"That's not what happened!" Alex protested Sofia's retelling of the events. "It was just a really stressful day. The System had just assigned him Harper, we were just testing his new power, and things… simply went out of control."
Magnus raised a hand. "I'd like to state for the record that I was a victim that night. I was promised we could cuddle and sleep after I tried out my power, and instead there was very little actual cuddling and sleeping that night."
"You're not helping!" Alex smacked his shoulder.
"I'm telling the truth! You tricked me into triggering one of your kinks and I only got three hours of sleep that night!"
"I didn't know it had become a kink at that point! And you enjoyed it too. We both know you did."
"Be that as it may," he shot back, "I only got three hours of sleep before I had to be up for Jordan's training. You nearly killed me that night!"
"So." Valeria tapped the table with her index finger. "The general consensus is that Alex is the one doing the overwhelming here and not the other way around?"
Magnus froze.
"Well," he started slowly, "I wouldn't say she overwhelms me, necessarily. More like she drags me into decisions that I'd come to regret before, during, and after the execution phase of said decisions."
"You too?"
"I know that feeling."
"I get that."
"Can relate."
Ethan, Aaron, Chloe, and Miguel said almost simultaneously.
All of their girlfriends — except for Maya, who just grinned proudly — whirled on them.
"Excuse me?" Camila, Rachel, and Carmen chimed together.
"Well," Aaron said. "Objectively speaking, you make questionable decisions sometimes that I don't necessarily agree with, but I follow along anyway because I want to be supportive."
"What he said." Miguel pointed at Aaron.
"Sometimes?" Ethan snorted. "Try all the time. Camila makes more questionable decisions than reasonable ones." He paused. "That's what makes it fun, but sometimes it's exhausting."
The girlfriends looked genuinely offended. Tori picked this moment to speak up:
"So, plans for today: girls' day out, no boys allowed?"
Several girls cheered. Carmen, Camila, and Rachel made it a point not to look at their boyfriends when they moved away from them and sat down at the table and started discussing a shopping trip to the mall with all the other girls.
"Hey! Chloe also agreed with us," Ethan protested.
"Yeah, but Maya is Maya," Alex said.
"Thank you!" Maya didn't miss a beat.
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I'm taking it as one anyway," she shot back, then she turned to the guys. "Also, I'm just more forgiving than your girlfriends, boys."
Chloe could be seen rolling her eyes in the background.
"Plus, unlike you four, Chloe's still a girl," Nicole added.
"That's sexist—!" Ethan exclaimed. But before he could say anything else, Aaron clamped a hand over his mouth.
"Shut up, you idiot!" he said in a low voice. "Do you want us all to be dragged along and be their valets all day while they still ignore us anyway? Let them cool off, then we'll deal with each of our girlfriends tonight when they're not backed up by the whole flock."
Ethan thought about it for one long moment before nodding. Then the Boyfriends Squad quietly moved away from the scene.
***
And that was how it had come to be that the Council of Women went shopping while the Boyfriends Squad ended up in the backyard of the beach house with a science project of their own.
"Gentlemen," Ethan began. "We're gathered here today for something of utmost importance. We're here to experiment with Magnus's powers to better understand them and help him utilize them more effectively."
Magnus raised his hand. "I never agreed to that."
"Bro. It's better than sitting on our asses doing nothing all day."
"Hate to admit it," Aaron said, "but he's got a point."
Magnus scratched the back of his neck. "Still, we could… I don't know, play a sport or something."
Ethan and Aaron both looked at him like he'd gone insane.
"Bro. Are you serious right now? What kinda sport could be more interesting than testing your powers?"
"And, if you understand them better, it would be more beneficial to you and everyone around you," Aaron added.
Magnus stared at them. Then he looked at Miguel, who didn't agree or disagree with anything. Miguel simply shrugged, but he didn't go anywhere. That was, in a way, his own answer.
And so, that matter was decided just like that.
"So, Telekinesis," Ethan began again. "Do you know how it actually works?"
"I just focus with my mind and things move, or stay locked in place," Magnus replied.
