pillow.

"Breakfast time," I tell her.

"Mrrghlerg," she answers eloquently. Oh boy, she's gonna be one of these. While I certainly have nothing against a bit of healthy sleeping in, we're on the military's schedule now and they're a bit prickly about those. I have to get her used to getting up. If she was one of my siblings I'd probably recruit someone to just yank her out of bed, but I'm alone with her and… uh. Huh, right. I guess I could just do it myself now. But it doesn't matter, because Christine and I don't have the kind of relationship where that would be appropriate. She's clearly a person who likes privacy and doesn't like being touched; yanking her covers away or anything like that would be a recipe for resentment and distrust, and therefore obviously unacceptable.

But I still need her ass out of bed.

For better or worse, Christine, Anastasia, and I will be considered something of a unit. Even to the other new powered folk who don't know what we did or why we were here late, we still arrived together late and sat together mostly alone and didn't really talk to anyone outside of the big scene I accidentally caused, which is incidentally another thing that will alienate us. The instructors and soldiers, conversely, do know what we accomplished, and they of all people are well aware that anyone who kills hundreds of aliens keeping their companions alive isn't just going to up and abandon them now. Nothing forges loyalty like overcoming adversity together, and there's no way that the military believes that any of us are as loyal to them as we are to each other.

And naturally, the military is absolutely right about this. I don't expect that to be a huge issue for them, and I don't expect things to come to a head over it, but yeah. If they fuck with Christine or Anastasia, there will be a toll to pay with me. And if they fuck with Christine or myself, Anastasia might legitimately just kill somebody. And yes, it is very nice and sweet and we're such a horrific little found family and it's so romantic that it's us against the world and blah blah blah but I need to be very clear that this is not a good thing.

We are a trio of traumatized teenagers. They are the entire motherfucking United States military. That is not a battle we can win.

So how do we stop the idiot bigwigs from fucking around and forcing us to find out? Simple. We match what they want with what we want. We prove that we aren't just three traumatized teenagers; we're an effective team that supports each other and basically comes ready-made out of the box to do exactly what they want us to do: kill aliens. If these guys are as desperate for potential firepower as I suspect they are, they'll be overjoyed to be presented with new supers that already have experience working together in combat as long as those new supers obey them. And since that's something we have to do anyway because of the whole draft thing, I want to make sure our bosses are really happy with us, to minimize the chances that they try to take Anastasia away.

To do that, I have to regain their trust. And to do that, I have to show that I'm a positive influence on other future soldiers around me. See, human trust is fundamentally based on two factors, each more or less equally weighted: first impression and usefulness. First impressions are important because people are, on a whole, really bad at changing their minds, and fucking terrible at nuance. People instinctively want to slot others into generalized 'good' and 'bad' bins wherever physically possible, because life is complex and humans are simple.

A big example of this is a thing called the halo effect: effectively, a positive impression that a human has about someone in one area causes them to be more likely to have a positive impression about that person in completely unrelated areas. The famous example of this is appearance: attractive individuals are literally statistically more likely to be assumed to be good people by total strangers. People straight up don't even think about it, there's just something instinctively wired in the human brain that looks at a hot guy and instantly assumes he's more intelligent than an ugly woman without a single conscious decision being made. Trust me, as a lifelong hideous fuck I have quite a bit of personal experience with this fact.

Anyway, returning to the main point, I think it's fair to say that this all-important first impression ended up, if we are being generous, rather mixed. Most people saw me as a monster to take down, and when it turned out I wasn't that they remained so suspicious of it that I was shoved into a secret interrogation black site and pretty directly accused of being an alien spy. Even if people don't believe I'm an alien spy—and I suspect most of the military won't, because as far as I know there has been no such thing in three decades of constant war—that bad first impression is still going to color their opinion on me. They're going to assume I'm a potential problem case. They're going to treat me as an issue to be solved, and I will absolutely under no circumstances stand for that shit.

So I need the other fifty percent, as always. I need to be useful. So goddamn useful that they have no choice but to trust me, because they'd rather expose themselves to a potential leak than have to handle all the problems I'm solving for them without me.

