"Naturally."

“Naturally,” you say. “It’s only fair, now that I’ve gotten my end of the deal down.”

She approaches you, and swivels her hand counter-clockwise. You don’t even need to open up your mind to her – she pushes past your defences when you don’t resist, and you can’t feel her trying to fiddle around with the different parts of your mind.

“It’s not working,” she says, frowning. “I can’t influence your mind correctly.”

“Curious,” you say.

“It’s because you linked my ability to harm you to what you consider harm,” she says. “And apparently, you consider me manipulating your mind to be a harmful action.”

“Well, that seems pretty reasonable to me,” you say. “You’re pretty dangerous with your vast swathes of mental powers.

“No, it’s really not,” she says. “There’s no way I get my end of the agreement like this. You have to loosen your binding.”

“I don’t think so,” you say. “What if this is just a trap for you to take me over the moment I let you loose? That doesn’t seem wise.”

“Then what can I do?” she says, exasperated. You can see that she’s trying to **** the components of your mind into certain configurations, but she always stops just short of actually doing the actions. She shakes her head, and finally relents. “But you promise to uphold your side of the agreement?”

You nod, trying to appear sincere. It’s not exactly easy, but you manage to pull it off.

“Alright. I’ll work on a solution, but for now, to uphold your agreement, I need you to go visit HYDRA and tell me what they’re up to.”

“You sure you don’t want to try a little harder?” you ask. “Maybe you can get it this time.”

“Believe me, I’m trying pretty hard,” she says, and you can tell she’s straining her psychic powers pretty hard to try to find some loophole within your soul to make her intended changes. This way, you figure, you’ll be safe if she ever decides to betray you. The advantage of working with heroes, of course, is that they’re always much too trustworthy.

After several minutes of frustrated grunting, she tries to go all out, attempting to push on your mind with incredible ****. She squeals in delight as she sees your mind click into a new position, one that’s seemingly unable to now touch any of the girls, and is devoted to stopping HYDRA.

“It worked,” she cries out. “I guess your binding wasn’t so good after all. Don’t worry, though – I won’t break our agreement.”

“Interesting,” you say. “I think this is cause for tightening my bindings further, in light of recent circumstances. If you would, Rachel.”

“Fine,” she says reluctantly, opening her mind once more to you.

You tighten the bindings on her abilities, narrowing the definition of harm and linking it even tighter with your own intentions, so that under the right conditions, you can practically coerce her into making certain moves. This will be convenient, you think to yourself.

“Looks good to me now,” you say, nodding.

“Alright. You have a room for me to sleep in?” she asks, and you silently lead the way to an occupied room, silently doing a victory dance.

When Summers used her powers and apparently influenced your mind, you had sensed what she was about to do, and timing the change precisely with the thrust of her power, you had really changed it yourself. That caused her to be tricked into thinking she had broken free of the binding, meaning three things – one, that she had no way of getting to you originally; two, that you got to tighten the bindings on her for free; three, that she didn’t actually have a mental binding on you. Since you made it yourself, you could drop it at any time without consequence, and she wouldn’t know until it would be too late. All things considered, you’re quite satisfied with how the last hour played out. If you manage your resources correctly, it might even be possible to simultaneously develop relations with the heroes and villains alike, with neither being the wiser.

What do you do next?