After my fellow gate survivors left, I was taken to a lab where a quirky woman swiftly began putting me through a bunch of tests. I felt a little awkward when the researcher cheered and clapped for me when I didn’t cry from getting my blood drawn, but her energy was infectious. I dutifully went through all of her tests and scans and tried not to blush too hard as she showered me with compliments for being “such a good girl!” 

After she pulled off the patches that I assumed had been monitoring my heart, she declared all of the tests complete. I sat down on a chair and let out a small sigh of relief as the woman whistled cheerfully while typing furiously on her laptop. It didn’t take long for her to finish making notes on the tests I’d performed and she suddenly spun her swivel chair in a complete circle before shoving with her feet and shooting across the room to come to a screeching halt in front of me. 

“So, I was told by the psychologist that I shouldn’t press you for details if you seem upset,buuuut I really really REALLY want to know more details about how your powers work,” the woman said with an almost manic glint in her brown eyes as she swiveled side to side in obvious excitement while somehow maintaining direct eye contact with me. 

“If you don’t want to answer me, just tell me to shut it. I won’t be offended, I promise!” she said while holding two fingers to her forehead which looked like a really lackluster and unreliable salute. Even so, I couldn’t keep from giggling and I nodded my head in silent understanding. 

“What’s your name?” I asked right as she was about to say something. I felt a little bad for my interruption, but she gave me a radiant smile and rested a finger on the tip of her nose.

“Who, little ol’ me? You can call me Margie. Can I call you Teagen?” she asked politely but with an amused sparkle in her eyes. 

“Of course,” I assented while trying to stop my giggles. It had been a long time since I’d known anyone as kooky as she acted but I had to admit I didn’t mind it. 

“Great! So Teagen, tell me everything you can remember from the incident. Start from the very beginning,” Margie prompted me as she rolled back to where her laptop was resting on a desk. 

I did try to do what she asked, but Margie was more detail-oriented than I had realized. She stopped me after every fifth word to ask a question or to clarify something. She was incredibly interested in the wave of energy that I felt and asked me so many questions about it that I felt a little dizzy. Once she was satisfied she finally let me move on. 

When we got to the part where I had somehow materialized a shield, she asked me to recreate it for her. I closed my eyes and held out my hands lightly, surprised when the liquid energy that I experienced in the midst of the fight seemed to come down my arms extremely sluggishly. I had to really focus in order to create the shield. It was the same pale gold color as I remembered, but it was only half the size of what I first created when the hornet was about to skewer me. 

“You seem frustrated,” Margie commented as she wheeled over to me again and began poking and prodding the shield with obvious glee. 

“Well, it was a lot harder to create this time. It’s almost like… Whatever that energy was that came out of the gate and filled me up got depleted after the fight,” I mused, trying to do my best to describe the sensation I was feeling. 

Margie, with lightning speed, had connected my shield to a few machines as she listened to me, but she turned away from the readings to give me a contemplative look. 

“How interesting,” she muttered as she rolled her way back to her laptop and furiously typed down whatever observations she had made. She then turned to me and leveled a serious gaze at me. “In fact, you’re not the only one to feel that way.”

“I’m not?” I asked, surprised at the amount of relief I felt at hearing that. Margie gave me a reassuring smile and nodded gently. 

“That’s right. Officer Guzman also mentioned that he felt his ability to create his energy bullets was severely lessened after the portal closed. In fact, all of the people who exhibited supernatural abilities felt a dip in their power after it disappeared,” Margie explained before turning back to my shield, removing the patches, and whipping out what looked like a handheld scanner from her lab coat pocket. 

“So all of us felt a decrease in power after the gate closed…” I repeated out loud, a little surprised to hear that. 

From what I could remember, most of the stories that featured gates opening into dungeons with monsters usually had humans awaken with a specific level of skill or magical prowess that was then given a letter ranking with S being the highest and depending on the story E or F would be lowest. However, I couldn’t recall a dungeon story where awakened humans lost power when a gate closed. 

Although most gate stories take place after the gates have been around for a while and there is at least a solid working knowledge of how to clear them. Maybe I’m in the prologue of a story and that’s why I’m so young…

“Wait,” I exhaled as my eyes widened and I turned to look at Margie again. “If we’ve all lost some of our powers, what about the people that went to Los Angeles? Are they going to be okay?” 

Margie glanced up from the screen of the scanner she had been staring at and gave me a wide grin.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she asked with another manic glimmer in her eyes that made me shudder slightly. “My current hypothesis is that there is a type of radiation that is expelled from the portals which affects the human body in an untold plethora of ways! If that is correct, then having humans who have exhibited abilities after coming into contact with said radiation go back into an environment that is rich in the radiation should result in an increase to their abilities.” 

“Radiation?” I echoed with surprise, glancing down at my hands and then at the shield Margie was still excitedly testing. “So you think that we were mutated by that energy that came out of the gate?” 

That doesn’t sound as cool as being ‘awakened’, I couldn’t help but complain inwardly. Margie laughed and gave me another bright smile. 