Think about it. In a professional situation, who makes you happier to see on shift: the person you can shoot the shit with, or the person who gets so much shit done that your job becomes way easier as a result? The most powerful person in a social situation is always going to be whoever the most people like, and the way you get superiors to like you is to become essential to them in ways they needed, wanted, but never had to ask you for.

So that's what I'll do, and it starts with making sure Christine gets out of bed on time. God knows she'll need a little help to shape up into a soldier.

"Come on, Christine. We gotta get up."

"Can I not just rest a little after nearly dying a dozen times?" she groans.

"Nope, sorry," I answer bluntly. "End of the world and all that. You want any help getting up?"

I offer her a hand, and she glowers at it for a while like it slapped her mother, but eventually one of her arms snakes its way out from under the covers and clasps it. I smile and pull her up into a sitting position, where she stretches and yawns.

"It's criminal," she mutters. "What's the point of saving the world if it's just going to be run by fascists?"

"The not dying part, I imagine," I say. "You want me to step out while you get dressed?"

"...Uh, yeah," she mutters. "Thanks."

"No problem," I nod. "I'll be right outside."

I head out of the room and lean on the wall just outside our door to wait. I could spend the time waking up Anastasia or just going to eat by myself, but it's better to wait here; Christine is a lot less likely to just curl back up in bed if she knows that I'm waiting on her, after all. And sure enough she's staggering out of the room about five minutes later.

"Alright! Let's pick up Anastasia then, yeah?" I smile at her. She grumbles various unintelligible things that I'm pretty sure include the words 'morning people' and at least seven swears, but at least she follows me.

I knock on Anastasia's door and call out to her, and I'm suddenly startled as I feel the radius of her power expand out from the room and brush up against me. I'm not really sure what to do other than mentally poke at it a little, but once I do it retreats away, and after a bit of shuffling Anastasia opens the door with a smile.

"Lia!" she greets me.

"Hey, Ana," I smile at her. "Breakfast time."

"Yeah, okay!" she nods. "But… then we have to go to school, right?"

"Well, it's cool school," I tell her. "It's a school for superpowers, after all."

"Hmm. Well, if you say so," she frowns, clearly not buying it.

"Look, it'll probably be boring," I admit, "but I think we've earned a bit of boring, right? We can just sit around and learn stuff without anybody trying to attack us."

Probably, anyway. Still, the idea seems to cheer her up at least a little bit, so we head off to eat breakfast. Ed unfortunately doesn't seem to be there when we arrive, and Peter is so I just grab us the empty table furthest away from him. I'm still not entirely sure how to handle him and don't particularly want to deal with it this early in the morning. Thankfully, he seems happy to just keep chatting with the people around him and leaving us alone. We manage to get through the meal without incident.

By following the other newly powered people, we make our way to the classroom, though that turns out to be something that ends up as an incident. A minor one, definitely, but still.

"Not you three," the person I assume to be the instructor snaps at us when we enter. "You need remedial. Head to the room next door."

I feel everyone's eyes on us at once, yet more unwanted attention that signals us as other to the main group. Unfortunate, but what can you do? I drag Anastasia and Christine into the next room as instructed, where we see a grumpy-looking military woman with short brown hair that's turning a little gray. Judging by the fully-armed guy next to her, she either doesn't have powers or simply doesn't share Commander's confidence in holding her own against us by herself. Prudent, I suppose. The room is relatively small and set up with a projector, three desks, and not much else. The desks are already heavy with papers that we will presumably need to memorize. Joy of joys.

"All three of you sit down," she orders. "You do not speak a word in this classroom unless I prompt you to speak, do you understand me? You're four days behind and you are going to learn every last bit of it today, or you will wish you had."

Pfft. Okay, lady. Christine immediately opens her mouth to say something, because of course she does, but I clap my hand over it and raise my eyebrow at her until she swallows whatever comment she was about to make. Then I head for my seat. A very slight twitch of the instructor's lips indicates that I have already earned myself some brownie points. Score.

"At least you had the decency to show up on time to class, if not to training as a whole," the woman grunts. Bitch, I was busy. Angels don't kill themselves. "Let's begin."

