Loo paused for a moment:

  “You need to get the hell out of here.”

  “Why the dramatic pause, didn’t you already say that a couple of times?”

  “Yup, but the last few times there wasn’t a higher level predator snooping around the bottom of the tree. Seriously, I have no idea how you didn’t get dropped at least 2 points on discernment. Intuition side of things must be off the charts, but we’ll look under the hood later. The rat can carry the eye with him. Even if he waits a week it will have enough energy to make him pop ten times over.”

  “What predator?”

  “The bushy bear thing. Or is it a beaver? All of the animals from your planet look the same to me, big bunches of hairy flesh running around on half the correct number of limbs.”

  “The names here are odd, but I have a hard time believing anyone would name something the bushy beaver. If its the same as the one from earlier, it’s definitely a bear.”

  “I am sure that’ll be a great comfort to you when it claws apart your insides. Time to move.”

  Oregano was keeping a look out, but had not spotted the bear yet. Jon looked down, and understood why. The bear was well camouflaged in this area of heavier vegetation. Jon could only spot it due to his mental and vibration senses. He shared his vision with Oregano.

  The reply from the rat carried an impression of a racing heart beat. There was a tinge of shame with the message as well, but the rat quickly moved past it. An image came across the link, two rats standing still in the dark as a shadow passed overhead and then away.

  Jon was in agreement.

  “We can try to wait it out. But be ready to run”

  Oregano made his way carefully up into his carrier. Jon watched the bush bear ambling around on the ground, sniffing about. It was wandering in the wrong direction, which Oregano had correctly identified when he recommended they wait it out. Jon got ready to run now that they had some breathing room, but paused to ask Loo a question,

  “Hey, does the quest on me still exist? It shares my location, right? How exact is that information?”

  “The quest is almost certainly still going. How accurate the location it shares is depends on the quest. Some will bring them close enough to find signs of you, and some will bring them close enough to physically spot you. The bear won’t know which type it has been given, even if it's smart enough to know the difference.”

  “If I get away, won’t the quest just keep sharing my location?”

  “Yes, but quests have inherent limitations. If you can get out of the defined quest area, they will fail and stop giving away your location. I had a passive ability to disrupt the quest system before my mishap, and I believe it should still be active.”

  “Then why are they finding me still?”

  “Listen, lets just add this to the gab session for later. Happy to gossip like a schoolgirl once we get free and clear. For now, we’re probably safe if we can leave this cavern.”

  Jon felt along his drag-line, and was getting ready to send a distracting noise to direct the bear further away. Loo interrupted him,

  “If you ever want to do anything useful with that psionic ability, you need to learn to directly access your opponent’s mind. The thing that makes specialists in mental magic dangerous isn’t mind blasts. It’s subtlety. By the time your opponent knows you’re there, they should already have lost.”

  “So how do I do better?”

  “I just told you. You need to access the mind of your opponent. Every person has a different method, but when you’re casting magic you should use your dominant sense in most cases. In your case, it seems to be vision. Picture your magic getting past the bear’s hide. What you use should be subtle: make the place you pierce through as small as possible. From there, seek out the mental energy. It won’t always be the head, but it probably is in most creatures related to your world.”

  The bear was now on the far side of the clearing, but it stopped and turned, snuffling this way and that. It looked like the bear who attacked the alpha chasing him earlier. Rather than legs, it was skiing on a bed of vines. Sprouts of flowers and leaves covered it in place of fur.

  The surrounding plants and bushes often seemed to veer away from its path of their own accord, but at other times they seemed to actively impede the bear’s path. It made for a strange scene, with plants dancing back and forth as the bear passed. The bear was slowly starting towards the tree they were in, vines creeping forth as it made its way back across the clearing in front of them.

  Jon began to picture the threads that Loo had sent out earlier, but the ones he made seemed too rigid compared to the ones Loo made. They were more like wires than fishing line, and rapidly broke apart.

  “Not horrible, but you need to make it your own. What I use might not resonate properly for you. What would make it feel right?“

  Jon thought a few moments.

  He needed to introduce a foreign energy to the bear. For some reason, all he could picture was a needle. Jon pictured his wire-like thread with a hole on its end instead. A path to carry the energy from himself to the bear. He jabbed the mental wire towards the bear, picturing it breaking the skin, the energy breaching a vein and circulating.

  The mental needle made contact, and Jon felt a link forming between himself and the bear. He began to feel thoughts and feelings like he had from the bunnies during Loo’s fight. The connection remained faint and fuzzy though.

  He began trying to seek the source of the bear’s mental energy, and the needle broke apart. Jon felt himself lose a portion of his psionic energy store, the energy leaking rapidly from his mental construct.

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  The bear gave a grunt, and whirled about, prowling off to the side. It had noticed something amiss, but beyond that it seemed a bit clueless.

  “Oh! Thank goodness, it’s denser than you are. Perfect practice dummy. In every sense.”

  “It could have found me with that?”

  “A blind, deaf, one-armed monkey with mange could have found you in a couple seconds. That was insanely clumsy.”

  “I don’t see what being one-armed or having mange has to do with anything,” Jon muttered.

  “We’ll focus on discernment next level up.”

  Jon ignored his new second asshole and made another attempt. This time the needle broke on the bear’s skin, and the bear roared at a rock on its left.

  “Mental defenses usually fail against higher intelligence scores. He’s probably right to think the rock could have been guilty.”

  Jon took a moment to think things through. The needle felt right, but the wire was all wrong.

