this is how it starts (ready set go)

down the road that's so uncertain

Tecna was absolutely up in arms over this new information; she hadn't put down her PDA for more than a moment in what might have been hours, and that had only been to turn on her several desktop computers. Musa occasionally tried getting a word in edgewise, but the other girl was completely unresponsive, leaving her friends to talk amongst themselves and invent increasingly implausible theories as they waited for her results.

It had actually started off reasonably enough—"Maybe her power is basically mind control," Bloom had proposed, "like making her enemies…not fight her?"—and reached increasingly outrageous heights only a short time later—"I bet she controls the fabric of the universe," Stella had said conspiratorially, "like some kind of god fairy."

"Yeah," Aisha said sarcastically, "I bet that's it. She's the human equivalent of the Great Dragon, and she and Bloom are going to have an epic battle to determine the fate of the universe."

Stella pouted, folding her arms across her chest and sulking back into her chair. "It was just an idea," she said sourly.

Bloom laughed and shook her head. "Don't worry, Stella," she reassured, "it's an interesting idea. I just bet we would've heard of a fairy like that before now if it was true."

"Seriously, though," Flora said, her brow furrowed in thought, "what kind of power could a Control fairy have? We haven't ever really seen fairies with powers that aren't based in some kind of natural force. This is completely unknown."

"That's unfortunately true," Musa said coolly. "I haven't seen her use any sort of power in any of my classes, or outside them, so I can't say anything firsthand."

Bloom frowned. "Could we ask her?"

Despite the rationality of the solution, Musa shook her head dismissively, even as Stella nodded her agreement. "Nah. Even when she told me what her power was, she sounded like she was teasing me; she won't tell us anything else."

The staccato of Tecna's clicking keyboard filled the silence as the girls tried to figure out what to do. There was no reason to give Allison any sort of demerit; she handed in high-quality work on time and was never disruptive in class or out, and had even been fairly unobtrusive until this most resent transgression (if it could even be called that). Even as a teacher, Musa couldn't punish her for being a brat, and there was no real way to prove that she was controlling information critical to the capture of the Meadowsweet group (if she even was).

"Does she have any friends?" Aisha asked.

Musa shrugged. "I haven't seen her hang out with anyone. There's one girl in my class, Janika, who tries really hard to make friends with her—I think that's what she does, she's always smiling at her, it's like this masochistic unreciprocated thing she's got going on. But Allison never pays any attention to her and I've never even seen her speak to any of the other girls, either."

"Is she even in any of our other classes?" Bloom asked suddenly. "I mean, I could see not noticing her much, not having it occur to us if she's as quiet as Musa says, but…she's gotta be taking more than just the one, right?"

Tecna suddenly stopped typing, moving to a different screen and tapping it a few times. "Here are our registration lists," she said. "Check for Allison's name, I'm almost done with this."

Flora leaned over the screen and trailed her finger down the lists. "It says she's in Musa's class as well as Stella's and Tecna's," she said. "Allison of Tempero, she seems to be maintaining a 4.0 without much trouble. But that's all it says."

Stella shook her head. "I can't believe I didn't remember her; Musa, what does she look like?"

Pressing down on the girl's name, Flora called up a picture of her on the computer screen. Musa pointed—"Pretty much like that."

Leaning over to scrutinize the picture, Stella nodded as she rested her fingers on her chin thoughtfully. "Oh yes," she said, "I do remember this girl. I never knew her name, she never speaks."

"Sounds familiar," Musa muttered.

Aisha waved her hands. "Anyway. Allison of Tempero, fairy of Control, very quiet, very smart. Is that all we know so far?"

"Very much a brat," Musa said testily. Flora frowned, turning back to face the group.

"That's not entirely fair," she said, hand on her hip. "She's only spoken to you like this once, right? Otherwise she seems pretty inoffensive. Maybe she was just having a bad day."

Finally finished with her work—whatever it had been—Tecna turned around in her seat, looking as eager as any of them had ever seen her. The energy in the room seemed to pool around the center of the circle as each girl leaned forward, eager to hear something, anything, that might help sort this mystery out. Tecna smiled proudly and appeared to try and calm herself, taking a deep breath.

"Well." Tecna bit her lower lip and grinned, unable to contain her excitement. "I think I may have found a link between a couple of problems in our lives right now."

"Well don't just gloat about it," Stella urged, "let's hear everything you found!"

Taking a deep, giddy breath, Tecna swung one of her monitors around so the rest of the group could see it, pointing to a long article pulled up in the middle of the screen. "Tempero," she read, "the Control planet, located in the Agnosco system. Breeds fairies with the mind-based power of Control."

"So I was right, she does use the power of mind control," Bloom said seriously, leaning forward to take in this new information. Tecna shook her head.

"No, that's not what it means," she said. "The power of Control is based in a fairy's mind, that's what it's saying. It doesn't have a source like the elemental powers do; she can use her power even if there's no sunlight," she pointed to Stella, "no nature," to Flora, "no music," to Musa, "or anything else. It could be just her and her enemy in a black box room and she would still have all her magic."

Stella shook her head disbelievingly. "No, no way," she said. "There's no way a fairy can survive without the power of nature, we're just not—that's not the way it works!"