The next couple of hours are supremely boring. Our instructor outlines a lot of things we've already been told, like what our schedule will be like for the foreseeable future, with educational classes in the morning and more practical power classes in the afternoon. Even accounting for our four-day delay, she expects us to be up to standard in six weeks or less, which seems like a really short amount of time to master a gosh dang superpower, but what do I know? Most of the time is spent with her just establishing common-sense guidelines, like 'don't use your powers on people' and 'ideally, don't use your powers outside of structured classes at all.' That one is less of a hard rule, though, which is nice since my power doesn't really ever turn off. Eventually, though, we start actually getting into some interesting stuff.

"Alright, let's talk terms," the woman snaps. "There are a lot of different ways people classify and understand powers, but the three of you only need to know one way: the military relevancy standard. Essentially, your powers are simply not important except in areas where they cannot be replaced with standardized hardware. If your power, for example, allows you to attack targets at range, but in a way that doesn't exceed the range or firepower of a standard-issue rifle? We don't give a fuck, because when you're in the field you're going to have a rifle, so your power isn't worth shit."

The projector suddenly flashes to a new slide, showing seven words in big letters, the first letter of each capitalized in extra-big: Strike, Transit, Recon, Artillery, Tactical, Armor, and Sapper. STRATAS.

"But let's say your power isn't ass. Let's say you can attack things with it, and while the range is equal or less than a standard firearm, the destructive potential exceeds a spray of bullets, or ideally even standard explosives. If that's the case, the power is given a Strike rating. Artillery ratings, conversely, are for offensive abilities that exceed the range of standard firearms and either the accuracy or the destructive potential of competing options like sniping weapons, mortars, or the like."

She slaps the wall the projection is displayed on for some reason.

"The less brain-dead among you may notice that these terms match the sort of language we already use, and that's explicitly because we want to match what your power can do with what it provides to a military engagement. Strike powers go in strike teams. Artillery powers work alongside artillery teams, and so on. You don't need to think about where you believe your power to be the most useful; as we learn about your abilities here, your ratings will be assigned to you on a scale of zero or higher in each category, zero meaning your power can't accomplish that goal, one meaning that it can but not in a way that's relevant, and anything above that being a relative heuristic representation of your capacity to affect a battle. The scale generally goes up to ten, and two to four is fairly standard."

She walks in front of the projection, swapping sides so she can point to the other words. She smacks one.

"Transit means you can redeploy yourself or, ideally, other troops more quickly than normal. This is almost always going to be your most important rating if you're capable of it to a high degree."

Smack.

"Recon powers gather information, either through literal reconnaissance or, more commonly, through esoteric bullshit. Many, if not most powers feed you information in some way or another. It's how useful that information is to anyone other than you that determines your Recon score."

Smack.

"We already talked about Artillery, so next we have Tactical powers. They are loosely categorized as any ability that focuses around supporting, empowering, or otherwise increasing the tactical value of any troops under its aegis, commonly through resonance effects but ideally through other means as well. These abilities tend to be both rare and dangerous, and in the hands or tentacles or what have you of Angels, they almost always denote essential targets to take down in order to win an engagement."

Hmm. What's a 'resonance effect?' Sounds important. I assume she'll probably explain later.

Smack.

"Armor is all about the forces that must be committed against you to bring you down. If you're abnormally durable, the aliens are going to need to commit more resources towards killing you in order to succeed, and that provides value even if you're not a huge threat on your own."

Smack.

"Finally, you have Sapper powers if you can work like a sapper. These are abilities geared towards preparing a battlefield, a defensive position, or otherwise supporting troops via preparation rather than direct combat."

She steps away from the projection screen, presumably having finished beating the shit out of it.

"The important thing to note about these values is that they are heuristics; they will increase and decrease as your abilities are reassessed through experience. Likewise, they are assigned to opposing Angels in order to quickly convey relevant information to allies in the field. Your allies will need to know if an Angel could be ranked Artillery 1, for example, and they'll definitely need to know about any values higher than that. As powered individuals yourselves, though, there are two more major attributes that you'll also need to be aware of: odd-op and are-dee."

