Middle school had been troublesome, having started out poorly due to being revealed as a psychic, before ending up mostly positively. However times moves on, and it had been time to advance yet again.

High School.

Better known as the place that inflicts Eternal Torment. Home to Supreme Embarrassment and Torturous Memories.

Or at least that’s how it had been the first time around. So far it hadn’t been that bad. I knew many of the students, since most of them had either advanced with Sammi and I, or had done so one to two years in advance.

There were fewer second and third years than first, but that was because the average age of a first year was fifteen, whereas second years were usually sixteen. Those who were missing were usually those who’d left on their Trainer’s Journey.

The sixteen year olds and above that remained were those who either had no interest in going on a journey, or those who’d failed to graduate in order to head off. Which is where my current dilemma comes in.

My tutoring business. It made me plenty of money, but it was taxing. Combine that with my new problem, and you get a very grumpy Rynn.

I’d already seen the shadows of it when I’d been working on my shapeshifting skills years ago, but having to endure it constantly was a nightmare.

What was the issue?

Puberty. Mukin’ puberty.

For some reason, Sammi and I both started experiencing the torment that it was at nearly the same time. It was like our bodies had synced, but in the worst possible way, leaving us both snappy at each other due to the unstable hormones running amok within us.

For a while we couldn’t stand being around each other, though things eventually got better and we started getting along again.

By the time first year ended I’d gotten a pretty good handle on myself, being able to manipulate my body and energy made it easier to manage than I’d thought. It was also very different from what I’d gone through the first time around, and I’m not just talking about periods. Because I’m not going to talk about that.

Sammi did not have my skills and had to get through things the hard way.

Anyway, we’d always been somewhat fashion conscious, especially as we’d been among those two to three years older than us, but now things that hadn’t interested us before, or at least as much, became much more important.

Like makeup. We’d gotten some basic lesson from mom occasionally, but now we were diving in the deep end. We tried out so many different things, though with my pale pink hair it was a little difficult for me to use the darker colors without making it clash, and I didn’t want to alter my hair color. I wasn’t the biggest fan of pink, but I’d gotten used to it, even with its length slowly creeping past my bottom.

I tried a bunch of different things, and eventually found a look a liked. I may have gone a bit mewish and taken to wearing pink eyeshadow and touching up the color of my face to match. The fluffy pink cat eared hoodie I took to wearing was icing on the cake. It was light enough to not get to warm, so except for summer, I could wear it most of the time. It even had a small tail coming off the back that I could play with!

Unlike me, Sammi didn’t decide on any one theme, changing her look at least once every week or two. Her looking different every few days became a matter of course. I even tried out a few things with her, though I usually ended up back in pink.

The other effects of puberty started hitting us as well, but more Sammi than me. Growth. While girls don’t tend to shoot up suddenly like boys do, we did start to grow slightly faster. Her more than me.

Before, she’d only been slightly taller than me, despite being a year older. Now the gap between us was slowly increasing. I was still gaining height, but the rate was nothing compared to hers.

Though I already knew this would happen.

Just like how I’d known that puberty was going to suck, I also knew that I wasn’t going to get too large. I’d just barely break the five foot mark, but I’d also remain slender, in all regards, unless I really let myself go. My chest was still barely there, just having begun to grow in, though I knew it’d top out at a B-cup.

I could tweak it, but I didn’t want to throw off the proportions of my body. Plus I didn’t want to have too much weight there. I’d heard enough complaints about sore backs from carrying the weight, or how they could get in the way, that I was definitely a fan of having a small chest.

With our growth, we started being more interested in romance, though I wasn’t really as interested as Sammi was. There were plenty of people I found attractive, but not to the point where I would go out of my way to interact with them outside of my normal activities.

That did not stop me from going on dates. I just waited to be asked, rather than being the one to ask, like sis did a couple times.

I think we started to drive dad a little crazy, since his little girls were growing up too fast for him. Mom felt the same way, I could tell, but she hid it better, and reined dad in before he went out of control, though she did impose conditions on us.

First: Since we were younger, we were only allowed on group dates.

Second: No being alone with the opposite sex, or other romantic partners.

Third: Dates in public places only. No going off to remote locations.

The rules made sense in that they were supposed to allow us to date in safety, though that didn’t mean we always followed the rules…

---

It was during the autumn of our second year when the incident occurred.

We weren’t on a date, just attending a harvest festival on the outskirts of town. Mom and dad had trusted us to come by ourselves, especially since they knew I’d be able to get us home instantly if there was trouble.

We found trouble, though we didn’t realize it at the time. At first I thought I was seeing double, but on a closer look, the hair wasn’t quite the same style. A pair of twins had decided to try and pick us up. While they weren’t nicely dressed, they were at least neat. They were handsome, and probably not too far from us in age.

