“Not moving,” was the response, quiet.

“No using powers. Stay put, stay calm. We’re going to find out a way to help you.”

“I don’t think I can be helped,” the man said. His head was bowed, and he couldn’t seem to move it. His hair was long, tied back into a low ponytail, and it covered much of his face.

“We can figure something out,” Rocketround said.

“Two,” Typhlosis said, quiet.

Two parahumans left.

The effect had caught over ninety over what couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes. Now there were two.

“I’m worried,” the man in the clearing’s center said. “I can feel all the others.”

He moved his hand.

Every body in the vicinity moved. A matching movement of hands, limp arms rolling off of sides or fingers digging into powdered sidewalk.

“Don’t move!” Rocketround called out.

“I’m on a brink, and I can’t see it, but I can feel it,” the man said.

“Try not to think about it,” Rocketround said. “Okay?”

“I can feel it,” the man said. He wasn’t paying much attention to Rocketround. “All the way down to this vast well, partially filled with potential energy. Like I’m on the lip of a volcano and it’s an impossibly long fall with only magma at the bottom. I don’t know if I’m better off throwing myself down into that or leaving it alone.”

“Leave it alone,” I said, my voice joining more than one other person’s.

“What if my thoughts and brain get made into a part of that? One piece in that thing’s construction. What if it makes me immortal, forever a part of this thing? A recording of me in there, how I think, how I do things.”

“We’ve studied parahumans, powers and power sources a lot,” Roadblock said. “We’re pretty sure that’s not a thing.”

“Yeah,” the guy in the clearing’s center said. “But…”

He trailed off.

“It’s not a thing,” Rocketround’s voice joined Roadblock’s.

“But I’m standing closer to it than you are,” the man said. “And from where I stand, I feel like it might be.”

Nobody had a ready response to that.

“One,” Typhlosis murmured.

“I’m the last one standing on the brink now,” the man said. “I don’t think I can do this much longer. Do I embrace it or turn away? I wish I could see you, to—”

He reached up, to move his hair out of his eyes.

“Don’t!” I called out. My voice wasn’t the only voice of protest, but it might have been the first. Perhaps because I was most mindful of arms that weren’t mine, in my immediate vicinity.