On my first day everything was like parts of a lock, fitting together. I walked through while the gears moved.

My grandma said to me "Zero, Fate = Predestination + Freewill."

I'm a psychic lockpicker. █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

When you’re a psychic lockpicker there are a lot of temptations. There’s robbing the past for future opportunities, and then there’s robbing the future for opportunities in the past. It’s all a matter of which way you pick the locks.

My roommate, Bitch Teen, doesn’t believe in the past or the future. Only the now. When she dons her Gloves of Power she forces the now into the shape she wants.

I think we’ll make a good team. █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

Skills don’t do you any good unless you know what to do with them. It’s important to set goals.

Bitch Teen and I were already getting on each other’s nerves in our tiny room. It was a regular Psyhigh double, two twin beds shoved in a shoebox, basically, with a view of the brick wall of the next wing.

“The world’s our oyster, honey,” I told her. “We’ve just got to open it up.”

So I spun the tumblers till we saw an opening. It’s the bright, clear light you’re looking for, not hazy and smokey. I jimmied it till I heard the gentle tinkle of the pins and rolled the plug.

Bitch Teen donned her Gloves of Power and opened the door.

Now we’ve got a penthouse quad to ourselves, overlooking the commons and the gardens in the distance. But Bitch Teen still leaves her stuff all over the place. We’ve got to work on that. █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

Bitch Teen says she wants a "real heist." The kind where we take the big prize, the one that's kept just out of reach at all times.

"You mean the Discs?"

"Yeah, whatever you wanna call them. The golden tablets, the real news, the true story. I want that."

They call them "the Discs" for a reason. The Aten, the Eye of Ra, the Moon Disk, Gold Records (Perry Como's hit single "Catch a Falling Star" and Glen Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo"), acetate, rare Strudelsoft, Holographic Versatile Disc... all mythical embodiments of the spheres of the Qliphoth, as laid out on a cheap subway map.

What the wannabes and the greenhorns don't understand is that getting ahold of the instructions isn't the treasure they think it is. Sure, it'll show you some shortcuts, some backdoors, some kill-switches... a lot of a psychic lockpicker's skillset is straight out of that book. But in the end, it's just another blueprint for a prison.

"Sure," I said. I didn't want to seem unsupportive.

"Great. I want to reach out and grab them with my hands." █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

We’re in the alley behind the Handymart. Bitch Teen’s Gloves of Power are tingling.

“What about here? My gloves feel something...”

Bitch Teen’s gloves have been “feeling something” everywhere we go. I’ve been humoring her all morning about going after the Discs, but it’s getting to the point where I’ve got to show her something or she’ll get pissed, and one thing you don’t want is a pissed off Bitch Teen.

“Okay lemme see...”

I reach out with my mind and start feeling for the locks. Oddly, there IS something here, next to the dumpster. It’s old—ancient and rusty. Primitive in design, relying more on its bulk than complexity in spatio-temporal encryption tech. Not too difficult but needing some muscle.

“Give me a hand here?”

Bitch Teen plunges her glove into the folds in space I’m holding open.

“Boo yah!” she whispers.

And the greasy wall of the Handymart ripples and the dirty alleyway disappears... replaced by a wall of stone and another dusty alleyway.

“Move it!” shouts Bitch Teen, as a column of knights on horseback comes galloping down on top of us. █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

"Get in!!" shouts the old man driving the cart. His face is leathery and actually peeling off the side of his jaw. How long has this guy been dead?

After the troop of knights on horseback almost trampled us, they were being led up the rear by this broken down cart full of hay pulled by a donkey. Being driven by zombies.

The one driving flashes us a rictus grin as we pile in, and drives the donkey ahead at top speed.

We drive in through the open gate of the castle, knights fighting knights all around us, but no one pays us any notice. The cart comes to a stop in front of a door and the dried up mummy man shoos us out of the cart.

"We want the discs!" he shouts as we start up the staircase. █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

"So what was all that about?"

Bitch Teen is confused, but exhilarated.

"Well, it's all about picking the locks."

I proceed to explain to her about the practice of Psychic Lock Picking. It's usually about picturing the room on the other side of the lock, then feeling your way to it, using our natural psychic tools to manipulate the Interlocken Gates, then opening the door to your target spacetime location.

You can also do it ala Russian Roulette, where you pick a lock blind. In that case, you could end up anywhere. It could be based on your unconscious, or some random thought, or nothing at all.

In this case, obviously, it was about the Discs.

"Wow! Bang! Did you see me knock that knight right off his horse? POW!" Bitch Teen shadow boxes with her Gloves of Power.

I'm glad she had fun. But we never found any Discs. And those old desiccated mummy guys were gone when we came back out of the castle. Did they find the Discs?

"I wanna do it AGIIIIIIIIN!!!" says Bitch Teen. █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

The power of the Discs is built into everything these days. What were once pure manifestations of different energies are now used to fuel cultural, political, and economic engines.

“You don’t look like you belong here.”

“You’ve been late three times in a row.”

“You’ll need to pay for that, you know.”

Bitch Teen and I walk through the mall. The signature energy patterns of the discs saturate the space, broadcast through the ceiling speakers, through the programmable multi-spectrum lighting, through the linguistic patterns of the trained employees.

The alarms go off as Bitch Teen uses her Gloves of Power to pummel through a wall. We step over the rubble to the room inside—racks of servers in golden faraday cages.

“See, it’s just a transmitter. Eidetic modeling. Holographic enforcement. Pied Piper Simon Says fascist brainwash.”

Bitch Teen tears down the cage and smashes the computers.

“BOO YAH!” █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

It’s not like the Discs are evil, or dangerous all by themselves. I would consider, say, a gun or a nuclear bomb dangerous in itself. The Discs, however, are really just records and data, all neatly compiled into their purest form... crystalline manifestations of mesmerizing hives of thought that are the source of all information structures. Osiris’s third eye is one of them, now captured by mad scientists and used to pump mind control waves into elevators and dentist’s offices. Akashic Records gerrymandered into unfair voting maps. Silver Tablets counterfeited and used as stars on corrupt lawmen’s chests. Ancient romance novels turned into destructive grimoires, like @Terra and @Izzy have ahold of. It’s how the Discs are misused that’s the problem.

“My Gloves of Power are angry,” Bitch Teen says. “I’m tired of punching at shadows.”

I’ve got to teach Bitch Teen about using a more delicate touch. █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠

I had to drop by the Tantric Savings Bank because there was a hiccup with my psychic student loans. I left Bitch Teen back at school because I knew she’d pester me the whole time about wanting to rob it, but you don’t want to mess with the Tantric Savings Bank. Not just because it’s so darn secure, but because it’s not really evil. It’s just big and can suffer from the bureaucratic issues of any organization its size. Ultimately it’s super handy. I need it functioning well and not broken, and a heist of any kind could mess that up.

Turned out all they needed was a middle initial. █ a⃠d⃠a⃠d⃠