While I could tell their motives were not entirely pure, I’d found that was the case with most teenage boys. Their head got in the way of their thinking.

After a brief consultation with Sammi, which to outsiders looked like us just making eye contact, we decided to hang out with them. We hadn’t really had any plans outside of having fun, and more people could make things more enjoyable sometimes.

We strolled through the festival, trying out a few things, while also playing the occasional game. I only cheated if I really wanted the item. Or if the booth was just being completely unreasonable, in which case I took whatever was the most expensive, or desirable, to punish them. Then surreptitiously helped out another person or two achieve similar results.

Yes! I’m a hypocrite. A cheaty cheater with massive cheats who hates cheaters and finds joy in punishing them. Fight me.

I may have gone a little overboard considering we’d taken the bus to get out here and had nowhere to stow the stuff, which included a just released video game console with a VR helmet. Mom wouldn’t let me buy the thing, saying it was a waste of money, even though I had a good amount from all the tutoring I did. Well, she can’t complain now, since I only spent five bucks on the thing.

I’d never mentioned anything about being able to store things, since I’d never heard of another psychic who could do things, but I could teleport…

I pretended to make a phone call, and ‘talked’ to a friend who was willing to let me put the stuff in their car. Then I disappeared into the crowd and ‘dropped off’ the stuff in a place where no one could see me.

I had a hard time locating my sister when I came back. They were supposed to stay where they were, but for some reason they’d moved, and then I felt a stab of fear go through my mind before fading. It was my sister. I’d spent enough time linked to her mind that I could feel her emotions far better than anyone else’s.

Expanding my psychic radar, I took off running towards where I could feel my sister. Dodging around the people in my way. I released some of the hold I had on my physical strength, allowing me to reach top-tier athlete levels of speed and agility.

The place I ended up was in the employees only section of the festival grounds. There was a small group of people there, not just the twins, who I could see were unconscious on the ground. Presumably, the two had tried to defend my sister, who I could see was unconscious thrown over the shoulder of a large man in a black suit with a small badge with a red letter I couldn’t read on it. I didn’t need to read it to know who these people were.

My sister was unconscious, held carelessly in a man’s arms, with a growing bruise on her cheek, and that was all I needed to see.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl, though what actually happened was I was spending PP to accelerate my personal time. This allowed me to react faster, though moving in this state was difficult and caused pain if I overdid it. But being a psychic, I didn’t have to move to take care of this situation.

The men were crushed to the ground, other than the one who held Sammi. I didn’t kill or even badly wound them, since that might get me in trouble, but a few broken limbs should be fine. The last guy was turning to see what was going on, his eyes widening in horror. As he was the one who touched my sister, that guy wasn’t going to get off as lightly as the others.

Freezing him in place, I extracted my sister from his grasp, placing her behind me where she’d be safe, then turned my fury on the villain. He didn’t have incidental damage from being crushed to the ground. Nope. His damage was intentional, though it might seem accidental. He wasn’t going to get far on two broken legs, especially since his broken arms would make crawling difficult as well. It was just too bad he’d gotten shoved forward into the opening into a vehicle while his limbs were spread out.

Now the only one around conscious, I’d made sure, I split my attention to two tasks as I returned to normal time. First was arranging everyone and giving first aid, to the victims first of course. They got a bit of healing, something I had to do carefully so as not to stand out in case there were cameras I had missed destroying. The criminals were dealt with next, being restrained and having makeshift splints applied to their broken limbs.

The second thing I did, in parallel with the first, was make some phone calls. I wasn’t going to get reamed by mom for dealing with the incident further without bringing her in. I’d learned my lesson from the first assassins that had come for me.

Mom was upset, I mean who wouldn’t be when your child is almost kidnapped, but was at least not in the middle of something, so I collected her via teleport before making a call to the police.

This was the fourth incident, that they knew about, so they responded rather quickly, but I had more than enough time to sift through my prisoner’s minds. Hmm, surprising. This was an attack of opportunity, not a well planned one. Well, at least I got some helpful info for when I took a walk that night.

The twins were innocents, just being boys from another high school who’d been bored and picked up some girls to hang out with, not knowing who we were. Sure they wanted more than we’d have been willing to give, but at least they’d dismissed the possibility of forcing things as being an idiotic move. They thought it, but then many boys have those temptations. It’s the ones who try to follow through on them that get punished.

The festival had to shut down, considering that one of the people behind it was the mastermind behind the kidnapping, of which my sister would have been the first of two or three, had I not stopped them.

When the criminals were carted away, the rest of us who were involved joined the police at the local station to give our statements, and provide evidence. Other than when I’d been healing sis and the twins, I’d had a mental hand holding a camera to capture video evidence. I did get scolded, lightly, for the ‘accident’ involving the car doorway, but wasn’t in trouble, so we went home pretty quickly this time.

