I was used to waking up in strange beds, as I had hopped my way all over New Marion in my worst days. I had helped myself to the food and housing of anyone I liked, living parasitically like some kind of bogeyman or cryptid, sometimes literally sleeping under peoples' beds.

The strange thing about this particular bed then, quite contrarily, was that it had been the same one for three months now. Really, its familiarity was the strangest thing of all. Being able to recognize my surroundings as my eyes inched open was comforting.

Oh, how things changed.

Today I was struck, as I looked at my alarm clock, by the fact that I was happy. How could that possibly be the case, as it read five-till-six in the morning? This would have been my idea of hell before, yet now it was heaven.

As I pulled myself from my sheets and preempted the clock's sounding, I stretched out and yawned. Not much time had passed, in the grand scheme of things, but so much could change from the adoption of a single real goal, no matter the span.

Standing from my bed, I was a little shaky still, but the nerve-integration was coming along well enough. In the mirror by my closet, I could see myself and weigh up the differences of my appearance. The addition of a cybernetic right leg was actually the least surprising thing to note, as it had been given to me not long after I lost the original. That despair had lasted just a short while, overcome by the optimism I'd found in myself after talking with Bigshot.

Far more shocking was the transformation that my whole body had undergone since then. Whereas the leg was obviously foreign to me, the rest was supposed to be native, but I didn't recognize it in the least.

Months before I had been somewhere between skinny and fat, with a pudgy gut fixed awkwardly on an emaciated frame. Now, though, I was altogether different. My muscles had grown. They rippled beneath the skin exactly like you would expect of a superhero, all dashing, imposing, and ready for the photoshoot.

Realistically, I was not so impressive that I would be gracing fitness magazines, but I did cut a mean figure, that was for sure.

As much as I would have liked to take full credit for this new and impressive physique, the truth was that I owed it primarily to massive steroid use. There had been blood, sweat, and tears on my part, of course, but in the end the results had been decided by government decree long in advance. Three months should not have been nearly enough time to look as I did, but that was the magic of bleeding edge biotech.

The state was quite intentional about the image it cultivated for its spandexed demigods, it turned out. The look they went for was meant to impress, I believed, and to further the idea that we were somehow otherworldly servants of the people. That is to say, above reproach; true superhumans, in every regard, and not subject to real scrutiny. This, by extension, included the people in charge, and was a way to protect our politicians from blowback.

Considering what I had seen, I almost had to sympathize. This hero business was a bloody mess.

Out my window, the dark blue sea churned. I was lucky to have a room on one of the decks above the water, so I got to be greeted by the sky upon waking. This facility was expansive, and well defended too. It was where psychologically questionable supers, both new and with previous work in the field, went for evaluation. Somewhere that we could be safely contained in a controlled environment. Somewhere our insanity could be hidden away from the public, kept from shattering that carefully constructed ideal that society now depended on, that heroes were the reliable portion of supers.

All the staff here wore psychic protection and, try as I might, I was unable to read the minds of the fish below. That left just the other candidates for my company during the last months and I had to say, it did not fill me with confidence. The truth was that their auras were the most volatile I had encountered. Outside of battle, it appeared that supers generally didn't know what to do with themselves.

It's like we were made for conflict, I mused.

I put on my pants, shirt, and shoes. I brushed my teeth in the dark, then came to sit on my bed and wait the last fifteen minutes until it was time to head out. In that interim, I could see that most of the others were already going. They preferred to be in early rather than to sit, wait, and be in on time. They abhorred their own company, but if I had anything to thank my previous solitude for, it was that I did not suffer from this same problem.

I liked to have my time in the morning to think, no matter how short. It kept me grounded.

The six other supers on this rig were not in good shape, unfortunately. I knew for a fact that, out of all of us, I was the only one likely to graduate at today's test. The rest would go on for another three months in training, with some enduring even more cycles than that, as they already had.

Ever since realizing how susceptible my power made me to the influence of others and the adoption of their personalities, I liked to make sure I was thinking through my feelings. I double-checked that I was being honest with myself about my own actions' motivations. It was this strategy that I attributed my advantage above them to, and nothing more.

When at last I entered the hallway, I picked up a decent pace. I had to be at my destination by six thirty on the nose, and any lateness would be counted against me. Regardless of the special occasion, today's schedule would be no different from any other weekday, at least up until the late afternoon.

