"Let's just do some stargazing tonight."
Tatsumaki's green eyes narrowed with the particular focus of someone who has identified the relevant detail beneath a transparent cover story. "You got a new ability somewhere and you want to show it off."
"That's a cynical reading."
"Am I wrong?"
Jordan looked at F-boy.
F-boy had been present in the room for the last several minutes with the professional stillness of someone who has decided not to have opinions about the current conversation. He was in the suit—the CEO aesthetic that had been his established form since the DBZ arc, pale purple and precisely fitted, a Stand that had graduated from something otherworldly into something that projected quiet authority instead. He acknowledged Jordan's look with a slight incline of his head, the gesture of a good waiter confirming the order.
Tatsumaki stared at him.
"When did he change?" She was looking between the two of them with the expression of someone who has been away from a situation briefly and returned to find it significantly different. "He was—before, he had the whole—" She gestured vaguely at an aesthetic that no longer existed. "The armor thing. Now he looks like he manages a portfolio."
F-boy appeared to consider this assessment with equanimity.
"The look evolved," Jordan said. "He's been through some things."
"You didn't tell me."
"You didn't ask about his wardrobe."
She reached out and touched the lapel of F-boy's suit—a testing gesture, the way she touched things that interested her. F-boy's expression remained professionally courteous. He was about to indicate, through some combination of gesture and posture, that he could answer her question more fully, when Jordan's hand found the back of his collar.
F-boy's aura retracted. His form compressed. His expression, in the half-second before he went back inside, communicated a single clear message—directed entirely at Jordan, unmistakable in its content.
The middle finger. Unhurried. Dignified. Then gone.
Tatsumaki blinked at the space he'd occupied. Then at Jordan.
"Did he just—"
"He does that," Jordan said. "Now. Do you want to try the technique or not?"
She made the face she made when she was going to say something and then decided the something was more trouble than it was worth, which meant yes. Jordan's hands settled on her head—she was already at the correct height for this, the seaweed curls still carrying the warmth from the earlier drying session—and the Potential Guidance activated.
The white light of the technique spreading through its work had barely registered before the green answered it.
Tatsumaki's psychic power had its own color—deep green, dense with the specific quality of energy that had been compressed and refined over years of continuous use, always running, always present, the baseline output of an esper who had never found an environment that required her to be fully on. What the Potential Guidance touched was the ceiling that the world's physics had placed on what that compression could accumulate to. What happened when it moved the ceiling was visible from the street.
Most of City A felt it.
The ground moved in the particular rolling way that precedes something structural, and every person within a kilometer radius got the distinct impression that the world had briefly entertained a different set of physical rules and was now reconsidering. Chandeliers swung. Vehicles made unplanned decisions about their trajectories. Dogs registered the frequency shift and registered it loudly.
The blue light of Jordan's intervention moved outward from the same point—a counterbalancing wave, psychic energy stabilizing psychic energy, the earthquake that had been building absorbed into the distributed field of his own power and quietly dismissed before it could complete itself. The people who'd stumbled found the ground solid again and looked around with the bewildered expressions of people who had been briefly somewhere else and were now back.
Tatsumaki opened her eyes.
She was looking at Jordan the way she had looked at him perhaps twice before—the way she looked at things that had genuinely surprised her, which was a short list.
"It's more," she said.
"Yes."
"It's significantly more." She was doing an internal count—Jordan could tell by the particular quality of her stillness, the energy moving through her at levels she was cataloguing rather than using. "More than ten times what I had before."
"The world suppresses its power ceilings," Jordan said. "The technique finds the gap between where you are and where you should be."
She absorbed this. Then, with the abruptness that characterized her when she was moving from processing to testing: "Have I developed any new abilities?"
"You'd know better than I would."
She closed her eyes for exactly three seconds.
Opened them.
The green light in her pupils did something Jordan didn't have time to fully analyze because in the same moment his hand felt lighter—the weight of her presence beside him simply ceased—and the space where she had been sitting was unoccupied.
He looked at it for a moment.
Spatial displacement, Jordan thought. Not standard telekinetic projection. Actually spatial.
He looked around the room. She was nowhere in it.
After a few seconds he heard movement elsewhere in the apartment—brief, experimental—and then she was back, appearing beside him with the small satisfied expression of someone who has just confirmed a hypothesis through direct testing. She landed without transition, no visual blur, no displacement of air. She had simply not been here and now was.
