Technically, she'd been killed.

That was what Agent Sasha Nein told Psychonauts Headquarters. She was dead. And they believed him, believed his report without question. He was an Agent in good standing, with a fairly good record. There was no reason for him to lie. His story matched up with eyewitness reports. There had been a fire, and then she was gone. That was the end of it. There was no way she could have escaped, unless she was microscopic at the time. The higher ups laughed at the thought, gave him a medal for the trouble of losing a partner, and called it done.

Psychic secret agents have a way of not dying when they should. She should have. She would have. But he wouldn't let her, and so he risked his career, his sanity and his life for her. No one could ever know, or would ever know. It was a secret between him and her. The official records lied. She wasn't dead. She wasn't a pile of ashes somewhere. The reports lied, to a degree.

Agent Valerie Frizzle had been killed.

But he'd done a fine job of bringing her back to life.

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She was new to the job, like he was.

She was dead serious and constantly frowning, the obnoxious voice of overkill. Later, agents would laugh at the idea of Sasha being the light hearted member of any team, but things were different then. She was severe and her hair was pulled into a tight bun. Her solemn expression served to hide any hint of beauty there was to be had in her pale skin and light red hair. She had graduated from the Academy alongside him, the very best empath they had. He had scored extremely high in General Psyche Knowledge; Sasha had the human mind mapped out and pictured in his head at all times. The two were put together for a few missions on a test basis. Their areas of expertise matched up on paper - that didn't mean, however, that they were permanent attached to each other. After six months together, they'd make that decision.

Agent Frizzle was not duly impressed with Sasha. She didn't like that he drank and smoke and swore so much. Constantly, it seemed, she spent the first two weeks of their partnership telling him he was going to shorten his lifespan. He argued back that if it wasn't hurting her, she had nothing to complain about. Out of respect, he smoked outside when he was working with her and never showed up to work drunk. The only thing he never quite got a handle on was his mouth. He seemed to rub off on people in that regard. Within a month, Agent Frizzle was muttering under her breath just like he had. She took great pleasure in informing him how he was going to blow their cover on undercover jobs and ruin them on diplomatic ones.

Yet she warmed to him, in her own way. The criticism became affectionate rather than brutal. The frown softened little by little into a slack, somewhat relaxed sort of expression. There was something about being partners in life or death situations that brought people together. After being shot at together, tracking down criminals together, and going to Russia, Italy and France together, they couldn't help but tolerate one another. It was more than that, though. There was a comradery in being psychics and being friends. The rest of the world did not understand them. The rest of the world seemed to view them as freaks. Together, they were just Sasha and Valerie. By the end of their first four months together, they were as close to friends as ultra-strict Agent Frizzle could come to the term.

Her mind was uncrackable. Just like his was shoved down from the average mini-world landscape to a series of cubes, hers was packed down into a series of blocks in hallways that went on forever. His first introduction into her mind left him speechless, and she stood beside him with a silent kind of pride only a Psychonaut knew. Her mental landscpae was impeccable, utterly controlled and flawless. There were no figments of her imagination, no mental cobwebs, nothing. Just a clean slate of a mind that suggested utmost sanity.

Even so, she was new to the job.

Things tend to go wrong with new people.

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In the Academy, they'd been taught that they were weapons.

Their minds held nearly seven times the brain activity of normal people. They had the potential to create fire, water, wind, to blast someone with raw aggression and to become invisible. Therefore they were the most valuable weapons the world had. It was their job to protect. First and foremost, to protect free thought, the most valuable asset on Earth. Second of all, to protect themselves, because everfy Psychonaut down was a grave loss. Thirdly came partners. Partners were weapons too, just as dangerous and intense. Yet there was a difference. The Academy said to save yourself before them.

Sasha had listened, but admittedly only absorbed part of it. He knew he was dangerous, as surely as he knew the Collective Unconscious was real and levitation was safe. He just didn't get the part about leaving someone for dead. He couldn't. It wasn't in him. All his life, from the day he ran away from home in Germany to now, he'd been on a continual run from everyone and everything that mattered. Once Sasha was assigned Agent Frizzle, he questioned the idea of leaving a partner behind even more. He doubted she would leave him. He heard what the professors said and he retained that knowledge, he just refused to apply it to his life.

It was one thing to say it, another to do it. In the heat of a fight, injured and screaming commands and hurling bolts of energy at people, it would be all too easy to look after himself. The idea was always there, looming, tempting. He fought it. He was going to be the partner that didn't suck. He was going to be the partner that didn't have an ego the size of a circus. He threw himself in front of attack after attack for her, saved her at the last second from blast after blast she never saw coming. Her other half. The defense to her offense. Her partner.