First on the agenda was the morning meeting. There, we would be told of the day's events, receive our injections, and then begin our exercise routines. Everyone met with smiles and warm greetings on the helipad where it was to convene. This degree of discipline and predictability in our lives had to be by design, forming camaraderie and stability in us. As I looked out on the sunrise happening against the waves of the open ocean, I found myself really appreciating it, too. My mental health was doing the best it had been since I got my powers.

Even though I had given the other students a bad report in my mind, there were really only two of them that were hanging on by a thread. I did not doubt that the rest would go on to graduate in time.

Though I was supposed to refer to them strictly by their hero names, inwardly I knew them as Andel and Markus. I had been practicing my powers nonstop while I was here, both on my own time and in dedicated sessions, and I was getting better at picking up basic information without my target having to think it aloud. With some caveats, I could now access whatever rested closest to the surface of the mind. Facts of life and passing thoughts.

The auras in this case were a mixture of extreme depression and barely contained rage. Like many of the others, their minds were powerfully dominated by a single emotional pathology that had grown out of hand. It was as if they were only capable of seeing the world one way, enslaved to a rogue personality. Per the rules, I was sadly not allowed to help either of them, as that did not constitute a 'reliable fix'. My powers were only temporary unless used with traumatic force, and they were not about to let me go rewriting the brains of the mentally unsound.

I was not the only person here who knew a name they weren't supposed to, though. Ironically, but not unexpectedly, it was my own name that was known to one other. She was a young super, called Flashpoint.

On the day I took down the rampager, she had been there. At some point amongst the carnage when my name was yelled, she must have overheard it, even though she was apparently half-buried in corpses. We had gotten an opportunity to talk about it one time when she accidentally referred to me as Adrian. It explained also why, whenever she looked at me, she was stricken with the fear that had settled into her bones from that day.

While I might have liked to befriend her and make nice with a future colleague if and when we made it back to New Marion, she tended to stay as far away from me as she could. Our conversations had been short and curt up to this point, with no luck breaking through.

The other three supers were less standoffish, but I still didn't know their true names, as they had taken to thinking of themselves each by their hero names internally. It was an interesting phenomena, shared by Flashpoint, but one I couldn't quite wrap my head around emotionally. It was as if they were so engrossed in the goal of achieving that status for themselves, that they had lost their real identities in the process.

Maybe it's narcissism, I thought. Either way, I didn't believe it was healthy.

After the meeting was concluded, I spent my requisite hours sweating away and getting screamed at. Our instructors tried as hard as they could to stress-test us. First was the run, which involved an obstacle course, then came weightlifting, then fight-training, and lastly we focused on developing our powers.

Mine were to be tested in a dark room while communicating with someone I could not see or hear. This person would ask me questions like, 'what color am I thinking of?' Or 'what picture is on the card in my hand?' Occasionally, I would be assaulted by loud noises and lights coming from screens and speakers, attempting to throw me off my focus. I didn't find this method of testing too useful, as I had already pushed my power under similar circumstances; or really, far harsher ones. But they refused my suggestion to try puppeting people around, so here we were, making do.

I wrapped up my day exhausted, both physically and mentally, twelve hours from when it had started. This would normally have been when our regular academic instruction began, consisting of accelerated courses in the legal, practical, and military concerns of hero-work.

Today, we simply entered one at a time into the classroom, alone among many chairs. My turn came third with Flashpoint exiting as I went in, her face pale and haunted.

Once seated, I met a gaunt man with sunken eyes and not a hair on his body. He was dressed in a full black three-piece suit, and he paced around the edge of the classroom as he came in, as if sizing me up.

I had been under the impression that I would be taking a written test like I had last week, but now I was certain that wouldn't be the case.

This man wore no psychic helmet, yet I hadn't seen him coming. Looking at him even now, he was completely invisible to my inner sight.

"Sir?" I asked. It was an open-ended question. We had been taught a great deal of respect while here for the chain of command, so I wasn't about to just ask what the hell was going on, but this was as close as I could get.

"I am from the central intelligence agency. I am here to evaluate you," he said, cold and dry in his tone.

Okay, I thought, this seems to make sense.

"You're a psychic," I hazarded a guess.

The longer I looked, the more energy I saw around him, but because it hadn't been localized to him, it was difficult to detect. Instead, it swirled outward from his eyes, increasing its intensity as time went on.

"We are going to take a journey," he told me, “Through a couple of scenarios."

As his hands outstretched towards me, I braced myself for the worst.