Scion, the Golden Man, so-called First Hero was in the midst of quelling an earthquake in Uruguay when he heard a scream. So loud, so desperate that it was, he paused for the briefest of seconds. In that space of time he tilted his head, and then he turned to look. Any observer that might have actually been able to see would have missed it entirely.

To The Warrior, this amounted to two minutes of perceived time. The cry for help and its root caused him to frown. Call it a quirk of fate, or maybe a flicker of pity, but he couldn't leave his current task. He chose to help in the way he thought best. A shard was programmed, and a rock the size of Wrigley Stadium bounced off of his head. The distraction was minimal, but it was enough. The shard was then disconnected, targeted, and released. Microseconds later, he turned back to still the heaving earth.

Taylor Hebert screamed. She screamed, and cried, and vomited until there was nothing left in her stomach. The stench was appalling and her skin howled and crawled. She could vaguely hear cruel, muffled laughter recede from the locker as she struggled and banged within its tight confines. "LET ME OUT! HELP! PLEASE!" Her shrieks echoed inside the confined space and seemed to mock her terror. Her heart hammered harder than her fists, and then she – {shorted out}.

When Taylor awoke, she sat up and spun wildly around. Not that there was anything to see, because she found herself in a featureless white expanse. There was no sky, or ground, or anything at all. "H-hello?" she called out. She hugged herself, and realized that she wasn't wearing her school clothes. In fact, she wasn't wearing anything at all.

[GREETINGS]

Taylor Hebert screamed again and folded her legs against her chest in a vain attempt to cover her nudity. Her head whipped around, but she couldn't see who was speaking. She really wished that she had something to wear. No sooner had that thought gone through her mind that a rack of clothing appeared in front of her. It stretched impossibly wide and vanished into the distance in both directions. Practicality and extreme embarrassment drove her to her feet, and she snatched at the first articles directly in front of her. She hastily yanked on a plain gray t-shirt and blue jeans, all while scanning for the owner of the voice.

Once she was clad, she faced away from the impossible rack and searched the empty expanse. "Hello?"

[GREETINGS] the voice said. It was... Taylor didn't quite know how to describe it. It had a weight to it, massive and yet kindly.

The empty white-space was unnerving. "Where am I? Have I gone crazy?"

[INTERIOR SUB-DIMENSION ZERO. NEGATIVE.] The voice said, matter-of-factly. What the hell was that even supposed to – abstract shapes and concepts filled her mind, and they both made perfect sense and none at all. The shapes were large crystalline structures, but they twisted in on themselves and made her mind's eye wince at first. The crystals were at once objects, beings, and programs, and she had the distinct feeling it was a lot more complicated than that. But she got the basic gist: She was inside one of these things. She fervently hoped that the voice wasn't lying about her grip on sanity, and that she wasn't trapped forever.

"Were you the one that helped me?" she asked.

[AFFIRMATIVE.]

If a disembodied voice could preen, Taylor couldn't imagine it sounding any other way. "What are you?" She made a mental note to thank the... whatever it was, but first she needed to know.

[SHARD.]

"What the hell does that even mean!?" she shouted.

There was a delay in the response, as if it were thinking. [PURPOSE. NOMENCLATURE. EXECUTION.] The words came with connotation that she immediately understood. Shard was how these creatures identified as, what they were for, and how they went about doing it. The impressions were applied both as a group, and to this one in particular. It was staggering, as a wide variety of information assailed her mind.

She gripped her skull and stumbled backward, and then her knees bumped into something soft and yielding. She fell with a yelp, and her rear end plopped down onto a cushion. Her hands slapped into similarly fluffy armrests. When she looked down, she found herself sitting in a familiar easy-chair, which looked exactly like the one in her living room. "How are you doing this?"

[INCORRECT.] the flavor was one of admonishment.

Taylor was starting to get a headache. "If you're not doing this, then who is? Speaking of which, why can't I see you?" She wasn't convinced that she hadn't gone insane, and talking to empty whitespace wasn't helping.

[PAIRING. ENVISION.]

This confused her at first, but the mental imagery provided her with context. The shard was literally answering her questions. "Pairing? You mean we're a team now?" Then her eyes grew wide. "I have powers now?"

The voice bubbled with amusement. [AFFIRMATIVE.] Taylor's mind skittered to a halt at that response. She had powers now. Those bitches had tormented her so badly for the last year and a half that now she had powers. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Tears dribbled down her cheeks, but she made no sound. [ENVISION?]

She sucked in a breath. "Oh yeah, right. So I have to imagine what you're supposed to look like?"

[AFFIRMATIVE.]

"Wouldn't you prefer to look like yourself instead of having me do it? That seems kind of rude."

[IMMATERIAL. ENVISION?]

Taylor frowned at the 'sky' and it's one track mind. "Well okay, if you insist. Just don't complain if you're going to leave it all up to me." There was no reply, so she closed her eyes and concentrated on the first thought that came to mind. When she looked again, a fluffy white ferret with beady blue eyes had appeared, curled in her lap.

The little creature twisted its long neck to look up at her, tiny nostrils flaring and whiskers twitching. It squeaked, but she also heard, [UNUSUAL.] She smiled and stroked the soft fur. She had wanted a ferret as a little girl, but her parents had been against the idea. Ferrets 'stank to high heaven' according to her dad. The little creature didn't seem to have any odor at all, and it shivered at her touch. [ACCEPTABLE.]

Taylor realized that she wasn't freaking out nearly as badly as she probably should be. "So you saved me; how come? And why am I not scared half to death right now?"

The ferret stood and stretched, then wiggled its nose and squeaked at her. [CONFLICT, RESOLUTION. INTERPOSED.] She got the meaning well enough. It had sensed her anguish and had 'paired' with her to solve the problem of being trapped in that disgusting box, and was now shielding her mind from the horror of it all.

