Chapter 108 – Self-Disgust
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Erica was an unassuming, sheltered girl with low self-esteem, little self-awareness, and zero ambition. Her only real strength was her caring and compassionate nature. It was a miracle she'd managed to survive to adulthood in a city as vicious as Grandebelle.

She joined the Chosen Ones at the same time as Jessica, but her psychic powers were far slower to develop. She started smoking Nuke for no particular reason other than the fact that Jessica did, and she never noticed any particular effect beyond a weak ability to sense auras. And then when Jessica switched to smoking the far more powerful Rampage, Erica naturally did the same. She never thought too deeply about it. She never even really thought of herself as a psychic, really. The idea that she was a loser incapable of doing anything useful on her own was so deeply ingrained in her mind, it never occurred to her to challenge it. But... somewhere along the way, she started to realize something about her was changing.

The first time she noticed that smoking Rampage was doing something came when she smoked two on an especially challenging day at work, one right after the other. It gave her a horribly painful headache that lasted for hours. She went home early and felt better right away, so she chalked it up to stress and forgot about it.

Before long, that sort of incident started to happen more and more frequently. More pain. More headaches. And then one night while she was working late on a research project she started feeling sick to her stomach. She ran to the bathroom and emptied the meager contents of her stomach into the toilet. She felt exhausted. She didn't understand what was happening to her.

Before she could get up off the bathroom floor, she felt an incredible surge of energy flooding through her entire body. She could feel people all around her. Their souls. She could see the patterns of the world revealing themselves in swirling lines of color. Erica was overwhelmed with confusion and fear. She thought she was dying.

The strange experience lasted for five whole minutes. And then everything faded away. Erica came to her senses. She picked herself up and stumbled back to her desk in the office. She was too afraid to tell anyone about what happened. But she started paying attention to the colorful auras that she saw everywhere in her mind’s eye. They were always there, ever since she started smoking Nuke to be more like Jessica, but she'd always ignored them. She couldn't ignore them anymore. Her weak little body was bursting with pale green light. Her aura. It pulsed like a living organism. Changing shape. Swelling up under her skin.

Erica's psychic power was growing stronger every day. She tried ignoring it, pretending not to notice the strange colors and shapes forming inside the corners of her vision, but it was getting harder and harder to do. She saw patterns in the carpet. She saw pictures in her mind whenever she looked at people. She saw swirling shapes whenever she closed her eyes.

Erica couldn't stand the disgusting sight of her own glowing, throbbing, twisting aura any longer. It made her nauseous. So she figured out how to compress it, manipulate it, and hide it deep inside herself so that she didn't have to look at it anymore. It sort of worked. And yet she could still feel it sloshing around deep inside her, trying to force its way out. Erica got better and better at sealing her power away, but it had a nasty tendency of leaking out on its own when she was stressed and making her sick to her stomach. It was an uninvited, obnoxious guest that had taken up permanent residence inside her body and its suffocating presence was ruining her life.

It was only after Jessica showed her a Feeder and explained what exactly it was and where it came from that Erica realized how much danger she was in.

Psychics whose power grew out of control transformed into monsters. The process was irreversible and fast, and most died within days of being consumed by the power inside them. The most common transformation was a Feeder, a giant creature with red glowing eyes and sharp claws. But there were plenty of other types as well. Some were closer to abstract shapes made of psychic power than physical beings. Sleepers. Purple Shadows. Strands. Other creatures that had no form at all. These strange beings were barely more intelligent than animals and they spent the entirety of their short lifespans wandering around the Pit looking for people to kill.

Erica's most defining characteristic was her overwhelming lack of confidence in her own abilities. She'd never been good at anything. Her entire life, everything she did was clumsy and awkward and painfully slow. She just kind of stumbled along as best she could. But the discovery that she was at risk of transforming into a monster made her realize that she had to do something. She had to change. She had to take control.

"I don't want to become a Feeder," she whispered to herself in her tiny new office. "Maybe I'm too stupid to figure this out, but... I'm going to try anyway. I have to learn how to use my powers the right way."

Erica felt her hands shaking. She thought about all the time and effort Jessica had wasted on her in their four years working together, all of the kindness that she didn't deserve and that she never showed enough appreciation for, and the fact that she still believed in her despite how much of a total waste of space she was.

"I don't want to become a Feeder. I want to stay here with Jessica."

After months of struggling to suppress her strength, hide it, ignore it, obliterate it, Erica finally stopped fighting the power inside her head. She let herself feel it again, and it slowly revealed itself to her in all its awful glory. The true form of Erica's psychic power was a great invisible pressure that permeated through her very being. It felt like an endless tide pushing and pulling at the world around her, making her dizzy, causing waves of nausea, filling her mind with swirls of color, creating strange sensations of warmth and coldness, shifting, throbbing, swelling...

Erica's neglected psychic power had developed into a sickening thing with a mind of its own. It was called 'Flawed Copy.'

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