"Apparently some can," Tecna said, knocking her crooked finger against the screen. "From the size of the Agnosco system, as far as I can tell, quite a lot of them. It's pretty big; in addition to Tempero, there's also Maeror, Videlicet, Speculum, Aetas, Conticeo… The list goes on." She shrugged, dragging her fingertip along the screen to scroll the page down. "It's not too surprising, when you think about it; the Agnosco system appears to keep pretty separate from the dimension of Magix, and I would expect a lot of people just don't know about it. The fairies there don't seem to want to mix much with the more elemental magics."

"Wait," Aisha cut in, "so they know about us, but we don't know about them? That's so unfair! Unjust!"

As the other girls made affirmative gestures to show their agreement, Tecna frowned and rested her chin in her hands. "I don't know," she said, "it's not really that unfair, I don't think. It wasn't that hard to find this information; the tricky part was finding information about fairies of Control and exactly what their powers are. The stuff about the Agnosco system is right out there on the 'nets, and it's not hard to figure what kinds of power are on each planet. Just what exactly those powers are for, what they can do. Maeror, for instance, is the planet of fairies of Grief and Sorrow. No," she said before any of the girls could ask, "that doesn't mean they're depressed all the time. Just that their power involves grieving, somehow. I would estimate that they use their magic to make their enemies so sorrowful, grieve so much over nothing at all, that they more or less destroy themselves." She shrugged. "But without empirical evidence, I can't be sure."

That was certainly true. The girls sat back somewhat abashedly, each collecting her own thoughts; it wasn't like the information couldn't be acquired, just that it typically wasn't. If these non-elemental fairies tried to stay away from Magix proper, there was no real reason to suspect their existence, which explained the lack of general knowledge about them around the realm. Who knew, maybe there was just as much misinformation and absent knowledge in Agnosco about Magix as there was in the reverse.

"I guess it's no one's fault that our powers are a lot more straightforward," Flora said finally. "If they know we exist over here, and they have as much information about us as we do about them, it's not hard to figure this stuff out. I mean, Linphea, the planet of the Nature fairies? Anyone could just guess what kind of magic we have at home, what it does, what it's for."

Clearly displeased with the conclusion but willing to begrudgingly admit to it, Stella shrugged dismissively and jerked her head aside in what might, under other circumstances, have been an obvious nod. Bloom nudged her shoulder, making a goading face, and she rolled her eyes.

"It's true, the offensive nature of our powers is much more obvious," Tecna summarized. "In any case, I did manage to find out some information about the Control fairies."

Stella leaned forward at once, her eyes bright. "Dish, dish, dish!" she said eagerly. Bloom pulled a face but shook off her friend's scattered attitude and Flora smiled sagely.

"Right," Tecna said, her excitement fading just slightly. "Well, the Control fairies don't control their enemies mentally," her eyes darted to Bloom and back to the computer screen, "but physically. Like puppets, you might say. They have the power to control their movements. Remember Darcy's power when she kept hypnotizing Riven?" Musa ground her teeth and sunk her nails into her chair. "It's not like that. Because it doesn't rely on overpowering a person's mental state, it's very dangerous; contingent entirely upon the user's—the fairy's ability to control her own power. Her own strength, not her strength in relation to her opponent."

Musa itched her nails along the chair, digging at the wood as she tried to remember something—it was at the very tip of her brain, she could almost see it, what was it…

"Sabrina!" she burst out suddenly. Tecna looked at her curiously and Bloom made a waving motion with her hand, urging her to elaborate. Musa shook her head as if to clear it and twisted her mouth as if it had a sour taste in it. "Don't you remember?" she asked fiercely. "Sabrina, the fairy from Magix, she's a Control fairy! She must be from Tempero too, Allison must know her. That's why she's been so—that's why she's trying to tease us, she thinks she knows something we don't because she's friends with Sabrina!"

Tecna pointed at Musa, wide grin plastered back on her face. "Very close," she said smugly. "I managed to film part of the last battle we saw and I ran Sabrina's face through a matching software against all the students in Alfea, just to make sure. Before we let this information loose on the public sphere, I mean."

"Oh my God!" Flora cried, raising her hands to her mouth.

Tecna winked. "Bingo."

Musa shook her head, half disbelieving and half fascinated. They both spoke with soft tones, but Sabrina was so forceful, so…callous, swiftly confident in her actions…exactly as Allison had described in class that very day. Powerful and motivated, but by Allison's definition still unturned (as far as Musa could tell) because she was not driven by greed (or at least she didn't appear to be so). The poor girl had struck Musa as unnecessarily self-assured, but tragically mature for her age, maybe misguided in her interpretation of the world and its inner workings. But if she and Sabrina were really the same person…

"They look so different," Stella marveled in a hushed tone.

"Sabrina's hair is a lot longer," Aisha commented wryly, trying not to draw herself down too seriously. Stella shook her head, still stunned.

"Not just that," she said slowly. "Allison is so unassuming, so…so unpretentious, so unnoticed."

Her eyes glued to the image overlay on Tecna's computer screen, Bloom nodded. "Sabrina was completely in control of that fight. She jerked that fairy around like it was nothing, she didn't even seem to care if she was hurting her."

Tecna rolled her shoulders in the authoritatively impassive way only she could.

"Just goes to show what keeping quiet can do."