Pocket Monster University

It’s time for your next lesson. Do well and maybe this time I’ll let you remember the fun. I’m at the library, so don’t keep me waiting.

Seeing a message from Professor Sabrina Natsume brought some warmth to my cheeks, remembering the last encounter. I definitely didn’t want a repeat performance, but I didn’t think Sabrina was one of the teachers that would take no for an answer. Unlike Flannery, she was more than happy to throw her weight around.

“Let’s talk more this evening.” I said to Faye, excusing myself and heading back into my room. The message had said to not keep her waiting, but I still needed a cold shower and a fresh change of clothes.

I left without grabbing anything for breakfast and there was a briskness to my steps though.

Why had she sent me that message personally? Was this going to be one-on-one? What was she planning?

I kept mulling the questions in my head as I made my way to the library, not paying attention to my surroundings until I opened the door… and saw that there wasn’t anything on the other side. Nothing but darkness.

“...huh?”

Grabbing the edge of the doorframe, I stuck my head inside and looked around. But everywhere I looked, nothing but inky blackness. This wasn’t a case of the lights being off. It was as though the library had been removed completely, replaced with an empty bottomless pit.

“Hello…? Miss Natsume?” I called out into the room, leaning inside as far as I could.

“Took you long enough.” Her self-assured, mischievous voice answered immediately, coming from behind me. I nearly jumped into the inky blackness, but I grabbed the frame with both hands and backed up a few steps, the professor stepping lightly out of my way.

“Not going to head inside?” Sabrina asked me with a toothy smile on her face.

“Well, it’s… the library seems to be missing.” I answered.

“Your second lesson starts now. Ask yourself, Mr. Krimson. Which is more likely? That the universe has deleted the library from existence, replacing it with an inky black void…” Sabrina leaned in towards me, looking up at me from so close I could feel her warmth. “Or is your mind playing tricks on you?”

She was so confident and strong, I couldn’t help thinking of just how satisfying it’d be to put her in her place, get revenge for last time. Maybe have her and Wicke serve me together, naked on their leashes.

“Second one, right?” A mental illusion. Which meant… she was inside my head. Was she reading my mind right now?

“Of course I’m not reading your mind. That’d be a gross invasion of privacy. But a threesome with Wicke? That does sound like it might be fun.” Sabrina let out a girlish giggle, and I followed with some nervous laughter. “But if you want to break through an illusion, the best way to do so is to introduce a contradiction. Something for your mind to latch on to. That’s why illusions generally fall apart as soon as you touch them.”

“Right, so I just need to plant my feet. The floor is still there, even if I can’t… fuck!”

I’d thought that this was an illusion, that I’d hit the floor, but instead, it was like I’d just walked off a cliff. I tumbled down and down, air rushing past me as I kept falling faster and faster. I twisted my body to look up and could see the doorway rapidly receding to a point of light as I kept falling.

What the hell!?!

“Take note. Just because you think something is an illusion, that doesn’t make it so. If there was an illusion of a fire-breathing dragon, that doesn’t mean you should stand in the way of its breath just because you’re convinced it’s fake.”

I twisted around in the air and saw that Sabrina was falling right underneath me, arms crossed, standing up straight, poised, even though her hair was whipping back as we fell.

“If it was fire, then I’d be fine, though. Er… yeah, I mean, I think I get the point. But… what is this?” I asked, wondering how it was that we still hadn’t hit a bottom. Was there a bottom?

“This…” She spread her arms, gesturing around us. “Is the mindscape. When two psychics commune on a deep level, our senses leave our physical bodies and we create a brand new world that exists only for the two of us. Of course, when one psychic is far more powerful and skilled than the other, she can not only draw the other psychic into a mindscape, but remain conscious in the real world at the same time.”

“Think of it as dreaming, but the two of us are sharing the same dream.”

“Just so you know, this is what’s going on in the real world.” With a wave of her hand, Sabrina brought up a floating window in the air. From what I presumed was her point of view, I saw my body slumped over on the floor. I wasn’t in the library either. I was still back in my own room, a towel wrapped around my waist.

I’d never even left the dorm, then. But if I was draped in a towel, then that means the rest of my morning was as I remembered it. Which meant that Yuna really was a pokegirl, and Yang was on the cusp.

“Your own bedroom is just about as safe a spot as anywhere,” Sabrina continued. “So you’ll be sticking there while I run you through the basics.”

This was… distressing. My overwhelmingly more powerful professor had trapped me inside of a mental prison and didn’t seem to be in a hurry to let me out.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“Because last night, you caused the corruption levels of four different girls to spike, and only one of those was your roommate,” Sabrina answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You are experiencing some explosive growth in ability, but as it stands, that makes you more of a liability than an asset. Training in psychic powers isn’t something that’s meant to be mastered in a week. You can think of it as a complicated martial art that takes years of exercise, discipline, and training to master. And if we were to continue this analogy, you haven’t done any of that. You’re a toddler with a handgun who knows just enough to pull the trigger.”

