"I need you to talk to me, Tori," Lockdown said over the comlink, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in her ears. "We lost eyes on you for almost a whole minute in that apartment complex, and Adept got a weird ping on your vitals while you were out of sight. Were you compromised? Utopia Lass respond immediately, over." A half-dozen of Adept's heavy drones surrounded her, stun turrets charged to full capacity, making it clear that the other Utopians weren't just asking the question out of sincere concern for her welfare. They needed to know if she'd looked directly into the Medusa Hive.

As much as Lockdown's patronizing tone annoyed her, Tori could understand why. They'd dealt with three previous incursions from the Medusa Hive before, and each one had been a narrow escape for not just the human race but the entire universe--the psychic infestation spread so quickly, requiring only a few seconds worth of eye contact to turn even the strongest-willed person into a mere extension of the otherdimensional consciousness, that whole cities could fall before the civilian or military authorities even knew anything was wrong. It took magic and precognition to catch the infection in time... which meant it fell to the Utopians to save the world. As usual.

Stakes that high on only Tori's third mission as part of Alpha Team left her frazzled as hell, which was probably why she babbled out, "I--no, I don't think so." She didn't know why she put it like that--of course she was fine, she could feel her own thoughts as clear and as plain as day inside her head and she knew from studying the field logs that Medusa drones were nothing more than ambulatory vessels for the hungry, relentless will of the Hive, but the lingering terror of her unexpected encounter with the host body she barely spotted in time to knock unconscious left Tori shaken and decidedly off her game.

"Say again, you don't think so?" Lockdown snapped, sounding decidedly tense, and the urgency in his voice was echoed by the barrels on each and every stun turret aimed in her direction as they quivered with a millimeter or two of motion that suggested microprecision targeting. Adept's hovering robots somehow managed to project an air of looming menace even without facial expressions or body language, and it took all of Tori's finely-honed control not to swat them out of the air on pure reflex. She'd been trained to recognize a threat when she saw one, and her teammates were definitely threatening her right now.

Threatening and threatened. Tori wasn't dumb, she knew that if time hadn't been of the absolute essence there was no way they would have let her tag along on this particular mission; they'd been diverted by an emergency distress call from Foursight because they were mere minutes away and the Medusa Hive expanded too fast to wait for another team, but under any other circumstances there was no way they would let a telepath--even a latent telepath with a host of intricately designed mental baffles that prevented her power from manifesting--anywhere near the Hive. It was simply too big a risk. Nobody knew what would happen if the Hive got hold of a mind that could project its will directly into the thoughts of others, and nobody wanted to find out.

Especially not Tori. "No, I'm sure it's fine, I didn't really see anything," she stammered, holding out her hands in a placating gesture she knew Adept's radar scans would pick up. Normally Adept operated with a full camera array, but with any kind of visual connection a potential point of vulnerability she was no doubt using other means to track Tori. Everyone was paranoid and on edge, and Tori was almost surprised her teammates hadn't simply blasted first and asked questions later. She wasn't sure she would have given them the same chance they were giving her.

Even so, she needed to talk fast. "You didn't see anything, or you didn't really see anything?" Lockdown asked, sounding a little out of breath over the comlink. She had no doubt he was heading in her direction--in a situation like this, his dampening field might be the only thing that saved them from whatever Tori might become if the Medusa Hive got its hooks into her mind. Which it hadn't, of course, and she knew it hadn't because she could still think clearly and talk to her friends and exercise her own self-determination the same way she always had.

Which was what made it so odd to realize she was telekinetically gripping Adept's drones, swiveling the barrels of their stun turrets a few significant fractions of an inch away from her so that any shots they fired would be guaranteed to miss. Tori hadn't intended to do that, and one of the things she was always very careful about was to exercise her powers with intent--she'd almost killed someone the first time her nextstep abilities flared up, turning a simple penalty kick in her high school soccer game into a devastating blow that broke four of the goalie's ribs. "I, um, I'm sure it was nothing," she gabbled, the words spilling out thoughtlessly while she focused her attention on trying to release the hovering robots.