“Rather than mutated, the scientific community has been calling it an ‘enhancement’, from what I've heard,” Margie explained while reaching out and gently stroking my head. “Doesn’t being an enhanced human sound better than being a mutant?” 

I had to admit that it did, and I soon found myself responding to Margie’s prompting to continue recounting my experience with the monster hornets. With copious amounts of interruptions from Margie, more than an hour went by before I finally got to the part where I created a protective dome to shield us from the exploding helicopter.

Margie already had me demonstrate how I could manipulate the shield I created to change shape and size, although I could only make it smaller instead of larger with my depleted amount of liquid energy. So instead of asking me to recreate the dome, she instead focused on how the material of my dome had begun to flake away before disappearing completely into nothingness. 

“Let me just do two more tests and then I’ll have you show me,” she instructed excitedly before urging me into a new medical room. 

A huge starkly white tunnel-like scanning machine stood waiting in this room. She quickly explained that she would be taking scans first of my brain then my entire body while I had the shield materialized, and she would take new scans directly after the shield disappeared and then again an hour after.

While Margie did her last tests on my shield, a nurse came in and had me drink a sour liquid. We had to wait a while for whatever the liquid was to travel through me before the nurse came back and gave me a shot of something that made my body heat up weirdly. I could hear Margie muttering about how she should have taken a scan before I had created the shield, but she quickly waved a hand in the air and got me positioned on the bench that would then slide me into the scanner. 

An echoey thumping sound came from the scanner as I lay still and breathed evenly. My face flushed with embarrassment as Margie cooed compliments at me for being so brave and not letting the machine scare me. 

The scan didn’t take long to complete and once I was fully outside the tunnel part of the machine Margie instructed me to make the shield go away. Not knowing exactly how to control it, I pictured in my mind releasing the shield, and just like that the solid shape of the shield became oddly fuzzy and then it suddenly disintegrated into nothingness. 

Margie oohed and aahed as she waved first her scanner and then her hand in the space the shield used to occupy. Seemingly convinced that the shield really had disappeared, she sent me back into the scanner. 

By the time I had completed my time with Margie, I was both physically and mentally drained and could barely make myself return her abnormally bright smile as she waved her hand frantically at me in farewell. The government official who had left me with Margie was back, but I was surprised when he brought me to an office at the very end of the basement floor laboratory. He knocked politely and when he heard a muffled response he opened the door and gestured for me to go in first. 

I walked into the room and was surprised at how neat and orderly it was. In fact, it was so neat that I began to feel a bit anxious at the thought of disturbing any of the picture-perfect displays of books, models of what looked to be the human brain, and carefully stacked manilla folders. A man wearing a white lab coat over a pristinely ironed charcoal gray dress shirt and perfectly knotted tie was typing methodically at his desk computer without sparing me or the government official a glance. When he finally did turn to look at us I was surprised that he looked to be in his early forties with black hair swept back from his face and styled to perfection. His sharp blue eyes honed in on me and I couldn’t help but gulp as he quickly looked me over before turning his attention to the government official. 

“This is the girl?” he asked, his voice leaning towards monotonous. My toes fidgeted anxiously in my shoes as I tried not to let myself be intimidated by the stern man.

“That’s right. This is Teagen Ashby. She’s eleven years old and has been in the foster care system for five years,” the official explained as if reciting from an invisible dossier only he could see.

The man’s mouth twitched down into a frown and he peered at me with what seemed like a judgemental gaze. I stiffened, wondering if I should try to act cute or if that would backfire in this situation when the man raised his gaze to the official and stated, “She’s much too short for eleven. What kind of foster parents did she have to be so underdeveloped?” 

I blinked, surprised that he was finding fault with someone other than me. The government official coughed lightly and shook his head. 

“That information was not included in my briefing,” he responded stoically and the man behind the desk let out a clipped tsk before waving his hand at the tall guy next to me. 

“Very well. Be on your way, I’ll be leaving in the next few minutes,” he ordered succinctly before turning to me and pointing at a very stiff-looking couch against the wall. “Sit patiently until I’m finished.” 

I mutely glanced up at the government official, wondering what exactly was happening. He gave me a reassuring nod and gently led me towards the couch that he had indicated. 

“Dr. Montressor and his wife are the only licensed foster parents in this research division, so you’ll be staying with them temporarily until the government creates a more permanent dwelling for those with abilities,” the man explained quietly to me. I pushed myself up onto the couch which was as hard as it appeared and slowly let my gaze wander over to the stern man focused on his computer screen. 

That man is a foster parent? I thought to myself incredulously. Even if his mannerisms were quite abrupt though, he had seemed concerned about me being ‘underdeveloped’ so maybe he was hiding a soft center behind his unapproachable exterior. 

The government official left me with what I assumed was meant to be an encouraging smile and soon the only sound in the room was the steady typing on a keyboard. The constant faint tapping actually was rather soothing and despite the hard couch, I could feel my eyes becoming heavy. 

Being in a child’s body can be quite inconvenient, I grumbled inwardly as I tried to stave off the drowsiness that had been steadily building throughout the many tests Margie put me through. In the end, I couldn’t fight against my childish body’s primal need for sleep and drifted off into a peaceful rest.