She repaid him in full.

The fire was raging. The whole town was ablaze. With people running to and fro, screams everywhere, people still stuck in buildings, and a mad pyrokinetic continuing to burn all that he could, it was easy to be distracted. It was easy not to notice things in the thick black smoke and the noise of explosions, alarms and screams. He didn't see the pyrokinetic take aim at him, nor did he catch sight of another fireball among the infernos. Agent Frizzle did. She didn't have time to scream as she shoved him out of the way, knocking him over in the process. What happened next took both of them by surprise.

There was a flash of lightning in the fire, which reached out to slam through her. Only it wasn't lightning. It was psychic energy. She howled and shrieked and clutched at her head like a madwoman. In that moment Sasha Nein damned free thought, himself and the whole of the Psychonauts. He scooped his partner into his arms, lifted her head up gently and tried to talk to her. It soon became apparent she was in too much agony to hear him. She screamed and screamed until she was hoarse, finally dropping to the ground as if totally dead. Sasha looked over at the pyrokinetic and felt more fury rage in him than he thought was possible.

It took one shot to kill the man, and as firefighters rushed in to do their job, Sasha crept, invisible and silent, through the town, his partner cradled against him. All those radical theories he'd done papers on and all those inventions he'd shown off were about to prove their worth.

Sometimes weapons were the last thing anyone needed.

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The bus was the pride of his inventions.

It came to him that night, and flew them back to his lab deep in the mountains. No one ever had time to register he was gone. The bus was designed to be under the radar, like a stealth plane. On top of that, it shrank the two humans and itself down to the size of a fleck. No one saw a thing. Sasha affectionately patted the bus, muttering a thanks to it, before turning his attention on his fallen partner. It was strange to see her unmoving, silent. It was as if she were asleep.

The next four hours were a blur for him. Getting her heartbeat back came first. Her lungs were stimulated with a simple application of CPR. Taping chunks of psitanium to her head was all he could do to stabilize her brain activity, which bounced between half normal human capacity and fourteen times human capacity as he frantically searched through the bus's compartments. Keeping her on a steady mixture of oxygen and sleep gas was critical. There was no way to tell how much damage could be done if she woke up right now. If she were to confuse the real and mental worlds, as many a fallen agent had, she would go completely insane. For now, this was all he could do. That, and clean her up. Germs were going to be a very serious problem for someone in her state. Finally, after four hours of flight and work, they arrived at his lab.

Without any explanation to Ford Cruller - the rogue Psychonaut would be suspicious, but it'd have to wait - Agent Nein placed Agent Frizzle inside a pod in the isolation center, letting her rest. It would be a long time before she would be able to be allowed to wake up. Until her brain activity stabilized, she was in constant danger. His only consolation was that the bus had become strangely loyal to her, seeing her so close to death. It always found its way from the parking lot to just outside the isolation center. Though there was no real parking to speak of, it stayed in the area most of the time. As months passed and it seemed she wasn't going to get better, it began to worry. It expressed as much to Sasha telepathically.

"If she ever wakes up, you'll be hers," the German man promised, stroking the bus's face absently. "You are the pride of flock, after all."

It merely tooted in response.

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A year passed before she was stabilized.

A year of a new partner. A year of pretending Agent Frizzle was dead. A year of lying that no, he had no idea where all that psitanium went. A year of test tubes, feeding bags, and oxygen supply to someone who very well might be insane upon waking. An entire year of lies, cover ups, fake paperwork, and constant denial of what he knew to be reality. In that year he'd had to go into the mental world and seal off her door to the collective unconscious. He felt bad disconnecting her from everyone else's subconscious, but he couldn't risk someone stumbling upon her and driving her insane. In that year he managed to get her blood pressure, heart rate and lung capacity back to normal while simuletaneously going off on missions every other week. In that year he went to Spain, Portugal, China, Egypt and Thailand, yet all he ever thought about was the pod and whether or not it was holding up alright.

Once she was stabilized, he was almost terrified to go into her mind to assess the damage. His stern, familiar partner might not exist any more, for all he knew. A part of him said he should've given up on her a long time ago when she died. This was the same as bringing someone back from the dead and then considering the moral applications of the action. One look at her convinced him he was doing the right thing. He couldn't abandon someone in her current state. Gently placing the mental doorway on her head, he took a deep breath and prepared to enter his partner's mind.

Technically she'd been killed.

In actually, by the time a year passed, she was more alive than ever.

Ms. Frizzle was alive.