"You're not reassuring me, Tori," Lockdown snarled, even as the first few stun blasts seared the air just inches away from her head. "Tell me exactly what you saw, okay? You know what's at stake here, you know we can't risk you getting compromised. Just putting you into combat was--" He broke off, unwilling to relitigate the argument that ended with her going into the field alongside the others. Harrier was the one who made the call, he'd seen the Medusa Hive in action before and he knew there was no such thing as a safe zone when it came to the spreading psychic infestation, and he was the one who paired her up with Lockdown just in case something went wrong. But that didn't mean Lockdown had to like it.

But Tori had bigger things on her mind right now. Like the way her powers were bearing down on Adept's drones, crushing them one by one like aluminum cans while they fired ineffectually in her direction. She definitely knew that wasn't something she wanted to do, just like she was sure she didn't intend to lash out with a burst of invisible force that swatted Militant out of the air before he could get within even a hundred yards of her. It didn't make sense, and Tori felt like she'd be able to figure out why it didn't make sense if she only got a few seconds to think properly without everyone trying to attack her all of a sudden.

So she grabbed the last wildly-firing drone and used it to shoot Lockdown as he came around the corner, his ability-dampening field useless against a purely technological attack, and she telekinetically vibrated Harrier's brain inside his skull until the multiple concussions overwhelmed even his superhuman resilience. A telekinetic shockwave collapsed the earth underneath Starheart, sending him plummeting a good forty feet to the bedrock below, and just like that Tori had the immediate battlefield all to herself. "I only caught a glimpse, okay?" she murmured absently into her comlink, clarifying for the benefit of her teammates who were out of range but no doubt converging on her position. "It couldn't have even lasted a whole second, I'm sure it was fine."

But in the peace and quiet that greeted her announcement, Tori could feel something slowly, ominously gathering strength in the back of her skull and she realized how wrong she truly was. That momentary glimpse had been enough to infect her with a seed of the Medusa Hive, somewhere down below the subconscious level where even her trained and disciplined mind couldn't detect it, and now that it had broken that threshold of gross perception she discovered she couldn't push it back down. It was simply too powerful for her to fight, and the harder she tried the more she felt it simply crushing her resistance and her thoughts right out of her head.

It was just... it was so terrifyingly strong. Tori thought she knew what strength was; her mentor was one of the single most powerful telepaths in the known universe and they practiced together regularly. But this was another order of magnitude altogether, like the difference between a bulldozer and a tornado. It was simply a force of nature, and Tori realized within moments that she only had moments left to her. She was about to be crushed against the boundaries of her own consciousness.

And if she fell... dear god. There was no way Professor Psyche's telepathic blocks would hold, not with this kind of force directed against them. The Medusa Hive's near limitless power would shatter them effortlessly, freeing its consciousness from the necessity of inhabiting a single vessel and allowing it to radiate out for thousands of miles. It would touch every single mind in that radius, turning them all into extensions of its hungry will in an instant and spreading the infestation too far and too fast to possibly contain. Tori was about to become a one-woman extinction event, and there was no way to stop it.

At least... not with brute force there wasn't. But as Tori felt the power bearing down on her mind, rendering the world around her increasingly distant and irrelevant even as her stolen body used her powers to batter her arriving teammates with storms of telekinetic force far more powerful than anything she'd been able to manage before, she began to realize just how little there was to the Medusa Hive beyond raw mental power. It had no true sentience, nothing behind that overwhelming will beyond the raw desire to consume and expand and devour. It was....

Frankly, it was fucking dumb. And if there was one thing Tori knew about herself, it was that she had way too much pride to let herself get beaten by an enemy this stupid.

