Masao, who had been sent out to the beach behind the house to watch for his father, also heard the otherworldly scream, then blacked out. Hours later, his father, Umeji, found his unconscious son. Upon rousing him, he found that his son has lost his hearing. After the initial shock, the boy tried to explain that Aiko had gone into labor, and that he had heard a horrid screeching sound before passing out. They hurried back to the house to find the two corpses, as well as the newborn Kina, sleeping soundly on the bed.

After the tragic and questionable circumstances of Kina’s birth, her father was devastated, and confused. What was he to do with a newly deafened son and a newborn baby, who seemed to have animal-like features? But being a wise, resilient, and family-centered man, he came to his senses rather quickly – buried his wife with honor, found a better paying job on a bigger island, and moved his family into a small apartment in a burgeoning town. Despite his handicap, Masao proved to be extremely helpful to his father in caring for the house and his little sister. He was not able to attend school, but there were dozens of educational resources online, including sign language tutorials. Before long, both Umeji and Masao were proficient in communicating with one another.

Over the next five years, Kina matured under the watchful eye of her brother and father. The Japanese Office of Hyper Affairs provided Umeji and Masao with specialized earpieces that would allow them to withstand her cries, and a crib developed from Ebb-cell technology, in which they could place baby Kina whenever her inconsolability posed possible threats to other people in their neighborhood. Luckily, she was a generally content and quiet child, and by the time she was 3 years old, the earpieces and the crib were no longer needed. She began learning English, Japanese, and a variety of sign languages, and sat beside Masao whenever he was on the computer, studying math, philosophy, biology, sociology, engineering and hyper-morphology. They really had carved out a nice life for themselves.

Then, when Kina was nearly 6 years old, tragedy struck again: the building Umeji was working at was bombed by a hyper-villain terrorist squad called Stripes and Stars (named after a group started over a hundred years prior in the United States), and everyone inside perished. Kina was just old enough to understand what had happened. She was also old enough to know that her hyper-ability could be used to find and destroy the assailants. But her brother explained to her that revenge was irrational – at least for the time being.

Officials from the Office of Hyper Affairs took them in, until it could be decided what to do with the little furry girl and her teenage brother. Because neither Kina, nor Masao were not typical children, putting them in foster care or with adoptive parents was a risky, and potentially dangerous proposition. The decision was made to send them to a group home in the United States, which specialized in dealing with hyper-powered orphans who had been through traumatic experiences. “The Home”, as it was referred to by some, was located in New Orleans, and run by a powerful psionic hyper-being named Francine Fray, aka “Placebo”.

Upon arriving, Placebo accepted them in and began their counseling. Her powerful telepathic mind immediately detected Masao’s intelligence and empathetic temperament; within months, she offered the now 18-year-old a position as a counselor at The Home. He accepted, and excelled. Kina, however, was a much more difficult case to deal with. Despite her brother’s efforts to be a voice of reason, her father’s death at the hands of terrorists had made her spiteful and angry. For the first few weeks none of the other children wanted to be around her, as none of Francine’s conventional counseling methods were working.

Francine was forced to employ a more drastic tactic – “The Placebo Effect”. This method was quite controversial, but it was something that she used often, as many of the children at The Home were emotionally and psychologically damaged beyond repair. With the Placebo Effect she would use her enormously powerful psionic abilities to alter the minds of her patients, in a way that forced them to bury the memory of the tragic circumstances that brought them to The Home. She would then replace the gaps in their memories with new ones, which would then allow her to employ her conventional methods more effectively.

It worked for Kina, and she became a much more agreeable resident of The Home. But her agreeability, like that of dozens of her housemates, depended heavily on Placebo maintaining psionic links with every member of the house. If the governess changed the truth for one child, she had to change that truth for every other child. For example, muting Kina’s memory of how her parents died was useless, if Masao still held the memory. It was an an extremely delicate psionic web, that allowed to The Home to run as smoothly as it did. But Placebo was easily powerful enough to maintain it.

Then, about a year after Kina and Masao had come to The Home, 6-year-old Maximilian Finch arrived. His parents had died tragically in an accident involving his psionic hyper-abilities – his extremely potent psionic abilities. It was immediately apparent that Max’s power level was close to – if not higher than – Placebo’s. It was also clear that the boy had intention on challenging The Home’s governess, as she would soon find out that Max was not simply a boy with a tragic past… but he was being embodied by a man from a different time period (nearly a hundred years prior), and that he was there for a specific mission – to find a way to reattach the future to the past, thus repairing the Core Timeline, and saving Reality from disappearing into oblivion.

In order to complete his mission, however, Max would have to probe, and potentially unlock the minds of some of the other children at The Home, thereby disrupting Placebo’s harmonic psionic web, and ultimately leading to chaos and almost certain cataclysm, due to the mix of insanity, brokenness, and extreme destructive prowess of the residents. Placebo saw Max as her most challenging patient.