Ouch.

“So this is supposed to help me train my powers?”

Sabrina smiled back at me at the same time I could feel my descent start to slow. Looking down, I saw a bird's-eye view of a bedroom we were approaching. My feet touched down on the carpet, while Sabrina settled on the edge of the bed with red sheets. “Exactly. Until you’ve got some control, you’re stuck in here. But since ‘here’ exists entirely within your mind, just being here is good practice for your abilities.”

That did make sense. Only…

“Wait, how long are you planning on keeping me in here if I can’t get the control?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll let you out long enough for your duel on Friday! It’s the talk of the school. I’d hate for you to disappoint your fans.” Sabrina let out a giggle.

“Gee, thanks.”

I looked around the room we’d ended up in. Larger than my dorm room, it looked like a proper master bedroom, a feminine touch showing through all the furniture and decorations, save maybe the long black couch against the opposite wall of the bed. Sabrina pulled her legs up to her chest and watched me.

I took a seat on the couch and looked back at her. “And you’re going to be here the whole time watching?”

“I wouldn’t leave you all on your own.” As I looked, Sabrina’s two-piece red top and skirt vanished, leaving her in nothing but the black latex bodysuit she wore underneath. A beat later, that was gone too, but before I could really ogle her nudity, she’d dressed herself again, this time in a comfortably oversized red sweater and loose-fitting blue shorts. “But don’t worry. I have the Parallel Processing ability. Just a fraction of my mind is being used to talk with you while the rest of me is carrying on about her business.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “That’s such a relief. So how do I get out of here?”

“Easy.” Sabrina faced me, sitting cross-legged on the bed, her hands tucked against her shins. “Fuck me.”

“...pardon?”

“I’m a fragment of the real Sabrina, with… hmm, let’s say 11.2% of her power, but all of her skill. You’re several times more powerful than me, more than powerful enough to bend me to your will. But until you’ve got a handle of the fundamentals, you can’t do jack to me. And sure, you could take control of me and just get me to disable the mindscape…” Sabrina tugged on the loose collar of her over-sized shirt, giving me a tantalizing glimpse of her round cleavage. “But it’s more fun this way, right?”

Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

“Alright then. Challenge accepted.” I closed my eyes and focused my mind. I didn’t have time to be wasting laying down. I had an all-or-nothing fight the day after tomorrow, and I needed to be ready. “Sabrina, {take off your clothes}.”

Only when I opened my eyes Sabrina was gone, leaving me alone in the room.

<Lesson one. Your psychic senses. You need to stop thinking of these as something you can flip on or off. A little hide and seek ought to do the trick.>

That was the start of the training. While Sabrina taunted me inside of my head, I looked everywhere for her. Not that there was a lot to check: the bedroom didn’t have any doors or windows, and there weren't very many places to hide. Under the bed, behind the curtains, the other side of the couch. It took me longer than it should have to realize that nothing I was seeing was real. We were inside of a dream, and if Sabrina could control it, so could I. And if I wanted to find her…

Deep breath, focus… and get rid of everything. Obliterate the room, but don’t replace it with darkness. Instead, I pictured a white void filling up every inch of this domain, light everything up so she couldn’t hide. Destroying the room was rather easy, but spreading out the void took some effort, straining mental muscles I hadn’t been aware of as the white filled up the darkness slowly.

It took a few minutes, but I was rewarded with the sight of Sabrina revealed far in the distance. I ran towards her, remembered this was all a dream, then flew to her instead, having fun with it in spite of myself. “There you are!”

“Well, you’re a fast learner.” Much to my delight, Sabrina was waiting for me naked. Apparently, that command from earlier had landed before she got away. She wasn’t covering herself up, standing up straight and proud of her body. “But time for round two. Try and find me again, but this time…” Sabrina’s body vanished below her neck, leaving only a floating head. “You can’t rely on your lying eyes.”

And so it went. Finding the invisible Sabrina took a lot longer and required me to sense where she was rather than spot her. Round three was even more troublesome.

{Stay away from me.}

It was then that I realized that it didn’t matter how powerful my psychic abilities were. I didn’t really know the first thing about defending myself. As way of encouragement, Sabrina changed the layout of the mindscape to that of a tropical resort, lounging on the beach, at least for the area around her… after just ten feet, it became a frozen tundra with a bitterly cold blizzard raging through it. And I was stuck there shivering, that blasted command of hers keeping me from approaching.