What and what? Oh, there she goes, she swapped the slide. It's spelled "ODoP" and "RD." Acronyms.

"RD is the big one," she continues. "It stands for Range-Density, and while it often functions as a general numerical measure of your power, it's technically a measurement of how many standard troops you can safely protect inside your domain against a specific opposing level of power. Which, of course, leads us to domains: the only universal attribute of all supernormal abilities."

I adjust myself in my seat a little, actually getting kind of interested now. A universal attribute of powers, huh? Is it that thing Anastasia and I 'feel' about other powers, or is it something else?

"All of you have a domain," the instructor tells us. "Your domain, in essence, is the space in which you can use your power. I hear you three have actual combat experience, so you might already be aware of your ranges. Everyone's domain is sized differently by default, but it's possible to alter that size however you wish, potentially using your powers at dramatically longer ranges than you're currently used to."

Huh. That's interesting. My power only affects me, though. What would extra range even do? Let me shapeshift into bigger things? I can already turn into Behemoths so that doesn't make any sense. But… hmm. I can only feel other powers and gain new forms when I physically come into contact with the power radius or form in question. With this 'domain' thing, maybe I could gain the ability to shapeshift into someone just by looking at them. That could be handy.

"The downside to this, of course, is that powers do not play nice with their own kind," the instructor continues. "When domains overlap with each other, they will generally fight each other for control. A domain that is in control can smother other domains in overlapping areas, weakening or outright removing their ability to function. We call the capacity of a domain to beat out other domains its 'density,' because it seems to scale with a domain's current volume: the larger you make your domain, the worse its ability to establish control, and vice-versa. This is extremely important, because the protection of an unsmothered domain is the only known defense against paranormal abilities, period."

I see. I see! Oh my god, I get what was going on now. The constant pressure from the Queen was its domain trying to press into mine so it could smother and kill me. But it couldn't, because the Queen's domain was stretched all over the entire greater Chicago area, so it was incredibly thin and I could keep its influence out. Andre and Lia, conversely, had no such protection, so the extremely low 'density' of the Queen's power didn't matter when there was no domain to protect them at all.

I must have been instinctively extending my domain to cover things that I touch, which makes sense, because how could my power scan the biological data of a person if it wasn't encompassing them in its area of effect? If I had just figured that out and learned to expand my domain back then, I could have potentially saved them. Damn it.

"One of the most important things about your RD score," the instructor continues, ignorant of internal chastisement. "Is that the starting value you're working with can be improved dramatically with training, effort, and experience. The RD score is our way of codifying your overall domain strength, which is essential for both offensive and defensive purposes. A large part of what you will be doing at this camp is maximizing your RD score as much as possible."

The next slide swaps over, showing a diagram of a blue stick figure standing in the center of a large blue circle, black stick figures all around them.

"It's rarer for powers to not be able to pop the skull of anyone in their radius, or something similarly lethal, than to be harmless," the instructor says. "And since power domains are the only defense against power domains, your number one priority in any engagement will almost always be to encompass and provide resistance to allied forces against enemy powers. A high RD score is essential for this, but it is also essential for offensive operations that don't have you protecting assets. It is possible that you may be deployed exclusively with other powered individuals in order to mount an assault on Angels. This is where your ODoP score comes in."

The next slide swaps over, showing a scale from zero to three, labeled as 'less penetration' to 'more penetration.'

"Recruit Morgan!" the instructor snaps, and it takes me a split second to remember that Morgan is Lia's last name and she is talking to me.

"Ma'am?" I prompt.

"I hear you're already a wing ripper. What was it like, using your powers in the midst of things?"

I blink.

"Uh… more or less the same as it usually is?" I hedge. "My power works by changing me, so I'm not sure if it's affected by this stuff, bar my scanning ability. I scanned a copy of the Angel rather than the real thing to take its form. Making clones was its power."

