FREYA was still holding me when I started looking around.
The empty space was fine for a few seconds but then it was just kind of boring. No walls, no floor you could see, no anything. Just us floating in white nothing. I had already looked in every direction twice and there was nothing new to find.
I thought, kind of without meaning to: I wish this was a playground.
And it shifted.
Not slowly. It just changed. The empty space broke apart and two things appeared in front of me like options on a screen. On one side the words: CREATE. On the other side: USE MEMORIES.
I looked at them. The CREATE side had a small lock symbol on it.
I pointed at USE MEMORIES.
The whole space came to life.
My neighborhood park. The one from this life, the one a few blocks from our house with the blue climbing structure and the slide that got really hot in summer and the old wooden bench near the path where my mom sat when she brought me here. Grass under my feet. The sound of wind moving through the trees around the edges. The sky was the same flat winter blue it had been when we drove home.
FREYA set me down.
I took two steps forward and stopped.
"What the," I said. "What is this?"
[It is your world. Take it.]
I turned around to look at her. She was standing with her hands at her sides, watching me the way she always seemed to watch things, like she already knew how it was going to go and was just waiting for me to catch up.
I looked at the park. Really looked at it. The climbing structure was the right shade of blue. There was a small scuff on the third rung of the ladder from where I had slipped once and grabbed it too hard. The bench had a crack along the top left corner.
It was exactly right. All of it.
I reached out and touched the ladder.
Cold metal. Real cold, the actual feeling of it, the way your hand registered temperature and texture at the same time. I grabbed the rung and it was hard and slightly rough under my palm. I let go and touched the grass and it was soft and a little damp and each blade bent under my fingers.
Then I pressed my hand flat against the ground and the gravel path nearby and the bark of the closest tree and I was getting a little overwhelmed because everything felt completely real, hot and cold and soft and hard all at once, everything the right thing.
"Is this part of my quirk?" I asked.
[Unsure, boss.]
I stood up and turned around.
"Boss?"
[Unsure, boss.]
She said it the exact same way. Like she had not noticed anything was wrong with it.
"Please don't call me that," I said.
[What would you like to be called?]
"Just Akira."
[Okay, Akira.]
She smiled when she said it. Small, like she was fine with it, which somehow made me feel like she had been waiting to see what I would say and found the answer acceptable.
I looked back at the park. The slide. The bench. The path cutting through toward the street.
I had built something like this once. Not a dream space, obviously. But systems. Architecture for something to run inside. Rooms inside machines where information lived. This felt like that in a way I couldn't fully explain. Like somewhere in the overlap between what I used to know and what I was now, this space existed.
I wanted to explore more of it. I wanted to figure out what CREATE meant and why it was locked and what it would take to unlock it. I wanted to know if I could bring other places here or build new ones or change things that were already here.
But then something pulled at the edge of the dream.
Not sharp. Just a gentle kind of insistence, like someone calling your name from another room.
[Looks like you're home, Akira.]
I looked at FREYA.
She was already looking at me. Same expression as always, calm and a little knowing. She raised one hand in something that was almost a wave.
I opened my eyes.
* * *
The car was in the driveway. My mom was leaning over the back seat unbuckling me, her face close, her voice soft the way it got when she thought I was still half asleep.
"Hey. We're home. Come on."
I let her carry me inside. My legs worked fine but she was already picking me up and honestly I was still a little out of it so I just went with it. The house was warm. It smelled like the candle my mom kept on the kitchen counter.
Hina was already inside, shoes off, flopped on the couch like she had been there for an hour.
"He awake?" she asked without looking up from her tablet.
"He's fine," my mom said.
I was set down on the couch next to Hina. She glanced at me.
"You slept the whole ride."
"I know."
"You snored."
"I did not."
She grinned and went back to her tablet.
My mom went to the kitchen. My dad came in from putting the car away a few minutes later, coat still on, and went straight to check on something in the back room where he kept his tools.
The TV was on. Hina had put on some afternoon show, the kind that was mostly music and people doing challenges. I watched it without really watching it, still thinking about the dream. The park. The two options. The way everything felt real when I touched it.
And then a girl on the TV did a cartwheel.
It wasn't even a particularly impressive cartwheel. Just a regular one, hands down, legs up and over, land on the feet. But I had been thinking about my quirk since the hospital and I was four years old and I figured now was as good a time as any.
I stood up.
"What are you doing," Hina said.
I didn't answer. I found a clear stretch of floor between the couch and the TV stand, checked both directions, and tried the cartwheel.
It was fast.
Like, really fast. Way faster than the girl on TV. My hands hit the floor and my body went over and I was already upright before I had fully processed that I had started and the TV stand was right there, close enough that I could see the individual scratches on the corner from when Hina had moved it last year.
I stopped.
Just barely.
I stood there for a second with my heart going and my nose about three inches from the TV stand.
[Output is consistent with the assessment results. Reaction time is also consistent. He stopped himself in time. Good. But we are going to need to work on spatial awareness before he tries anything like that again indoors.]
I took a step back.
Hina was staring at me with her tablet lowered.
"That was so fast," she said. "Do it again."
"No," I said.
"Why not?"
"I almost hit the TV."
She looked at the TV stand. Then back at me. Then she started laughing.
I sat back down on the couch and thought about it.
Fast was fine. Fast was good, even. But fast in a living room with furniture everywhere was a problem. I had no idea how fast I actually was. I had no idea how to control it yet. I had just copied something I saw on TV without thinking and nearly put my face through a piece of furniture.
I needed to practice. I just needed to figure out where and how to do it without destroying anything.
[For what it is worth, the form was correct. You have good instincts. We just need space.]
I looked up at nothing, which was the only direction FREYA was really in.
"Yeah," I said quietly, so Hina wouldn't hear. "We do."
On the TV, the girl was doing a second cartwheel.
I kept my hands in my lap this time.