“Sir! Sir! A moment of your time, please?” a reporter that happened to be lucky—or perhaps unlucky—enough to be at the scene asked the hostage negotiator. He had been in the bank to make a deposit when the robbery took place.Moments like these would make government officials’ careers in the past. They would use them to propel themselves to fame, then use that fame as a springboard to either work their way up into a higher position in the government, or quit their low-paying government jobs and enter the high-paying public sector. And it was all on the backs of the misery of others.“No comment for now. The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll release a statement to the press after our work is completed,” the negotiator answered. As the on-site commander had rushed into the bank behind the SWAT team and medical rescue, the negotiator was temporarily in charge. But even though he could have given out some tidbits of information to whet the public appetite, thereby gaining a reputation a

The video of the sniper firing from the door of a hovering shuttle was completely unbelievable to people that found their way to it in the Akashic Record. Not to mention the distance it was fired from, just the fact that it had enough power to penetrate a reinforced bank vault from one side, essentially disintegrate the person it hit, then penetrate a second reinforced vault wall was incredible enough. And that wasn’t even mentioning that the sniper had no visual on his target and was firing completely blind!The people that saw it had chills running down their spines and goosebumps all over their bodies. Especially considering the empire hadn’t hidden that capability, which made them wonder just what actually was hidden in the classified files of the Akashic Record.Thus, they took the footage and posted it online, either in its raw version or with different edits, and through that method, the empire’s capabilities finally filtered down to non-citizens. Although the internet was free

Katrina briefly brought Rick up to speed on the Three Percenters, and what had happened to him. He fell into a daze for a while, considering the situation, then clarified, “So I spent six weeks in a coma receiving my blessing. How long did it take everyone that received theirs? And why did mine take so long?” He had just woken up and his brain was still a little fuzzy. To him, the time had passed in an instant and he just remembered a fierce, tearing pain in his head before he collapsed. But even that memory was fading, as all memories of physical pain do, a convenient defense mechanism that humanity had.“Yes. Although you were among the first to receive your blessing, it took this long for you to wake up due to resources. The empire’s blessed started coming to around the second week, while ours mostly started around day twenty. While we have access to the Biogen that the tyrant’s company developed before the war, that’s likely generations out of date now and the medical pods in the

‘So she doesn’t remember what I made her do at all,’ Rick thought as he opened his eyes, returning to his purple world. He had tested many things on Katrina and she seemed to have no recollection of anything she’d done under his control, despite all the things he’d made her do to herself.The only test that had failed was the one where he attempted to take control of a single body part, but he wasn’t sure why. Taking over her entire body had been simple, like putting on new clothes, so why would he be incapable of taking over individual body parts? He wasn’t sure, but he felt it was likely because he lacked the fine control necessary to do so. Thus, more training and experimentation was in order.Gaaathheeeeeeeerrrrr ffffaaaaaaiiiiiithhhh,§ the voice in the back of his mind chanted, but Rick only had the vaguest idea of how to go about that.When he’d looked down at his body and noticed that the thread connecting him to Katrina had slightly dimmed, and the pulses of light had decrease

‘So physical sensations don’t translate when I’m just a passenger,’ Rick thought. The young man—no, Rick’s test subject—was laying on the ground, groaning in pain and choking on blood from a punctured lung, not to mention the host of other broken bones in his body beyond the ribs. But Rick didn’t feel a thing, marking it a successful, though dangerous, test.Looking at the thread of belief stretching off into the distance, he saw no changes in it. After briefly considering a test involving what happens if he was a passenger in a body when it died, he discarded the idea as the test was simply too dangerous. With a thought, he willed his consciousness to begin the arduous journey back to his own body, leaving one last sentence behind for the boy.“You’ve worked hard. Rest now, and if you survive this, I’ll visit you again,” he said, pushing it into the teenager’s mind with a few hundred pulses of light. Whether the boy heard it or not, he didn’t really care.When he returned to his own