But if she was really a Star Guardian—shouldn't I have been able to taste her?

  I flicked out the tip of my tongue. There were a bunch of different tastes in the area, but I was focused on only a few of them. I don't think so. She doesn't taste like Katherine—she's really not too different from any of the other four. Had I been mistaken? Perhaps I was overreacting to the demonstration, and the ability she showed wasn't as ridiculous as I first thought. As we got back into a bigger circle and Chloe stepped forward, I pulled out my phone to send a quick text to Katherine.

  star guardian?

  Her phone must have buzzed, because she checked her pocket. She didn't pull it out, though. Instead, she tilted her head as if she were listening to something I couldn't hear. Then, glancing in my direction, she tipped her chin in Maria's direction and then shook her head.

  No? I'd proceed with the assumption that my taste wasn't failing me, then. Also, wait. Did she somehow read what I texted her without—my own phone buzzed. Pulling it out, I saw that it was a text from Katherine. Seriously? This freaky psychic bullshit really has to stop. The message was short enough to all fit on the lock screen notification. Perhaps I should change my settings to disallow that preview, now that I had more important communications going on.

  She sounds similar to you while using that ability.

  I put my phone away. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to be ready to watch. "Sorry, just got a text and wanted to make sure it wasn't anything urgent." Laurence nodded, and Chloe began her demonstration. As I watched, the tiny girl started floating up off the ground. Flight? It looked almost like she was floating underwater, though. Also, part of me was still distracted by what Katherine had sent back. She sounds like me?

  I didn't know what to make of that, other than that Katherine's spooky psychic senses took the form of sound, apparently. My initial, alarmist reaction had been to wonder if Maria was also some kind of Anathema in disguise. I didn't think that was likely, though, because she didn't taste like an Anathema. I knew that taste very well, and I myself still had it even when I looked fully human—a reminder that I definitely wouldn't be able to slip through any kind of Anathema detection device. Maria tasted mostly human, like all the other regular Guardians I'd met in the past week. Katherine tasted more like an Anathema than she did.

  Still, I wasn't going to dismiss whatever it was Katherine had picked up on. So something about the way she 'sounds' is similar to me—but only when she's using her power. Huh. There was definitely some kind of connection, and it reinforced in my mind something that Dad had said to me and Katherine. He made a point about how Anathema and Guardians were in some way inherently related. Makes sense, honestly.

  All that aside, I was also still interested in watching Chloe float around. I wondered if my guess about her filling the persistent damage role was wrong—up until Laurence continued with his job as the announcer for the whole set. "Chloe is mainly our sustained damage specialist, though she's also well-suited for scouting and medical support. Chloe, do you want to go ahead and demonstrate?"

  I thought she was already demonstrating—but then again, I didn't see how hovering a few feet off the ground was supposed to damage anything. The scouting part made perfect sense, though.

  Chloe looked uncertain. "Are you sure?" She looked around the yard, then directed her attention back to Laurence. "What would I use it on?"

  Kevin pointed at the little evergreen bushes ringing the inside of the fence. "It works on plants, doesn't it? I don't think anyone's going to get too upset if you kill one of those." Laurence coughed into his fist, and Kevin continued on to amend his statement. "...Assuming you even end up killing one. It won't be dead if you manage to keep it alive."

  Ha! I silently snickered. For some reason, I just loved tautologies. I got the impression that they were supposed to be a bad thing, for some lame reason, but I thought they were great. Yes, it is indeed true that the bush won't be dead if you manage to keep it alive. Someone needed to get this man some kind of award.

  Chloe still looked uncertain, but she nonetheless raised her arm to point at the same bush Kevin had. "Alright." A second later, the bush started to wither and turn brown right before our eyes. Her power was skipping straight to killing the damn thing, forgoing any of the usual intermediate steps like 'hitting it with something' or 'covering it with a toxic cloud.' No specific disease, toxin, or other agent, at least as far as I could see. Just pure—I don't know. General infirmity leading to death? I was now very curious to see what it would look like if she used it on a human.

  The bush wilting and shriveling up wasn't the only thing that happened. Chloe herself was starting to drift towards it—I wasn't sure, but it looked more like she was being pulled than flying deliberately. There was a smooth, slippery sort of acceleration that gave the impression of a weightless astronaut getting tugged around without their control. Is that what's happening?

  My tongue flicked out again—reflexively, this time, which was a habit I needed to control—and I realized I could taste a delicious tingling in the air. The moment it grazed my tongue, a weight settled in my mouth, and I felt thick and heavy saliva welling up, threatening to spill out in what I knew would be shimmering drops of mercury. Fuck fuck fuck shit fuck no not right now! My hands flew to my jaw, confirming that my whole lower face hadn't shifted to metal. I felt like my pupils had probably widened, and my coppery, metallic blood was starting to race. I felt my skin grow hot.

  No no no no no! Not here! However Chloe's power worked, some part of the underlying mechanism was driving my Anathema instincts crazy. The ever present grip of my hunger spiked, and it was all I could do to stand there, locked tight, doing everything I could to stay in control and not shift into anything inhuman. It's like blood in the water.