"No, that's not what I meant…" Ethan thought about the right words, then: "Have you all seen Charmed?"
"The TV series that started when we were like four or five and ended when we were around eight or something?" Miguel asked.
"No, not that — that was the reboot." Ethan shook his head. "My mom and grandma hated that reboot, so I was subjected to the original series way back in like the nineties and early two-thousands. Anyway, in that show, telekinesis is like an umbrella term. Prue's telekinesis was a direct psychic push. Eyes, gesture, object moves. Paige's was object-to-object: she'd call something and redirect it. Different mechanics entirely. Both called telekinesis." He turned back to Magnus. "So, what I'm trying to say is, do you know the exact mechanics your Telekinesis works under?"
"I've never actually thought about that…" Magnus said slowly.
Aaron seemed deep in thought. "The way you said all that, do you have a hypothesis already?"
"I do." Ethan nodded at Aaron, then held up one finger as he turned back to Magnus. "Option one: you're directly controlling objects with your mind. Pure psychic influence, the object just moves because you want it to. Think Jean Grey from X-Men." He held up a second finger. "Option two: you're creating invisible constructs — essentially invisible hands or force fields — and those constructs are what's actually interacting with the objects. For lack of a better example, think Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four."
"Sue Storm is explicitly about force fields," Aaron corrected. "That's not the same as telekinesis."
"I did say for lack of a better example." Ethan protested. "Also, the functional difference is minimal in application."
"The functional difference is enormous mechanically—"
"For our purposes—"
"If we're trying to understand how the power works, the mechanism matters—"
"Okay, first of all, bro, we're not arguing comics. And even if we were, you're not gonna win against me if we really get into it. And secondly, we're trying to understand what he can do, not—"
Miguel cleared his throat loudly. "Oi, nerds! How do we actually test it?"
That shut both of them up.
Ethan scratched his chin. "I'm leaning toward option two. Invisible constructs. Because the control you've demonstrated is too precise for direct influence. You held almost twenty people in place simultaneously and maintained distinct pressure on each of us. Direct psychic influence at that scale would be—"
"Diffuse," Aaron said. "It would spread. You couldn't maintain individual precision across that many separate targets. The one furthest from you should theoretically have been the least affected."
"Exactly." Ethan pointed at him. "Constructs explain it. You're essentially generating invisible hands and using them."
Magnus considered this, thinking back to all the moments he could remember — ones during intimate moments where he'd restrained Alex, Jordan, and Chloe, or the way he had applied pressures inside of Maya, the way he'd deflected projectiles without thinking, and the way he'd kept everyone in place on the beach two nights ago while he healed Chloe. Invisible constructs felt like what he'd been doing.
"Anyway, for the actual experiments, I have proposals." Aaron adjusted his glasses. "If it's construct-based, there should be a maximum range. The construct has to extend from your body, which means it's limited by something — concentration, energy, some kind of tether. If it's direct influence, range might only be limited by line of sight."
"So… we test range?" Magnus asked.
"We test range," Aaron confirmed. "Specifically, we find the point at which your control degrades or fails, and whether that degradation is gradual or sudden."
"I want to see if he can move something he can't see," Ethan said.
"That's a separate test."
"It's related—"
"It tests a different variable—"
Miguel clapped his hands together. "Guys, can we just get started?"
***
The range test was inconclusive in the way that good experiments were inconclusive — it produced more questions than answers. Magnus could move objects at the full length of the beach house without apparent effort. He could move things he couldn't directly see, as long as he knew roughly where they were. His control didn't degrade with distance so much as it degraded with precision: he could push something across a room easily, but guiding it through a narrow gap required proximity.
Ethan wrote this down on his phone with great enthusiasm. Aaron jotted down his own notes on paper with a different, more organized enthusiasm.
"This seems consistent with invisible constructs," Ethan said. "The constructs get less precise at range. That's consistent."
"Or his concentration attenuates with distance," Aaron countered. "That would produce the same observable result under either hypothesis."
"Then we need a test that distinguishes between them."
Miguel, who had been sitting on the steps watching all of this, said: "I mean, you could just lift one of us off the ground and we can tell you what it feels like."
