My eye roved over the room. It was reminiscent of a teacher’s lounge, but it had less of an emphasis on the lounging. Coffee cups sat on windowsills and there were places where furniture had been stacked once, and the furniture had been moved out into the open room at the front of the building, where all the people were or had been seated. Glass cases with model buildings had been brought inside and carefully stacked against the wall. A long table that might have served as a conference table was folded up in one corner.

I tried to imagine it like Crystalclear was describing it. A sketch in three dimensions, only the lines visible. “I follow you so far.”

“The edges of walls and floor are usually clear, crisp, and closer to white. Solid objects don’t change, so there’s no reason for that to change. It’s blurred. Blue tinted.”

“Future sight,” Tempera added. “Past-sight is red, future-sight is blue. Like the doppler.”

Crystalclear went on, “In the future, that wall vibrates. Similar effect with people, but they move around more. I see you all as streaks, shifting around, white-edged where you’re resting in present. There is refraction and some fractures around people’s heads, representing focus and kind of thinking.”

“That gets blueshifted redshifted?” I asked. “It’s not displayed as color?”

Crystalclear nodded his head. It was a motion made more weighty by the heavy growth at the top of his head. “Not as color. It’s… edges to the light around them, sharpness and softness, distortions like how you can look at a glass of water with a straw in it and the straw isn’t straight, or you see multiple straws. The worst breaks in focus look like grooves or outright breaks. A lot of people here are going to be distorted soon. Or were. They’re leaving and they’re clearing up.”

His head turned as he focused on things on the other sides of the walls.

“What about, say, Jasper?” I asked.

“Hey,” Jasper said. “Use yourself as an example.”

Crystalclear looked at Jasper. “Hard to say. Whatever it is, it’s small or it’s distant.”

Crystalclear glanced over at Tempetera and Fume Hood. “Not just him either. It doesn’t give me much to work with.”

He turned his attention to me.

I cut right to asking my next question, before he could comment. “Do you see the direction of it? Anything big and blue that’s suggesting a major thing coming in sometime in the future? One section of the building that gets hit harder?”

He shook his head. “I’d have to see it before I saw how things were around it, and even then there’s nuance.”

“You’re thinking of a parahuman or weapon?” Tempera asked.