  “Can I make multiple separate constructs? I have an idea.”

  “Sure. It will slightly increase the difficulty of maintaining the structure though.”

  The biggest I.V.’s used in a hospital were called central lines, so named because they went into the largest central veins: the internal jugular, subclavian, and femoral veins were the most common. Placing these big lines was risky for obvious reasons. If you fucked up, you had a big hole in expensive real estate. Because of this, most clinicians used ‘Seldinger technique.’

  Seldinger technique involved a staged approach, using a very small needle to place a guidewire in the vein, cutting and dilating the path down to the vein, and finally passing the larger catheter into the enlarged hole. Jon pictured the set up in his mind. Needle, flash of blood, pass wire, cut, dilate, line placed, seek confirmation.

  Jon made his mental needle much thinner than it had been, striking a smaller area of the bear’s defenses.

  This time he pierced the defenses easily without being noticed. Jon passed a bridge of energy through this to serve as a connecting line, and pulled back the mental needle. He directed more energy down the connecting line, and felt the breach in the bear’s defenses expand momentarily, dilating the breech.

  The bear grunted, and Jon felt its attention turning towards his mental attack. Jon visualized smaller needles spiraling off and carrying lidocaine, a numbing medication.

  In an actual procedure this would take place before he made the first stick, but no need to be picky right now. Jon felt the bear turning back to its quest to find him, forgetting its brief discomfort as he breached the mental defenses. It began digging under the offensive rock to its left. Loo let out a sigh over their connection.

  Finally, Jon passed a larger conduit through his victim’s opened defenses, and began circulating energy from himself to the bear. He felt the energy contact the nexus of mental power in the bear’s brain. As he did so, he felt a deeper connection with the bear. He began seeing from its eyes, feeling from its paws, and hearing from its ears. This time the sensory feedback was clear and crisp. Success.

  “Congratulations. It only took you long enough for Oregano to raise three generations.”

  “Sick burn bro. If you’re done being a dick, can you tell me what to do next?”

  “I don’t know anyone named Richard, so how can I be him? You’ve invested about half of your mental reserves into making this connection, and now you have two options. Option one is to drive the bear off or see if you can take it out with a surprise attack.”

  “That’s two options.”

  “I know but they’re both stupid so I saved time by lumping them together. The bear might be dumb, but it looks like it’s at least level 4 and likely getting close to level 5 based on the aura manifestations. It could kill you by farting in the wrong direction.”

  “Ok, what’s option two?”

  “Option two is to lead this stubborn, stupid bear by the nose to clear your way and fight off any competition. It’s strong and dumber than a bag of rocks. A perfect patsy. Just give it something shiny to chase and run after it. If it starts paying too much attention, make it think you’re a shrub or something.”

  Jon felt out the bear’s mind. He could sense the same hunger he experienced, but much deeper. He also felt an intense feeling of love and longing, directed vaguely into the forest. It felt oddly connected to the hunger.

  As he connected more deeply with the mind of the bear, a picture came into Jon’s mind. It was out of focus at first, but became clearer with each passing moment. A small bear. It was the object of the love and longing from the larger bear, and the feeling was intensely tied into the bear’s hunger.

  “It has young to feed!” Jon realized.

  If he could tap into that feeling, the bear would do anything to keep him safe. He had seen how the bear from earlier had rushed to fight the alpha when it heard the cries of a cub.

  “I’ve got a better idea, I’ll hide in plain sight,” Jon said.

  Jon gathered up Oregano, placed him in his carrier, and hung him from his abdomen. He pictured himself as the smaller bear, the object of the large bear’s love. Jon let out a little mental cry, pretending to be the small bear. He prepared for a quick drop to the ground and an easy walk out of the cavern.

  “Uh, what the fuck is this? I did not consent to the bear kink. This is why everyone thinks psionic specialists are creepy.”

  “What?”

  Jon felt a spike of intense interest from the large bear in the clearing. The bear let out a roar, and galloped directly in Jon’s direction, its eyes fixed on his location in the tree. Jon examined its feelings again, and had a realization. Not love. Lust.

  “Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “What are you trying to do, manifest it into existence? Here’s a hint, this is very much a doberman-chihuahua situation! It will not go well.”

  Jon ran further up the tree as the bear barreled into the base of the trunk.

  Jon leapt, landing on another tree’s branch about fifteen meters away. He continued to run along the branch, planning his next jump.

  Even in his panic, he marveled at how much easier the movements felt.

  It was like he had been in this body for years rather than days. The bear roared behind him, and Jon bounded forward, landing on a nearby bough.

  “Ok, so you screwed the pooch a bit there. Or rather, you realized we don’t want to screw the metaphorical pooch. No big deal, we can use this too. Got to adjust to the times. You certainly got the bear moving in the right direction, now we can use him as a distraction for the others we encounter.”

  Jon kept leaping from branch to branch, finding the motions as effortless as walking.

  He did not have to use his dragline silk once to change trajectory, landing on the branches and bouncing slightly before leaping to the next. Jon took advantage of the relatively clear canopy and the bear’s limited mobility. The bear rapidly fell behind, as it had to keep circumventing small hills, bushes that did not give way to it, and several ravines Jon was able to clear in a single bound.

  “Careful, if you make too much distance you’ll lose the link,” Louis cautioned.

  Jon acknowledged the advice, slowing a little. He had begun fleeing without a plan or even much thought to his direction, and found himself looking over the river and the pond beneath the falls again as the canopy cleared.

  “Perfect! Well done,” Loo said.