Somehow, I do not recall meeting the one who has scouted me to that mission. It certainly happened, and she certainly was explicit about the risks before performing... some procedure to imbue the seed of power. Or was it a spark?

... "she." At least one detail was not erased, even if a record of what exactly that 'procedure' entailed was expunged so thoroughly that I could not recall how to replicate it - as if it did not almost certainly use esoteric materials I would find between rare and nonexistent.

I was prepared, but was not. Was everything a raw test of survival, of combat, where reasoning and investigation would fare less relevant to raw physicality? Repairing my spectacles was mandatory, correcting that outdated prescription for one more recent, and revision of the skills I'd find potentially necessary soon followed. Restocking, a new notebook, a more secure backpack and filling it with all the equipment I could have used the day before. And yet, that did not seem enough, and without the next day I would have considered any future tasks explicitly impossible should they escalate difficulty to my experience.

I woke up one day in a tower, amidst a widespread amount of glass that wasn't there when I slept. 'How curious,' I thought, as they appeared to coalesce around myself as I looked into the reflections within.

"... memories," was my conclusion. Records of my knowledge, records of my experience, reflected in the mirror-shards that only then I realized were responding to my will. A woman in a library, writing the results of her studies only to be interrupted by a student's interjection, as she calmly folded her notebook up to confront the disruption. Two women at a cafe, discussing their findings as they were joined by two more, the couple joining the colleagues as they mentioned the cross-disciplinary applications.

A woman standing at the airport, preparing to handle the...

The glass dissolved, as I tried to mentally dismiss it, before I felt the lack of the somewhat-subconscious line of thought that commanded it. Willing it to restore itself, its recalcitrance persisted for approximately a day as I've measured it, before coalescing with my call once more. Naturally, this took some research to determine the exact details of, and an amount of experimentation to determine what exactly this did - determining "how" was a task for another day, although the question still remained.

The mystery woman was clear, however. This growth would be tied to any of the future "tests" that I was to undergo. And therein crystallized my resolve: if these were the grade of tools I was to wield, these tasks may be merely improbable, rather than impossible, and I recalled Nathalie- Dr. Fourier mentioning that 'if your elders - even myself - say something is impossible, they are often very wrong.'