I arrived and assessed the room, surprised to see Gray, Jenkins and Bekert in the same place again, but there wasn’t anything that was going to kill us.

  I turned towards Orchid, “What happened?”

  They told me about the question.

  “Oh, that’s going to be tricky.”

  “Do you have any idea what to do?”

  “Well, I can’t ask in your place since I’m human.”

  They rolled their eyes, “Yeah, no shit sherlock.”

  “Why not just answer it yourself?”

  “If I thought that would work, I would’ve already done it.”

  “Well, it should.”

  “How, i’m don’t know if I count as ‘human’.”

  “Well, the way the power seems to work is that they need a yes or no, and it only activates on lies. But this isn’t a yes or no, so it shouldn’t activate it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Orchid grumbled, but wrote down, “No.”

  The people on the other side of the wall reacted weirdly, so I took some of my sneakier minions and placed them on them on the other side of the wall.

  Catching Jenkins saying to Bekert, “What does that mean?”

  “That it’s more complex than a yes or no question.”

  I sighed. It wasn’t the best outcome, but it was better than nothing.

  “How can it be more complex than that?” Jenkins asked.

  Bekert shrugged, “We know next to nothing about it, that’s why we’re asking these questions, now if they were good questions,” Bekert turned their eyes towards Gray, “Maybe we’d get something done.”

  Gray stayed stern faced as ever, “The questions are not up to you to make Dr Bekert.”

  “I could think of a dozen more off the top of my head better than these.”

  “Just stick to the list.”

  Bekert opened her mouth to protest, but then something strange happened.

  A wave of Mana came from Lieutenant Gray, and shot towards her head. Her eyes went fuzzy for a moment, and when they cleared up, she said with a sigh.

  “Ok.”

  ‘The hell was that?” I said

  Then Orchid groaned, “Another mind controller.”

  We contemplated helping Bekert out of it, or killing Gray, but we didn’t know how to do any of that without garnering attention, or crossing a line we made. Then, as Bekert had said, we were bombarded with an hour's worth of horribly designed questions. Most of them about our willingness to harm people, but they were entirely devoid of context, so whatever part of Bekert's power that could tell something was too complex kept acting up.

  Over the course of the questioning she tried to change them again, but Gray always changed that, the act making my stomach twist.

  But I heard Orchid scoff at that, and say, “Don’t act like you can’t do that, don’t act like you haven’t done that.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “That was different. I had no choice back then. You wouldn’t blame a fighting dog for fighting in the ring when the owner throws them in there.”

  “Oh, then why do you so desperately want to go back to your owner then?”

  I winced, then said, “What about you, you seemed rather quick to enslave all those Marines when running from Second, and rather slow in releasing them.”

  I expect the easy retort of their hand being forced, but instead I got.

  “I was born to do that, no, that’s the wrong word. I was… designed to do it. You saw the descriptions the system made for me. Lunaris made me like this.”

  “You know you can choose not to do it, that’s the whole point of free will.”

  “Do you think I haven’t thought of that before? Sure, I choose when to use it, but it will always be a part of me, of us. We have a gun that we can never let go of, and it has a hair trigger, might as well use the bullets for something that benefits us.”

  “That…” I trailed off.

  And before I could respond, Bekert said, “That’s all the questions for today.”

  Then the three of them left the room. I had my minions climb onto them, then they went through a sanitation tunnel, being sprayed with chemicals. My mundane minions didn’t survive, but the ones from the Great Debate did just fine, only feeling slightly irritated.

  I hopped onto my minions' senses, taking a deliberate step from Orchid. Bekert parted ways, going to a nearby lab, doing nothing interesting, but I caught something Jenkins said to Gray as soon as they were alone.

  “Did you really have to do that, Jason?” they said to Gray whose first name was apparently that.

  For the first time, I saw Gray’s stoic expression break as they sighed and rolled their eyes, “Maybe not, but there wasn’t really any better option.”

  Jenkins sighed through their nose and didn’t say anything.

  Then, a few moments later, they separated. I kept spying on the three, but nothing more interesting happened, so I diverted my attention to exploring the surrounding region. I had already explored most of it since my control radius was 120 miles in diameter, covering an eighth of the state of Oregon, and the compound was only 20 or so miles away. But Orchid and I enjoyed the exertion, delighting in discovery, despite our wills clashing occasionally when trying to move units around that we both wanted.

  But our attention was drawn away from our exploration in the middle of the night when we noticed one of the three people we put our minions on had started moving. Bekert had gotten up in the middle of the night and was sneaking around the guards, heading straight for the quarantine tent we were in.

  She reached it and put her hand against the tent wall and released a pulse of raw MP, the mana echoing out through the structure like sound waves. I looked at the skill and realised it wasn’t a skill, it was too rough to be instructed by the System, so she must’ve made it herself. Which wasn’t a thing I realised you could do…

  After wallowing in the implications of it, I was hit by a weak spear of mana made by Bekert, making my body jerk. Then she went to the exchange box near the entrance of the tent, put there so that people could exchange items without going through the hassle of suiting up.

  Then the box ringed it’s annoying tone, deafening in the silent night, indicating something was inside. I went to it, finding a letter inside, opening it, I came to the shocking realisation that… I couldn’t read in the dark.

  So I found the most secluded corner I could in the room filled with people, and summoned a swarm of fireflies. Their warm green glow revealing the contents on the paper.

  “Hello Jacob, I heard that you have met my brother, whom I have told you about in some capacity. Please meet me tomorrow at 11 PM. I will find you, I simply ask you to clear your calendar.”

  ‘God, she writes so pretentiously.’

  I layed back down, thinking on what I should do, but I wasn’t given the time as Bekert moved to somewhere unexpected again. This time, the place Orchid was kept, quickly getting inside and hugging the wall as she scootched to the side. The purpose of which was revealed when she reached for a camera in the corner I hadn’t seen.

  She messed with the wires and put in what looked like a weird USB stick, then she let out a breath and turned around. This time probing the wall, sliding her hand across it till it found a small latch she tugged on, revealing the inside of the wall to be lined with a baby blue crystal.

  When she took one out, I felt my connection to Orchid strengthen, and the ambient MP to increase. Then Bekert pulled out a bead the colour of the Milky Way, and I felt an extremely faint thread of power that had been connected to Orchid's body without us noticing, strengthen.

  And we recognised the power, it was the same as the one on the track field, and of the man who wasn’t there. Then the next moment, space folded, and Juan Bekert was there.

  I looked at the scene in confusion, then let out a groan of frustration. I looked around the area surrounding the tent. No one was in earshot. I didn’t waste time.

  “This doesn’t sound like the best plan…” Orchid warned me.

  But I ignored them as I summoned a pile of beasts atop the two, dog piling them. Juan tried to use their weird dimensional power to teleport away, but I let Orchid take care of him. Using our Domain to subjugate him, I resisted the temptation of oblivion needed for Orchid to use the power.

  And I surfaced a second later, trying to find an effective way I could ask them questions, but I gave up and reached for something to use as a mask, finding a shirt.

  ‘Good enough.”

  Then I faded into Slip Away, reappearing in the room with Dr Bekert and her Brother.