"Alright," the instructor nods. "If your ability isn't affected by the presence of other domains, we call that ODoP zero. That means your Optimal Degree of Penetration is none: regardless of how dominant your domain is, your ability still works normally because it doesn't rely on dominance at all. These abilities are extremely rare, and for obvious reasons they make you quite dangerous in power-on-power combat. Ideal for wing ripping, really. Your sensory ability is more likely to be in the area of ODoP one; this means you can be matching an opponent equally in domain strength but still be capable of using your ability. It goes up from there: ODoP two means you need to have double the RD of your target for your ability to work normally, three means you need triple, and so on. Abilities hardly ever get ODoP scores higher than three, and if they did it would make them nearly useless in power-on-power combat."

Hmm. I think I get it. I guess it sounds like my powers aren't affected by this much, but I distinctly remember Anastasia having trouble with this against the Angel. Its power was preventing her from hurting it with her own, at least from a distance.

…It was Emily who told her to wait for the Angel to get closer before attacking, wasn't it?

Yeah, I remember that. It was. She was talking about feeling the radius of the Angel's power as a bubble and having Anastasia use hers to pop it, or something. She was basically talking about this ODoP and RD stuff: by waiting for the Angel to come closer before attacking, Anastasia wasn't stretching her range as much and therefore had a 'denser' domain. Her power was still weaker than normal while fighting the Angel's, but it became strong enough to do severe damage anyway. This is just… codifying that stuff, explaining it. It all makes a lot of sense when I think about it that way.

And of course, if I wasn't already convinced that Emily has powers, I definitely would be now. But how does she hide them? People with powers can feel other powers. Even if they don't have Anastasia's or my sensitivity to the weird little feelings those powers give off, they can presumably still tell when their domain is overlapping with another. To hide powers you'd have to, well, hide your domain. Is that possible? It would presumably be an important military skill if it is, but the instructor doesn't mention anything like that.

I wonder if it's being withheld from me specifically, because they know they'd never be able to find me if I could hide my powers. Without my domain acting as an identifying feature, I could just slip away and become anyone. Not that I'd consider doing so if I could, of course; Anastasia is still stuck here, after all. But they don't know that.

The class eventually ends, leaving me with a lot to think about. I share my thoughts on how our experiences with using powers in the incursion zone line up with what we've been taught, which seems to help Anastasia understand a lot of it. Christine stays pretty quiet, though.

"Do you think you were struggling to use your power in the Queen's domain because you have a high ODoP or something?" I ask her. Cuz, y'know, I'll feel really bad for all the mental shit I gave her if she was literally actually unable to use her powers most of the time and we just didn't know why.

"…Maybe," Christine hedges. "It's a little easier now, but I don't know if that's because of that op-op shit or if it's just…"

She trails off. Hmm.

"ODoP," I correct, in lieu of anything better to say. "Not op-op."

"Sure, yeah," she shrugs. "Sorry, it's just… I dunno. I have an executive function disorder. I can't just do things simply because I want to like normal people. If I'm not drugged up the ass on prescribed amphetamines I basically can't function, and I was both off my meds and either in the middle of or on the edge of a panic attack that whole time. I probably wouldn't have even been able to feed myself if you and Emily weren't constantly pushing me to. I was… basically not even a person."

She curls up a little in her seat, clearly uncomfortable with telling us all of this, or at least worried about it. Hmm. I mean, it definitely would have been good to know back when our lives were in danger, I guess. An actual medical condition explains it, and while I haven't really heard of an 'executive function disorder' before I certainly don't have any reason to think she's just making it up.

"Huh. Thanks for telling us," I say, not really sure how else to respond. "Is the military supplying your pills, then?"

"Yeah, I finally got to start them again today," she nods, seeming slightly relieved by my answer for some reason. "They don't just fix everything automatically, though. Even on my pills, it's always a problem. Sometimes my brain lets me do things normally, but most of the time it doesn't and I just kind of… well. You know what I do."

Nothing.

"What's that like, if you don't mind me asking?" I prod. It's the kind of question that I know would be annoying as hell from a stranger, but I saved her life a gazillion times so I can probably ask it without upsetting her.

