It was long moments before she could even piece together what the others were saying and doing.  She was lying down, her head on Sundancer’s lap, a cold cloth against her forehead.  Oliver leaned next to her, holding a bowl of cold water.

It is done.

I have a feeling Coil is going to be pressuring her to tell him about what she saw immediately, with no regard for her state.

“-running out of time!” Trickster shouted.

Ah, right, we don’t know how long she’s been out, and they do have limited time.

Coil stood just behind Trickster, arms folded, staring out over the railing, at his underground base. 

Considering tactics?

“Give her a moment,” Sundancer said.  “Whatever that was, it just knocked the poor kid out.”

“That deadline she gave us?  It’s here.  Now.”

Oh wow, she was out that long?

I mean, it can’t be quite there. If it was, there’d be a ~40% chance each of them were dead already, including Dinah. But chances are we don’t have much time before Crawler busts in.

But she did it, because as much as it would hurt, it would hurt more if she didn’t get her candy.  If Crawler got his hands on her, it wouldn’t hurt at all after those first few moments of pain, but that was bad too.  It meant dying.

Yeah, that ain’t ideal.

She focused hard on that scene, taking it from an image small and vague enough that it could have fit on the end of a pencil to something full size.  Her head exploded with pain.

How big is “full size” relative to the end of a pencil, though? For physical representations of images, that term could range all the way from an A5 sheet of paper to a full school board, or even bigger.

She caught fragmentary images as she felt herself double over and heave the contents of her stomach onto the metal catwalk and Sundancer’s legs and feet.

Whoops. Doubt Sundancer’s super happy about that. It’s better than dying, though.

Sundancer could have yelled, but she didn’t.  Instead, she fell to her knees and grabbed Dinah by the shoulders to steady her.

Sundancer is a good.

It was just in time, because Dinah felt fireworks erupt in her brain, felt her body go spastic.  Too much, too fast.  The image was overly sharp and detailed, overwhelming her senses, shredding all sense of time and present.

I suppose if she looks at a full section of timeline at once, that’s a bit like making her brain deal with interpreting a huge number of moments at once, instead of just the one present moment we deal with at a time. No wonder it gets fried.

(Well, technically the brain does attempt to predict the future to deal with delays such as the one between the eyes and the brain. I’m kind of including that in the present moment, I suppose.)

Let’s do this thing! The thing that I was doing, but then stopped doing, because I had done that thing for a while. That thing.

What was that thing again?

She had come close to experiencing it once, early on in her captivity.  Never again.  She would obey Coil in everything he asked for before she risked that happening again.

Hm. Except if she wants to go on without ever experiencing this… that means she’d need to take the drugs continuously her whole life.

“Okay,” she murmured.  She picked out one of the paths where they survived.  Even looking too closely at it made her head throb, like it was in a massive vise and someone had just cranked it a fraction tighter.

Ow.

So yeah, let’s see what you can do here.

Some of the possible worlds around the fringes of her consciousness disintegrated into a mess of disordered scenes as she pushed forward.  The scenes and images of the less possible worlds flew around her mind like razor-sharp leaves in a gale, cutting at everything they touched.  “It hurts.”

The more she zooms in on one branch, the more the others start beating on her…

Metaphorically, at the very least.

“Now, pet.  As quickly as you can.”

He didn’t know.  It was something else, like trying to will herself to stick a hot poker in her body, in her brain, knowing it would remain there and burn her for weeks before it cooled.

That does sound a little unpleasant. A teeny bit.

“Why is she so against this?” Trickster asked.

“Headaches,” Dinah answered, pressing her hands to her head,  “It breaks my power.  It takes days, sometimes weeks before everything is sorted out and working again.

Sounds like not just a headache, but a full-on burnout.

Headaches the entire time, until everything is sorted out, worse headaches if I try to get numbers in the meantime.  Have to be careful, can’t muddle things up.  Can’t lie about the numbers, can’t look at what happens, or it just becomes chaos.

Huh, that’s interesting, she’s sworn to honesty by the power, or she risks it leaving her for a while.

Also, if looking at what happens causes a burnout, I suppose the glimpses she already gets of each branch are part of why the power causes headaches if she uses it too much normally as well.

Safer to keep a distance, to make and follow rules.  Safer to just ask the questions and let things fall into place.”

I suppose that makes sense.

“Pet,” Coil said.

What she didn’t get from his tone, she grasped from the vague images she saw of her most immediate possible futures.

That sounds ominous.

“No,” she pleaded, before he’d even told her what he wanted.

“It’s necessary.  I want you to look at a future where we survived, and I want you to tell us what happened.”

Ohh, that’s a pretty neat touch. Her ability lets her see moments from each branch, but she can focus on a specific branch and look through it for the course of events that led there. Sounds like that takes a lot of mental power, though.

“No.  Please,” she begged.

“Now, pet.”

I feel like it says a lot about how much mental power, that Dinah doesn’t want to do this even though it seems to be their only solid way out of this mess.

This isn’t going to be pleasant.