It annoyed me that psychically obtained evidence wasn’t admissible as real evidence unless obtained with a warrant, so I didn’t bother telling them anything, but I guess I, or rather Mr Doe, would handle that personally. He may have gotten the title of vigilante and be wanted by the police at this time…

The twins interest in us took a nose dive after finding out this wasn’t the first time we’d been attacked, so I guess we wouldn’t see them again, at least not intentionally. Sad, they’d been amusing with the whole twin thing going on. They weren’t actively psychic, but they did have a low level passive thing going on like many identical twins did.

The next few weeks saw crime in the city take a sharp nose dive as the local vigilante cleaned up the city. The lower level criminals got a chance to go to prison and try to change their lives. They weren’t mentally tampered with, but were given strongly worded ‘suggestions’ about improving themselves and confessing properly.

The hardened criminals and those who’d done despicable deeds were removed from the gene pool. Sadly, some of them had already used force leading to passing their genetics onward, but I didn’t hold the innocent responsible for their progenitor’s failings.

Though there were several new children in the orphanage when criminal and druggie parents were both arrested, or when one or both went ‘on the run’ as their organization was dismantled.

Sadly I knew I couldn’t dismantle everything alone, but at least for now, Pallet was a little bit safer… and my available funds skyrocketed. I wasn’t a charity, so when I came across dirty money, most of it became mine, though some of it ended up donated, but that was mostly from bank accounts where it was anonymously and untraceably donated. Online classes in programming and cybersecurity went well with the hacking skills I’d picked up through the years.

---

The rest of high school was pretty tame in comparison to some of my more discrete activities. Although we were younger than the other attendees, we were actually pretty high on the social ladder, and used it to make sure there was little to no bullying, discrimination, or idiots acting out.

No acting out beyond reason anyway. As long as it wasn’t ridiculous or harmful, senior prank day activities were not affected. I had an alibi proving I was not involved in the shenanigans, and the hundreds of plushies that had been dropped from where they were hidden on the ceiling of the cafeteria during lunch time ended up being donated to good homes.

I got a new mew plushie to join the one Rachel had given me years ago. I hadn’t snuggled with it in a while since it was getting a little threadbare.

I also got to experience many of the high school events I’d missed the first time around, like parties and dances! I went to prom! My first prom! Previously I’d been unsociable, and a guy, so I didn’t go before. This time around, I got asked each year, so I was able to enjoy it.

We did the whole day date thing before splitting up to get ready and go to the dance in the evening, and I had so much fun, I ended up ruining my makeup crying in joy. Stupid bad memories being overwritten with good ones and teenage hormones don’t mix very well.

I was popular, had tons of friends, was rich, though I had to hide the source of much of that, and was altogether living a great life outside of people trying to kidnap or kill me…

However, I ran into a problem as high school was ending. I’d calculated things so Sammi and I could graduate together, but we wouldn’t be able to go on our Journeys together.

I’d taken into account the fact that I was a year younger than her, and thus required special dispensation in order to get my Trainer’s license earlier, so I’d jumped through so many hoops and spent a lot of time cutting through red tape and doing paperwork… only for my application to be denied.

I knew who was behind this. Those corrupt League axxholes. They couldn’t get rid of me, so they’d at least inconvenience me.

Or maybe they were doing this hoping to get a shot at kidnapping Sammi separate from me. It had been kept quiet, but I wasn’t the only one who’d been attacked. They’d gone after my siblings, hoping to use them as bait, hostages, whatever, though they’d failed.

Knowing they were at risk, mom and dad had gotten them some psychic pokémon to raise, and I’d trained them. A lot. They weren’t as powerful as me, but I passed on a lot of tricks I’d learned through the years, letting them protect my siblings and turn the tables on their attackers.

Mom had prepared two pokémon for Sammi when she’d turned sixteen, an Alolan vulpix, Haley, and an espeon, Lori. Both had been from eggs, though it had been rare for the latter to come from an egg rather than evolve from an eevee. Lots of work had gone into their breeding, including some questionable genetic manipulation, but everyone was happy, so no harm was done.

Like before I trained Lori in psychic techniques, since she’d be the one to be there for my sister since I couldn’t.

Sis did say she could wait a year so we could go together, but I knew how much she’d been looking forward to heading off this year, and she knew I knew. She couldn’t hide anything from me, I’d been in her mind enough, I almost had to force myself to not mentally link to her unconsciously, so reading her surface thoughts was nearly impossible to not do.

After some back and forth over the idea, more for form than anything else, she decided that she’d start her journey, but told me I should hurry up and catch up to her.

I gave her a big hug, promising that I’d do my best.

She prepared for her journey, with me helping her out.

I was really sad to see her go, and in my sadness, I finally made a decision, so I made my own preparations.