  Usually, the 'sharks smelling blood in the water' comparison was a fairly abstracted metaphor. In this instance, though, it was about as close to literal as it could ever be, at least without being actually literal. As my primitive hunger thrashed and rampaged, the most logical part of my mind tried to figure out what was going on. Is she sucking some kind of—what, life force? Spiritual essence? Doesn't matter—she has to be siphoning something away from it, something

  ...delicious.

  Ugh. Finally, Chloe touched back down on the ground right in front of the withered bush. The ones on either side of it were still perfectly sturdy and green, and the electrifying taste suffusing the air faded away. Christ. That was awful. My hunger was still worked up, having been sent into an active frenzy by Chloe's stupid demonstration. Now that the thing getting it so worked up was gone, though, I could put more of my focus into attempting to understand what just happened.

  I felt like it was super important, not just because it meant I would have to be super careful about working together with Chloe, but also because I really felt like it had some deep, fundamental connection to everything. To Anathema, to our hunger, to Guardians, to all of it. Anathema could eat basically anything, but I already knew firsthand just how much more compelling certain sources of potential 'food' could be. Was there perhaps some kind of universal, intangible 'essence' that was more or less prevalent in different things? The true 'food' that we were trying to eat all along? I wonder if it's even that same 'energy' Katherine talked about during the incursion—the thing they use to fuel their powers?

  I was making a lot of different leaps here, but even if it turned out not to be some kind of single, universal 'substance,' there was clearly something deeply intrinsic to the whole system that Chloe's power was interacting with.

  "All I can really do is drain the life from things," Chloe said, "and also put it back. "

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Pointing at the bush again, it was clear she was going to start using the same power in reverse. I made sure to keep my mouth closed and hold my breath. I really didn't want a repeat of what happened the first time, especially since my Hunger still hadn't fully settled down to its usual baseline. Fortunately, it worked, and I was able to prevent myself from tasting anything from her power activating. This time, she was skimming just a couple inches above the ground. Also, unlike the first time, she was getting pushed away, not pulled in. That's interesting. I wondered if there was a specific, pseudo-physical reason for that, or if it was just a quirk her power came with.

  It was also obvious what she meant by 'putting it back.' Under the influence of the reverse form of her ability, the shrub was revitalized in mere seconds. Interestingly, I didn't think it was exactly identical to the way it was before. I wasn't certain, of course, but it made it seem like she really was hurting and then healing it, as opposed to strictly reversing it back to the original state. Regardless, it was a pretty nice demo, except for the part where I almost went feral and tried to eat her. To be fair, I did get a hint about something potentially interesting and important.

  I had a few questions though—different ones, that were more acceptable and reasonable for me to ask right now. "Does that mean you can also heal something else? Like, could you have healed a different plant instead of putting it back into that same shrub?"

  "Yes," three different people said in unison—Chloe, Laurence, and—wait, Katherine? Ugh, of course she can already answer that. Stupid third eye, magic-seeing psychic bullshit. The other two also looked at Katherine in surprise. She suddenly looked very uncomfortable, so I decided to win some more favor by taking control of the conversation again. "That's awesome! So you're actually like, both another kind of support and persistent damage? Your team is super lucky to have you."

  I kind of felt like I might have laid it on a bit thick, there, but it was all completely genuine. Well, the words themselves were, the reason for saying it in the first place wasn't. Another irony I ran into a lot was that the most genuine 'nice' things I said often ended up sounding the most fake and hollow. It was honestly super annoying. Anyway. I also had another question I'd wanted to ask, and it would help with keeping the attention away from Katherine's little slip.

  "So what about the flight, though? It looked like you were cancelling your own gravity? I also noticed it looked like you moved toward the bush when you were draining it. And then you pushed away when it was healing?"

  Chloe nodded. "Yeah. I—I don't really know why I can float, but I can. It's not really flight, though. I can't control which way I move, only how fast I rise up or down. It's more like, uh..."

  "Buoyancy," Laurence supplied.

  "Yeah." She looked embarrassed. Probably because she blanked out on a basic word to describe her own power. Happens, though. "Anyway," she continued. "I can sort of control which way I end up going, 'cause draining things pulls me closer and healing them pushes me away. I think it's kind of like—like an underwater hose, that's either sucking in or pumping out?"

  Huh. Yeah, I can see it. I nodded. "That does make sense."

  Finally, it was Laurence, or Mr. Agent's turn. I wondered what he could do, or rather, what role he was supposed to fill. It was kind of a tossup, because there were a couple different classic team roles they were missing. The three we'd seen were strike specialist, support specialist, and sustained damage specialist. Other common, named roles were scout, defense, frontline, and control. That being said, Chloe was already blurring the lines, being simultaneously a super effective kind of additional support as well as sustained damage—and even a bit of a scout, what with the potential to just float up into the sky.

  Strike specialists like Kevin were the complementary mirror of sustained damage specialists. Both were the most offensively-focused archetypes, and the 'strike' in 'strike specialist' came from the idea of causing a lot of hurt in one go. If sustained damage was unleashing poison, then strike was lobbing bombs. Kevin's explosive, crystalline blades were perfect for that purpose. That being said, he also leaned a little bit into one of the other classic categories—specifically, the role of control.