"It works," she said.
"I can see that."
She disappeared again. Then reappeared across the room. Then vanished completely for about forty seconds—continental range, Jordan estimated, and not entirely surprised—and returned with the expression of someone who had just walked into a very large house and established the perimeter.
Both parents have spatial displacement abilities, Jordan thought, with the very specific corner of his brain that tracked these things. Their theoretical offspring would be navigating physical space before learning to walk.
He kept this observation entirely internal.
After she'd tired of the initial testing and returned to her regular altitude, Jordan filed what he'd learned and let the thought that had been forming crystallize properly. With her current output levels and the teleportation now accessible... He turned the idea over. She might actually be able to manage it.
He'd think about the approach. Later.
W City. 10 a.m.
The outskirts were the kind of geography that cities produce at their edges: the organized infrastructure thinning out, the forest beginning where the last road ended, the sense that whatever was out here had chosen to be.
Jordan had dealt with a Tiger-level incursion on his way through the city proper—a routine problem, resolved in the time it took for a reasonable person to drink a cup of coffee, after which a small crowd had assembled and needed to be navigated past before the autographs became a full event. He signed what seemed like a reasonable number, politely declined to stay for photos, and exited via a method that left the crowd looking at empty air.
The forest was old and dense and had no marked paths. Jordan moved through it with the Mind Network already active—the passive scan that extended his awareness through the trees and soil and the various things living in both, assembling the landscape as a continuous map.
He found the energy signature without difficulty. It had the quality of precision instruments in operation—clean, regular, the specific electromagnetic signature of sophisticated technology running well. Not biological. Not a monster. A research facility that had been built by someone who was serious about both the research and the facility.
He landed at the clearing's edge and looked at the building.
Modern industrial construction, alloy exterior, PRIVATE PROPERTY: NO ENTRY at the gate in the particular font that engineers prefer. No visible camouflage, which was its own kind of camouflage—something built this solidly in the middle of nowhere didn't need to pretend it was anything other than what it was. The outer walls were, indeed, high-strength alloy. Genos had mentioned tight security. Jordan supposed that was relative.
He stood at the gate and pitched his voice at the exact frequency and direction that would carry it to the person he'd already located in the building's underground level—working at a bench, mechanical components spread around him, the focused posture of someone deep in a project they'd been planning for a while.
"Hello, Doctor. I'm Jordan—a friend of Genos. He mentioned I might be dropping by."
Underground, the doctor set down his tools.
Dr. Kuseno had the kind of face that belonged to someone who spent a great deal of time in controlled environments—precise, observant, the eyes of a person who assessed things rather than just looking at them. His hair was arranged in the specific style that seemed to occur naturally in scientists of a certain generation, swept back from a high forehead with the efficiency of someone who had made a decision about their hair many years ago and not revisited it.
He pulled up the gate feed on the main screen and ran the comparison—the image against the Hero Association database file, adjusting for the hair color discrepancy because that was clearly going to be a factor in several conversations going forward.
"Super Cop," he said, to himself. Then, with the measured tone of someone confirming before committing: "The file has him with black hair. But everything else matches."
He pressed the access control sequence.
Outside, the alloy wall near the gate did something unusual: it unfolded. Not a door—the wall surface itself, reconfiguring, a section of it rising and splitting to reveal the control panel and screen behind it. A practical man's security theater, built to impress the kind of people who understood what they were looking at.
On the screen, a thin scientist in a white coat.
"Mr. Evans." Dr. Kuseno's voice was clear through the speaker, professionally cordial. "I apologize for the ID check—routine for anyone not pre-registered."
"Completely understood." Jordan produced the metal card and held it to the camera. The chibi portrait caught the light. "Genos gave me a pass."
A beat of recognition—the doctor's expression shifting slightly, the way it shifts when something confirms rather than surprises.
"One moment. Opening the gate now."
The alloy doors split and retreated in a way that communicated significant engineering effort had gone into making this look effortless. The corridor behind them was modern and well-lit, the kind of functional architecture that suggests the person who designed it cared about the work that would happen inside it.
Jordan walked through, the forest behind him, the facility ahead, and thought—not for the first time, and not without some appreciation—that the world's best scientists really did seem to share a preference for building in the wilderness, away from everything, where the work could be done without interruption.
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