Approaching Reality, a millimeter at a time...
Alright. Look past the speed. Feel the senses. It's a common misconception there are five, six at best. Like dimensions, senses just become harder to differentiate the farther along you get.
The raised hairs on the back of your neck? Ninth sense.
Deva ju? Sixteenth sense.
The feeling you left the stove on? Twenty-third sense.
X-Stream remembered strongly his days at the Institute. Eidetic Memory was little more than using the thirteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-first senses co-simultaneously. Not fully possible in the fourth dimension, but readily plausible here in the eighth.
CroSStream had taught him to use the expanding litany of his powers to actualize multiple dimensions simultaneously by exchanging moments on different planes inbetween the existential vibrations of non-meta human existense. In short - step between the moments of human life to 'pause' and collect himself. What he was doing now was along those lines, only more broadly.
But he made one mistake, by overassuming his power level.
In short, he was lost in causality. His suit's internal chronometer told him he had been out of synch with casual reality for close to one year. His experiences told him he had experienced more than thirty relativistic years concurrently.
He couldn't remember anymore what he had hidden from. And he couldn't process his cerebral cortex's infodump through the twenty-seventh and thirty-first senses while existing outside of normal space-time.
He had to go home.
Back in the neighborhood of Reality
Doug looked at him. "Ya gotta a plan?" asked.
"I always have a plan" winked Hero.
The heroes instinctively turned as a flash appeared behind them. Some had no means of seeing it (they didn't realize it was their fourteenth sense telling them of it). There the image of a young man, barely out of his teens -- if at all -- began to appear. He was clad in teal and gray, with a goggled helmet and aerodynamic running suit. At first a two-dimensional cut-out appeared, followed by a rotation of cutouts, then a transluscent holographic image.
"Help..."
Finally, the true individual appeared. He looked at the group before him, fell to his knees, vomited hard, and passed out...