Even with the incentive of the nude, oiled up and sunbathing Sabrina in the nice, warm sun right in front of me, it took me hours to get through that command. But before I could lay a hand on her…

{Forget what you were doing}

That one didn’t waste as much time as I would have thought. At first, I was simply confused. I knew I was in a mindscape with Sabrina, but she was gone, and I was left on my own. I thought that I ought to try and amuse myself while I waited, but there was an itch in the back of my head, a feeling of unease, and the more I tried to scratch it, the more I could feel something unraveling off of me.

The itch got worse, I got a ‘grip’ on it and ‘pulled’, and it came apart like an old cobweb, and as soon as it did, the command was gone.

I remembered what I was doing. Sabrina was hiding again, but by now, that no longer worked on me. We were inside of a shared mindspace. Thoughts shaped reality here.

“{Come here.}”

I spoke the command out loud, felt it push into her mind, and Sabrina was there.

“Not bad. You still lack finesse, but you’re at least learning to apply some brute force where it needs to go. But you’re still not ready for—”

“{Go into a trance.}”

This time, when I pushed the command towards her mind, Sabrina was slippery, sliding away from it, dodging away, pulling back at the speed of thought. But the same training she’d given me find her in the mindscape was coming into play here; I had the mental agility to keep up with her now, enough to pour more of my energy into the command, making it swell up to fill the mindscape, leaving her nowhere to run, forcing her to face it head on… and when it came to brute force, she was no match.

“Oh. Not… bad...” Sabrina gave me a mischievous smile as she felt her will being drained from her, and then her face went completely slack.

I could feel her mind. Feel how my command was blanketed over it. Feel her resistance as a part of her tried to fight against it. I could even feel the tether, a small part of her that was connected to the real Sabrina.

It was really only then that I realized just how blind I’d been before.

I closed the distance between myself and Sabrina, then with a thought, we were once more back in her bedroom from the start. This time, I was sitting at the edge of the bed and she was standing before me, naked, mind blank.

I finally had her. I could do anything with her now, and she wouldn’t be able to resist.

“{Wake up.}”

“...huh?” Sabrina looked almost disappointed as the awareness returned to her eyes. “I told you before. The only way you’re getting out of here is if you can fuck me. Not getting cold feet, are you?”

“No, it’s not that. I just wanted to see what else you could teach me before I broke out of here.”

“Oh, is that it?” Sabrina folded her arms beneath her breasts, drawing my eyes in.

“Well, there is one other thing,” I admitted. “You look like Sabrina. Sound like her. Your mind even feels like hers. But you’re only a fragment of the real thing.”

“Hey now! Parallel Processing doesn’t make fragments. It splits the consciousness off. I’m as much her as the rest of me is,” Sabrina objected.

“Yeah, but even if we had sex here, I don’t feel like it’d count for much.” Definitely wouldn’t do anything to increase my bond like it had with Yang.

“Your bond?” It looked like one skill I still needed to learn was to shield myself from mind-reading. Sabrina raised an eyebrow. “So you do have the same ability as your father, after all.”

That was news to me.

“You knew my dad?”

“We were in the same class,” Sabrina said, trying to play it cool. <And I was practically a member of his harem.>

Maybe it was simply hard to keep thoughts private in a mindscape?

I might have found that off-putting, but then, I’d never even met my father before. “I’ve got a duel on Friday. What would you say my odds of raising my bond with the real Sabrina are before then?”

The ‘fake’ Sabrina fixed me with a stare, not appreciating that distinction still. “Well, if your bond works like his, then you don’t have a chance in hell. I like my boytoys sweet and indulgent. Charming too. A submissive side certainly helps, but I don’t require it. A sense of humor is a must. Sure, you’ve got a pretty face and a nice body, but you’re… well, dull. Bland. Lukewarm. Would it kill you to smile some more, sweetie?”

Sabrina gestured to her naked body. “Even now, you’ve got me stripped down and at your mercy, but you’d rather talk than ravish me. Where are your horny teenage hormones? But no. All you seem to care about is conquest for the sake of conquest.” She shrugged. “That’s hardly romantic, is it?”

Well… ouch. That was blunt.

“Okay, let me come at this from a different angle, then.” I held my hand out towards her, then clenched my fist, bringing my mental influence back to smother out her consciousness once more. “{Go into a trance.} Now tell me. With your mind under my control, can I get the real Sabrina to submit to me?”

Her eyes were blank and glowing red, arms limp at her side, mouth hanging open. “Yes.”

Now I was turned on. Much as I appreciated this crash course on my psychic abilities, I didn’t appreciate Sabrina springing it on me without warning. And there was still the revenge for last time.

“What do I need to do?”