I felt sick. Sicker than I'd ever felt. Violated and twisted, like something had crawled inside me, and had gotten to probing the deepest parts of me, like my whole body -- my whole life, was just a glove.

And then I realized, terrified, that it wasn't something else inside me. I was the one inside. The glove I was wearing wasn't me.

I was too tall, for one thing. Too strong. Too fit. My body was inflexible, but so light...no, light wasn't quite right. Muscular. It felt light, but it was heavy. It felt like I could just run through a boulder if I wanted. Every movement I made had momentum, had force. My arms swung like hammers.

And...holy mother of Jesus' cousin's wet nurse, what the gravy-swilling dickens were those? They were HUGE. If I looked down straight at them, they could fill my whole vision. I found the hands I'd been so content to swing around like hammers just a moment ago suddenly crawling across this chest instead.

My chest, I realized, as I felt what I was doing to it. As though it were my own. It was terrifying, and the bout of sickness I felt earlier rose in full force as I gagged at my own unexpected touch.

"Are you alright?" a man asked me.

"Yeah, sorry--" I said, and then froze at the voice. Not his, but mine. It was a voice I almost recognized. It was Karu's, but lower, more sonorous, richer. "Hello?"

"Hello?" he answered.

"Sorry. Uh." I scratched my head by reflex and found my hair shockingly absent. Just bristles under my fingertips, and a clean scalp beneath. A scalp I could feel my fingers touching. This was just too dang weird.

This had to be a dream or something. This was just the most bizarro, realistic dream I'd ever had. I'd never once dreamed of being anyone else, and certainly not so...I glanced down again...convincingly.

But here I was. The man cleared his throat.

"What?" I asked.

"Well, we uh, were asking your opinion on the battle formations."

"The what?"

"The uh…" he gestured towards the stone slab in his hands, etched with writing. I picked it up and looked at the unfamiliar diagrams and words. "...you...requested this, not fifteen minutes ago, ma'am."

"Ma'am," I muttered. I'd never been a ma'am before, and I felt entirely too young to be one now. Maybe Karu wasn't though. Except I was Karu right now, so...yeah?

"Sorry uh," I said, giving it back to him. "It looks...fine."

He cocked his head. "Um. I was…" He stopped and seemed to stammer for a moment with a few half-baked responses, and I gleaned that my answer wasn't supposed to be a 'yes' or 'no'. Somehow, this dream had taken a turn for a test I hadn't studied for.

Which would have been a comfort, honestly, because I'd had that one before. I pinched myself real hard just to check, and yeah it hurt, and no, I didn't wake up.

"Sorry, what's the question?" I asked, seeing another man show up with another slate, and stand in line. Karu was busy in my dreams, I guess.

"Formation, ma'am. You said you wanted repeated, integrated cells across the walls instead of closed divisions. You said...you wanted a medical unit in every fourth squad, to vary power compositions and distribute humans among the cells...and then you said...you wanted these figures, so you could…"

He trailed off, his look hopeful for only a moment. I didn't even know what we were fighting, until I turned around and gasped -- in a far lower voice than my own -- at the huge screw-you array of XPCA nonsense lined up outside.

"Holy starfish," I shouted. "There's a billion XPCA outside!"

He blinked at me.

"Dude, what the actual WTF. Am I supposed to like, lead us against that?"

"Erm…" he glanced at the other dude. "You...have been. It is only thanks to your acumen that we have driven them to a stalemate. But that will not last forever...we need to seize whatever advantages we can…"

"Well screw that," I said. "I can't lead an army. What idiot decided that?"

Again the glanced at each other. "You...did?"

"Sorry boys, I can't fake this. I'm not going to get everyone here killed pretending to be Karu." I shook my head. I was Karu. I just didn't have any of her actual ability. Hell, I was glad she wasn't wearing the visor in this dream, because if she was, I wasn't sure I'd know quite how to see through it.

"What...you can't...would you leave us all to die?"

"No," I said, crossing Karu's arms. Holy shit her tits were heavy. "I'll go negotiate with them."

"Ne...go...tiate?"

"You can't." The other argued. "You are not...you...we need you within the city."

"Well screw that, I'm not dying in here when those guns start banging. If we're getting out of this mess, it's going to be talking our way out. Now I may not look it, but I've actually got a pretty good record of negotiating with the XPCA."

"You can't!" The first said this time. "It's too dangerous."

"Are you blind, dude? They're literally sieging the city."

"You aren't permitted to leave the outer ring. You must stay within."

"More rules?" I sighed at him, shocked at how little he seemed to recognize what a friggin' war zone this was. "Dude. Look. Use your freaking eye holes. Do you, or do you not see the massive army outside, ready to lay waste to this town and everyone in it? At the very least, I want to know what they want, and if possible, maybe even give it to 'em. And I know we're technologically deficient here so -- I get to go walk outside with a flag of truce and that's literally our best shot."

"But...the...troops."

"What about them?" I asked, liking just how cutting Karu's tone could bite.

"...um...formation them?"

