Overlap

Chapter 106: Psionic Atrophy

<10/10/2013 - 13:00 | Cage High School (Library), Austell, GA, USA>

Despite everything I fought earlier, I found myself in this position, crawling back and grasping straws to relive a part of the past I chose to abandon. There are days that I hate low-level psionic powers, and there are days I find every factor of psionics fully fascinating. I'm a man who doesn't want to be directly involved in something I'm already part of, desired to stand on the top of a dividing fence, claiming each as my home.

What I want changes over time. Mental clarity is a gift I only have on certain days; confusion owns the rest. I figured this must be why I continued trying, again, and again, and again to get this right. I shut my eyes once more, focusing on the exact psionic signatures I knew I would need to for another blip of clairvoyance. This was my ninetieth attempt this week, my interest in psionic powers renewed again. However, like many times before, no matter how hard I tried or how patient I was, I received no information from my invocations, proving the attempt of clairvoyance to be a total failure.

"Nothing again!" I panted audibly, since this was already taking too much energy out of me. Even though I was failing to make clairvoyance work like before, each attempt still cost me a great deal of limited psionic energy. All I could do to stabilize myself each time was to drink an excessive amount of water, and listen to Lumina on a broken loop again.

"It's not going to work for you anymore Reed. I already warned you about falling out of practice. If you don't keep using clairvoyance for a long enough duration, it will cause psionic atrophy of that specific ability."

"But why must this atrophy be a permanent change?"

"I don't make the rules Reed. That's just the way it is."

I still had to consider myself lucky that losing one ability didn't destroy the other. After my ninth school year ended, we went through another terrible summer. I'll spare the details by saying I suffered no mental break downs this time around, but I lost count of how many times I screamed and cried with Lumina's distant absence. She wasn't the only entity I paused interactions with though. Given what happened with some negative foresights of clairvoyance, and the annoyance of its upkeep, I made the decision to stop using it... That was several months back. Now the ability, along with clairsentience is gone for good.

Not long ago, I tried to invoke both abilities only to find that I couldn't, and I celebrated their departure from the reaches of my Cora. I no longer had to spoil the ending of every day. I no longer had to worry about the break of privacy I conducted on everyone. I no longer had to feel the anxiety of something bad happening every day even though our connected school life wasn't all that unfortunate. I no longer had to mentally drain myself each day just for the sake of psionic upkeep. It was fun while it lasted, but clairvoyance only caused more trouble than it solved...

At least, that's what I thought. I would have preferred to have the ability to invoke clairvoyance only at my explicit leisure, to mark an important moment for astral scoping without being forced into it, but I never had that choice. My options were either, use clairvoyance every other day, or stop using it entirely. I would try to take breaks that were longer than a few days, only to struggle with clairvoyance after, though I still managed to get it working again with extra effort. Apparently, only the several months of summer were enough time to atrophy the ability, as Lumina mentioned. Even though nobody seems to have an exact answer on why or how, according to Lumina's law of psionics, when a specific ability atrophies, this loss in ability structure is permanent, even through the depths of Altiri resurrection.

I don't know why I want these powers back all the sudden. Maybe I'm just the type of person who wants to invoke abilities I know I can't. Maybe I just want to prove a point, my point - that losing clairvoyance this way should not be permanent. If I could just relearn it somehow, it would mean Lumina was wrong about permanent atrophy. She never technically said it was a certainty, rather - her assumption follows available data consolidated by facts obtained from the Scryers. Maybe, all I want is something I can use as concrete evidence to present to another human someday, evidence that Lumina exists.