"Well, it's just… I dunno. I know what I should be doing, and I even know how to do it, but I just… don't. I can't really describe why because it doesn't really feel like there's a why most of the time. Like, maybe I can't do something because it's causing me to panic somehow, and even if that doesn't make sense I can say alright, I can't do this because I'm panicking. But a lot of the time there's just no reason at all. I'll try to get out the ingredients to make a sandwich, and I know where they all are, and I know how to make the sandwich, but I just… my body doesn't move. It refuses to make the sandwich. It won't let me start any of the steps, and trying to willpower through it does nothing but make me anxious. My mind just blanks in between the 'how do I do this' and the 'okay, then do it' steps."

Jesus Christmas Christ, that sounds horrific. I'm not sure what to say. I've gotten some shitty comments from people before where they say shit like 'oh man, it must feel like you're trapped inside your body' when I used to talk about all the assistive mechanisms I used to move around and stuff, which always pissed me off. Like holy shit just because I do everything a little slower than you doesn't mean I'm trapped, I can still do it. I can still determine my own life. But having a problem with the brain that says 'no, today you can't?' Having something that steals that control? That's fucked up. That's terrifying.

But of course I don't say that. 'That's fucked up and terrifying' is probably the exact same thing that went through the heads of the assholes who said that dumb shit to me. So in the same vein, I say what I wished those jerks would have said instead.

"That sounds like a lot to deal with. Let me know if there's anything I can do to make things easier for you," I say. "If you ever want help, and there's a way I can help you, just ask."

I get a small smile from her at that.

"Thanks," she mutters.

"Of course," I say amicably, while internally I'm trying to figure out what this means for my plans. Because like, damn, that shit sucks, both in general but also in the very specific issue of 'the military probably doesn't accept many excuses from their human weapons.'

It's the end of the world, after all. Nobody is going to give a shit why Christine is failing to do things, they're only going to care that she is, and no matter how many reasonable excuses she gives backed by diagnoses and doctors, it's still going to reflect poorly on me if I can't find some way to ensure she can follow orders. And it's going to be awful for Christine too, because the classic military response to less-than-obedient recruits is to break them hard enough that the brand-new trauma supersedes whatever problems were previously present.

I… don't really know how to solve this problem, though. If it's a medical disorder, I guess it's not necessarily 'solvable' in the traditional sense anyway. That's… really frustrating. I guess I feel a little better about Christine's problems now that I understand it's more than just her being flaky and unreliable, but at the end of the day she is still flaky and unreliable. Even when people had the basic decency not to blame me for my mobility issues (and isn't basic decency always a rare treat), they still had to plan around them. How do I plan around 'might randomly be incapable of doing important things,' though? I can't. I just have to accept that any given plan involving Christine has a random chance of failing for no reason. Which… well, is infuriating, frankly.

I'm trying to keep us all alive, after all. Not being in the middle of the warzone doesn't mean we aren't suffering the risks of war. Problems during training could absolutely get us killed down the line, be they a failure to learn or even just a failure to make proper connections. I won't let Christine drag me down with her.

But I can't let her struggle through it alone, either. No matter how frustrating it is, abandoning her wouldn't be right.

I keep thinking about it until lunchtime is over, at which point we once again follow the other powered people (keeping as far away from Peter as possible) to wherever it is we're supposed to go. They lead us outside to a wide courtyard behind the building, nestled in the forest. There isn't much to speak of here: just a grassy field in the middle of a bunch of trees. Commander herself is waiting for us there, along with half a dozen other soldiers. The other trainees start lining up in something vaguely resembling rows, so we do the same. I end up with Anastasia on one side of me and this comically tall girl with brilliant red hair in a braid and a shotgun spray of freckles all over her neck and face. Seriously, she's huge. Probably something like six foot five. I guess there's also a seven-foot-tall guy among the trainees too, but still!

Gosh, she has a lot of freckles. Actually, it's weirdly difficult to look away from her face for some reason. I wonder if that's her power.

"Alright recruits, you know the drill," Commander shouts. "You're all working on the same thing as yesterday. Morgan, Patrova, Baker! To me."

Alright, yeah, I was about to say. I certainly hope I'm not doing what I did yesterday. Christine, Anastasia, and I head over to Commander while the six other soldiers fan out to supervise whatever the heck everyone else is doing.