She only had the merest fractions of a second left to her, but time could slow infinitely within the realm of the mind. And Tori used that time to retreat inside herself, giving up entirely on any efforts to control or even notice her own body in favor of focusing on the nascent telepathy within her mind. She'd only ever used this particular set of abilities under Professor Psyche's guidance before... save for one notable exception she couldn't distract herself thinking about right now... but that was only because the blocks prevented her from extending her consciousness beyond herself. Within this mental space, there was no reason she couldn't use her powers to their fullest extent.

And while even that stood no more chance of holding back the might of the Medusa Hive than a single pebble did of holding back an avalanche, Tori discovered that she could hide herself from the entity sharing her mind. The trick wasn't too dissimilar from the telepathic baffles she'd grown accustomed to over the last few years, and in fact Tori found that she could draw on them to create her psychic cloak; only instead of confronting the power arrayed against it head on like the blocks did, Tori diverted the energies of the Hive around herself, making a pocket of relative quiet and safety she could use to examine her situation and come up with a plan.

At least, that was her intention. But with time slowed almost to a standstill, floating in a tiny bubble of calm amid the raging energies of the Medusa Hive, Tori found herself introspecting in a way she'd never experienced before. It was just her, this core of thought and will and identity that made up her sense of self, and the telepathic blocks that had become an intuitive and instinctive part of her... and as she realized, with absolutely nothing to distract her from her meditative state, there was a very good reason for that. They were.

She felt almost foolish once it finally hit her. Of course Professor Psyche wasn't constantly expending energy maintaining an intricate and elaborate series of telepathic barriers around Tori's mind. That would be exhausting and wasteful--and worse, if the Professor lost concentration from shifting her focus to one of their many foes, Tori's blocks might slip and falter the way they accidentally did once already. No, Tori's own abilities were fueling the baffles that held them in check, a seamless and perpetual psychic prison... save for the one time she expected them to drop, which became a self-fufilling prophecy because she was the one powering them. It made such perfect sense she could almost kick herself for not noticing it before.

Then the implications of that revelation finally kicked in. And Tori really did kick herself... metaphorically, at least.

It took her a few tries to get the hang of it, of course. The Medusa Hive was so powerful, its energies so overwhelming and all-consuming, that simply reaching out to it was like skimming a hand against the surface of the water while riding in a motorboat. But Tori already knew how the trick worked in principle, because she'd been living with it for years now and she literally understood it from the inside out--it was just a matter of properly redirecting the energies, taking the psychic cloak she'd woven around herself and inverting it so that it surrounded the otherdimensional entity instead.

And once she did... everything stopped. The raging storm that battered against her mind became a swirling sphere of warm radiance trapped somewhere deep inside her consciousness, Tori regained awareness of her own body just in time to stop herself from bending Sandstorm's legs backward, and time resumed its normal pace with an almost sheepish indifference to her heightened perceptions. The extrusion of the Medusa Hive didn't even try to fight her--it simply didn't have the sentience to understand that the power blocking it from its conquest was in fact its own. She was fully in control again, and as she began to hear the concern in her teammates' thoughts she realized she might even be better.

She reached down to the sphere inside her mind, siphoning off a stream of the contained power and using it to reach out with her newly unleashed telepathy to the still-enslaved drones of the Medusa Hive. A few moments of effort, and she'd sealed off those extrusions as well, ending the threat for the present even if Doc Frontier would need to come in and stitch up the dimensional rift that caused the whole mess. The only thing left to her was to explain what had happened to her extremely suspicious teammates... and certainly the fact that she wasn't kicking their butts anymore spoke in her favor.

"I need a status check, Utopia Lass," Adept said over the comlink, her voice dripping with frustration at losing the drones that normally functioned as her eyes and ears. "Everything's calmed down, but are you five by five or is this just a pause in hostilities?"

She smiled. "Everything's good now... but you can call me Perseis. I think it's a better code name for someone who just put down a Medusa, don't you?" She leapt into the air, enjoying her newfound strength. The entity inside her had power to spare, after all. And Tori could put it to better use.

THE END