The Icy Quest

Chapter 22

Pagoniá didn't have much time to savor her lunch before she was forced to endure Tilepátheia's new plan for her personal entertainment.

For the past hour, Tilepátheia had been making use of her abilities to play pranks on Pagoniá and Pozhar. After some intense study, Pagoniá had eventually learned how to identify when something she saw was real as opposed to a fake implanted image in her mind. However, Pozhar was clueless.

"Aghh!" he yelled in Tilepátheia's direction. "Why can't I figure out when you're tricking me?

"It's because of your photographic memory," Tilepátheia explained, shrugging her shoulders. "Your mind knows exactly what something should look like because of the perfect pictures you have in your head of everything you have ever seen. It fills in the gaps that I leave in the visual information that I implant much better than Pagoniá's can. Your illusions look virtually indistinguishable from the real thing."

As a result, Pozhar had to rely on Pagoniá to tell him if something was real or not by asking if she could see it.

"Is there a spider over there?" he interrogated, pointing to the corner of the shipping container.

Pagoniá looked in the direction he was pointing and quickly spotted a spider, but she knew that this first glance couldn't be trusted. Previously, Tilepátheia had only been messing with one or the other of them individually but not at the same time. Hence, if Pozhar saw something and she didn't, she could quickly determine that he was being pranked. However, now Tilepátheia was implanting visual information in both Pagoniá and Pozar's minds simultaneously, forcing Pagoniá to use her newly acquired discernment skills to answer Pozhar's question. Pagoniá tilted her head and squinted really hard at the image of the spider. After a few moments of intense concentration, she detected the faint blurriness in the image that was a tell-tale sign that Tilepátheia was pranking them both.

"Nope," she responded confidently, shaking her head. "It isn't real."

"Darn it, you're getting good," Tilepátheia complained. "I can hardly ever fool you anymore." The spider, as if in response, promptly disappeared.

"You stopped being able to fool me decades ago," Pagoniá joked with a toss of her head.

"Yeah, right. It took you hours," Tilepátheia retorted.

"Can you just stop?" Pozhar whined. "I'm getting really tired of this pointless activity."

Suddenly, a scorpion appeared near his foot.

"It's a pseudoscorpion," Tilepátheia commented calmly. "Isn't it cute?"

"Okay, you've had your fun, Tilepátheia," Pagoniá declared with a wave of her hand. "It's time to stop."

"You're no fun," Tilepátheia grumbled, wrinkling her nose.

The scorpion disappeared, as did a couple of other spiders around the container. However, in their place, a komodo dragon appeared.

"That isn't funny Tilepátheia. In the annals of the fire people, it is recorded that komodo dragons were once an invasive species in their land. Tons of people died because those things are super deadly. The venom of their bite causes a person to hemorrhage until they bleed to death. They are NOT a joke," Pozhar spoke rapidly, clearly freaked out.

"Tilepátheia, stop it. Now!" Pagoniá demanded, noting Pozhar's growing anxiety. "It isn't funny anymore."

"Whatever," Tilepátheia groused, turning her back on both Pagoniá and Pozhar.

Pagoniá knew that any further attempts to address Tilepátheia's excessive pranking would just make matters worse. Accordingly, she chose to ignore Tilepátheia's display of temper and turned her attention toward a nap instead.

---

I NEED VOTES AND COMMENTS!