"Hello, recruits," Commander says, flashing us a mirthless smile. "I trust you learned a lot in your class this morning?"

"Yes ma'am," I answer her.

"Good. I expect you three to be caught up by tomorrow," she orders. "I'm sure our little wing ripper is at least twice as smart as the average soldier, hmm?"

"Yes ma'am," I repeat.

"Oooh, confident, I like that," she smirks. "So. After lunch, practice is for practical experience. You three obviously have quite a bit of practical experience. So today, you're going to show me what you know and what you need to improve on. Morgan, based on what you've been taught so far, what do you think you need to improve on most?"

Hmm. Well, the instructor said that our primary duty was going to be protecting other units from powers, right? But I can only do that if I can touch others, which is… obviously not enough.

"Increasing my domain's radius, ma'am," I answer. "I've never done it before. My power has always been touch-only."

"Good. Next. Patrova?"

She goes down the line, assigning the other two individual instructors from among the other soldiers here, all of whom apparently have powers. I, of course, end up stuck with Commander herself. Her power washes over me, enveloping me with its promises of bliss, pressing against me like the tide.

"Domain movement is simple," she tells me bluntly. "Your domain will naturally react to pressure. Simply pay attention to it, and learn to do it consciously."

Her power presses against me even harder, threatening to crush and overwhelm me. My only options are to let it through or give it ground, so I give ground, letting her power dance across my skin but refusing it access to my brain. I've done this before, haven't I? She's right. In the fight with the first Angel, there was a feeling like this. I just did it on instinct. But how do I do the reverse, and make my domain larger?

Hmm. I guess it's called a domain, after all. What even is a domain, if not the insistence that some space is owned? I take a deep breath, hold that power in my mind, and push, the certainty that the world around me is mine at the forefront of my thoughts. My superpower is mine. Therefore, it obeys me. And I insist that everything—every last goddamn thing—is mine as well, so long as I can reach it.

So reach it, I do. My power expands. Commander seems to feel it, and so she pulls herself back and lets me grow unabated. My area of influence explodes out around me, stretching thin, and without warning a thousand sensations assault my mind at once, enough to tear it in half and leave me spasming on the floor.

The more it expands, the weaker my domain becomes, allowing everyone else in the class to easily block my power from affecting them without even a smidge of effort. But that doesn't help me even the slightest bit from the uncountable breadth of life that doesn't have powers. And I forgot, didn't I? I spent so long in an area where every living animal had been wiped out by the queen, then all my time after that in tightly controlled indoor spaces, that I forgot how much life there is in the world, and how my power reacts to life.

Insects, arachnids, worms, grass, fungi… even in the tiny space I manage to push my domain out to, I'm assaulted by countless minuscule examples of life, and my power makes a template for every last one of them, each fighting for domination of my consciousness and my body.

None of them lose. I vomit, feeling tiny, insectoid legs of a half-dozen different species start growing out of my arms and legs in place of body hair. Grass grows from my scalp, mycelium extends into the ground from anywhere my skin touches it, and tiny wings erupt from my cheeks and face like buzzing scales. And all the while, each and every part of each and every change is cataloged, analyzed, and filed into my brain at a level of detail far beyond anything I've ever wanted to know. Moments later, I feel Commander's domain crushing mine once again, smothering it back down to a more manageable size, but it's already too late. The changes are still happening, my body shifting, unshifting, and reshifting a seemingly endless array of useless possibilities.

…Or, well. No possibility is truly useless. They're certainly useless on my humanoid form, but there's potential to these designs if I lose enough mass. These chitin structures don't scale up well, but I can always simply scale myself down. …Am I screaming?

Whatever. I feel Commander's domain press down on me even harder, trying to take over the influence I have over my own skin, but since I'm making myself smaller I can shrink my domain to match—raising its density and strength, just like I was taught—to keep her out.