I headed for the gate, the two in tow, sputtering and apologetically making demands. Karu had strong, long legs, legs I would have killed for playing volleyball, and she could book it if she wanted to.

I laughed as I bounced...in uh, more ways than one. Why the heck did she ever need a jetpack when she had this body rockin'? Holy goats, dude. If this was what being at the end of puberty was like, sign me up a hundred times. I was so down.

I reached the outer gate faster than I thought possible and yelled at the guards.

"Open the gate!" I shouted. "This is an order!"

They looked at each other in confusion for a moment. But Karu was in charge of this whole siege defense, and I was Karu. The gate slid open even as the two aides came huffing and puffing up behind me, shouting feebly to close it.

But they were too late. Karu was too fast, and I didn't even wait for the gate to be all the way open before bounding towards it. If I could ditch them here, I might have a shot at talking things out with the XPCA. My guess was they weren't after the eradication of the city, or even the Exhumans here. Odds were, it was something--

The thought cracked out of my head with the sound of my skull. I staggered in surprise, fists up through a muscle memory and defensive reflexes I just did not possess. I felt blood on my forehead, and the pain was at once, more than I was used to, and less than this body cared to note. It was muted, like Karu was exceptionally used to pain, and that thought made me sad for a moment.

Until the rest of my thoughts rejoined my head, and I stopped to wonder the much more reasonable question of what the heck hit me? It was right in the forehead, right as I passed through the gate right--

My hand stopped as I touched open air where the gate had been. Just stopped. I felt nothing. There just wasn't anything there, but I couldn't pass through it.

I turned and faced the aides, who were frozen behind me. One pivoted on me strangely. "No human is permitted to leave the city," he said. "Please return to the task."

"Why is there an invisible wall here?" I asked, banging on nothing. He didn't answer, and I didn't like that, so I grabbed him by the arm and held it against the nothing for him to feel.

Except he fell right through it, still awkwardly frozen. But where he was standing, there was still something. I felt him in my hands still, even though he'd clearly fallen through the open door. It was as though what I saw and felt were completely at odds, and the door wasn't really open, and he hadn't really fallen through it. Though I saw he had.

"You're not...you can't try to leave," said the other.

"I did try," I spat, turning on him. "Why can't I? What the heck gives?"

"Please return to your task," Pleaded the first.

"No. Screw you guys, this is too weird." I went past him, but he didn't move to stop me, didn't react normally at all. Neither did the guys up top on the gate. Neither did anyone, I realized. I was running around with a cracked head, I'd just thrown someone out the front door, the forbidden front door, and it was all anyone could do to just stand in formation like we were still dealing with a siege as the one and only concern.

Nothing here made sense. This was a stupid, dysfunctional dream, and I wanted out.

And then I was back in myself. The tablet in my hands, a stool under my bottom. Still in Oasis, but back where I was before that whole...thing...happened.

Just a vision? Or a waking nightmare? Some kind of premonition maybe? Athan didn't give any stock to the supernatural but I had a fondness for it. More than likely though, it was some kind of Exhuman shenanigans. Just to be sure, I peeked outside and saw that there was no battle line of XPCA ready to kick down the door.

There were a couple people standing there though, staring at me. I looked at them warily, and then around at everyone else, who ignored me completely.

Too completely, I noted, and checked closer, still getting used to my own lanky, awful body again.

Beaten, unconscious, all of them. Kidney punches, cheap shots, dirty fighting. The kind of things Karu did in a fight. Or maybe I just had Karu on the brain after…

My hands throbbed and I looked down and saw my knuckles bloody and wasn't sure if it was mine or someone else's. This was too weird. Too, too weird.

And then, as I started to freak out, I saw another vision. Of a girl, just like me, freaking out, exactly as I did. I spun around, going well past three-sixty to locate just who or what was looking at me, seeing this girl freaking out and spinning and clutching at her knuckles in a room full of collapsed people.

And I found myself staring right at the couple. The girl waved, and the vision in my mind waved with her. Something about how she stood seemed familiar. Something about the vision seemed...like...something I'd dismissed just a bit ago. I'd been busy, it was just a passing thought.

But with everything that'd happened here now, there were no mere passing thoughts. Something was super screwy, and I was worrying it was my head. Except the one possible saving grace. The thing that girl reminded me of.

"Saga?" I asked the girl.

And though she politely said 'what?' and then 'no.', the vision in my head nodded, clear as day. And visions were a Saga thing. Saga gave vision, said yes, in the aftermath of the most screwed up few minutes ever, I was absolutely sold.

"Just tell me what's going on?" I asked.

I suddenly felt my mind jerking around and felt sick again, but when I came to, when my head stopped spinning...and when my eyes were shut tight against the sickness, I saw though another set of eyes, at strong hands with hilarious itty-bitty strands of hair growing on the knuckles. Athan's hands. And in them, a tablet, that he saw, that had words on it.

And as I read those words through his eyes, I began to understand, something impossible yet undeniable. My mind open and reeling as I was forced to confront reality itself.

"Balls," I said as I set my own tablet down. "I knew things were going too well."