Kina, on the other hand, saw Max as a friend. She introduced herself, and the two of them began hanging out constantly. Though Max developed a fondness for Kina, he also began attacking Placebo’s psionic manipulation on the young orphan, essentially using her as a pawn in the intricate game of chess in which the two hyper-cogs were now engaged. He soon found openings in Placebo’s barriers, and was able to tap into Kina’s mind.

Though he did not immediately find exactly what he was looking for – namely, metaphysical fragments of chronokinetic energy – he did find that Kina had a slew of dormant extraordinary hyper-abilities within her. He discovered that the furry spots on her body were not simply fox-like features; they were the manifestation of the fact that she was Kitsune. This meant that she possessed extreme intelligence, the ability to shape-shift and become invisible, as well as a host of magical and mystical powers. It also meant that as she matured, her fur would spread over more parts of her body, and she could eventually sprout up to nine fox tails! The more tails she ended up with, the more powerful she would be. Nine of them would indicate nearly god-like powers.

Max thought to himself that a being with this much power inside of her has to be able to help him accomplish his mission of repairing the timeline. He focused in on unlocking her mind, but Placebo also turned her focus toward Kina. The young girl’s mind became a battlefield for the immensely powerfulhyper-cogs, as they jockeyed for position. Then in a brilliant move, Max unleashed a blanket of psionic probs throughout the school. The split-second distraction allowed him to outmaneuver Placebo and totally dissolve the psionic barrier. Max then pinpointed her brain’s hyper-stem, and activated it!

Within seconds, Kina’s powers manifested in an explosive way! And so did her anger and mind for revenge, as the memories of her father’s death came rushing back. She unleashed one of her death screams, as tails began to grow from her lower back. Placebo was able to blanket The Home with a psionic shield, which protected everyone’s brains from liquefying. She then turned to see that Kina had indeed sprouted all nine tails!

The little girl looked around in amazement, as she was now seeing the world in a whole new light. She was also literally seeing the WHOLE world, including the locations of all the Stripes and Stars terrorist group members. Placebo screamed for her to stop and attempted to hit her with a psionic bullet, but it was too late – Kina unleashed a metaphysical burst of energy that instantly liquefied the minds of all 306 individuals on the planet who had anything to do with the Stripes and Stars organization. It was brutal.

But it was also crucial, for as Kina was maxing out at level 9,000, Max was able to detect the chronokinetic energy he was looking for! In that moment he linked up with Cynthia Quantic’s chrono-anchor back in the 22nd century, and began to metaphysically re-link the two portions of the timeline. Placebo was the only one who could feel the shift happening, and while she knew Max was ultimately saving the universe, she also knew that the unleashing of Kina’s powers in that way had greatly complicated the world moving forward.

A few moments later the shift was complete. Max telepathically communicated with Placebo, and told her that he would now work with her to reign Kina in. But as the two of them turned their focus to the girl, they found it extremely difficult to do so. She bucked and raged against their psionic chains, nearly yanking their essences out of their bodies, and into the astral plain. They managed to stand firm, though, and then Kina looked around and caught a glimpse of her brother. He locked eyes with her, and signed “I love you.”

With that, she began to calm down and reign her own powers in. Within a few moments, she had come to rest on the front porch of The Home, Placebo standing to her left, and Max on her right. Without needing to say anything to one another, the two of them worked together to re-institute a series of psionic locks on her mind and hyper-stem. She kept the nine tails and other physical manifestations, but she was no longer tripping on god-levels. One day her powers would bust through, but Placebo would have time to counsel her, and hopefully help her use the powers in a positive way.

The next day, Placebo and Max had another counseling session. He apologized for doing what he did, but insisted that it had to be done. Placebo said she understood, and admitted that some of her own actions were out of selfishness. She then revealed to Max that she was over 200 years old herself (the result of a combination of quasi-divine lineage, and the maximization of her psionic abilities). She had lived through more heartache, tragedy and cataclysmic events than he could imagine (much of the memories of which she kept hidden deep enough in her subconscious, that not even Max could detect). She had been one of the very few beings that lived through the timeline breach that Max had just fixed, and was eager to see how her present universe would be different now.

She also further explained why, despite her knowledge of the timeline breaches, she would still fight to keep the minds of children like Kina locked up in her psionic web – it was because in the past she had been responsible for some of the heartache, tragedy and cataclysms, and now she was attempting to make amends by counseling some of the children, who could potentially grow up to make some of the same mistakes she did as a young hyper-being with near-infinite destructive capabilities. She then asked him if he would be leaving, now that his mission was complete.

He said, his mission actually was not complete. He had connected this future to the past from which he came. However, he know had to find the next future piece of the timeline, and reconnect it to the one they were currently in. She smiled, then offered to help in any way she could. He agreed to accept her help. But first, he wanted to go and hang out in the game room for a little while. Kina was waiting to challenge him in a air hockey match. He then ran off to find his friend.

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