Meditating, to try to improve his focus and fine-tune his self image, so he might be better equipped while dreaming.

Kenzie was in the kitchen, tinkering at the dinner table. Sveta, Byron, Chastity and I stood in the hall. Tense.

“Will you accept it if they say no?” Sveta asked me.

“I’ll have to,” I said. “It has a lot of problems. It requires a lot. It’s… people are going to die. And I think I could make peace with being pissed at the Wardens for not accepting my plan, while being relieved those deaths won’t be on my head.”

“Might be easier said than done,” Byron said. He sat on the stairs, wearing scuffed chainmail, helmet off.

“Easier said than done, agreed.”

“Time is running out,” Natalie observed. “I’m not sure what I’m hoping for at this point.”

“Me either,” I admitted.

“Sveta!” Kenzie called out. She jogged over from the kitchen. “Here. If it’s lame, you can turn it off. There’s a few settings, but if you wear it over your heart, it’ll read your heart rate and adjust accordingly.”

Sveta took the pin, which looked like something between a conch shell, a tree, and a fish, a spiral with branches coming off of it, the ‘tail’ extended.

She fixed it to the breast of her costume, then activated it. Kenzie was already handing Byron one.

Sveta wore pieces of her prosthetic suit, armor that featured decorative curls and waves, and she’d put it on over her coat, mostly because she didn’t have another coat that really fit with the costume. I’d offered her some of mine, but just about everything I and Crystal had clashed.

With the pin’s activation, her coat took on a new texture, the patchwork pattern fading away, replaced with a mosaic of images that matched with the curl of her armor and the colors of the coat. They drifted, shifted, and moved, with watercolor blurs. The lines between coat and armor disappeared.

Byron had one too. It stuck to his chest with a magnet, and Kenzie pointed out where to put a clip so it would attach to a bit of plating as well, so it wouldn’t fall off. A similar, shifting texture, but it looked like the play of light off of rippling water, reflected on the brighter parts of his costume, while the rest was left cast into shadow.

“Cool,” he said.

“Isn’t it? I tried to use what I studied about your phase shifting with Tristan, if you’ll change?”

Byron blurred. Tristan emerged. The pin was preserved.

No visual effect, though.

“Crap,” Kenzie said.

“You do realize that preserving details across this change is the real accomplishment?” Tristan asked.

“But it’s not—oh! There we go.”

The red parts of the armor took on a bit of an ember glow.