Omake written after 7.2: Beginnings and Considerations, V2
Sara loved her job at F.I.X.F.I.C, since she had always wanted to help people, like the heroes of her world, the X-Men and Avengers. It was so amazing how much happiness she could bring just by introducing people to the wider multiverse that so many of them had only the faintest inkling of, and getting them into the 'Agent' role, and helping them to actualize themselves.
According to the clipboard she had, her current case was another 'Self-Insert' type from one of the organization's cultivated roles that didn't need any great heroes to make it a good world, with the influenced fiction creating an easy way for them to become acquainted with the mission worlds. She took a sip of water from her cup as she looked him over from just outside the room with her esoteric senses.
He wasn't particularly pretty, nor was he one of those irreverent geniuses that sometimes came through and inevitably chose the tech download options. He was... average, as much as any person who was selected for F.I.X.F.I.C. could be.
She adjusted her suit, focused her mind, and walked into the training room.
He was waiting there in the training room, drinking from another cup of water one of the many automated systems produced, glancing at the notes in front of him, and not really feeling much in particular.
She sat down across from him, glancing at the walls; the stark white coloration somewhat offset the industrial feel of the place. She set her own cup down next to his on the table, and placed down her clipboard.
She took another look at a later page of her notes, these ones of his selected powers. He selected the basic Captain America package, the most powerful Charmed Life option and XCOM psionics.
She resisted the urge to sigh and spoke. "Hello. I am Sara, your psionics instructor. For now, I just want you to levitate your cup." Certainty and focus were always important in Psionics, which had always been her fumbling point. Sure, she had a fairly powerful X-Gene, but she could never muster the conviction or focus needed to really hurt people, or to do much of anything in a combat situation.
He nodded and set his cup on the table, then stared blankly at it.
After a minute of silence, she decided that her cup was lifted, then double checked telekinetically that her will had actually lifted it. It was a basic technique that helped with lack of confidence, but not something she actually needed to do. "Don't try to lift the cup. When you try to lift the cup, you come up with all sorts of reasons why what you are doing couldn't possibly lift the cup. Even if you apply enough telekinetic force for the task, your scepticism will just end up negating your efforts."
He sat silently, taking a moment to look at her cup floating silently, and tried again to move his own. 'Tried' being the operative word. There was no pulse of energy, and his cup still refused to move.
He didn't like talking much, did he? Hopefully, the leadership that inevitably came with being an agent would help him be more social.
"Sometimes it helps if you focus on your energy first. You might not really believe you have psionic abilities when you can't feel it."
He took a deep breath, and I felt a burst of ineffectual energy.
"Great! At this point, you just have to focus on what you want and hold to it. It's good to see you getting this far."
As the session went on, he gradually started to learn to unlock the power of his mind.
Sara walked into the breakroom, marveling again at the bizarre mix of homey, palatial and industrial that led to intricate geometric designs being housed right next to mad technological contraptions seemingly assembled out of toasters, scrap metal and randomly-thrown-together circuitry, and also next to plain white refrigerators with snacks.
She sat down at a table, one that had probably been used for countless informal briefings over F.I.X.F.I.C.'s long life. The table was simple, without eye-catching colors or designs that might distract anyone using the room from their business.
Sara looked around, trying to spot someone to talk to. She immediately noticed Alice from the Reality Mage division and smiled at her. She wistfully remembered a time when everyone around her didn't have a professional bio-artist refining their look. She couldn't really get why Jon didn't use the service...
"Why do we even do this to people like Jon?"
She blushed, uncomfortable with the sudden outburst.
Alice stalked over confidently, her trademark psychic signature showing off her absolute bluster and confidence, and the undertones of compassion, worry and a total lack of fear that was very real considering how much she was projecting. She was baring her mind to me, and it was... comfy, cozy even.
Alice answered her clear green eyes that almost seemed to shine in the odd lighting created by the constantly shifting colors and architectural styles. "You're helping out with one of those ones, aren't you?"
It wasn't a question. Psychic powers are instinctive and almost entirely non-ritualistic. Just thinking and doing is often enough to get you started, at which point psionics is just a game of defining exactly what you want and feeling out the energy to accomplish your goals. It's almost just like a standard metahuman power in practice, beyond the way it shows up in populations and in such a consistent form.
She sighed. "Yeah, the ones who come in are often not very good at the job. But there are limits to importing people who don't have powers granted just by F.I.X.F.I.C. Many of them come with assumptions about how things work that can kill them in the field. Blank slates work best, 'cause you can train them explicitly."
Sara sighed. "That is not your true rejection." At this point, she was just working from her rationality training instead of any actual manual thought processes, because she was a bit fed up with it all. " Offhand, you could insert people who are already familiar with general 'rules' of the setting, keep them in the same 'genre'. Or you could exclusively recruit from worlds where anything is possible, like mine."
Alice stared forwards, her eyes very visibly shining, and a tempest of energy that came from her excitement made her even more intimidating. "Merge with me."
She radiated unconditional love, a small but embarrassing bit of arousal, and a desire and conviction to see this through.
The job gave a level of stress seen in few other places, in which you knew that every little detail was something that could save thousands of people and that your larger decisions would impact the lives of billions. You had to know that you could resolve your doubts, push forward despite regrets to be a part of this wonderful project, and merging had always been what kept her going.
It was a fairly simple technique and one that Jon's Mission World used all the time.
She nodded, flushing.
She felt her mind reach out, and touch the oddly structured details of her mind, and felt her reasoning (and her magic, but that wasn't the most important thing). Sure, superheroes could handle many, many situations, but as a rule of thumb, they were too important to remove, even when it wasn't inherently obvious to outsiders.
That made enough sense. If they managed to get on a major superhero team, they will have saved the world. Even with the absurd Psionic discipline that the heroes of her world always had, it was easy enough to read it on their faces and in their psychometric traces.
So, F.I.X.F.I.C. did recruit 'ordinary' people from that type of universe a lot, but that didn't really explain why not them exclusively.
She dived through Alice's mind, noting passively the layers of defenses, all inactive around her thoughts. Wait... What?
The people from 'normal' universes were selected to be dupes? F.I.X.F.I.C. is trying to be productive, not idiotic... they used productivity and idiocy together, to prevent people in Mission Worlds from digging endlessly and doing more harm than good, or stumbling into something they didn't understand the context of?
She jolted mostly out of her friend's thoughts, but held onto the warmth and comfort their shared feelings provided.
F.I.X.F.I.C. did way more than just the insertion and empowerment. Sometimes the more world-wise locals were too aware of things, and made demands, messed things up by working through almost all the implications behind the Organization's powers. Being too smart was sometimes a problem, and when F.I.X.F.I.C. wanted to intervene subtly, without triggering endless conspiracy theories in a Mission World...
Some people just didn't know any better, did they?
That burst of emotion was definitely Alice's, wasn't it?
She backed out and grabbed her meal with a smile on her face. Truly, this was a wonderful job, if a stressful one.