  'Control' was an implied reference to 'battlefield control' or other, similar concepts. It was the ability to sculpt the nature of a fight itself, for all parties involved. His spikes could clearly already do a lot of work there, and I hadn't even seen all of what he could supposedly do.

  Defense was simple, but critical—and from what I'd heard from my dad, surprisingly complex in execution. The basic, central idea was to stop Anathema from doing something in the first place, and usually in a way that wasn't just 'kill it before it can attack.' Shields and barriers were what people often thought of, but there were many potential forms. One of the few stories my dad told me was when he had to handle defense by, quote, 'manipulating the geometry.' I assumed that was a weird, technical way to describe warping space and distances, potentially like the reverse of how I suspected his extreme 'speed' actually worked. It was kind of funny to imagine a bunch of Anathema trying to climb up the metaphorical down escalator of spacetime.

  Naturally, there was inherent overlap between the concepts of defense and control.

  Finally, the last main archetype was a frontline specialist. That was me, basically—someone who was good at killing things up close and not dying. The general idea was for there to be a push and pull between the frontliner and the rest of the team.

  It turned out that Laurence was their defender, though like Kevin, his power naturally tended towards control. From what I'd already gathered, that was typical. Not every squad of Guardians would have exactly seven members with a strictly and rigidly defined purpose. That would be fragile, and the abilities themselves weren't inclined to only ever work that way.

  The basic, Tier 1 manifestation of Laurence's power were these little columns of icy wind. They were like little dust devils, and they could supposedly push and pull on things way harder than you'd expect. Continuing on with his explanation, Laurence said that it wasn't so much attraction and repulsion as hitting a wall or getting chained to a post. The obvious tactic was to lock down anathema in one spot or to make flexible, temporary shields around people. There was also a comparatively minor damaging element, mostly from the cold.

  As I watched, he focused on making just a single, small vortex as cold as possible. So far, it wasn't like there was snow or ice or anything like that—it was a temperature change in the existing air, not conjuring physical material. As he continued pouring power into it, though, small, delicate little flakes started to form.

  "That's from the water in the air," Kevin explained. "If he keeps going, the air itself starts condensing. Nitrogen and oxygen, you know? We haven't been able to get those to freeze yet, though."

  "It's not the best for doing damage, though." Laurence dropped the vortex, leaving nothing but a frosted patch of gravel. The cold air started to disperse out, though, so we all left the yard to go back inside. "So what about the two of you? I realize, of course, that it's only been about a week, but have you made any progress on figuring out what the basic form of your power is?"

  He was asking me and Katherine, of course, and I decided to take the lead. That was actually because I didn't want to talk about my abilities—I still hadn't come up with a good idea for what to tell Katherine—but fortunately, I could basically just repeat the same bullshit I gave the AAG people with these four. "I'm basically just strong and really hard to hurt." I paused, as if thinking how to contextualize my answer. "Like, I know that all Guardians get extra strength and regeneration, but the AAG regeneration test said my regeneration is in the top 0.005% of Tier 1 Guardians. I'm also extra durable."

  "What about the metal?" Maria asked. "I remember you had this full suit of armor when we met you after that incursion."

  "Yeah," Kevin pitched in, "it was super badass. I thought that was also part of your power?"

  Yeah, well, unfortunately, I still have no fucking clue how I did that. I definitely couldn't summon just my mouth and claws—far too monstrous without the rest of the 'outfit.' Just go with the same thing you told the AAG people. "Yeah, I can also shape metal while touching it—or at least, I managed to do it during the incursion. I haven't had much luck trying to replicate it, though. That's why I'm carrying a bunch of metal bolts around in my bag."

  Everyone looked at the backpack in question. There were several different 'Oh's and head nods going around. Ha. Nice one, Alex. I would admit I was a bit proud of myself for tying those two different ends back together like that.

  "What about you?" Chloe asked Katherine. "You knew I could heal other people before any of us answered—was that just a guess, or—?"

  "Oh." Katherine didn't look very confident. I was pretty curious what she was going to say. Are you going to give them the full picture, as far as you understand it, or are you going to give them a watered down version? Can't forget the whole secret Star Guardian thing. Either way, I really wanted to hear what her own analysis of her creepy psychic shit was. Like seriously—what do we have so far? Raising zombies, not-quite-mind-reading, anti-Anathema hatred aura... oh yeah, and sending me a text without using your phone? Like actually, what the hell.

  "It's honestly pretty confusing, and I had a really hard time actually understanding any of it at first, but—well, I'm still not really sure if it's correct." She scratched her scalp. "Basically, the best explanation I have is that I can sort of, hear the spirits of things? And also ask them to do stuff."

  I blinked. You can—wait. What?

  OHHHH MY. IT'S THE BIG REVEAL!!!

  ~eeeeeeeeeeeeeh~

  AnotherDorito pointed out that the phrase 'Horde of Interdimensional Hunger' sounds like the title to a Gloryhammer song, so I will definitely be whipping up some fake Dundee crossover lore sometime soon. Just for fun.

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