Everyone looked at him.
"If it's invisible constructs, being lifted should feel like something is physically under you or wrapping around you, picking you up. If it's direct influence, it might feel more like floating — no contact sensation at all." He shrugged. "Subjective report, but it's still data."
"That's—" Aaron paused. "That's actually well-designed."
"I have a good head on my shoulders," Miguel said with another shrug.
Magnus rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't love the idea of lifting someone like that—I mean, it feels like taking away someone's agency. I've only ever done it to Alex, once, and that was—" He stopped. "On instinct. During a moment of intimacy where curiosity got the better of me and I wasn't exactly thinking it through."
"Like on the beach with Chloe?" Ethan said.
"That was an emergency. This isn't."
"We know," Aaron said. "We're not conflating them." He looked at the others briefly. "You have explicit permission from all three of us. Stated clearly, right now."
"I'll go," Miguel said. "Do it."
Magnus looked at him for a moment. Then he reached his hand out and focused. Miguel rose slowly off the ground, five feet up, steady.
Miguel looked down, then at his hands and the empty air around him. He tried moving his feet up and down and swinging his arms around himself.
"Constructs," he said. "Not entirely solid. But there's definitely something under me. And the air around me also feels slightly different. I can feel it. It's like standing on—"
And then something stepped out in front of Magnus.
Not from around the corner of the house, or from the trees. From nowhere, the way they always came — just suddenly present, occupying space that had been empty a moment before. A figure, indistinct at the edges, grabbing at his collar, and Magnus felt his concentration crack before he could stop it.
"You've been getting too comfortable lately!" The voice rang in his head. "Complacency is how I died!"
Then the figure disappeared as fast as it had appeared. Magnus didn't even have time to let himself panic this time — his hand shot out immediately to catch Miguel right before he hit the ground before lowering him onto it.
"What just happened?" Aaron asked.
For a long moment after that, Magnus stood very still, trying to regulate his breathing while the other guys watched him.
Finally, he exhaled slowly and turned to Miguel. "Sorry. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," Miguel said. "You caught me. And even if you hadn't, I'd still have survived." A pause. "But are you okay?"
Magnus looked at where the figure had been. Then at the three of them.
"You're going to think this sounds insane," he said.
"We watched you heal a gunshot wound on a beach," Ethan said. "That set a fairly high bar for insane."
Magnus sat down on the steps. "I think they're ghosts," he said. "People who had the System before me and died. They show up sometimes. Usually with warnings. Just now, one of them showed up. That's why I lost control for a moment."
Nobody said anything immediately.
"Ghosts," Aaron said, in the tone of someone deciding whether to accept a premise before proceeding.
"I know how it sounds."
"You said warnings?" Miguel asked.
"Yeah. The one that showed up just now said I was getting too comfortable lately." Magnus rubbed the back of his neck. "And that complacency is how they died."
The four of them sat with that for a moment.
"There are others?" Aaron asked. "People who had the same System as yours."
"Yeah. We think — Alex and I think — that it's a possibility. The… uh, the exact wording for penalty for failure of a quest is 'heart failure,' so we think some of the recent cardiac arrests among young people in the area could have been them. Other System hosts, as the System itself calls us, who failed their quests."
Aaron nodded. "There has indeed been a spike in cardiac arrests among youths lately. I heard about that."
Everyone was quiet for a while after that, absorbing the information and its implications.
"So," Ethan finally broke the silence. "There are other superpowered individuals who are forced to sleep with others to survive."
"And they may not share Magnus's luck… and most likely not his moral compass, either," Aaron continued.
"I mean, I'm not doing anything anyone wouldn't have done," Magnus protested, but they all ignored him.
"That sounds like bad news," Miguel concluded. "Lots of scared and stupid guys running around with more powers than they can handle."
"Or girls," Ethan added. "We don't know if Systems like his only pick guys as hosts or if they also pick girls, now do we?"
Everyone else paused.
"You've actually made a lot of good points today," Aaron noted.
"Thanks. But why does that still sound like an insult?"