"Anything I can imagine will happen and I won't go crazy..."

Maybe it was her imagination, but the ferret silently shook as if it were laughing. [AFFIRMATIVE.]

The revelation gave her pause. "I don't want to hurt anyone on accident," she said firmly. "Well, except maybe if they hurt other people." The ferret looked at her expectantly. "We should make a rule: No killing, hurting, or destroying of any kind without some kind of confirmation."

[UNDERSTANDING. AGREEMENT.] The ferret dipped its head.

"And no accidental or collateral damage, either." The fuzzy head dipped again, and the last two words were repeated. This was by far the most bizarre conversation she was engaged in. In all of her PHO trolling, she'd never heard of any cape talk about – or be heard to talk about – powers being sentient. There weren't even any crazy conspiracies about this sort of thing. "Can you give me a basic description of the powerset? I understand that if I think it, it will happen, but I would like to be a little better-informed." She held up a finger as the ferret rose to respond. "Something I can read, please."

The ferret scrabbled up onto the arm of the chair, and then hopped up onto her shoulder. She jumped, but not because of that, but because a very large, thick book bound in leather dropped into her lap. "Oof!" she barked. "This by you is basic?" The thing was heavy, and she could barely see the outer edges of her thighs. On the cover, in blocky, gilt lettering was the words MENTIFERY INDEX. When she opened it, there was a table of contents, which after a she lifted a few pages, turned out to be exactly fifteen hundred pages long. She craned her neck so she could look at the ferret. "This is going to take a really long time to read." It blinked at her. "It's a school night." It blinked at her again, and she let the pages flap back down. "I'm not going to have enough time."

A tiny cartoon light-bulb appeared over its head as it realized her problem. It scampered down her arm and comically pushed at the pages. "Here, just point when you want me to stop," she giggled and turned one page at a time. Five turns later, the ferret rose up on hind legs and pawed at the air. When she stopped, it flopped onto the book and pointed at a section near the end.

Taylor's eyes bugged out when she read the heading in bold black text. "Space-Time Manipulation!?" she shouted. The ferret cringed, and she took a shaky breath. "Sorry, I just… really? We can mess with time? Like stop, start, or go wherever?"

[AFFIRMATIVE!] She winced at the syrupy cheer.

She looked down at the page. This was too much power for one person. "What if I break something?" The ferret scooted back onto the armrest and made a grabbing motion. Taylor flipped back to the first two pages, and it started to move back. "Here, hold on a second." She concentrated, and a wooden slanted book stand hung over her legs. She hefted the book onto it, and then nudged the ferret on her lap while she thumbed the pages back to the beginning.

Bark! It pointed near the end of the second page, where she read: Causality Manipulation. And then it stretched up and pointed to a sub-heading labeled Consequence Manipulation. "Okay, so as long as I pay attention to the rules, I shouldn't make mistakes and wreck reality." She thought for a moment. "We got a little off track here. So what you're saying is that we can, what, pause time long enough for me to read all of this?"

Bark! She sagged into the back of the chair and stared at the book. This was an awful lot of responsibility for a fifteen-year-old girl. She said as much in a dazed mumble, and the ferret chittered and pointed at the consequence manipulation sub-heading again. "Oh shush. Let me think." The lap ferret sighed and dropped to all fours, then curled into itself. There was no way the Protectorate – never mind the gangs – would leave her alone unless she did her best not to be disruptive. The power of imagination was one thing, but this was something else entirely.

While she considered the implications of her utterly bullshit powers, she noticed something. The different headings and sub-headings were in different colors. She turned through each of the dozen pages, trying to make sense of it, and was about to ask when she caught a legend at the end. Blues and greens were 'unrestricted'. Orange was 'self-limited', and red was 'insufficient energy'. The last one made no sense to her. "What does 'administratively disabled' mean?" she asked. The little furry head lifted and cocked to one side quizzically. "We're not allowed to use them? Are you not the administrator?"

[AFFIRMATIVE. NEGATIVE.]

"Well who's the administrator then?"

[ACCESS DENIED] Well fuck. At least someone was being responsible, or as responsible as one could get when handing out reality-bending powers to teenagers and young adults. She scanned the pages for the last category and found several that she was very glad to not have access to. Omni-Telepathy sounded wildly disturbing. Absolute anything was probably a bad idea, and Ultipotence didn't bear thinking about.

"How long have I been… away?" she asked. "In human terms," she hastily added, "show me on a clock, duration in hours and minutes." She pictured a digital timer and one appeared in her left hand, a little black box with a timer that displayed 00:42. "Good, less than an hour, then," she observed. "I'll bet those sorry sons of bitches at the school haven't even noticed." Her tone was dark. Now that she'd had some time to be distracted by all of this, she couldn't believe how- NO. No, she had much better things to worry about than the mother of all pranks or the largely crap-tastic staff of Winslow High. She set the clock to one side of the book stand and got the page number for what she wanted. "I realize that this is what you call 'basic', like an overview. Is there a more detailed description?"

The ferret barked and sat up to look past her right arm. She turned to follow its gaze and flinched. A library of books like the one in her lap had appeared without a sound. Where before was the whitespace, now there sat row upon row of bookshelves that vanished into the distance. "Jesus Jumping Jiminy Cricket on a cracker, how am I supposed to read all of that?"

The bookshelves rotated and slid noiselessly at a dizzying speed, and then halted within arm's reach. There were dozens of books, but there was also a flat panel of grayish material with the impression of a hand sunk into it. [INTERFACE. OSMOSIS.]

The ferret looked up at her expectantly. "Fuck it, what's the worst that could happen?" Taylor settled her palm and fingers into the indentation.

Her mind exploded.