“Yeah, so, I was pretty shaken. Battery ended our night early, said she’d do the paperwork. I called home for a ride, and I didn’t sound okay. I was feeling rock-bottom worthless, scared, and felt a bit like there was no future. I couldn’t shake the idea that ending up where she was right then would be far more likely than being okay or living a normal life.”

I nodded. “An unexpected hit, straight to a weak spot, at the worst time.”

“Yup. So my dad picked me up, I freak out a bit in the car on the drive home. We get back to the house and… we talk. Maybe for the first time in my life, my dad was a support, talked to me like an adult when I started the conversation feeling like such a kid. We talked until it was ridiculously late, I vented about some of the stuff that was getting to me, school stuff. He offered me a beer and I said no, and he accepted that. That’s just the kind of guy he was, the beer thing. He took off work the next day, I took off school. We slept in, went out for lunch at a pub and played pool, we went to an arcade and he showed me his pinball skills. Then I went to the HQ for my evening shift.”

I was a little bit surprised by the strength of my emotional reaction to the little story, especially the late night talk he described. I blinked a few times in rapid succession. “That stuck, huh?”

“Gets a little hazy toward the middle of that day off. What’s your line of thinking?”

“Is it negativity-adjacent?” I asked. “What stays, what goes? Why? What can we pull out, what can we focus on? How does it connect to what we already know of powers? They fluctuate, when we’re in certain mental states, can we use new knowledge to control that fluctuation?”

Kid Win nodded, but I could see the slight changes in his expression, tiny creases, small tensions.

I went on, “I ask because last night, I found a new connection to my power. One I want to hold on to. And if I need to, I want to be able to intuit and deal with other powers, including any situations resembling last night, or… could be it matters for what the thinkers say is coming today.”

“Ah,” Kid Win replied.

Off to the side, not quite in earshot, Dennis said something, and Vista had a giggle fit.

“That okay?” I asked Kid Win.

“I don’t feel as much like an experiment under the microscope if you’re using it for yourself.”

“Using a good part of it for myself. Using more of it to just figure out how this all works. Last night, I was in the midst of it all. Earlier in this conversation, I used the term… what was it? Negativity-adjacent?”