"Help me with her!" Commander shouts, and more pressure crashes into me, working with her to smother my abilities down further, forcing me to shrink my mass and domain size even faster. I want to test the upper limit of my ability to gain and lose mass; a lot of what I've just learned could come in handy if I'm able to make myself as small as a bug. And the possibilities of that! Infiltration, escape, spying, or just the simple joy of being able to fly! I mean, I'd obviously have to completely change my body plan and remove any form of complex central nervous system, but—

Oh fuck, that's why I'm screaming, huh?

Whatever currently passes for my lungs coughs and heaves for air, my self-awareness and self-preservation finally shunting itself back into the conscious part of my brain after it had been forced out by everything else. My body is… incomprehensible. A transient state between human child and insect that I'd been using to test how much of my body I didn't actually need to survive. I've reduced myself to nothing but a head and half a limbless torso, everything below my ribcage completely removed and sealed up, various tiny plant and bug bits sticking out from my body randomly as I messed around with them during my work.

This was me. I did this to myself. I can't vomit again without a stomach, but I give it my best shot, my throat constricting and trying to pull up acid that no longer exists.

I could make it exist. I could make it stronger. Stronger acid is probably better, right?

"Answer me, trainee," someone barks. "Nod, or blink three times, or say something."

Can I say anything? I inhale again, cough again, shape my lungs and throat a bit more normally, and finally manage to choke something out.

"...I'm okay," I croak. "I'm lucid."

Commander is kneeling over me, glaring with an intensely aggressive, yet at least slightly concerned expression on her face. How touching.

"We're taking you to medical," she says.

"No," I choke out without thinking about it. "I'm fine."

"You're fine?" she snaps. "Do you have any idea what you've just done to yourself, recruit?"

"Yes," I hiss, because I in fact know exactly what the fuck I just did to myself, to a frankly absurd level of detail. That's why I had a seizure. "I got overwhelmed and lost focus. …Ma'am. But I'm perfectly fine."

She's unconvinced, because of course she's unconvinced; I look like a mutant dead baby. I have to get myself back to normal, or… shit. My clothes are all splayed out on the floor, I'm wearing nothing but a dress-sized t-shirt now. Eh, whatever, I can just not regrow any genitals or breasts until I have my clothes back on, it's not really a big deal.

And I need to prove it's not a big deal. I can't allow a fuckup like this to be how my first day in practical training is remembered.

So I start to shift back to normal. I regrow a full body, albeit child-sized and lacking a few essential orifices for now. I get to my feet, ignoring the stares from literally everyone as I collect my clothes, tossing my shirt off with the rest of them so I can fix my bra properly when I grow back into it. And grow I do; my acceleration back to full adult height gives me a flash of vertigo, that deeply ingrained panic within me insisting I've fucked up, stood up too fast, and now I'm about to collapse into a life alert situation. I shove those instincts aside. They're useful to the real me, but I'm not her anymore.

May as well discard them, because now I can stand just fine. I will not fall.

So I don't. I fix my bra as best I can without actually having regrown Lia's breasts yet, then pull my underwear on, ignoring everyone's stares. I'm fine. I have to be fine, because I'm better than the sort of weakling who wouldn't be. I finish dressing myself in full view of everyone here, my body not matching any particular person I've copied so much as settling as a vague, mostly sexless mix between them.

Now fully clothed, I let out a huff of air as I push my body back to Lia's template, filling out my outfit and re-opening the frustratingly sensitive holes in my body that, frankly, I was just as happy without.

"...May we continue?" I ask flatly, wishing I could glower at the many eyes still not minding their own damn business but knowing I have to refrain from seeming emotional. To prove I am in control, I must control myself.

"No, trainee, you may not," Commander snaps back. "You're going to medical like I fucking said you were. You two, escort her."

Commander points at two of the soldiers that have just been hanging around, likely contributors to the other domains forcing mine down earlier. I grit my teeth, wanting to argue more, but I swallow the urge. Authority has been established. I can't step on that any further without consequences, so as painful as it is, I swallow it all down.

"...Yes, ma'am," I nod to Commander. "Apologies."

Seething and doing everything I can to hide it, I follow the soldiers towards the least necessary medical checkup of all time, my mind screaming at itself over my weakness. It's fine. It will be fine.

I'll plan around this. I always find a way.